• Michael Walzer has the sanest summation I’ve yet read of the past week in the Israeli-Palestinian crisis. [Dissent]

• Arthur Goldreich, a Jewish South African who heroically hid Nelson Mandela in the early 1960s, died at 82. [AP/Haaretz]

• Rachel Isaacs became the first openly gay rabbi to be ordained by the Jewish Theological Seminary, the main clerical school of the Conservative movement. [The Sisterhood]

• The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum applauds the arrest of suspected Serbian genocidaire Ratko Mladic. [USHMM]

• So apparently everyone always knew about DSK? [Daily Intel]

Boy, this guy can really play Tetris (be sure you fast forward to the five-minute mark).

At first, Ragone wanted the door to be in a Jewish institution. But after speaking with Gary Vikan, director of Baltimore’s Walters Art Museum, he changed his mind. He liked Vikan’s concept of a medieval-art gallery where Christian, Jewish, and Islamic art are commingled, showing how the cultures overlapped. And he liked the idea of a portal linking the Jewish community to the museum. For a sum that was less than half of the $1 million he believed the panel to be worth, he partially sold, partially donated it to the Walters, which acquired it in partnership with Yeshiva University Museum. The object will be featured in a show about Jewish life in medieval Egypt opening at the Walters in fall 2012 and later traveling to YUM. In 2013, the Walters has scheduled “Treasures of Jewish Silversmiths from Yemen,” spotlighting another recent gift, from Benjamin Zucker and Derek Content.

That a mainstream art museum would showcase Jewish ritual objects is rare but not unheard of—the North Carolina Museum of Art, the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, and the Royal Ontario Museum all maintain Judaica galleries conceived and funded by donors. What is new is that so-called encyclopedic museums are starting to integrate major Jewish ceremonial objects into their collections, exhibitions, and programming. In the newly opened Art of the Americas Wing at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, Torah finials by colonial silversmith Myer Myers (on loan from the historic Touro Synagogue) stand proudly amid Newport furniture. This spring, the Metropolitan Museum of Art is exhibiting the Library of Congress’ 1478 Washington Haggadah. The Detroit Art Institute, meanwhile, is looking to borrow Jewish items for its Islamic Art galleries, having recently returned three Judeo-Persian manuscripts to the Jewish Theological Seminary.

“One of the real strengths of this trend is the recognition of Jewish artifacts as high-class works of art that belong in high-class established art museums,” said Gabriel Goldstein, associate director for exhibitions and programs at YUM. “It shows we’re part of the canon.” But enhanced connoisseurship is only one factor inspiring museums to court collectors, rush to make strategic alliances with Jewish institutions, and scour storerooms, auction catalogs, and local living rooms for Jewish ritual objects to display. Another is the desire to make collections truly multicultural. And then of course there is the untapped pool of potential donors and supporters who have largely focused on Jewish institutions.

That’s what the MFA discovered when it bought a spectacular silver gilt menorah from Augsburg, Germany (now on view in its 18th-century European-art galleries), for about half a million dollars at Sotheby’s in 2009, using individual donations from dozens of supporters. Shortly afterward, director Malcolm Rogers received some unexpected news: A woman neither he nor his staff had ever heard of, Jetskalina Phillips, left the MFA a seven-figure bequest to support the acquisition, study, and display of Judaica. (Phillips, it turned out, was a retired elementary-school educator in Kansas, who had converted to Judaism under the tutelage of a Boston rabbi.)

The museum will have to be strategic in deploying the gift, Rogers acknowledged. Its collection of Judaica is, as he diplomatically put it, “underdeveloped.” While the MFA, like most encyclopedic museums in this country, showcases the artistic achievements of world cultures, it hasn’t made much of an effort to collect, study, or showcase Jewish ceremonial art. “It’s not been seen as an essential part of the museum’s mission to diverse communities,” Rogers said. But he’s well aware that purchase funds alone can’t conjure a respectable Judaica collection from the MFA’s current holdings, which include a shofar, a Torah binder, and a kiddush cup. “Get the message out,” he urged. “We would love to work with collectors.”

