Max Kadushin

Max Kadushin (Belarusian: Макс Кадушын; December 6, 1895, Minsk – July 23, 1980) was a Conservative rabbi best known for his organic philosophy of rabbinics.

Max Kadushin grew up in Seattle; his father operated a store for gold miners going to the Klondike. Kadushin came to New York in 1912. After graduating from New York University and getting a B.A. in 1912, Kadushin studied for the rabbinate at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America and was ordained in 1920. There he encountered Mordecai Kaplan and soon became a key figure in Kaplan's Reconstructionist Judaism movement. As his studies in aggadah continued during the late 1920s, however, he found himself drifting away from Kaplan's decidedly modernist approach to rabbinics and began to argue for a more aftermodernist approach—one that placed greater weight on the enduring significance of the aggadah.

In 1921, Kadushin became the rabbi of Congregation B'nai Israel of Washington Heights in New York City. In 1923 he married Evelyn Garfiel, a psychologist and professor, who later became well known for her book on Jewish prayer, The Service of the Heart (1958). Their son, Charles Kadushin, became a notable sociologist and social network analyst at Columbia University and later, the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.

In 1926, Kadushin moved to Chicago, where he became the rabbi of Humboldt Boulevard Temple. In 1931, Kadushin moved to Madison, Wisconsin, where he served as the rabbi of the University of Wisconsin Hillel. In 1932, he received a Doctor of Hebrew Letters degree from the Jewish Theological Seminary.

From 1942 to 1952 he was director of the Hebrew High School of Greater New York, later known as the Marshaliah Hebrew High School. During the next several years he served two congregations in the New York area, the Bay Shore Jewish Center of Long Island, 1953–1954, and Synagogue Adath Israel of Riverdale, Bronx, New York, 1954-1958. From 1958 to 1960 Kadushin was professor of midrash and homiletics at the Academy for Higher Jewish Learning in New York City.

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