From Self-Realization to Collective Liberation | A Neo-Kaplanism for Our Current Moment | Part I
Rabbi Dr. Mordecai M. Kaplan is, for me, the most influential Jewish thinker of the twentieth century and whose work has directly shaped all Jewish life in the twenty first. He’s also one of the least properly acknowledged. For as influential and important as he was in his own time, he is rarely spoken about today. His legacy is not just theological, but institutional, cultural, and infrastructural.
He revived the Bat Mitzvah to American (and indeed, global) Jewish life in 1922, creating a model of inclusion that has since become normative across all denominations. He reimagined the synagogue as a full-service communal hub, not just a space for prayer and study, but for recreation, culture, and civic life - his own synagogue on the Upper West Side was the first in the United States to include a swimming pool, laying the conceptual and physical groundwork for what would later become the Jewish Community Center (JCC) system. He championed Jewish camping as a formative tool for cultural and spiritual transmission, directly influencing the founding of the Ramah summer camps.
As the founding rabbi of the Reconstructionist Movement’s flagship synagogue Society for the Advancement of Judaism and a major force behind Young Israel, he shaped the trajectories of Modern Orthodoxy, Reconstructionism, and the emergence of American Conservative Judaism. He trained generations of rabbis during his 50-year tenure at the Jewish Theological Seminary, and helped establish the Teachers Institute and the University of Judaism (now American Jewish University) in Los Angeles. There isn’t a part of the American Jewish landscape that he hasn’t touched directly or indirectly via his students.
