Noam
Hey everyone, welcome to Wondering Jews with Mijal and Noam.
Mijal
I’m Mijal
Noam
And I’m Noam, and this podcast is our way of trying to unpack those really big questions being asked in the world today about Israel, about Judaism, and about the Jewish experience.
Mijal
So now I’m really excited to share with our listeners what it is that we’re doing for the next few episodes because we are starting a new series. So I think it was based on some of our earlier episodes based on like Jewish law and what is Judaism. We got a ton of folks emailing us and writing to us and asking us to explore denominations in Judaism a little bit better.
So today’s episode, we are going to explore the biography, the work and the influence of a giant in Jewish thought.
that is seen as a precursor to reconstructionist Judaism, but who also impacted the religious practice, identity, and experiences of American Jews across the nominations. We are going to be talking and exploring more about Mordechai Kaplan.
Noam
And here to talk about Kaplan, we have, we have…
Mijal
I feel like we need a drum roll for this one. Yeah.
Noam
We have Jenna Weissman Joselit. Jenna Weissman Joselit is my aunt. Aunt Jenna. Aunt Jenna. That’s right, my dad’s sister. And she is, in addition to being my aunt, she is a professor of Judaic studies at GW, George Washington University. She’s been a professor in like other places, I believe like Yale, Princeton, Columbia. I don’t know what I made up and didn’t, but anyway, she is going to be the author, she is the author of the new book,
Mijal
I am so excited for this conversation.
Noam
Mordechai Kaplan, Restless Soul. And it’s a book that’s part of Jewish lives. If you don’t know about Jewish lives, this series is like if you’re…
At all nerdy like me or cool like Michal, then this is the type of series that you gotta check out. It’s a prize-winning series of biographies from Yale University Press. They’re sponsoring today’s episode. You can get your copy of Jenna’s book at www.jewishlives.org. Again, that’s www.jewishlives.org. And be sure to use the promo code Kaplan, K-A-P-L-A-N for 25 % off.
Noam
Hey, welcome Aunt Jenna to Wondering Jews. It is so exciting to have my aunt or my aunt to be fancy, Jenna Weissman Joselit, the professor in the family. So excited to have you on our podcast.
Jenna Weissman Joselit
Yeah.
And it’s a thrill for me to be speaking with my nephew and not about family things, but about mighty things.
Mijal
I feel lucky to be part of this family reunion and I’ll just share, that Noam and his brother Chanan have shared so much about you and your work and your expertise in American Jewish history. So I’m excited.
Jenna Weissman Joselit
Yes.
Jenna Weissman Joselit
Thank you.
Noam
The truth is, Mijal, that when you and I were speaking like a year or so ago, when I mentioned my aunt is Jenna Weissman Joselit, you were like, of course I’ve read works by your aunt before, you know?
Mijal
Yep. Yeah, yeah, Yeah.
Jenna Weissman Joselit
Thank you, thank you. Yeah
Noam (02:21.689)
Okay, so Jenna, can you start by giving us an overview of the book on Mordechai Kaplan? And I’ll tell you from my perspective, I remember studying for the LSAT.
And I found myself kind of ignoring studying for the LSAT. And on the side, I was distracting myself by reading a biography of Mordechai Kaplan that was written by Jeffrey Gerach and J.J. Schachter.
Mijal
So he became a podcaster.
Noam
It’s called a modern heretic and a traditional community. And I’ve been so interested in Mordechai Kaplan for years. I want you to start by giving us an overview of the book and maybe why you chose to write about Mordechai Kaplan.
Jenna Weissman Joselit
It’s a very simple answer. I didn’t choose to write. He wasn’t part of my portfolio. I was asked by the Jewish Lives people at Yale and how could I resist? What a great challenge. Most of my work has really been about daily life and about phenomena and about things. I’m really big on what’s called material culture things. And biography wasn’t part of my jam.
I was so excited to have the opportunity at this late stage of my career to work on a biography. And how could I resist Mordechai Kaplan? I had, of course, known of Mordechai Kaplan. I had read Mordechai Kaplan as a graduate student. My husband, Jaws, is particularly fixated and fascinated by Mordechai Kaplan. And I knew, I knew the big draw was that I knew he had this diary. And I had actually used the diary on another project a little bit, a snippet.
