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Vol. 70, No. 1 (Summer 2026) - Celebrating America’s Sestercentennial

Vernacular American Judaism

 

Deborah Dash Moore

In 1994 Jenna Weissman Joselit, a historian of American Jews, published The Wonders of America: Reinventing Jewish Culture, 1880-1950, that looked at the transformations that had occurred as American Jews moved from being immigrants to becoming second generation. Her evocative chapter titles—“Kissing Business, Yidishe Nachas, Red-Letter Days, Home Sweet Haym, Kitchen Judaism, The Call of the Matzoh, A Last Farewell”—marked transitions in marriage, motherhood, education, and religion, along with changes in the kitchen, classroom, banquet hall, and even the funeral parlor.1 Indeed, Joselit borrowed her title from a short story by the Yiddish writer, Sholom Aleichem, where he described, with mordant humor, what it cost to get buried in America. Joselit may have been inspired by the historian Arthur Goren’s use of the short story in a published lecture he gave on Jewish funerals on New York’s Lower East Side, including impressive send-offs to Jewish criminals. The funeral of gangster Big Jack Zelig aspired to match that of Rabbi Jacob Joseph, considered the leading Orthodox rabbi in NYC in 1903 when he died. Thirty-six carriages and twenty-five automobiles followed Zelig’s casket in 1912; everyone who was anyone in the Jewish underworld attended the funeral, yeshiva students sang psalms, and Zelig was buried next to the famous Yiddish playwright Jacob Gordin. These honors exemplified changes brought about by capitalism.2

But whether hardworking householders or enterprising gangsters, everyone necessarily faced death. Goren emphasized the public character of mourning and its communal power to unite Jews in gestures of rededication, uplift, and solidarity through funeral processions on Manhattan’s streets.3 By contrast, Joselit stressed the quotidian dimensions of death, including its costs—reproducing, for example, a 1930s bill from a funeral home listing the various services performed and their prices.

The dust jacket of her book aptly summarized its contents and aims: “The selective relish with which most American Jews affirm their identity . . . has usually given rise to satire or consternation,” it explains, letting us understand attitudes toward American Jewishness at the end of the twentieth century. “The Wonders of America offers an alternative perspective,” it continues,

for this innovative social history of Jewish culture highlights the cultural ingenuity and adaptive genius of American Jewish life . . . . Drawing on advertisements and etiquette manuals, sermons and surveys, Jenna Weissman Joselit offers a lively . . . account of how American Jews created their distinctive culture . . . how they raised their children, decorated their homes, shopped and cooked, celebrated holidays, and marked birth, marriage, and death as they became at home in America. Her fresh, original analysis makes clear that it is . . . the small choices of daily life that shape and sustain a culture.4

These “small choices of daily life” continued to evolve in the postwar years and on into the beginnings of the twenty-first century. Although Joselit eschews theorizing the cultural and religious changes she depicts, she could have drawn upon what Leonard Norman Primiano, a scholar of religion and folklore, dubbed “vernacular religion.” In his 1988 article on “Vernacular Religion and the Search for Method in Religious Folklife,” Primiano rejected the then current distinction between “elite” and “folk” religions popular among scholars, instead positing that all religion was lived. “Understanding religion as ‘vernacular religion’,” he wrote, “does justice to the variety of manifestations and perspectives found with past and present human religiosity.” Primiano championed the term “vernacular” because of the way it did “justice to the experiential component of people’s religious lives” which could “only be satisfied by a term which specifically addresses the ‘personal’ and ‘private.’” Thus “Vernacular religion is, by definition, religion as it is lived: as human beings encounter, understand, interpret, and practice it. Since religion inherently involves interpretation, it is impossible for the religion of an individual not to be vernacular,” Primiano concluded.5 I want to suggest that Joselit’s and Goren’s framing of religious adaptations in the years prior to World War II as modes of Americanization can also be profitably understood, per Primiano, as expressions of vernacular American Judaism.

