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American Judaism between Religion and Race: Reflections on Mordecai Kaplan and Jewish Whiteness

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 July 2022

Judah Isseroff
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Abstract

Mordecai Kaplan's Judaism as a Civilization (1934) is most often read as Kaplan's effort at a rapprochement between Judaism and America. In contrast to conventional readings of that work, this article highlights Kaplan's suspicion of America, and liberal modernity more generally, by engaging with his analysis of the categories of religion and race. Kaplan, I argue, is haunted by the prospect that in adopting either of these categories, American Judaism will surrender its particularity and collectivity to the liberal, ultimately Christian, state. Indeed, in his own context, Kaplan considered Reform Judaism to be proof of the perils of Jewish accommodation of either category. The article attends to Kaplan's analysis of religion and race as an unlikely resource for thinking through a number of contemporary issues with respect to religion, race, and Jewishness in American life. I argue that Kaplan's anxieties about Christianity and modern liberalism demonstrate a striking prescience about the denaturing of American Judaism in its being annexed to whiteness. The article puts Kaplan into conversation with James Baldwin, who clearly saw Jewish whiteness as yet another casualty of conquest by that “old, rugged Roman cross.” Finally, Kaplan's comments in Civilization about anti-Black racism are few. Read together with his diary, however, they evince sensitivity to the religious constraints put on Black life in America. This article thus concludes by putting Kaplan in conversation with Sylvester Johnson's work on “Black ethnics” and Judith Weisenfeld's research on “religio-racial movements.” This engagement suggests that Kaplan's analysis is not specific to Judaism only, but is more broadly related to the issue of how the modern logics of religion and race continue to discipline expressions of otherness that do not abide by the boundaries of these categories. Kaplan thus contributes an important Jewish vantage on the continued over-determination of American religious life by white Christianity.

Type
Research Article
Information
Religion and American Culture , Volume 32 , Issue 1 , Winter 2022 , pp. 1 - 29
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Copyright © 2022 by The Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture

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References

Notes

1 Mel Scult notes that Kaplan's reluctance in this regard was motivated by his “determination not to be divisive.” Kaplan thus tried to “[preserve] the Reconstructionist movement as a ‘school of thought’ rather than as a denomination.” Mel Scult, The Radical American Judaism of Mordecai M. Kaplan (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2015), 362.

2 Kaplan, Mordecai M., Judaism as a Civilization: Toward a Reconstruction of American-Jewish Life (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1994)Google Scholar.

3 Kaplan, Mordecai M., Communings of the Spirit: The Journals of Mordecai M. Kaplan, Volume I: 1913–1934, ed. Scult, Mel (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1999), 188Google Scholar.

4 Scult, Radical, 3. Lila Corwin Berman also regards Kaplan as paradigmatic of her story of Jewish Americanization in Lila Corwin Berman, Speaking of Jews: Rabbis, Intellectuals, and the Creation of an American Public Identity (Berkeley: University of California Press), 78–90.

5 Talal Asad's Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993) is the foundation text for this argument.

6 Kaplan's arguments anticipate some of those made by the New Black Theologians, like J. Kameron Carter and Willie Jennings, who offer compelling accounts of the Christian theological origins of race and racism. However, whereas Jennings and Carter take these origins to exemplify theological mistakes, Kaplan makes no such distinction. The upshot from Kaplan's arguments is that Christianity cannot be divorced from the logics that led to so many modern afflictions. Carter, J. Kameron, Race: A Theological Account (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Jennings, Willie James, The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010)Google Scholar.

7 Kaplan, Civilization, 177.

8 Matthew Frye Jacobson dates the period of American Jewish whiteness as beginning after World War II. See Jacobson, Matthew Frye, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 176CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

9 Jacobson documents the turn from the language of race to that of ethnicity. The former was the default mode of classifying all sorts of European immigrants, including Jews, in the early twentieth century. Jacobson defends the use of the term “race” in his scholarship on this time period, despite the tendency of some scholars to regard this usage as a misapplication. Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color, 6.

10 James Baldwin, “Negroes Are Anti-Semitic because They're Anti-White,” in Black Anti-Semitism and Jewish Racism (New York: Schocken, 1970), 1–15.

11 The term “religio-racial” is borrowed from Judith Weisenfeld's New World A-Coming: Black Religion and Racial Identity during the Great Migration (New York: New York University Press, 2016).

