• Ira Eisenstein Portal

    The Reconstructionist Rabbinical College recently celebrated the 50th anniversary of its first ordained Rabbi, Michael Luckens. The inspirational teaching of Rabbi Mordecai Kapan featured quite prominently in the celebration. In simple terms one must say, no Mordecai Kaplan, no Reconstructionist Rabbinical College.

    Yet it is equally true that without Rabbi Ira Eisenstein our Rabbinical College, a thriving Reconstructionist movement, and The Kaplan Center would have been just as unlikely.  Kaplan’s son-in-law, Rabbi Ira Eisenstein, was his foremost interpreter and popularizer.  He translated dozens of Reconstructionist ideas into institutional realities, always adding depth and nuance in the process of translation.

    The Kaplan Center is delighted to be launching the Ira Eisenstein portal on our website. It includes: 

    • Introductions by Rabbi Richard Hirsh to Ira Eisenstein’s books Creative Judaism and What We Mean by Religion with digital copies of those currently out-of-print volumes soon to be made available on our website;
    • A Book Club next year around the above volumes, led by Harriet Feiner and Rabbi Lee Friedlander; 
    • Reflections about Ira Eisenstein as theologian and wise leader by Rabbis Dennis Sasso and Jeffrey Schein;
    • A recording of reflections on Rabbi Eisenstein’s contributions that the SAJ (now known as Judaism That Stands for All) hosted as part of its centenary celebration.

    From Synagogue to Movement: Remembering Rabbi Ira Eisenstein

    A recording of reflections on Rabbi Eisenstein’s contributions that the SAJ (now known as Judaism That Stands for All) hosted as part of its centenary celebration.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J1PDFcyQI_8

    Reminisce with Ira & Judith

    Rabbi Ira Eisenstein and Dr. Judith Eisenstein spoke to congregant Ruby Kohn, (daughter of Eugene Kohn, one of Kaplan’s students): Looking back at their twelve years of living in the creative and vibrant Jewish community of Woodstock, New York; Judith’s retelling of how and why she became North American Jewry’s first Bat Mitzvah; Ira providing…

    Read more… Reminisce with Ira & Judith

    Lessons I Learned From My Teacher

    From Ira, I learned that Judaism is not an abstract idea, that religion does not exist in a vacuum, that religion
    is as religion does. Judaism begins with the Jewish people; religion is a human, social reality, one in which “Belonging precedes Believing” If we want to help Jews love and practice their heritage, we must first make them feel at home in the tradition and community and feel that they have a stake in it.

    Read more… Lessons I Learned From My Teacher

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    Margie Jacobs

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  • Between Father and Daughter: Exploring the Career and Influence of Judith Kaplan Eisenstein

    with Rabbi Elizabeth Bolton
    March 23, 2025

    https://vimeo.com/1068670327?share=copy

    The story of Dr. Judith K. Eisenstein, Mordecai Kaplan’s eldest daughter, is undertold and deserving of attention. She was an educator and an ethonomusicologist, and her accomplishments not only established her as an innovator in her own right, but also as a concrete expression of her father’s views on Jewish communal life and theology. A musician and teacher of nusach herself, Rabbi Elizabeth Bolton has begun the work of understanding Judith’s immense contributions to the field of Jewish musicology.

    Elizabeth Bolton is a Montreal-born rabbi and cantor who began her musical career as a singer of classical music, spanning repertoire from early music to the opera stage. Following exciting years of touring and performing in several Montreal-based professional choral ensembles, she was encouraged to explore the opera repertoire. Career highlights included a dramatic production of Carmen with the Vancouver Opera, and a live-broadcast Royal Gala recital for Prince Charles and Princess Diana in 1986, featuring an international roster of vocal stars.

    While studying, teaching and performing, Liz was active in a wide variety of social justice issues, including union organizing, abortion rights, queer liberation, and the AIDS crisis. Following a serendipitous opportunity to serve a Reform congregation as cantor in Toronto, she reoriented her path towards Jewish spiritual leadership and applied to only one seminary – the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College (RRC) in Philadelphia.

    While a rabbinical student Liz taught voice and service-leading skills, served as cantor for a Conservative congregation in suburban Philadelphia, and founded several choral ensembles, including the RRC ApiChorus and Mak’helat Micha’el, a community choir based at Congregation Mishkan Shalom. Following graduation in 1996, she taught hazzanut and voice at RRC, continued to lead the ApiChorus, and served as a staff chaplain at the Philadelphia Geriatric Centre. From 1999-2004 she created and directed the Music and Liturgy Project for the Jewish Reconstructionist Federation while serving as rabbi with Reconstructionist affiliate Congregation Beit Tikvah in Baltimore, MD from 1999-2012.

    Her voice can be heard on recordings linked to the Reconstructionist songbook Shirim Uvrahot: Nashir Unevareh, as well as the CD series keyed to the Kol Haneshamah: Shabbat Vehagim prayer book. Her singing is featured on recordings with Sonia Rutstein of disappear fear, and with storyteller Gail Rosen in the DVD of For Tomorrow … the Poetry and Words of Hilda Stern Cohen, a prayerful and poetic account of a Holocaust survivor’s journeys. She has provided learning and communal singing experiences by creating “instant choirs” at conventions, retreats, and shabbatonim, and through teaching the history, evolution and practice of the music of the Jewish people as scholar-in-residence at synagogues across North America.

    Liz is an alumna of study and service programs with the Institute for Jewish Spirituality and American Jewish World Service. She was named one of the Forward’s most Inspirational Rabbis of 2016 and twice invited to be a “book” for the CBC and the Ottawa Public Library’s Human Library events. She is a regularly invited guest with CBC radio and television in Ottawa, commenting on issues affecting the Jewish community. Her Hebrew Bible and liturgy commentaries have been featured in newspapers, anthologies and web sites in Canada and the US, including a chapter in The Women’s Torah Commentary. She posts at Words of the Spirit at www.orh.ca.