This essay extends the concept of vernacular American Judaism into the latter half of the twentieth century and first decades of the twenty-first century. It looks at some distinctively American Jewish practices drawing upon work by religious studies scholars and historians. Meant to be suggestive, rather than comprehensive, it argues that processes of religious invention, interpretation, practice, and experience continue to shape contemporary American Judaism as much as theological creativity.

Let me begin with one of the most far-reaching changes introduced into Judaism by American Jews. I am speaking, of course, of the impact of feminism that transformed Jewish education, ritual, liturgy, and leadership and continues to inspire new forms of religious expression. Rabbi and theologian Mordecai M. Kaplan, inspired in part by the Nineteenth Amendment to the US Constitution that gave women the right to vote, introduced the idea and practice of bat mitzvah for his daughters, starting with his oldest, Judith, back in 1922. But the concept did not catch on until the rise of women’s liberation and second wave feminism in the 1960s and 1970s. By the 1980s, bat mitzvah had spread beyond Reform, Reconstructionist, and Conservative congregations to reach even some liberal Modern Orthodox congregations.6 And by the end of the twentieth century, it had joined bar mitzvah to become a hallmark of vernacular American Judaism. Along the way, it helped propel opportunities for women to gain advanced Jewish learning and the leadership that flowed from it.

The ordination of women as rabbis followed, starting first with Reform Judaism, then Reconstructionist Judaism, then in the 1980s Conservative Judaism, and in the twenty-first century, Modern Orthodox Judaism. Women’s ordination and scholarship spurred rewritten forms of liturgy (for example, morning blessings), revised translations of sacred texts (including Tanach), and new modes of midrash reflecting feminist insights.7 The impact of these changes extended to recognition of LGBTQ Jews in the twenty-first century as worthy of rabbinic leadership. Transformations initiated by Jewish feminists permeated vernacular American Judaism, although they did not necessarily extend to the Jewish world outside of the US.8

Despite all the changes, a 2006 article noted regarding the exclusion of women in leadership positions: “We have seen these patterns in the Jewish federation world, where no woman has served as CEO of any of the largest federations — ever.” It went on to enumerate the exclusion of women in the religious world:

We have seen these patterns in Conservative synagogues, where women are more active than men in all roles except for governance and liturgical leadership. We have seen them in the Conservative rabbinate, where only one woman has ever served as the leading rabbi in a large congregation, and where women rabbis get paid less than male counterparts as spiritual leaders of congregations of similar size. And we have seen them in the Jewish professional world, where the compensation patterns of JCC directors and of all communal professionals display substantial gender-related disparities, even after statistically controlling for the status of the position and the qualifications of the professionals.9

Twenty years later, both Conservative and Reconstructionist rabbinical seminaries have been led by women, a scholar and rabbi respectively, even if the critique of Jewish communal organizations stands.10

In the US, where Jewish women and men increasingly share equal responsibilities for leadership and authority, where girls and boys both receive Jewish educations, where women are integral members of Jewish life and contributors to Jewish culture, these attributes mark vernacular American Judaism as distinct from other forms of Judaism. They also represent a type of change sufficiently radical to prompt consideration of other innovations that flowed from understanding women and men as equal Jewish human beings.

I want to return to the widespread popularity of bar/bat mitzvah, drawing upon religious studies scholar Patricia Munro’s research. “When thirteen-year-old bar or bat mitzvah students stand before family, friends, and sometimes community in a public ritual, they exemplify the core values of Judaism, uphold the family honor, and symbolically represent the Jewish future,” she writes. The implications are profound. “Bar and bat mitzvah have affected who joins synagogues and how they participate, the way Jewish professionals allocate their time, what Jewish supplementary schools teach and why, and what comprises the regular religious service into which the bar or bat mitzvah ritual is embedded;” it has also exerted influence on American Protestant culture. Its widespread popularity among Jewish 13-year-olds and their friendships with Christians have brought knowledge of both elements of the event—ritual and celebration—into broader public consciousness.11

