Henry Enoch Kagan

Background

Henry Enoch Kagan was born on November 28, 1906 in Sharpsburg, Pennsylvania, United States, the son of Alexander Benjamin Kagan, a designer of men's suits, and Sarah Rivlin Ginsburg, a milliner-designer. His ancestry on the maternal side contains an unbroken line of rabbis dating back four centuries. After spending his childhood in Washington, Pennsylvania, Kagan moved to Cincinnati, Ohio.

Education

Kagan graduated in 1924 from Hughes High School, Cincinnati, Ohio and in 1928 from the University of Cincinnati with the Bachelor of Arts degree and Phi Beta Kappa election. He spent the following year studying theology at Hebrew Union College, also in Cincinnati. Later he a earned the Master of Arts degree in political science in Uniontown. He pursued graduate work in psychology at Columbia University for over a decade before completing the Doctor of Philosophy degree in 1949.

Career

Kagan held rabbinical positions at Temple Beth Zion in Johnstown, Pennsylvania (1929 - 1930), Temple Israel in Uniontown, Pennsylvania (1930 - 1934), and Temple Rodef Shalom in Pittsburgh (1934 - 1937). While at Uniontown he also directed the Hillel Foundation at West Virginia University. In 1937 he accepted what was to become his major lifetime position, rabbi of the Sinai Temple in Mount Vernon, New York. This suburban congregation, which numbered 125 families when Kagan arrived, grew to 1, 800 members by 1965.

In many ways, Kagan pioneered in promoting the integration of the rabbinical ministry and psychotherapy. He was the first practicing rabbi to deliver a scientific paper before the American Psychological Association and the first Jewish clergyman to gain official certification as a psychologist by the state of New York. He founded both the Committee on Psychiatry and Religion of the Central Conference of American Rabbis and the Counseling Center of the New York Federation of Reformed Synagogues. Kagan ardently opposed the anti-Semitism among Christians. His 1934 Master of Arts thesis, "The Treatment of Jewish Minorities Under the League of Nations, " indicated his developing interest in relations between Jews and non-Jews. In 1952 he published his other work entitled Changing the Attitude of Christian Toward Jew: A Psychological Approach Through Religion. In this study, Kagan described the results of his work with over 500 Christian youths at Episcopal and Methodist summer church camps in 1946 and 1947. He found that traditional efforts to reduce anti-Semitism by admonition and appeal to religious ideals influenced how a person believed he should feel but not how he actually felt. Kagan, by contrast, achieved much more significant attitudinal changes when he encouraged the young people to discuss openly their feelings while he guided them in evaluating these feelings in the context of the Christian value system. The key ingredients, then, in Kagan's system of group prejudice-reduction included verbal catharsis, a skillful counselor, and an objective evaluation of how the prejudice related to the charitable ideals of the faith accepted by the group. Kagan's method of combating prejudice became widely influential, especially in the Roman Catholic church, where eventually it was incorporated into the church's educational system.

He accepted a perhaps unprecedented role for a rabbi when in the 1950's and 1960's Roman Catholic authorities invited him to serve as a professor of pastoral psychology and counseling for priests at St. John's Abbey in Minnesota and for priests and nuns studying at Iona College in New York. Especially noteworthy was Kagan's impact on the Second Vatican Council's Declaration "The Attitude of the Church Toward Non-Christians" (1965), which formally redefined the age-old charge of Jewish guilt for the death of Jesus. Two years earlier Kagan had appeared at the Third International Congress of Group Psychotherapy in Milan, Italy, to read a paper on his method for dealing with anti-Semitism resulting specifically from the New Testament account of the Crucifixion of Jesus. As a result Roman Catholic authorities in Italy invited him to the University of Milan to organize a research program studying the relation of the Crucifixion story to anti-Semitism throughout the centuries. The program was linked with the proposed declaration then before the Vatican Council, and Kagan served as a consultant to Augustin Cardinal Bea, who prepared the declaration.

Achievements

• The contribution for which Kagan earned his greatest recognition nationally and internationally was his promotion of Freudian insights and group-therapy techniques to reduce anti-Semitism among Christians. His most influential writing was his Columbia dissertation, which was later published as Changing the Attitude of Christian Toward Jew: A Psychological Approach Through Religion (1952).

Works

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  • Changing the Attitude of Christian Toward Jew: A Psychological Approach Through Religion

    (Changing the Attitude of Christian Toward Jew: A Psycholo...)

  • Six Who Changed The World

Religion

Kagan became increasingly convinced of the need for clergymen to understand psychology and to emphasize their role in counseling. He was greatly influenced by Freudian thought and even argued that this emphasis was warranted by ancient rabbinical traditions. He maintained that the religious counselors of biblical times, who used healing techniques intuitively similar to those of modern psychotherapists, greatly outnumbered the prophets and priests.

Membership

Kagan served on the Committee on the Relations Between Religion and Psychology of the American Psychological Association.

Connections

Kagan married Esther Ruth Miller, a teacher, librarian, and writer, on July 16, 1939. They had two children.

Father:

Alexander Benjamin Kagan

designer

Mother:

Sarah Rivlin Ginsburg

designer

Spouse:

Esther Ruth Miller

teacher, librarian, writer