    After 24 years in the United States, she returned to Canada in 2013 to serve Or Haneshamah: Ottawa’s Reconstructionist Community, becoming Ottawa’s first woman and first queer congregational rabbi. She also serves on the professional Multi-Faith Chaplaincy team at the Queensway-Carleton Hospital. Liz co-leads Rainbow Haven, a community group created in 2015 that sponsors and settles queer refugees to Canada.

    Thank you to our sponsors!
    Pamela Lerman and Rabbi Bob Gluck, Dr. Karen Hofmann, Ellen Jahoda and Rabbi Jonathan Kligler, Shelley Sadowsky, and from Ann Eisenstein, Miriam Eisenstein and Carol Stern, and Jane and Harvey Susswein in loving memory of Paula Eisenstein Baker.

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    Sheridan

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  • About Mel Scult

    Mel Scult, professor, scholar, husband, father, grandfather, and great grandfather, was born May 28, 1934 in Paterson, New Jersey. It is quite amazing that Mordecai Kaplan’s Judaism as a Civilization appeared on that same day. Scult’s family were members of a Conservative synagogue, where as a teen, he participated in services and in synagogue activities, frequently serving as a cantor in the Junior Congregation. Truth to tell, however, he was much more interested in girls than in Judaism. He enjoyed ballroom dancing very much and reports that he went to dances frequently at the local Y.

    At age fifteen, he received a scholarship to Camp Ramah, a camp sponsored by the Jewish Theological Seminary, to encourage young people to speak Hebrew, to study Jewish sources and to follow the rituals of Judaism. That experience transformed him in a fundamental way. Life would never be the same. He states, “I deeply wanted to be part of that group and I hoped to share their goals and their values.” 

    As a consequence of that camp experience, Mel entered into an illustrious stream of higher education with a focus on Judaism and the Jewish experience past and present. At the same time that he was an undergraduate attending New York University majoring in philosophy, he attended the Jewish Theological Seminary at night. Thus he received a B.A, and a Bachelor of Hebrew Letters simultaneously. Somewhat later he studied at the Hayim Greenberg Institute in Jerusalem spending six months in the holy land. Upon returning, he attended Harvard University where he received his M.A. in teaching from School of Education and then studied at Brandeis University where he was awarded a Ph.D. in  Near Eastern and Judaic Studies a few years later. 

    After completing his doctorate, he served as professor of religion at Vassar College and then spent the next thirty years teaching at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York, where he founded  and directed the Program in Comparative Religion and was also a founding member of the Master of Arts Liberal in Studies. He has also held teaching positions at The New School, and at Brandeis University and most recently served as Adjunct Professor of Philosophy at the Jewish Theological Seminary where he taught rabbinical students about the life and thought of Mordecai Kaplan.

    Scult’s involvement with Mordecai Kaplan began after he completed his doctorate. He decided that he wanted to write a biography and thereby get intimately involved with the life and thought of one person. Looking around, Kaplan seemed like a likely candidate because of the excommunication and the first Bat Mitzvah. After reading in the works of Kaplan for a year, he asked his PhD advisor Ben Halpern to write a letter of introduction. One thing led to another and Scult began his life’s journey by spending three days at Camp Cejwin interviewing Kaplan. Mel continued his conversations back in the city, and then Kaplan showed him his twenty-seven volume diary. Kaplan’s diary is one of the largest in history and has been an endless source of inspiration to Mel and to others. It has been the basis of his biography of Kaplan and three volumes of excerpts which he published. In the course of his research he also interviewed Louis Finkelstein, president of the Seminary; Robert Gordis, noted Bible scholar; and additionally Judith Kaplan Eisenstein and Ira Eisenstein.

    Kaplan as a person and as a thinker has been a model for Mel in many ways.  Kaplan thought endlessly about the basic questions that any religious person might confront. These include the meaning of our individual existence, the matter of what is right and good, the belief in God, and as a Jew, the relationship to the Jewish people and their experience past and present.  Mel believes that his discovery of the centrality of the individual in Kaplan’s thought and the emphasis on growth and fulfillment is a key aspect of his legacy. Kaplan understood that the search to find one’s place and what life is all about is never ending. His writings have been inspirational to Mel in his research and hopefully will be helpful to you.

    Mel has continued to study and learn and publish his thinking on a variety of subjects. In addition to his work on Kaplan, he has also produced a major study of the early Seminary administration of Solomon Schechter and has written on the life of Schechter’s wife Mathilde Roth Schechter. He has also written about Henrietta Szold, the founder of Hadassah.

    He is a trustee of PEF- Israel Endowment Fund and a vice president and one of the founders of The Mordecai Kaplan Center for Jewish Peoplehood. He is not a rabbi but often feels like one because of his very supportive friends and colleagues at West End Synagogue and at the Society of the Advancement of Judaism. He davens and speaks frequently at both synagogues.

    Mel has a son, ten grandchildren and thirty one great-grandchildren, all of whom live in Jerusalem. He lives in New York with his wife Barbara Gish Scult.

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    Sheridan

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  • Rabbi Manny Goldsmith Tributes

    The Kaplan Center joins the family and many communities touched by Rabbi Goldsmith in mourning his death and celebrating his life. He was a student, disciple, and colleague of Mordecai Kaplan of the highest order.

    In this folder, you will find four different tributes to his life:

    • an obituary shared by the Reconstructionist Rabbinical Association,
    • a tribute to him written by his children
    • a letter from Kaplan Center Board Member Jack Wolofsky about his decades-long relationship with “Manny”
    • and a tribute from Mel Scult, Vice President and Academic Advisor for The Kaplan Center.

    Later in the year, The Kaplan Center will publish several of Rabbi Goldsmith’s most seminal articles about Judaism and Democracy as part of a project with The Jewish Partisanship for Democracy, A More Perfect Union.

