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ARTHUR WASKOW, ACTIVIST RABBI WHO BROUGHT JEWISH SPIRITUAL WISDOM TO
BEAR ON PROGRESSIVE POLITICS, DIES AT 92  
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Ben Harris
October 20, 2025
Forward
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_ Waskow became one of the leading voices bringing Jewish spiritual
wisdom to bear on the progressive political agenda. Waskow was
arrested more than two dozen times for his activism. _

In 2004, Waskow was arrested in a nonviolent sit-down protest against
passage of a federal tax bill that enriched what he called “the
hyperwealthy” and imposed more burdens on the poor. He said the
police arresting him and the other members of his group —, Courtesy
of Waskow

 

(JTA [[link removed]]) — Rabbi Arthur Waskow, an activist and
author of more than two dozen books that refracted progressive causes
like civil rights, economic injustice and, most pressingly in his last
decade, climate change through the lens of Jewish text and tradition,
died Monday at his home in Philadelphia. He was 92.

Starting with his creation in 1969 of the “Freedom Seder,” a
version of the Passover Haggadah that introduced contemporary
liberation struggles into the ancient story of the Israelite escape
from Egyptian bondage, Waskow became one of the leading voices
bringing Jewish spiritual wisdom to bear on the progressive political
agenda.

 
 
Waskow disseminated these ideas as the founder of the Shalom Center in
Philadelphia, initially to address the threat of nuclear weapons
through a Jewish lens. Over time, the organization came to focus on
other concerns, including Middle East peace, interfaith relations and
climate change.

In 1993, Waskow co-founded, with Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi and
others, ALEPH: Alliance for Jewish Renewal, a flagship for the Jewish
Renewal movement. Waskow was said to have coined the term “Jewish
Renewal” — a movement grounded in “Judaism’s prophetic and
mystical traditions” — in an issue of Menorah, a magazine for
social justice and ritual issues he launched in 1979.

 
The author of more than two dozen books, several of which have become
Jewish classics, Waskow celebrated his 92nd birthday this month while
in hospice care at a Zoom launch of two books that he’d written
since turning 90. “Tales of Spirit Rising and Sometimes Falling”
is an activist’s memoir; “Handbook for Heretics and Prophets: A
New Torah for a New World” is a collection of essays by Waskow and
fellow Jewish activists.

His reach was so extensive that, in 2012, the feminist icon Gloria
Steinem told Oprah Winfrey that it had been Waskow’s urging that
kept her going as an activist at a pivotal moment of disillusionment
back in 1968. The pair reconnected for the first time since then in a
public conversation about their eight decades of activism.

More than an armchair theologian, Waskow was arrested more than two
dozen times
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first while protesting a segregated amusement park in his hometown of
Baltimore in the 1960s and continuing throughout his life. In 2019,
Waskow was arrested outside an Immigration and Customs Enforcement
office in Philadelphia
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while protesting the Trump administration’s treatment of migrant
women.

Waskow was destined for activism from an early age. Both his parents
were politically engaged — his father was a labor organizer who had
headed the Baltimore teachers union and his mother registered Black
voters. Both were active with Americans for Democratic Action. His
grandfather was a precinct organizer for Eugene Debs, the union
organizer who ran for president five times as a socialist between 1900
and 1920.

“That was in my bloodstream,” Waskow told the Jewish Telegraphic
Agency in 2021
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Waskow received a bachelor’s degree from Johns Hopkins University in
1954 and a Ph.D. in American history from the University of Wisconsin
in 1963. He  went to work on disarmament and civil rights for Robert
Kastenmeier, an influential longtime member of the U.S. House of
Representatives. Later he became a fellow at the progressive Institute
for Policy Studies. In 1970, he testified for the defense at the trial
of the Chicago 7, Vietnam war protesters who had been arrested for
incitement at the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago. The
defendants included the Jewish radicals Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin.

The trial was the first time that Waskow had worn a kippah in a
nonreligious setting — the judge tried to have him remove it, but
relented at the prosecutor’s urging. At the time, Waskow “was
still wrestling with what this weird and powerful ‘Jewish thing’
meant in my life,” as he would write later. Though he had always
observed Passover, Judaism had failed to seriously capture his
attention until well into adulthood.

That changed on an April evening in 1968 as Waskow headed home to
prepare for the Passover Seder. Federal troops were out in force to
quell riots sparked by the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.
just days before. Seeing a machine gun pointed at his block in the
Adams Morgan section of Washington, D.C., Waskow likened the show of
force to Pharaoh’s army.