Not only has the ritual has changed how “American Jews understand and engage with Judaism,” it has also changed how non-Jews understand and engage with Judaism. No longer an exotic spectacle, “a strange ethnic rite of passage far outside the mainstream,” but a vernacular American Jewish practice—Munro’s first chapter is titled “It’s Not Duddy Kravitz’s Bar Mitzvah Any More” referring to the 1974 movie’s video montage of exotic ritual practices shown at a bar mitzvah—it initiates more than the Jewish 13-year-old into consciousness of Judaism and its dimensions. Munro concludes, riffing on Ahad Ha’am’s notion about the reciprocal power of Sabbath observance to preserve Jewish life: “Bar mitzvah has played a crucial role in creating and sustaining American Judaism, so much so that it can be said that as much as American Jews have created bar mitzvah, so has bar mitzvah created American Jews.” The adoption of patrilineal descent by Reform Jews in 1983 challenged Reform congregations to figure out how to incorporate intermarried families. The bar/bat mitzvah allowed those families to demonstrate to fellow congregants that they had raised Jewish children.12

Along with changing life cycle rituals, American Jews rescrambled the hierarchy of Jewish holidays. Even as recognition of the significance of the High Holidays of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur registered in public school calendars, at least in heavily Jewish cities like New York, American Jews were increasingly observing Passover instead.13 In the immediate postwar years, Passover moved to the top of the list of widely celebrated Jewish holidays. The sociologist Marshall Sklare argued that its popularity stemmed in part from its home-based structure, emphasizing family, and conducted around a table that culminated in a feast.14 As more American Jews participated in Passover seders, they also began to rewrite its central liturgical text, the haggadah.

An early pioneer of rewriting the haggadah, Kaplan emphasized its significance as a holiday of liberation, not redemption, linking the first emancipation of Jewish slaves from Egypt to subsequent emancipations throughout history, including such non-Jewish examples as the emancipation of serfs from their masters, and ending with the promise of democracy’s freedoms, also understood as an emancipation. Published in 1941 as American Jews watched World War II unfold in Europe, Kaplan’s political optimism expressed in The New Haggadah presaged other haggadot of the postwar years.15 In 1969 the activist Arthur Waskow’s Freedom Seder radically reimagined the seder as a political gathering of Blacks and Whites, Jews and Christians. Motivated in response to the murder of Martin Luther King, Jr. the previous year, the Freedom Seder—held on April 4, the third night of Passover and the anniversary of King’s death—spurred ongoing rewriting of the seder liturgy and ritual. As Waskow wrote in the preface, “a Freedom Seder should be not only a ritual remembrance, not only a shared promise for the future, but itself a political act . . . as the first Passover was, when the people of Israel liberated themselves and their God.” 16

For several decades following the Freedom Seder, women regularly held feminist seders, repurposing a previous generation’s third seder tradition. Among the largest of these, Ma’yan: the Jewish Women’s Project of the Jewish Community Center of the Upper West Side of Manhattan, held seders that soon drew more than 1,500 participants each year on three consecutive nights before Passover. Ma’yan rewrote the haggadah for these seders, explaining “Seders are not rituals led by experts. They are home-based, peer-led rituals that can help us revive our personal connections with Jewish history, and restore our sense of ownership of Judaism’s future.”17 Jewish feminists reimagined the symbolic objects of the seder ritual. For example, they added “Miriam’s Cup” of water to the prophet “Elijah’s Cup” of wine.18 And in the early 1980s, inspired by scholar Susannah Heschel’s suggestion of how to include LGBTQ Jews as part of the seder, many American Jews placed an orange on the seder plate.19 Over the course of the next several decades, hundreds of haggadot were published, versions of vernacular American Judaism.20 In the twenty-first century, American Jews increasingly adopted DIY versions, mixing texts from any number of sources. This type of individualism, encouraged by American capitalism, permeated other Jewish practices such as kashrut.