    Rabbi Dr. Emanuel S. Goldsmith (8/15/1935-1/5/2024) was a scholar of Yiddish literature, interpreter of Reconstructionism, teacher of Judaism, and musical composer, who inspired students and congregants with his love of Jewish life in all its forms. He taught on the faculties of Brandeis University, the University of Connecticut, and Queens College. Dr. Goldsmith authored and edited many books and articles, including Modern Yiddish Culture, Dynamic Judaism, and Yiddish Literature in America 1870-2000. He also served on the boards of directors of the Congress for Jewish Culture, the Rena Costa Center for Yiddish Studies at Bar Ilan University, and the Highland Institute for American Religious Thought. Dr. Goldsmith led congregations in Halifax NS (Shaar Shalom Congregation), Hyde Park MA (Adas Hadrath Israel) and Scarsdale NY (Mevakshei Derech). He was predeceased by his beloved wife Shirley (Zebberman) and her son Garry, and survived by children Mirele (Richard Marker), Leizer (Sharon Bray), Rachel (Howard Ungar), and step-children Beila Sherman, Dawn Rosen (Sam z”l), Miryawm Faerman (Hillel), Tova Sherman (Joe Lang), grandchildren, and great-grandchildren.

    May Manny’s memory be a blessing and may those who mourn his passing find comfort among loving community.

    What a journey our father took over his lifetime.  In many ways he lived out a classic Jewish story, starting out as the child of immigrants in the Bronx, making the most of the opportunities America offered, entering the professional class and passing on his good fortune to his children.  In other ways he remained a child of that immigrant milieu until the end of his life.  The through line in Manny’s life is his love for Judaism, Jewish life and the Jewish People. 

    Manny’s father was raised in the Yishuv in Palestine.  Hayim came to America to escape the Turkish draft in the First World War.  He was proud of having attended the first modern, Hebrew-speaking school in Jerusalem, the Lemmel School. Hayim went to high school with Moshe Nathanson, credited (some say inaccurately) with composing Hava Nagila.  Hayim’s enthusiasm for Nathanson’s music had an enduring impact on Manny, who treasured his mixtapes of this music until the end.  Jewish music became one of his great passions – others being Yiddish, Reconstructionism, Theology and Philosophy.

    Manny’s parents were ardent Zionists who read The Tog – a Zionist Yiddish newspaper that competed with the better-known Forward. Manny remembered his father taking him to many political meetings, exposing him to the vibrant Jewish atmosphere of New York City. He recalled collecting money for the Yishuv on the subway and sending packages to family in Jerusalem during the war.  His parents were also active members of two landsmanshaften (mutual aid society).

    Manny’s mother came with her family from Ukraine to Minneapolis.  Manny met his grandparents only a couple of times – his parents were too poor and too tied down by their little Bronx grocery store to make the trip to Minneapolis.  On one such trip Manny’s grandfather played a cantorial record for him – another important musical moment.  Like many immigrant parents, Manny’s parents wanted him to learn English, but they took him to the Yiddish theater and listened to Yiddish radio.  Later, Manny used to say that he took up Yiddish to become closer to his mother.

    The New York public schools nurtured Manny’s outgoing personality and love of performing. He liked to tell how he always played Santa at Christmas time because he was a round little boy.  He learned to play piano – or maybe he just played by ear – and toured as the “Hava Nagila Kid.”  He attended New York City’s High School of the Performing Arts and performed the lead role in a long-running show put on in Hebrew (HaOtsar B’meara – the Treasure in the Cave) by the Jewish Board of Education for Hebrew school classes.  Manny followed a Jewish educational path that is hard to imagine today: He attended Willets Avenue Talmud Torah, the Marshalliya Jewish High School, and then the Jewish Theological Seminary (JTS). 

    Manny was fortunate to receive a world-class education, courtesy of New York City.  While at City College, Manny heard a lecture by Dr. Max Weinreich– one of the founders of YIVO who took refuge in America– about the Yiddish language.  After a chance encounter on the subway, Manny became so enamored with Dr. Weinreich that he vowed to take all of Weinreich’s classes. This was the start of his career as a scholar of Yiddish literature.

    Manny realized that his future lay in the Rabbinate and not on Broadway.  At JTS he encountered Rabbi Mordecai M. Kaplan, another teacher who changed his life. With his usual dramatic flair, he would tell the story of how he picked up Kaplan’s book, The Meaning of God in Modern Jewish Religion, and threw it down immediately upon reading the first paragraph.  He said that as a person training to be a rabbi, he was shocked that Kaplan wrote that the traditional view of God had no relevance to modern Jews.  But then, he would say, he picked the book back up because he was curious.  Manny began attending services at the Society for the Advancement of Judaism. Ultimately, he became a close student of Kaplan’s, including working for him as editor of The Reconstructionist journal, and indeed becoming a key interpreter and teacher of Kaplan’s ideas. Later, Manny expanded his scholarship in religious naturalism by drawing on the work of Protestant theologian Henry Nelson Weiman. Manny was particularly proud that he was accepted into the fellowship of Christian scholars at the Highlands Institute as a result of this work, and frequently enjoyed attending its annual conferences.

    While at JTS, Manny met and married Karen Merdinger, who was studying at the JTS Teachers Institute, headed at the time by Kaplan. Together they embraced Kaplan’s vision of Judaism as a civilization in their own life.  During this time, Manny was approached to record an album of Shabbat prayers and songs for the purpose of teaching students learning Hebrew with the newly popular Israeli accent. He composed some original music and conducted a choir of Seminary students to record the album, titled “Beloved of Days.”  Just a few years ago one of his compositions, Chai Hashem, was re-recorded by local musician Chaim Fruchter.  He also performed with Theodore Bikel on the album Theodore Bikel Sings Jewish Folk Songs.

