Background

Will Herberg was born on June 30, 1901 in Lyakhavichy, Russia (now Belarus). He was the son of Hyman Louis Herberg, a merchant, and Sarah Wolkov, a teacher. The family moved to Brooklyn in New York City in 1904.

Hyman Herberg was unsuccessful in business and deserted his family around 1910; Will and his brother helped their mother with piecework at home. The family seems to have been mostly indifferent to their Jewish heritage.

Education

Strongly encouraged by his mother, Herberg supplemented his work in elementary school and Boys' High School with a rigorous program of study at home in sciences and languages. He attended City College of New York from 1918 to 1920, when he was suspended, apparently for too many absences from the required courses in military science. To the end of his life he retained a great respect for formal, higher education, although most of his prodigious learning derived from a lifetime of voracious reading.

Career

In the 1920s Herberg wrote the first of the more than 300 articles he would publish in his lifetime. In 1929, Herberg remained loyal to Jay Lovestone when, on orders from Stalin, the Lovestonites were expelled from the American Communist party. For the next decade, Herberg helped edit Revolutionary Age (later, Workers Age). He also gave popular courses on Marxist theory at the Lovestonite New Workers School. From 1933 to 1954 he served as "educational director" of a local of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union - a position that gave him ample time to read and to write.

His most influential book, Protestant-Catholic-Jew (1955), maintained that a high percentage of the flood of Americans who joined churches and professed religious convictions in the post-World War II years did so in order to "belong. " On the basis of a few specialized sociological studies, Herberg concluded that a large percentage of Americans were, in fact or in spirit, third-generation immigrants; alienated from the foreign ways of their grandparents, they were demonstrably unwilling to renounce their ethnicity as completely as had their parents. They refused to believe that to become Americans it was necessary for everyone to enter the same large "melting pot. " The third generation, instead, celebrated the existence of a "triple melting pot" that encouraged Protestants, Catholics, and Jews to preserve their religious heritages even as they renounced their "foreign ways. " Implicit in this sociological explanation of the religious revival was the politically "good news" that most Americans now believed that all three religious communions were "legitimate. " But, Herberg hastened to observe, there was a theological price to pay. Each communion had come to endorse, uncritically, the "American Way of Life"; each verged on becoming merely a "culture-religion"; each ignored or suppressed the prophetic element in authentic Judaism and Christianity.

Shortly after the publication of Protestant-Catholic-Jew, Herberg was appointed professor of Judaic studies and social philosophy (and later professor of philosophy and culture) in the graduate school of Drew University. He was a demanding but popular lecturer until his health forced him in 1976 to retire.

He published anthologies on Maritain, Berdyayev, Buber, and Tillich (in Four Existential Theologians, 1958); on Buber (1956); and on Barth (1960). A representative sample of his many theological essays written in his years at Drew was published in 1976 as Faith Enacted as History: Essays in Biblical Theology. Herberg also lectured and wrote extensively on social and political issues.

From 1961 until his death in Morristown, New Jersey, he was religion editor for William F. Buckley's National Review.

Achievements

• Herberg represented an independent strand in American Jewish leadership. While working from the standpoint of a Conservative Jew, he interacted with other Americans of many faiths, reflecting on the cultural and social conditions which challenged all those who took religion seriously. Herberg is remembered as a prominent traditionalist conservative and contributor to traditionalist publications such as Russell Kirk's Modern Age and to William F. Buckley Jr. 's leading conservative magazine National Review, which published a special issue in August 1977 in Herberg's honor.

Works

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  • Four Existentialist Theologians: Maritain, Berdyaev, Buber and Tillich.

    (It is the purpose of this book to present, within the con...)

  • Religion In America

    (The Founding Fathers could not have imagined the extent a...)

  • Judaism and Modern Man: An Interpretation of Jewish Religion (Jewish Lights Classic Reprint)

    (Many of the earliest books, particularly those dating bac...)

  • The Heritage of the Civil War

    (Reprinted From The Modern Quarterly, Summer Number, 1932 ...)

  • Protestant--Catholic--Jew: An Essay in American Religious Sociology

    ( "The most honored discussion of American religion in mi...)

  • 3 Volumes of Systematic Theology by Thomas C. Oden: Volume 1- The Word of Life, Volume 2- The Living God, Volume 3- Life in the Spirit

    (The first volume of this comprehensive trilogy proffered ...)

  • Four Existentialist Theologians: A Reader from the Works of Jacques Maritain, Nicolas Berdyaev, Martin Buber and Paul Tillich

    (The revival of theology in our times is best exemplified ...)

