And yet, the conservative chair never materialized—a fact that came as a disappointment, if not a surprise, to some. Although American Judaism’s largest religious denomination prides itself on being a big tent—part of HUC’s mission statement is to apply “the open and pluralistic spirit of the Reform movement to the study of the great issues of Jewish life and thought”—certain students and observers are sensing a troubling trend that directly contradicts this vision, particularly on the matter of Israel.

“While I loved my time there and deeply respected my professors, I found that HUC was not comfortable exploring or discussing anything politically that wasn’t left,” said Rabbi Samantha Kahn, who received her ordination from Hebrew Union College in Los Angeles in 2011 and is now the assistant rabbi at Congregation Emanu El in Houston, Texas. “I definitely struggled with it, and I was hurt by the lack of openness and the anger toward positions of center and right when it came to Israel and foreign affairs.”

To be sure, most observers point out that the political atmosphere at HUC does not comprehensively reflect the reality of the wider Reform movement. But the differences can sometimes be unusually stark. Kahn, who worked at the Hillel at the University of Miami before entering HUC, recently recalled the “strange transition” she experienced: “As a Hillel professional, it seemed that I was [politically] very left. All of a sudden, at HUC I wasn’t left anymore, but very right. The truth is, being in Houston, I feel more left again. I pay attention to the New Israel Fund and read Haaretz. But I’m also still involved with and appreciative of AIPAC and Hadassah and am glad to see them still thriving in Houston. At HUC, AIPAC and Hadassah were four-letter words. They were the devil.”

HUC—like all educational institutions—is a bubble of sorts, and it is often difficult to find genuine ideological pluralism inside any such closed environment, especially on a subject as complicated as Israel. Nevertheless, some have grown concerned about the ways the political culture of HUC could influence the future texture of Reform Judaism and the broader American Jewish community.

“You could probably do the same story at Yeshiva University and you might get the exact opposite political trend,” David Wolpe, the rabbi of Sinai Temple in Los Angeles, said in an interview this week. “Having said that, the difference between right-wing support of Israel and left-wing support of Israel is that left-wing support much more easily morphs into indifference to and abandonment of Israel. That’s what the left wing has to guard against.”

***

Founded in 1875, Hebrew Union College has always been a proudly liberal institution. It has brought religious leaders through its ranks that have played integral roles in nearly every major social movement of the past century—from its social-action mandate in the 1885 Pittsburgh Platform to the March on Washington in 1963. Rabbi Jerome Davidson, a longtime pulpit rabbi from Great Neck, N.Y., who teaches a required course on social action at the seminary, seems to exemplify a certain model of rabbi-as-political-leader popular at the institution. “As far as I’m concerned, a rabbi should be able to get up on his pulpit and speak about why it’s necessary to have stronger gun-control laws or why the death penalty should be abolished or curtailed or strengthened or whatever she or he thinks Judaism teaches us,” Davidson said in an interview this week. And to his mind, the politics that should be transmitted from the pulpit are very specific.

Continue reading: Politics from the pulpit

Tefillin, of course, are traditionally for men. So these, by Israeli artist Ayana Friedman, could drive your average traditionalist to strangle himself with his own straps, which Friedman has no interest in using anyway because they are made of “dead animal’s skin.”

Not every piece in A Stitch in Jewish Time: Provocative Textiles is quite so provocative. The title is a bit deceptive, as some of the show consists of purely beautiful ritual objects made of fabric and designed by women. But most pieces are thought-provoking, sometimes funny, sometimes very moving.

Historically, textiles haven’t gotten a lot of respect. Sure, they covered the body, decorated the walls, kept folks warm in bed, added a little zhoozh to the floors. But anything having to do with thread or fabric, no matter how intricate, festive, or visually pleasing, was women’s work. Craft. Not until a 1971 Whitney Museum show, called “Abstract Design in American Quilts,” was this traditionally female textile form viewed as art. When quilts were hung on plain white walls, suddenly people saw connections to abstract expressionism, cubism, color-field painting, op-art. As the civil rights and feminist movements gained ground, the textile work of once-anonymous black and poor women was deemed valid.

Some of the women in the Hebrew Union College show are very famous—art-world rock stars Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro, members of the pioneering feminist art program at CalArts, are both represented. But it’s wonderful to see works by lesser-known artists, too.

Rochelle Rubinstein, Oy Girl, 2006.
Courtesy Rochelle Rubinstein

I was particularly drawn to the quilts. My college thesis was on quilting as a metaphor for women’s writing. Bear with me: Eudora Welty used to write snippets of narrative and character description on little pieces of paper, then move them around and pin them together. Her work reappropriates little bits of folktale, fairy tale, Greek myth, and Southern legend, clips them out of context the way a quilter salvages a bit of fabric from a frayed old garment, then creates something entirely new out of the pieces. Other women writers have talked about how they can only write in snippets, piecing things together when their children are napping. Of course, not all women’s writing is about asserting mastery over source material or stitching old things together. But in quilting, for me, the evocative sense of reclaiming a disrespected old feminine art form is always there.

