A Modern Heretic and a Traditional Community

by Jeffrey S. Gurock, Jacob Schacter

Mordecai M. Kaplan, the founder of the Reconstructionist movement, was the most influential and controversial radical Jewish thinker in the 20th century. Examining the intellectual influences that prompted Kaplan to reject fundamental Orthodox precepts, Jeffrey S. Gurock and Jacob J. Schacter ask a question crucial to the understanding of any religion: can an established religious group learn from a heretic who has rejected its most fundamental beliefs?

Genres: Religion

256 pages, Hardcover

First published January 27, 1997

About the author

Jeffrey S. Gurock is Libby M. Klaperman Professor of Jewish History at Yeshiva University. He has written over a dozen books in the field of American Jewish history and also served as associate editor to American Jewish History, the most important journal in that field, from 1982 to 2002. His work focuses on the American Orthodox community and the variations in Orthodox practice and ritual over the course of American Jewish history. His books include Orthodox Jews in America (Indiana University Press, 2009), a comprehensive social and cultural history of this group and its relations to other Jews and mainstream American society, and Jews in Gotham (New York University Press, 2012), which chronicles New York Jewry from 1920 to 2010.

For its 135th annual gala in 2015, CCNY honored Dr. Gurock as one of its distinguished alumni.

Reviews

[Michael Lewyn · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book explains why, even after Kaplan espoused extremely non-Orthodox views in the 1910s, Orthodox Jews for years treated Kaplan as one of their own. First, some of Kaplan's more inflammatory statements were published in academic journals that were not highly read; in a pre-internet world, it took time for such statements to be widely publicized. In addition, even Kaplan's most widely publicized speeches did not lead to his ostracism, because even when he made arguably anti-Orthodox remarks in his speeches, Jewish newspapers focused on other parts of his speeches. Finally, the lines between Orthodox and Conservative Judaism were far blurrier than they are today; even in the 1920s, some lay leaders proposed a merger between the leading modern Orthodox and Conservative rabbinical seminaries - something that would be unthinkable today.