An Interview with Dr. Richard L. Rubenstein
by Jerry Gordon (March 2010)
 Dr. Richard L. Rubenstein is an ordained rabbi, noted theologian and author. He began his religious training at Cincinnati’s Hebrew Union College, receiving the B.A. from the University of Cincinnati. He was ordained and received the Master of Hebrew Literature from the Jewish Theological Seminary. He earned the Master of Theology from Harvard Divinity School and the PhD in the History of Religion from Harvard. He was also a post-doctoral fellow at Yale. For a quarter of a century he taught religious studies at Florida State University where he was named a Robert O. Lawton Distinguished Professor, the University’s highest academic honor. Following his retirement from FSU, Dr. Rubenstein served from 1994 to 1999 as President of the University of Bridgeport (UB), Connecticut, where he continues to serve as Distinguished Professor of Religion. Upon retirement as president, UB’s trustees named him President Emeritus for his years of meritorious service.
Dr. Rubenstein was a founding member of the Editorial Advisory Board of the Washington Times, later serving as chairman. His views on the Shoah (Holocaust), Jewish and Christian theology, and the psychology of religion have been much sought after by Christian colleagues. His opinions on these and other subjects have been published in the New York Times, Time Magazine, Newsweek and even Playboy. He has published widely in scholarly journals and attended international theological and interreligious conferences where he encountered directly Muslim jurists and Imams and their views on Islam, the Sharia law of the Quranic Canon and treatment of unbelievers.
He is the author of many books on religion, the Holocaust, and the impact of surplus populations on immigration, social destabilization, war and genocide. Among his works are:The Religious Imagination: A Study in Psychoanalysis and Jewish Theology, based on his Harvard PhD thesis, for which he received an Italian literary prize in Rome in 1977. His seminal book, After Auschwitz: History, Radical Theology and Contemporary Judaism and its companion volume, Approaches to Auschwitz: the Holocaust and Its Legacy co-authored by John K. Roth, are highly regarded by Holocaust scholars. The Cunning of History : Mass Death and the American Future, with an introduction by the late Pulitzer Prize author, William Styron, and The Age of Triage : Fear and Hope in an Overcrowded World, are considered important readings in the study of surplus population and historical causes of conflict. His latest book, Jihad and Genocide: (Studies in Genocide, History Religion and Human Rights ) is the product of several years of research on the threat of annihilationist Islam to Western civilization and Jewish survival. You may read a review of Dr. Rubenstein’s Jihad and Genocide by Rebecca Bynum in this current edition of the New English Review.
Dr. Rubenstein thank you for consenting to this interview.
Gordon: What was it like growing up as a Jew among pro-Nazis in the Yorkville section of New York during the 1930’s?
Rubenstein: In 1937, East 86th Street was the heart of Yorkville. It was then the German section of New York and was almost completely Nazi. Wherever you went, there were swastikas flying. I remember that at one end of the block, there was a tourist agency advertising trips to Germany on the Hamburg-America Line. This was when the German American Bund was strongest. One of my friend Bob's acquaintances was a German by the name of Henig. We barely talked to each other. I was aware of what was going on, both over in Europe and also in the United States, not that it directly affected me.
Then it did affect me. I think it was in 1938, when I was walking along the street at about 10:30 at night, after having been at a school affair and I heard, across the street, three drunken men – I think they were Irish – shouting, "Goddamn dirty Jews!" I said, "Shut up," and they came over and they beat the hell out of me. My parents complained to the police who came up and I noticed two things: One, the police were trying to find me guilty – "Why were you out that late? Why were you making trouble?", and my parents were being quite weak about it. They did not stand up for me. So, I had the feeling of Jewish powerlessness in a very graphic way.
I thought to myself, "Well, if this is what being Jewish means,” – I had had no Bar-Mitzvah. I had no emotional ties to anything Jewish at the time, except that I knew that my background was Jewish. I asked myself, "Why should I be Jewish?” I thought it was a matter of choice in those days. So, I went to All Souls Church at 80th Street and Lexington Avenue in Manhattan, and talked to the Director of Religious Education. She invited me to join the Young People's Group. Shortly thereafter, I took the right hand of fellowship and became a Unitarian. I decided that I was going to become a minister. I had come to feel that religion was overwhelmingly important.