    Following graduation, Manny and Karen – now Kayla,  went to Israel where Manny hoped to pursue a PhD. Although that didn’t work out, they came home with their first child, Mirele.  Manny remained an ardent lover of the State of Israel and returned there many times. 

    Manny took a position as the Rabbi of Shaar Shalom Congregation in Halifax, Nova Scotia, where Leizer and Rachel were born.  Manny and Kayla became fast friends with Shirley and Dave Sherman and their family. Many years later Manny and Shirley married and Shirley’s children, Beila, Garry, Dawn, Miryawm and Tova became Manny’s as well. While living in Halifax in May 1963, Bull Connor unleashed his dogs and water cannons against peaceful civil rights demonstrators in Birmingham, Alabama. 

    Manny, a lifelong supporter of civil rights, traveled to Birmingham as a representative of the Rabbinical Assembly to stand in solidarity with Black leaders and the civil rights movement. He told the Halifax Mail-Star that: “We wanted to translate our religious beliefs and values into action. . . We wanted to practice what we preach about freedom, equality and human dignity.” While in Birmingham, the rabbis stayed at the A. G. Gaston Motel, which was then bombed two days after they left. Manny participated with other rabbis in a private meeting with King, the NAACP’s Roy Wilkins, and other leaders, in which the rabbis continued to express support. When a colleague raised the issue of Black anti-semitism with King, King’s forceful and unequivocal response that it was to be eradicated so moved Manny that he mentioned it many times thereafter.  He said at the time that Dr. King was “a great religious leader, for whom I have only the greatest admiration.” True-to-form, after the Black and Jewish leaders had exchanged songs of love and freedom, he said he “heard God” in  the “songs and prayers of freedom he heard in the Black churches.” He was later awarded life membership in the Nova Scotia Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

    After Halifax and short stints in New York and Washington DC– where they taught the Confirmation and Post Confirmation classes at Adas Israel– Manny and Kayla moved to Brookline, Massachusetts and Manny earned his PhD at Brandeis University.  His PhD thesis on the Czernowitz Conference on Yiddish– a pivotal moment in Jewish intellectual history– became an instant classic in the field.  While a student, Manny made a living leading several congregations part-time.  He loved to tell how he once held 3 rabbinic gigs simultaneously: one Reform, one Conservative, and the third Orthodox. Ultimately, he remained the rabbi of Congregation Adas Hadrath Israel in Hyde Park – the Conservative congregation– even after moving away from the Boston area.  In 1990, the congregation honored him for twenty inspiring years of service.

    Manny taught at the University of Connecticut and then moved to Queens College, as Professor of Yiddish and Jewish studies.  While in Queens he took on editing Yiddish Literature in America 1870-2000. This huge two-volume anthology was a project of the Congress for Jewish Culture and was to be carried out by a committee. As time went on, many of the committee members passed away.  Manny completed this major work by working with the proofreader of the Yiddish Forward and the cover artist. 

    Manny also recorded an album  “I Love Yiddish” on which he recites Yiddish poetry, sings and plays the piano.  This is a wonderful snapshot of his love of Yiddish Language and Culture.

    Manny married Shirley in 1982.  After her divorce, Shirley had made aliyah and took a job as a social worker in Jerusalem.  Manny went to Israel to visit and propose.  Shirley was surprised when he asked her to marry him.  It was just before Passover and Shirley promised to wind up her affairs in Israel and join Manny in New York by Seder.  Shirley encouraged Manny to accept a position as the part-time Rabbi of Reconstructionist Congregation M’vakshei Derech in Scarsdale NY, which he held until retirement.  

    Manny and Shirley moved to Ring House at the end of 2009.  For the first year they faithfully attended B’nai Israel Congregation where Rachel was working.  Manny and Shirley then found their home at Adat Shalom where the Rabbis appreciated his mini-sermons offered from his seat in the congregation. He continued to teach and inspire, delivering lectures that were co-sponsored by Adat Shalom.  When he could no longer lecture, he began delivering programs on Jewish music for Ring House residents. He was able to indulge his bibliomania by rebuilding the library he had sold upon retirement by purchasing secondhand books, and to enjoy his extensive music collection, movies curated by Shirley, and time with his grandchildren.  After Shirley died, Manny was fortunate to receive loving care at Brightview and finally at Larmax Group Homes.

    When Manny was declining he would repeat his famous one-liner about Judaism and his worldview.  He was particularly fond of saying, “Judaism is ethics wrapped up in beautiful traditions.”  Manny’s enthusiasm for Judaism, loyalty to the Jewish People, and enjoyment of Jewish life was the essence of his being. He was blessed to be able to devote his life to this passion, fulfilling the beautiful words of the Psalms: “One thing do I ask of God, it is this that I seek: to live in the house of God all the days of my life, to behold God’s sweetness and frequent God’s house.” (Psalm 27:4)

    Rabbi Dr. Emanuel S. Goldsmith (8/15/1935-1/5/2024) was a scholar of Yiddish literature, interpreter of Reconstructionism, teacher of Judaism, and musical composer, who inspired students and congregants with his love of Jewish life in all its forms. He taught on the faculties of Brandeis University, the University of Connecticut, and Queens College. Dr. Goldsmith authored and edited many books and articles, including Modern Yiddish Culture, Dynamic Judaism, and Yiddish Literature in America 1870-2000. He also served on the boards of directors of the Congress for Jewish Culture, the Rena Costa Center for Yiddish Studies at Bar Ilan University, and the Highland Institute for American Religious Thought. 

    Dr. Goldsmith led congregations in Halifax NS (Shaar Shalom Congregation), Hyde Park MA (Adas Hadrath Israel) and Scarsdale NY (Mevakshei Derech). He was predeceased by his beloved wife Shirley (Zebberman) and her son Garry, and survived by children Mirele (Richard Marker), Leizer (Sharon Bray), Rachel (Howard Ungar), and step-children Beila Sherman, Dawn Rosen (Sam z”l), Miryawm Faerman (Hillel), Tova Sherman (Joe Lang), grandchildren, and great-grandchildren.

