The Life and Death of Arthur Hertzberg

The charge was absurd. Szajkowski, an autodidact whose English was weak, could never have written the powerful thesis-driven book that Rabbi Hertzberg produced. But this did not prevent the two hard-headed ex-friends from having an acrimonious quarrel. Nevertheless, a few years later, when Szajkowski died suddenly, it was Rabbi Hertzberg who conducted his funeral and eulogized him. That was his way.

Rabbi Hertzberg spent the better part of his life teaching, writing and – as he put it – polemicizing. He devoted himself, consistently, to thinking, to learning, to the life of the mind. He was the very model of the engaged scholar, the public intellectual.

Rabbi Hertzberg’s two most famous scholarly works dealt with Zionism and the French Revolution. Both books were widely read beyond the academy, and both raised important questions that scholars continue to debate. The bulk of his writing, however, focused on America. He commented on the state of American Jewish religious life, on the synagogue, the rabbinate, and on a host of contemporary Jewish issues and problems, particularly assimilation, anti-Semitism and American policy in the Middle East. Even those who did not agree with him on every issue – and it is safe to assume that almost nobody did – knew that what Rabbi Hertzberg wrote could not be ignored. For half a century he was one of the most challenging, illuminating and engaging commentators on the American Jewish scene.

Rabbi Hertzberg’s best-known and most enduring contribution to the study of American Jewry was his one-volume survey entitled “The Jews in America,” published in 1989. Beginning with the book’s subtitle – “Four Centuries of an Uneasy Encounter” – Rabbi Hertzberg signaled that his approach to American Jewish history would differ from that of many of his predecessors. Much of American Jewish historical writing emphasized the contributions and achievements of American Jews: their heroes, their “adventures in freedom.” His goal, by contrast, was “to explain the whole course of American Jewish experience as leading naturally, and inevitably, to … contemporary problems.” He did not see his as another uplifting book about American Jews. Ever the contrarian, he closed his survey on a deeply pessimistic note, warning that absent “some kind of spiritual revival, American Jewish history will soon end, and become a part of American memory as a whole.”

In many ways Rabbi Hertzberg’s book was shaped by a series of interrelated questions that bothered him for most of his life. Why, he wondered, was the inner life of the American Jewish community so shallow? Why weren’t American Jews more Jewishly learned? Why didn’t Judaism and Jewish culture play a larger role in American Jewish communal life? These, he understood, were not the kinds of questions that social scientists could ever answer. He believed instead that history held the master key to their solution. And that is the kind of history he produced: not a history that made Jews feel good, but a history that made Jews think.

“The Jews in America” is an easy book to criticize. In places it is sloppy, in places facile, in places just plain wrong. But its central thesis remains powerful and challenging, and it stimulated a great deal of debate. It demonstrates, as all of Rabbi Hertzberg’s best work does, that history can be a powerful interpretive tool for understanding the Jewish experience as a whole.