That’s why I loved Esther Kessler Yarinsky’s quilt Gracia (2002), depicting the story of Dona Gracia Nasi, the wealthy 16th-century converso Jew. When her husband died, Dona Gracia took over his businesses, ran a fleet of merchant ships, got even wealthier, helped less-advantaged Jews escape persecution in various countries along her trading routes, and by the time of her death was living openly as a Jew rather than practicing in secret. Yarinsky’s quilt depicts her dressed magnificently, against a background of sea and sky. Embroidered around her are the names of the cities she did business in as well as the Hebrew names of other strong women in our tradition like Devorah and Esther. There are bits of tapestry, lace, traditional quilt-block patterns. It’s exuberant.

Lisa Rosowsky, Baker Street, 2007.
Paula Swift, courtesy Lisa Rosowksy

Another quilter, Rochelle Rubinstein, uses the Welty-ian strategy of making us see familiar text in a new way. She carves Ezekiel’s lament for Jerusalem, which he calls “a wicked prostitute”—“Oy, oy, lach,” woe, woe to you—on a printmaking block, as well as “Oy, oy li,” woe, woe to me. She prints them over and over in tiny squares over the woodblocked image of a little girl. Who is the girl? Any small girl in a coat tends to remind us of Holocaust victims being rounded up, but she could be any child who hasn’t yet felt the weight of the world’s boxes and constraints.

And Lisa Rosowsky’s Baker Street (2007) quilt made me cry. Made of cotton, silk, and “found tallit,” it’s a photographic collage depicting the West Roxbury cemetery in Massachusetts, where my dad is buried. Many of Rosowsky’s relatives are there too. As she notes in a caption to her work, rather than adhere to the 19th-century idyll that imagined the cemetery as the “sylvan garden,” gravestones in West Roxbury would “huddle and clump, locked in gossip … to me, it feels like home.”

I was drawn to a piece by Carol Hamoy, whose family worked for years in the garment industry, made of vintage white ladies’ gloves. Overlaid and overlapping, they’ve been turned into wings. Embroidered in red over the fluttering fingers is a reference to the book of Exodus, a story of becoming free. Also exploring the idea of freedom is Coat of the Agunot, by Andi Arnovitz, which incorporates digital scans of antique ketubot, Jewish wedding contracts, torn into pieces, tiled, and turned into the fabric of a high-necked, long coat. The hem and sleeves are sewn shut, and multiple threads dangle, reflecting the uncertainty and entrapment of an Agunah, a “chained woman” whose husband will not grant her a get.

Leslie Golomb and Louise Silk, Exodus from Deez Nights Be All Da Same to Me, 2003.
Courtesy Hebrew Union College Museum

Many of the pieces in this show consider the way women’s voices have been silenced or lost. Jane Trigere’s portraits of Orthodox women, using abandoned cushions from an upper Manhattan shul’s balcony seating section and pages of women’s prayer books, are wonderful. Leslie Golomb and Louise Silk‘s trio of quilts take a different tack, reflecting on Southern history and bigotry. Using as their starting point a pre-Civil-War photo of a Southern Jewish family and its slave, Golomb and Silk create a narrative that starts at a seder (the first quilt has a matzoh-patterned background); the slave reflects, in embroidery thread, that this night isn’t different from all other nights for him. (I wasn’t comfortable with the white artists’ attempt to reproduce black speech, but that’s a small flaw in a well-intentioned work.) The next quilt shows the scapegoat ritual from the Book of Leviticus and the slave boy escaping into the wilderness. The third has a repeat pattern of Stars of David, made up of bits of fabric from the previous quilts, reflecting the wish that the boy will follow his own evening star to safety and peace. The juxtaposition of quilt techniques associated with Southern history and tradition and a narrative about Judaism and civil rights is fascinating.

I don’t want to give short shrift to the few men in the show. Adam Cohen shows us an embroidered “laser gun army ant,” using comic book imagery to reflect on childhood, gender roles, and violence; Brooklyn artist Doug Beube creates a shocking suicide bomber vest with the cartridges filled with segments of the New World Atlas instead of explosives, indicating that “words can disseminate propaganda or wisdom.” Robert Forman creates a self-portrait in Huichol-style string painting of himself at different ages, looking at appropriation and self-perception as well as masculinity and Jewishness.

As you no doubt know, there’s a cool trend of “reclaiming” needlework, calling it “not your grandma’s knitting.” Oh, please. Your grandma was awesome. And there’s a whole line of grandmas, a whole tradition, with something to teach you whippersnappers. Calling an apron or sampler “punk rock” does not make it the revolution. On the flip side, there’s a countermovement of young, Waldorfian, stay-at-home mom crafting fiends who eschew punk-rockness and see their work as domestic, womanly, a return to tradition and homespun values. I’d like to take both sides to see this show; it’s proof that textiles can be legitimately insurrectionary and also reflective of woman’s history.

A Stitch in Jewish Time, curated by Laura Kruger, is at the Hebrew Union College museum in New York through June 11, 2011.

When I arrived at Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, the flagship campus of the Reform movement’s seminary, in June 1968, cheeseburgers were still served in the dining room—a vivid expression of classical Reform Judaism’s disregard for kashrut and other Talmudic customs. Months before, a rabbinical student who had dared to stand up to lead services wearing a kippah and a tallit had been forced off the bimah by school authorities. His act served notice that a generation of emerging Reform leaders was fascinated by traditions that earlier leaders had categorically rejected.

