A Modern Heretic and a Traditional Community
Author(s): Jeffrey S. Gurock (Author), Jacob Schacter (Author)
- Publisher: Columbia University Press
- Publication Date: January 15, 1998
- Edition: Revised ed.
- Language: English
- Print length: 256 pages
- ISBN-10: 0231106270
- ISBN-13: 9780231106276
Book Description
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?
Editorial Reviews
Review
This fine biography focuses not only on the emergence of Kaplan's unique thought and approach to Judaism but on the larger thought-world of American orthodoxy from which his thinking emerged and with which it stood in continuing debate. The resultant study not only lays bare Kaplan's mind and personality but, equally important, reveals much about the nature of American Orthodoxy. ― Choice
As important thinkers in the Orthodox world [the authors] help us to see Kaplan from the vantage point of the world that raised him, New York's Orthodox community. In exploring how its different elements responded to Kaplan, they give us a richer understanding of Orthodoxy. ―
Jewish Book World
From the Back Cover
Mordecai M. Kaplan, the founder of the Reconstructionist movement, was the most influential and controversial radical Jewish thinker in the twentieth century. A Modern Heretic and a Traditional Community follows Kaplan from his earliest days as a member in good standing in the Orthodox community, through his period of private estrangement, into his public divorce from Orthodoxy, and ultimately through his many decades as Reconstructionism's leader. Jeffrey S. Gurock and Jacob J. Schacter examine the intellectual influences that moved Kaplan from Orthodoxy and analyze the combination of personal, strategic, and career reasons that kept Kaplan close to Orthodox Jews. More than a biography, A Modern Heretic and a Traditional Community is also a social history of American Orthodoxy and of American Judaism over the last century. Demonstrating how Orthodoxy in America was not a monolithic entity but rather allowed for a wide range of beliefs and practices, the book makes a distinct contribution to the fabric of American social history, Judaism, and the history of religion in the United States.
About the Author
Jeffrey S. Gurock, Libby M. Klaperman Professor of Jewish History at Yeshiva University, is the author of When Harlem Was Jewish, 1870-1930 and The Men and Women of Yeshiva, both published by Columbia.Jacob J. Schacter is rabbi of the Jewish Center in New York City. Editor of the The Torah u-Madda Journal and Jewish Tradition and the Nontraditional Jew, he is also an author of numerous articles on early modern and contemporary Jewish life.
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