Arthur Hertzberg - Views and Influences

Views and Influences

Mordecai Kaplan was also an influence on the young Hertzberg, who attended the Jewish Theological Seminary, where Kaplan taught and served as dean. Kaplan had proved, writes Hertzberg, that with talent and guts, you can be your own man even in mainstream America. Both from Kaplan and later from the eminent scholar of Jewish history, Salo W. Baron, Hertzberg accepted the hypothesis that cultural and religious identity in America would exist in the future "only if they were redefined and reconstructed." Because the two men shared a genuine respect both for tradition and for intellectual rigor, during Kaplan's lectures on Reconstructionist philosophy, Hertzberg was welcome to speak up, in that situation advocating more traditional views.

Kaplan's influence is apparent when considering the breadth of Hertzberg's public career and reputation as gadfly. Never one to eschew unpopular stands when it came to core issues that impacted on the Jewish community, Hertzberg's reputation as a maverick was perhaps most in evidence in the aftermath of the Six-Day War in 1967 when he called for the creation of a Palestinian state alongside Israel, a position that was anathema among most America Jews. He had recounted his public battles with both Golda Meir and Menachem Begin over their policies toward the Palestinians:

I was largely in opposition to the dominant policies. I found myself restating this view year by year, as repeated attempts were made to silence me in Jerusalem and by its lackeys in New York and Washington. I insisted that we in the Diaspora could represent the best interest of the Jews worldwide — never mind the political and moral foolishness that governments in power might be proclaiming … I also had no fear that I was committing treason by denouncing what I knew was wrong and foolish, and I laughed off the label "maverick".

Hertzberg's early support for accommodation with the Palestinians, coming from a leader of the American Jewish establishment, subsequently added credibility to the Israeli peace movement.

Hertzberg challenged the wisdom of what he viewed as banking the future of Jewish continuity on the twin pillars of unquestioned support for Israel and the veneration of the Holocaust. Referring to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., as "the national cathedral of American Jewry's Jewishness", Hertzberg questioned whether the memory of the Holocaust was sufficient to keep Jews "on the reservation." Citing demographic studies, he contended that the proliferation of courses on the Holocaust would not be sufficient to stop a large number of Jews from leaving the Jewish community.