Richard Lowell Rubenstein (January 8, 1924 – May 16, 2021) was a rabbi, theologian, educator, and writer, noted particularly for his path-breaking contributions to post-Holocaust theology and his sociopolitical analyses of surplus populations and bureaucracy. A Connecticut resident, he was married to art historian Betty Rogers Rubenstein (d. 2013).

Rubenstein was born in New York City on January 8, 1924. He began his undergraduate studies at the City University of New York and completed them at the University of Cincinnati. While in Cincinnati, Rubenstein also studied for the rabbinate through the Reform-affiliated Hebrew Union College, where Abraham Joshua Heschel was a faculty member at the time. After completing his B.A. at the University of Cincinnati, Rubenstein discontinued his studies at Hebrew Union College. Instead of continuing training in the Reform movement, he followed Heschel to the Jewish Theological Seminary of America (JTSA), where he received rabbinical ordination into the Conservative movement and a master's degree in 1952. Subsequently, he studied under the Christian theologian Paul Tillich at Harvard Divinity School, where he earned a master's degree in sacred theology and a doctoral degree in the history of religion in 1960. He was later awarded two honorary degrees: The first, a Doctorate of Hebrew Letters from JTSA, and the second, a Doctorate of Humane Letters, from Grand Valley State University.

Following his ordination in 1952, Rubenstein was the rabbi of two Massachusetts congregations in succession, and then in 1956 became assistant director of the B'nai B'rith Hillel Foundation and chaplain to the Jewish students at Harvard University, Radcliffe, and Wellesley, where he served until 1958. From 1958 to 1970, he was the director of the B'nai B'rith Hillel Foundation and chaplain to the Jewish students at the University of Pittsburgh, Carnegie-Mellon University, and Duquesne University. At the University of Pittsburgh, he also taught an upper division course on French Existentialism.

From 1970 to 1995, Rubenstein taught in religious studies at Florida State University, where he held a professorial chair. He then became president and professor of religion at the University of Bridgeport, where he served from 1995 to 1999.

Rubenstein was also a newspaper columnist for a Japanese newspaper and authored several books on the Holocaust, theology, Jewish-Christian relations, ethics, and politics.

Rubenstein emerged in the 1960s as a significant writer on the meaning and impact of the Holocaust for Judaism. His first book, After Auschwitz, explored radical theological frontiers in Jewish thought. Rubenstein argued that the experience of the Holocaust shattered the traditional Judaic concept of God, especially as the God of the covenant with Abraham, in which the God of Israel is the God of history. Rubenstein argued that Jews could no longer advocate the notion of an omnipotent God at work in history or espouse the election of Israel as the chosen people. In the wake of the Holocaust, he believed that Jews have lost hope and there is no ultimate meaning to life.

[A]s children of the Earth, we are undeceived concerning our destiny. We have lost all hope, consolation and illusion.

In After Auschwitz, Rubenstein argued that the covenant had died. He did not mean he was now an atheist, nor that religion had to be discarded as irrelevant. However, he believed not in a transcendent God, but in God as the ground of being: