Arthur Hertzberg was a Conservative

Conservative Judaism

Conservative Judaism is a modern stream of Judaism that arose out of intellectual currents in Germany in the mid-19th century and took institutional form in the United States in the early 1900s.Conservative Judaism has its roots in the school of thought known as Positive-Historical Judaism,...

 rabbi

Rabbi

In Judaism, a rabbi is a teacher of Torah. This title derives from the Hebrew word רבי , meaning "My Master" , which is the way a student would address a master of Torah...

 and prominent Jewish-American scholar and activist.

Biography

Avraham Hertzberg was born in Lubaczów

Lubaczów

Lubaczów is a town in southeastern Poland, close to the border with Ukraine, with 12,405 inhabitants .Situated in the Subcarpathian Voivodeship , it is the capital of Lubaczów County and is located 50 kilometers northeast of Przemyśl....

, Poland, the eldest of five children, and left Europe in 1926 with his mother and grandmother to join his father in the United States, where his name was Americanized to Arthur. Hertzberg recalled that as a teenager in an Orthodox

Orthodox Judaism

Orthodox Judaism , is the approach to Judaism which adheres to the traditional interpretation and application of the laws and ethics of the Torah as legislated in the Talmudic texts by the Sanhedrin and subsequently developed and applied by the later authorities known as the Gaonim, Rishonim, and...

 Jewish neighborhood in Baltimore, Maryland, he would not accept the notion that the literary world of talmud

Talmud

The Talmud is a central text of mainstream Judaism. It takes the form of a record of rabbinic discussions pertaining to Jewish law, ethics, philosophy, customs and history....

ic learning, the kabbalistic

Kabbalah

Kabbalah/Kabala is a discipline and school of thought concerned with the esoteric aspect of Rabbinic Judaism. It was systematized in 11th-13th century Hachmei Provence and Spain, and again after the Expulsion from Spain, in 16th century Ottoman Palestine...

 books and the writing of the chasidim

Hasidic Judaism

Hasidic Judaism or Hasidism, from the Hebrew —Ḥasidut in Sephardi, Chasidus in Ashkenazi, meaning "piety" , is a branch of Orthodox Judaism that promotes spirituality and joy through the popularisation and internalisation of Jewish mysticism as the fundamental aspects of the Jewish faith...

 were less worthy as compared to the Iliad

Iliad

The Iliad is an epic poem in dactylic hexameters, traditionally attributed to Homer. Set during the Trojan War, the ten-year siege of the city of Troy by a coalition of Greek states, it tells of the battles and events during the weeks of a quarrel between King Agamemnon and the warrior Achilles...

, the Odyssey

Odyssey

The Odyssey is one of two major ancient Greek epic poems attributed to Homer. It is, in part, a sequel to the Iliad, the other work ascribed to Homer. The poem is fundamental to the modern Western canon, and is the second—the Iliad being the first—extant work of Western literature...

or Dante

Dante Alighieri

Durante degli Alighieri, mononymously referred to as Dante , was an Italian poet, prose writer, literary theorist, moral philosopher, and political thinker. He is best known for the monumental epic poem La commedia, later named La divina commedia ...

's Inferno

The Divine Comedy

The Divine Comedy is an epic poem written by Dante Alighieri between 1308 and his death in 1321. It is widely considered the preeminent work of Italian literature, and is seen as one of the greatest works of world literature...

. His father was an Orthodox rabbi

Rabbi

In Judaism, a rabbi is a teacher of Torah. This title derives from the Hebrew word רבי , meaning "My Master" , which is the way a student would address a master of Torah...

 trained in Eastern Europe

Eastern Europe

Eastern Europe is the eastern part of Europe. The term has widely disparate geopolitical, geographical, cultural and socioeconomic readings, which makes it highly context-dependent and even volatile, and there are "almost as many definitions of Eastern Europe as there are scholars of the region"...

