The “cartel” in question is the Conservative movement’s Rabbinical Assembly, which tightly governs the placement of rabbis with member synagogues across the country—a delicate matchmaking process whose result is often a major determinant of whether a congregation will thrive. The professor, Barak Richman, is a lay leader at his synagogue in Durham, N.C., and has spent the last eight months developing his claim that what started as a way to make sure that far-flung synagogues got their fair pick of rabbis graduating from the seminaries—and to prevent internecine poaching of successful clergy between competing synagogues—may today run afoul of the same federal antitrust statutes that brought down Rockefeller’s oil empire.

In Richman’s view, the Rabbinical Assembly and its analogues in the Reform and Reconstructionist movements use their oversight of the hiring process to threaten the autonomy and, at a fundamental level, the independent spirit of individual synagogues. (Richman excludes the rabbinic association of Modern Orthodoxy, known as the Rabbinical Council of America, from his analysis.) “Each placement system imposes severe restrictions on the labor market for pulpit rabbis without creating any identifiable pro-competitive benefit,” Richman wrote in his paper. “These rabbinic organizations are acting to advance their own commercial interests to the detriment of the welfare of consumers, namely the congregations and congregants who hire and ultimately benefit from a rabbi’s services.”

The argument lays bare a facet of Jewish life that remains obscured to the vast majority of American Jews today, who think of their congregations as independent religious communities and who are far less likely than their grandparents to know—or care—about the umbrella movements. But the rabbis’ and cantors’ professional associations do what secular professional associations do: maintain standards, facilitate hiring, and organize pensions. Under the current system, rabbis and cantors seeking jobs declare their candidacy through their movements’ placement offices, rather than operating as free agents. On the other side of the equation, synagogues agree to accept panels of candidates screened by the central placement authorities, rather than posting their jobs on public job boards or recruiting privately. Rabbis and cantors follow the rules in order to protect their access to future jobs at their movements’ synagogues; congregations, most of which go through the hiring process only infrequently, follow the rules because it’s easier and to preserve their good standing within their movements. Bucking the system requires an appeals process that can, in some cases, cost congregations, and rabbis, matches that both sides hope to make.

The idea that American synagogues are, at such a fundamental level, subject to a centralized leadership is a foreign one to most of their members—there is, after all, no Chief Rabbi in this country and no sense that a Jew in Pittsburgh is somehow answerable to an authority in New York, let alone in Jerusalem. The question of what the appropriate relationship between synagogue and movement should be is emerging at a moment when the Conservative movement, in particular, is painfully aware of the need to re-engage its constituents; indeed, its annual conference, last month, was devoted to the issue of rebranding. It underscores the degree to which mainstream synagogues feel the movements have hampered their efforts to attract younger Jews at a time when independent minyans and other groups are succeeding with a less institutional approach to Jewish practice. And it dovetails with a general decline in support for unions—which the rabbinic associations, in some sense, are—among a younger generation accustomed to union-busting. But Richman’s claim, first set out in a Forward op-ed last September, is that the movements’ constraints on rabbinic hiring aren’t just run-of-the-mill Jewish parochial concerns—it’s that they’re actually illegal.

***

Grumbling over the rules imposed by the rabbis’ and cantors’ professional associations is, by itself, nothing new. The issue was explored at length a decade ago by the journalist Stephen Fried in his book The New Rabbi, in which seniority rules restricting hiring by large synagogues became a major plot point, once the Conservative Philadelphia congregation at the heart of the story decided it wanted to promote its young assistant rabbi rather than hire a more experienced stranger from somewhere else to replace its retiring senior rabbi. (The Rabbinical Assembly eventually bent its rules to accommodate the synagogue, Har Zion, one of the largest and most powerful in the country.) And the idea that the movements might use their control over the hiring process to influence theological decisions by its member rabbis surfaced in 2005, when Ayelet Cohen, a Conservative rabbi, complained to the New York Times that she was being punished by the Rabbinical Assembly placement committee because she had officiated same-sex weddings. (The movement responded that Cohen was only being called out for violating the terms of a waiver allowing her to work at Congregation Beth Simchat Torah, a largely gay and lesbian Manhattan synagogue that is unaffiliated with any major movement; the Conservative movement voted the following year to allow its members to marry gay couples.)

The current system emerged in the 1960s to impose order on what was largely an ad hoc process, according to Marc Lee Raphael, professor of Judaic Studies at the College of William and Mary and author of a new history, The Synagogue in America. “In the old days, and this was true at the Orthodox seminary and the Conservative seminary and the Reform seminary, the chancellor of the seminary just told new rabbis what pulpits they were going to,” said Raphael, who also serves as rabbi of a Reform pulpit in Maryland. “The next step was the old boys’ network, where the president of the synagogue would call a guy and say, ‘We’re twice as large and pay twice as much and why don’t you come over.’ So, the placement process replaced two terrible ways of hiring rabbis.”

