Richard L. Rubenstein, the leading Jewish voice in the theological groundswell of the 1960s known as the “Death of God” movement, who argued that the idea of an omnipotent, benevolent deity who safeguards Jews as the chosen people, died on May 16 in Bridgeport, CT. He was 97.

Dr. Rubenstein was a Conservative campus rabbi and academic, who had studied at Harvard Divinity School as well as at Reform and Conservative Jewish seminaries. In 1966, in the seminal book, After Auschwitz: Radical Theology and Contemporary Judaism, he challenged the notion of a cosmos-controlling God, principally by raising the specter of the six million Jews, one million of them children, killed by the Germans and their collaborators.

“How can Jews believe in an omnipotent, beneficent God after Auschwitz?” he wrote. “Traditional Jewish theology maintains that God is the ultimate, omnipotent actor in the historical drama. I fail to see how this position can be maintained without regarding Hitler and the SS as instruments of God’s will.”

While he contended that the God of traditional beliefs did not exist, Dr. Rubenstein never renounced a belief in a God and attended synagogue every Sabbath, his daughter said.