At the time, Reform Judaism—a movement that in 19th-century Germany had characterized Judaism as exclusively a matter of faith and so had abandoned the notion of Jewish peoplehood and the authority of rabbinic law—was absorbing the implications of the Holocaust and the rebirth of a Jewish polity in Israel. The pride and wonderment of the Six Day War were palpable; within a few years, Hebrew Union would lead all Jewish seminaries in establishing a mandatory one-year program in Israel for its rabbinical students.

I remember the perplexity I felt the first time I heard fellow students discuss the notion that tradition might command us, that the religious norms of the past might become existentially alive to us. I did not know it at the time, but we were in effect entering a conversation that had been conducted 45 years earlier in Germany, between Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig, concerning the nature of Jewish law and the renewal of Judaism. Buber had utterly rejected rabbinic law, or halachah, as having anything to do with God or revelation, and he claimed that the forms of traditional Judaism had ossified and served only to stifle authentic religious encounter. Rosenzweig, on the other hand, asserted that spontaneity and freedom were intrinsic to the experience of being commanded, that “Law [Gesetz, in German] must again become commandment [Gebot] which seeks to be transformed into deed at the very moment it is heard.”

I would soon learn that the Talmudic sages had taught 1,700 years prior that true freedom, cherut in Hebrew, could only be found in compliance with the Torah. But doctrine is one thing and experience another. The Reform Judaism that I was drawn to was God-centered and freedom-based. While the Hebrew Union curriculum included a fair amount of Jewish history—ancient Israel, medieval Diaspora, modern Europe, American Judaism, birth of Israel—my keenest interest was theology, an area that I found insufficiently addressed.

Perhaps that interest led me to Israel in 1969—this was before the Israel year was formally built into the Hebrew Union curriculum—to spend my second year of rabbinical training in Jerusalem. I left an America in which my generation lived in the shadow of the Vietnam War, immersed in the social, political, and cultural struggles that shook American democracy. In Jerusalem, I came to realize how fortunate I was to witness the rebirth of a people, a language, and a land-based culture. I came to understand in the depths of my soul what a privilege it is to live one’s life as a member of the Jewish people, to participate in the shaping of this ancient-new civilization. The possibility of the emergence of a “new Jew” became critical to my sense of our people as ever-evolving. And I glimpsed the possibility of the emergence of a new me when Elana Rockower, who had come to Israel on her own religious quest, agreed to become my wife. I have been blessed to share my journey with her ever since.

Because I had never planned to serve as a congregational rabbi but rather had been drawn to rabbinical school as a way to fill in some of the gaps in my Jewish education, I was thrilled when Elana and I were hired, during the last year of seminary, to teach in the pilot year of the Miami High School in Israel, the brainchild of the late Rabbi Morris Kipper. A pioneer in the field of Jewish immersion education in Israel, long before Birthright/Taglit, Kipper had understood the transformative educational potential of bringing young American Jews to Israel to study the history of their people. Under intense, camp-like conditions, we purveyed an exciting overview of 3,000 years of Jewish history, on and off the land, and augmented classroom time with regular trips to the field.

In that context, during a field trip, Elana and I first visited Kfar Chabad, the Chabad village in central Israel. We came to love the totality of experience Chabad offered, the sense that on Friday afternoon as the gates to the village closed, you left the 20th century behind and found yourself back a century or two inside a Polish or Ukrainian shtetl. Here I felt one could live a God-centered life. I began covering my head, and Elana and I took up thrice-daily prayer using the siddur T’hilat HaShem.

We were in the Old City of Jerusalem davening at the Chabad shul on Yom Kippur 1973 when we first heard the sirens that signaled the onset of the war. All of our students remained in Israel during the war, and together we spent much time picking vegetables and pruning roses on various collective farms, called moshavim, and visiting the wounded, some of whom we had just met on our campus at Beit Berl. The war changed everything for everybody. For Elana and me, it hastened our path to parenthood and deepened our attachment to Israel.

After a year at the Miami High School in Beit Berl, we moved to Jerusalem, planning to spend a year during which I wanted to study Talmud at a yeshiva. In 1974 we became parents, joined a community of young Anglo-American, modern Orthodox Jews, and met a visionary teacher who became our “rebbe,” Rabbi David Hartman. A recent immigrant from Montreal, a disciple of the leading light of modern Orthodoxy, Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik, Hartman deployed his charismatic intellect to reveal the vital wisdom of Jewish law and to demonstrate how the State of Israel was the testing ground where the true value of halachah would be determined.

We felt that we had finally come home. I studied with Hartman at Hebrew University, worked with him in establishing the Shalom Hartman Institute, taught at Pardes Institute and Young Judaea Year Program, and worked with American students in Reform and Conservative youth programs and Israeli high-school students. During that time I also went through boot camp and artillery training in the IDF, during a peaceful interbellum season. I loved it.

But when in 1981 I received a phone call from Rabbi Richard Israel, who had been my Hillel rabbi when I was an undergraduate at Yale, inviting me to consider becoming Jewish chaplain there, I leaped at the opportunity. Almost all of my teaching in Israel had involved American Jews. I remembered the decisive impact Rabbi Israel had exerted in my life, and I felt ready to offer that kind of energy to the next generation of American Jews. So, Elana and I began the process of wrenching ourselves away from a life that was precious to us. We believed we would return to Jerusalem after three years. It has now been almost 30.