But the core of Richman’s argument, which has not been tested in any court, is that the rabbis’ professional associations organized their system in a way that violates the terms of the Sherman Act, which was passed in 1890 to combat the power of the railroad and oil monopolies, and later helped break up the Bell System. Rather than operating as a neutral clearinghouse, the hiring process run by the rabbinic associations is structured to limit both member rabbis and affiliated synagogues from using other avenues for making hires. And it turns out there is precedent for using the Sherman Act against secular professional associations for just this kind of behavior: In 1995, the Justice Department successfully sued the American Bar Association, the body governing the legal profession, on the grounds that it was using its cartel power to unfairly manipulate law schools into guaranteeing higher salaries for law faculties.

Richman’s crusade against the Rabbinical Assembly emerged from his personal frustration with a system that prevented his Conservative synagogue, Beth El, from interviewing Reconstructionist candidates to replace its retiring senior rabbi, who had been ordained in the Reconstructionist movement and obtained a waiver to preside over the congregation when it was still a Jewish backwater, decades before the universities in the area’s Research Triangle emerged as a hot destination for young academics, many of them Jewish. His initial salvo in the Forward elicited a statement from the Rabbinical Assembly asserting that its system “encourages talented individuals to enter and remain in the profession” and thereby “benefits not only rabbis and their families, but the Jewish community as a whole.” (Representatives of the Rabbinical Assembly did not respond immediately to phone and email messages left seeking comment; Richman declined to speak to Tablet Magazine on the record, citing potential legal action against the Rabbinical Assembly.)

But Richman is far from alone. Congregation Beth Elohim, a popular Reform synagogue in Brooklyn, ran into difficulty earlier this year over its efforts to hire a star cantorial student on the verge of graduation named Joshua Breitzer. Under the ranking system used by the American Conference of Cantors—Reform cantors’ equivalent of the Rabbinical Assembly—Beth Elohim was required to hire a cantor with more than three years of experience. In order to hire Breitzer, the synagogue had to appeal for a special waiver, which it eventually won. But the process took so long that they nearly lost their candidate to another congregation that could offer a job without waiting for secondary approvals. “In the end, we got who we wanted,” Beth Elohim’s rabbi, Andy Bachman, says now, “but it was an unnecessary wringer that we needed to go through.”

Part of the problem is that having a national office act in any substantive capacity is antithetical to the idea of local control. “I’m happy with how everything worked out, but down low, on a personal level, nothing was going to stop me from getting the best cantor, or the best rabbi, I could for our congregation, whether it was someone who was Reform or Conservative or Reconstructionist,” Bachman said. “We don’t need the national movement to tell us what Jews in Brooklyn need—we know what Jews in Brooklyn need.”

It’s an irony Richman notes in his paper: The approach taken by the movement may in fact be strangling the very community it purports to support. “It amounts to an effort to deprive local congregations of the very autonomy and self-determination that has fueled the blossoming of diverse Jewish experiences for two thousand years,” Richman writes. “Were the rabbinical organizations to adopt less restrictive rules that were consistent with the Sherman Act—rules that empower individual communities and defer to the preferences of both congregants and rabbis—it would kindle the passions and empower the dynamism that Jewish communities have shown over time.”

• A company is being sued for allegedly manufacturing electric, kosher-for-Shabbat locks that can be opened with a magnet. [NYT]

• At the Conservative confab in Las Vegas, Sue Fishkoff finds concern for institutions’ futures. [JTA]

• Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon argues that violent Palestinian anti-Semitism does not find its roots in the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories. [WSJ]

• Politics & Prose—The Scroll’s favorite bookstore—has been sold, though not to the group that included contributing editor Jeffrey Goldberg. [WP]

• A heartfelt dispatch from the front lines of the New York City high school admissions process. [Gotham Schools]

Waterloo Sunset!

Like other Conservative rabbis, [Rabbi Carl Wolkin of Northbrook, Illinois,] will not officiate at an interfaith wedding, but he wants the couple to know they are wanted in the congregation as they explore their Jewish future. That message has been blurred too often in the Conservative world, which hurts the movement, he says.

If that seems like no news to you, then you haven’t been paying attention.

Conservative Movement Tipping Toward Openness to Children of Intermarried [JTA]

• Hamas’s West Bank leadership may be quietly against its more extreme cohort in Gaza and Damascus, who have stepped up terrorist activity in response to the talks. [JPost]

• Speaking in Britain to a group that included the Royal Family, Pope Benedict XVI compared “atheist extremism” to Nazism. [AOL News]

• The Conservative movement has brought out its first revision of its Mahzor (High Holiday prayerbook) in nearly 40 years. Awesome! Awe-inspiring! [NYT]

• Some Harvard teachers and groups are protesting a forthcoming ceremony that will honor Martin Peretz, who has come under fire for writing in his blog for the The New Republic (of which he is editor and an owner), “Muslim life is cheap, most notably to Muslims” (he has apologized for and retracted the sentence). [NYT]

