Arthur Hertzberg was a Conservative rabbi and prominent Jewish-American scholar and activist. Avraham Hertzberg was born in Lubaczów, Poland, the eldest of five children, and left Europe in 1926 with his mother and grandmother to join his father in the United States, where his name was Americanized to Arthur. Hertzberg recalled that as a teenager in an Orthodox Jewish neighborhood in Baltimore, Maryland, he would not accept the notion that the literary world of talmudic learning, the kabbalistic books and the writing of the chasidim were less worthy as compared to the Iliad, the Odyssey... or Dante's Inferno. His father was an Orthodox rabbi trained in Eastern Europe, who taught Arthur to appreciate the richness of the Talmud and the other great works of Judaism. Although Hertzberg would later stray from his Orthodox upbringing and be ordained as a Conservative rabbi, he "never used my 'heresy' as the excuse to prefer the majority culture to my own." He was married to the former Phyllis Cannon from 1950 until his death. They are the parents of two daughters, Dr.
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