When asked by Yale students and faculty in 1981 what kind of Jew I was, the best answer I could muster was that I was a Jew from Jerusalem, that I had begun my Jewish life in the Reform tradition but understood myself as trans-denominational, connected to all forms of Jewish religious expression and not an advocate of any particular one.

In the course of my study in Jerusalem inside the Shalom Hartman Institute, I had come to understand that halachah reflects not so much the truth of God as the pragmatics of attempting to live in the world connected to divine norms whose claim, by definition, eludes one’s ability fully to realize. This understanding has guided me as a practicing rabbi as I have been called upon to make practical decisions, especially in areas where there is no precedent. Like intermarriage.

For many years when couples of differing religions presented themselves to me at Yale, I told them that I would gladly help them design a wedding ceremony that gave expression to their different religious traditions, but I explained that I could not myself preside. Jewish law, I said, simply does not recognize the possibility of a Jew contracting a marriage with a non-Jew. And further, since the presence of a rabbi evokes the generations of Jews who came before us, one needs to ask whether the prior generations belong at this wedding.

About five years ago, however, I began to acknowledge that my legal scruple about officiating or co-officiating at such a wedding was not consistent with my willingness to discount many other traditional norms. The halachah’s non-recognition of a particular action had never restrained me from praying in an egalitarian minyan where a woman might serve as cantor, for example, or joining in a service at which instruments were played on Shabbat.

I also found myself rethinking the nature, function, and meaning of conversion. For a good number of years I had felt obliged to preface my work with a conversion candidate with a disclaimer. “You realize,” I would say, “that regardless of your effort and sincerity in this process, a large number of Jews will never recognize you as a Jew. You will not be able to get married or be buried in Israel, because the court that I convene does not have universal jurisdiction among Jews. If you choose to become an Orthodox Jew and work to that end with an Orthodox rabbi, you will come closer to achieving full recognition.” The vast majority of the people I worked with, however, were clear that they did not want to become Orthodox Jews. One young man said to me, “I want you to help me become a Jew like my fiancée and the majority of our friends: a secular, cultural Jew.” I found a way.

Conversion, I came to realize, is a highly personal decision that should be presented as an option, never as a precondition. I always explore the possibility of conversion with a couple of mixed religions, for it is one of the glories of Jewish law that it long ago codified the gesture of solidarity enacted spontaneously by biblical Ruth into the formula of giyyur, a mode not only of marrying into the Jewish people but also of marrying the Jewish people itself directly. But I have begun to meet serious young couples of differing backgrounds to whose wedding I would not hesitate to invite the ancestors even if the non-Jew declines the conversion option.

My problem with intermarriage, I now realize, is based on legitimate fears about the survival of our people, period. But what if our people is in fact evolving into new forms of identity and observance? What if we are indeed generating new models of Jewish commitment and engagement with the world? What if Rabbi Donniel Hartman is right when he observes in his book The Boundaries of Judaism that “when the intermarriage act is in fact only … an expression of one’s choice as to partner and not of one’s personal religious and collective identity, the classification of intolerability is not warranted” and that “modernity and the choices it has engendered have created complex realities which we must take into account in our boundary policies”?

I submit that it is time for Judaism to formulate a thoughtful, traditionally connected ceremony through which a Jew may enter into marriage with a non-Jew, a prescribed way or ways by which a rabbi may officiate or co-officiate at such a wedding. I believe we are the ever-evolving people and that there will always be among us those who are rigorously attached to ancient forms. I believe it is critical that there will also always be among us those who vigorously dream and search for new vessels into which to decant the sam chayyim, the living elixir of Torah. If we only look backward as we move into the future, we will surely stumble. We need scouts, envoys, chalutzim, pioneers to blaze new ways into the ancient-newness of Judaism.

Perhaps for example we might note that there may be stages of entrance into and levels of engagement with the Jewish people, which might find liturgical expression both in the wedding ceremony and at other lifecycle events going forward. After all, becoming a Jew, like becoming a person, takes a lifetime. And just as we want to be able to invite our ancestors to the weddings and brisses and bat mitvahs of the present generation, we want our grandchildren and great-grandchildren to feel drawn to the love and joy of being connected to the Jewish people. We want them to know that we have not forgotten that the Jewish people is “a covenant people, a light of nations.”

Rabbi James Ponet, the Jewish chaplain of Yale University and the director of the Joseph Slifka Center for Jewish Life at Yale, officiated the wedding of Chelsea Clinton and Marc Mezvinsky together with Rev. William Shillady, a Methodist minister.

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.”

Specifically, Ellenson predicted that in the next decade, the number of Israeli Reform rabbis will increase from 60 to 130 or more. “What an Israeli expression is going to require is Israelis who are alive to the culture of what Israeli society is,” Ellenson said: a future brand of Israeli Progressive Judaism will not “progress very far at all” if the movement consists solely of Americans. However, he acknowledged that many of the Israelis studying at HUC’s campus in Israel were influenced by a trip to the Diaspora, where they gain “a broader sense of what the possibilities are.”

As for how Progressive Judaism will grow within an Israeli political and economic system that doesn’t support it, Ellenson argued that it will be able to move outside of the existing structures; he cited two thriving congregations in Tel Aviv that receive funding from the municipality.