• Some asshole drew another swastika on Omri Casspi on that Sacramento, California, mural. [Sacramento Bee]

• A dispatch from the great Uman, Ukraine, Hasidic pilgrimage for Rabbi Nachman. (Rodger Kamenetz went for Tablet Magazine.) [Slate]

• Guess which American religious group tends to give the most to charity (income-adjusted)? [Miller-McCune]

• While Israeli law has long switched the country to daylight-savings time before Yom Kippur to make fasting easier, the holiday’s earliness this year brought the separation-of-synagogue-and-state issue into high relief. [Religious News Service/HuffPo]

• Why do the novels of official Tablet Magazine Man Booker Prize nominee Howard Jacobson have trouble attracting readers outside Britain? [New York Jewish Week/Jewish Ideas Daily]

• The Conservatives represent the smallest movement in Europe—but also the fastest-growing. [JTA]

Harold Gould (né Goldstein) died today at 86. He’s really good at playing a pompous blowhard in Love and Death.

• Israeli-American billionaire Haim Saban is trying to get Oliver Stone’s forthcoming ten-part Howard Zinn adaptation off the air. [Jewish Journal]

• Conservative by any other name? Arnold Eisen, the Jewish Theological Seminary’s chancellor, said the movement was “open” to changing its name, most likely to Masorti, or “traditional,” which is what it’s called in Israel. [Forward/JTA]

• Jason Diamond pens a moving (seriously!) tribute to his number-one childhood shiksa crush, who just so happens to be getting married this weekend. [Jewcy]

• Some detective work appears to show that, specifically, it is Amar’e Stoudemire’s maternal grandmother who is the Jewish one. Which, of course, would make him the Jewish one as well. [Just ASC]

• Speaking of which: He clarifies, “I think I might have some Hebrew Roots.” Oh, Amar’e, don’t let us down now. [@Amareisreal]

• The U.S. and Israeli Reform and Conservative movements are furious at today’s vote on a bill that would give exclusive conversion authority to Israel’s Chief (Orthodox) Rabbinate. [Haaretz]

• Lebanon reinforced its troops in its south with 5,000 more. [WP]

• Meanwhile, Lebanese newspapers are reporting that the July 2006 conflict with Israel is “not over.” [Ynet]

• In a move that resembles 1979’s “morality police,” the Iranian regime is sending 1,000 clerics to Tehran schools to enforce against political dissent. Last month, the teaching of music was banned in Iranian schools. [NYT]

• Congratulations to España, which won the World Cup yesterday in its first-ever final game appearance. [ESPN]

There’s only one catch: Each institution must use $1 million of its grant money on joint teacher-training endeavors with the other two schools.

If that sounds like an obvious request, you probably don’t remember the interdenominational Jewish politics of the recent past. During the 1980s and 1990s, the three major synagogue movements were widely perceived as being at loggerheads. Movement leaders and observers seem to agree that, in the past decade or so, tensions between the denominations have eased—led in part by a warming of the relationships between the heads of HUC, JTS, and YU, all central institutions within their movements.

But the relative ease with which this arrangement was made may less reflect a burst of newfound harmony among disparate monoliths as much as a loss of power experienced by each. During the period in which relations have improved, major Jewish community donors have eschewed giving to the denominations at all, often contributing instead to robust nondenominational organizations like Birthright and Hillel that target often-unaffiliated youth—and where such “megadonors” also have more control. What the Jim Joseph Foundation may have done is found a creative way to harness the decreased power of the denominations—by combining it.

“They’ve all been hit, but one of the ways to recover your health is to cooperate, save a few bucks, and ideally augment your quality,” said Charles Edelsberg, the Jim Joseph Foundation’s executive director. Edelsberg maintained that his organization is basically neutral on the issue of interdenominational collaboration: The point of the mandate, he said, was to reduce “unnecessary duplication of effort” that would waste the foundation’s dollars; more cooperation between the universities “would be great if it happened, but it’s not something we’re going to measure” when evaluating the success of the grant program, he added.

But the mere existence of the grant-sharing stipulations suggests that the foundation may have an agenda vis-à-vis the movements. “The Jim Joseph grant reflects a general belief among major donors that the denominational differences need to be overcome,” said Steven M. Cohen, a professor of sociology at HUC.

But for those with a strong commitment to the denominations remaining distinct—either for ideological or, for those employed by one of the synagogue movements, professional reasons—harmony between the movements is not necessarily a good thing. That’s especially true for the right-wing of the modern Orthodox movement—which is probably why, of the three university leaders, YU president Richard Joel has been the most direct about having to hold his nose while accepting an offer he couldn’t refuse. Far from celebrating the spirit of the new partnership, Joel took pains to minimize its significance in an interview with Tablet Magazine. “There’s no joint programming involved in any of this,” he said. “There are profound philosophic and doctrinal differences between Orthodoxy and liberal Judaism and this doesn’t represent any change in those differences.” Moreover, he added, “I don’t believe that people from different orientations in Judaism speaking together makes any kind of statement legitimizing or delegitimizing each other.”

