biography
| name: |
Wise, Stephen Samuel
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originally Weiss
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| sex:
| male
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| lived:
| (1874–1949)
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| biography:
| Rabbi, social activist, and Zionist leader, born in Budapest, Hungary. Brought to the USA as a baby by his rabbi father, he grew up in New York City, studied to be a rabbi there and in Vienna, and by age 19 was the rabbi of New York's Congregation B'nai Jeshurun. Outspoken in his sympathies for labour and other social causes, he refused an offer to be rabbi of New York's most prestigious temple, Emanu-El; instead he founded his own Free Synagogue (1907), where until his death he preached a message that combined liberal Judaism with calls for social justice. Along with openly siding with labour, he attacked everyone from corrupt politicians to the Ku Klux Klan. He was one of the founders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (1909) and the American Civil Liberties Union (1920). A founder of the Federation of American Zionists (1893), he was the first president of the new Zionist Organization of America (1918), and in 1919 went to France to argue for the goal of a Jewish homeland in Palestine. During the 1930s he spoke out against Hitler's treatment of Jews, and in the 1940s, with World War 2 raging, he took the lead in demanding that the Allies stop the extermination of Jews. Not unexpectedly in such a man, he could be contentious, and in his final years he lost his leadership of the American Zionist movement, but for half a century he had been one of the strongest voices for and from the American Jewish community. |
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