The Radical American Judaism of Mordecai M. Kaplan
Mordecai M. Kaplan, founder of the Jewish Reconstructionist movement, is the only rabbi to have been excommunicated by the Orthodox rabbinical establishment in America. Kaplan was indeed a radical, rejecting such fundamental Jewish beliefs as the concept of the chosen people and a supernatural God. Although he valued the Jewish community and was a committed Zionist, his primary concern was the spiritual fulfillment of the individual. Drawing on Kaplan's 27-volume diary, Mel Scult describes the development of Kaplan's radical theology in dialogue with the thinkers and writers who mattered to him most, from Spinoza to Emerson and from Ahad Ha-Am and Matthew Arnold to Felix Adler, John Dewey, and Abraham Joshua Heschel. This gracefully argued book, with its sensitive insights into the beliefs of a revolutionary Jewish thinker, makes a powerful contribution to modern Judaism and to contemporary American religious thought.
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Mel Scult is Professor Emeritus of Judaic Studies at Brooklyn College, City University of New York, and a member of the history faculty at the CUNY Graduate School. He is author of Judaism Faces the Twentieth Century: A Biography of Mordecai M. Kaplan and editor of Communings of the Spirit: The Journals of Mordecai M. Kaplan, Volume 1: 1913-1934.
"I'm going to mark Mel Scult's recent book . . . as one of the most important books in modern Jewish philosophy that I've read in a long time. In re-introducing us to Mordecai Kaplan, Mel opens out new directions for the field as a whole. Based on his lifelong study of the man and his work . . . Mel tells us is that we have all gotten Kaplan wrong for too many years. Mel wants us to know . . . is that Kaplan was much more and much deeper than a social thinker, that his thought is not simply humanist . . . that he was, in fact . . . a theologian."--
"All in all, an interesting, stimulating, and well-done analysis of Kaplan's life and thought. All students of contemporary Jewish life will benefit from reading this excellent study."--Jewish Media Review
"I've read a lot of Kaplan. I even used to sneak peeks at his personal correspondences when I worked in his archive at RRC. This book by Mel Scult is by far the best on Kaplan's ideas. Heck, it is even better than Kaplan himself because Scult does an amazing job of tying together loose threads and making Kaplan more readable."--Rabbi Howard Cohen
"[This book has] frequent quotations from Kaplan's writings . . . his diary underlines the deep attachement of Kaplan to the Jewish people, to the evolution and expansion of Judaism as a force for all humankind. . . [Mel Scult] agrees that Kaplan was . . . a heretic who reconstructed Judaism from its increasing loss of significance into a vital and meaningful force in contemporary life. . . The Radical American Judaism of Mordecai M. Kaplan is true to its title, rigorously examining Kaplan's bold thinking and innovative contributions to Jewish life in America."--Jewish Book Council
"[T]his book is the work of a mature scholar. It displays the erudition Scult has acquired over a lifetime of research on Kaplan and is unparalleled in its clarity as well as in the breadth and depth of its treatment of Kaplan--his writings, his achievements, and his meaning for Judaism and the Jewish people today and in the future."--The American Jewish Archives Journal
"The book is highly readable--at times almost colloquial in its language and style--and is recommended for anybody with a familiarity with Kaplan but who wants to understand his thought within a broader context."--AJL Reviews
"[T]his new volume represents a clear contribution to scholarship. It situates Kaplan within the development of twentieth-century American Jewish thought and considers the intellectual influences and interlocutors that led Kaplan to the sometimes contradictory religious positions he adopted."--American Jewish History
"Mel Scult, professor emeritus at Brooklyn College, explores the ways in which Mordecai Kaplan, the only rabbi to have been excommunicated by the Orthodox rabbinical establishment in America, was a radical. Using Kaplan's 27-volume diary, Scult places Kaplan's thought in conversation with other thinkers like Spinoza, Emerson, Ahad Ha-Am, John Dewey, and Abraham Joshua Heschel."--NBN New Books Network Jewish Studies
"An important and powerful work that speaks to Mordecai M. Kaplan's position as perhaps the most significant Jewish thinker of the twentieth century. . . . Scult shows Kaplan's theology to be imbued with American values of democracy and individualism."--Deborah Dash Moore, coeditor of Gender and Jewish History