In a field plagued by scarcity, fakes, and provenance issues, many experts question whether it’s possible to create a substantial Judaica collection even if money is no object. “It’s a challenge, but it’s doable,” said philanthropist Michael Steinhardt, speaking from experience. About five years ago, he went to Philippe de Montebello, then director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and offered to help create a department of Judaica with a permanent exhibition space. “The answer was a flat no,” Steinhardt said. (Via Harold Holzer, the Met’s senior vice president for external affairs, de Montebello confirmed that discussions took place but never resulted in a plan.)

As many Jewish scholars ruefully point out, mainstream museums are moving into a void left by culturally specific museums. Some, like the Klutznick National Jewish Museum in Washington, D.C., and the Spertus Institute of Jewish Studies in Chicago, have downsized exhibitions and public programming. The collection of the Judah L. Magnes Museum was transferred to the University of California, Berkeley, which is planning to open an exhibition space this fall. Jewish art museums have come to focus on crowd-pleasing modern and contemporary art exhibitions, or on community programming. “There’s growth on one side where there’s a little stepping back on the other,” said Grace Cohen Grossman, senior curator at the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles, who worked on a comprehensive study of the Smithsonian’s Judaica holdings in 1997. “I can’t afford to buy the pieces that North Carolina does.”

“Basically Jewish museums are lazy,” said Tom Freudenheim, who ran Berlin’s Jewish Museum and the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, among other institutions. “Isn’t it ironic that the places that have real riches don’t do a lot with them?”

Goldstein has a more philosophical approach. “Maybe the Jewish museums had to be there to say Judaica mattered at an artistic level,” he said. In addition to working with the Walters, Goldstein has advised the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, which has two Jewish microcollections: Judaica donated by Dr. Fred Weinberg and Joy Cherry Weinberg, a local couple, in the European galleries; and in the Asian Galleries, 11 objects related to the Jewish community of Kaifeng, China, acquired by Bishop William Charles White in the 1920s.

Goldstein has also worked with the North Carolina Museum of Art, whose Judaica gallery, resplendently installed in the museum’s recent expansion, was founded in 1983 by Abram Kanof, a former president of New York’s Jewish Museum. Supervised by John Coffey, the museum’s deputy director for art and curator of American and modern art, it features a multicultural range of Judaica including an Ottoman Empire Megillah, a Chinese Torah case, and a Bohemian silver Torah shield. Last March, the museum acquired a set of late-18th-century Torah silver made in London for the Orthodox Synagogue of Plymouth. “Quite frankly it really almost stands alone as a boutique selection of beautiful objects,” said the museum’s director, Lawrence Wheeler.

Nevertheless, like other directors I spoke to, Wheeler stressed the educational benefits of adding the Judeo to their Judeo-Christian storyline. “Our collection is driven by so much Christian subject matter; it’s heavily into Renaissance 16th- and 17th-century painting,” he said. “To have another perspective on celebrating faith is interesting to people.” Similarly, Kaywin Feldman, director of the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, stresses that her Judaica gallery, started by a local couple, Harold and Mickey Smith, is on gallery tours devoted to the religions of the world.

The result of offers that perhaps couldn’t really be refused, Judaica departments at mainstream museums inevitably land in the portfolio of curators with little or no expertise in Jewish art or religion. That was the case of Corine Wegener, a curator of American and European decorative art at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. To get up to speed, she signed up for a program at the Jewish Theological Seminary, offered in 2004, 2006, and 2007, that she called “Judaica for dummies.”

Vivian B. Mann, director of the master’s program in Jewish art at the seminary, conceived the program, funded by the Henry Luce Foundation, for curators at museums like the Met and the Getty as well as smaller Jewish and secular institutions. “They had the pieces, but they didn’t understand them,” she said. “We helped to develop the context of use and meaning and how they could be integrated with other treasure arts.” She uses the term “treasure arts” rather than decorative arts, she explained, because the latter “is now considered to be a pejorative term for this area of study when compared to the ‘higher’ arts of architecture, painting, and sculpture.”

Mann, former chair of Judaica at the Jewish Museum, is strongly in favor of integrating Judaica into permanent-collection galleries rather than isolating it in its own space. Since there are few restrictions on the forms of ceremonial art in Jewish law, Mann said, Judaica reflects the styles of the surrounding culture. That is especially the case in Islamic cultures, she said, where through the mid-20th century, Jews were “an integral part of the artist class.”