    For Manny

    How does one usually choose a friend, a teacher, a mentor? 

    I first met Manny at a Reconstructionist convention in Montreal in 1967. Manny led the Friday night service by starting with the Aaron Zeitlin poem “Praise me, says God, and I will know that you love me”. He recited it in Yiddish. I was moved. This changed my understanding of a synagogue service. Yiddish could and should be used to enhance the experience. I introduced myself to Manny, and expressed my gratitude for his use of mama loshen in the service. His response was that Yiddish is part of the Jewish civilization and should be incorporated into all synagogue services. I was left thinking. That Sunday, at a plenary session, the question of starting a Reconstructionist college where Kaplanian thought and teaching could be promulgated was discussed. It was Manny who championed the idea against the wishes of those who felt that starting a college would take too much energy away from The Reconstructionist magazine. Manny’s erudite persistence prevailed, and we all know the result.

    I renewed my acquaintance with Manny when he came to Montreal as the principal of the brand new Bialik High School, a high school where Yiddish was being taught and where my children would eventually graduate. We’d meet frequently back then, mostly in Yiddish bookstores. He’d pull out books from the shelves and INSIST they needed to be part of my library. Each book would be explained and championed for their implications in our lives. Our friendship grew as did our arguments. But, so did my learning from his teachings. His knowledge was vast in both civil society and Yiddish-Jewish civilization. Manny became my mentor.

    On Saturday nights his Yiddish music abilities shone. We would sit at our piano and sing Yiddish songs together. He and I were the only ones who knew and sang Lewandowski’s ”Ha Mavdil” and boy, would we sing it with gusto! 

    Manny had a great sense of humor. He realized that to lead a service and keep his congregations interested, he needed to tell a joke. Shirley secretly told me Manny would keep a Jewish joke book hidden behind his siddur when he was sitting on the pulpit –but not leading the service. 

    At Mirelle and Richard’s wedding, Manny put on a clown suit, danced, sang and MC’ed the evening as the shtetl Badkhn would have done in days gone by.

    Manny’s Judaism was a commitment to justice for all. He insisted I see or read Matthew Lopez’s play “The Whipping Man.”  The thoughts and ideas expressed in the play about freedom, slavery and democracy were important, he told me, for every Jew, not only for their personal lives, but particularly in their relationships to other oppressed populations. He taught me that!

    In Florida, he brought me to a concert by Emil Gorovets, a Yiddish singer who at the time had just left Soviet Ukraine. He sang the songs of the murdered poets, which of course, lead Manny to an hours-long conversation with Gorovets about the fate of Jewish poets, artists and doctors under Stalin. True to Manny’s personality, after that discussion, we made our way to Jewish bookstore where he insisted I buy every book about Stalin’s Russian that had ever been printed. 

    His sense of justice and humor also extended to the intolerance of our own kind. When Shirley’s daughter Miriam and Hillel were married in an ultraorthodox wedding, Manny was called up for a Sheva brocha as Mr. Goldsmith. The officiant’s unwillingness to recognize Manny’s semicha didn’t deter him. Once on the bima, he looked at his counterpart and replied, “it’s Rabbi Doctor Emmanuel Goldsmith.”

    It didn’t long for Manny to be recognized by the cognoscenti world. 

    Manny organized Kaplan conferences at Queens College and as well, was invited to attend conferences convened by others to speak on Kaplanian ideas.

    Because of Manny’s research on and writings about Henry Nelson Weiman, he was invited to attend the Highland Institute conferences where he presented and was engaged. Both Manny and Shirley related the stimulation and the joy they experienced there. 

    Manny taught Yiddish at Oxford University summer school in England.

    These encounters often lead to important scholarship and influence upon others:

    After attending a conference convened by Rafiel Patie, Manny and Patie published a two-volume anthology on “Modern Jewish Thought and Thinkers.”

    When Manny attended the International Conference of Yiddish Theater groups in Montreal, he gave a genius erudite analysis of a Jewish movie. When he was finished, a fellow lecture attendee offered, “That’s why I took his lectures at Queens College, and that’s why I became a professor of Jewish studies.”

    When Manny worked on his two volumes of “Yiddish Literature in America-1870-2000,”  he called me to ask if I could get him pictures of the Montreal writers Korn, Elberg, Ravitch, and Rosenfarb. How could I refuse? As I knew them all, I took the time to locate them and get what Manny wanted, as well as some unpublished work of Elberg, which I also sent to Manny. Aside from referring to various poems and writing, I glean and cherish most from reading and rereading Manny’s brilliant fourteen-page introduction to both the authors and their writings. It is through Manny’s interpretations that we can appreciate the creative powers unleashed by Jewish civilization’s newfound freedom in America to express itself.

    Manny produced for Truro College two series of audio tapes on 1. People of Importance in Eastern European History and 2. Shapers of Modern Jewish Thought.  There are 13 lectures in each set, and to this day these tapes are still the most convenient way for anyone wishing to learn their heritage.

    One of Manny’s best traits was his fearlessness in speaking Truth to Power!

    Manny spent weeks in the summer at Circle Camp and lectured in and about Yiddish. He complained that while he enjoyed the Yiddish, he missed the commitment to Jewish ritual. 

    After attending a conference of the Society for Humanistic Judaism, he said they have many good Kaplanian ideas, but they had to bring the Torah down from the shelf where they have put it –and read and fight with what it said!

