CJ: Voices of Conservative/Masorti Judaism

by Joanne Palmer

May 2007 -- In the January 1957 United Synagogue Review, the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism’s president, Charles Rosengarten, announced that the publication soon would change radically. The sporadically published newsletter was not a good-enough way to communicate with the members of all United Synagogue’s affiliated congregations, he wrote. “Except for perhaps 20 per cent of our total membership, who may on occasion receive what is hardly more than a leaflet telling sketchily about some aspect of our activities, the rank and file of our Movement is never communicated with by any printed word from either the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, the principal fountainhead of Conservative Judaism, or from the United Synagogue.”

Things soon would be different. “It is our hope that before long such a publication will be a reality and will maintain a standard of high literary quality, worthy of our Movement...” he continued. But the change would not be easy, and it certainly would not be free. “The publication of such a magazine will probably entail an annual cost in excess of $100,000.00, a sum which is not now available to us, or even in sight,” he wrote.

Somehow, the financial challenge was met, although it would be many years before the magazine accepted advertising. In the summer of 1957, the first issue of the new, magazine-size quarterly United Synagogue Review was published. Its cover featured a photograph of earnest young people, in black-and-white shorts, sitting by a black-and-white Camp Ramah lakefront as they studied Torah. The issue included an article called “The Vital Center” by a rabbinical student named Jacob Neuser. Another rabbinical student, who spent his summers working at Camp Ramah, wrote about the camp. His name? Neil Gillman.

Some things change, others remain the same. This summer – coincidentally exactly 50 years after it became a magazine – the United Synagogue Review will cease to exist in the form we know today. (It has appeared in a number of sizes and at varying intervals and acquired color during this last half-century, but it always maintained its identity.) It will be replaced by a new magazine, CJ: Voices of Conservative/Masorti Judaism.

The new magazine, again a quarterly, is being formed by merging the Review with two other magazines from Conservative movement bodies, Women’s League Outlook and the Federation of Jewish Men’s Clubs’ Torchlight. We are making this change for a number of reasons. Some are purely pragmatic. We will benefit from economies of scale. We will be able to create bigger magazines and publish them more often. We will be able to tell more of our stories to our readers than we have been able to do before.

The other reasons for making the change are broader. As balkanized as the Conservative movement often seems, we must remember that in fact we are one movement. We hold firmly to the idea of pluralism, but we must realize that pluralism is nourished by the roots the movement shares and is sheltered by the boundaries that bring us together.

We are at an exciting time for Conservative Judaism, but as everyone knows exciting times can be dangerous as well. Crossroads by definition go in many directions; we can travel only one at a time. We movement insiders know that we are at the vibrant center of Jewish life as we explore the tensions between halakha and the 21st century, between faith and reason, between the past, the present, and future. But we know that to outsiders it often seems that we are in a movement in crisis, losing members as we take only default positions, hugging the center of the road as life flashes past us on our right and our left.

We cannot let that definition go unchallenged.

With the combined resources of the three organizations, we can model the cooperation that should come naturally to the movement. Each of the three groups will continue to have its own pages and we will share others. We will not lose our own identities and we will continue to offer our United Synagogue readers United Synagogue news. We also will be able to provide information about the broader Conservative movement and perhaps even the wider Jewish world beyond.

This is an enormously exciting opportunity to show who we are as a movement– what we believe in and how we turn those beliefs into action.

We are one movement, engaged in a passionate exploration of what it means to be in the center. We will continue that exploration together.