Melanie Holcomb and Barbara Drake Boehm, curators in the Met’s medieval department, attended Mann’s program in 2006. Since then they have worked extensively with the Jewish Theological Seminary, as well as other institutions, to arrange loans of objects such as the Haggadah currently on view at the Met. “We’re interested in the way Jewish art is integrated in a broader context, the way it interacts with other artistic traditions that surround it,” says Holcomb. “That’s been our angle.”

At the MFA in Boston, Marietta Cambareri, curator of decorative arts and sculpture, has added “Jetskalina H. Phillips Curator of Judaica” to her title. When we spoke, she was on her way to Phillips’ congregation, Temple Israel, to learn more about the mysterious donor, part of a crash course to bring herself up to speed on Jewish art, religion, scholarship, and collectors. Often she is targeting her own colleagues: “I work with every department that might work with Judaica—and that is pretty much every collection in the museum,” she said.

A team from the Columbus Museum of Art recently toured North Carolina’s Judaica gallery as it considers whether and how to create its own Jewish art program. While the Columbus museum has received several gifts of Judaica in recent years—among them Allan Wexler’s Gardening Sukkah—executive director Nannette Maciejunes said that the impetus is a desire to re-contextualize the museum’s 20th-century holdings. “We have a great collection of American modernism,” she said. “I joke that it’s the best art of white gentile guys.”

Two recent acquisitions got her wondering how to build on that base. One was a group of images by 70 members of the Photo League, a New York organization of photographers devoted to social change; the other was the Philip J. and Suzanne Schiller Collection of American Social Commentary Art, 1930–1970, which includes work by many Eastern European Jewish artists. “I started thinking, is there a way of looking at the collection through a lens that talks about Jewish life,” she said. The museum has invited YUM’s Goldstein to Columbus in the fall for an “Antiques Road Show”-style event to see what else might be in local private collections. “We’re on an exploratory road,” she said. “It’s a journey to see what’s possible.”

Robin Cembalest is executive editor of ARTnews. She blogs at www.letmypeopleshow.com.

It was a picture-perfect August morning, the sky over northern New Jersey a California shade of blue and the air unusually fresh. My friend Jonathan had finished building the chuppah with at least a half-hour to spare. My best man, Neal, had located the ketubah, which I had managed to misplace. Three little nieces in lovely pink dresses had been to the bathroom and back for what seemed the umpteenth time. The guests were seated expectantly, and the wedding party was lined up and ready to go. The only one not quite ready to march down the aisle, I then learned, was me: The friend and teacher who was going to perform the ceremony approached me with the suggestion that I take a few moments to reflect on the life-altering step I was about to take. “Where’s Arnie going?” my almost-mother-in-law asked my bride. “He has to think,” she replied. I did so, grateful ever after for that moment.

But if it’s hard not to reflect from the ketubot in the show to the one on your own wall and to the moment when you ceremonially signed on to more than you could possibly have understood before entering into marriage, it is harder still not to wonder how much of your own experience was shared by the couples whose names, prayers, and promises we know long after their deaths only because they (or, more likely, their fathers) chose to engage skilled artists to make beautiful the legal document that sealed their union.

I am particularly mesmerized by the earliest contract in the exhibit: a fragment from the Cairo Geniza that dates from the early 12th century. The word that stands out most clearly—easily deciphered by any Hebrew reader—is simcha: joy. One wonders, how long did the joy last? How long did the lives of bride and groom last? How old were they when the witnesses signed them over to one another? Teenagers, perhaps? And what did the young couple feel as the witnesses confirmed their contract? What was joy for them?

Historians can give us facts on the average age of marriage in medieval Egypt, average life expectancy, average divorce rate. But I want to know about the couple’s emotions, which—even if average, too—were surely not experienced any less intensely. The legal document that joined them powerfully resembles every other in the exhibit, as well as the one that bound my wife and me to each other. But would that Cairo bride and groom have been friends? Were they in love? Did they look to their love, as we do, to defy time and change? If so, they succeeded after a fashion. This scrap of paper survived, after all. Here I am staring at it, enchanted.