Joel himself came out of one of the most successful nondenominational Jewish organizations, the campus movement Hillel, which he presided over for 14 years. But even if he personally understands the wisdom of that model, much of his YU constituency would likely recoil at the idea of working in significant ways with other denominations. “It’s very important that Richard Joel not appear to be moving toward a liberal position that’s untenable for them,” said Adam Ferziger, a historian at Bar-Ilan University in Israel who studies Jewish denominationalism. “It’s a very tough tightrope.”

Ellenson and Eisen, with their more liberal—and, maybe more to the point, more apathetic—memberships, are at greater ease talking up the collaboration. Ellenson went so far as to disavow what he called the “financial carrot” completely in an interview with Tablet Magazine, instead describing the collaboration as “a genuine reflection of a strong religious and ideological commitment to the value of k’lal Yisrael.” Eisen, fittingly occupying a tenuous middle ground, sounded resigned to if not wildly enthusiastic about the new facts on the ground. “I think we’re in a moment where keeping Jews, especially young Jews, involved, is more important than keeping us involved in particular denominations,” he said. “So, all of us recognize this and see why cooperation is necessary because of this mood.”

But, some observers note, these leaders also have a stake in not letting collaboration go too far: As they become more and more ideologically indistinguishable from each other, they run the greater risk of losing their separate identities. The Conservative movement in particular, poised shakily between the other two movements, has been accused from within its own ranks of melding with its Reform counterparts—a fear that has sometimes been stoked by collaborative efforts between JTS and HUC. Earlier this year, for instance, the downsizing of JTS’s cantorial school led some students and faculty to wonder whether their program and HUC’s—which already share some courses—were going to merge. But it seems unlikely that either school—especially JTS, which is reportedly millions of dollars in debt—could have afforded to refuse $11 million even if it had wanted to.

It’s no coincidence that the collaboration between the universities will be directed at the level of their education Masters programs—first because the Jim Joseph Foundation’s focus on young adults is typical of megadonor-sponsored Jewish initiatives, but also because of what the education programs lack: the kind of inextricable relationship to theology and halacha that the universities’ rabbinic and cantorial programs do have.

According to Edelsberg, the schools have talked about using some of their shared grant money to create joint training in experiential education, but even that prospect has not gotten past the discussion stage. And optimists hoping for a slide from pedagogical collaboration on educational matters to collaboration on rabbinical ones should keep their hopes in check. While JTS and HUC offer some joint seminars for rabbinical students, Joel put the kibosh on such prospects involving YU.

“It’s counterintuitive to a contemporary liberal aesthetic,” he said. “But I’m trained as a lawyer. Some things are simply not negotiable.”

This morning, during commencement at JTS’s Upper Manhattan campus, I witnessed Eisen confirm that he is on a mission to reverse the prevailing view that the Conservative movement is on the wane. “This moment offers not only unprecedented challenge but unprecedented opportunity,” he said in his address. He pledged to position his school not just as a hub for people who identify as Conservatives, but for “the religious center.”

Who’s that, we wonder? Well, Eisen wasn’t quite clear about his definitions, but it apparently includes anyone in New York who’s interested in Judaism: Full-time students and part-time students “eager for Jewish learning and Jewish wisdom” will learn together at newly developed continuing education classes. And he was clear that JTS’s umbrella will now extend not just to Jews but to people of other faiths, particularly Christians and Muslims, whose clerics are going to be welcomed not just into public policy debates at JTS but into training in things like providing pastoral care.

These are general principles; what about specifics? Last week, Eisen outlined six core principles that will guide the school’s mission going forward. He elaborated, a bit, this morning on what that will mean: more interdisciplinary classes, more practical training for future clergy, and more continuing education, especially for professional staff at Jewish organizations. It will also mean more targeted focus on shaping how day schools and summer camps teach Jewish principles, and—you knew it was coming—“the revitalization of synagogue worship.” For more, I guess we’ll have to wait for the prospectus.

An interesting thing to note, especially in light of Peter Beinart’s powerful new essay about the future of American Zionism: Eisen was clear that he was speaking to American Jews, as Americans. Israel came up twice, once in a mention of the need for “creative thinking” about the Israel-Diaspora relationship (especially, we imagine, in light of the new conversion bill making its way through Israel’s Knesset), and once in explicit reference to the “inescapable tension between our focus on North American Jewry and significant involvement in the State and society of Israel.”

But to the new graduates, American Jews or otherwise, he said this: “You will no longer be enacting the hyphen in your identity by walking up and down Broadway” and exhorted them to go out into the wider world and do good.

Full speech after the jump.