So all of those factors came together and I realized this is just too good a project not to undertake. Little did I know how complicated it would be. A little did I know how complex the diary was, but it turned out to have been quite a joy and a difficult road ahead, I would say, because so much has been written about him with very defined perspectives. I just came at it as an interesting story as
an attempt to situate him in a larger context, you know, and to think of him as a person, a flesh and blood person, not just as a fount of all sorts of compelling ideas. And so between that perspective and the diary itself, which really maps out his interior landscape for over 70 years in this neat and tidy little handwriting that scrolls from one end of the page to another end of the page.
I had a bonanza of material. And so I thought, how can I encompass all of this? You the Yale series is very taught. places a premium on concision. So a lot of stuff ends up on the cutting room floor.
Mijal
Maybe we’ll have the pleasure to hear some tidbits that were left in the cutting room floor and just, you know, hear some secrets from the diary. know, but Jenna, what you’re saying resonates, I’ll say for myself as somebody who has kind of like worked in the Jewish community and studied the Jewish community. If I hear the name Mordecai Kapel, I’m like, of course I know who he was. He helped
Jenna Weissman Joselit
Yeah, no, no, no, no,
Noam
Yeah.
Mijal
You know, found reconstruction is what became eventually reconstruction is Judaism. He’s known for big ideas of Judaism as a civilization. But then when when I, you know, when I encountered your book, I realized there’s so much that I don’t know about him as a person. So could you give us a brief just overview, paint for us a picture, even before we talk about the significance of his life and ideas and institutions? But what is biography? Who was Mordecai Kaplan?
Jenna Weissman Joselit
Right.
Jenna Weissman Joselit
That’s a good question. I’m not sure I really know. What I do know is that he was a kind of tormented restless soul. So he came to the States at the age of eight and grew up on the Lower East Side briefly, but he wasn’t like a typical Lower East Side Jewish immigrant kid. He was very bookish. I think he was probably a kind of illui or a prodigy of some sort because 1880, 1801,
Mijal
Ha ha ha!
Noam
You
Mijal
Yeah, and remind us when he was born he was 18. Yeah.
Noam
1881 No? YES! Michal you like that, Michal you like that
Jenna Weissman Joselit
1881, yes you got that, you got that. You like dates, yeah. That’s all this is right, yeah. annoying, yeah, yeah.
Mijal
No, I have the worst memory for dates and no, I guess it runs in the family, but he’s got this gift that he just knows all dates for everything. It’s cute and it’s frustrating because I don’t have that, but you
Noam
You
Noam
And I thought you were gonna say weird. I thought you were gonna say it’s weird. But all right, put it on. Sorry Jenna.
Jenna Weissman Joselit
No, no, Yeah. Well, and here’s another date. He lived until he was 102. So he died in 1983. So he starts out eight and by 12 and a half, he’s enrolled at JTS. I what kid before Bar Mitzvah is enrolled in JTS? When JTS, Jewish Theological Seminary, wasn’t quite the institution that it is today, it was more of a preparatory school.
And by the early 1900s, I would say, so he’s a sweet young thing. He’s in his 20s. He’s involved in every single aspect of New York Jewish communal life. He’s involved in synagogue life. He’s the minister, note the language, the minister, not the rav or the rabbi at
K.J., Kehilath Jesharin, which is still going strong.
Anyway, he stays there for a little bit. He’s miserable there. And he’s repeatedly thinking, and the diaries give voice to this, of chucking it.
Mijal
Smicha is ordination, is usually what rabbis… Yeah.
Jenna Weissman Joselit
off over completely and entering into the business world. But for some reason, he stays the course. One of those reasons being that he meets his beautiful wife at KJ. And so for a while he cools his jets and he stays at KJ. But he’s invited to give a talk at JTS. And sometimes talks open up a Pandora’s box and sometimes talks open up a brand new world. And that happened to Kaplan because he gave such a compelling speech to the
Noam
Wow.
Jenna Weissman Joselit
so-called alumni, I’d imagine there were too many, about his vision of Jewishness in which he placed as early as like 1908 maybe, the Jewish peoplehood at the center, not Torah. Jewish peoplehood was the primary motivation and he thought he’d be canned for that or at least in a lot of trouble. But his speech was so well received that the president of JTS at the time, Solomon Schachter, invites him to join the faculty.
Mijal
Can you flesh that out for us? Because I think for many,
Jenna Weissman Joselit
Yeah, sure, sure, sure.
Jenna Weissman Joselit
Torah.
Mijal
contemporary American listeners. I’m going to make a guess. No, I’m telling me if you agree or not. I think many people would feel very comfortable putting Jewish peoplehood at the center of Judaism.
So why was it so radical back then to give a speech at JTS saying, peoplehood instead of Torah?
