Radical American Judaism of Mordecai M. Kaplan

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.

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)

• AcknowledgmentsPrefaceIntroduction1. Excommunications: Kaplan and Spinoza2. Self-Reliance: Kaplan and Emerson3. Nationalism and Righteousness: Ahad Ha-Am and Matthew Arnold4. Universalism and Pragmatism: Felix Adler, William James, and John Dewey5. Kaplan and Peoplehood: Judaism as a Civilization and Zionism6. Kaplan and His God: An Ambivalent Relationship7. Kaplan's Theology: Beyond Supernaturalism8. Salvation: The Goal of Religion9. Salvation Embodied: The Vehicle of Mitzvot10. Mordecai the Pious: Kaplan and Heschel11. The Law: Halakhah and Ethics12. Kaplan and the Problem of Evil: Cutting the Gordian KnotConclusionAppendix: "Thirteen Wants" of Mordecai Kaplan ReconstructedNotesSelected Bibliography and Note on SourcesIndex