In the postwar decades kosher observance plummeted among American Jews as efforts to recruit food companies to agree to kosher certification escalated. The Orthodox Union increasingly succeeded in getting an ever-wider array of companies to accept their OU symbol and pay for a mashgiach to supervise industrial food production. At the same time, other Orthodox rabbis got into the act, introducing the concept and practice of glatt kosher and extending it beyond meat to dairy products and other types of food. They called on their followers to adopt their symbols when making food purchases. This fracturing of kosher certification emphasized the extent to which individualism had come to dominate vernacular American Judaism. Each Jew could choose which symbols, if any, they wanted to trust to determine whether food was kosher. Ironically, perhaps, successful advertising of kosher products simultaneously reached widening circles of Americans of all backgrounds. Hebrew National hit on the slogan, “we answer to a higher authority,” to imply the better quality of its all-beef hotdogs. Levi’s rye bread went further, explicitly urging Americans that “you don’t need to be Jewish to love Levi’s.” Hammering home the slogan were pictures—very clear for the time (the mid-1960s)—of non-Jews engaged in taking a bite out of a sandwich made with Levi’s rye bread: a native American wearing a headdress, an Irish cop in uniform, a Black boy.

One of the most vivid examples of a successful sales pitch occurred as the makers of Manischewitz wine discovered a new audience for its sweet product among Black Americans, which reminded them of a similar wine made from Southern grapes. The company’s initial advertising campaign—“wine like mother used to make”—resonated with Black customers from the South. Then Manischewitz realized they needed make their name pronounceable. So, they started to promote “man-o-Mani-schewitz.” It caught on. “When astronaut Buzz Aldrin invoked the by-then iconic phrase ‘Man-O-Manischewitz’ to capture the awe he felt stepping on the moon in 1973, he also inadvertently certified the remarkable success of a quarter century of company marketing efforts.” 21 His exclamation was broadcast around the world.

Similarly, Hanukkah entered the public sphere starting in the late 1960s, albeit with controversy. It’s not that American Jews had not increasingly embraced the holiday, elevating it to compensate for the extensive commercialization of Christmas. Hanukkah was gradually rising in popularity among American Jews. But in the process, the festival of lights was changing into a celebration of religious choice. Vernacular American Judaism reinterpreted the Hanukkah “miracle” as “created by individual Jews who maintain their religious commitments, not by a divine power. Yet the emphasis on individual choice,” argues historian Dianne Ashton, “lent cultural support to those who were seeking new ways to enact their religious lives.”22

Dissension arose, however, around new modes of celebration involving huge public menorahs set up in cities around the country and often lit by political figures. In the immediate postwar decades American Jews had worked hard, often through litigation, to get public observances of Christian religious holidays, especially Christmas and Easter, out of the public schools. Using court cases, the American Jewish Congress argued successfully before the Supreme Court to ban even generic forms of daily prayers, as well as to eliminate Easter and Christmas holiday pageants.23 And now, Lubavitch Ḥasidic Jews were promoting Hanukkah observances in the public square.

The Lubavitcher Rebbe Menachem Schneerson, taking inspiration from President John F. Kennedy’s creation of the Peace Corps to spread American values around the world, recruited young Ḥasidim to reach out to Jews first throughout the US and then throughout the world. Large public Hanukkah celebrations with enormous menorahs became their signature religious event. Political figures participated, kindling lights and signaling support of their Jewish constituents. In 1979, Chabad erected a 30-foot menorah in Lafayette Park across from the White House. President Jimmy Carter lit one candle of the menorah. “From the 1980s onward, Hanukkah assumed a role of public prominence,” observes historian Joshua Eli Plaut. “What historically had been internally based December dilemmas, once faced exclusively by Jews, expanded to become political wars, pitting Christian Americans of different political orientations against each other over whether Christmas and Hanukkah symbols should be displayed in public places.”24

