Mordecai Menahem Kaplan, was a Lithuanian-born American rabbi, writer, Jewish educator, professor, theologian, philosopher, activist, and religious leader who founded the Reconstructionist branch of Judaism along with his son-in-law Ira Eisenstein. He has been described as a "towering figure" in the recent history of Judaism for his influential work in adapting it to modern society, contending that Judaism should be a unifying and creative force by stressing the cultural and historical character of the religion as well as theological doctrine.
Avram Noam Chomsky is an American public intellectual: a linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, historian, social critic, and political activist. Sometimes called "the father of modern linguistics", Chomsky is also a major figure in analytic philosophy and one of the founders of the field of cognitive science. He is a Laureate Professor of Linguistics at the University of Arizona and an Institute Professor Emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and is the author of more than 150 books on topics such as linguistics, war, and politics. Ideologically, he aligns with anarcho-syndicalism and libertarian socialism.
Reconstructionist Judaism is a Jewish movement that views Judaism as a progressively evolving civilization rather than a religion, based on concepts developed by Mordecai Kaplan (1881–1983). The movement originated as a semi-organized stream within Conservative Judaism and developed from the late 1920s to 1940s, before it seceded in 1955 and established a rabbinical college in 1967. Reconstructionist Judaism is recognized by some scholars as one of the five streams of Judaism alongside Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, and Humanistic.
Aryeh Moshe Eliyahu Kaplan was an American Orthodox rabbi, author, and translator, best known for his Living Torah edition of the Torah. He became well known as a prolific writer and was lauded as an original thinker. His wide-ranging literary output, inclusive of introductory pamphlets on Jewish beliefs and philosophy written at the request of NCSY, is often regarded as a significant factor in the growth of the baal teshuva movement.
Walter Kohn was an Austrian-American theoretical physicist and theoretical chemist. He was awarded, with John Pople, the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1998. The award recognized their contributions to the understandings of the electronic properties of materials. In particular, Kohn played the leading role in the development of density functional theory, which made it possible to calculate quantum mechanical electronic structure by equations involving the electronic density. This computational simplification led to more accurate calculations on complex systems as well as many new insights, and it has become an essential tool for materials science, condensed-phase physics, and the chemical physics of atoms and molecules.
Michael Laban Walzer is an American political theorist and public intellectual. A professor emeritus at the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) in Princeton, New Jersey, he is editor emeritus of Dissent, an intellectual magazine that he has been affiliated with since his years as an undergraduate at Brandeis University. He has written books and essays on a wide range of topics—many in political ethics—including just and unjust wars, nationalism, ethnicity, Zionism, economic justice, social criticism, radicalism, tolerance, and political obligation. He is also a contributing editor to The New Republic. To date, he has written 27 books and published over 300 articles, essays, and book reviews in Dissent, The New Republic, The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, The New York Times, Harpers, and many philosophical and political science journals.
The Beta Israel, also known as Ethiopian Jews, are a Jewish community that developed and lived for centuries in the area of the Kingdom of Aksum and the Ethiopian Empire, which is currently divided between the modern-day Amhara and Tigray regions of Ethiopia. Most of the Beta Israel community immigrated to Israel in the late 20th century.
Morris Halle was a Latvian-born Jewish American linguist who was an Institute Professor, and later professor emeritus, of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The father of "modern phonology", he was best known for his pioneering work in generative phonology, having written "On Accent and Juncture in English" in 1956 with Noam Chomsky and Fred Lukoff and The Sound Pattern of English in 1968 with Chomsky. He also co-authored the earliest theory of generative metrics.
David Henry Fromkin was an American historian, best known for his interpretive account of the Middle East, A Peace to End All Peace (1989), in which he recounts the role European powers played between 1914 and 1922 in creating the modern Middle East. The book was a finalist for both the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction. Fromkin wrote seven books, ending in 2007 with The King and the Cowboy: Theodore Roosevelt and Edward the Seventh, Secret Partners.
Justin Jeremy Gimelstob is a retired American tennis player. Gimelstob has been a resident of Morristown, New Jersey, and as of 2009 lived in Santa Monica, California.
Dropsie College for Hebrew and Cognate Learning or Dropsie University, at 2321–2335 N Broad St., Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, was America's first degree-granting institution for post-doctoral Jewish studies. Funded by the will of Moses Aaron Dropsie (1821–1905), it was chartered in 1907, and its first building was completed in 1912. It ceased to grant degrees in 1986.
Hans Kohn was an American philosopher and historian. He pioneered the academic study of nationalism, and is considered an authority on the subject.
Tevi David Troy is a best-selling presidential historian and the former United States Deputy Secretary of Health and Human Services during the Presidency of George W. Bush. He also served as a senior White House aide in the George W. Bush administration from March 2005 to July 2007. Troy founded the American Health Policy Institute and served as its CEO from 2014 to 2018. He is currently a Senior Fellow at the Bipartisan Policy Center.
Anti-Zionism is opposition to Zionism. Although anti-Zionism is a heterogeneous phenomenon, all its proponents agree that the creation of the modern State of Israel, and the movement to create a sovereign Jewish state in the region of Palestine – the biblical Land of Israel – was flawed or unjust in some way.
The RAND Corporation is an American nonprofit global policy think tank created in 1948 by Douglas Aircraft Company to offer research and analysis to the United States Armed Forces. It is financed by the U.S. government and private endowment, corporations, universities and private individuals.
This timeline of anti-Zionism chronicles the history of anti-Zionism, including events in the history of anti-Zionist thought.
David N. Myers is a professor of history at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he holds the Sady and Ludwig Kahn Chair in Jewish History. Myers was the president and CEO of the Center for Jewish History from July 2017 to August 2018. He serves as the President of the New Israel Fund Board.
Moral Man and Immoral Society: A Study in Ethics and Politics is a 1932 book by Reinhold Niebuhr, an American Protestant theologian at Union Theological Seminary (UTS) in New York City. The thesis of the book is that people are more likely to sin as members of groups than as individuals. Niebuhr wrote the book in a single summer. He drew the book's contents from his experiences as a pastor in Detroit, Michigan prior to his professorship at UTS. The book attacks liberalism, both secular and religious, and is particularly critical of John Dewey and the Social Gospel. Moral Man and Immoral Society generated much controversy and raised Niebuhr's public profile significantly. Initial reception of the book by liberal Christian critics was negative, but its reputation soon improved as the rise of fascism throughout the 1930s was seen as having been predicted in the book. Soon after the book's publication, Paul Lehmann gave a copy to Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who read it and was impressed by the book's thesis but disliked the book's critique of pacifism. The book eventually gained significant readership among American Jews because, after a period of considerable anti-theological sentiment among Jews in the United States, many Jews began to return to the study of theology and, having no Jewish works of theology to read, turned to Protestant theological works.
Simon Rawidowicz (1897–1957) was a Polish-born American Jewish philosopher.
