1881 CE–1983 CE · ACH · New York
R. Mordecai M. Kaplan (1881–1983) was the founder of Reconstructionist Judaism. Born in Lithuania, raised in New York, and ordained at the Jewish Theological Seminary, he taught at JTS for over fifty years while gradually developing a radically new theology that defined Judaism as 'the evolving religious civilization of the Jewish people.'
Rejecting traditional supernaturalism, Kaplan re-cast Jewish religious life in naturalistic and sociological terms — God as 'the Power that makes for salvation,' Jewish peoplehood as the bedrock category, and ritual as folk art rather than divine command. He founded the Society for the Advancement of Judaism in 1922, the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College in 1968, and introduced innovations such as the Bat Mitzvah (his daughter Judith's in 1922 was the first).
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Founded the Society for the Advancement of Judaism and developed Reconstructionist theology while teaching at the Jewish Theological Seminary.
New York in the early twentieth century was a teeming metropolis under American democratic governance, a magnet for Jewish immigration fleeing European persecution and poverty. Kaplan arrived as the great waves of Eastern European Jews were transforming the city's Lower East Side into a densely packed immigrant quarter, where Yiddish-speaking laborers packed into tenements and organized synagogues along kinship and regional lines. The same decades that saw the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire (1911) and the rise of labor unions witnessed Kaplan developing his revolutionary vision of Judaism as a "civilization" rooted in culture and peoplehood rather than supernatural revelation—ideas he would teach at the Jewish Theological Seminary and test through the Society for the Advancement of Judaism, a movement-founding congregation he established in Manhattan. His ideology took shape amid New York's fervent Jewish intellectual ferment, where immigrant Jews were debating Zionism, socialism, secularism, and American identity in cafes and study halls, making the city itself a laboratory for Jewish modernism.
R. Moshe Feinstein's lifelong American rabbinate (1937-1986) from his MTJ yeshiva.
New York · 1934
Landmark 1934 book defining Judaism not as a religion alone but as the totality of Jewish civilization — language, art, food, history, ritual, and ethics. The founding text of Reconstructionism and a major influence on twentieth-century American Jewish self-understanding.
Full text not yet available in our corpus.
New York · 1937
His systematic 1937 theological statement, recasting traditional Jewish God-language in naturalistic, ethical terms.
Full text not yet available in our corpus.