Ellenson made it clear that Reform Judaism’s Israeli future is about Israel’s future, too. “You cannot have a country where 20 percent of the people… cannot have a union sanctified,” he argued, adding, “this type of monopoly is seen as pernicious. … I don’t want to be overly Pollyanna-ish about it, but I do believe you can begin to see certain chinks in the formerly monolithic armor.”

Samansky is one of 15 students who graduated in May from the Los Angeles campus of Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, the Reform movement’s seminary. At ordination, fewer than half of her classmates had jobs. On that day, a stirring sense of calling prevailed, she and her classmates say. But then, diploma in hand, it was back to reality. “I really felt like I was going to spend the next year or two filling time, just making enough money to pay student loans, health care, day care,” said Samansky, who has a 15-month-old daughter.

Samansky eventually landed a job as part-time assistant rabbi at a synagogue in Northridge, California, where she handles a mix of adult and youth education, services, programming, and life cycle and senior staff duties—all, somehow, in 15 hours a week. She also teaches two nights a week for the local Florence Melton Mini-School, a pluralistic adult Jewish education network. “I ended up with two amazing jobs,” she said—ideal in content, just not in billable hours. “Five years and a hundred thousand dollars later, I’ll be making slightly less than before I entered rabbinical school.”

As unemployment continues to rise, Samansky and many of her colleagues, both rookie and experienced, have had to invoke their professional training to weather the current dearth of professional placement. “I just decided I’m going to practice what I preach and have a little faith that it’s all going to turn out,” she said.

The recession has not spared the rabbinate. At a bleak and stressful time, when pastoral hand-holding may be more in demand than ever, full-time pulpit jobs in America’s liberal movements—Reform, Conservative, and Reconstructionist—are in short supply. Seminaries and synagogues have had to pare their budgets down to essentials; individual rabbis, likewise, have had to figure out what it means to be a rabbi without working as one. But as painful a moment as it is, some in the field suggest that this perhaps relatively short-term hardship for rabbis and institutions could ultimately prove to be, as they say, good for the Jews.

“It has been an unprecedentedly difficult year,” said Rabbi David Ellenson, president of Hebrew Union College, noting that back in early summer—by which time 90 percent of a graduating Hebrew Union class usually has job commitments—almost one-third of the 47 graduates in the class of 2009 were still looking for work. Rabbi Leonard Thal, interim placement director for the Central Conference of American Rabbis, the professional association for Reform rabbis, said that now approximately 10 are still looking. (Those who find work with organizations or cobble together part-time patchwork, like Dalia Samansky—and more of her peers than usual this year—are not obligated to report their status to him.) “Five years ago, when this group entered, an awful lot of folks out there in congregation-land were complaining about a shortage of rabbis,” Thal said. “Now the pendulum has swung in the other direction, even farther.”

Representatives from the main Conservative and Reconstructionist seminaries report that the large majority of their classes of 2009, which number 43 and 10, respectively, have found jobs. It should be noted that the latter two institutions in particular—for philosophical rather than economic reasons—typically encourage their students to look for work beyond the pulpit to begin with; generally about half of Reconstructionist graduates find jobs outside synagogues, in organizations and institutions such as Jewish community centers. That held true this year.

But it’s not only newly minted rabbis who’ve been pounding the pavement. Many mid-career rabbis, their positions eliminated, have also found themselves with nowhere to go. Their employed counterparts, like many other American workers, are postponing retirement or staying put when they might otherwise move on. Cash-strapped synagogues, like many churches, are balking at hiring at all, in some cases giving up the now-luxury of an assistant rabbi. And as part of its massive restructuring last spring, the Union for Reform Judaism—the organization that supports Reform congregations in America—eliminated 20 percent of its employees nationwide, erasing scores of potential positions and sending numerous on-staff rabbis back into the pool. Since it’s not exactly a boom time for organizations, foundations, or non-profits Jewish or otherwise, even non-pulpit jobs can be hard to find.

Exact numbers on the rabbinic employment landscape—past and current—are hard to pinpoint, in part because some rely on self-reporting and are not closely tracked. But the bleakness of the current mood is palpable. “There’s a lot of anxiety and sadness,” said Kim Geringer, 56, a Reform rabbi among those who lost a position at the URJ. “We don’t have a model for this; we haven’t been here before. Up until now I think rabbis felt pretty confident that, let’s say something didn’t work out with a congregation, as difficult and sad as that might be, there was a sense—even if it was in the background, unarticulated—that if you were willing to be flexible, you could always find a job. At the moment, that’s not there.”

Some rabbis, maxed out and disillusioned, are leaving the rabbinate altogether. Amita Jarmon, 48, a second-career Reconstructionist rabbi ordained in 2004, lost her job as the first-ever full-time rabbi at a small synagogue in New England earlier this year when the money to pay her simply ran out. She moved to Massachusetts for a relationship that has since ended and found no work; colleagues there were already losing their jobs as area JCCs and Hillels cut budgets.

“I applied for a job teaching first grade at Solomon Schechter. That’s not what I went to rabbinical school for,” she said, noting that the school, of course, hired someone with teaching experience. “What I’d be reduced to if I were to stay here would probably be teaching and tutoring, which is stuff that I did before I became a rabbi.” Unwilling to work “just anywhere” in the United States, and noting that she saw few listings for Reconstructionist rabbis anyway, she is in the midst of a permanent move back to Israel, where she lived for five years after making aliyah in 1983, and contemplating a return to her training as a physical therapist. “I’m willing to do all kinds of things there just to be in Israel,” she said. “But if I were really attached to being a rabbi, I would be in a bad way.”

