Talk:Carl Sagan

Early Life

He later described his family as Reform Jews, the most liberal of Judaism's four main branches.

The idea that Judaism has "four main branches" with Reform being the "most liberal" among these is a very strange claim that either unintentionally misrepresents its source, is a questionable paraphrasing of its source, or is invented by the editor without any source. There is not much agreement among Jews about which denominations constitute the "main branches" of Judaism, but if we accept arguendo that there are four, most would not agree that Reform is the "most liberal" of the four (that would be Recontructionist Judaism; it is not typical for Jews to consider Orthodox Judaism and "ultra-Orthodox" sects or Haredim to be separate branches of the religion).

I went back and checked the closest referenced source, Keay Davidson's Carl Sagan: A Life. The text in the linked edition of Davidson's book reads as follows on p.11 (boldface is mine for emphasis):

In a 1991 interview, Sagan recalled that they were Reform Jews, the more liberal wing of Judaism's three main groups (Orthodox, Conservative, and Reform). Cari (Sagan Greene), however, says they were Conservative (that is, more conservative than Reform but more liberal than Orthodox).

One paragraph down, on page 12, is the following text:

Secularization was in the air. The great rabbi Mordecai Kaplan, the originator of Reconstructionist Judaism, a new, fourth branch of Judaism, urged Jews to abandon superstition, to rebuild their lives around ethnic identification rather than ancient folk tales.

Even if the editor's claim of "four main branches" of Judaism is an acceptable paraphrasing of the meaning of the text on pages 11/12 (that there were three branches, and then the fourth, Reconstructionism, was evolving during Carl Sagan's early life), and even if it's okay to represent the claim in Davidson's text of 3+1 branches of the religion as established fact, the idea that Reform Judaism would be the "most liberal" of the four is one that most Jews, and I suspect most scholars, would disagree with. (Yes, technically Reconstructionist Judaism is considered an offshoot of Conservative Judaism, probably because Mordecai Kaplan was affiliated with a Conservative institution, Jewish Theological Seminary, when he formulated its key elements, but few would place it as less "liberal" than Reform Judaism in terms of its major principles.)

So I'm stumped where the editor got the idea that Reform Judaism is the "most liberal" of the four branches. It seems like either they misread Davidson's discussion here and didn't understand that Davidson is describing the quasi-mainstream view that the new branch of Reconstructionism was more liberal than the Reform movement, or else they injected their own claim here despite it being directly contradicted by the text of the source. Neonwaiters (talk) 08:00, 20 July 2024 (UTC)

image

Why does his photo look like he had his head photoshopped unto another person's torso? 2600:1700:721:DBE0:37F4:1503:DE2C:C004 (talk) 16:03, 26 October 2024 (UTC)