"Who is a Jew?" David Ben-Gurion asked in a letter he dispatched to fifty Jewish leaders and thinkers around the world in 1958. He had good political reasons to launch such an inquiry, and equally good reasons to expect answers or attempts at answers. Isaiah Berlin wrote back, and so did the Jewish scholar Alexander Altmann, the novelist S.Y. Agnon, and the Lubavitcher Rebbe, as well as many others. But Abba Hillel Silver, the prominent Reform rabbi and American Zionist leader who had represented the Jewish Agency before the United Nations a decade earlier did not respond to Ben-Gurion's missive—not directly, anyhow.
On December 7, 1958, the first day of Hanukkah, Silver explained to his Cleveland congregation, Temple Tifereth-Israel, why he did not think it was the business of the State of Israel, or any state for that matter, to formulate an answer to Ben-Gurion's question. What really mattered, in his eyes, was not the legal definition of "Who is a Jew?" but rather a genuine understanding of "What is a Jew?" in both Israel and the diaspora. More than fifty years have passed since Silver delivered this sermon, but, as one scarcely needs to emphasize, it resonates deeply with our contemporary situation and retains all of its relevance.
The sermon was rediscovered by Professor Ofer Schiff of Ben-Gurion University, in the Abba Hillel Silver Archives at the Western Reserve Historical Society in Cleveland, Ohio. Schiff's forthcoming book, Abba Hillel Silver: The Defeated Zionist (Resling), is scheduled to appear in 2012.
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