    When Manny was invited to be at Klezkanada to lead and present on Yiddishisms, he taught Sholom Asch and his exposing of the darker side of Jewish community such as prostitution, conversion, Jesus, and at the time, the taboo of Lesbianism. There were many in the audience who were enraged at the subject as they were aware the “Yiddish Forward” had ostracized Asch’s writings. A professor from McGill University’s Jewish studies program was especially enraged. Manny, like a Ninja, took them all on! He was unafraid to tell them we were not God’s Chosen People, and that we had our dark sides like everyone else. 

    Manny told me a story, which I am sure he told many others. As a student counsellor of children at Camp Cejwin he was walking and arguing with Kaplan. Manny disagreed at a point and responded to Kaplan “But Rabbi, you yourself said…” to which Kaplan angrily replied, “I never could have said that,” and walked away in a huff. Manny was sure that Kaplan would never talk to him again. The next morning, Kaplan came up to Manny in the dining hall and said, “Manny, you were right. I looked myself up.” Truth to Power!

    At a class at the Jewish Theological seminary, he asked Abraham Joshua Heschel, “Does he believe in Revelation?” HesChel prevaricated. Manny repeated, “Yes or no, do you believe?” Heshel walked out of the room. Manny followed him to his office and repeated over and over, “do you believe in revelation from heaven, yes or no?” When Heschel finally said “yes,” Manny said thank you and walked out of the room. Again, truth to power. He was fearless and determined. 

    I have not here spoken about Manny’s commitment to Kaplan – that is well known, and others will speak to it.

    And so, let me end where I began. 

    How does one choose a friend, teacher, and mentor?
    By setting and being an example of their teachings. 
    And those teachings and examples began for me in 1967, with Zeitlin’s Yiddish poem. 

    Zeitlin’s poem is a call to action that we must always be involved: “If you neither curse nor praise, then I have created you in vain, says God”. Manny praised loudly and cursed softly. He created an oeuvre that will be studied, read, and listened to for many years to come. He has left our Jewish civilization much greater for having lived. I will carry his memory in me for the rest of my life. 

    I very deeply regret to report that Professor Emanuel Goldsmith has passed away. For many years he taught Jewish Studies at Queens College with a strong expertise in the Yiddish language and literature. At the same time he was a deeply committed Reconstructionist having not only read and written about Mordecai Kaplan but actually worked with Kaplan at the SAJ in the early sixties.

    Manny, as we all called him, was probably responsible for a number of important things including the title of “ Not So Random Thoughts.” He proudly related to me many times that Kaplan and he were talking about the book which contains the many one liners referred to as Random Thoughts and originally published in the Reconstructionist. “ Why not call the book “ Not so Random Thoughts. “ he said to Kaplan, and that’s how the title came to be.

    Manny was a rabbis rabbi. Deeply informed about many areas of the Jewish experience and a committed Recontructionist, Goldsmith was a profoundly devoted person. His commitments and his vitality . were infectious to the many congregants in the several congregations which he served as rabbi. His energy and liveliness were noteworthy in his fine singing voice which we all enjoyed.

    I first met Manny when we were teen agers and students at the Jewish Theological Seminary. We were both students in the night program at the Seminary College and Manny went on to become a Conservative rabbi.. Over the years we lost touch but I saw him again at Mordecai Kaplan’s funeral in 1983. We talked then and afterwards and he invited me to collaborate with him on a Kaplan reader he was working on, entitled “ Dynamic Judaism. “ The reader was originally published by Schocken Books and the Reconstructionist Press. Over the years this work was translated into Hebrew and published by Yediot Ahronot in Israel.

    Manny’s scholarship was vast and he was particularly proud of the contacts and articles he published making Kaplan known not only to the Jewish community but also to many Christian colleagues . He also may have been a key figure in the establishment of the Reconstructionist College. In the late sixties when the idea of the college was very much on people’s minds, Manny was a very strong supporter when some others had doubts as to whether the rather small community of Reconstructionists could support an independent institution.

    But of course in the last analysis accomplishments are less important that what we become as a person. The word that keeps on coming back to me , a word which Kaplan favored , is “vitality.” Manny was one of the most vital people I have known. He was very much alive in so many ways and everyone who knew him felt it. As Jews and as human beings we would do well to follow his example.

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    Margie Jacobs

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  • What We Are Reading

    “The Parting of the Ways? Open Orthodox Judaism in Historical Perspective”

    “Atheism as my path to High Holy Days enlightenment”

    “Learning Judaism as a Native Language Requires More Than Synagogue Once a Year”

    “Stephen Hawking’s Shofar”

    “On Judeo-Persian Language and Literature | Part One: State of the Field”

    “The Reform movement’s new holiday prayer book is radically inclusive”

    “The Parting of the Ways? Open Orthodox Judaism in Historical Perspective”

    “The Pathology Plaguing American Jews“

    “The Lilliputians in Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels may have been speaking Hebrew“

    “In Polls We Trust“

    “New Show from Slam Poet Vanessa Hidary Takes on Jewish Identity“

    “The Unusual Pe Preceding Ayin Order in the Acrostics of the Book of Eikhah“

    “For first time in 100 years, outsider tapped to lead Looksteins’ N.Y. shul“

    “Alan Brill Interview with Adam Ferziger – Beyond Sectarianism“

    “Seraphs“

    “Ancient Mosaic Discovered in Israel May Depict Alexander the Great Meeting a Jewish Priest“

    “Did Israel’s President Really Refer to Reform Judaism as ‘Idol Worship’?“

    “Israeli Rock Music’s Spiritual New Sound“

    “Is Capitalism Hurting Synagogue Life?“

    “Why the King James Version of the Bible Remains the Best“

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    Hirsch Fishman

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  • Chutzpod Podcast

    Primary Contact – Rabbi Shira Stutman
    sstutman@gmail.com
    https://chutzpod.com/home

    We invite you to listen to our podcast.
    Chutzpod!