Jenna Weissman Joselit
Right.
Jenna Weissman Joselit
Yeah, it’s hard time. It’s cold.
Jenna Weissman Joselit
Because the center of Jewish life was halachah and Jewish law and God was really the center. you were observant, you’re doing all this stuff, the Shem Shemaim, for the sake of heaven, not for the sake of earthly concerns. And so he’s shifting the center. He’s not negating Torah, he’s a big fan of Torah.
And for rabbinical leaders, particularly on the more right-wing side of the equation,
Being so forthright about that and making that, saying that so boldly, and it was probably something everybody agreed to on the street, but making it as a proposition, as a philosophical construct, it’s a really great question, Michal, it was really extraordinary. And it was very attractive and it’s why he was hired. And I think he was hired because he spoke well, he looked polished, he had a real charisma. There’s something very engaging about him.
him. And so he stays. Yeah.
Mijal
Well, Jenna, sounds, I wonder if you would agree with this. It sounds like part of what was attractive was that it was an alternative to some of the binaries that were emerging. So you have like assimilation, you’ve got assimilation and they’re very like traditional holding on to God and Jewish law. And he’s kind of saying something in the middle. He’s, don’t know if you would say he’s in the middle, but he’s using modern language. Is you.
Jenna Weissman Joselit
Absolutely. Absolutely.
Jenna Weissman Joselit
It’s blurring. Yes, bingo. Yes, exit.
Mijal
You know, language is not rejecting religiosity, but he’s saying it’s about the people. It’s not assimilating. There’s something there that it’s like a new American, but still traditional way to talk about who we are.
Jenna Weissman Joselit
Right. And offering a way to be Jewish in modern America. So he has all these balls in the air. He’s thinking about modernity. He’s thinking about modernization. He’s thinking about America. He’s thinking about freedom. Not all at once and not so much in 1908. These ideas evolve and they keep on changing. And so over the years, he fleshes it out more. And so what at first had been more of a, I would even say,
a sociological understanding, little by little by little he transforms, and at great expense to his own career, he transforms into a philosophy and ideology, perhaps even a theology.
And then he gets into trouble because some of the balabatim, the big shots in the community,
Jenna Weissman Joselit
begin to realize that he’s cooking up all sorts of ideas, philosophical, theological ideas that either they don’t understand or it just doesn’t sit well with them, which is kind of the…
Noam
Give us like three of those. Give us three examples of theological things that he drummed up that people either didn’t understand or were like, no, that’s past the line.
Jenna Weissman Joselit
You know, I could…
Jenna Weissman Joselit
like he says about Shabbat, know, if you can’t, he’s fully mindful that at the time he’s cogitating, thinking up all these things, there’s no five day work week. So it’s inordinately difficult to keep Shabbat, especially for the folks at the Jewish Center who are business people, you know, they’re not people who could shut their doors on Shabbat. And so he says something along the lines of, look, if you can’t keep the whole thing, keep some of it.
And if kashrut is really hard, keep some of it.
Mijal
or a Sephardic Rabbi.
Jenna Weissman Joselit
Chabab Rabbi says it sounds like him, right? And then he also begins to write and it’s in the writings that people get upset with him because he says things like, orthodoxy does not march with the tempo. he says so beautifully what he really needs to do. Sometimes he’s so lyrical and sometimes not.
When he is lyrical, he’ll say something like, his objective is to reconcile the TikTok of tradition, TikTok of tradition with the tempo of modern times. So if you have to adjust, if you have to kind of bend the rules a little bit, if you have to think of halakhah, a word he never uses, as something that’s more flexible.
Mijal
Ha ha ha!
Jenna Weissman Joselit
That’s fine, just as long as you keep intact a sense of the vitality of Jewishness.
Mijal
Noam, am I remembering this right? Did he say a L’chaad Jewish law should have a vote but not a veto?
Jenna Weissman Joselit
I think he said ritual should have a vote, not a veto. He says that well into his career. It’s one of these quotes that circulates a lot because it’s so compelling, isn’t it? And it’s so true to way many American Jews then as now behave. But he said so many other things that get lost in the shuffle, but this stuck for someone. I’m trying.
Mijal
Yes.
Noam
What did he say, Jenna? Tell us what are the other things. Michal and I, can’t help ourselves. like, there’s so much treasure with Kaplan. Give us the goods, Jenna.
Mijal
Yeah, because he was the title of the other.
Jenna Weissman Joselit
Yeah.
Mijal
But but no I might also say you mentioned this other book you read that described him as a heretic. So we want to we want to hear heresy.
