A Life of Courage: Sherwin Wine and Humanistic Judaism by Marilyn Rowens

Author:Marilyn Rowens [Rowens, Marilyn]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: IISHJ and the Milan Press
Published: 2004-06-01T07:00:00+00:00

THE COLLOQUIA AND THE QUEST FOR LEGITIMACY

By the time our first rabbis were ordained, Humanistic Judaism at last was becoming recognized as a legitimate, though still relatively small, branch of Judaism. That was no accident. It required strategizing, and again Sherwin was up to the task.

His main tool was involvement in high-visibility religious conferences. In 1993 he and Rabbi Friedman gave a presentation at the Parliament of the World’s Religions, along with leaders of non-Jewish humanist groups including the American Humanist Association and Ethical Culture. Our presence there, as well as that of pagan witches and earth goddess worshipers, led to the walkout of the Greek Orthodox delegation. The B’nai Brith Anti-Defamation League also walked out, but their protest was against the presence of Louis Farrakhan.

Next, Sherwin decided that we ourselves would become major conference givers. With the help of a hardworking, dedicated committee, he boldly organized a series of biennial colloquia, held at the Pivnick Center in 1995, 1997, 1999, and 2001, with the fifth scheduled for October 2003, featuring distinguished professors, writers, and thinkers in dialogue with the faculty of our institute. The colloquia have been partly funded by the Detroit Jewish Federation and have been introduced by its president, showing what a force Sherwin’s temple has become in the Detroit Jewish community.

The stage was set at the 1995 colloquium when keynote speaker Shoshana Cardin, past president of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Organizations, called upon her coreligionists to embrace Secular Humanistic Judaism as one of multiple valid forms of Jewishness. “Unless we begin to redefine who we are, we will lose those who don’t see any reason to affiliate with us,” she said. “Can we learn to give up turf and give people options?”

Colloquium ’99 coincided with Tamara Kolton’s ordination. At the end of the weekend, Emmanuel Goldsmith, a professor at Queens College, City University of New York, and a leading student of Mordecai Kaplan, expressed disappointment with the increasingly theistic direction Reconstructionism has taken and announced that he was joining our movement. While not all of our distinguished guests have become “converts” to our cause, all of our colloquia, as well as other outreach activities, have attracted widespread attention; as a result, a growing number of influential Jewish leaders and thinkers, such as Egon Mayer and Alan Dershowitz, know we exist and have had positive experiences with us.

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