In memoriam: Benny Kraut, 1947-2008.

Whitfield, Stephen J.

With the death of Benny Kraut in the early fall of 2008, the community of historians of American Judaism lost one of its ablest and most beloved interpreters. Born in 1947 in Munich, where his parents were consigned to a displaced persons' camp, then raised in Canada, Kraut was serving as professor of history at Queens College of the City University of New York and was also a member of the faculty of CUNY's Graduate Center. From 1986 until 1991, he edited the book review section of this journal. Upon the news of his death, the interim chairperson of the Academic Council of the American Jewish Historical Society, Jeffrey S. Gurock, did not exaggerate in describing Kraut as "a distinguished scholar and intellectual who wrote with elegance and taught with great style and enthusiasm." (1)

His higher education and his academic career were pursued in the United States. Kraut graduated summa cum laude in philosophy from Yeshiva University in 1968, then earned his M. A. in 1970 and five years later his Ph. D. from Brandeis University's Department of Near Eastern and Judaic Studies. Ben Halpern supervised Kraut's doctoral dissertation. Beginning in 1976, and for over two decades, Kraut directed Judaic Studies and taught Jewish history at the University of Cincinnati. He came to Queens College in 1998 to teach in the Department of History. At both Cincinnati and Queens, Kraut taught a prodigious variety of courses, including the history of Jewish civilization (from the Biblical through the rabbinic periods, from the middle ages down through the modern era); American Jewish history; the Book of Job and the problem of evil; the history of antisemitism and other Jewish-Christian encounters; and the history of Zionism. Both at Cincinnati and at Queens he was beloved by his students.

Having won two teaching awards at the University of Cincinnati, Kraut continued to win acclaim in the classroom at Queens College and to be admired and appreciated as a sagacious mentor. In 2004, Queens College bestowed upon him the President's Award for Excellence in Teaching. On that occasion President James Muyskens cited the recipient's "unyielding intellectual rigor combined with a deeply humane connection to the material," especially in the teaching of the history and meaning of the Holocaust. Kraut had also come to Queens College to direct its Jewish Studies Program and to head the Center for Jewish Studies. The writ of the Center was outreach--to attract the larger, mostly non-academic community and to create an intellectual and cultural resource of high visibility and appeal for the Queens and Long Island area. With extraordinary energy and commitment, Kraut devoted himself to that task until his retirement from administrative duties in 2006, when Professor Elisheva Carlebach praised her colleague's "brilliance and dedication" as well as his "great dignity, eloquence, integrity and sense of humor." (2)

The combination of administrative competence and pedagogical flair are rare enough to be noteworthy, but readers of this journal are likely to be most familiar with the scholarly legacy of Benny Kraut; and thus his contributions to American Jewish historiography made him a triple threat. He won numerous grants and fellowships (from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture, the Canadian Foundation for Jewish Culture, the New York Council of the Humanities, and the American Jewish Archives, for example), all of which testify to the promise he projected and the talent he demonstrated in capturing what is significant about the American Jewish past. His friend, Professor Jonathan D. Sarna, has drawn special attention to the importance of a series of articles that Kraut published on the interaction of universalist faiths, especially on the terrain where Reform Judaism and liberal Christianity met, in close-as-handcuffs alignment. (3) Kraut's essays on the entanglement of the Unitarianism of the late nineteenth century with Reform Judaism, on the attitudes of Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise toward liberal Protestantism, and on the agenda of the National Conference of Christians and Jews are central components of Kraut's Nachlass. (4) Moreover, a monograph on an Orthodox synagogue that German refugees founded in Cincinnati in 1939 deserves to be better known. With precision and judiciousness, German-Jewish Orthodoxy in an Immigrant Synagogue: Cincinnati's New Hope Congregation and the Ambiguities of Ethnic Religion (1988) dealt with an exception to the rules of Jewish religious formation in America: eastern Europeans are supposed to found Orthodox shuls, and Germans are supposed to build Reform temples. Yet Orthodoxy, for all of its fragility, somehow established a beachhead in a Reform stronghold like Cincinnati, which is a paradox that Kraut's book deftly unravels. (5)

