Judaism as a Civilization: Toward a Reconstruction of American-Jewish Life

Mordecai Kaplan was the founder of Reconstructionist Judaism, and this 1934 book is his own foundational statement of that movement's theology, arguing for Judaism as an evolving civilization rather than a fixed supernatural revelation. As a primary text by the movement's own founder, it is the strongest possible source for what Reconstructionism originally set out to be, in Kaplan's own words rather than a later summary of them. Its limit is exactly that, it is one founder's argument at one moment, not a neutral history of the movement or an account of how Reconstructionist thought developed and diverged after Kaplan, which needs later and more distanced scholarly sources. Read here as the movement's own founding statement, not as an outside assessment of it.