Creating American Reform Judaism

1998 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sefton D. Temkin
Keyword(s):  
Jewish Community ◽  
New World ◽  
Jewish Life ◽  
Reform Judaism ◽  
American Jews ◽  
Prayer Book ◽  
American Jewish ◽  
Jewish Prayer ◽  
Union College

Isaac Mayer Wise (1819–1900), founder of the major institutions of Reform Judaism in America, was a man of his time — a pioneer in a pioneer’s world. When he came to America from his childhood Bohemia in 1846, he found fewer than 50,000 Jews and only two ordained rabbis. With his sense of mission and tireless energy, he set himself to tailoring the vehicle of Reform Judaism to meet the needs of the growing Jewish community. Wise strove for unity among American Jews, and for a college to train rabbis to serve them. The establishment of Hebrew Union College (1875) was the crowning achievement of his life. His quest for unity also led him to draw up an American Jewish prayer-book, Minhag America, to found the Central Conference of American Rabbis, and to edit two weeklies; their editorials, breathing fire and energy, were no less important in his quest for leadership. Here as elsewhere, it was his persistence that won him the war where his impetuosity lost him many battles. This book captures the vigour of Wise’s personality and the politics and concerns of contemporary Jewish life and leadership in America. The biography is a lively portrait of a rabbi whose singular efforts in many fields made him a pivotal figure in the naturalization of the Jew and Judaism in the New World.

A New American Jewish World

1998 ◽  
pp. 294-297
Author(s):  
Sefton D. Temkin
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New York ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Eastern Europe ◽  
Jewish Community ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Jewish Life ◽  
The United States ◽  
Reform Judaism ◽  
American Jewish

This chapter shows how the battles over the Pittsburgh Platform were being fought over a terrain which other factors were already transforming. Large-scale migration from Eastern Europe had begun. The number of Jews in the United States, estimated at 250,000 in 1880, reached the million mark in 1900, the year of Wise’s death. The acculturated community, speaking English albeit with a German accent, largely middle class, reformed in religion, was outnumbered by one that spoke Yiddish, belonged to the proletariat, and was untouched by Reform Judaism. The processes which Wise saw at work when he arrived in 1846 had to begin over again; but although many of the factors were similar, the answers were not necessarily the same. Incidentally, the presence of a second and larger Jewish community enhanced the importance of New York in American Jewish life and diminished the significance of Cincinnati and other Midwest communities where Wise had held sway.

A Congregation of Strangers

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shari Rabin
Keyword(s):  
Social Networks ◽  
Jewish Life ◽  
Religious Authority ◽  
American Jews ◽  
National Union ◽  
American Jewish Life ◽  
Informal Social Networks ◽  
American Jewish ◽  
Professional Leadership

This chapter argues that American Jewish denominationalism developed not only to enshrine religious authority but to create cooperation, familiarity, and access among mobile American Jews who seemed to be “strangers” to one another. Beginning with newspapers and informal social networks, leaders like Isaac Mayer Wise and Isaac Leeser worked to develop programs for traveling preachers, rabbinic credentials, and the collection of statistics. These became some of the most important goals of their new denominational bodies, the Board of Delegates of American Israelites and the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, which sought to familiarize and order American Jewish life. Efforts to create a national union failed because of sectarian and sectional divisions, but they did succeed in enshrining norms of congregational membership, professional leadership, and rational information throughout the nation.

A New World Babylonia

2021 ◽  
pp. 252-275
Author(s):  
Deborah Dash Moore
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New World ◽  
Jewish Life ◽  
Church And State ◽  
The United States ◽  
American Jews ◽  
Jewish Culture ◽  
Profound Impact ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
The Creation

This chapter discusses the distinctive rise of American Jews as a new center of Jewish culture. It focuses on the conditions in the United States, especially separation of church and state, which encouraged religious creativity, and the genocide of the Holocaust that spurred the transfer of aspects of European religious and intellectual Jewish life. It argues that feminism encouraged women to contribute in vital ways to the creation of Jewish culture that had a profound impact throughout the Jewish world. America has exemplified a new Babylonia, one that would produce influential forms of Judaism shaped by women as well as men.

Materially Poor, Spiritually Rich

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rachel Kranson
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Social Status ◽  
Jewish Identity ◽  
Jewish Life ◽  
Symbolic Power ◽  
American Jews ◽  
World War ◽  
American Jewish Life ◽  
American Jewish ◽  
State Of Israel

As the fortunes and social status of American Jews grew in the years after World War II, the symbolic power of the shtetl, the immigrant slum, and the struggling new state of Israel gained in importance. Jewish writers, educators, and clergy depicted these locations as deeply authentic Jewish spaces, uncorrupted by the influence and comforts of the non-Jewish world. Isolated rather than integrated, impoverished rather than affluent, they seemed to represent the opposite of mid-century American Jewish life. In the romantic imagination of American Jewish leaders, the deprivations suffered by their ancestors and co-religionists transformed into sources of pleasure, strength, and Jewish authenticity, and poverty and isolation emerged as integral components of a genuine and deeply satisfying Jewish identity.

