American Reform Judaism: An Introduction Review

Ari Goldman, who was a reporter for the New York Times and who now teaches at Columbia School of Journalism, once wrote that you cannot understand your own religious position unless you understand that of those with whom you disagree. For that reason I would hope that members of all three religious groups in American Jewish life will read all three of these books. If they do, they will understand their own positions better for having encountered the opposition at its best.

Dana Kaplan is both a Reform rabbi and a scholar of Reform Judaism. As a scholar, he evaluates the spiritual state of Reform Judaism very well in this book. He clearly explains the issues that the movement has had to confront in recent years, feminism, the gay issue, the problems of intermarriage, the struggle for acceptance in Israel, and the tension between autonomy and Jewish norms.

I think that the glory of Reform Judaism is its ability to reinvent itself. Anyone who remembers the Reform Judaism of the thirties has to be astonished at the changes that the movement has made since then. No longer do we have the high church dignity of the past. We no longer have clergymen in striped pants and black coats”now we have tallit and kippot. We no longer have the organ and the hymn; now we have the guitar and the folksong. We no longer have a religious education that consisted almost completely of Sunday School. We have youth groups and summer camps and even some Reform day schools. Where once there was hostility to Zionism and stress on Americanism, Israel is now very much a part of the Reform movement.

But if the capacity to reinvent itself is the glory of Reform Judaism, it is also its dilemma. What are the limits to which a movement can go to be in keeping up with whatever is fashionable without losing its moorings? What are the limits of what one can believe and do and still be accepted? What shall we make of a religion that almost never pronounces the words: forbidden over anything? How far can the concept of autonomy be stretched before it becomes: do whatever you want and call it Judaism if you like? As Alexander Schindler put it: As liberal Jews we assert our autonomy; our right to choose. But all to often we choose nothing at al. And what will hold the movement together if there are so many competing visions within”except for a placement service, a pension plan, and a prayer book that has nine different Friday evening services in it so as to accommodate all the different theologies within the movement? These are some of the questions that Kaplan deals with insightfully in this book.

Jack Riemer

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