Mordecai Kaplan and the Reinvention of Jewish Identity in America

Tuition: $360 | YIVO members: $270**
 

Register

This is a live, online course held on Zoom. Enrollment will be capped at about 25 students. All course details (Zoom link, syllabus, handouts, recordings of class sessions, etc.) will be posted to Google Classroom. Students will be granted access to the class on Google Classroom after registering for the class here on the YIVO website. This class will be conducted in English, and any readings will be in English.

Instructor: Jenna Weissman Joselit

A household name in 20th century American Jewish circles, and still going strong today, Mordecai M. Kaplan was at once the most celebrated and the most criticized of American Jewish personalities. Everyone, it seemed, had something to say about him, from his students at the Jewish Theological Seminary, where he taught for 50 years, and his congregants at Manhattan’s Society for the Advancement of Judaism, the then-unusual synagogue which he founded in 1922, to those American Jews who prided themselves on being well-read and up to date.

Drawing on her recently published and very well received biography, Mordecai M. Kaplan: Restless Soul, a Yale University Press “Jewish Lives” publication, historian Jenna Weissman Joselit explores what made him tick and rendered him a lightning rod, and how his fluid, if contested, views on faith, identity, belonging, and ritual shaped modern American Jewish life.

Sessions will explore Kaplan’s growing up in New York in the late 19th century; his relationship to East European traditions; the 1934 publication and reception of his landmark, 500+page manifesto-cum-proclamation, Judaism as a Civilization; his public excommunication in the shadow of World War II; post-war America and the launching of Reconstructionism as an independent denomination.

Course Materials:
Students should purchase the following text:

• Jenna Weissman Joselit, Mordecai M. Kaplan: Restless Soul (Yale University Press). (Purchase)

The instructor will provide all other course materials digitally throughout the class on Google Classroom.

Jenna Weissman Joselit is the Charles E. Smith Professor of Judaic Studies and professor of history at the George Washington University, where she specializes in the history and culture of America’s Jews, U.S. cultural history, and the relationship between material culture and identity. Her many books include Set in Stone: America’s Embrace of the Ten Commandments and The Wonders of America: Reinventing Jewish Culture, 1880 – 1950, a National Jewish Book Award winner in History.

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