That insight inspired Waskow to write the “Freedom Seder
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which referred to King and Mahatma Gandhi as “prophets” and
introduced quotes from a range of modern thinkers alongside the
traditional text, including Thomas Jefferson, the enslaved
abolitionist Nat Turner and the Black Power leader Eldridge Cleaver.
In 1969, a group of young Jewish activists led by Waskow organized the
original Freedom Seder, which was held in the basement of a church in
Washington.

Although it was written in a long tradition of adapting the Passover
seder script [[link removed]] for
contemporary issues, the Orthodox Rabbinical Alliance of America
denounced the work
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as “most offensive” for making radical changes to the Haggadah
without rabbinic authority and quoting alleged anti-Semites.

“There’s no question, it was chutzpadik,” Waskow said of the
book, using a Yiddish expression that roughly means audacious. “I
think it turned out to be holy chutzpah.”

The “Freedom Seder” would be the first of many works Waskow would
pen that reimagined Jewish tradition to speak more directly to
contemporary concerns
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initiating a movement that many Jews now take for granted.

Waskow continued in this vein with his 1982 work “Seasons of Our
Joy,” a New Age guide to the Jewish holidays (New Age became
“modern” in subsequent editions). Written in the DIY spirit of
“The Jewish Catalog,” the book reintroduced the earth-based,
agricultural roots of the Jewish holidays decades before Jewish
farmers and environmental activists would make such linkages seem
obvious.

In 1982, when hundreds of Palestinians were massacred by
Israel-aligned Christian Phalangists at Sabra and Shatila, Waskow was
at a retreat center near Baltimore for Rosh Hashanah. Waskow took the
front-page article on the killings from the Philadelphia Inquirer and
chanted it as the haftarah at the morning service.

“He was almost a lone voice for a long time, really trying to bring
Jewish values to the political situation,” Rabbi Mordechai Liebling,
a fellow Philadelphia activist rabbi and the founder of the social
justice training program at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College,
said in 2021. “Heschel certainly had done this, and there were two
or three other rabbis who did that well — Everett Gendler
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some more. But they weren’t as radical as Arthur.”

Waskow decided to seek rabbinic ordination in 1995, when he was 62 and
already teaching at the Reconstructionist seminary. He also taught at
Swarthmore College, Temple University, Drew University, Vassar College
and the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute for Religion (where he
taught the first course on eco-Judaism in any rabbinical seminary).

In 2007, Newsweek named him one of the 50 most influential American
rabbis.

Waskow met Rabbi Phyllis Berman at a conference in 1982, some months
after she read “Seasons of Our Joy” and sent Waskow a love letter,
which he never answered. (It had been lost in the mail.) Berman
confronted Waskow over the lapse and the two struck up a friendship.
Four years later they were married and each took on a new middle name
— Ocean — inspired by their shared love of the sea.

“People have said that I have softened him,” Berman told JTA in
2021. “And I think that I have. And he has also toughened me. So
both things are true. He said to me very recently, in a very precious
exchange, that I don’t take any shit from him anymore. And I think I
probably did for a long time. He is a frightening man when he’s
angry. But I’ve learned to stand in the face of it in a much, much
more profound way.”

Waskow told JTA that he hoped his legacy would be a deeper shift in
Jewish theology — and by extension in the Jewish psyche. Waskow
believed that modernity presented Judaism with a challenge on par with
the one faced by the ancient rabbis following the destruction of the
Temple. That challenge, reflected in the cascading crises now facing
humanity, will require a profound transformation in religious thought
— from one centered on serving God as a ruler or king to a more
ecological worldview that sees all of creation as part of an organic
whole.

“Modernity did to us what Rome, and before Rome Egypt and Babylon,
did,” Waskow said. “And the question is now, has modernity gotten
so powerful, and so uncaring, and so uncontrollable, it’s going to
wreck the whole joint before we can create an effective response. Or
can we create an effective response? And that’s what I’ve been
trying to do.”

Waskow’s successor at the Shalom Center, Rabbi Nate DeGroot,
announced earlier this month, ahead of Waskow’s Oct. 12 birthday,
that he had entered hospice care.

Berman survives him, as does a son, David Waskow; a daughter, Shoshana
Elkin Waskow; stepchildren Josh Sher and Morissa Wiser, their spouses
and five grandchildren.

His other books included “Torah of the Earth: Exploring 4,000 Years
of Ecology in Jewish Thought,” “Down-to-Earth Judaism: Food,
Money, Sex, and the Rest of Life” and “Godwrestling,” a
collection of Torah commentaries.

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* Rabbi Arthur Waskow; Freedom Seder; Shalom Center;
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