, who taught Arthur to appreciate the richness of the Talmud and the other great works of Judaism

Judaism

Judaism ) is the "religion, philosophy, and way of life" of the Jewish people...

. Although Hertzberg would later stray from his Orthodox upbringing and be ordained as a Conservative

Conservative Judaism

Conservative Judaism is a modern stream of Judaism that arose out of intellectual currents in Germany in the mid-19th century and took institutional form in the United States in the early 1900s.Conservative Judaism has its roots in the school of thought known as Positive-Historical Judaism,...

 rabbi, he "never used my 'heresy' as the excuse to prefer the majority culture to my own." He was married to the former Phyllis Cannon from 1950 until his death. They are the parents of two daughters, Dr. Linda Beth and Susan Riva, and they have four grandchildren named Rachel, Mike, Michelle, and Derek.

Hertzberg's love of Judaism and the Jewish texts was at the core of his life as a rabbi, scholar, educator and Jewish communal leader. Over the course of his 50 plus year career, Rabbi Hertzberg served as a congregational rabbi, president of both the American Jewish Policy Foundation and the American Jewish Congress

American Jewish Congress

The American Jewish Congress describes itself as an association of Jewish Americans organized to defend Jewish interests at home and abroad through public policy advocacy, using diplomacy, legislation, and the courts....

, vice president of the World Jewish Congress

World Jewish Congress

The World Jewish Congress was founded in Geneva, Switzerland, in August 1936 as an international federation of Jewish communities and organizations...

 and a leading representative of world Jewry in the historic Catholic-Jewish dialogue that commenced during the papacy of Pope John XXIII

Pope John XXIII

-Papal election:Following the death of Pope Pius XII in 1958, Roncalli was elected Pope, to his great surprise. He had even arrived in the Vatican with a return train ticket to Venice. Many had considered Giovanni Battista Montini, Archbishop of Milan, a possible candidate, but, although archbishop...

. As a major public figure in the world of Jewish organizational life, Hertzberg was at the center of the crucial events shaping American Jewish life since the end of World War II.

Rabbi Hertzberg died on April 17, 2006 of heart failure en route to Pascack Valley Hospital

Pascack Valley Hospital

Pascack Valley Hospital is a former 291 bed hospital, located at 250 Old Hook Road, Westwood, New Jersey.-History:Pascack Valley Hospital opened on June 1, 1959, as an 86-bed community hospital. It has undergone several expansions and grew to 291 beds.In 2005, the PVH completed construction on a...

 in Westwood, New Jersey

Westwood, New Jersey

Westwood is a borough in Bergen County, New Jersey, United States. As of the 2010 United States Census, the borough population was 10,908....

, at the age of 84. He was survived by his wife, daughters, brothers Rabbi Isaiah and Rabbi Joshua, and a sister, Eve Rosenfeld.

Social activism

He participated in the 1943 Rabbis' March, walked with Martin Luther King, Jr.

Martin Luther King, Jr.

Martin Luther King, Jr. was an American clergyman, activist, and prominent leader in the African-American Civil Rights Movement. He is best known for being an iconic figure in the advancement of civil rights in the United States and around the world, using nonviolent methods following the...

, in the 1963 March on Washington and Bloody Sunday at the height of the American civil rights movement, and also served as an intermediary between the American Jewish Community and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger

Henry Kissinger

Heinz Alfred "Henry" Kissinger is a German-born American academic, political scientist, diplomat, and businessman. He is a recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize. He served as National Security Advisor and later concurrently as Secretary of State in the administrations of Presidents Richard Nixon and...

. Hertzberg played a major role in some of the most significant issues the world Jewish community faced in the decades following World War II, including discussions with the Roman Catholic Church

Roman Catholic Church

The Catholic Church, also known as the Roman Catholic Church, is the world's largest Christian church, with over a billion members. Led by the Pope, it defines its mission as spreading the gospel of Jesus Christ, administering the sacraments and exercising charity...

 over the still unresolved conflict over the Vatican's release of documents pertaining to Pius XII and the Holocaust, as well as his outspoken criticism of the policies of Israel

Israel

The State of Israel is a parliamentary republic located in the Middle East, along the eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea...

 toward the Palestinians.

