Introduction

"Mark, what are your thoughts on Zionism?"

It was early in 1990, in a few months I would be ordained as a rabbi, and it was one of the most loaded questions I had ever been asked. It came from an official of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations (UAHC) - now the Union for Reform Judaism (URJ) - and he was about to offer me a position as a director of its national youth movement. For me, it was a dream job. Throughout nine years of college and rabbinical school, youth work had become a passion of mine. Now, I was about to be offered a position as Director of Youth Leadership for the entire Reform movement. I was excited and honored beyond words.

"Yeah," my supervisor continued. "I heard about your thesis, and people are telling me you're some kind of . anti-Zionist or something."

My thesis - I'd been afraid it would come up. To fulfill the major research project required for ordination, I had decided to write a biographical study - of a man who was not only still alive, but reviled by vast numbers of American Jews and Reform Jews in particular. The subject was Rabbi Elmer Berger, the long-time leader of the American Council for Judaism.

Why did I choose to write about Berger? I explained part of the answer in the first sentence of my thesis. "I have always been fascinated by heretics," I explained, and Berger was certainly regarded as a heretic by most of the Reform movement. I had first learned about him when I was an undergraduate at Washington University in St. Louis. There, I had taken a seminar on the history of Zionism, taught by Rabbi James Diamond, during which we touched on American Jewish anti-Zionism. Having come of age in the Reform movement of the 1970s and 1980s, I'd embraced Zionism as a central part of my Jewish identity. Many of my religious school teachers and camp counselors were Israelis, and as a camp counselor and teacher myself, I ran more educational programs about Israel than I could ever count. I spent a summer in Israel during high school and returned for both my junior year of college and first year of rabbinical school. For a time, I considered making aliyah - moving to Israel.

The very idea that there was ever a large group of Reform Jews who rejected the very notion of Zionism simply astounded me, and when I learned that the most notorious name associated with American Jewish anti-Zionism was still alive, I saw an exciting opportunity for in-depth research. Dr. Michael A. Meyer, the pre-eminent historian of Reform Judaism, agreed to serve as my advisor; I wrote a proposal and it got accepted.

Elmer Berger, ordained by my same Hebrew Union College (HUC) campus in 1932, had variously served as executive director and executive vice president of the anti-Zionist American Council for Judaism (ACJ) from its creation in 1942 until its implosion in the aftermath of the 1967 Six Day War. Though he remained engaged with sympathetic activists throughout his long retirement, I would focus on his life and work from 1948 to 1968. I read his books and perused relevant material at the American Jewish Archives, on the HUC campus in Cincinnati. I learned that the papers of the ACJ themselves were housed at the Wisconsin Historical Society, and I spent a week in Madison wading through the unprocessed collection - some of the papers in their original filing cabinets after arriving when the ACJ national office in New York finally shuttered only a year earlier.

I also interviewed many of Berger's associates and adversaries - among Jews, the latter were far more numerous than the former. A surviving member of Berger's ordination class with socialist and pacifist credentials supported the ACJ early on and spoke highly of Berger as a thinker and organizer, but parted company with them by the early 1950s. Ideologically and personally, many felt, Elmer Berger could be impossible to work with.

Berger's opponents, on the other hand, weren't so nuanced. When I contacted one prominent Reform rabbi who had been an outspoken supporter of the Israeli peace movement since the 1970s, his first response was, "Are you going to include the fact that he was a fucking nuisance?" Shocked, I told him that I wasn't planning to say that. "Here we were trying to support the creation of a Jewish state," he told me, "and Berger - a rabbi - was going around saying that Jews shouldn't have anything to do with it. He made it much harder to make our case on behalf of the Jewish people."

A leader of the Reform movement's Central Conference of American Rabbis boasted to me of his unceasing calls to formally expel Berger against the apathy of his colleagues. "I finally got him out for non-payment of dues," he said (though Berger once wrote of being stunned to receive a letter soliciting his dues after he quietly ceased paying them over a decade earlier). To a generation of Reform Jewish leaders, not to mention rank-and-file Zionists, I realized, the mere mention of Elmer Berger's name was bound to provoke visceral and even violent reactions.

Along the way, I learned Berger's thought. Here was a rabbi who, in adamantly denying that Jews constituted a "nation" in the modern political sense, appeared to reject the very idea of the Jewish people. He saw Zionism not as a genuine expression of Judaism, but as a political corruption of it. He argued that Zionism and the State of Israel didn't ensure the safety of Jews, but would sooner or later imperil it - even notwithstanding the Holocaust.

At the core of the philosophy of Jewish emancipation in Europe, and of the religious movement it inspired in Germany that ultimately became known as Reform Judaism, was the rejection of the Jewish community existing as a separate corporate entity internally governed by a rabbinic establishment - the medieval European norm - rather than as integrated citizens of a liberal state. Indeed, among the most profound yet subtle transformations in the making of modern Judaism was the inference in recasting the synagogue as the "temple" - the ancient longing to rebuild and restore the Temple of Jerusalem rejected for the new, emancipated and enlightened synagogue.

In 1841, at the dedication of a new building for the century-old synagogue of Charleston, South Carolina, the rabbi famously declared, "This synagogue is our Temple, this city our Jerusalem, and this happy land our Palestine." As 19th century Reform Judaism spread much farther and struck far deeper roots in America than Central Europe, such sentiments were increasingly taken for granted. By 1885, the "Pittsburgh Platform," a particularly radical though unofficial document, nevertheless set the tone of American Reform Judaism for at least another half-century. The salient passage read:

We consider ourselves no longer a nation, but a religious community, and therefore expect neither a return to Palestine, nor a sacrificial worship under the sons of Aaron, nor the restoration of any of the laws concerning the Jewish state.

By the late 1980s, my classmates and I - not to mention most of the Reform movement - found that statement to be astounding. After the Holocaust, how could any Jew possibly reject the importance of a Jewish state for the safety and well-being of the Jewish people? But even as the Holocaust was unfolding, Elmer Berger had been arguing in favor of what we saw as a naïve and outmoded expression of Reform Judaism.

I pored through Berger's prodigious correspondence, examined years' worth of ACJ newsletters, and read press reports of Berger's activities. As I did, contrary to the accusations of some, I realized that he really believed what he was saying! Not only that, some of it was actually starting to make sense to me - or at the very least it got me thinking.

Of course anti-Semitism had been a norm throughout Jewish history, and the Holocaust its unspeakable climax. Whereas Zionism argued that the answer was to create a Jewish state in Palestine, the ACJ, and Berger especially, doubled down on the emancipation ethos, arguing that Jews should strive not for the ingathering of all Jews to one small country in the Middle East, but to secure freedom and safety for Jews in all countries.

Zionism was nothing more than ghettoization writ large, and Jews had worked to dismantle such segregation ever since the French Revolution. Zionism argued that the Jewish people, like every people, deserved a state of its own. Berger questioned the very existence of a Jewish people, arguing instead that it is religion rather than ethnicity that unites the world's Jews. After all, he reminded his readers, what did a Jew in North Africa and a Jew in America really have in common? Not culture or language or politics. Since antiquity, Jews in different lands couldn't even lay claim to a shared history. All they've really shared over the centuries is Judaism. To create a nation-state out of the Jewish religion made no sense.

In fact, Berger and his ACJ colleagues argued, subjecting Judaism to the realpolitik of statehood would gravely corrupt the great truths and principles of the Jewish religion. In deploring how so much of American Jewish life was reduced and subordinated to a crudely demanding and morally dubious political project - symbolized in their own time by the United...