“A window onto history,” one might say of the ketubah show; “a window” into marriage is what many of the ketubot were, it seems, intended to be. Take the contract made in Modena in 1756 or the one signed in Baghdad a few years later. In each, a block of text is written on a white background and framed by intricate and delicate ornamental designs that bring to mind windows. It’s as if the artists were expressing the paradox to which every illustrated ketubah points. Marriage, unlike romance, depends for its survival on the legal fine points: promises made not in general but in specifics, intentions made good in routine provision of raiment and furnishings, 10 zuzim here, 6 zuzim there. Even conjugal rights are codified. But marriage also requires romance and, I’d wager, always did: splashes of color and extended plays of line, flourishes that are and are not measured, order that is accomplished in and through profusion.

It is telling, I think, that the congratulatory wishes characteristic of Sephardi contracts are writ large, as in the Modena ketubah, and the legalese much smaller. The Baghdad ketubah sets its three windowed prayers above the legal door through which the couple are about to walk. Light streams from both openings. Words and artistry form a unity that one hopes bride and groom were able to emulate for many years.

It’s probably my own fancy, but the large cypress tree that rivets the eye on the Isfahan contract of 1885 seems to me a giant teardrop. Lion and sun may be a Persian national symbol testifying to the age-old Jewish desire to be part of the lands in which Jews dwelled and not only set apart from them by distinctive customs such as ketubah-signing. To me these symbols seem universal as well in their implicit prayer: May God guard bride and groom from sadness, or—because we know sadness will come—may God protect them in time of trouble, may the sun rise to shine on a new day.

The symmetry of the contract from Afghanistan, framed in red and blue, seems to intend similar comfort. Indeed, the beauty of the ketubah itself—the colors, the flowers, the burst of life, as in the Damascus document from 1885—all seem prophylactics against loss, harm, death. I wonder if the brides, whose futures were arranged for them by these contracts, uttered prayers as they received the ketubah that they get pregnant and not die, as so many women did, in childbirth.

Two of the three New York City ketubot seem to my eye far less solemn or intense than the rest. One features twin grandfather clocks set at 6:13, the traditional number of commandments binding Jews, a cute touch at a moment when cuteness seems unsuitable; the twin rings adorned with handshake and crown are cleverly joined by the clasp of contract and reinforced by arches above and below. Maybe the Civil War raging when it was signed, in 1863, made lightness of mood and design imperative. Abraham Hochman looms large in the ketubah that he has provided to bride and groom in his Central Palace Hall. We can see him, much like contemporary caterers who take charge, ushering the young couple up the stairs to the red curtains surmounted by the all-American eagle. Right this way, please! Did the wedding party want to be reminded, as it mounted the stairs to the window of possibility framed by the red curtains, that it stood in a millennia-long queue?

I prefer the distinguished serpentine line and color in the Jewish National Fund ketubah, from around 1930, not seeking to fill its parchment, muted perhaps by the Depression—and seizing on the mention of Jerusalem in the wedding ceremony to solicit funds for the rebuilding of Palestine. Is this bad taste in a wedding document? Maybe—but it is true to the text’s concern with sums of zuzim and also to the ceremonial breaking of the glass at the wedding ceremony’s conclusion in memory of the Temple’s destruction. Jerusalem was being rebuilt in 1930, as the design at the top of the ketubah reminds us. The bride and groom might well want to get on a boat and visit.

My wife and I inscribed our intention to do more than visit Israel on our ketubah. After consultation with us, the artist who designed it, Shoshana Walker, placed verses featuring Jerusalem in a gold ring surrounding the legalities, and she surrounded those words, in turn, with a delicate floral pattern of deep blue, paler blue, white, and red. Our parents learned under the chuppah, not entirely happily, that we intended to go on aliyah; we ourselves learned under the chuppah, and in the hours of dancing afterward, that we were thankfully part of a generation that had reclaimed elements of Jewish tradition that had long lain dormant, the illustrated ketubah being one of them.