Views and influences

Mordecai Kaplan

Mordecai Kaplan

Mordecai Menahem Kaplan , was a rabbi, essayist and Jewish educator and the co-founder of Reconstructionist Judaism along with his son-in-law Ira Eisenstein.-Life and work:...

 was also an influence on the young Hertzberg, who attended the Jewish Theological Seminary, where Kaplan taught and served as dean. Kaplan had proved, writes Hertzberg, that with talent and guts, you can be your own man even in mainstream America. Both from Kaplan and later from the eminent scholar of Jewish history, Salo W. Baron, Hertzberg accepted the hypothesis that cultural and religious identity in America would exist in the future "only if they were redefined and reconstructed." Because the two men shared a genuine respect both for tradition and for intellectual rigor, during Kaplan's lectures on Reconstructionist

Reconstructionist Judaism

Reconstructionist Judaism is a modern American-based Jewish movement based on the ideas of Mordecai Kaplan . The movement views Judaism as a progressively evolving civilization. It originated as a branch of Conservative Judaism, before it splintered...

 philosophy, Hertzberg was welcome to speak up, in that situation advocating more traditional views.

Kaplan's influence is apparent when considering the breadth of Hertzberg's public career and reputation as gadfly. Never one to eschew unpopular stands when it came to core issues that impacted on the Jewish community, Hertzberg's reputation as a maverick was perhaps most in evidence in the aftermath of the Six-Day War

Six-Day War

The Six-Day War , also known as the June War, 1967 Arab-Israeli War, or Third Arab-Israeli War, was fought between June 5 and 10, 1967, by Israel and the neighboring states of Egypt , Jordan, and Syria...

 in 1967 when he called for the creation of a Palestinian state alongside Israel, a position that was anathema among most America Jews. He had recounted his public battles with both Golda Meir

Golda Meir

Golda Meir ; May 3, 1898 – December 8, 1978) was a teacher, kibbutznik and politician who became the fourth Prime Minister of the State of Israel....

 and Menachem Begin

Menachem Begin

' was a politician, founder of Likud and the sixth Prime Minister of the State of Israel. Before independence, he was the leader of the Zionist militant group Irgun, the Revisionist breakaway from the larger Jewish paramilitary organization Haganah. He proclaimed a revolt, on 1 February 1944,...

 over their policies toward the Palestinians:

I was largely in opposition to the dominant policies. I found myself restating this view year by year, as repeated attempts were made to silence me in Jerusalem and by its lackeys in New York and Washington

Washington, D.C.

Washington, D.C., formally the District of Columbia and commonly referred to as Washington, "the District", or simply D.C., is the capital of the United States. On July 16, 1790, the United States Congress approved the creation of a permanent national capital as permitted by the U.S. Constitution....

. I insisted that we in the Diaspora could represent the best interest of the Jews worldwide — never mind the political and moral foolishness that governments in power might be proclaiming … I also had no fear that I was committing treason by denouncing what I knew was wrong and foolish, and I laughed off the label "maverick".

Hertzberg's early support for accommodation with the Palestinians, coming from a leader of the American Jewish establishment, subsequently added credibility to the Israeli peace movement.

Hertzberg challenged the wisdom of what he viewed as banking the future of Jewish continuity on the twin pillars of unquestioned support for Israel and the veneration of the Holocaust. Referring to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., as "the national cathedral of American Jewry's Jewishness", Hertzberg questioned whether the memory of the Holocaust was sufficient to keep Jews "on the reservation." Citing demographic studies, he contended that the proliferation of courses on the Holocaust would not be sufficient to stop a large number of Jews from leaving the Jewish community.