Jenna Weissman Joselit
Yeah, so the Harris, because it stops the conversation. And he wasn’t a heretic. He didn’t disavow Jewishness, as he says at one point when he’s getting involved with really toxic shul politics, because he’s also tough. He’s not going to easily give up his positions. They’re at loggerheads. He says something like,
Noam
Yeah, Jenna doesn’t Jenna doesn’t like that description. I know that.
Jenna Weissman Joselit
you accuse me of offering up a new Judaism. No, he says, I’m trying to keep the old Judaism alive and in ways that are inconsistent with modern Jewish life. And he feels that Orthodox, because by now, like I’m jumping ahead all over the place by the eve of World War I, these boundaries are hardening, hardening, not loosening.
And he sees the hardening of denomination. He hates denominations. His whole objective consistently throughout his life is to bring Jews together, not separate them. And he thinks that denominations, which are a Christian, an American Christian invention, end up de-Judaizing Jewishness. so in his remarkable, Judaism is a civilization, which comes 30 years after he’s been in this business. And it’s a little late in the day.
but he feels that unless he concretizes and puts everything down, his ideas will be a willow wisp. How pretty is that? A willow wisp. It’ll just kind of disappear.
What he wants to see are plus Jews, not minus Jews. That’s so great. That’s such a marvelous calculus. It means Jews who are not Jewish simply because of antisemitism or because of guilt and responsibility or because of some kind of sense of duty, but they’re plus Jews. It resonates with them. It speaks to them. It keeps them alive. He had a really hard time understanding.
Mijal
What does that mean?
Jenna Weissman Joselit
why one wouldn’t be Jewish. You just couldn’t understand why you wouldn’t. And so it was so profoundly unnerved when people either thought of Jewishness as a burden or as a malady or as something to be marginalized, trotted out a couple of times a year, but not fully lived.
And he wanted them to wear it as a…
cloak of sorts, that it had to be integral to everything, how you think morally, how you behave towards your fellow man, how you see the role of the Jews in the world, everything. And so what does he come up with? Civilization, which is all-encompassing.
Mijal
It’s so funny because as so many, some of what Kaplan stands for really resonates. And then some of it, I’ll share my personal perspective. Well, he also sounds like a very grumpy person, I’ll just say. He’s a grumpy person who just wants a little bit less joy in some of our prayers. He wants more joy, but he comes off as like, you know, he’s tough, he’s tough.
Jenna Weissman Joselit
He’s a grumpy person, right?
Jenna Weissman Joselit
No, no, actually, actually, actually, I just want to say, but for…
He’s tough, he’s tough, right.
Mijal
But it’s funny because there’s a part of me and I don’t know, you and I might have different reactions here, but part of me felt like my biggest distinctions came from my Sephardic side. I’ve got my rationalism and my this and that, but I’m like, get rid of the nostalgia of what my grandparents stood for. I’m like, that is the core of everything. So it’s interesting. I don’t know, Noam, if you had any…
Jenna Weissman Joselit
Right. Right.
Noam
similar reactions. have a, I mean, I think that you have that more than I do. I have a strange affinity to Mordechai Cap’n. I’m just like enthralled listening to the stories. I don’t know why. to keep, I want to hear more and then keep on figuring out what, I want to understand myself better to understand, I want to understand Mordechai Cap’n better to understand why I’m enthralled.
Mijal
So maybe, Nellie, me sharpen that question, Noam, because Jenna, we could probably do this for 12 hours, but we want to be respectful of your time in scholarship. But if you could share with us maybe like, you know, top three ideas that were part of this project that many people call today Reconstruction is Judaism, the Kaplan ends up standing for, what would these top three ideas be?
Jenna Weissman Joselit
We could. That’s okay. Happy to do this. Yeah.
Jenna Weissman Joselit
I really can’t limit them. It’s more of a sensibility than it is a top three ideas. No, it’s just that you think rationally about things. You question everything. You don’t take for granted. And you are not motivated by a false sense of loyalty or responsibility. You actively take Jewishness on. You engage. And that
Mijal
So top three sensibilities.
Jenna Weissman Joselit
that you feel keenly, organically, a larger connection to the Jewish people and that all of these ways of thinking, all of these activities, practices, books you read, people you consort with, all of that is designed to sharpen your sense of community. The irony, and I bet you’re sensing this, the irony at the heart or the fundamental tension that
messes things up is that what he’s really offering is fundamentally an emotional sensibility. You feel connected. I mean, just look at post October 7th. You feel so connected, but why? It’s not based on hard facts. It’s not based on reason. It’s based on sentiment, on gesture, on emotion. But he’s continually, or continuously, I never know the difference.
