COMMENTARY: Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg, a Dazzling Scholar and Leader

c. 2006 Religion News Service (UNDATED) Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg’s death on Monday (April 17) at age 84 robs both America and the world Jewish community of a dynamic and gifted leader. He combined significant scholarship at prestigious academic institutions _ including Columbia, Dartmouth, Princeton, Rutgers and the Hebrew University _ with the presidency of the […]

c. 2006 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg’s death on Monday (April 17) at age 84 robs both America and the world Jewish community of a dynamic and gifted leader.

He combined significant scholarship at prestigious academic institutions _ including Columbia, Dartmouth, Princeton, Rutgers and the Hebrew University _ with the presidency of the American Jewish Congress and the vice presidency of the World Jewish Congress. Yet he still maintained enough time and energy to be the senior rabbi of a large U.S. synagogue, Temple Emanu-El in Englewood, N.J.


Most clergy, Jewish or Christian, would happily settle for just one of Hertzberg’s achievements _ esteemed congregational leader, respected university professor, or honored president of two major organizations.

But Hertzberg represented something more than an outstanding professional resume. He was, until his death, a living link with the extraordinary Jewish community in Poland that numbered 3.5 million people in 1939 on the eve of the German invasion and the start of World War II. Indeed, Polish Jews constituted 10 percent of Poland’s total population until the mass murders of the Holocaust. The Poland of Hertzberg’s birth was in many ways the religious, cultural and intellectual capital of the Jewish people.

Hertzberg was fortunate. He escaped a Nazi death camp and becoming one of the 6 million Jewish victims of Nazism because his family left Poland and came to the United States in the mid-1920s when Arthur was just 5 years old. But he never forgot his Hasidic religious roots in Poland nor the fact that he, his father and two brothers, all rabbis, came from a long and distinguished line of Jewish teachers.

I first encountered Arthur Hertzberg through the printed word in the 1960s. It was only years later that I personally worked with him on a series of interreligious projects and activities, especially those involving Catholic-Jewish relations, the state of Israel and the Vatican.

In 1960, as a newly ordained rabbi, I became a U.S. Air Force chaplain assigned to American military bases in Japan and Korea. Hertzberg had also been a USAF chaplain in Britain a decade earlier.

On the long flight across the Pacific Ocean in a propeller-driven transport plane, I read “The Zionist Idea: A Historical Analysis and Reader,” a lengthy anthology that Hertzberg edited. While I was interested in the writings of the founders and leaders of the Zionist movement, Hertzberg’s superb analytical introduction to the book had a profound effect upon me.

Hertzberg made clear that Zionism, the national Jewish liberation movement that provided the intellectual, religious and political energy for the creation of the state of Israel in 1948, was never monolithic in nature. Rather its power to attract followers and its ultimate success in achieving a democratic Jewish state in the Middle East came from a myriad of sources stemming from the Jewish people’s collective experience and history.


In 1968 Hertzberg published “The French Enlightenment and the Jews: The Origins of Modern Anti-Semitism.” Until reading that book, I had mistakenly assumed that anti-Semitism was more virulent and visible in culturally and politically backward societies like czarist Russia. However, Hertzberg clearly documented how Voltaire and other “enlightened” French intellectuals and philosophers also suffered from the pathology of hating Jews and Judaism.

After reading Hertzberg’s excellent study, I have never been surprised or shocked by the continuing existence of anti-Semitism in France and other Western democracies. While Voltaire’s overly upbeat character, Dr. Pangloss (“This is the best of all possible worlds”), may be a symbol of Western optimism; Hertzberg documented the dark anti-Jewish side of many Western societies and leaders.

Actually working with Arthur Hertzberg was never easy nor simple. A life-long champion of Zionism, he was often a fierce public opponent of various Israeli policies. A self-proclaimed child of “Jewish modernity,” Hertzberg was a relentless foe of other intellectuals who used their carefully honed erudition to justify anti-Semitism.

Most of all, Arthur Hertzberg was sharp-tongued and acerbic as he constantly punctured hypocrisy, academic and religious arrogance, and inflated egos. He had many admirers and probably an equal number of detractors. But both groups always agreed that he was dazzling, irascible, knowledgeable, unpredictable and iconoclastic _ a true original.

MO/RB END RNS

(Rabbi Rudin, the American Jewish Committee’s senior interreligious

adviser, is the author of “The Baptizing of America: The Religious Right’s Plans for the Rest of Us.”)

Editors: Retransmitting to correct Hertzberg’s role with the World Jewish Congress in the 2nd graph. He was vice president, sted president of that group. A corrected version of the commentary that was transmitted on Thursday (April 20) follows.


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