Jonathan Marc Gribetz
Tablet, Aug. 4, 2024
“And when Berger spoke, Palestinian nationalists and their Arab supporters listened.”
Rabbi Elmer Berger was born in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1908 and studied at the University of Cincinnati before undertaking rabbinical studies at Hebrew Union College. After his ordination in 1932, he served as rabbi of various Reform congregations in Michigan for a decade. In 1942, a half-decade after the Reform movement’s Columbus Platform overturned classical Reform Judaism’s opposition to Jewish nationalism, and three years into World War II, Berger wrote an essay titled “Why I Am a Non-Zionist.”
Shortly thereafter, he was appointed head of the American Council for Judaism (ACJ), a newly founded organization that promoted the Reform movement’s earlier anti-Zionism. Berger propagated his anti-Zionist views, first at the helm of the ACJ, which he led from 1942 until 1955; then as its executive vice president until 1968. Finally, in his remaining three decades, he led a still newer one-man organization called the American Jewish Alternatives to Zionism (AJAZ).
For Berger, the idea of a “Jewish people” was a fallacy. “I cannot write about a Jewish people because there is none,” he asserted in 1945 in his first full monograph, The Jewish Dilemma. “To designate them [Jews] as a national group is a vestige of the past,” Berger wrote. “Enlightened states always refer to Jews as citizens of the Jewish faith,” he continued, and thus “as nations emerge from absolutism and oligarchy and join the march of freedom into representative government, Jews slowly get out from under the concept of a restrictive, separate nationality group.”. … [To read the full article, click here]