READING GUIDE By Julian E. Zelizer
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CONTENTS
Timeline
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Discussion Guide
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Further Reading
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About Jewish Lives
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TIMELINE January 11, 1907: Abraham Joshua Heschel is born in Warsaw. He is the youngest of six children. His father was Moshe Mordechai and his mother Reizel (Rivka) Perlow. His siblings are Sarah, Esther, Gittel, Devorah, and Jacob. 1916: Moshe Heschel, only 43 years of age, dies during the Influenza Pandemic. Heschel’s uncle, Rebbe Alter Israel Shimon Perlow, takes over Abraham’s rabbinic training. January 11, 1920: Abraham celebrates his Bar Mitzvah. 1925: Heschel begins his studies at the Vilna Real Gymnasium in preparation for attending a university. June 26, 1927: Heschel graduates from the Vilna Real Gymnasium. Fall 1927: Heschel begins his doctoral work at the University of Berlin. He also studies at the Hochschule fur die Wissenschaft des Judentums (Academy for the Science of Judaism) and the Rabbiner-Seminar fur das Orthodoxe Judentum. January 31, 1931: Heschel starts his dissertation on the Hebrew Prophets. 1933: Heschel publishes a collection of poems, The Ineffable Name of God: Man. 1933: Nazis force Jewish-owned stores to place yellow stars on their doors and there is a major book-burning right at the time that Heschel is trying to find a publisher for his dissertation. 1933: Under a pseudonym, Heschel publishes a poem in the Yiddish newspaper, Haynt, called “On This Day of Hate.” July 1934: Heschel completes degree at the Hochschule. December 1934: The Polish Academy of Sciences agrees to publish Heschel’s dissertation. 1935: Heschel publishes a biography of Maimonides. December 11, 1935: The University of Berlin grants Heschel his doctoral degree. March 1936: The Polish Academy publishes Die Prophetie. March 1, 1937: Heschel starts as director of the Mittelstelle fur Judische Erwachsenen Bildung. October 28, 1938: The Gestapo deports Heschel from his German home and place him in the Zbaszyn detention camp along the Polish border. Through family connections, Heschel is able to obtain a release after which he accepts a position at the Warsaw Institute of Jewish Study. April 6, 1939: Heschel receives a letter from Julian Morgenstern, the head of the Hebrew Union College, offering him a position as Research Fellow. September 1939: After the Nazis invade Poland, his sister Esther is killed in the bombing. His mother and sister Gittel are forced to flee from their home. 1940: While waiting to obtain a visa so that he can travel to the United States, Heschel lives with his brother Jacob in London. There, he establishes the Theodor Herzl Society. 3
TIMELINE March 9, 1940: Heschel boards the Cunard White Star Liner Lancastria and arrives in the United States twelve days later. After a few weeks in New York City, he takes an overnight train to Cincinnati. April 1940: Heschel begins his term as a fellow of Jewish philosophy at HUC. July 21, 1942: Heschel joins a rally with twenty thousand people at Madison Square Garden to protest Nazism. February 1943: The HUC Bulletin publishes “The Meaning of War.” 1943: HUC promotes Heschel to the position of Instructor in Jewish Philosophy and Rabbinics. 1943: Heschel’s mother dies of a heart attack when German police raid her apartment. The Germans kill his sister in Treblinka. October 6, 1943: Heschel joins Rabbi Eliezer Silver, Hillel Kook, and a group of Orthodox clergymen in the “Rabbis’ March” in Washington, D.C. 1944: HUC promotes Heschel to Associate Professor. May 1944: Devorah Miriam is murdered in Auschwitz. 1945: Rabbi Louis Finkelstein, Chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary, offers Heschel a professorship. Heschel accepts and moves to an apartment on Riverside Drive in New York. December 10, 1946: Heschel marries a concert pianist named Sylvia Straus, who he met at a dinner party while at HUC, in Los Angeles. 1948: Heschel celebrates the establishment of the state of Israel. 1949: Publication of The Earth is the Lord’s: The Inner World of the Jew in Eastern Europe, a book based on the lecture that Heschel delivered at YIVO after the war. 1951: Farrar, Straus and Young publishes The Sabbath. 