I don’t think I realized at the time that, until this revival, ketubot like those in the exhibition at the Jewish Museum would almost certainly not have been hung on the wall. They would have been locked away in safekeeping until required to ensure the woman’s rights in the event of divorce or death of the husband. Jews did not need displays of Jewishness in medieval Cairo or early modern Baghdad to remind them who they were. They knew, and so did their neighbors. Still—I like to think that those couples did not miss out on the pleasure gained from casting their eyes over the ketubah from time to time, remembering the beauty associated with their union and perhaps saying again a prayer to the Merciful One that joy and life continue.

The exhibition The Art of Matrimony: Thirty Splendid Marriage Contracts from The Jewish Theological Seminary Library opens at New York’s Jewish Museum today.

Arnold Eisen is chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary.

• 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]

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

• Scholarship in Service to Judaism and the Jewish Community

• Excellence in Teaching and Learning

• Synergy

• Partnerships

• Reaching New Types of Students

• Engaging and Strengthening Conservative Judaism and the Religious Center

Which were all things it presumably was doing before (hopefully, anyway).

So why is this mission statement different from all other mission statements? Well, promises Chancellor Arnold Eisen, “There will be more news to share as we move into the fall semester—exhilarating news that will vibrate through the halls of 3080 Broadway and well beyond our walls.”

Allison Hoffman is planning to schlep up to Morningside Heights on Monday for commencement; she’ll have a report then. Should be some interesting news to break. Stay tuned!

JTS Drafts New Mission Statement [The Fundermentalist]

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.

Kahn is the seminary’s first-ever artist-in-residence, and his embellishment of the now-antiquated card catalogue is one of an ever-growing series of works he has created at American Jewish institutions. The card catalogue is part of an exhibition of his works that will be on view at the library until January. Two other shows in New York currently feature Kahn’s art, one at the Jewish Museum and another, devoted to his sacred spaces, at the Museum of Biblical Art near Lincoln Center.

A sculptor and painter, Kahn has been designing sacred spaces like a meditation room at the HealthCare Chaplaincy on the Upper East Side, which provides spiritual care for patients of all religions in New York City hospitals; a just-completed Reform synagogue in Milwaukee; as well as newly installed ceremonial art for the Plaza Jewish Community Chapel funeral home and the Abraham Joshua Heschel School, both on New York’s Upper West Side.

Kahn calls himself a “reductive realist,” and his paintings are intended to echo the works of Mark Rothko and the 19th-century painters Caspar David Friedrich and Albert Pynkham Ryder. Yet unusually for a contemporary artist who has exhibited widely since his work was included in a Guggenheim survey in 1985, he is an observant Jew who spent several years at a yeshiva in Israel after completing studies at a Jewish day school.

Kahn grew up in the Washington Heights neighborhood of Manhattan as the son of refugees from Nazi Germany, and he recounts his childhood in strikingly aesthetic terms. “I loved Kol Nidre, because I remember everything being white,” Kahn said in an interview. “That was my first sacred space.”

Quick to cite artists he admires, Kahn often uses Jewish references in doing so. Speaking with reverence of the Rothko Chapel in Houston, he says that it’s best suited for reading Eicha, the Book of Lamentations. He calls installation artist James Turrell a “Gadol hador,” one of the “greatest of his generation,” a term usually invoked by religious Jews to refer to revered sages. Of his own work, Kahn says, “People ask me, am I a Jewish artist? I don’t believe in any of that. I believe that I’m an educated person. When I think about color theory, I think about Josef Albers, but I also think about how the Beit HaMikdash was created.”

Kahn’s is the finest piece in the Jewish Museum’s current exhibition “Reinventing Ritual”—a moveable wall sculpture of dark pewter-colored blocks used to count the 49 days between Passover and Shavuot in commemoration of the wandering in the desert before receipt of the Ten Commandments. Kahn’s austerely beautiful wooden peg board rivals the assemblages of Louise Nevelson and at the same time uses aesthetics and material culture to deepen religious practice.

The Museum of Biblical Art exhibit bears traces of a visit Kahn made years ago to Charleston, the riotously colorful English country home of Bloomsbury artists Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant. This inspired a set of four multi-hued, high-backed chairs he created for mothers and grandmothers to sit on at the naming ceremony of a baby girl. The quartet corresponds to the four Biblical mothers, and contrasts with the two chairs used at a male circumcision; one a ceremonial seat for the prophet Elijah and the other for the newborn’s godfather.