He is undoubtedly best known for From Reform Judaism to Ethical Culture: The Religious Evolution of Felix Adler (1979), his revised doctoral dissertation. (6) Kraut's subject was compelling. The son of Rabbi Samuel Adler of New York's Temple Emanu-El, the brother-in-law of Louis D. Brandeis, and the creator (virtually ex nihilo) of the Ethical Cultural Society, Felix Adler was decisive in injecting the social gospel into the bloodstream of American Jewry. Repudiating Social Darwinism, he helped make tikkun olam an irrepressible ideal in the vocabulary of the minority from which he proceeded to distance himself. A devotion to the betterment of a society that professed the civic goals of freedom and equality became integral to the progressive interpretation of Judaism itself. Thus a not very sinuous line can be drawn from Adler's Ethical Culture to the ardent New Freedom and then New Deal allegiances of Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, from the front-line inclusion of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel in the march from Selma to Montgomery in 1965, down to the Religious Action Center run by what is currently the largest of the denominations, Reform Judaism, in Washington, D. C. Because of Adler's own denials in his later years of his Jewish identity, the evolution of his ideas and his self-definition became for Kraut a way to trace the limits of religious tradition under the pressure of modernity. His book recorded how the forces of secularism, the claims of reason, and the advances of science affected the Reform Judaism that Adler decided to abandon. Candor requires an acknowledgement that intellectual history has generally been among the least vigorous precincts of American Jewish historiography. But Kraut's book, which did not profess to be a full-scale biography and which dared not plumb psychological depths, is an exception to that rule.

Administrative and communal responsibilities, combined with a love of teaching, torpedoed Kraut's progress on the research project that he had long wished to complete--a history of Yavneh, the National Jewish Religious Students Association to which he himself had belonged. But Kraut managed to get a second wind, in a burst of writing that drew upon his full access to the archives of the Orthodox collegiate society. In early August 2008, six weeks before he died, he sent an e-mail to this writer, announcing that from April until mid-July he had been "working like a maniac, literally 14-hour days, and could not stop. [I] have not felt that emotion in many, many years," he added, undoubtedly because an exploration of the history of Yavneh was a way of tapping into his own past, connecting the public with the personal (as he had done with his intellectual biography of Adler). (7) Only three more uninterrupted months of writing were needed; death denied him that request. The uncompleted manuscript is nevertheless scheduled to be published under the imprint of Hebrew Union College Press, and even in this form will surely deepen scholarly appreciation of how Orthodoxy managed to defy the odds against survival in America.

This writer knew Benny Kraut for exactly a quarter of a century. We met at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in the early fall of 1983. He was there for the academic year with his family--his cherished wife Penina ("Penny") and their three children, Racheli, Yehuda, and Yosefa ("Sefi"), all of whom survive him. In Cincinnati and on Long Island, Benny also showed himself to be a charming and gracious host; and to speak under the auspices of the programs that he directed ensured that his would be the most probing questions, the sort that hone in on the inconsistencies of an argument or the vulnerabilities of an interpretation. He managed to put more of a philosophical spin on the residue of the past than most professional historians are comfortable doing, perhaps because his primary interests were in Judaic thought and in the social context of religious ideas. He was both serious and civil. And who can forget the radiance of Benny's smile, the grace of his manner, or his generosity of spirit? The sobriety of the demands of the Orthodoxy that he practiced cast no shadow upon the geniality of his disposition. The psychic scar from the horror that the Third Reich had inflicted upon the Jewish people and upon his own family could not possibly have healed. Yet the openness with which Benny Kraut faced the world and the warmth of his disposition linger in the memory, and were undoubtedly achievements of character that had to be earned. Yehi zichro baruch.

Stephen J. Whitfield

Brandeis University

(1.) E-mail from Jeffrey Gurock to the members of the Academic Council of the American Jewish Historical Society, Oct. 29, 2008.

(2.) Elisheva Carlebach, quoted in Evan Zimroth, "Tribute Program Honoring Professor Benny Kraut," in Culture and Arts Guide, newsletter of the Center for Jewish Studies at Queens College (2006): 22.

(3.) See Sarna's tribute to Kraut on the H-Judaic online discussion network, posted Sep. 26, 2008. H-Judaic postings are searchable from the H-Net Discussion Logs Search webpage, http://www.h-net.org/logsearch/.

(4.) See, for example, Benny Kraut, "A Unitarian Rabbi? The Case of Solomon H. Sonneschein," in Jewish Apostasy in the Modern World, ed. Todd M. Endelman (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1987), 272-308; "Judaism Triumphant: Isaac Mayer Wise on Unitarianism and Liberal Christianity," AJS Review 7 (1982): 179-230; "Toward the Establishment of the National Conference of Christians and Jews: The Tenuous Road to Religious Goodwill in the 1920s," American Jewish History 77 (Mar. 1988): 388-412; and "A Wary Collaboration: Jews, Catholics, and the Protestant Goodwill Movement," in Between the Times: The Travail of the Protestant Establishment in America, 1900-1960, ed. William R. Hutchison (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 193-230.

(5.) See Benny Kraut, German-Jewish Orthodoxy in an Immigrant Synagogue: Cincinnati's New Hope Congregation and the Ambiguities of Ethnic Religion (New York: M. Wiener, 1988).

(6.) Benny Kraut, From Reform Judaism to Ethical Culture: The Religious Evolution of Felix Adler (Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College Press, 1979).

(7.) Personal e-mail from Benny Kraut to the author, Aug. 3, 2008.