Resigning to Change: The Foundation and Transformation of the American Council for Judaism (Masters Thesis)

In 2008-2009, I wrote my Masters Thesis with Professor Jonathan Sarna on the topic of the American Council for Judaism. Between the founding of the American Council for Judaism in 1942 and the establishment of the State of Israel in 1942, the anti-Zionist organization's character, mission, and membership base transformed around the axis of competing "pro-Reform" and "anti-Zionist" visions. The Council was established by a cohort of leading Reform rabbis in response to the growth of Zionism in the Reform movement, but in reality, most sought to reinvigorate their declining movement through reviving the ideology of classical Reform. As the Council shifted from concept to implementation, it was overtaken by leaders who prioritized the battle against the Zionist movement over outreach to the laity, and over the course of 1942 and 1943, the great majority of its founders withdrew from the anti-Zionist organization. This study is an attempt to unpack the discourse of the Council's foundation and comprehend the forces that impacted its evolution. I have endeavored to peel back the layers—the founders' motives for establishing the Council, the close relationships they shared, the string of resignations that began shortly after its founding, and the anti-Zionist ideology espoused by the Council's leadership—to better understand the marginalization of the Council in American Jewish life. Furthermore, the Council presents a powerful case study which can help us better comprehend the nature of a struggling organization seeking to find its purpose and the best way to fulfill its mission, and the intellectual roots of the discourse that embodied that debate. In the end, what at first appears to be a unified opposition to Zionism was undermined by deep-seated disagreements over the nature of Zionism, Judaism, and Jewish history.

Resigning to Change is available from the Brandeis Institutional Repository.

Between Berlin and Tel-Aviv: Simon Rawidowicz and the Politics of Culture (Senior Research)

In 2007–2008, I conducted my senior research project with Professor Eugene Sheppard, studying the works of Dr. Simon Rawidowicz (1896–1957). A founding professor of Brandeis' Near Eastern and Judaic Studies department, Rawidowicz was a prolific scholar and also played an important but often-ignored role in the Jewish community of late Weimar Germany in the realm of the development of Hebrew culture in the Jewish Diaspora. In my thesis, I studied a series of Hebrew essays and manifestos in which Rawidowicz proposed a set of revolutionary theories regarding the relationship between Jews living in the land of Israel and the Diaspora, and the nature of Jewish life. In this exploration of these largely forgotten sources, I aimed to shed light on the charged and fractious environment in which this discourse took place as well as assess the peculiar robustness of Rawidowicz’s philosophy. This study ultimately engages the ways in which these debates from the early 1930s still resonate with and challenge Jewish thought in the twenty-first century. Download the thesis here.