Academic career

Hertzberg graduated from Johns Hopkins University

Johns Hopkins University

The Johns Hopkins University, commonly referred to as Johns Hopkins, JHU, or simply Hopkins, is a private research university based in Baltimore, Maryland, United States...

 in 1940, received rabbinic ordination from the Jewish Theological Seminary of America

Jewish Theological Seminary of America

The Jewish Theological Seminary of America is one of the academic and spiritual centers of Conservative Judaism, and a major center for academic scholarship in Jewish studies.JTS operates five schools: Albert A...

 in 1943 and a Ph.D. in history from Columbia University

Columbia University

Columbia University in the City of New York is a private, Ivy League university in Manhattan, New York City. Columbia is the oldest institution of higher learning in the state of New York, the fifth oldest in the United States, and one of the country's nine Colonial Colleges founded before the...

 in 1966. He began his career as the director of the campus Hillel

Hillel: The Foundation for Jewish Campus Life

Hillel: The Foundation for Jewish Campus Life is the largest Jewish campus organization in the world, working with thousands of college students globally...

 for Amherst College

Amherst College

Amherst College is a private liberal arts college located in Amherst, Massachusetts, United States. Amherst is an exclusively undergraduate four-year institution and enrolled 1,744 students in the fall of 2009...

 and the University of Massachusetts

University of Massachusetts

This article relates to the statewide university system. For the flagship campus often referred to as "UMass", see University of Massachusetts Amherst...

, and taught at Princeton

Princeton University

Princeton University is a private research university located in Princeton, New Jersey, United States. The school is one of the eight universities of the Ivy League, and is one of the nine Colonial Colleges founded before the American Revolution....

, Rutgers

Rutgers University

Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey , is the largest institution for higher education in New Jersey, United States. It was originally chartered as Queen's College in 1766. It is the eighth-oldest college in the United States and one of the nine Colonial colleges founded before the American...

, Columbia

Columbia University

Columbia University in the City of New York is a private, Ivy League university in Manhattan, New York City. Columbia is the oldest institution of higher learning in the state of New York, the fifth oldest in the United States, and one of the country's nine Colonial Colleges founded before the...

, Hebrew University, and Dartmouth

Dartmouth College

Dartmouth College is a private, Ivy League university in Hanover, New Hampshire, United States. The institution comprises a liberal arts college, Dartmouth Medical School, Thayer School of Engineering, and the Tuck School of Business, as well as 19 graduate programs in the arts and sciences...

. He was the Bronfman Visiting Professor of the Humanities at New York University

New York University

New York University is a private, nonsectarian research university based in New York City. NYU's main campus is situated in the Greenwich Village section of Manhattan...

 from 1991 until his death in 2006.

Rabbinic career

In addition to his academic posts, Hertzberg was a rabbi for congregations in Philadelphia and Nashville

Nashville, Tennessee

Nashville is the capital of the U.S. state of Tennessee and the county seat of Davidson County. It is located on the Cumberland River in Davidson County, in the north-central part of the state. The city is a center for the health care, publishing, banking and transportation industries, and is home...

, served as a chaplain in the United States Air Force

United States Air Force

The United States Air Force is the aerial warfare service branch of the United States Armed Forces and one of the American uniformed services. Initially part of the United States Army, the USAF was formed as a separate branch of the military on September 18, 1947 under the National Security Act of...

 from 1951 to 1953. He lived in Englewood, New Jersey

Englewood, New Jersey

Englewood is a city located in Bergen County, New Jersey. As of the 2010 United States Census, the city had a total population of 27,147.Englewood was incorporated as a city by an Act of the New Jersey Legislature on March 17, 1899, from portions of Ridgefield Township and the remaining portions of...

, where he served as rabbi of Temple Emanu-El from 1956 to 1985, and remained as rabbi emeritus until his death. He also served as president of the American Jewish Policy Foundation since 1978, president of the American Jewish Congress from 1972 to '78, and vice president of the World Jewish Congress from 1975 to 1991.

