Berkowitz decided to become a Reform rabbi because he heard a sermon by Isaac Mayer Wise and enrolled at the new Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion founded by him, where he graduated in 1883 in the first class.
In his speech, he compared the Egyptian Jews to independence activists for both courage of being rebellious to the totalitarians and confirms the strength of that sympathy bond.
In Philadelphia, he was a member of the Mayor's Vice Commission which dealt with the prostitution among East European immigrant girls and of the Board of Recreation, and was a vice-president of the Universal Peace Union and Social Purity Alliance.
[1] Berkowitz published many works, with all his manuscripts are conserved at the Jacob Rader Marcus Center of the American Jewish Archives in Cincinnati, OH.
At the Central Conference of American Rabbis (CCAR) convention in Cincinnati in 1899, well before the establishment of the modern State of Israel, he listed three reasons for his opposition: (1) he remained hopeful that the world would accept Jews; (2) he believed Zionism was more sentimental rather than practical; (3) he claimed Zionism would make Jews shift focus from religion to the race and nationality of being part of a Jewish state.
A petition signed in 1919 by Berkowitz and other US Jewish leaders was published in The New York Times,[6] with the title "Protest to Wilson against Zionist State: Representative Jews Ask Him to Present it to the Peace Conferences."