Arnold Eisen, “Kaplan’s Judaism at Sixty: A Reappraisal,” in Mordecai M. Kaplan, Judaism as a Civilization (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1994), xi-xxiv (original) (raw)
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Mordecai Kaplan's The Future of the American Jew The Americanization and Radicalization of Judaism
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.
was one of the most interesting religious leaders of American Jewry in the twentieth century, and several biographies of him have been written, the best them being that of Mel Scult.1 Scult writes, however, as an avid admirer of Kaplan and is, at times, insufficiently criti cal in his analysis. On the other hand, Gurock and Schacter, ideological antagonists of Reconstructionism's founder, are unsparingly critical of him. In contrast to the image of Kaplan as a towenng religious thinker
2015
Amidst all trends present nowadays, the latest and the most controversial appears to be the Jewish Reconstructionism, which has been conceived by Mordecai M. Kaplan. "e starting point for Reconstructionist involves actual reconstruction of traditional Judaism, which takes place based on ideas taken from social and natural sciences. "e performed analyses permit to state (but not to conclude decisively), that Jewish Reconstructionism is a speci#c Jewish theory, a way of living for a certain group of Jews, but it is not a Judaism. "e Kaplan’s system, which represents a result of an intentional reconstruction and revaluation of traditional Judaism, becomes in fact a deconstruction and a devaluation of Judaism.
Kaplan's Radical Religious Hope: The Three Volumes of Communings of the Spirit
CCAR Journal, Fall/Winter 2020, 2020
Students of twentieth-century American Judaism and Jewish theology have long sought to understand the broad thinking and depth of influence of Mordecai M. Kaplan-one of the most prolific writers and theologians and rabbis of American Judaism. Kaplan's teaching and writing had a long-term impact not only on generations of rabbis and educators-but on non-Orthodox Jews in general. It is not an exaggeration to say that much of how American Jews understand Judaism, Jewish life, the Jewish people, and Zionism is through the lenses and language that Kaplan created. 1 With more than sixty years of Kaplan's many published works and recorded lectures, we have already had abundant material on all the major questions of Jewish life over the course of more than 70 years. In addition, we can even find his handwritten master's thesis at Columbia University, submitted in 1902 and at the archives of the Jewish Theological Seminary, the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College and the American Jewish Archives, we find additional letters and papers as well as the decades of diaries by a man who wrote nearly every day for over 70 years But even with that abundance of materials, we were still missing something very