April 17, 2006
Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg, a leading scholar and Jewish communal and religious leader perhaps best known as the author of The Zionist Idea, dies of heart failure at 84.
Hertzberg was born in Poland in 1921, immigrated to Youngstown, Ohio, when he was 5 years old, and eventually settled in Baltimore. Descended from a line of Hasidic rabbis, including his father, Hertzberg received a traditional European-style Jewish education in Baltimore before moving to public school in the seventh grade. Soon after becoming a bar mitzvah, without his family’s knowledge, he joined the Labor Zionist youth group Gordonia, named for A.D. Gordon. Hertzberg attended Johns Hopkins University, majoring in history and Oriental languages, before deciding to pursue the rabbinate and attending the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York, where he was greatly influenced by Mordechai Kaplan.
After his ordination in 1943, Hertzberg worked as a Hillel director, held pulpits in Philadelphia and Nashville, Tennessee, and served as a chaplain in the U.S. Air Force. He spent the summer of 1949 in the new State of Israel. Returning home that fall, he wrote about the future of American Zionism after the establishment of Israel in Commentary magazine: “The experience of Israel, a nation in the making, is complex on the surface but in reality simple — it is the problem of the getting on with the job. The problems of the Diaspora, under the tension of both Jewish and general spiritual allegiances, are rather less precise and more difficult. The Diaspora has chosen to live on as such. How to make it live on creatively and how to maintain inner identity between it and Israel — these are the most important questions that face us today.” (Hertzberg, “American Zionism at an Impasse,” in Commentary, October 1949, p. 345.)
He became the rabbi at Temple Emanu-El in Englewood, New Jersey, in 1956 and served there until moving to emeritus status in 1985. While leading the congregation, Hertzberg completed a doctorate in history at Columbia and taught at various times at Rutgers, Princeton, Dartmouth and Columbia. Calling himself a “rabbi, a social democrat and a Zionist,” he served as the president of the American Jewish Committee and as a vice president of the World Jewish Congress.
He was an outspoken civil rights activist and was noted for often contrarian views within the Jewish community, including calling for a Palestinian state in 1967 after the Six-Day War and encouraging the first Bush administration to deduct the cost of maintaining Jewish settlements in the West Bank and Gaza Strip from American aid to Israel.
Among numerous books and articles, he published a collection of writings on Zionism, The Zionist Idea, in 1959. The collection adds original essays by Hertzberg to writings by such Zionist thinkers as Theodor Herzl, Ahad Ha’am, Martin Buber, Louis Brandeis, Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook, Vladimir Jabotinsky and David Ben-Gurion.