Commencement Address 2010
Arnold Eisen
Two aspects of the Sinai covenant that Jews celebrate and reaffirm at Shavu’ot strike me with special force: the fact that the covenant binds Jews to one another and to the world at the very same moment that it binds us to God; and the fact that now, as much as ever, the covenant needs each one of us to bring it to fulfillment. The Creator requires the diverse knowledge, skills, experience, and wisdom of human partners to carry on the work of creation. Our world is still not just or compassionate enough, the Torah insists. You and I can make it better. The responsibility that this Shavu’ot message imposes, the work to which the covenant calls Jews, the meaning it bestows on every one of us, confer more than enough blessing for a lifetime.

That lesson is particularly relevant on this occasion, as we send forth another set of dedicated and well-trained men and women into the world, armed with the ability and the resolve to treasure the knowledge they have acquired here for its own sake and to use that knowledge for the good. The age-old covenant of Judaism is also especially relevant today because The Jewish Theological Seminary has just completed a reassessment of its mission and role in the world, the details of which I want to share publicly for the first time with this gathering of the JTS community.

We began the process of institutional examination and renewal fully aware that this is a time of rapid change and massive challenge: change in the worth and significance of books; change in the meaning of knowledge and its transmission; challenge to major institutions and assumptions that have structured the Jewish community in North America for many decades; and challenge to the ability of Judaism and its covenant to speak in any sense to the great majority of contemporary Jews. We knew that it would not be simple to plot the next chapter in JTS’s future at a time of economic constraint and widespread uncertainty inside and outside the Jewish community. But we also knew that it was essential that we do so because we believe that JTS remains essential to the future of Jews and Judaism in North America and beyond.

JTS stakes the new direction that I shall describe to you today on the conviction that this moment offers not only unprecedented challenge but unprecedented opportunity. It is true, of course, that the Jewish community in North America must deal with anxiety and alienation so widespread they threaten the vitality and even the survival of numerous Jewish organizations and institutions. It is also true, however—and, we believe, of decisive importance—that recent decades have seen substantial achievement in a number of areas: day schools and camps, revitalized synagogues and congregational schools, programs in adult Jewish study, social justice, spirituality, and the arts. We should not forget as we contemplate present opportunities that the Jewish community, despite recent losses in financial and social capital, possesses material and human resources of which our parents and grandparents could only dream. The possibilities for growth and renewal today may be less readily discerned and less frequently noted than the obstacles that confront Jews, but they are truly remarkable. The question is how we can best take full advantage of them.

The administration and trustees of JTS believe that now, as at every previous turning point in the life of North American Jewry over the past century, the keys to success in meeting challenge and seizing hold of opportunity are learning, leadership, and vision. An in-depth, clear, and nuanced understanding of the Jewish past, combined with a firm grasp of present-day dilemmas and complexities, can equip Jewish leaders to shape a future for Jews and Judaism that is both vital and authentic. We must chart a way of learning and living Torah in our generation that is at once deeply grounded in the experience and wisdom of our ancestors and thoroughly responsive to contemporary needs and sensibilities.

Solomon Schechter made the link between learning, leadership, and vision the theme of his address at the seventh JTS commencement ceremony exactly one hundred years ago. Leaders of the Jewish community, Schechter stated, had to declare in all that they said and did, as courageously as the martyrs of old, “A Jew I am and a Jew I shall remain.” Great learning was required for this task. Jewish leaders needed to know from first-hand study what Judaism had meant in the past in all its variety and complexity. They also required an unambiguous understanding of the change required to conserve Judaism, as opposed to the kind of change—alarming to Schechter as to us—that turns Jews and Judaism into something else entirely.

Charting and transmitting authentic ways of learning and living Torah in greatly altered circumstances, and educating leaders able to preserve Judaism faithfully by changing it faithfully: this is the mission to which JTS rededicates itself this Shavu’ot. For almost 125 years, JTS has provided the Jewish community—and the world—with a distinct vision of what Judaism has been and can be, and has educated leaders imbued with that vision and capable of directing its realization. The role this institution has played in nourishing the religious and intellectual life of North American Jewry through our world-class library and outstanding faculty is widely appreciated. JTS’s track record of groundbreaking innovation in the service of Jewish community and tradition is no less impressive. Think of Camp Ramah, The Jewish Museum, The Eternal Light series that JTS produced for radio and television, foundational interfaith dialogues, the conception and development of numerous Conservative and community day schools, and the formative contribution made by JTS to the growth of academic Jewish studies. In 2010, The Library of The Jewish Theological Seminary remains among the very finest Jewish collections in the world; the JTS faculty continues to be distinguished and world-renowned; the student body is just as excellent and eager as ever; and the record of innovation goes on unabated. In recent years, JTS graduates have founded and led an array of dynamic new institutions, revitalized existing synagogues and schools, and stood at the forefront of organizations dedicated to reenergized worship, renewed pursuit of social justice, creative thinking about the Israel-Diaspora relationship, and high-quality adult Jewish learning.

