Arthur Ocean Waskow

By Zak Failla From Daily Voice

Rabbi Arthur Ocean Waskow, a Baltimore native whose lifelong fight for justice and spirituality reshaped American Judaism, has died at 92 in Pennsylvania.

Waskow, founder and longtime executive director of The Shalom Center in Philadelphia, passed away at his home on Monday, Oct. 20, according to a statement from the organization.

Born in Baltimore in 1933, Waskow helped redefine the intersection of faith and activism — from marching for civil rights to protesting war and environmental destruction — all while reimagining Jewish ritual for modern times.

Waskow earned his bachelor's degree from Johs Hopkins University in 1954, and after earning his PhD in American history from the University of Wisconsin and working on Capitol Hill, Waskow’s life changed in 1968.

The assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. — and the military occupation of DC that followed — inspired him to write The Freedom Seder, a revolutionary Passover text that linked Jewish liberation with the civil rights and anti-war movements, according to the organization.

That act would become the cornerstone of Jewish Renewal, blending prophetic Judaism with social justice.

Over the next five decades, Waskow authored dozens of books, co-founded Fabrangen — one of the nation’s first egalitarian Jewish communities in Washington, DC — and taught at Swarthmore, Temple, and Hebrew Union College.

At The Shalom Center, which he founded in 1983, Waskow led faith-based efforts to protect the planet, oppose nuclear war, and expand LGBTQ and gender equality in Jewish life. 

Newsweek once named him among America’s 50 most influential rabbis, and in 2014 he received T’ruah’s first Lifetime Achievement Award as a Human Rights Hero.

Known for his humor and humility, Waskow often joked that he’d been arrested more times than he’d written books — more than two dozen times — beginning with a 1963 civil rights protest at Baltimore’s Gwynn Oaks Amusement Park, later fictionalized in Hairspray.

There was an outpouring of support and memories shared on social media following the famed rabbi's peaceful passing.

"I did not always agree with the political positions Rabbi Arthur Waskow took, and I had significant reservations about people dubbing their own politics 'prophetic,' Shai Held posted.

"But I rarely, if ever, met another Jew so burning with spiritually-rooted moral fire quite like Arthur."

"I have an indelible image in my mind of you sliding under a fence to fully protest, at the age of 85? - nothing was going to keep you out," Ellen Lippman shared. 

"I think you may not go gentle into that good night, but I pray you go with more joy than fear, more love than anger, more knowledge of the vast numbers who love you rather than a sense of aloneness."

"His teaching inspired me that summer to start a research project on Jewish responses to hunger, focusing on the Shmitah year and the Jubilee year," David Seidenberg added in a separate tribute.

"Arthur's work and example have never stopped being a model for me," he added. "I can honestly say that Arthur's work set me on my life's path."

Waskow is survived by his wife, Rabbi Phyllis Ocean Berman, children David and Shoshana, stepchildren Josh Sher and Morissa Wiser, and five grandchildren, according to The Shalom Center.

Waskow may have summed it up best in his book Down-To-Earth Judaism: Food, Money, Sex, and the Rest of Life.

"I look at this web of earthiness that feeds me, and I see its strands as aspects of the God Who is both One and Infinite," he wrote.

"And I know that what I want is to be able to see this fully and to say it fully and to act it fully."