One day, I got a letter from somebody I had met whose father was the executive secretary of the American Unitarian Association. He said, "You are going to make a fine minister, but you need to change your name from Rubenstein to one that is less Jewish, more Anglo-Saxon." That sort of hit me like a lightning bolt. I went home and thought about it and said to myself, "I'm not going to do this, change my name." First of all, I would have spent the rest of my life worrying about being found out. Secondly, all of a sudden, I began to worry about ancestry and I thought, "I can't rat on my background."
Living on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, I had friends who went to Temple Emanu-El on Fifth Avenue. They introduced me to Rabbi Nathan Perelman of Temple Emanu-El. I told him, with a lot of chutzpah (nerve), “I want to be a reform rabbi." I couldn't read Hebrew. I never had a Bar-Mitzvah. I knew very little about Jewish tradition, but he thought I was presentable and could do it. So, he decided to mentor me and invited me to become a member of the Junior Society of Temple Emanu-El, in preparing to become a student at the Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, Ohio
Gordon: What was it like going through the Reform Jewish Hebrew Union College n Cincinnati during World War II?
Rubenstein: Early on, there was one crucial encounter when Julian Morgenstern, who was the president of the Hebrew Union College, came to New York. Rabbi Perelman said, "You ought to call on him and tell him that you're interested in becoming a student at the College,” which I did. We got along especially well when I made a comment that I will never forget. "Dr. Morgenstern,” I said, “if being a rabbi means being a Zionist, then I could never become a rabbi." He smiled broadly and said, "Richard that will not be a problem." It was obvious that he was looking for presentable, American-Jewish young men who did not have a Yiddish trace in their spoken English, and who could become presentable American Reform rabbis. In spite of my ignorance, I seemed to fit the bill.
As a student at the College, my opinions began to change drastically. I realized what was happening to Europe’s Jews. I also realized that anti-Zionism was absolutely no answer, that basically, Jews were being slaughtered because they lacked the power to defend themselves and that Zionism was an attempt to provide empowerment and sovereignty for Jews. By 1944, I had completely abandoned my hostile views on Zionism and saw the logic of the Zionist position. Theodore Herzl (1860-1904), founder of political Zionism and an assimilated Jew, was one of the thinkers whom I most greatly admired. Like me, he understood the role that power plays in human and group relationships. I had come to realize that anti-Zionist groups simply didn't understand what was going on. I understood that it was a very desperate effort on the part of Europe’s surviving Jews to get to Palestine, but there was no other place for them. My attitude changed completely. The problem with Martin Buber and many of the other people who talked about a bi-national state of Jews and Arabs was that they would have reproduced the same powerlessness in the refuge that had caused them to flee from Europe. This would have been a disaster.
At the same time, my theological opinions began to develop. By the fall of 1944, I was very troubled by the Reform Judaism of the time. In some respects, I've never ceased to be a Reform Jew, even though I'm an ordained conservative rabbi.
When I arrived in Tupelo, Mississippi as a student rabbi, the news came that the Russians had reached the Majdanek death camp near Lublin, Poland and found 600,000 pairs of ownerless shoes. I was preparing to deliver a sermon, reading the Reform Prayer Book. There was one sentence that I never forgot: "And now that we live in pleasanter times and pleasanter places," and it stuck in my craw. I said to myself, "This is wrong. We don't live in pleasanter times and pleasanter places. If anything, we live in the worst of times". So, I could not continue to think of God as I had thought of him, and my ideas of God began to change.
Gordon: After graduating from the Hebrew Union College you attended the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York. How did that lead to attending Harvard Divinity School and later earning a Doctorate from Harvard?
Rubenstein: By the time I was about to graduate from the Seminary, I was married with two children. I had one crucial meeting with my teacher, Abraham Joshua Heschel. I had written a paper on some aspects of theology and he said to me, “You must go on, and you mustn't be a congregational rabbi." I asked, "Why not?" He said, "You will not have the time to do the work you need to do intellectually.” I decided to apply first to Harvard Divinity School.