Compiling a Bibliography סf American Jewish Liturgy through 1925

2000 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 51-57
Author(s):  
Sharona Wachs
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Identity ◽  
American Jews ◽  
The Press ◽  
American Jewish ◽  
Jewish Liturgy ◽  
Union College

The experience of compiling a bibliography of American Jewish liturgy from the establishment of the press through 1925 is discussed. The parameters of the bibliography are detailed as well as its contents. The present lack of complete or systematic documentation of American Jewish liturgy in Judaica libraries is noted. Also discussed is the significance of liturgy for the study of American Jews, their religious and cultural identity, as well as their demographics. This paper details the experience of compiling a bibliography of American Jewish liturgy through 1925, and describes some of the parameters and contents of the bibliography. This bibliography was published by Hebrew Union College Press in late 1997 under the title American Jewish Liturgies: A Bibliography of American Jewish Liturgy from the Establishment of the Press in the Colonies through 1925.

The Legacy

1998 ◽  
pp. 304-306
Author(s):  
Sefton D. Temkin
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New York ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Jewish Community ◽  
Jewish Life ◽  
Industrial Society ◽  
American Jewish Community ◽  
Immigrant Generation ◽  
The Past ◽  
American Jewish

This chapter considers Isaac Mayer Wise’s legacy to the Jews of America, as well as events in the aftermath of his death. In time, America’s powerful industrial society homogenized the American Jewish community, at the same time allowing for unforeseen divisions. The rejection of practices brought over from Europe, which characterized much of nineteenth-century Reform, abated as the immigrant generation disappeared, and nostalgia for the past helped to influence their descendants. As the twentieth century staggered to its mid-point, the scene was transformed in a more fundamental sense. In 1919, when the centenary of Wise’s birth came round, Europe had lost its hegemony in world affairs; in 1946, at the centenary of Wise’s arrival in New York, Europe lay in ruins, and world leadership had been thrust into America’s hands. The old heartland of Jewish life did not just lie in ruins; it had been utterly destroyed. It was for the Jews of America to take up the torch, and to this task they applied themselves with energy and generosity. Unencumbered by ideological restraints, the institutions which Wise had fostered, amid doubts as to whether American soil could sustain them, showed themselves resilient enough to rise to the challenge.

From Generation to Generation

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rachel Kranson
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Jewish Life ◽  
Common Denominator ◽  
American Jews ◽  
Class Culture ◽  
American Jewish Life ◽  
American Judaism ◽  
Soviet Jewry ◽  
The Common ◽  
American Jewish

Beginning in the late 1960s, young Jewish radicals rejected the middle-class culture in which they had been raised, and attempted to reinvent American Jewish life in the spirit of the era’s global youth revolt. This Jewish counterculture organized multiple religious and political collectives and advanced a variety of causes, some of which overlapped and some of which actually contradicted with one another. The common denominator linking together all of these disparate undertakings, however, was a pointed critique of the middle-class Jewish culture that had been forged by the older generation of American Jews. Indeed, when members of the Jewish counterculture created narratives to justify their investments in such issues as the plight of Soviet Jewry; the inclusion of women, gays and lesbians in American Jewish life; Zionism; or the restructuring of American Judaism – none of which pertained directly to the class position of American Jews-- they often cited American Jewish affluence as not only relevant but fundamental to the problems they were trying to solve.

scholarly journals ‘Bringing in Those Who Are Far’: Jewish Sociology and the Reconstruction of Jewish Life in Post-War Europe

2016 ◽  
Vol 9 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 225-246
Author(s):  
Bart Wallet
Keyword(s):  
Jewish Community ◽  
Quantitative Data ◽  
Jewish Life ◽  
Community Life ◽  
Policy Makers ◽  
Jewish Communities ◽  
Demographic Research ◽  
Scientific Methods ◽  
American Jewish ◽  
Post War

Sociology played a major role in the reconstruction of European Jewry after 1945. It offered a putatively objective language, enabling Jews of different religious and political leanings to collaborate. With Jewish communities having been devastated by the war, policy makers now sought quantitative data regarding composition, orientation, and the needs of these populations. Through institutions, journals and conferences, American Jewish theories, and models were transferred to Europe, but were channelled for a distinct function. Demographic research and Jewish community centres were developed with the goal of locating and attracting ‘marginal Jews’ so as to reconnect them to community life. Jewish sociology in post-war Europe was part of a major effort towards reconstruction of Jewish communities; this effort was based on scientific methods and aimed at ‘saving’ all remaining Jews for the greater Jewish cause.

“The Edge of the Abyss”: The Origins of the Israel Lobby, 1949–1954

2018 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 23-43 ◽  
Author(s):  
Doug Rossinow
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Jewish Life ◽  
The United States ◽  
Public Affairs ◽  
American Jews ◽  
The West ◽  
American Jewish ◽  
Main Components ◽  
State Of Israel ◽  
Israeli Soldiers

The main components of the Israel lobby in the United States were organized in the spring of 1954, six years after the State of Israel declared independence, in response to a crisis in U.S.–Israel diplomacy that erupted in October 1953. Israeli soldiers had massacred more than sixty Palestinian villagers in Qibya, on the West Bank, eliciting widespread condemnation; American Jews, in reply, mobilized to defend Israel in new ways. The American Zionist Committee for Public Affairs (later renamed AIPAC) and the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, established at this time, displayed two outstanding features. They were Jewish united front organizations that brought together Zionist with “non-Zionist” groups. They also emerged from transnational contacts with Israeli leaders and realities. A staunch near-consensus in defense of Israel in the most trying circumstances established a lasting framework in American Jewish life.

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