By the beginning of the twenty-first century, such observances—lighting candles, singing songs, sharing food—had become a widespread part of vernacular American Judaism. “By 2000 Hanukkah had become a winter festival familiar to broad swaths of Americans. Non-Jews who conclude that Hanukkah must be the most important of Jewish holidays,” Ashton urges, “should not be faulted for their error. After all, it garners more public attention than any other Jewish holiday.”25 It is the only Jewish holiday, for example, to have a postage stamp, initially issued in 1996. Although the United States Postal Service had rejected any Jewish religious symbol three years earlier when it was first proposed, the change of heart occurred in response to a write-in campaign.26

American Jews gradually integrated other forms of politics into their vernacular religious practices. In the 1970s and 1980s those politics centered on Soviet Jewry and efforts to get the American government to pressure the Soviet Union to allow Jews to emigrate. The anticommunism that helped to fuel the movement brought American Jews onto the same side as the government in the Cold War, a dramatic change in public perceptions of Jews from the postwar years when many were labeled Communists during the McCarthy era. The Soviet Jewry movement emphasized notions of American freedom as it affirmed a transnational Jewish peoplehood. But it embedded these ideas in tactics designed to engage large numbers of American Jews and ultimately to enter vernacular American Jewish religious practice.27

Sociologist Shaul Kelner argues that these tactics emerged from what he calls the “mobilizing gaze” of activists. Sometimes rational choices, other times expressive choices, and occasionally both, they reflected in their solemn mode the influence of Jacob Birnbaum, the founder of the Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry (SSSJ) and “a religiously observant Jew who believed with his own perfect faith that the fight for Soviet Jewry bore religious significance.” Kelner characterizes the SSSJ mode of public demonstrations as “protest-as-religious-ceremony.” Perhaps one of the most effective forms of “cultural coproduction,” aside from the massive rallies on Solidarity Sunday that drew hundreds of thousands, occurred within the synagogue. Activists co-opted the widespread popularity of bar and bat mitzvah observances to encourage “twinning” the American ritual with a Soviet Jewish teenager unable to have a bar or bat mitzvah due to state persecution.28

The popularity of the Boston Jewish rock group Safam’s song “Leaving Mother Russia” offers another example of vernacular American Judaism. Inspired by Anatole Sharansky’s arrest in 1977 and his words before the Russian court, Robbie Solomon wrote and then played the song with Safam at a concert “at the Rutgers Hillel house in N.J. This first performance of Leaving Mother Russia was so electric that the whole audience stood en masse at the end and joined in,” he recalled. “We knew we had captured the spirit of the Soviet Jewry movement in a way that only an inspiring song could.” The words, sung by American Jews often at massive rallies, affirm that they are “leaving Mother Russia” although, obviously, they are not living in the Soviet Union. It suggests the powerful political identification with Soviet Jews and the way in which it entered vernacular American religion, even following Sharansky’s release from prison nine years later. “During the instrumental break our custom was to read the names of all the refuseniks who were still behind bars,” Solomon explained. “The song was sung at all the rallies throughout the country in support of Soviet Jewry, including the giant gatherings in front of the U.N. Plaza, which some years exceeded 300,000 people.”29