Why did I want to go to Harvard Divinity School? Because I had come to believe that a lot of what had happened in the Shoah was the result of Christian animus towards Jews and Judaism. I wanted to know more about Christianity. Because I was a married man with two children, I had to take a small congregation in the Boston area so that I could go to Harvard Divinity School. I took a congregation in Brockton for two years and then one in Natick for two years, and in 1955, I received a Master of Theology in Christian Theology from the Divinity School. I then went on to get my doctorate in the history of religion at Harvard’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.
At the time, I was also in psychoanalysis. Fortunately, the outcome was very good. Psychoanalysis gave me an appreciation of the importance of ritual, religious symbolism and how the non-intellectual, non-conceptual elements in religion are very powerful. I did a doctoral dissertation on the Aggadah – the legends and myths of the rabbis of the first three centuries of the Christian era on the issue of sin and deviance.
The thesis became The Religious Imagination. It was translated into French by France’s leading publisher, Gallimard. It's called l'Imagination Réligieuse. The Italian translation also won a literary prize in 1977, the Portico d’Ottavia Prize.
My ideas had begun to develop with a strong social science and historical bent. I saw religion as an enormously potent force, both in individuals and groups. By this time, there was absolutely no doubt as to where my fundamental commitment lay within the Jewish community.
Gordon: What encounter with a German theologian in 1961 defined your post-Holocaust theological views?
Rubenstein: In 1961, I was the guest of the Bundespresseamt, the Press and Information Office of the West German Republic. I was scheduled to spend two weeks investigating conditions in Germany. There had been a series of what they called Schweinerei – anti-Semitic attacks on [a] synagogue in Cologne, etc. They wanted people to see that the Germans were clean. I was supposed to arrive on the 13th of August, 1961. I was living in the Netherlands that summer. That was the day that the Wall went up between East and West Berlin. I postponed going until the 15th of August, and instead of going to the Rhineland, at their urging, I went directly to Berlin. I was in Berlin two days after the Wall went up. Four days after the wall went up, I had an interview with Dean Heinrich Grüber, one of the most important interviews in my life. Dean Grüber's church was in East Berlin. He lived in West Berlin. He couldn't get from West Berlin to his church and he was very upset about what was going on.
The reason they wanted me to meet with Dean Grüber was because he was the only German who testified against Adolf Eichmann at the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem, that summer. Also, he had spent three years in Sachsenhausen, sent there by Eichmann for having tried to rescue Jews. I mean, there was nothing fake about the man.
When we met, Gruber was understandably very upset. He said, "Well, you know, Dr. Rubenstein. We Germans made people refugees. Now we are refugees. We destroyed churches and synagogues. Now our churches are being destroyed. God is punishing us.” Then he got carried away and said, "Dr. Rubenstein, it was God's will to send Adolf Hitler to punish the Jews at Auschwitz.” In that atmosphere of crisis, when nobody knew whether there would be war, I said, "Dean Grüber, I'd rather be an atheist than believe in such a God." He said, "How can you say that and be a Rabbi?" I said, "There's one thing I need more than God, to be a Rabbi, a few live Jews. By your logic, I would be praising God for his destruction of almost all the Jews of Europe."
Gordon: How did you become involved in the ‘Death of God’ movement in the 1960’s?
Rubenstein: In 1965, William Hamilton, who was one of the leading ‘Death of God’ theologians, pointed to me as perhaps a Jewish ‘Death of God’ theologian. There was a Time Magazine cover, "Is God Dead?" I was invited by Emory University to a conference called ‘America and the Future of Theology’ and I was supposed to respond to Thomas Altizer, who was a leading ‘Death of God’ theologian. The conference was covered by the New York Times and other media. Altizer's basic message was "God is dead and this is a great liberation for us." I knew, as a Jew, instinctively, that the death of God is no problem for Christianity because of Good Friday which is always followed by Easter Sunday. Because Good Friday is not the end of the story, Altizer could rejoice in the ‘Death of God’. The crucial sentence in my response was, "If God is dead, I will not dance at the funeral.” It is a tragic event, with tragic loss. Although we live in the time of the ‘Death of God,’ there is a God, and in fact, in the second edition of After Auschwitz, the final chapter is, "God after the death of God."