Our alumni have exercised this leadership at a critical time when Jewish identity can no longer be taken for granted and Jewishness of all sorts is up for grabs. Hundreds of thousands of Jews in North America, however, do make and retain strong connections to Jewish tradition and Jewish community. Many others are searching for meaning and purpose for themselves and their families. They are powerfully attracted to experiences of tangible, face-to-face community that supply what they most need and want in life: ethical lives of purpose, ritual observance that offers profundity and joy, guidance at key junctures of the life cycle, and celebration that fills their homes and hearts with spirituality and transcendence. Many seek inspiring faith that brings them to encounter with God and impels them to work for a better world.

The successes and failures of the Jewish community in recent decades show that leadership and vision make all the difference—particularly when these are grounded in unquestionable authenticity born of learning and commitment. The Jews who lead us into an uncertain future by building new sorts of community and supplying new interpretations of our tradition must be so confident in their knowledge of the past that they are able to adapt Judaism to new circumstances without fear that such change will destroy what is most precious in our inheritance. They must understand how previous leaders have conserved Judaism by teaching, living, and changing it: carefully but boldly, and always with great learning and profound love.

In 2010, many institutions of higher education seek this balance. Louis Menand, in his perceptive reflection on what he calls “the marketplace of ideas,” suggests that knowledge changes faster than “the system.” Americans insist “that the production of knowledge should be uninhibited and access to it should be universal,” and the Internet would seem to represent and advance both goals decisively. But the system of higher education in this country dates in almost every aspect from the late nineteenth century, and as a result, the academy and its disciplines are faced with urgent and challenging questions: What do students gain by sitting in a classroom now that knowledge is instantly available on countless ubiquitous devices? Do books still matter? How can we hope to order knowledge—or careers—in late-nineteenth-century categories when Internet searches break down all categories, fuse past and present, and threaten every order with randomness and disorder?

It is clear that all institutions of higher education require a willingness to be flexible and to adapt inherited paths to new realities. In the face of overwhelming uncertainty, we will also need the wisdom to stand fast in the convictions and covenant that define us. A society, tradition, or community can cope with change of this rapidity and degree, I would suggest, only by providing tomorrow’s leaders with the learning and vision they need to carry their traditions and communities forward, not least the knowledge of how their traditions have grown through change in the past.
That balance of history and possibility, now as ever, is difficult to find. From the very outset, JTS has taught and demonstrated that there is no necessary contradiction between scholarship and belief, no unavoidable conflict between faith and reason, no inescapable tension between our focus on North American Jewry and significant involvement in the State and society of Israel, just as there is no incompatibility between rootedness in the Jewish community and pluralist respect for individuals and communities of other faiths. JTS has long sought to shape Jewish leaders who are fully open to the contemporary worlds of science and the arts, society and politics, and at the same time fully committed to Jewish history, teachings, and practices in all their complexity and variety.

I promise today that JTS will seek to articulate and communicate this vision of Judaism with renewed effort in the coming years and to imbue it in a new generation of scholars and religious, educational, and lay leaders.
Because learning is essential to the task of covenant, JTS will remain a preeminent institution of Jewish higher education that integrates rigorous academic scholarship and teaching with a commitment to strengthening Jewish tradition, Jewish lives, and Jewish communities. We cannot rightfully seek to steer Jews and Judaism into the future without ever-new and always first-rate scholarship about the Jewish past. In response to the changing conditions in which Judaism must be lived and taught, JTS will work to better focus both teaching and learning, and to maximize synergy among JTS’s various offerings and schools. We will stress interdisciplinary study in every area and develop core curricula in every field. We will provide future rabbis and cantors, scholars and educators, lay leaders and professional leaders, not only with rigorous textual and contextual learning, as always, but with the new skills and training demanded by their changing roles—as in pastoral care and arts education or in education in Jewish leadership as JTS uniquely understands that particular set of roles and responsibilities. In addition, we will offer our future leaders greater exposure to other faith traditions and broader understanding of the diverse Jewish community. There will also be heightened emphasis on how to teach the texts and history that are studied here, and how to inspire others with what has been learned.

Secondly: JTS will renew its efforts to bring the unique resources of teaching and learning gathered at 3080 Broadway to bear in a host of new ways for the benefit of Judaism and the Jewish community in North America and beyond. The continuing education of Jewish professionals at work in the field will become a core mission of the institution. The degree awarded to you today is only the beginning of lifelong learning with JTS. It will also be part of JTS’s core mission, starting this fall, to reach adults in the New York metropolitan area with high-level, in-depth, cutting-edge, and open-minded Jewish learning. The Library will seek to live up to its potential as a major cultural resource to this city, and especially to the Jewish community of this region. Just as the walls separating schools and disciplines inside JTS will come down, so will the walls dividing full-time students on campus from part-time students in the surrounding areas who are eager for Jewish learning and Jewish wisdom.