    Chutzpod! is a spiritual, educational, and joyous podcast designed for non-religious Jews and spiritual seekers of all types, and one of the most successful Jewish podcasts in the world. Each episode of this weekly podcast explores a different spiritual question, holiday celebration, or mindfulness practice, often using the weekly Torah portion as a springboard.

    Episodes are hosted by West Wing and Scandal actor Joshua Malina (long-time member of a Reconstructionist congregation) and noted Rabbi Shira Stutman, RRC class of 2007.

    Mordecai Kaplan understood that in order for Judaism not only to survive but also to thrive, it needed a refurbishment, revival, and sometimes entirely new iteration of Jewish culture, language, religious practice, and understanding of God, one based both on all the Jewish generations that came before, and understanding that changes will continue in ways unimaginable in the generations to come. And that these changes, developments, and leaps of faith will come especially quickly in the goldene medina of America, where Jews live with an unparalleled freedom and in which scientific, psychological, historical, and other forms of knowledge expand at an exponential pace.

    Kaplan also understood that Judaism is not something that takes place only around a dinner table or on a bima, that it is more than religious rites and rituals, that it includes peoplehood and culture as well. Kaplan was also a teacher and a public intellectual. He wanted to get his ideas out into the wider world.

    If he lived in 2022, would Mordecai Kaplan be a podcaster? Perhaps he would have considered it too low-brow a medium. But we like to think that he would have felt aligned with the goals of Chutzpod!, one of the leading Jewish podcasts in the world.

    Chutzpod, too, understands the universe of multiple identities, specifically that of Jewish Americans who fully desire to embody both civilizations.

    We have found that there are three basic Chutzpod archetypes, each represented below by a recent email from an actual listener:

    The spiritual seeker: “I have been listening to Chutzpod! since the first episode, and I wanted to write to express my thanks to you. I am not Jewish, but I have been undergoing something of a crisis of faith recently, and your words and conversation often speak life to me. I’m so grateful for you two, who are keeping me tethered to spirituality and the divine when the roots and ties I have had in the past have all but evaporated.”

    The Jew who wants to know more: “As someone who grew up in a family that described itself as ‘Jew-ish’ I’ve often felt not ‘Jewish enough’ to engage, and this podcast is one of the first times the door feels truly open to me. I keep having moments of ‘oh, so that’s why Grandpa used to say that!’ I’m learning, I’m reflecting, and I’m connecting with my heritage — thank you for this gift.”

    The wandering Jew: “I have missed going to synagogue since the pandemic started, but at the same time inertia has kept me from returning. Chutzpod has become part of my Shabbat routine – I listen to it while cleaning up after the Friday night meal.”

    Back to the Innovation Garden

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    Sheridan

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  • I Remember Mordecai

    On this page you will find a treasure of reminiscences by those who knew Kaplan directly as a person- his students, family members, and more.

    Jack Wolofsky

    Jack Wolofsky, co-founder of the Kaplan Center, shares memories of and reflections about Kaplan.

    https://vimeo.com/968159527/84a3c1b055?share=copy

    Mitchell Rothman

    Rabbi Michael Cohen speaks with Mitchell Rothman,  life-long Kaplan student and devotee of the Kaplan diaries

    https://vimeo.com/881434472?share=copy

    Daniel Musher

    Daniel Musher, the grandson of Mordecai Kaplan,reminisces about Shabbat with his grandfather.

    https://vimeo.com/833411373/3c92577d02?share=copy

    Rabbis Ray Artz & Michael Graetz

    Rabbis Ray Arzt and Michael Graetz, students of Mordecai Kaplan, reflect on his impact on their approaches to Judaism

    https://vimeo.com/847045476?share=copy

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    Margie Jacobs

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  • Recording of “A New Haggadah for a Time of Crisis? The Radical 1941 Haggadah of Mordecai M. Kaplan” (4-5-20)

    In order to view or download the source sheet for this program, please click here.

    In order to view or download the lovely Haggadah addition from “Our Common Destiny” that was shared during the program, please click here.

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    Daniel Cedarbaum

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  • Education Colloquium: Dr. Bill Robinson

    Will The Real Mordecai Kaplan Please Stand Up?

    Monday, April 19, 2021 3:00pm EST

    Dr. Bill Robinson will reflect on how his thinking about Kaplan and Virtue Ethics has continued to evolve since our initial program on January 6, 2021.

    Dr. Eric Caplan will augment our discussion of Kaplan and Virtue Ethics by guiding us beyond Judaism as a Civilization (1934) to The Future of the American Jew (1948).

    Sue Penn, Director of Education at University Synagogue, will explore with us, “What would our ethical stance look like if it emerged out of the practice of Jewish education rather than theory?”

    To attend this free program, please contact Dr. Jeffrey Schein.

    Please enjoy this recording of our first colloquium with Dr. Robinson on January 6, 2021 program.

    For your convenience, here are notes summarizing the conversation as well as a transcript of messages posted in the chat during this program. Finally here are key questions that emerged during conversation.

    In advance of that program, participants were asked to read a draft of Dr. Robinson’s upcoming chapter about Kaplan’ educational vision. The chapter is referenced throughout the conversation. Please contact Dr. Jeffrey Schein if you wish to review that preliminary document.

     

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    Daniel Cedarbaum

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  • Kaplan, Zionism, and Us

     by Rabbi Toba Spitzer

    In The Meaning of God in Modern Jewish Religion (published in 1937), in the chapter on Chanukah, Mordecai Kaplan reflected on Jewish survival in the face of competing cultures. He wrote: “Paradoxical as it may seem, if a nation wishes to survive, it must not make survival itself its supreme objective, but rather aim at the achievement of the highest intellectual, esthetic and social good that alone makes national survival important to its individual members.” (p. 352). He then goes on to talk about the Zionist project in what was then Palestine:

    “The motive that has been the dynamic force behind Jewish achievement in Palestine has been a faith in the destiny of [humanity] to achieve a better social order that has not yet been achieved anywhere, one in which nationalism would function not as an aggressive military or economic force in the hands of predatory interests, but as a civilizing agency utilizing the cultural traditions of the various peoples for intellectual growth, esthetic enjoyment, and social communion. Combined with this motive has been the faith that the Jewish people, if given a chance to develop in contact with nature and under autonomous political conditions in its own land, could and should make a significant contribution to this goal… Were this faith to become inoperative, Palestine would soon become but another Jewish ghetto, with no more appeal to the loyalty of the Jew, with no more power to stir our imagination or to elicit from us that self-forgetful devotion with which the Palestinian enterprise has so far happily evoked, than any other center of Jewish population” (p. 354).