The Shoah was the most perfect example of what it meant to live without God. The Nazis felt they could do as they pleased. They understood that nobody would or could stop them. That's basically what I meant. I've never retracted a word, but there was shock in the Jewish community. At the time, there was also some anger that I had asked the question, "If you hold that God has chosen us, what do you make of the Shoah?” There were several possible responses: One can say that the Shoah was divine punishment for Israel’s sins. This was what Dean Gruber was saying. Some very orthodox rabbis were saying the same thing, although the rabbis and the Dean would have different sins in mind. Alternatively, one might say that God is less than God, that He’s not fully powerful, or one might say that the idea of a direct relationship between the existence of God and human actions is questionable. That's the position I took.
I had a lot of media attention. There was an interview in Playboy. The New York Times had a four column story, and I did an op-ed piece for The Times. My views were widely disseminated. I was trying to make sense out of the Jewish situation, both politically and theologically in our times.
Gordon: What do you consider as the basic Jewish value at the core of your writings?
Rubenstein: I think the idea of Jewish values can be a trap because for 2,000 years Jews had no experience being the masters of their own destiny and had no experience with what that meant, what its responsibilities were. As Israeli Ambassador to the U.S., Michael Oren said in an Azure article, "They had no experience with sovereignty.” If you have an army, if you have enemies you know are out to destroy you, then having abstract values that are unrelated to the actual context of danger in which you live does yourself a disservice and one which is potentially suicidal.
Now, I believe that Jews should practice justice, but what I mean by justice is to give each man and each group its proper due. This is fundamental. That means that if you have an enemy who is out to kill you, you don't necessarily have to kill him, but you have to do whatever is necessary to defang his power so that he cannot kill you.
Nevertheless, I do not believe, for example, in doing more than you have to against an enemy. I don't believe in gratuitous killing or torture.
In that same article, Oren describes how David Ben Gurion, Israel’s first Prime Minister, sat by himself on Israel’s first Independence Day, wondering whether the people understood what they were getting themselves into, whether they understood what sovereignty meant. He was afraid that they didn't. He knew that neither Martin Buber nor the German-Jewish professors at the Hebrew University understood sovereignty. Sovereignty means that you possess an army and, as the German sociologist Max Weber put it, “The sovereign state is that human community that successfully claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory." Ben Gurion understood that insight when he forcibly disarmed the Irgun militia at the start of the new State of Israel in 1948. Ultimately, the conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians is over the question of who possesses a sovereign monopoly of the use of force. Such a monopoly cannot be shared.
To me, the most basic Jewish value is to survive with dignity as an individual and as part of a people. However, learning from tradition can be a trap. Rabbis, whose background was that of a powerless minority, neither understood sovereignty nor were they able to exercise it.
Make no mistake about it. I have enormous respect for Jews who exercised restraint under conditions of powerlessness. They had no other choice then. The way I used to put it to my students in class, was, "If a person comes along and says, 'You dirty Jew boy,' I'm going to go after him, but if five people come and surround me and say that, I'm going to have to learn to hold my temper." That was the situation of Jews for almost 2000 years.
Gordon: What is your political philosophy?