Last but not least, JTS will redouble its efforts to provide intellectual and spiritual leadership for Conservative Judaism and the vibrant religious center of North American Jewry. Indeed, we shall return to the promise of Schechter and Finkelstein that this Jewish theological seminary truly be of and for America, by broadcasting the message of Judaism as we know and teach it to the broadest possible audience. We shall serve Conservative Judaism and the religious center by continuing to provide professional and lay leaders to communities that seek to live in accordance with the vision of Torah that JTS articulates, as well as by communicating that vision with new energy to a variety of audiences through a variety of media. In cooperation with other institutions and organizations, we shall use the resources of the William Davidson Graduate School of Jewish Education to make a greater impact than ever before on day and congregational schools. We shall strengthen JTS’s close connection to Camp Ramah and seek to bring the methods and insights of Ramah to bear on synagogues and schools. We shall direct the resources of our rabbinic and cantorial schools to the revitalization of synagogue worship. We shall engage students, faculty, and others in rethinking the paths of learning and living Torah that define Conservative Judaism and the broader religious center. Finally, we shall bring Judaism into more frequent encounter with the areas of health and medicine, weigh the impact of Jewish principles and teachings upon key matters of public policy, and seek new sorts of honest dialogue between Judaism and other faiths, particularly Christianity and Islam.

That is JTS’s agenda for the years to come, our covenant with graduates and supporters, our tradition, and our community. For many of us, myself included, the way we practice scholarship at JTS for its own sake and seek to use it for the good is also part and parcel of our people’s covenant with God. The Jewish community has wisely invested heavily in new programs and talent in recent decades. I hope that it will join us in investing in you, our newest alumni, and in this established but ever-innovative institution that is uniquely committed to the learning, leadership, and vision needed to ensure the Jewish future. You, our graduates, hold the key to that future. I speak for the trustees, the faculty, and the administration in saying that I believe firmly in your ability and in that of the institution that has trained you. I am convinced that you are well-prepared for the work ahead. So is JTS. The gifts and responsibilities of covenant summon us, now as always. We dare not fail to respond with all the boldness and experience at our command. Let’s get to it.

Earlier: JTS Is on a Mission

The shift comes at a delicate time for the institution and for the Conservative movement, for which it serves as spiritual incubator and intellectual home. The school is reportedly millions of dollars in debt. At the same time, the once-vibrant movement has seen a steady shrinking of its membership rolls and a parallel diminution in what sets it apart from Judaism’s Reform movement.

These tensions come to the fore in the institution of the cantorate. In the immediate postwar years, most Reform and Conservative congregations boasted a charismatic, operatic cantor, who sometimes even eclipsed the rabbi. Reform Judaism began a move away from this model toward more participatory services in the 1960s and ’70s. The Conservative movement has been caught in something of a bind: while it has more recently embraced the shift in an effort to lure a younger audience, doing so has served to further blur the line that divided it from the Reform movement.

On Monday afternoon, JTS chancellor Arnold Eisen met with a large, distraught group of students, alumni, and faculty to defend the de facto demotion of the cantorial school. While students complained about a lack of institutional transparency, Eisen reassured the assembly that the cantorial school would not be closing. Monday’s meeting may be the only student-administration faceoff in recent memory in which a polite student body prepared for the face-off with a “Solidarity Mincha,” or afternoon prayer service, and in which student leaders requested that the chancellor not only promise to give students more decision-making power, but that he ratify that promise by signing a covenant, or brit.

The reorganization did not come as a complete surprise. Faculty, if not yet students, got a whiff last year that big changes were ahead in the cantorial school. Last spring, the seminary’s board hired Jack Ukeles, a management consultant who often works with Jewish organizations, to develop a strategic plan for revamping the institution. The plan that Ukeles drafted a few months later advised shutting down the cantorial school altogether. Chancellor Eisen has stated repeatedly that he never even considered implementing that suggestion—and Provost Alan Cooper told Tablet Magazine that the changes now being announced have nothing to do with Ukeles’s report—but rumors nevertheless began to circulate.

“Everyone jumped to the worst possible conclusions after it came out,” said Alberto Mizrahi, a Miller School alumnus who is now a cantor at Anshe Emet Synagogue in Chicago and a frequent music coach at his alma mater. “Everyone has something to say: Are we going to close the school? Are we going to merge with Hebrew Union College?”
There’s no truth to the latter rumor either, the administration says, though cantorial students at JTS and HUC, the Reform movement seminary, last year began sharing some classes on musical technique.

While the faculty’s worst fears were not realized, they were reactivated Friday afternoon when students and professors were informed via an email from Eisen that “the position of dean of the H.L. Miller Cantorial School will no longer be part of the academic structure of JTS.” He further explained that the previously autonomous cantorial school will, as of this summer, fall under the same umbrella as the seminary’s larger rabbinical school, and will be supervised by the rabbinical school’s dean, Danny Nevins. It also announced, less controversially, that JTS’s graduate and undergraduate schools of academic Jewish studies will soon share a dean as well.