12 Much contemporary literature about religion and race has emphasized how whiteness has structured the approach to religion by sequestering talk of race to a narrow domain that leaves religion racially innocent. See, for example, Schneider, Rachel S. and Bjork-James, Sophie, “Whither Whiteness and Religion?” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 88, no. 1, (March 2020): 175–99CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Religious studies has sought to address the “ways white racial identity informs religious discourse and practice.” Schneider and Bjork-James, “Whither Whiteness and Religion,” 190. This study of Kaplan participates in this trend, though it arguably inverts the approach by emphasizing Kaplan's attention to the hidden Christian antecedents of American racial logics.

13 The history of Jewish emancipation, and the accuracy of Kaplan's views of it, is far too big and complicated an issue to engage with at length in this essay. What is important for the current purpose is only to highlight Kaplan's opposition to emancipation and his association of it with the conversion of Judaism into a religion. For a more comprehensive overview of the story of Judaism, modernity, and emancipation, see Leora Batnitzky, How Judaism became a Religion (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011); David Sorkin, The Transformation of German Jewry, 1780–1840 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1987); Michael Meyer, The Origins of the Modern Jew (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1967); see also Kaplan, Civilization, 25, where Kaplan explicitly mentions Moses Mendelssohn (the father of the Jewish Enlightenment) in regard to this position.

14 Kaplan, Civilization, 273.

15 Ibid., 273. Kaplan's language of “religion only” will recur in this article as a negative counterpoint to Kaplan's idealized premodern, preemancipation view of the capaciousness of religion.

16 “Every modern nation expects all citizens to identify themselves completely with it.” Kaplan, Civilization, 20.

17 Ibid., 5.

18 Noam Pianko also notices this connection, writing: “Kaplan considered the United States liable to debilitate Judaism through the ultimate fulfillment of European liberalism.” Noam Pianko, Zionism and the Roads Not Taken (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), 106.

19 Noam Pianko, “Reconstructing Judaism, Reconstructing America: The Sources and Functions of Mordecai Kaplan's ‘Civilization,’” Jewish Social Studies 12, no. 2 (Winter 2006): 49.

20 Kaplan, Civilization, 184.

21 Kaplan, too, would move beyond the term “civilization,” such as in the 1957 preface to Judaism as a Civilization where he beings to favor the term “peoplehood.” In his last work, Kaplan would revisit some of the core themes of Civilization but would frame them under the rubric of The Religion of Ethical Nationhood.

22 This distinction between “religion” and “civilization” is somewhat artificial and alien to Kaplan's thought. After all, Kaplan elided the difference between religion and civilization in the term “religious civilization,” which appeared from the book's first printing. Kaplan, Civilization, 422. Pianko has argued that the centrality of religion was too “parochial” and thus contributed to the failure of Kaplan's program. Pianko, Zionism, 133. In slight contrast, I find the language of “civilization” to be the most parochial and least conducive to contemporary update. Without it, I think the relation of Kaplan's analysis to a number of contemporary questions is better able to come out.

23 Pianko, “Reconstructing,” 44.

24 Mordecai M. Kaplan, “Judaism and Christianity,” Menorah Journal 2 (April 1916): 114.

25 Ibid., 114–15.

26 American Protestantism, it seems, had disabused him of the idea that Protestantism was an improvement as compared with Catholic Christendom in Europe.

27 Pianko “Reconstructing,” 48.

28 Pianko, Zionism, 106.

29 Kaplan, Communings, 258.

30 Kaplan, Civilization, 217.

31 This was likely based on the fact that Jews and Catholics were often grouped together for nativist abuse. See, for instance, Leonard Dinnerstein, Anti-Semitism in America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 93.

32 Howard M. Sachar, A History of the Jews in America (New York: Vintage Books, 1992), 312–15.

33 See Dinnerstein, Anti-Semitism, 84; Eric Goldstein, The Price of Whiteness: Jews, Race, and American Identity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 132.

34 Dinnerstein notes that “apartment house owners in the Jackson Heights section in New York City advertised that their buildings were ‘restricted’ and prohibited Catholics, Jews, and dogs.” Dinnerstein, Anti-Semitism, 93.

35 Kaplan, Civilization, 250.

36 Ibid., 201. “Every difficulty or necessity for reinterpretation that the surviving religions encounter in modern times confirms the truth that a living religion is not universal abstract truth but local and concrete experience, which is interpreted in terms of universal human interest.”