Others within the field have found a rather rabbinic way to view the recession. They say it’s painful, to be sure, but it also presents an opportunity for self-reflection, even positive change, for both rabbis and the institutions that support them. While seminaries along with synagogues are struggling—Hebrew Union reportedly came close to shuttering one of its four campuses; the Jewish Theological Seminary has implemented significant pay cuts; the modern Orthodox Yeshiva University reduced its non-academic staff by 120 in response to an endowment decline of 30 percent (thanks in part to Bernard Madoff)—many see an upside to Jewish institutions’ being forced to do more with less. “The economic contraction is going to accelerate a process of reexamination and reorganization that’s already going on in the larger Jewish community, in order to figure out how to best serve a 21st-century population,” said Rabbi Julie Schonfeld, executive vice president of the Rabbinical Assembly, the international association of conservative rabbis. “How can we best use our resources to help rabbis work more effectively? How can our synagogues strengthen the Jewish community in times of greater challenge?”

For individual rabbis as well, recession is the mother of invention. Many are exploring—even inventing—new professional options, whether hospital or military chaplaincy, Hillel positions, or a non-pulpit rabbinate of their own design. “This trend has been happening for a few years, but there’s nothing like an economic downturn to really force some innovative thinking in terms of what it means to have this degree and contribute to the Jewish community in ways that aren’t your standard pulpit options,” said Elie Kaunfer, a JTS-ordained rabbi who is executive director of Mechon Hadar, an institute that oversees an egalitarian yeshiva and helps organize independent minyanim. “We’ve been presented with the opportunity to broaden even further what it means to be a rabbi in America.”

Rabbi Howard Cohen, 51, a canoe builder and former volunteer firefighter, left a Reconstructionist congregation in Vermont in 2006 when he became concerned that the congregation might not be able to continue paying for a full-time rabbi. He was until recently the interim dean of Jewish life at a Jewish boarding school in North Carolina. Now he’s no longer setting his sights on existing Jewish institutions. “There are very few jobs to pursue,” he said. In addition to officiating at life cycle events, he’s “considering a constellation of small enterprises: revamping my Jewish outdoor adventure program called Burning Bush Adventures, spiritual and general counseling, and something connected to the graying segment of our society.”

Synagogues continue to be the key to Jewish community, says Hebrew Union College’s Rabbi Ellenson. “But we live in an age when not all congregations are able to hire the set of rabbinic professionals they would normally desire. So rabbis themselves have become more entrepreneurial in terms of bringing their skills into other settings—coffeehouses and elsewhere—venues that provide novel opportunities for teaching and learning. As a result, they’re able to bring the message of Judaism to a larger audience and to forge Jewish community in new, unconventional places.” In this way, the economy can only help accelerate the kind of change already envisioned by, for example, Rabbis Without Borders, founded this spring to encourage and train rabbis to offer Jewish leadership and insight to a broader cross-section of the public.

“Rabbis Without Borders was founded because it was clear even before the recession that rabbis needed to change and grow in order to respond to the postmodern world,” said Rabbi Rebecca W. Sirbu, its director. “Jews are not found only in synagogues; in fact many Jews never enter a synagogue or Jewish institution. No matter what the economic situation is rabbis need to be more creative in how we teach the meaning of Jewish wisdom.”

Cohen, along with other rabbis interviewed, believes that the rabbinic educational community had laid the groundwork for a bit of a rabbi glut even before the economy began to nosedive. “Rabbinical schools are pumping out rabbis,” Cohen said. “But nobody really addressed the question about where they were all going to work. And where there are jobs—in communities that are dying with no real hope of being revitalized—rabbis are not willing to go.” While the Reform, and Reconstructionist movements each have one affiliated seminary ordaining rabbis, and the Conservative movement has two (in addition to JTS, there is the Ziegler School at American Jewish University in Los Angeles), there are several non-denominational rabbinical schools in operation—including Hebrew College in Newton, Massachusetts; the “Modern Open Orthodox” Yeshivat Chovevei Torah in New York; and the Academy for Jewish Religion in Riverdale, New York, founded in 1956— that also add about 30 new rabbis to the market each spring. Some rabbis claim, with frustration, that graduates of unaffiliated seminaries will work for less, thus “taking” jobs from their affiliated counterparts.

The president of the Union for Reform Judaism, Rabbi Eric Yoffie, counters that there’s room for everyone. “I am someone who believes there can never be too many rabbis,” he said. “At any given moment the congregations in our movement may not be able to absorb more, but there are other things to do. We need more rabbis on campuses, in JCCs, in federations, in youth work.” Rabbi Ellenson of Hebrew Union echoes that thought. “We need liberal rabbis on college campuses and in Jewish organizations” he says. “There is a strong need for humane, liberal interpretations of Judaism to be put forth in the public arena. By placing our rabbis in these positions we serve the religious needs of a very diverse population, and that is all to the good.”