  • From Marxism to Judaism: The Collected Essays of Will Herberg (Masterworks of Modern Jewish Writing)

    (This is the first book of essays by Will Herberg. His wri...)

  • Freedom of Choice in Education
  • An American Dialogue: A Protestant Looks at Catholicism, and a Catholic Looks at Protestantism

Religion

For a decade Herberg wrote comparatively little, but he read extensively in Judeo-Christian theology. He was especially impressed by the definition of the human predicament developed by Rienhold Niebuhr, whom Herberg was to declare "America's most searching contemporary theologian. " He also found in Kierkegaard, Nicholay Berdyayev, Karl Barth, Martin Buber, and Franz Rosenzweig justification for a "religious existentialism. " At the same time, Solomon Schechter helped him explore the rabbinic tradition, which he had never carefully studied. The dramatic reorientation of Herberg's thought was epitomized in his Judaism and Modern Man, which was published in 1951 as "a confession of faith" - an attempt to present "the truth of my existence as man and as Jew. " He contrasted "Greco-Oriental" spirituality--otherworldly, impersonal, ahistorical--with the "biblical faith" common to Jews and Christians. Only a biblical faith would enable man to "transcend" the "tragic absurdity of existence"--"the self-defeating, self-destroying dynamic of human life conceived in its own terms. " Only a "total and unreserved allegiance to the Living God" would save humanity from such pervasive modern "idolatries" as science, psychoanalysis, and Marxism. The book was criticized by political radicals who deplored Herberg's "failure of nerve" and by some Jewish theologians who protested that Judaism was considerably less pessimistic about the moral and rational powers of men than was presented.

Herberg acquired a substantial audience for his book and for his lectures among college students and among a growing number of intellectuals like himself who could no longer commit themselves to Marxian socialism but hoped to find, in a modern interpretation of the theology of their forebears, a faith to live by. Herberg felt obliged to distinguish genuinely God-fearing affections from the flatulent self-satisfaction of the "religious revival" of the 1950s.

Herberg also wrote that anti-Catholicism is the antisemitism of secular Jewish intellectuals.

Politics

While at City College, Herberg joined the Communist party; subsequently, he directed the summer camps of the Young Workers' League and was elected to its "Politburo" with a special responsibility for agitprop.

Herberg's range was remarkable. He undertook to clarify the "Negro question, " to demonstrate the congruence of Marx and Einstein, and to rebut both Mike Gold and Edmund Wilson on the relation of literature to revolutionary action. He won recognition as a leading "theoretician" in the Lovestonite attempt to reclaim from the Stalinists the leadership of the Communist movement while eschewing the errors both of Trotskyites and of social democrats like Sidney Hook. He subscribed to Lovestone's belief that American culture had had an "exceptional" past and was therefore unlikely to have a future like that confidently charted by the Stalinists for all modern industrialized countries.

Throughout the 1930s, Herberg demonstrated the wide reading, the cocksureness, and the verbal extravagance of an effective polemicist. By 1940, however, Herberg--like most Lovestonites--had wearied of attempting to define a genuinely Marxist alternative to Stalinism. "Old-line social democracy, traditional Marxian orthodoxy, and Russian Bolshevism have all failed, " he wrote, the victims of flawed philosophy and of an inveterate willingness to justify shabby, even criminal means by invoking illusory ends. The Lovestonites closed their school and discontinued their journal.

He published angry polemics against modern "liberalism. " He sharply censured the radical individualism of Martin Luther King Jr. , that led to the assertion of the right of civil disobedience. He criticized the "humanist" implications of Pope John XXIII's aggiornamento. He declared Senator Joseph McCarthy's "system of government by rabble-rousing" to be the "logical outcome" of Franklin D. Roosevelt's populist contempt for constitutional checks and balances.

Personality

Quotes from others about the person

• "As a philosopher and theologian Herberg has helped Christians to reach a deeper understanding of their own faith. "

Connections

Herberg married Anna Thompson on July 6, 1925. She died in 1959. They had no children.

Father:

Hyman Louis Herberg

Mother:

Sarah (Wolkov) Herberg

Spouse:

Anna (Thompson) Herberg

References

• The Right Opposition. the Lovestoneites and the International Communist Opposition of the 1930s
• Up from Communism
• Will Herberg: A Bio-Bibliography (Bio-Bibliographies in Law and Political Science)
• Will Herberg: From Right to Right (Studies in Religion)