Pulling his own work from a stack of books beside him, Bennett Muraskin told his audience the story of Rabbi Levi Yitzchok and a poor illiterate tailor who had come to see him on the eve of Yom Kippur.

“Since you couldn’t read the prayers, what did you say to God?” asked the rabbi.

The tailor blurted out a litany of sins, including shortchanging customers and eating nonkosher food. Next, the tailor said, he urged God to “just examine your own sins. You have robbed mothers of their babes and left helpless babes orphans. Your sins are much more serious than mine.”

The tailor then urged God, “Let’s make a deal. You forgive me and I’ll forgive you.”

“You foolish man,” cried the rabbi. “Just think! You were in an excellent position to make Him redeem the whole Jewish people.”

The tailor’s story was one of dozens of tales of Jewish folklore told from a “humanistic Jewish” perspective that Muraskin shared with some 40 listeners at the Alex Aidekman Family Jewish Community Campus in Whippany on Feb. 27.

The stories, said Muraskin shortly after his talk, reflect his “devotion to a secular humanist approach to Jewish culture apart from the Torah and the prayers and having a nonreligious view of Jewish literature. It is to show there is an alternative to the authoritarianism and the ethnocentrism and the violence that permeates much of the Torah.”

The approach has led Muraskin to write two books, Let Justice Well Up Like Water: Progressive Jews from Hillel to Helen Suzman and Humanist Readings in Jewish Folklore.

He leads the Jewish Cultural School and Society, which meets at the Leon & Toby Cooperman JCC, Ross Family Campus, in West Orange.

Since 1991, Muraskin has been writing articles on Jewish culture and politics for magazines like Jewish Currents, the venerable journal of the “progressive, secular” Jewish Left (published in cooperation with the Workmen’s Circle).

His is also an approach that runs counter to some of the central trends in Jewish communal life today, especially in its criticism of Zionism and its nonreligious approach to Judaism.

The JCCS, he said, “is for secular-minded progressive Jewish families. Belief in God is irrelevant to us, and we don’t have any God language or prayer in our practice. It’s a cultural-secular approach to being Jewish.”

Muraskin was born in Brooklyn as a working-class “red-diaper baby.”

“My father was very close to the Communist Party, and my grandfather was definitely a party member. But I am not a communist,” he said.

While other Jewish radicals in the New York of his youth disdained their ethnic heritage, Muraskin’s own identity was formed by a merger of secular Judaism and the Yiddish-language socialism of folkshules, after-school programs, and summer camps.

Today he represents state college members of the American Federation of Teachers.

To Muraskin, atheism is his “private personal belief. I don’t go around condemning religion. I knew very little about religious Judaism until I married a woman from the mainstream Conservative movement and I started going to synagogues. So I took it upon myself to learn more about beliefs and rituals. I thought it was my obligation to be well-rounded.”

He confided that he and his wife, Ellen, have occasional conflicts over Israel and Zionism, but, he said, “they haven’t stopped me from teaching adult education classes at her synagogue,” Adath Shalom in Morris Plains, where the couple lives.

“I talk about folklore. I talk about Yiddish. I’m welcome there,” he said.

And yet, he acknowledged, he does not “feel comfortable in any setting in a sanctuary for any services. I don’t believe and I don’t get any inspiration out of prayer or any ritual.”

When it came time to consider the upbringing of their daughters, now 18 and 22, “it was a compromise with my wife. She won. The kids both went to the Adath Shalom Hebrew school. I would go there for Shabbat programs and for bar and bat mitzvas. The kids are halfway between. They would go to my secular group in West Orange when there was no conflict.”

But he has plenty of conflict with mainstream American Judaism’s strong support of Israel.

“I cringe because other Jews are so closely embracing a state in which they weren’t born and may never live and may not have any relatives,” he said. “They are worshipping another government. To me it’s unhealthy to be nationalistic for a country in which they don’t even live. It’s ‘my nation right or wrong.’”

Muraskin is also critical of specific Israeli policies. “I think the interests of the Jews in Israel are not the interests of holding onto the occupied territories, are not the interests of dropping cluster bombs on Lebanon, are not the interests of holding thousands of Palestinians in prison without due-process rights, are not the interests of building more and more settlements on the West Bank.”

And yet he described his own family’s visit to Israel 10 years ago as “wonderful. We had a great time.” The family took part in a Kibbutz Family Adventure sponsored by what was then the United Jewish Federation of MetroWest.

“We lived on Kibbutz Gezer,” he said. “We weren’t indoctrinated. They weren’t trying to get us to live there. They weren’t trying to get us to give money. They weren’t asking to make any kind of political commitment or commitment to any theology. It was a great program.”

Still, Muraskin’s “non-Zionist” views make him a lightning rod for criticism from other members of the Jewish community. After he shared his views on Israel in a letter published in NJ Jewish News, other readers responded angrily, accusing him of distorting history, downplaying the need for a Jewish refuge from persecution, and ignoring anti-Semitism.

Muraskin remains unapologetic.

“For American Jews to so strongly identify with the power and military might of another country — I think it does erode the spiritual and ethical values of the Jewish people that were developed in the Diaspora,” he said. “I am a Diasporist — not a Zionist.”