This book explores the state of the American Jewish world in the early 21st century, after decades of accelerating change that has transformed it and all other religious groups in the United States. It reveals a community in an unparalleled state of flux grappling with a society in which religious identity is more and more considered an individual choice, rather than an inheritance, and where fewer adults feel impelled to identify with any religious tradition at all. In chapters written by leading experts, the book examines the community’s evolving demographics, the direction of the principal denominational movements, contemporary religious trends, interactions with other American religious communities and engagements in the country’s secular politics. This text uniquely covers all these aspects of Judaism in America making it appealing to students and researchers in such fields as the sociology of religion, Judaism, and American history.

Volume V: A Time for Healing. A Time for Healing chronicles a time of rapid economic and social progress. Yet this phenomenal success, explains Edward S. Shapiro, came at a cost. Shapiro takes seriously the potential threat to Jewish culture posed by assimilation and intermarriage—asking if the Jewish people, having already endured so much, will survive America's freedom and affluence as well.

Scholars and students of American Jewish history and literature in particular will appreciate this internationally focused scholarship on the continuing reverberations of the Second World War and the Holocaust.

No longer controlled by a handful of institutional leaders based in remote headquarters and rabbinical seminaries, American Judaism is being transformed by the spiritual decisions of tens of thousands of Jews living all over the United States. A pulpit rabbi and himself an American Jew, Dana Evan Kaplan follows this religious individualism from its postwar suburban roots to the hippie revolution of the 1960s and the multiple postmodern identities of today. From Hebrew tattooing to Jewish Buddhist meditation, Kaplan describes the remaking of historical tradition in ways that channel multiple ethnic and national identities. While pessimists worry about the vanishing American Jew, Kaplan focuses on creative responses to contemporary spiritual trends that have made a Jewish religious renaissance possible. He believes that the reorientation of American Judaism has been a "bottom up" process, resisted by elites who have reluctantly responded to the demands of the "spiritual marketplace." The American Jewish denominational structure is therefore weakening at the same time that religious experimentation is rising, leading to the innovative approaches supplanting existing institutions. The result is an exciting transformation of what it means to be a religious American Jew in the twenty-first century.

In a landmark volume of new essays destined to reshape the parameters of future discourse on American Jews and their relationships to major ideologies and organization of our time, Lipset has brought together many of the finest social analysts of Jewish life—both in the United States and overseas. Indeed, Canadian and Israeli perspectives add a comparative dimension that increases the special value of this book. S. N. Eisenstadt calls attention in his opening chapter to the thrust of the volume as a whole: a focus on the most distinguishing aspect of the American Jewish experience—the incorporation of Jews into all arenas and aspects of American life, and the effects of such incorporation on the structuring of Jewish life and self-perception. The work emphasizes the burgeoning of Jewish institutions, the visibility and acceptability of such institutions, and the changing Jewish definition of their collective identity. The work is conceived of as Festschrift, essays in honor of Earl Raab. Thus, the work has a community dimension that typifies Raab's work. The four essays in the final segment—"California is Different"—will come as a pleasant bonus in a work that otherwise features the more global dimensions of Jewish life in America. The first section on the "North American Community" features essays by S. N. Eisenstadt, Nathan Glazer, Arnold Eisen, Chaim Waxman, and Morton Weinfield. The second section on "Politics" contains contributions by Irving Kristol, Carl Sheingold, Eyton Gilboa, and Alan Fisher. The third segment is on "Jewish Community Life" with essays by Daniel Elezar, Larry Ruben, and Arnold Dashevsky. This is, in short, a major collective statement by scholars long associated with the subject. It will be of interest to political scientists and sociologists interested in ethnic studies and Jewish life in America.

Thinking Jewish Culture in America argues that Jewish thought extends our awareness and deepens the complexity of American Jewish culture. This volume stretches the disciplinary boundaries of Jewish thought so that it can productively engage expanding arenas of culture by drawing Jewish thought into the orbit of cultural studies. The eleven contributors to Thinking Jewish Cultures, together with Chancellor Arnold Eisen’s postscript, position Jewish thought within the dynamics and possibilities of contemporary Jewish culture. These diverse essays in Jewish thought re-imagine cultural space as a public and sometimes contested performance of Jewish identity, and they each seek to re-enliven that space with reflective accounts of cultural meaning. How do Jews imagine themselves as embodied actors in America? Do cultural obligations limit or expand notions of the self? How should we imagine Jewish thought as a cultural performance? What notions of peoplehood might sustain a vibrant Jewish collectivity in a globalized economy? How do programs in Jewish studies work within the academy? These and other questions engage both Jewish thought and culture, opening space for theoretical works to broaden the range of cultural studies, and to deepen our understanding of Jewish cultural dynamics. Thinking Jewish Culture is a work about Jewish cultural identity reflected through literature, visual arts, philosophy, and theology. But it is more than a mere reflection of cultural patterns and choices: the argument pursued throughout Thinking Jewish Culture is that reflective sources help produce the very cultural meanings and performances they purport to analyze.

Explores the meaning of Jewishness in light of the increasing assimilation of America's Jews and suggests ways to preserve Jewish identity.

First Published in 2001. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.