I should know the difference. always get them confused. But always, always, always Kaplan is…
arguing for a reasoned approach, placing too much of a primacy on reason and not enough on feeling, on emotion. And what is American Jewishness, if not fundamentally, a gestural Judaism? That’s what I’ve called it elsewhere. It’s all about feeling Jewish. And he has a really hard time, perhaps because he takes it for granted, of articulating that. And so he seeks all sorts of answers in words.
There’s a torrent of words, so many words. It’s peoplehood for one generation, civilization for another. It’s a very late part of his life. He’s kind of in his 70s, 80s. He’s coming up with this idea of covenant. And there should be a new constitution for the Jewish people that would replace and supplant and augment in a way the Basel program of 1897. And he’s full of ideas.
Jenna Weissman Joselit
big words, but what they add up to is feeling a connection. And that connection is fundamentally predicated on emotion. And so there’s a real…
Mijal
Jenna, me, since you’re talking about big words and concepts, I’ll just share too that I’ve heard people really throw around when they’re talking about Kaplan as two things that he really revolutionizes. One is God and one is chosenness. So could you give us your articulation of what would Kaplan have to, how would he, I know these are big things, but like, know, God and chosenness.
Jenna Weissman Joselit
Yeah.
Jenna Weissman Joselit
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Jenna Weissman Joselit
So for God, I think he did. I absolutely think he did. And I think he was given, he was treated very harshly. The joke was that there is no God and Kaplan is his prophet.
Noam
Did Kaplan believe in God?
Jenna Weissman Joselit
that made the rounds. He believed in God profoundly and he believed in prayer. He believed in all of these things with every inch, every fiber of his being. But it wasn’t the traditional God, a supernatural, supernatural God. It was a God who was more here on earth. And here his thinking gets kind of muddy and woolly. And it’s the reason that people dismiss him as somebody who is more humanist than Jewish.
Mijal
haha.
Jenna Weissman Joselit
is that he thought the God was process and in us and salvational, but not in the traditional sense. So it’s really hard to understand it. And I had a hard time with it. I went through this diary, tooth and comb, and so does he in trying to come up with his notion of God. He’s continually or continuously revamping his idea of God. But the bottom line is that it’s not a God that’s up there who’s really paying attention.
who’s also a supernatural God. didn’t believe in Torah, misi nai. He didn’t believe in all of those things, he believed profoundly. Revelation, revelation. It happened. Maybe it happened, maybe it didn’t. it’s myth. He loved Midrash too. He’s a bundle of contradictions, this guy. But at the end of the day, he felt that the God was a device that was internalized and that made for a stronger and better person and a sense of community.
Noam
Tar from Sinai, meaning the Sinaitic Revelation.
Jenna Weissman Joselit
Beyond that, I really have trouble articulating it for you. Chosen people, he was clear on. It was a lovely concept. It sustained the Jewish people for millennia. But in America, there was no room for it, not because people thought it was some kind of racialized understanding of Jewishness. That wasn’t it. He just thought it got in the way and that there needed to be more modern, more democratic ways of thinking about
who the Jews are. And he felt, I think that for so many people, Jewishness started and ended with the Jewish chosen people concept. And that was giving the panoply of Jewish ideas short shift.
Noam
So I’m going to stake a claim here. Reconstructionist Judaism, there’s roughly 2 to 5 % of American Jews identify as Reconstructionist, which is a pretty small percentage, emerges out of Mordecai Kaplan’s teachings. Okay, claims to emerge out of it. But tell us why that’s wrong. And that’s a small percentage, but now I want to make a second claim. I believe that…
Jenna Weissman Joselit
Go ahead. Go ahead.
Mijal
They claim to.
Noam
And I’ve said this before, if we were to play game between the three of us, who are the three most influential rabbis in the United States of America, a fun game would be who would be those three names. And I would say without a doubt, my three, I’ll just tell you who my three are. Rabbi Aaron Cutler, the leader of the Yeshiva movement in the 20th century, created Lakewood. Number two is the Lubavitcher Rebbe. Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, Crown Heights Chabad. And number three is Rabbi Mordechai Kaplan. I would argue that he is a
Jenna Weissman Joselit
Mm-hmm.
