Milton Steinberg

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Milton Steinberg (1903 – 1949) was an American rabbi and author.

Born in Rochester, New York, he was raised with the combination of his grandparents' traditional Jewish piety and his father's modernist socialism. He majored in Classics at City College and then entered the Jewish Theological Seminary. In seminary, he was strongly influenced by Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan (1881–1983), the founder of Reconstructionist Judaism.

After five years in a pulpit in Indiana, he was invited by the Seminary to assume the pulpit of Manhattan's Park Avenue Synagogue, then a small congregation with a Reform orientation. In his sixteen years at the congregation, he grew it from 120 to 750 families.

While a disciple of Kaplan who considered himself a Reconstructionist, Steinberg was critical of Kaplan's dismissal of metaphysics.

Steinberg's works included Basic Judaism , The Making of the Modern Jews , and As A Driven Leaf (1939), a historical novel revolving around the talmudic characters Elisha ben Abuyah and Rabbi Akiba. In his final years, he began writing a series of theological essays. This project, which he had hoped would conclude in a book of theology, was cut short by his death at age 47.