1951: Farrar, Straus & Young publishes Man is Not Alone. In his New York Herald review of the work, the internationally renowned theologian Reinhold Niebuhr predicts that Heschel “will become a commanding and authoritative voice not only in the Jewish community but in the religious life of America.” 1951-1952: The United Synagogue of America organizes a two-year campaign, called “Sabbath Observance Project,” that features Heschel’s Sabbath. The American Jewish Press serializes the book to 28 newspapers. May 15, 1952: Susannah Heschel is born. June 1953: Heschel speaks to the Rabbinical Assembly Convention at the Breaker’s Hotel in Atlantic City. Taking aim at the suburban synagogue, where many JTS students were working, he warns that “the fire has gone out of our worship. It is cold, stiff, and dead.” He criticizes rabbis for not teaching congregants how to pray. 1954: The Guggenheim Foundation awards Heschel a fellowship. 1954: Heschel publishes Man’s Quest for God. 4
TIMELINE 1955: Publication of God in Search of Man. 1957: The Heschels take their first trip to Israel. 1959: Heschel spends two months as a visiting scholar at the University of Minnesota. April 1960: Heschel speaks at the Eisenhower administration’s Conference on Children and Youth in Washington. 1961: Heschel addresses Eisenhower’s White House Conference on Aging. November 1961: Marc Tanenbaum arranges the first meeting between Heschel and Cardinal Augustin Bea to discuss church doctrine that relates to Jews. The discussion is part of Vatican Council II. 1962: Heschel writes a lengthy report for the American Jewish Committee, On Improving Catholic-Jewish Relations. 1962: Publication of the first volume of Torah min HaShamayim. 1962: Publication of The Prophets, a revised version of his doctoral dissertation. The book resonates with civil rights activists, particularly African American preachers who see inspiration from the Hebrew Prophets. January 1963: Along with Martin Luther King Jr., Heschel speaks to the Conference on Religion and Race in Chicago. January 25, 1963: Heschel appears in Time magazine. March 27, 1963: Heschel meets with Cardinal Bea at a private luncheon in Boston. He presents him with a copy of The Sabbath. The two men continue their conversation about how the Catholic Church could change its doctrine in order to undercut core sources of anti-Semitism. May 1963: Stanford University appoints Heschel to deliver the Raymond Fred West Memorial Lectures. The three lectures would be published as Who Is Man? September 4, 1963: Heschel delivers a sermon at JTS calling rabbis to action to protect Soviet Jewry. October 7, 1963: Heschel convenes a meeting, along with Rabbi Uri Miller of the Synagogue Council, about the condition of Soviet Jewry. They map out a plan to call greater attention to the crisis. December 1963: Heschel flies to Rome to meet with Vatican officials after the death of Pope John XXIII. He warns them that there need to be Vatican reforms to stop holding any Jews responsible for the crucifixion and to abandon the belief in conversion. February 25, 1964: Heschel speaks to an interfaith conference on civil rights in New York, one of several addresses that he makes on the subject following the talk in Chicago. 1964: Heschel joins American Jews in Washington, including Senator Abraham Ribicoff, to rally support for Soviet Jews. September 1964: Heschel meets with Pope Paul VI at the Vatican in a top-secret meeting. The goal is to prevent the Pope from allowing changes in doctrine to be watered down. The meeting goes poorly. 5
TIMELINE October 1964: News outlets report on Heschel’s top secret meetings with the Vatican. Fall 1964: Heschel participates in a march to the Soviet Mission at the UN in New York City. Speakers included Senators Robert Kennedy and Kenneth Keating. 1965: The Union Theological Seminary appoints Heschel as the Harry Emerson Fosdick Visiting Professor. He becomes the first Jewish scholar to be appointed by a Protestant seminary to the faculty. He delivers a lecture “No Religion is an Island.” December 1965: Ma’ariv publishes a controversial interview with Heschel in which he castigates the Vatican and says that he would prefer to go to Auschwitz than to be converted. Bea reports to Heschel that Vatican officials were furious, believing that Heschel compared them to Nazis. 