Rubenstein: In the world of politics, I'm a Hobbesian. Thomas Hobbes believed that originally men lived in a state of nature in which there were no rules. Inevitably,the very strongest prevailed and the weakest served them or fell by the wayside. Finally, in order to protect themselves, men agreed to delegate whatever powers they had to one sovereign who would protect them and who would prevent them from behaving towards each other as if they were in a state of nature. For example, if my neighbor and I have a dispute over where my property line ends and his begins, we don't take out guns and settle it that way. We believe that, through the sovereign state, there are impartial institutions which will decide whether my claim or his is right. However, Hobbes also says something else. He says, "Sovereigns always live in a state of nature with regard to each other." That is, between nations, there are no permanent, fixed rules. Nations may agree on rules, because it is within their interest to do so, but the same nation that makes a rule can break a rule. There is no such thing as an international community. There are only states with different interests which sometimes conflict, and I don't think that's always understood. I think this is especially true when it comes to Jews in Israel. They don't understand that when you are faced with a mortal foe who is out to destroy you, you owe that foe absolutely nothing. That foe has announced in advance that he owes you nothing and he will use your conscience, which restrains your action, as part of his weapon against you.
Gordon: How do you view the historical relationship between Jews and Islam?
Rubenstein: In some sense Muslim Spain was a golden age; that is, it was a great center of culture. Both Averroes, the Muslim jurist, and Maimonides, the Jewish doctor and sage, were born there. However, as a young adolescent, Maimonides had to flee Cordoba because of its conquest by another Muslim group, the Almohads. They were rigid in their Islamic extremism and in their insistence on conversion or death. Under the Sharia Islamic law of the so-called Golden Age of Spain, Jews and Christians were dhimmis, second class subjects. They were allowed to exist within Muslim civilization, but only in certain professions and under humiliating circumstances. I don't know anywhere Islam was dominant that wasn't the case. The reason why Jews left Spain in 1492 and went to Turkey was that their conditions at the time were less harsh in Turkey than they were in Spain. It wasn't because they received religious freedom in the Ottoman Empire, they didn't. They were given the choice in Spain of death or conversion. In Turkey, they were given a third choice dhimmitude and they accepted dhimmitude, the status of second class citizens. There was never a time when the Muslim world was dominant that Jews or Christians were anything but subordinate second-class citizens. That they were used for their talents is true; as financiers, as doctors, but never as the decision-makers. This was always done by the Sultan or the Emir.
Since Dhimmis were Jews or Christians under Muslim domination who accepted their subordinate, humiliating status, they had to employ the strategies of the powerless in their dealings with those who had power over them. They tried to argue or to use words of persuasion to do what they could not do by force of arms. They thought, "Well, we will try to persuade the Muslims to see our point of view." That didn’t work, because the Muslims said, "We are in power.”
With regard to interreligious dialogue with them, I do not see the point. I've been involved in a number of Jewish/Muslim/Christian dialogues with noted British and American Imams and Sheiks. One of the Arabic words for dialogue with infidels, unbelievers, is takyyah. Takyyah in Arabic means religiously sanctioned dissimulation. There is no real engagement with non-Muslim thought.
There is another element to this, the Muslim claim that the original will of God for all eternity is expressed in the Qur'an. The Qur'an wasn't simply what came into existence with Muhammad. It was revealed to Muhammad in the 7th Century, but it was already there from the very beginning of creation. They believe that the Qur'an was revealed to Abraham, the first great Muslim prophet. So, how do they explain the Bible and the New Testament? They claim the Jews and Christians misrepresented and distorted the original message of God and that is why the texts appear so different. No Jew or Christian can accept that.
If you start with the idea that the Qur'an existed from all eternity and that the Bible and the New Testament are distortions of this original version, how do you get to historical study of the Bible? Jewish and Christian scholars can usually at least agree on the history of the Bible, not completely, but mostly, because they understand that there was an historical process. However, to admit that there was a historical process and that Islam came after the other two is to deny an absolutely fundamental belief of Islam. They won't do it, so there's no such agreement on the one thing that could allow for dialogue; historical examination and criticism. All they will do is tell you their truth.
Gordon: Recent polls of Israeli and American Jews reveal a vast difference of opinion regarding the current Obama Administration in Washington. To what do you attribute that?
Rubenstein: Most Israelis understand that the Obama Administration is the most pro-Muslim, anti-Israel American government since the founding of the State in 1948. They further understand that their own lives as individuals and the existence of their nation can disappear in an instant if a nuclear Iran, governed by messianic, apocalyptic theocrats, uses the weapons it is acquiring to fulfill its oft-repeated promise to annihilate Israel. Yet, in spite of Iran’s threats, the Obama administration has repeatedly announced sanctions then delayed their imposition.