Kahn’s ceremonial works break the mold of traditional Judaica, bearing little resemblance to the gleaming Kiddush cups used for generations to sanctify the Sabbath. Kahn’s art “unites our perception of the material with our memory,” says the art critic Dore Ashton. So instead of precious silver or delicate porcelain, Kahn has reimagined these items out of acrylic on wood, giving them a vaguely surreal aspect, perhaps to refocus the user’s attention on the substance and meaning of the ritual rather than solely on the object with which it is performed.

Now a 57-year-old father of three, Kahn has widened the array of ritual objects he has designed in response to his own experience. His designs cover birth through death, including the chairs for his daughter’s naming, his own marriage canopy, and a portable Torah ark used in a house of mourning. Kahn invents titles for all of his works that are vaguely Hebraic yet devoid of meaning—Lhayd, Vyhti, Ykarh, Yr-Hyla are a few examples. Is intentionally obfuscatory language helpful to American Jewry nowadays?

“I don’t like work that is illustrative,” he says of his ambitious project for Congregation Emanu-El B’ne Jeshurun in Milwaukee, where Kahn painted eight richly textured canvases with abstract imagery recalling amorphous shapes on a microscope slide and designed the ark doors, the eternal flame, candelabras, Torah breast plates, pointers used for reading the scrolls, mezuzahs, as well as Havdalah candle holders and spice boxes. Kahn avoids the use of recognizable symbols in this all encompassing environment, with the exception of the cast bronze eternal light that alludes to the shape of a pomegranate.

“I want the viewer to go on a journey,” he says. “I don’t want to spoon feed the viewer. I believe the viewer is an equal participant to the artist. I want people to come in there and feel the presence of something greater than themselves. If you can change the way you feel when you walk into a space, that’s what holiness is to me.”

Through workshops and courses at places like JTS, he wants to elevate visual sophistication and awareness. In addition to serving on the faculty of New York’s School of Visual Arts, Kahn teaches regularly at synagogues and day schools and is artistic director of the group Avoda that uses art to promote Jewish learning. “I am very upset that people don’t realize how important the visual is in Judaism,” he says.

“If you count the letters and words in the Bible, there is more written about the conversation between Bezalel and God and the whole idea of what angels should look like in the Holy of Holies than about keeping kosher. I will fight until the end of my life saying that Judaism is a visual language. Do I think that people portray it as that? Well, the truth is that if you’re fleeing from country to country, it’s easier to take your books than it is to take your menorahs because they’re easier to pack. We are a very knowledge-based religion and I love that, but one does not have to compete against the other.”

Michael Z. Wise is a contributing editor at Travel + Leisure magazine and has written on cultural topics for The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times and ARTnews.

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.”

In fact, the protest was if anything a boon to CBST. Synagogue leaders asked supporters to pledge a dollar or more in donations for each minute the Westboro members spent picketing, according to a report in the New York Daily News. The congregation raised $10,000.

Messages of Hate Met by Scorn and Shrugs [NYT]
Manhattan Synagogue Makes $10G Off of Westboro Baptist Church Protest [Daily News]
Previously: Anti-Gay, Anti-Jewish Activists Coming to New York

JTS and CBST officials found out about Westboro’s weekend plans from the group’s website, they said. The institutions have planned different responses: while JTS advised students at the Conservative movement’s rabbinical school to ignore protesters (“There will be a police presence, and we said not to engage,” said seminary spokeswoman Sherry Kirschenbaum), CBST will be holding a “peaceful prayer service” in its courtyard on Sunday, within view of the opposition. “We don’t feel that we can leave these people without a response,” said CBST executive director Ilene Sameth, who connected the rhetoric of groups like Westboro with the recent murders of abortion provider George Tiller and a guard at the U.S. Memorial Holocaust Museum.

Westboro members have apparently been busy lately. Yesterday they protested at Fairfax High School in Los Angeles, where a gay male student was elected prom queen last month.

Related:
CBST Is Under Attack by the Westboro Baptist Church [CBST]

Militant Anti-Gay Church Turns Its Sights on Jews [JTA]