Wolpe articulates a common political posture among the intellectual leadership of his denomination, the Conservative movement, which, despite decades of attrition, remains a primary source of community for Jews around the country, with over one million American Jews identifying as Conservative. In its sole statement following the 2016 elections, the Rabbinical Assembly, the movement’s clergy arm, declared itself “one [family] sensitive to and aware of the many and varied views held by our members and members of our communities about any political figure or public issue.” A few weeks earlier, Marc Gary, chief operating officer at the Jewish Theological Seminary (JTS), the movement’s rabbinical school and intellectual center, had pointedly avoided criticizing either candidate by name, instead lamenting in general terms the “dire condition of widespread poverty.” (Like Wolpe, JTS has checked its avowed centrism at the door when it comes to Israeli foreign politics, hailing President Trump’s 2017 decision to move the American embassy to Jerusalem.)
This particular brand of centrism among Conservative leadership is a feature, not a bug, of that leadership’s hundred-year history, and a legacy of their consistent aversion toward radicalism. While this stance has been shaped by a number of broad historical trends like upward economic mobility among white American Jews, its origins lie in the movement’s infancy more than a century ago, when a cadre of donors took over JTS, the intellectual wellspring of what would become Conservative Judaism, as part of a larger strategy to smooth out the rough edges of a Jewish community teeming with recent immigrants. Those donors—including giants of American Jewish philanthropy Jacob Schiff and Louis Marshall—understood political radicalism and Old World religious observance as interrelated obstacles to the goal of seamless Americanization, and in response they created an institution meant to serve as a force of acculturation. Their vision would enjoy a long-lasting afterlife as an axiom of the emergent institutional Jewish status quo. If Judaism was to become truly American, they decided, political, economic, and social opposition to the mainstream ultimately had to go.