37 Ibid., 481.

38 Ibid., 250.

39 Ibid., 103.

40 Ibid., 125.

41 Cornel West ventriloquizes some questions from Black compatriots about this vexed relationship: “Why do you spend so much time with Jewish progressives who soon betray you on the altar of Jewish interests and networks? Are not black-Jewish alliances the occasion for black deference and Jewish paternalism? Why do you engage Jewish Zionists in such a charitable manner when you put forward such harsh criticism of black nationalists? It is possible to forge black-Jewish coalitions with integrity without attempting to create conditions under which black progressives, liberals and nationalists can coalesce?” Cornel West, “Tensions with Jewish Friends and Foes,” in The Cornel West Reader (New York: Civitas, 1999), 531–32.

42 See, for instance, Marc Dollinger, Black Power, Jewish Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018).

43 Baldwin, “Negroes,” 9.

44 Ibid., 12.

45 Ibid., 9.

46 Ibid., 12. Emphasis added.

47 I am borrowing this term from John Rawls's A Theory of Justice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971).

48 Jacobson, Whiteness, 176.

49 Goldstein, Price, 2.

50 Kaplan does not consider Reform to be the only Jewish denomination that has redacted itself into the aspect of “religion only.” This self-definition afflicted every corner of Judaism touched by emancipation. Reform is only unique in its zeal to totally reimagine Judaism in accord with emancipation. For instance, the Pittsburg Platform, the charter document of American Reform Judaism, stated: “We consider ourselves no longer a nation, but a religious community, and therefore expect neither a return to Palestine, nor a sacrificial worship under the sons of Aaron, nor the restoration of any of the laws concerning the Jewish state.” “Article Declaration of Principles,” Central Conference of American Rabbis, accessed May 19, 2021, https://www.ccarnet.org/rabbinic-voice/platforms/article-declaration-principles/.

51 Goldstein, Price, 101.

52 Ibid., 108.

53 “White people cannot, in the generality be taken as models of how to live. Rather, the white man is himself in sore need of new standards, which will release him from his confusion and place him once again in fruitful communion with the depths of his own being.” James Baldwin, “The Fire Next Time,” Baldwin: Collected Essays (New York: The Library of America, 1998), 342.

54 Goldstein, Price, 146.

55 Jacobson, Whiteness, 172.

56 Goldstein, Eric, “The Unstable Other: Locating the Jew in Progressive-Era American Racial Discourse,” American Jewish History 89, no. 4 (December 2001): 398CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

57 Goldstein, Price, 176. On Kaplan, Reform, and race, see also Shaul Magid, American Post-Judaism: Identity and Renewal in a Postethnic Society (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013), 43–48.

58 See Goldstein, Price, 119–37.

59 Kaplan, Civilization, 230. In fact, the Reform's Columbus Platform of 1937, partially in response to Kaplan's criticisms, codified the shifts that Kaplan observes in relation to race and Zionism. A representative example includes the section called “Israel”:

Judaism is the soul of which Israel is the body. Living in all parts of the world, Israel has been held together by the ties of a common history, and above all, by the heritage of faith. . . . In the rehabilitation of Palestine, the land hallowed by memories and hopes, we behold the promise of renewed life for many of our brethren. We affirm the obligation of all Jewry to aid in its upbuilding as a Jewish homeland by endeavoring to make it not only a haven of refuge for the oppressed but also a center of Jewish culture and spiritual life.” “Reform Judaism: The Columbus Platform,” Jewish Virtual Library, accessed March 8, 2022, https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/the-columbus-platform-1937.

60 Kaplan, Civilization, 178. The other major effect of the turn to racial language, really a simultaneous development, was Reform's change in attitude toward Zionism.

61 Kaplan, Civilization, 120.

62 Race was also the choice mode of Jewish differentiation for American Zionists; see Goldstein, Price, 86–93.

63 Kaplan, Civilization, 230.

64 Ibid., 231.

65 Kaplan's analysis of race to this effect would be impossible without his realistic account that emphasizes race's physical and phenotypic reality. As Jacobson shows, however, the social life of race in the United States has been obsessed with race as visualizable and therefore as representable as natural. “Jewishness seen is social value naturalized and so enforced.” Ibid., 174. Though Kaplan is wrong about there being an absolute racial truth, he is right about the correspondence between race and the natural.