The soundtrack of vernacular American Judaism evolved in these years, especially but not only among Reform Jews. Abandoning the formality of choirs and English language hymns that had characterized the movement in the years prior to World War II, Reform congregations increasingly adopted a role for the cantor with a guitar.30 The popularity of Debbie Friedman’s folk melodies, first sung at Reform summer camps accompanied by guitar, spread to the adults in Reform congregations.31 In 1993, her prayer for healing, Mi Sheberach, introduced a concept largely absent from Reform religious practice. The song, written in Hebrew and English, appealed to both God who blessed “our fathers” and served as a source of strength to “our mothers” and invited congregants to make praying for physical and spiritual health an integral part of the Sabbath liturgy. “May the source of strength who blessed the ones before us/ help us find the courage to make our lives a blessing,” Friedman sang, followed by a reversal of the invocation of God of our mothers and source of strength of our fathers. Then came the explicit prayer for healing: “Bless those in need of healing with r’fuah shleymah/the renewal of body, the renewal of spirit/And let us say Amen.” The numbers of congregants who found this prayer meaningful embraced diverse individuals who brought not just family members into the circle of healing but also friends, both Jewish and not Jewish. “I try to make prayer user-friendly,” Friedman explained. “Because the music is in a familiar genre, people are able to make the connection between the music and the text.”32

But the most significant feature of vernacular American Judaism correlates with the rise of egalitarianism, namely, the integration of Holocaust observance and identification with Israel. In the 1960s and 1970s as women’s liberation shook up established practices of American Jews and initiated substantial and enduring changes in vernacular American Judaism, support for the state of Israel reached across denominational divisions, with only a few exceptions (e.g., Satmar Ḥasidim). Although the character of that supportive identification varied depending on time, place, and religious movement, it grew ever stronger over the decades. The popularity of Leon Uris’s Exodus, including Otto Preminger’s 1960 film version, recast Israel in America’s image. “Israel entered the popular Jewish-American imagination as a romantic screen legend,” secured and strengthened in the brief war of June 1967.33 When the Soviet Union disbanded in 1991 and Jews were free to leave, the success of the Soviet Jewry movement coincided with the first Intifada, which began in December 1988, and was followed by the Oslo Peace Accords between Yasser Arafat, head of the Palestine Liberation Organization, and Yitzhak Rabin, premier of the State of Israel in 1993. The possibility for a peaceful resolution to the Palestinian/Israeli conflict coming only two short years after the end of the Soviet Union and the departure of over a million Soviet Jews, most settling in Israel, seemed to promise an era of peaceful coexistence.

The joint integration of Israel identification and Holocaust memorialization into vernacular American Judaism in the early 1990s cemented a narrative of redemption from the despair of annihilation to rebirth in the promised homeland. This was not a new narrative; it dated back to the late 1940s. But it achieved increasing prominence in the postwar decades, becoming dominant in the 1990s.34 Even as vernacular American Judaism championed Passover as a holiday of liberation, the theme of redemption became increasingly associated with Israel’s establishment after the devastation of the Holocaust. Symbolizing this relationship, in 1988 Israeli politicians established the March of the Living, which brought Jewish youth from around the globe to Poland. On Holocaust Memorial Day, as observed in Israel (there is an international Holocaust Memorial Day which marks the liberation of Auschwitz by Soviet troops at the end of January, observed in Europe), thousands of young people walked from Auschwitz to Birkenau. “I had a very unusual fifteenth birthday,” wrote the future novelist, Dara Horn. “During my birthday week, the end of April, I was traveling with 5,000 high school students from around the world, visiting concentration camps in Poland. I learned more there than I learned during my entire life in school; once I stepped out of a gas chamber, I became a different person.” The trip usually culminated in a visit to Israel. Horn wrote about what she saw and felt, published in Hadassah Magazine in 1992, that implicitly connected her experience learning about the horrors of the Holocaust with the State of Israel. She ended her essay: “In Israel I planted a tree with soil I had taken from concentration camps. In the soil were white specks, human bone ash. I am fifteen years old, and I know I can never forget.”35

In the twenty-first century, as heritage tourism to Eastern Europe has boomed, the role of the March of the Living and, later, Birthright Tours of Israel, have kept pace, using the tourism experience to animate, stimulate, engage, and hopefully transform (as Dara Horn was transformed) young American Jews.36 As a vernacular practice, with its own rituals and interpretation of contemporary realities and past ones, these forms of American Judaism have increasingly come under question because of Israel’s extended conflict with Hamas and Hezbollah, both politically established terrorist organizations supported by Iran. As of this writing, it is not clear what the outcome will be, whether vernacular American Judaism will find alternative connections to a redemptive narrative or reaffirm its current religiously inflected political ties to Israel. Fewer and fewer survivors of the Holocaust remain, so the linkages that worked well for the children of the postwar generation may need to be reimagined for their children, an American Jewry that includes ever larger numbers of non-Jews married to Jews and raising Jewish children. How they will shape vernacular American Judaism remains to be seen, but one can be confident that it will come from the “small choices of daily life.”

