Richard Lowell Rubenstein

Abstract

Abstract Richard Rubenstein was born into an assimilated Jewish family in New York City in 1924. After difficult teen years in which he suffered directly and physically from anti–Semitism-despite his not having a Bar Mitzvah because of his family’s complete disinterest in Judaism-he flirted with the idea of becoming a Unitarian minister. Drawn back to Judaism, he enrolled in September 1942 as a rabbinical student at Hebrew Union College, the Reform movement’s rabbinical seminary in Cincinnati, and spent three years there. During these years he also studied at the University of Cincinnati and in 1945-1946 he received a B.A. in philosophy from the university. After the end of the war, in the wake of the Holocaust and the creation of the State of Israel, he returned to his rabbinical studies. However, he was unhappy at HUC and with the help of Abraham Joshua Heschel, who had made a similar move, and the well-known Orthodox rabbi Isaac Hutner, at whose yeshiva he had begun to study in New York City, he transferred in 1948 to the Conservative Jewish Theological Seminary in New York City. He was ordained at JTS in 1952. He then did graduate work at Harvard, worked as a Conservative rabbi in Brockton, Massachusetts, and served as the Hillel director at Wellesley College between 1958 and 1960. In 1960 he received his doctorate from Harvard for a thesis in which he applied Freudian analysis to rabbinic aggadah (the nonlegal sections of the traditional rabbinic texts).