Rabbi Arthur Waskow died on October 20, 2025, after finalizing this new memoir. It is full of stories from his life of activism, writing, public speaking, arrests, and leading progressive Jewish organizations such as The Shalom Center in Philadelphia, which he founded in 1983.
Waskow is part of our “Remembering Spiritual Masters” project. He’s also featured in “The Practicing Democracy Project.”
The memoir's opening anecdote has Waskow with Gloria Steinem at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in 1968, and readers are plunged into the counterculture of resisting power and corruption. Then, Waskow explains, “But in the summer of 1968, I didn’t have the language of Spirit,” and thus begins a chronicle of blending active resistance to tyranny with a discovery of what Waskow calls very simply, “Love.”
He explains: “This book is about what I have learned when I think or feel the Spirit rising, falling, disappearing in relation to a particular moment — a problem, an insight, an incident…. I send blessings to all my teachers, to all who lived with me in these tales. It is only my own feelings that I can honestly report. I ask their and your forgiveness for any misunderstandings.” This is because there are stories of intra-religious conflict as well as interreligious cooperation, and moments when protest and disagreement were called for, including times when Waskow admits to mistakes.
It makes for a deeply honest memoir that should resonate with anyone who’s been involved in progressive, faith-informed social justice work in the last half-century. If this is you, Waskow will be a name already familiar, and yet, his vulnerable accounting will probably lead you to respect him — and his memory — even more.
Chapter 8 is titled “1968: The Longest Year,” and tells stories of protests at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in Memphis, and all of the ways that people of conscience were battling their government throughout that painful year. It’s impossible to read this now without feeling how the American scene today has turned back toward similarly darker times. “We are all scarred with some pustule of the anti-Spirit,” Waskow suggests.
Another fascinating chapter is one that recounts when, how, and why Waskow penned his most important book, The Freedom Seder (1969). It includes this explanation:
“For the week after Dr. King’s death and the White House demonstration…I was…providing emergency support day and night. Then came the first night of Passover. After my bar mitzvah ceremony when I was thirteen years old, the only Jewish festival I’d observed was the Passover seder. The festival was about resisting and escaping slavery to Pharaoh. The other holy days held little meaning for me. But as I made my way home on that bitter day, as I came to my block on Wyoming Avenue in Adams-Morgan neighborhood, I met an Army Jeep with a machine gun ‘guarding’ my block. My kishkes, my guts, began to cry out at me: You are about to celebrate freedom from Pharaoh, and this is Pharaoh’s Army on your street! So when I got home, I was awake as I had never before been to some words of the traditional Haggadah:
“‘In every generation, every human being (not just every Jew; kol adam) must see himself, herself, theirself as if they themselves, not their ancestors only, go out from slavery to freedom.’
“I had read that line ever since I was old enough to read, but only in 1968, after meeting Pharaoh’s Army on the streets, did I read its fullest meaning. I did not yet know that, buried deep as a seed to grow in my soul, it was the call to write The Freedom Seder.” It sought, and seeks, to transform the ancient Jewish Passover ritual into a collective moment of concern and activism for justice and freedom for all people everywhere — including what Waskow called “the Pharoahs of our time.”
You will also want to see some of his remarks on the current situation in Israel/Palestine, in the excerpt accompanying this review.
