In Memory of Rabbi Arthur Ocean Waskow (z”l)
October 12, 1933 – October 20, 2025
For full content related to Reb Arthur’s passing, funeral, shiva, and honoring Arthur, please visit The Shalom Center’s page highlighting his legacy.
Rabbi Arthur Ocean Waskow, a pioneering proponent of what he described as a prophetic vision of Judaism that fused social justice with traditional Jewish themes and spirituality, died at his home in Philadelphia. He was 92.
Waskow initially rose to prominence in the 1960s as an historian and author on civil rights and military policy and was a leader of the anti-war movement during the Vietnam War. Following a PhD in American history from the University of Wisconsin, his early career included serving as a legislative aide in Congress and as a fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies, one of the first Washington think tanks.
His life and career took a major turn in 1968. Following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., he witnessed the military takeover of Washington, which fell that year during the same time as Passover. Waskow, who was not yet Jewishly religious at the time, saw important parallels between the Passover story of liberation and movements to overthrow what he described as the pharaohs of racism, militarism, repressive authorities and uncontrolled capitalism.
He was stirred to write the Freedom Seder, a pathbreaking haggadah linking the Passover story with modern themes of liberation. While the haggadah was seen by some in the Jewish community as unacceptably iconoclastic, it paved the way for what has become a large number of Passover haggadahs that integrate modern issues, including feminism, with the Biblical recounting of the Exodus.
Over the next 50-plus years, Waskow went on to publish a wide range of books and served as a spiritual leader in the American Jewish community, particularly within the Jewish Renewal wing of Judaism. He was a founder of Fabrangen in Washington DC — one of the first havurahs, participatory, egalitarian Jewish prayer communities — and of the National Havurah Committee.
His books Godwrestling and Seasons of Our Joy brought new ways to engage with Jewish spirituality and communal life to several generations of American Jews. In his later years, he focused attention on ways to describe God that were based on tradition but bringing new insights, including using the name Yah to describe God as the breath of all life.
As the executive director of The Shalom Center, which he founded in 1983, he galvanized Jewish action to foster peace, prevent nuclear war, protect the environment from global ‘scorching’, build bridges with like-minded people of other faiths, and elevate the voices of the dispossessed. Waskow was also known for pioneering support for the full equality of women and LGBTQ people in all aspects of Jewish life and religion, including same-sex marriage, and he was at the forefront of efforts to bring greater attention within Judaism to environmental concerns.
Waskow’s views on Israel and Palestine were often at odds with mainstream Jewish institutional perspectives, but he viewed his role as one of bringing fundamental Jewish values and prophetic teachings to resolving conflict between Jews and Arabs.
Waskow was a member of the faculty of the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College from 1982-89, and he also taught in the religion departments of Swarthmore College, Temple University, Drew University, and Vassar College. At the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute for Religion, he taught the first-ever course on Jewish environmentalism at any rabbinic seminary. In 2007, Newsweek named him one of the fifty most influential American rabbis. In 2015, The Forward named him one of “America's most inspiring rabbis,” and in 2014 he was honored by T'ruah: The Rabbinic Call for Human Rights with its first Lifetime Achievement Award as a Human Rights Hero.
Waskow would often laughingly compare the number of times he was arrested during activist protests on various issues — more than two dozen — to the number of books he had written. His first arrest was during an effort to integrate Gwynn Oaks amusement park in Baltimore in 1963, an event that was later fictionalized in John Waters’ movie Hairspray.
Waskow was born in Baltimore, MD, in 1933 to Henry Waskow, a public-school teacher who cofounded the Baltimore Teachers Union, and Hannah Waskow, a homemaker and a longtime volunteer leader of the Baltimore chapter of Americans for Democratic Action. With his brother Howard, who was three years younger, Waskow wrote a joint autobiography, Becoming Brothers, about the evolution of their relationship.
He 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. While pursuing his graduate degree, he met his first wife (later divorced), Irene Elkin. He received rabbinic ordination in 1995.
Rabbi Waskow is mourned by his wife Rabbi Phyllis Ocean Berman, whom he married in 1986, his son David Waskow (Ketura Persellin), his daughter Shoshana Elkin Waskow (Michael Slater), his stepchildren Josh Sher (Christy Sher) and Morissa Wiser (Jason Wiser), and five grandchildren Yoni Slubin (Hilary Slubin), Elior Waskow, Shifra Waskow, Kalman Slater, and Yaela Wiser. He was predeceased by his brother, Howard, who died in 2012.