Moreover, most Israelis understand that the Obama administration has used its very considerable leverage to encourage Israel to surrender territory to the Palestinians in East Jerusalem and the West Bank with no credible guarantees of an ensuing genuine peace. Since their lives are on the line, Israelis are far less likely to delude themselves than liberal American Jews, large numbers of whom are not unlike “Yellow Dog Democrats,” those Southerners who used to say they would rather vote for a Yellow dog on the Democratic ticket than vote Republican.
When 78 per cent of American Jews voted for Obama, they were continuing without reflection a tradition of Jewish loyalty to the Democratic Party that goes back at least to Franklin Delano Roosevelt. I have always thought that both the historic experience of persecution and the injunction repeatedly pronounced by Moses to the Hebrews, “Remember that you were slaves in Egypt…” (Deut. 5:15; 15:15; 16:12; 24: 18, 22) has instilled in Jews identification with the victim or underdog. Such identification is impossible for Israel. In ancient times, the slave was either an enemy defeated in war or the descendent of such an enemy. Israel exists because it was militarily victorious and will continue to exist only as long as it can keep its enemies at bay. For 2,000 years, Diaspora Jews lacked sovereignty. Put differently, for 2,000 years Jews never had the weapons with which to defend themselves. The result was the Holocaust. If Israel means anything after the Holocaust, it is that Israelis would not lack such weapons. That is why Israel built its nuclear arsenal and it’s military. Moreover, every young Israeli must serve in the military. Israel would perish as a nation if its youth refused. Military service is a matter of choice for American youth, Jewish and non-Jewish. Lacking military experience, American young people find it difficult to understand that force remains the foundation on which civilizations are built. The Israelis understand this, because they must.
Gordon: How dangerous is the deepening rapprochement with the Muslim world that began in the Bush Administration and is now flourishing in the current Obama Administration?
Rubenstein: There is every reason why Barack Obama’s Administration should seek good political relations with Muslim nations, insofar as it is consistent with our national interest. It is something very different when the President seeks a rapprochement with Islam as a religion. Unfortunately, that is what he set out to do as indicated by his Inaugural Address in which he stated: "The United States is a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus and non-believers.” The President is a lawyer trained at Harvard Law School and had the distinction of serving as editor of the Harvard Law Review. He knows the importance of every word, indeed of every comma, in public documents such as the Inaugural Address. His words were no accident. Not only did he reject the traditional formulation, “a nation of Christians and Jews,” but as Hugh Fitzgerald has pointed out, he allowed Muslims to claim “some kind of historic or cultural or other connection to this land, when everything that makes America, America … is in direct opposition to, and is permanently threatened by the texts, the tenets, the attitudes, of Islam.”
The President either will not or cannot understand that a religious war - for that is what jihad is - is being waged against the United States by people who are unshakably convinced that they are doing God’s will by seeking to destroy us. It is extremely dangerous when our enemies understand the nature of the war and our leaders do not.
Gordon: What do you wish to be noted for as a legacy?
Rubenstein: I have not given much thought to my legacy. I may be deceiving myself, but at age 86 I believe there is still much work for me to do. Above all, I want to do all that I can to make people understand that radical Islam is the most dangerous adversary the United States has ever confronted. It means what it says when it threatens a second Holocaust against Israel. It expresses confidence that jihad can subvert and then bring down the United States. I have little hope for Europe which is in the process of being subverted into submission. I would be more confident if the leaders of both Israel and the United States understood that they are in a long-term religious war with an ancient enemy. Further, that the strategies necessary to overcome that enemy, involve a transformation of consciousness and a knowledge of the religion and history of Islam. I hope that I will be granted some years to use the knowledge and insights I have acquired to help in the transformation if both Israel and the United States are to prevail. Of one thing I am certain, if Israel were destroyed, radical Islam would not be satisfied. Such an outcome would only whet its appetite to complete global Islamic domination.
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