Hirsch Fishman

  • Recordings of Kaplan Center Programs

        For the program hand-out, please click here.       For the program hand-out, please click here.     [We are grateful to Barry Dornfeld for providing this recording.]  

    Read More

  • Shabbaton: March 8-9Conference: March 10-112019 in Chicago The conference program booklet  is available here. The Shabbaton schedule is available here. (Please note that you will need to scroll quite far to the right in order to see the entire schedule.) To purchase tickets for the Sunday evening concert only, at KAM Isaiah Israel Congregation, please click here. If you are driving,…

    Read More

  • The Kaplan Quiz

    Round 11 In 2022 we will be celebrating the centennial not only of the SAJ’s founding, but also of Judith Kaplan Eisenstein’s Bat Mitzvah.  With that in mind, we ask:  What famous 20th-century rabbi wrote the following regarding Bat Mitzvah? “Clear logic and principles of pedagogy virtually require equal celebration for a girl when she reaches the…

    Read More

  • More than 80 years ago, at the very beginning of the very first issue of The Reconstructionist journal, Rabbi Mordecai M. Kaplan and his colleagues reprinted an editorial from a 1928 issue of that journal’s predecessor, The S.A.J. Review, succinctly explaining their reasons for the creation of a new movement. “[T]he problem of Jewish life is just th[e]…

    Read More

  • Eric’s Forum Archive 9-24-19

    For the next year, I will be using this space to post selections from the published writings of Mordecai Kaplan that address issues of continued relevance to Jewish (and non-Jewish) life. Most of these will be passages that are not well known. A new selection will be posted every month. For each passage chosen, I…

    Read More

  • by Samuel Fleischacker, Ph.D. — Philosophy Department, University of Illinois-Chicago (We are grateful to TheTorah.com – Project TABS for permission to republish this essay, which first appeared there — please see www.TheTorah.com.) Abstract:  We would like clear evidence that the Torah is God’s word — if God has spoken to us, we would like to know that…

    Read More

  • Scult on Kaplan’s Philosophy

    by Mel Scult From time to time Mordecai Kaplan attempted to reduce his thinking about Judaism and religion to a series of principles that could be easily understood. We attempt yet again to summarize his thought in our own words. Kaplan’s approach to Judaism is usually associated with the primary concepts of his system –…

    Read More

  • The Herem and the SAJ

    Read More

  • Herem Text

    (We are grateful to Dr. David Golomb, Professor Emeritus at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College, for this translation.) Text  of the Decree of Excommunication  My help comes from the Lord, the maker of heaven and earth (Psalm 121:2) The leaders of the people, rabbis of Greater New York and surroundings, heads of yeshivos, hasidic leaders, and…

    Read More

  • by Zachary Silver (We are grateful to the American Jewish Achives Journal for permission to republish this article, which first appeared there in Vol. 62, No. 1 (2010), pp. 21-48.)

    Read More