Shortly after the email was sent, Shabbat began, and for a strange 24 hours, everyone on the religiously observant campus was at least officially at rest. Once the Sabbath ended, though, cantorial students began feverishly posting alarmed status updates on their Facebook pages: one student was “very worried about the future of the North American Cantorate”; another ominously referenced the upcoming meeting with Eisen: “Crisis at JTS Cantorial School. Monday is the Day of Judgment.” Meanwhile, Cooper sent a memo that attempted to dispel the rumors about the cantorial school closing, merging with HUC, or being taken over by the rabbinical school. Though students say their worst fears have subsided, they are still—as student representatives said at Monday’s meeting—worried about being left out of the process, and devastated about the loss of their dean.

“JTS has always been the place for people who sought to maintain traditional nusach [musical style] in the service—to move forward and add contemporary music as well, but also to preserve some of the great pieces we have from the golden age of hazzanut [cantorial performance] when cantors were really something,” said Rebecca Platt, a second-year cantorial student. “Now I’m concerned about whether we’re going to be able to maintain that, without Henry and without a very autonomous program.”

The economic logic of the move goes beyond JTS’s budget deficit, said Andy Shugerman, a recent graduate of the JTS rabbinical school who now runs educational programs for the seminary in Florida and the South. Some small synagogues are cutting costs by hiring just one spiritual leader instead of a rabbi and a cantor. By making the boundary between rabbinic and cantorial training more fluid—teaching rabbis to lead a congregation in prayer and training cantors more extensively in halacha—JTS hopes it can make its alumni more marketable at a particularly vulnerable time.

The softening of that boundary could be a silver lining of Eisen’s plan, cantorial students said, and not just because of the dismal job market. Historically, relationships between rabbis and cantors have been rocky—JTS itself didn’t allow cantors to sleep in its dorms, which were for rabbinical students only, until the 1970s. “What might finally start happening is bringing together the rabbinical and cantorial schools, and that might be great,” said Yakov Hadash, a fourth-year cantorial student and the president of the Miller School’s student organization.

Eisen and Cooper have publicly framed the restructuring of the cantorial school as part of a philosophical shift toward a future model of the Conservative movement, a demonstration of just how far the pendulum has swung in Conservative circles away from traditional hazzanut. But outside the JTS administration, even those sympathetic to the plan see it as primarily an economic decision. “The school is in major financial trouble, and Henry Rosenblum, who is an old and dear friend of mine, is one of the statistics that happens in this world,” Alberto Mizrahi said.

It’s not yet known who will be hired as the new cantorial school director—a position that will encompass some duties of the erstwhile cantorial school dean but will be subsidiary to the rabbinical dean—and how long a search for that person will take place. Students in their first few years of the five-year cantorial program, Hadash said, are concerned about whether their academic lives will be thrown out of whack if they are temporarily leaderless—and that, if they don’t like the yet-to-be-appointed director, things might not improve.

Most of all, though, students are mourning Rosenblum’s departure; he held his position for 12 years and had, by all accounts, been an important mentor, advocate, and emotional support system for JTS students both in an out of the cantorial school. Said Platt, “Our hearts are collectively a little broken.”

With additional reporting by Jenny Merkin.

Hadeish Yameinu by David Gelernter

David Gelernter, a prominent victim of the Unabomber, is a Yale computer science professor who is also fluent in the history and practice of Judaism. An observant Jew, Gelernter just published Judaism: A Way of Being (Yale University Press). Partly an exploration of the religion’s core themes and partly a defense of adherence to its commandments, the book is also an impassioned and provocative plea for Jews to recognize their religion’s unique relationship to God and to Western civilization. Gelernter spoke to Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry about the importance of separation to Jewish life, about Jewish superiority, and about why Conservative and Reform Judaism appear doomed to failure.

Rabbi Steven Wernick, United Synagogue’s new head, candidly told us that his group’s finances were adversely affected by both the economy and “by the credibility issue.” He continued: “I think [United Synagogue]’s been ineffective in the last several years at meeting the needs of our congregations, who are our stakeholders.” (As the rabbi at Philadelphia’s Adath Israel until about two months ago, Wernick said, he had helpful perspective here.) The goal of the reorganization is not to redefine Conservative Judaism, according to Wernick, but rather to more effectively and consistently uphold traditional Conservative values. “It’s about a commitment to Jewish ritual practice and Jewish study, via classical means, overlaid with modern scholarship,” Wernick explained. “Ultimately, the expression of that is in vibrant centers of Jewish living and learning.”

Since the Conservative movement lies directly on the fault-line between tradition and assimilation, we also asked Wernick how he felt about that controversial Israeli ad which implied that Jews who did not feel a connection to Israel and who intermarry are “lost” (the ad was pulled yesterday). “Every time I hear about those suggestions, I think they’re just silly, and they represent a point of view that is out of touch with reality,” he told us. “I’m glad the ad was pulled. My thought process is that probably my colleagues in the Conservative movement and other movements spoke quite passionately against it, and hopefully they played a role in getting it pulled.”