1965: Publication of the second volume of Torah min HaShamayim. March 21, 1965: Heschel marches in Selma, alongside Martin Luther King Jr., to protest for voting rights. The photos from the march become some of the most iconic images of the black-Jewish alliance during this era. October 25, 1965: Heschel joins 100 preachers at the United Nations Church Center in New York to support the right to protest the war. The organizers launch the Clergy Concerned About Vietnam (which they renamed Clergy and Laity Concerned About Vietnam). March 1966: Heschel tells the Rabbinical Assembly that they need to be doing much more to save Soviet Jews. The comments make the national newspapers. Holocaust survivor and author Elie Wiesel credits Heschel with awakening him to this problem, which results in his book The Jews of Silence. 1966: FSG publishes The Insecurity of Freedom. January 1967: The Rabbinical Assembly declares their full support for the operations in Vietnam and says they “deplore the efforts by the so-called ‘Guardians of the Faith’ organized under the name Clergy and Laymen Concerned About Vietnam.” January 1967: CALCAV convenes its first anti-mobilization in Washington. Over 2,000 clergy and religious persons attend. Heschel joins a vigil at the White House and participates in Capitol Hill meetings with members of Congress. In addition to addressing all the attendees at the Presbyterian Church that served as a base, Heschel joins a small delegation that meets with Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. During the meeting, Heschel erupts in frustration about American policy in the war. April 4, 1967: Heschel stands alongside Martin Luther Jr. at New York Riverside Church. King, who until this time had been reluctant to criticize the war given Lyndon Johnson’s support of civil rights and the broad popularity of the war, accepts this invitation from CALCAV to make his first major address against what the United States was doing in Vietnam. Heschel speaks as well. 1967: CALVAV publishes Vietnam: Crisis of Conscience with essays by Heschel and King from the Riverside event. Businessman Harry Wachtel, a friend of the civil rights movement, pays to have this sent to every member of Congress. June 1967: Heschel finds himself in conflict with allies from the anti-war movement during Israel’s Six Day War. Some progressive allies, though not all, start to discuss Israel through the lens of western imperialism. Heschel strongly supports Israel’s right to self-defense. 6
TIMELINE February 5-6, 1968: Second CALCAV anti-war mobilization in Washington. Heschel leads a gathering at the Arlington National Cemetery with King. Twenty-five hundred protesters hold a silent vigil. Rabbi Maurice Eisendrath carries a Torah as part of the protest. March 25, 1968: King attends the Rabbinical Assembly Convention at the Concord Hotel for a belated celebration of Heschel’s 60th birthday. When King enters the auditorium, the rabbis rose and linked arms as they chanted “We Shall Overcome.” April 1968: Invited by Coretta Scott King, Heschel attends King’s funeral procession in Atlanta. He attends the services at the Ebenezer Baptist Church and at Morehouse College. At Morehouse, Heschel reads a passage from the Old Testament. February 1969: Heschel organizes a third CALCAV anti-war mobilization in Washington. Heschel, who is increasingly sympathetic to more radical tactics such as avoiding the draft, meets with National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger. Heschel asks: “How could you as a good Jew prosecute a war like this?” 1969: Heschel suffers a major heart attack. 1969: Publication of Israel: An Echo of Eternity. March 17, 1971: Heschel visits Rome and the Vatican where he obtains a private audience with Pope Paul VI. November 21, 1971: Heschel appears on ABC Television with Frank Reynolds. 1972: Heschel is featured in a Time magazine cover story, “What It Means to be Jewish.” 1972: Heschel endorses Democratic presidential candidate, Senator George McGovern, writing a letter to the New York Times claiming that the Jewish tradition inevitably pointed to a McGovern presidency. December 20, 1972: Heschel attends a rally in Danbury, Connecticut to celebrate the release of Reverend Philip Berrigan from a thirty-nine-month sentence for having destroyed draft records. December 23, 1972: At 65 years of age, Heschel dies in his home on the Sabbath of a heart attack. February 4, 1973: Carl Stern’s interview with Heschel appears on NBC Television’s The Eternal Light. 1973: Publication of A Passion for Truth and Kotsk: A Struggle for Integrity.
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DISCUSSION QUESTIONS TO OPEN THE CONVERSATION, BEGIN BY ASKING: 1. Why have so many Jewish Americans participated in progressive politics? 2. Why does Abraham Heschel loom so large in contemporary Judaism?
