Isaac Landman (October 24, 1880 – September 4, 1946) was an American Reform rabbi, author and anti-Zionist activist. He was editor of the ten volume Universal Jewish Encyclopedia.[1][2][3]
Biography
Landman was born in Russia on October 4, 1880, to Ada and Louis Landman. He emigrated to the United States in 1890.[1] He graduated from the Reform Hebrew Union College. In 1911, with the assistance of Jacob Schiff, Julius Rosenwald, and Simon Bamberger, he founded a Jewish farm colony in Utah. In 1913 he married Beatrice Eschner. During World War I he was "said to be the first Jewish chaplain in the United States Army to serve on foreign soil".[1][3]
He was a leader in Jewish–Christian ecumenism.[3] He was editor of American Hebrew Magazine from 1918, served as the delegate of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations to the 1919 Paris Peace Conference.[1]
Landman had also been a prominent opponent of Zionism: when, in 1922, the United States Congress was considering the Lodge–Fish resolution in support of the Balfour Declaration, Landman and Rabbi David Philipson had presented the Reform movement's (then) anti-Zionist position to the House Committee on Foreign Affairs. Landman also printed many opinions against the resolution and Zionism in his American Hebrew Magazine.[4] The bill was eventually unanimously supported by both houses of Congress,[5] and approved by President Harding.[6]
He became rabbi of Brooklyn's Congregation Beth Elohim in 1931.[1][2] Three years later he began editing the Universal Jewish Encyclopedia, which was published in ten volumes in the 1940s.[1] He died on September 4, 1946.[3]
Landman was also a playwright. With his brother, physician Michael Lewis Landman, he authored the play A Man of Honor. Michael Landman's daughter was the architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable.