Arthur Hertzberg

Arthur Hertzberg was born in Poland in 1921 . Hertzberg, was 5 when he left Europe with his parents in 1926, recalled that as a teenager in an Orthodox Jewish neighborhood in Youngstown, Ohio , he would not accept the notion that the literary world of talmudic learning, the kabbalistic books and the writing of the chasidim were less worthy as compared to the Iliad , the Odyssey or Dante 's Inferno . His father was an Orthodox rabbi trained in Eastern Europe , who taught Arthur to appreciate the richness of the Talmud and the other great works of Judaism . Although Hertzberg would later stray from his Orthodox upbringing and be ordained as a Conservative rabbi, he "never used my 'heresy' as the excuse to prefer the majority culture to my own." He has been married to the former Phyllis Cannon since 1950 . They are the parents of two daughters. Professor Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg His love of Judaism and the Jewish texts is at the core of his controversial life as a rabbi, scholar, educator and Jewish communal leader. Over the course of his 50 plus year career, Rabbi Hertzberg has served as a congregational rabbi, president of both the American Jewish Policy Foundation and the American Jewish Congress , vice president of the World Jewish Congress and a leading representative of world Jewry in the historic Catholic-Jewish dialogue that commenced during the papacy of Pope John XXIII . As a major public figure in the world of Jewish organizational life, Hertzberg has been at the epicenter of the crucial events shaping American Jewish life since the end of World War II. He walked with Martin Luther King, Jr. , in the 1963 March to Washington and Bloody Sunday at the height of the American civil rights movement , and Henry Kissinger . Hertzberg played a major role in some of the most significant issues the world Jewish community faced in the decades following World War II, including discussions with the Catholic Church over the still unresolved conflict over the Vatican's release of documents pertaining to Pius XII and the Holocaust , as well as his outspoken criticism of the policies of Israel toward the Palestinians . Hertzberg also made his mark in Jewish scholarship. His landmark book, The French Enlightenment and the Jews: The Origins of Modern Anti-Semitism (1968), argued that the source of modern antisemitism could be traced to the "liberal" ideas of such "enlightened" philosophers as Voltaire. Similarly, his The Zionist Idea: A Historical Analysis and Reader (1970) pioneered the study of Zionism and provided generations of students with the understanding that modern Zionism was a secular movement to remake Jewish identity into one of the many modern secular nationalisms. Finally, although a self-styled pragmatic liberal, Hertzberg saw no contradiction between his political convictions and his reverence for a Jewish tradition shorn of its religious fundamentalism.¹