Milton Steinberg

Rabbi Dr. Milton Steinberg
Rabbi Milton Steinberg
Organisation	Park Avenue Synagogue
Personal details
Born	1903 Rochester, New York
Died	1950
Nationality	United States
Denomination	Conservative Judaism
Children	Jonathan Steinberg, David Steinberg

Milton Steinberg (November 25, 1903 – March 20, 1950) was an American rabbi, philosopher, theologian and author.

Born in Rochester, New York, he was raised with the combination of his grandparents' traditional Jewish piety and his father's modernist socialism. He graduated as valedictorian of his class at DeWitt Clinton High School and then majored in Classics at City College of New York which he graduated from summa cum laude in 1924. Steinberg received his doctorate in philosophy from Columbia University in 1928 and then entered the Jewish Theological Seminary of America where he was ordained. In seminary, he was strongly influenced by Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan (1881–1983), the founder of Reconstructionist Judaism.

After five years in a pulpit in Indiana, he was invited by the Seminary to assume the pulpit of Manhattan's Park Avenue Synagogue, then a small congregation with a Reform orientation. In his sixteen years at the congregation, he grew it from 120 to 750 families. In 1943 he had a near fatal heart attack.

While a disciple of Kaplan who considered himself a Reconstructionist, Steinberg was critical of Kaplan's dismissal of metaphysics.

Steinberg's works included Basic Judaism, The Making of the Modern Jew, A Partisan Guide to the Jewish Problem and As A Driven Leaf, a historical novel revolving around the talmudic characters Elisha ben Abuyah and Rabbi Akiva. In his final years, he began writing a series of theological essays. This project, which he had hoped would conclude in a book of theology, was cut short by his death at age 46.