Mordecai Kaplan's The Future of the American Jew The Americanization and Radicalization of Judaism (original) (raw)

Mordecai Kaplan's "The Future of the American Jew" was supposedly his response to the situation of Jews after the Holocaust and a continuation or refinement of his 1934 book, Judaism as a Civilization. The result was a treatise that was increasingly controversial and received mixed responses. In this volume, Kaplan builds on his previous thesis that Judaism, a unique religious civilization, is at risk of extinction unless revived and reconstructed to adapt to changing conditions. In the intervening years since publishing "Judaism as a Civilization," Kaplan revised his doctrine to address new demands in the US Jewish scene, including a "theological dualism" in which American Jews were uninterested. Jewish survival was always Kaplan's main goal in writing his 1934 "magnum opus" "Judaism as a Civilization" but it became a more desperate situation after the Holocaust, and that may be why Kaplan's philosophy might have been becoming more radical. He completed this volume, before Israel declared independence, and that might have changed some of his viewpoints and the urgency, but not the theology.

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