URJ’s Yoffie even says, perhaps counter-intuitively, that now is a time to redouble recruiting efforts. “There’s this notion that you have more students in, for example, business and law school during economic crisis because while there aren’t jobs now, there will be when they get out. Will that same dynamic work in the rabbinate? It’s not clear. All this talk about there being fewer jobs and all the uncertainties may lead to fewer students,” he says. “My concern is that four or five years from now that as the economy comes roaring back—we hope—we’re going to need more rabbis to serve our congregations and our communities and they aren’t going to be there.” So far, Yoffie can rest easy: seminary admissions officers say applications—from people seeking deeper Jewish meaning and a detour from the job market—are up.

Rabbis in pulpits may be forced to reexamine their roles as well—in ways, some say, that can strengthen the communities they serve. They and those who work with them concur that many synagogues will survive, even thrive, based in large part not just on the size of their endowment, but also on their ability to forge most fully the relatively new model of congregational rabbi as neither autocrat nor employee, but as leader and partner.

While a generation ago, many Jews grew up with “their” rabbi functioning as a top-down (and white, straight, married, male) head of household, healthy congregations—and smart rabbis—today strive for a “brit” (covenant) or “sacred partnership,” said Rabbi Steven E. Kaye, a rabbinic employment coach and consultant based in Denver. It’s even more necessary in the downturn—especially with many rabbis foregoing raises and doing more for less—and it creates an even more vital community for the long term. Eric Yoffie offers the example of congregational bikur cholim, visiting the sick. “If rabbis are saying to their congregants, ‘This is more than I can handle; people are not going to get visited unless our laity comes forward and takes this on as an ongoing project,’ then that’s a wonderful thing,” he said.

For many adult Jews, “their” rabbi was also the same rabbi that saw them through Hebrew school and high school, welcomed them back from college at High Holy Days, perhaps even married them. That model has changed in recent decades as well, with rabbis leaving jobs more frequently, including those they once might have been expected to keep until retirement. Now, though, we may see a return, if small-scale and short-term, to the earlier pattern, with rabbis staying in positions they might otherwise have left. “There is some good in the natural shifting and dynamics of life in terms of positions opening and then being occupied by a new generation,” he said. “In many instances at the current moment, that has certainly been placed on hold.”

Still, individual rabbis are endeavoring to see the upside. One Conservative rabbi in his late 40s is on the last year of his contract at a New England synagogue; while he’s ready for something new, he’s not about to leave: “As much as I don’t want to be looking for a job at age 50 in a bad economy I don’t want to be looking for a job at age 60 in a bad economy, either.” (He requested not to be named because of the sensitivity of his upcoming negotiations.) When it comes time to renew his contract, he said, “I’m going to say this is it: I’m going to stop looking around until I retire.” Much as he’d like to be somewhere “more exciting,” he said, his commitment to not leaving has renewed his dedication to finding ways to build and revitalize the congregation. He also recalled the pleasure of coming back from rabbinical school to visit the rabbi who’d been at his home synagogue since he was 6. “There is a benefit to longevity,” he allowed. “I’m not sure the old pattern wasn’t better.”

Of course there also is a silver lining for synagogues in an economic downturn: those hiring right now are able to choose from more, and more qualified, job applicants. And within a few years, future applicants might have more diverse resumes after they’ve held jobs in universities, social service agencies, Jewish communal organizations—and as some rabbis interviewed reported doing, take college-level classes in the increasingly attractive skill of fundraising.

“It’s a sad and difficult time, no two ways about that,” said Ora Prouser, executive vice president and academic dean of the non-denominational seminary Academy of Jewish Religion. “But the economic situation has also led to some moments of real creativity.” Reform rabbi and former lawyer Tom Alpert, 54, whose interim pulpit job at a Connecticut synagogue recently ended, is considering—among other things—building a circuit-riding rabbi program for underserved communities in the Northeast based on existing models in the South. Margot Stein, a 48-year-old Reconstructionist rabbi, seeing her longtime freelance gigs for Jewish organizations dry up, is launching a tutoring and bar and bat mitzvah prep business for children who, like her son, have special needs.

As more rabbis expand their own horizons, so too do they expand the scope, and definition of Jewish community. Whether in Jewish organizations or fundraising class or even Starbucks, rabbis may come into more contact with unaffiliated Jews, those without a rabbi they call “theirs.” That in itself holds promise. “The Talmud says that when questions of law arise, one way to find the answer is to ‘Go see what the people are doing,’” said Rabbi Alpert. “If we are looking to create, and perpetuate the rabbinate, we have to go see what the people are doing.”

When NBC aired the Holocaust miniseries in April 1978, it was a watershed moment, bringing a subject still largely taboo to the broad public consciousness. But neither this feat, nor a host of accolades, inured the show from charges that it trivialized and sentimentalized the atrocities. It would be difficult to launch similar critiques against the stark black-and-white drawings commissioned by Holocaust’s producers to introduce each segment of the eight-hour saga. These rough-hewn renderings of brutality, by the Lithuanian-born artist Arbit Blatas, appeared onscreen as historical stage-setters, lending gravitas and an air of authenticity to the unfolding drama.

The producers approached Blatas, who was born in 1908 and fled Nazi-occupied Europe in 1941, having seen a forceful lithograph he made depicting the Babi Yar massacre, a subject he also treated in an epic 1944 oil (when the fate of his parents, whom he had left behind, was uncertain). It is currently on view in an exhibition at Hebrew Union College (HUC) celebrating the centenary of Blatas’s birth—and bringing together, for the first time, major examples from every period of his long career. He died in 1999, at 90.

