Reconstructionist Judaism, wrote the Jewish sociologist Charles Liebman almost 60 years ago, “comes closer than any other movement or school of thought to articulating the meaning of Judaism for American Jews.”

By emphasizing belonging over rote observance, personal fulfillment over inherited obligation, and Jewish “civilization” over theology, Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan’s brainchild seemed poised to capture the imaginations and loyalties of Jews fully at home in America.

And yet, as Jenna Weissman Joselit notes in her new biography, “Mordecai M. Kaplan: Restless Soul,” Reconstructionism remains the smallest by far of American Jewish denominations. Similarly, the “liberal” Reform and Conservative movements, which absorbed a number of Kaplan’s principles,  wrestle with their identities and struggle to hold on to engaged followers. Orthodoxy, meanwhile, a movement of obligations and inherited do’s and don’t’s, is the fastest growing denomination.

Joselit’s book is an intimate portrait of a thinker and institution-builder who spent most of his career in the Conservative movement while staging a rear-guard action against many of its tenets. But again and again, frustration haunts his life story: By setting out to rescue Judaism from what he saw as “blind habit,” did Kaplan loosen some of the very bolts that hold religious life together? Four decades after his death in 1983, Jews are still asking: Can community thrive without commandments?

“He’s hopeful that people will take on these things on their own, and one doesn’t need a stick with which to beat them,” Joselit, professor of Judaic studies and history at George Washington University, told me in a Zoom interview (available here) last month. Kaplan wanted Jews to engage with Shabbat, the holidays and the totality of Jewish life “not because grandma said, or because........

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