Abstract
Abstract This chapter compares Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan, the founder of Reconstructionist Judaism, and Felix Adler, the founder of the earlier Ethical Culture movement. Kaplan had once been a student of Adler and drew many ideas from him. Despite a shared commitment to a religion without supernaturalism, both men reached radically different conclusions about what being Jewish meant to them personally. While Alder sought to move beyond his own Judaism, seeing Ethical Culture as surpassing Judaism, Kaplan sought ways to reinvent it so that it was not based on racial kinship or religious belief. Kaplan’s notion that Judaism was a “civilization,” a form of “peoplehood” or culture, offered a novel and important way to preserve Jewish identity for many Americans.
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