Babi Yar is an angry, almost barbaric painting, with brushstrokes rendered like stabs, though it still exhibits the artist’s trademark expressionism, giving the work a universal power beyond its deeply personal roots. A contorted heap of faceless bodies is tormented by Nazi officers, distinguished from the mass by their bluish uniforms and blurred, blood-red swastikas, under a bruised purplish sky flecked with gray and white. It is one of the most significant paintings of the Holocaust, offering a rare representational depiction of a contemporaneous event that was gleaned only through scant news reports, and it predated by nearly two decades the Yevtushenko poem that would make the killing site notorious. But upon its completion, Blatas returned to the more exuberant images for which he was celebrated, primarily cityscapes, portraits, and theatrical works.

The artist’s renderings of the light-filled cities where he made homes—Paris, New York, and Venice—showcase his talent as a vivid colorist, while his portraits of fellow École de Paris artists (those émigrés seeking refuge in the city between the wars) suggest a keen understanding of his sitters that goes well beyond likeness. At 21, he became the youngest member of this group, joining an avant-garde circle that included Picasso, Matisse, Braque, Dufy, Utrillo, Vlaminck, Soutine, and Lipschitz. More than 100 of these portraits were placed on permanent display at the Museum of the Thirties in Boulogne-Billancourt outside Paris a decade ago, shortly before Blatas’s death. On more than one occasion, he also rendered with great tenderness his dear friend and kindred spirit, the mime Marcel Marceau.

During the 1970s, in collaboration with his wife, the mezzo-soprano and stage director Regina Resnik, Blatas designed sets and costumes for nine productions, including Elektra for the Teatro La Fenice, Falstaff for Warsaw’s Grand Theater, and Carmen for Hamburg’s State Opera. These works, as well as numerous studies based on The Threepenny Opera (which he saw at its 1928 world premiere in Berlin and would revisit time and again during its run at Greenwich Village’s Theater de Lys in the 1950s), powerfully fuse color and emotion. Blatas’s particular affinity for Threepenny’s beggars—he featured them in some of his most poignant pictures and, in 1952, created a set of 10 tabletop bronzes in an edition of six, depicting them in loving, lyrical detail—exemplifies his joyful approach to art and life, even as he acknowledged its underside.

Sitting in the West 56th Street atelier where Blatas lived and worked from the time he settled in New York—the walls and floors still covered with his artworks and even his brushes carefully preserved on a mantel—Resnik, his widow, tells me, “He fell in love with the beggars and would say that he followed them around all his life, and they followed him.” By contrast, the Holocaust works were unexpected.

The NBC commission awakened buried emotions, Resnik says, inspiring what may have been his most important work. At that point, Blatas knew that his mother had perished at Stutthof, and his father, who survived Dachau and found his son in America by tracking down Picasso, had died. After sitting through a marathon viewing of footage for Holocaust, Resnik recalls, Blatas immediately agreed to do the project. He was similarly moved after the couple attended the docudrama’s premiere. Two days later, they set sail for Venice, where Blatas had a studio on the island of Giudecca, the city’s first Jewish settlement. En route, he was very pensive, and upon arrival, he spent 40 days and nights at his foundry, not stopping his work until he had completed seven bas-relief sculptures in the form of narrative plaques based on (and taking their titles from) the miniseries drawings.

In 1980, this monument to the Holocaust was erected on a brick wall in the Venice Ghetto still trimmed with barbed wire, as a public memorial to the first 200 Jews rounded up for deportation in December 1943. The following year, another casting was placed by the Shrine of the Unknown Jewish Martyrs in Paris, and the year after that, a third set was installed outside the former headquarters of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) at Dag Hammerskjold Plaza in New York. (The HUC show marks the reemergence of the ADL plaques, which went into storage when the organization sold its building two years ago and were recently donated to the College.) Posthumously, Resnik found an appropriate home for the final edition: the infamous Fort Nine in Kaunas, Lithuania, Blatas’s birthplace.

As in his upright, three-dimensional figurative sculptures, Blatas modeled the clay almost entirely with his bare hands, using tools sparingly to chisel subtle crevices. But the myriad indentations of his fingertips, so effective in conveying a distinctive combination of blunt realism and tender emotion, translate as more battered than expressive here because of the subject and scale. In the absence of color, chiaroscuro creates plays of shadow and light off the mostly rough, unpolished surface. Simultaneously, Blatas painted two more Holocaust canvases—The Final Solution and The Deportation. The Last Train would follow in 1990, the year that a bas-relief of the same title was added to the Venice Ghetto memorial, along with names of all the city’s victims. All three are more carefully executed than Babi Yar but no less stirring, depicting similar masses of twisted, faceless figures, suffering beneath burnt orange skies streaked with smoky gray.

Many museums dedicated to the Holocaust focus their art exhibits on work by victims and survivors, avoiding curatorial judgment and treating these expressions as testimony. This earnest approach protects the legacy of the calamity but tends to discount artistic merit and leave little room for other worthy contributions, no matter their integrity or skill. As an accomplished, masterful artist—and as a witness who escaped the maelstrom—Blatas brings a necessary complexity.

Jeannie Rosenfeld, a former editor at Art + Auction magazine, is a New York writer specializing in fine and decorative art. Her work has appeared in ARTnews, Interior Design, and the Forward.