(or Secular Humanistic Judaism). A tendency that sees in Judaism the civilization of the Jewish people rather than a solely or mainly religious concept. Jewish secularism claims that the theocentric foundations of Judaism were questioned even in ancient times (cf. Elisha Ben Avuyah, who reached the conclusion that there is "no Law and no Judge"). Since the Emancipation period, increasing numbers of Jews identified with the Jewish people while declining to observe religious traditions, and many embraced an agnostic or atheistic philosophy. Today, many Jews both in Israel and the Diaspora have no contact at all with any kind of organized religious life. In the United States, the proportion of the religiously unaffiliated (that is, those who do not belong to any type of synagogue and do not visit one at any time) has been estimated at over 50%. In Israel the number is lower. Modern Zionism emerged as a mainly secular movement, and many of its leaders (such as David Ben-Gurion and Vladimir Jabotinsky) identified with the history and culture of the Jewish people, but were nonobservant. A prime role in the creation of a non-religious Jewish culture in Israel was and is the kibbutz movement. In the Diaspora, mass movements such as the Bund in Eastern Europe supported a nonreligious, Yiddish-language Jewish autonomous culture in the framework of a progressive gentile environment.
Secular humanistic Judaism contends that the belief in an omnipotent and omnipresent God who presides over history, such as is posited by religious Judaism, presents insuperable problems. The Bible and the writings of the sages were the product of a developing civilization and of a people that tried to adapt itself to changing conditions. Judaism contains philosophy, literature and folklore, and its religious and moral teachings, for all their great importance, are far from being consistent---just like those of any other civilization. Secular Jewish humanists deny that there are any specific Jewish values, but they affirm that general human moral values received the special coloring of the Jewish culture and that, in many cases, the Jewish people preceded others in its moral teachings. Humanism places the autonomous individual and not a Supreme Being squarely in the center of the human world.
In 1985, an International Federation of Secular Humanistic Jews was founded. In the United States, the Society of Humanistic Jews and the Congress of Secular Jewish Organizations became affiliated to it, as did the Centre du Judaïsme Laïc in Brussels and the Israeli Association for Secular Humanistic Judaism. The American movement was founded in the 1960s by R. Sherwin Wine, who established its first congregation, the Birmingham Temple in Farmington Hills, Michigan. In 2000 its membership included 30 congregations and chapters and over 1,300 families. Rabbis are trained at the International Institute for Secular Humanistic Judaism
