Authors: Jack Wertheimer
ISBN-13: 9780874518481, ISBN-10: 0874518482
Format: Paperback
Publisher: University Press of New England
Date Published: September 1997
Edition: 1st Edition
JACK WERTHEIMER is Professor of History at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, author of Unwelcome Strangers: East European Jews in Imperial Germany (1987), and editor of The American Synagogue: A Sanctuary Transformed (UPNE/Brandeis, 1995).
An analysis of contemporary American Judaism within the broader scope of American religious life.
American Jewry has become increasingly polarized, asserts Wertheimer. In his estimation, current dynamic programs for religious revival are the creations of a vocal, passionately involved minority, while for the vast majority of American Jews, religion plays a minimal role. In this searching inquiry, the author, a history professor at the Jewish Theological Seminary in Manhattan, looks at various innovations, from the Havurah movement, which has stressed gender equality, prayer services and intimate communal experiences, to Jewish feminism and reconstructivist congregations. Nor are the more established sectors exempt from change. At the same time that Wertheimer ( Unwelcome Strangers ) finds an eclectic openness to traditional teachings in Reform Judaism, he also notes a shift to the right among the Orthodox and deep splits in a Conservative community. This is a tough-minded corrective to more optimistic recent surveys. (Aug.)
Preface | ||
Introduction | ||
Pt. I | Postwar Judaism: An Era of Stability, a Decade of Conflict | |
1 | Expansion and Respectability at Midcentury | 3 |
2 | The Turbulent Sixties | 18 |
Pt. II | Popular Religion: Apathy and Renewal | |
3 | The Drift toward Religious Minimalism | 43 |
4 | Expressions of Popular Religious Revival | 66 |
Pt. III | The Fragmenting World of Organized Judaism | |
5 | Reform: Change in Both Directions | 95 |
6 | Orthodoxy: Triumphalism on the Right | 114 |
7 | Conservative Judaism and the Challenge of Centrism | 137 |
8 | The Reconstruction of Kaplanian Reconstructionism | 160 |
9 | Religious Movements in Collision: A Jewish Culture War? | 170 |
Conclusion: Judaism within the Landscape of American Religion | 185 | |
Notes | 197 | |
Bibliography of Selected Secondary Works | 247 | |
Glossary | 255 | |
Index | 259 |