Meeting with John Paul II

During Pope John Paul's March 2000 Jerusalem visit, he asked the Pope numerous questions about his activities during the Second World War.

Jewish scholarship

Hertzberg also made his mark in Jewish scholarship. His landmark book, The French Enlightenment and the Jews: The Origins of Modern Anti-Semitism (1968), argued that the source of modern antisemitism could be traced to the ideas of such Age of Enlightenment

Age of Enlightenment

The Age of Enlightenment was an elite cultural movement of intellectuals in 18th century Europe that sought to mobilize the power of reason in order to reform society and advance knowledge. It promoted intellectual interchange and opposed intolerance and abuses in church and state...

 philosophers as Voltaire. Similarly, his The Zionist Idea: A Historical Analysis and Reader (1970) pioneered the study of Zionism and provided generations of students with the understanding that modern Zionism was a secular movement to remake Jewish identity into one of the many modern secular nationalisms. Finally, although a self-styled pragmatic liberal, Hertzberg saw no contradiction between his political convictions and his reverence for a Jewish tradition shorn of its religious fundamentalism.

Hertzberg wrote, edited or co-edited over thirteen books. Hertzberg had planned to write two more books and had partially completed one at the time of his death, entitled "This I Believe", an exploration of his personal theology. He had also intended to write a book explicating the Talmud to an educated but non-Orthodox Jewish audience, preserving the integrity of the source material but also demonstrating its relevance and accessibility to modern readers. http://www.jstandard.com/articles/933/1/A-JEW-IN-AMERICA

In his memoir A Jew in America, Hertzberg frequently referred to American poet Ralph Waldo Emerson. Emerson, a descendant of American Puritans who revolted against his heritage and became a Unitarian, wrote that "every man is a conveyance on which all his ancestors ride." Hertzberg said he may not have opted to agree with every word of his Jewish forebears but wrote "my respect and reverence for them is the foundation of my being." http://www.forward.com/issues/2002/02.10.04/arts1.html

Quotes

• "I became an American by refusing to assimilate."
• "Cultural and religious identity in America would only exist in the future if they were redefined and reconstructed. Everything that I have written in the last half century has rested on this premise that I learned from Kaplan and Baron."
• "I never identified the ghetto with backwardness."

Published works

• Essays on Jewish Life and Thought (1959) (co-editor)
• The Zionist Idea (1959)
• The Outbursts That Await Us (1963)
• The French Enlightenment and the Jews (1968)- won the first Amran Award as the best work of nonfiction in the Jewish field.
• Judaism (1961)
• Being Jewish in America (1978)
• The Jews in America: Four Centuries of an Uneasy Encounter (1989), ISBN 0-231-10841-9
• Jewish Polemics (1992)
• At Home Only with God (1993)
• The Zionist Idea (1997)
• Jews: The Essence and Character of a People (1998) (co-authored with Aron Hirt-Manheimer)
• A Jew in America: My Life And a People's Struggle for Identity (2002)
• The Fate of Zionism : A Secular Future for Israel & Palestine (2003).

External links

• Articles by Arthur Hertzberg on the Berman Jewish Policy Archive @ NYU Wagner
• New York Times Obituary, April 18, 2006
• Jewish Standard Obituary, April 21, 2006
• Association for Jewish Studies Obituary focusing on his work in Jewish education, Fall 2006.
• Amazon's Listing
• American Jewish Congress
• Arthur on 9-11
• Beliefnet Entry
• New Age Zionism: Holding On as the World Turns Arthur Hertzberg. January 1, 1998
• New York Review of Books entry
• The Day the Rabbi Rescued Rashid by Martin Kramer
  Martin Kramer
  Martin Seth Kramer is an American scholar of the Middle East at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and the Shalem Center. His focus is on Islam and Arab politics.-Education:...