Milton Steinberg (1903-1950) Papers

American author, philosopher, rabbi, teacher, and theologian Milton Steinberg was born in Rochester, NY on November 24, 1903. His father Samuel was born in Seraye, Lithuania and educated at the yeshiva in Volozhin, Lithuania. His mother Fannie, nėe Sternberg, was born in Rochester, NY to a family that managed a boarding house. Milton had two sisters: Florence and Frieda. In 1919, the Steinberg family relocated to the Bronx so that Florence might pursue a singing career.

Milton attended DeWitt Clinton High School, where he excelled in his studies and graduated as the valedictorian. In 1924, he matriculated the City College of New York to study philosophy, and graduated first in his class; with additional prizes in history, philosophy, Greek, and Latin. He then attended the Jewish Theological Seminary and was ordained as a rabbi in 1928. While attending seminary, he simultaneously earned a Masters degree in philosophy at Columbia University.

Steinberg’s rabbinical career began in 1928, Indianapolis, IN, at Congregation Beth-El Zedeck. In June 1929, Milton married Edith Alpert. Despite his good work and efforts at ministering to that community, the distance from family and familiar surroundings in New York City put a strain on the Steinbergs.

In 1933, he and Edith returned to New York City, where Milton was hired as rabbi of the Park Avenue Synagogue. The following year their first son, Jonathan, was born. Their second son, David, was born in 1937.

Under Milton's administration, the Park Avenue Synagogue grew from 120 families, to over 700. The Steinbergs made their home at the synagogue, and Milton remained its rabbi until his death. In addition to his rabbinical career he worked with Hadassah, the American Jewish Congress, the Rabbinical Assembly-Committee on Social Justice, B’nai B’rith’s Hillel Commission, Jewish Publication Society’s Publication Committee, the Board of Jewish Education, the Jewish Reconstructionist Foundation, and served as editor of The Reconstructionist. He taught classes at the Jewish Theological Seminary’s Teachers Institute, and at the 92nd Street YMHA.

In 1942, while serving at Park Avenue Synagogue, Milton joined the New York State National Guard as a chaplain, and was given the commission of Lieutenant Colonel. His first mission was to tour various Army bases throughout the country, mostly in Texas, to determine the spiritual needs of the soldiers. His busy schedule and work load eventually took its toll on his health and, while on tour in 1944, he suffered a heart attack. Due to the remoteness of his location he was unable to receive immediate medical attention. While this severely limited his physical capabilities and restriscted his ability to do as many things in one day as possible, it allowed him to focus on his family and his writings.

After the war, his activities were limited mostly to writing, although he still served as rabbi and worked with Christian clergy, seeking their support for the establishment of the state of Israel.

Throughout his life, three men left their mark on Milton's intellectual identity, and influenced his work: Morris Raphael Cohen, Jacob Kohn, and Mordecai Kaplan. He met Morris Raphael Cohen as a student at the City College of New York. Cohen’s teaching instilled in Steinberg intellectual discipline and a commitment to philosophical rationalism. Jacob Kohn was Steinberg's rabbi at the Ansche Chesed synagogue, which his family attended after moving to New York in 1919. Under the guidance of Rabbi Kohn, Milton came to believe that any philosophical understanding required faith in an absolute truth. Lastly, Mordecai Kaplan, Steinberg's homiletics professor and mentor at the Jewish Theological Seminary, developed a significant and lasting relationship. Despite differences of opinion between Steinberg and Kaplan, Steinberg strongly believed that Kaplan’s Reconstructionism was an acceptable ideology for American Jewry, and a solution to what Steinberg believed were the problems facing modern Jewry.

Steinberg was convinced that faith is an essential component to modern Jewish life, and elaborated on this philosophy in his works. In his first book The Making of Modern Jewry (1934), he examined the causes of what he and others called the “Jewish Problem,” that is, how can the tenets of Judaism fit into modernity. Based on his philosophy and the ideas put forth in the above mentioned work, he set out to describe his ideas in fiction. In his first novel, As A Driven Leaf (1939), he tells the story of the heretic Elisha ben Abuyah, who betrayed the Jews to the Romans during the Bar Kochba Revolt. In the novel Steinberg attempts to reconcile Judaism with Greek philosophy in order to demonstrate the interdependence between reason and faith. In the years between the writing of As A Driven Leaf and his next book, A Partisan Guide to the Jewish Problem (1945), much in Judaism had changed and, he had suffered a heart attack. In this new work, he laid out his frustration at the lack of answers and offered his solutions to the many problems besetting the Jewish world. In Basic Judaism (1947), he returned to the topic of theology, and offered a synoptic description of the Jewish faith, accessible to all Jews, the believers and the indifferent, as well as non-Jews. This was his last work published in his lifetime.

When he died suddenly in 1950, he had been already at work on two books concerning theology, and another novel. Edith, his wife and assistant, published the first, a collection of his sermons and papers called A Believing Jew, in 1951; the other, Anatomy of Faith (1960), edited by Arthur A. Cohen, was an attempt describe Steinberg's theology in a systemic fashion. Following the Holocaust, Steinberg’s theology had grown increasingly relational and mystical as he read the works of Christian Neo-Orthodox writers such as the Reinhold and H. Richard Niebuhr and Karl Barth. The manuscript for his second novel, A Prophet’s Wife (2010), tells the account of Hosea and Gomer, in which God's compassion, mercy, and forgiveness are demonstrated. The novel was published sixty years after his death, in March 2010.

In March 1950, at the age of 46, Milton Steinberg passed away. He was survived by his wife, Edith, and sons Jonathan and David. Despite only having been in the rabbinate for two decades, Steinberg's ideas, work, and writings left a profound mark on American Jewish thought.