66 Kaplan's reflections on American Jewish intermarriage were ambivalent, but also well ahead of their time. When he wrote Civilization, intermarriage rates were still quite low. Nevertheless, he warned that Reform's “Jewish racialism” gambit would wind up in failure and then Reform “will be driven sooner or later . . . to permit intermarriage.” Ibid., 119. This reflected Kaplan's parochial anxiety that intermarriage would be a leading indicator of Judaism's demise in America: “It is certain that, if nothing is done to prevent the tendency to intermarriage, Judaism can barely survive another century, and even it does survive, it will have become hopelessly devitalized.” Ibid., 417. And yet, only two pages later, Kaplan proclaims the folly of staking the American Jewish future on the willingness of young Jews to forego marrying gentiles. “Nothing is so contrary to the ideal of cultural and spiritual cooperation as the unqualified refusal of one element of the population to intermarry with any other.” Ibid., 419. Shaul Magid writes of Kaplan's view of the “need to accept intermarriage as part of the American Jewish experience.” Magid, American Post-Judaism, 43. This surely isn't wrong, but doesn't capture Kaplan's full ambivalence. Cf. Sylvia Barack-Fishman “Relatively Speaking: Constructing Identity in Jewish and Mixed-Married Families,” in American Jewish Identity Politics, ed. Deborah Dash Moore (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008) for a contemporary discussion of the issue of Jewish intermarriage and race.

67 Kaplan, Civilization, 231.

68 Goldstein, Price, 284.

69 Jacobson, Whiteness, 176.

70 Kaplan, Civilization, 76.

71 Ibid., 66.

72 In his recent biography of the Meir Kahane, Shaul Magid has emphasized how Kahane's racist version of Jewish nationalism and his ultimate turn to Zionism reflected a deep dissatisfaction with the liberal consensus. Shaul Magid, Meir Kahane: The Public Life and Political Thought of an American Radical (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2021).

73 In a lecture called “Jews and the Religion of Whiteness,” delivered at the Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies, J. Kameron Carter argued that Zionism is not only associated with whiteness but that, in looking at the writings of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, it appears that Zionism has been the very vehicle for Jewish adoption by the West (i.e., into whiteness). While I agree with Carter with respect to the contemporary condition of Jewish whiteness and the complicated role of Zionism in this phenomenon, his argument could benefit from a look at the role of Zionism in Jewish history prior to Bonhoeffer. “Jews and the Religion of Whiteness,” Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies, YouTube video, 1:00:07, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PK-Ucq-4ZuQ.

74 Kaplan, Communings, 501.

75 Weisenfeld, Judith, “‘The Secret at the Root’: Performing African American Religious Modernity in Hall Johnson's Run, Little Chillun,” Religion and American Culture: A Journal of Interpretation 21, no. 1 (Winter 2011): 46CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

76 Kaplan, Communings, 290.

77 Weisenfeld, “‘Secret,’” 41.

78 Kaplan, Communings, 502.

79 This was true, for instance, of Louis Marshall (1856–1929)—the Jewish philanthropist most associated with the NAACP. Marshall, according to Eric Goldstein, increasingly adopted racial language to describe Jewish difference and regarded his support for African Americans as an alliance of two of America's racial minorities.

80 Again, this not to discount the color line but to illustrate how some of its effects are religiously constituted.

81 Johnson, Sylvester, “The Rise of the Black Ethnics: The Ethnic Turn in African American Religions, 1916–1945,” Religion and American Culture: A Journal of Interpretation 20, no. 2 (Summer 2010): 125–63CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

82 Weisenfeld, New World, 443. I prefer Weisenfeld's formulation to Johnson's, particularly as it relates to Kaplan, because her term does not transcend the relevant categories—religion and race—which were the modern stumbling blocks in the way of the possibility of vibrant minority life in America. Johnson's “ethnicity”—while denoting mostly the same idea—is more of a cross-pollination of religion and race, which to a certain extent obscures the animating problematics.

83 Johnson even makes the comparison to Kaplan, noting that Kaplan's idea of Judaism was “more an ethnic heritage than a religion.” Johnson, “Rise of the Black Ethnics,” 147.

84 Weisenfeld, New World, 5.

85 Johnson, “Rise of the Black Ethnics,” 127.

86 Weisenfeld, New World, 18.

87 Kaplan's views of Jewish chosenness are more complicated than normally represented. At once, he mourns “the retreat from the stand taken by them . . . with regard to their being God's chosen people” because such a stand preempts “complete self-identification with the state.” Kaplan, Civilization, 23. At the same time, Kaplan concludes that the “harm which results from upholding the doctrine of ‘election’ is not counterbalanced by the good it is supposed to do.” Ibid., 43.

88 From Exodus 19:6.