new york | Years ago, David Twersky asked his secretary to give Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg a call.
“She asked, ‘Can you hold for David Twersky?'” recalls Twersky, now the director of international affairs for the American Jewish Congress. When he picked up the receiver, however, he found that Hertzberg had hung up.
When Twersky called back, Hertzberg told him, “The only person I hold for is the president of the United States.”
Hertzberg, who died April 17 at age 84 of heart failure, wasn’t making it up: Presidents, indeed, called to pick his brain. The anecdote is telling: Hertzberg was a man of enormous influence — and he knew it.
His views, say those who knew him, were frequently contrarian and often controversial, but they always were backed by an extraordinary intellect.
Born in Lubaczow, Poland, in 1921, Hertzberg immigrated to America with his family in 1926. He grew up in an Orthodox home in Baltimore and was ordained as a Conservative rabbi at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York.
He served as a Hillel director, an Air Force chaplain and as a pulpit rabbi in congregations in Philadelphia, Nashville and then in Englewood, N.J., where he served as spiritual leader of Temple Emanu-El for some 30 years.
In 1961 Hertzberg took a job as a history professor at Columbia University. Later he taught religion at Dartmouth College, and in 1991 he joined the faculty at New York University.
“Here was a rabbi who served decades as a congregational rabbi doing the kinds of rabbinic service that every rabbi did: marrying people, burying people, preaching, leading a community. At the same time, he rose to prominence as the leader of several major organizations and gave voice to Jewish issues of the day, whether they were concerned with interfaith matters, the state of Israel, with human rights and civil rights,” said Rabbi Joel Meyers, executive vice president of the Conservative movement’s Rabbinical Assembly.
Hertzberg served as president of the American Jewish Congress from 1972 to 1978, and as a member of the World Zionist Congress executive from 1969 to 1978. In 1975 he was elected vice president of the World Jewish Congress, a post he held until 1991.
Hertzberg authored and edited several books, including “The Zionist Idea: A Historical Analysis and Reader,” “The Jews in America,” and “Jewish Polemics.”
He also authored dozens of essays on the state of American Jewry, and an autobiography, “A Jew in America: My Life and a People’s Struggle for Identity.” He was at work on two books when he died.
Hertzberg was an early and outspoken proponent of racial equality in the United States, taking part in the March on Washington in 1963. He also was chairman of the International Jewish Committee for Interreligious Consultations when it became the first Jewish group to formally meet with the Vatican about the Church’s response to the Holocaust.
Friends and colleagues remembered Hertzberg as a brilliant, funny, eloquent man who was not afraid to poke fun at himself or make his opinion known about issues and individuals, sometimes in salty language.
“He was a very sharp intellect, it was always apparent,” said Alan Tigay, executive editor of Hadassah magazine, where Hertzberg sat on the editorial board for some three decades. “He was brilliant, sharp, iconoclastic. He always was a commanding presence.”
Hertzberg was an early and outspoken dove on Israeli politics. After the 1967 Six Day War, for example, he ruffled some feathers in the Jewish community by calling for the establishment of a Palestinian state.
Still, his stances on issues of politics often were unpredictable. When he was in the company of doves, he took hawkish positions, those who knew him say, but in the company of hawks he took dovish stances.
“He always presented contrary views with intellectual arguments to back them up,” says Rabbi Israel Singer, chairman of the World Jewish Congress’ Policy Council. “You had no choice but to reassess your views after you heard his brilliant presentations.”