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From 1913–1918, the United Synagogue of America remained staunchly committed to diversity. Its members overlooked their vast differences, choosing instead to work together to implement Schechter's vision. Not everybody, however, believed that this was the best path for strengthening traditional Judaism in America. This chapter focuses on the two disciples who challenged Schechter's inclusivity: Mordecai Kaplan the “heretic” and Herbert S. Goldstein the “maverick.” The experiences of Kaplan and Goldstein demonstrate that prior to 1927 the United Synagogue did not represent a distinct, third religious movement with boundaries that clearly distinguished it from other movements. Instead, it was an ethnoreligious group with elastic boundaries that stretched wide enough to unify the disciples who chose to join forces to implement the vision of Solomon Schechter.

This chapter compares three twentieth and twenty-first century overviews of Jewish culture and civilization through the works of Mordecai Kaplan, Louis Finkelstein, and David Biale. It addresses criticisms to some of the treasured dichotomies of what might be called “Judaism”. It also discusses exile versus sovereignty, Jewish versus non-Jewish culture, elite versus popular culture, and Jewish distinctiveness versus cultural hybridity and pluralism. The chapter reveals the modern topos of the Jewish contribution to civilization that can be traced back to Moses Mendelssohn, who argued that the Jews had anticipated modernity by removing coercion from religion. It mentions Jewish writers who strove to persuade that the Jews deserved to enter Western civilization.

Mordecai Kaplan’s conception of Judaism as a civilization is emblematic of the anthropocentric turn in Jewish self-understanding. The theocentric values and horizons of the imagination of traditional Judaism would recede before the emphatically this-worldly interests of the Jews seeking a place in the modern order, what in Zionist parlance is called normalization. Judaism was now to be conceived as an ethnically based cultural civilization constituted by popular, as well as literary, cultural codes, of which religious beliefs and practices are but one, and for many Jews, not necessarily the most commanding value. But as Sigmund Freud noted, civilization and culture are in the end but illusory palliatives, discontent is humanity’s psychic fate. For traditional Judaism, however, discontent in civilization is a divine commandment. It is a sacred duty most powerfully expressed by the prophets who are ever alert to the foibles of human hubris and folly.

This chapter focuses on 'Jewish civilization', in which the term served the interests of Jewish intellectuals far better when counterpoised against the German Romantic notion of a distinct national culture. It probes the significance of 'civilization' at several key rhetorical moments during the last two hundred years. It also recounts the event when German Jews endeavoured to reach a high standard of civilization through concerted self-cultivation and social integration in the early nineteenth century. The chapter talks about European Jews who applied their own standards of 'civilization' to other 'oriental' Jews. It describes the years between the Great Depression and the outbreak of the Second World War, when Mordecai Kaplan equated Jewish peoplehood and civilization.

Ostensibly a children’s book, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince (Le petit prince) may be read as an allegory of second innocence, a window into the phenomenology of faith. Accordingly, it is argued that it is profoundly mistaken to assess religious truths as epistemological claims; their existential significance can only be understood as they are actualized in the cognitive universe they instantiate. Faith is thus held to be a disposition of the heart, a spiritual attitude allowing one to behold what otherwise would be hidden. With respect to Talmud Torah, faith is an act of sacred attunement (Michael Fishbane), a hermeneutic practice of meditative reflection. As citizens of a cosmopolitan, multi-cultural universe, the hermeneutic reflexes of post-traditional Jews are inflected by knowledge of analogous or even alternative perceptions of the sacred attested other faith traditions. The threat to the spiritual and cultural integrity posed by competing truth claims is lifted when they are viewed not as epistemological and historical challenges but as alternative ontological perspectives. The fact that these perspectives may be considered to be culturally specific and existentially incommensurable, they need not threaten and destabilize a commitment to one’s cultural patrimony.

The idea of a Jewish body provides the background to understand the major Jewish migrations, the core features of modern Jewish politics, the transformation of Judaism as a religion and the role played by Jews in the Minority Rights Movement. Eastern European Jews’ immigration to the United States or Palestine as two sides of the same coin.