    Lately I have been musing on Kaplan’s prophetic words, and wondering what he would make of the challenge that present-day Israel poses to “the loyalty of the Jew” in the diaspora. Kaplan is held up as the archetypal Zionist, both within the Reconstructionist movement and beyond. And it is certainly true that he was devoted to the creation of a Jewish homeland in the historic land of Israel, and had deep personal connections to the state of Israel after its founding. Yet as Noam Pianko powerfully illustrates in his 2010 book, Zionism and the Roads Not Taken, Kaplan’s brand of Zionism—a non-statist, idealistic vision of “ethical nationhood”—was never incorporated into the mainstream of  Zionist thought or practice. Kaplan and his circle  differentiated between a Zionism that would function as an international movement binding together Jews wherever they lived, and the creation of a sovereign Jewish political entity in historic Palestine. Writing in The Reconstructionist in February 1949, the editors argued that the flag of the new state of Israel should not be the blue and white Zionist flag, but rather a flag that represented “the aspirations of all the citizens of Israel,” and would acknowledge the “Arab minority” in the state (and that there should be a separate flag to represent global Jewry). In 1955, in A New Zionism, Kaplan wrote: “The State of Israel cannot be a Jewish State, nor can world Jewry continue to be a nation in the modern sense. The State of Israel will have to be an Israeli State, and world Jewry will have to be metamorphosed into a Jewish People which is rooted in Eretz Yisrael and which has its branches wherever it is allowed to live” (p.page 93).

    As Pianko illustrates in his study, Kaplan was wary of the “bellicose” nature of state-based nationalisms as they manifested after World War II, and he criticized “the sort of irresponsible and obsolete national sovereignty that modern nations claim for themselves,” going on to argue that this concept of sovereignty “is liable to bring about a catastrophe that will destroy the very foundations of human civilization” (Future of the American Jew, p. 125).  Pianko explains that “Kaplan proposed peoplehood to stand in for nationhood after his initial term became too closely associated with statehood.” (Roads Not Taken, p. 198).

    All of which is to say, we should be honest in admitting that none of us have any real idea of what Kaplan would be saying about the current state of affairs in Israel or where he would come down on present-day debates about Zionism. His thinking about issues of Jewish peoplehood and nationalism in general were complex, and one could make a plethora of arguments grounded in Kaplan’s words and deeds. Rather than making speculative claims about “what would Kaplan say?”, those of us who consider ourselves Kaplan’s intellectual heirs (and I consider myself among that group) would better be guided by Kaplan’s ability to interrogate the conformist thought around him, to pose radical questions, and to stay current with the debates roiling his—and our—communities today. Having said that, I will allow myself,  for the sake of argument, to wonder what indeed Kaplan might be  thinking in this moment.

    In my imagination, Kaplan would be wrestling with the growing trend of non- and anti-Zionism among many American Jews, especially those of a younger generation, and inquiring into its origins. In the wake of the passage of the Nation-State Law, which formally enshrined Jewish supremacy in Israel as a Basic Law, I can also imagine him questioning whether it is still possible to consider Israel  both a Jewish and a democratic state, or one still capable of reflecting the universal values which he held up as the raison d’être of “ethical nationhood.”

    I also imagine Kaplan challenging the reactivity of aspects of anti-Zionist thought, which in many ways is defined by mainstream Zionist assumptions and simply replaces them with their opposite. He would not question the Jewish right to self-determination or the assertion of Jewish peoplehood/nationhood, nor would he tolerate reducing the Zionist project to a maleficent extension of European settler-colonialism. But I do believe he would wrestle seriously with the facts of the ongoing Nakba, the erasure of Palestinian ties to the land and the destruction of Palestinian society and culture which began in 1948 and which continue today, both within the bounds of Israel proper and in Gaza and the West Bank. 

    When I articulated the “new mitzvah” of ahavat yoshvei ha’aretz, an obligation to care about and remain engaged with all who dwell in the land of Israel/Palestine, I was doing so from what I consider a Kaplanian perspective. What are the demands of this historical moment in which we Jews find ourselves? What do our values ask of us? How do we follow Kaplan’s early admonition that “if a nation wishes to survive, it must not make survival itself its supreme objective”? In my mind, the radical, visionary Kaplan of the 1930s and ‘40s would not be litigating the past, nor wasting time on the binary of Zionism/anti-Zionism. He would be seeking to provide new answers for all Jews everywhere, and especially in his beloved Israel and his beloved America. He would understand that the simple fact of Jewish and Palestinian existence upon and devotion to the land necessitates new models of confederation and partnership. He would be committed, I have little doubt, to the understanding that in this moment, Jewish and Palestinian liberation are bound up together, and must be striven for together. And we, following in his footsteps, can help cultivate new thinking about how Jewish culture and values can be nurtured in a state where Jews continue to build a home, but which would not be a “Jewish state.” A place where Jews, Palestinians, and all others can live with full dignity, equality, freedom, and security.  

    May we who are inspired by Kaplan wrestle together to create new visions and new possibilities, with open hearts and minds, for the sake of all who dwell in Israel/historic Palestine, for Jewish communities around the globe, for all who dwell on Earth.

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    Margie Jacobs

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