Mordecai M. Kaplan, founder of the Jewish Reconstructionist movement, is
the only rabbi to have been excommunicated by the Orthodox rabbinical
establishment in America. Kaplan was indeed a heretic, rejecting such
fundamental Jewish beliefs as the concept of the chosen people and a
supernatural God. Although he valued the Jewish community and was a
committed Zionist, his primary concern was the spiritual fulfillment of
the individual. Drawing on Kaplan's 27-volume diary, Mel Scult describes
the development of Kaplan's radical theology in dialogue with the
thinkers and writers who mattered to him most, from Spinoza to Emerson
and from Ahad Ha-Am and Matthew Arnold to Felix Adler, John Dewey, and
Abraham Joshua Heschel. This gracefully argued book, with its sensitive
insights into the beliefs of a revolutionary Jewish thinker, makes a
powerful contribution to modern Judaism and to contemporary American
religious thought.
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