Elmer Berger was an author and Jewish Reform rabbi widely known for his anti-Zionism.
Background
Elmer Berger was born on May 27, 1908 in Cleveland, Ohio, United States. Son of a Hungarian-born railroad engineer and a third generation German-American Jew born in Texas. As a boy his family attended the Euclid Avenue Temple (Anshe Chesed Congregation) where he was encouraged to study for the rabbinate by Rabbi Louis Wolsey.
Education
Elmer graduated from the University of Cincinnati.
Career
Elmer began his brief career in the ministry in Pontiac, Michigan before serving in Flint, Michigan from 1936 to 1942. Beginning in 1943, he served the American Council for Judaism as its national executive director until becoming its executive vice president from 1955 until 1967. He was also director of American Friends of the Middle East and began serving as the president of American Jewish Alternatives to Zionism in 1968. He wrote several books, including "The Jewish Dilemma", "Who Knows Better Must Say So", "Peace in the Middle East: How to Achieve It?", "Judaism or Jewish Nationalism", and "Memoirs of an Anti-Zionist Jew". In 1968 he founded, with the support of some loyal friends, American Jewish Alternatives to Zionism (AJAZ), which was intended to serve only as his personal vehicle for writing and lecturing.
Politics
From the beginning, Elmer Berger was squarely in the camp of those Reform rabbis who opposed the Columbus Platform of 1937 which moderated the movement's original anti-Zionism and rejection of traditional ritual. It was Berger's mentor, Louis Wolsey, who would in June 1942 issue a call to convene the American Council for Judaism, and who hired Berger as its first executive director. In the organization's struggle against the Zionist program adopted at the Biltmore Conference in May 1942, Berger increasingly became the movement's public face, particularly with the publication of his book The Jewish Dilemma in 1945, which argued that Zionism was a surrender to the racial myths about the Jews and that assimilationism was still the best path for the Jews in the modern world. In his book "The Jewish Dilemma", he also expressed support of the Soviet Union. He wrote "..the Jews of the Soviet have enjoyed equality of status and opportunity for only about a quarter of a century. They are the most recently emancipated Jews in the world... Freedom and integration and emancipation flow now through the veins of the Jews." and that "We have seen Jews free and equal under democracy and communism. In respect to Zionism he wrote, "At a single stroke, the Revolution emancipated those very Jews for whom, previously, no solution other than Zionism would be efficacious, according to Zionist spokesmen. Soviet Jews no longer had need of Palestine- or any other refuge. The level of suffering of Russian Jewry... was gone".
Personality
Quotes from others about the person
Norton Mezvinsky: "Elmer Berger was a Jewish patriot".
Connections
Berger married Seville Schwartz, the sister of a classmate at Hebrew Union College on September 3, 1931. They divorced in 1946, and shortly thereafter he remarried to Ruth Winegarden, the daughter of a prominent furniture manufacturer who belonged to the Flint congregation. They were married until Ruth's death in 1979.