Noam
one of the three most influential rabbis outside of Israel. My argument would be, and we haven’t gotten to this yet, he created the concept of the JCC. He created, meaning Jewish community structure and not just being the synagogue being a place of worship, but actually a Beit Knesset, which means a house of gathering, not just a Beit Avodah, a house of worship. Number two is that he created the concept of Bat Mitzvah, which we didn’t get to that.
Jenna Weissman Joselit
Why?
Jenna Weissman Joselit
That’s right?
Noam
either. And number three is, and this is my most controversial take, but I think it’s right, is if you read Jay Lefkowitz’s article 15, 20 years ago, whatever it was, about social orthodoxy, what I believe is that for a long time, and I think it’s changing now with the advent of neo-Hasidist, which is a conversation for another time, so many Orthodox Jews were Reconstructionist Jews.
Mijal
orthopraxia one.
Noam
cloaked in orthodoxy, meaning that they, believed and I’ve seen them that whether or not God was central to the conversation, I’m not making a prescriptive comment, I’m making a descriptive comment. They were Orthodox Jews because that’s what they did, but socially they were Orthodox, but not that they believed in the supernatural God influencing their lives in a day-to-day life, which is how Orthodox Judaism is often conceived of. And I think that so many Jews in the Orthodox world
are descriptively much more reconstructionist or Kapilinian than they even realize. Kapilinian maybe.
Jenna Weissman Joselit
Kaplanoon, right. I would echo that and expand it by saying I think a goodly number of American Jews are not just Orthodox Jews because so much, and here we’re getting to the end of that story, maybe a little bit prematurely, maybe not, is that one hopes, one hopes, one hopes, one hopes, one hopes, one hopes from your mouth to whoever’s ears.
Noam
Okay, even better.
Noam
Well, everyone will read the book. This is just a… Everyone. Everyone.
Jenna Weissman Joselit
is right, God of the process, God as process, is that so many of his ideas about the centrality of community, about, post-denominationalism, he didn’t use that word.
Mijal
God has a process.
Jenna Weissman Joselit
that only came current fairly recently, but the idea that we’re not defined by denomination and that so much of what had once defined the denominations is no more. That things that are happening in the reform movement are the same things that are happening in the Orthodox movement, maybe with a little different gloss, but they’re doing the same stuff. So there’s that. I think the importance of
practice, ritual practice, again, not as divinely inspired, but for a whole host of other reasons that bring us together, that shore us up as a community. These are all part of his ideas without being given the name of Kaplani or reconstructionist. As far as reconstruction goes, again, one of the engines of Kaplan’s life was the belief in community writ large.
And the way that he gives voice to it is either through civilization or peoplehood, but it’s community, it’s the people. And anything that got in the way of that sense of unity and that promoted fracture was anathema to him. And he would repeatedly say, until he was blue in the face, that he thought.
rendering reconstructionism not as a sensibility, a way of talking. He loved to describe reconstructionism as a social movement that was about a way of talking, as an electric current. How beautiful is that? As an electric current that lights up the metropolis that is Jewishness as a formula, but not as a denomination because as we said at the outset, denomination moved to a separate
beat to its own beat, it had its own institutions, it didn’t bring people together, it brought them apart.
he would have seen his ideas take root. But it took a really long time and there were a lot of bumps along the way. by the time he gives up his mortal coil, it’s sort of clear that reconstructionism may be taking root and being institutionalized, but it’s not the cultural
and emotional powerhouse that he thought it would be.
Mijal
Yeah. know, Jenna, this has been so fascinating. And again, we just want to recommend to all of our listeners to read the book. I think you’re leaving us with so many questions. I know that I’m wondering, for example, how much was he influential with his ideas versus how much was he an early kind of like observer who was able to diagnose certain ideas that then caught on in American Judaism? I think that’s a really interesting question. And the other thing that
that I just want to erase as we’re wrapping up this conversation is this is part of a series that Noam and I are having on denominations and you’re bringing up so many insights for us to consider. What role do individuals play? What role do ideas play? How do legacies end up transforming and shifting? What is controversial at one time that becomes obvious at another? Normative.
Jenna Weissman Joselit
Right.
Jenna Weissman Joselit
Right, right.
Mijal
And then how do things shape us today? These are really big, important questions. And I know that I’m grateful because I’ve heard of Mordechai Kaplan a lot, but never in a way that was this in depth. I’m just super grateful to you, Jenna, for joining us for this conversation.
Jenna Weissman Joselit
Thank you. My pleasure for the opportunity.
Noam
Thank you, Aunt Jenna. Thank you.
Mijal
Jenna, thank you so much. That was fascinating.