JUDAICA - Wisdom In Torah

eisenstein, sergei mikhailovich
City, Eisenstein was the eldest of the four daughters of Rabbi
Mordecai Menachem *Kaplan, the philosopher and founder
of Reconstructionist Judaism, and Lena (Rubin) Kaplan. In
1922, at the age of 12, she celebrated one of the earliest known
bat mitzvah ceremonies in the U.S. at the Society for the Advancement
of Judaism, where her father was the presiding
rabbi. Judith Kaplan Eisenstein had a second bat mitzvah at
the age of 82 where she was honored by a number of Jewish
and feminist leaders.
Kaplan continued her Jewish education at the Jewish
Theological Seminary Teachers Institute and her secular education
at Columbia University Teachers College, from which
she received her B.S. in 1928 and her M.A. in 1932 in music
education. Following a brief first marriage that ended in divorce,
Kaplan married Rabbi Ira *Eisenstein, her father’s assistant
at the Society for the Advancement of Judaism, in 1934.
This marriage endured for over 60 years; the couple had three
children. From 1929 to 1954 Judith Eisenstein taught music
education and the history of Jewish music at the Jewish Theological
Seminary’s Teachers Institute (now the Albert A. List
College of Jewish Studies). While at the Teachers Institute she
began her publishing career with a Jewish songbook for children,
Gateway to Jewish Song (1937). She wrote several more
books on Jewish music and on Jewish musical history for
young readers; these include Festival Songs (1943) and Songs
of Childhood (1955) with Frieda Prensky. In the years between
1942 and 1974, Eisenstein composed two song cycles and five
cantatas on Jewish themes, written in collaboration with her
husband. The most frequently performed of these is “What
Is Torah?” (1942).
Eisenstein began doctoral studies at the School of Sacred
Music of Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion
in New York in 1959. Her dissertation was entitled,
“The Liturgical Chant of Provencal and West Sephardic Jews
in Comparison to the Song of the Troubadours and the Cantigas.”
After receiving her Ph.D., she taught at HUC-JIR from
1966 to 1979. In 1978, when her husband became president
of the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College, the Eisensteins
moved to Philadelphia. Eisenstein taught at the RRC from 1978
to 1981. Her book, Heritage of Music: The Music of the Jewish
People, was published in 1972 and reprinted in 1990. In 1987,
she wrote and broadcast a series of 13 radio lectures on the
history of Jewish music.
Bibliography: I. Eisenstein, Reconstructing Judaism: An
Autobiography (1986); P.B. Eisenstein, “Eisenstein, Judith Kaplan,”
in: P.E. Hyman and D.D. Moore (eds.), Jewish Women in America, 1
(1997), 370–71.
[Carole Kessner (2nd ed.)]
EISENSTEIN, SERGEI MIKHAILOVICH (1898–1948),
Russian film director, son of a Jewish father who converted
to Christianity and a non-Jewish mother. Eisenstein’s work,
revolutionary both in technique and in subject matter, was a
major contribution to the modern art of the cinema. He was
originally trained as a civil engineer, and served the Red Army
in this capacity during the Russian civil war. In 1920, however,
Eisenstein took up stage work, joining first the Proletkult
Theater in Moscow and then the avant-garde company of V.
Meyerhold. He was a disciple of Meyerhold in stage direction.
After deciding that the theater was not close enough to the
masses, he turned his attention to the cinema. His first film
was The Strike (1924), followed in 1925 by Battleship Potemkin,
which had an immediate impact on contemporary film
making. It demonstrated a new approach, the dramatic handling
of crowd scenes, and the use of nonprofessional actors
for greater realism. Eisenstein further developed his methods
in October (1926), a film about the Russian Revolution, and
The General Line (1929), which extolled Soviet agriculture. He
was invited to Hollywood in 1931, but his scenarios proved
unacceptable there. With the assistance of the novelist Upton
Sinclair he spent 14 months in Mexico making a film on the
Mexican revolution but he was recalled to the U.S.S.R. before
its completion. Parts were edited in Hollywood as Thunder
Over Mexico (1933), evoking much criticism as being untrue
to Eisenstein’s principles. Another section of the film was issued
in 1940 as Time in the Sun. In the 1930s he encountered
difficulties with the authorities, who saw film as an important
propaganda tool. They criticized his esthetic approach, and he
was unable complete some of his works. In Russia, after these
difficulties, he won the Order of Lenin for Alexander Nevsky
(1938). Of his Ivan the Terrible trilogy, part 1 was shown in
1946, part 2 was suppressed until 1958, and part 3 was not shot.
He expounded his theories in lectures and in two books, The
Film Sense (1942) and Film Form (1949). Though he never affirmed
his Jewish ancestry, he agreed to appear together with
other known Jewish cultural activists in antifascist meetings
on August 24, 1941, and in 1942. Eisenstadt’s memoirs, called
Beyond the Stars and written in 1946, appeared as volume 4
of his selected works in 1997 (published by the British Film
Institute). A previous version had appeared in 1983 as Immoral
Memories.
Bibliography: M. Seton, Sergei Eisenstein (Eng., 1952).
Add. Bibliography: O. Bulgakowa, Sergei Eisenstein, a Biography
(2002); A. Nesbit, Sergei Eisenstein and the Shape of Thinking (2003);
R. Bergen, Sergei Eisenstein: A Life in Conflict (1999).
EISLER, EDMUND MENAHEM (1850–1942), writer who
envisioned a Zionist utopia. Born in Tyrnau, Slovakia, Eisler
was active for many years in Jewish literature and journalism.
He contributed Hebrew poetry to the literary annual Kokhevei
Yiẓḥak (1877) but later wrote only in German. In 1882 he wrote
a vision of a Zionist utopia in the form of a novel entitled Ein
Zukunftsbild, which he published anonymously in 1885. The
book relates the exodus of Jews from Europe and the establishment
of a Jewish state under the rule of a king (the one
who had conceived the idea of the exodus and the state was
chosen as a monarch). It includes a detailed description of the
constitution, how Hebrew functions as the official language
of the country, and the division of the country into tribes according
to the biblical account. There is even a description of
274 ENCYCLOPAEDIA JUDAICA, Second Edition, Volume 6