CHAPTER 1: WARSAW 1. How did the vibrant Hasidic world of Warsaw intersect with other strands of Jewish life in shaping Heschel’s childhood? 2. What compelled Heschel to leave Warsaw?
CHAPTER 2: BERLIN 1. Why were contemporary Jewish scholars drawn to Eastern European Hasidic Jews such as Heschel? 2. What did Heschel take away from his studies at the University of Berlin and his time in the city? 3. Who were some of the figures who influenced him in Berlin?
CHAPTER 3: CINCINNATI 1. Which elements of Reform Judaism troubled Heschel at HUC? 2. What were some key moments in his introduction to political activism during these years?
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DISCUSSION QUESTIONS CHAPTER 4: NEW YORK CITY 1. What were core ideas that could be found in Heschel’s different publications? 2. How did the Holocaust shape his writing? 3. What allowed Heschel to become so popular as a religious figure during the early Cold War? 4. What were some of the intellectual fault lines at JTS? 5. How did Heschel’s writing during these years create a foundation for his political activism in the 1960s?
CHAPTER 5: SELMA 1. What explains the strength of Heschel’s relationship with Dr. King? 2. How were Heschel’s involvement in Soviet Jewry, civil rights, and the fight against anti-Semitism in the Catholic Church interconnected? 3. Why did the march in Selma have such a huge impact on Heschel’s life and legacy?
CHAPTER 6: WASHINGTON 1. What did the Clergy and Laymen Concerned about Vietnam achieve that proved more difficult for other parts of the anti-war movement? 2. Why did Vietnam consume Heschel’s attention? 3. How did Heschel handle the rifts that emerged with fellow anti-war activists over the Six Day War? 4. What was the purpose of the CALCAV mobilizations in Washington?
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DISCUSSION QUESTIONS CHAPTER 7: LEGACY 1. What challenges arose after the 1960s to Heschel’s progressive religious politics? 2. How did synagogues and rabbis incorporate Heschel into the liturgy? Why did his work gain popularity among Conservative rabbis? 3. What parts of his legacy resonate most powerfully today?
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FURTHER READING Jon Butler, God in Gotham: The Miracle of Religion in Modern Manhattan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020). Hasia R. Diner, We Remember with Reverence and Love: American Jews and the Myth of Silence after the Holocaust, 1945-1962 (New York: NYU Press, 2009). Marc Dollinger, Quest for Inclusion: Jews and Liberalism in Modern America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000). Samuel Dresner, Heschel, Hasidism, and Halakha (New York: Fordham University Press, 2001). Mitchell K. Hall, Because of their Faith: CALCAV and Religious Opposition to the Vietnam War (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990). Shai Held, Abraham Joshua Heschel: The Call of Transcendence (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014). Susannah Heschel, ed. Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity (New York: FSG, 1997). Edward K. Kaplan, Abraham Joshua Heschel: Mind, Heart, Soul (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society and Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 2019). Michael Marmur, Abraham Joshua Heschel and the Sources of Wonder (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016). Albert J. Raboteau, American Prophets: Seven Religious Radicals and Their Struggle for Social and Political Justice (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016). Jonathan Sarna, American Judaism: A History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004). Bruce Schulman and Julian Zelizer, eds., Faithful Republic: Religion and Politics in Modern America (Philadelphia: University of Philadelphia Press, 2015). Any of the work of Heschel, including The Earth is the Lord’s, The Sabbath, Man is Not Alone, Man’s Quest for God, God in Search of Man and The Insecurity of Freedom.
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Jewish Lives is a prizewinning series of biography designed to explore the many facets of Jewish identity. Individual volumes illuminate the imprint of Jewish figures upon literature, religion, philosophy, politics, cultural and economic life, and the arts and sciences. Subjects are paired with authors to elicit lively, deeply informed books that explore the range and depth of the Jewish experience from antiquity to the present. Jewish Lives is a partnership of Yale University Press and the Leon D. Black Foundation. Ileene Smith is editorial director. Anita Shapira and Steven J. Zipperstein are series editors. For curated collections and special offers, please visit www.jewishlives.org. Recommended Reads:
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