Seekers of Meaning 11/05/2021: Rabbi Stephen Fuchs, author of “And Often the First Jew”

Rabbi Address chats with this week’s guest, Rabbi Stephen Fuchs

On this week’s episode of the Seekers of Meaning TV Show and Podcast, Rabbi Stephen Fuchs, former president of the World Union for Progressive Judaism, and author of the new book, And Sometimes the First Jew, which chronicles the accomplishments, adventures, and “firsts” in Germany for Rabbi Fuchs and his wife Vickie, who are both children of Holocaust survivors. Rabbi Fuchs tells of the arrest and brutal treatment that his father, Leo Fuchs, received at the onset of Kristallnacht and how he was able to survive.

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About the Guest

Rabbi Stephen L. Fuchs

Rabbi Stephen Lewis Fuchs was born in East Orange, New Jersey on March 16, 1946. Upon graduating from East Orange High School, he matriculated at and graduated from Hamilton College in Clinton, New York. After five more years and four summers of full-time study, he was ordained as a Rabbi at Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, Ohio where he earned his MA in Hebrew Letters and a graduate certificate in Jewish Communal Service from the Hebrew Union College branch in Los Angeles, CA.Rabbi Stephen Fuchs and Victoria Steinberg Fuchs, a now-retired elementary school teacher, married on June 9, 1974 in San Francisco, CA. They currently reside in Sanibel Island, FL where Rabbi Fuchs is the spiritual leader at Bat Yam Temple of the Islands. They have three children and five grandchildren.​While studying at Hamilton and at HUC, Rabbi Fuchs worked as a teaching tennis pro at Spring Garden CC in Florham Park, NJ and at the famed Concord Hotel in the Catskills Mountains.“I’ve learned more about people through teaching and  dealing with them during those five summers than I did in all the years I’d studied in college and graduate school,” he says.​In 1992, Rabbi Fuchs earned a Doctor of Ministry (D.Min.) degree in biblical interpretation from Vanderbilt University Divinity School in Nashville, Tennessee. He received a Doctor of Divinity Degree, Honoris Causa, from the Hebrew Union College—Jewish Institute of Religion in New York in March of...