Deborah Dash Moore, PhD is the Jonathan Freedman Distinguished University Professor of History and Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan. She is Editor in Chief of the Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization. Her most recent book is Walkers in the City: Jewish Street Photographers of Midcentury New York (Three Hills, an imprint of Cornell University Press, 2023).

  1. 1 Jenna Weissman Joselit, The Wonders of America: Reinventing Jewish Culture, 1880-1950 (Hill & Wang, 1994).

  2. 2 Arthur A. Goren, “Saints and Sinners: The Underside of American Jewish History,” Brochure of American Jewish Archives, no. 7 (1988): 19-21.

  3. 3 See, for example, Arthur A. Goren, “The Rites of Community,” in Politics and Public Culture of American Jews (Indiana University Press, 1999).

  4. 4 Joselit, Dust jacket.

  5. 5 Leonard Norman Primiano, “Introduction: Vernacular Religion and the Search for Method in Religious Folklife,” in Leonard Norman Primiano, Vernacular Religion: Collected Essays of Leonard Norman Primiano, Deborah Dash Moore, ed. (NYU Press, 2022), 1-13; quote on 6.

  6. 6 Pamela S. Nadell, America’s Jewish Women: A History from Colonial Times to Today (W.W. Norton & Company, 2019), 182-183; Paula E. Hyman, “The Introduction of Bat Mitzvah in Conservative Judaism in Postwar America,” YIVO Annual 19 (1990): 133-146.

  7. 7 Pamela S. Nadell, Women Who Would Be Rabbis: A History of Women’s Ordination 1889-1985 (Beacon Press, 1998), 118-221.

  8. 8 For a discussion of similarities and differences in women’s religious roles focusing on mikveh and fertility treatments in the US and Israel, see Cara Rock-Singer, Gestating Judaism: The Corporeal Technologies of American Jewish Religion (University of Chicago Press, 2026).

  9. 9 Steven M. Cohen and Shaul Kelner, “Gender Bias is a Fact of Communal Life,” Forward, June 21, 2006.

  10. 10 Dr. Shuly Rubin Schwartz at Jewish Theological Seminary and Rabbi Deborah Waxman at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College. Both concluded their tenure in 2026.

  11. 11 Patricia Keer Munro, Coming of Age in Jewish America: Bar and Bat Mitzvah Reinterpreted (Rutgers University Press, 2016), chapter 1, quotes on 1-2. It has acquired the reputation of a Bar/Bat Mitzvah Industrial Complex.

  12. 12 Munro, 1-2. See also, chapter 8.

  13. 13 The Pew Survey of American Jews found that 62% of all Jews attended a Passover seder in 2019 (61% participated in a life cycle event and 62% shared holidays with non-Jews) compared to 46% who fasted on Yom Kippur. https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2021/05/11/jewish-practices-and-customs/.

  14. 14 Marshall Sklare, Jewish Identity on the Suburban Frontier: A Study of Group Survival in the Open Society (University of Chicago Press, 1979).

  15. 15 Deborah Dash Moore, “Democracy and The New Haggadah,” American Jewish History 95, no. 4 (December 2009): 323-348.

  16. 16 Arthur I. Waskow, The Freedom Seder: A New Haggadah for Passover (Micah Press, 1970), v-vi.

  17. 17 The Journey Continues: The Ma’yan Passover Haggadah (2002), 2-4, quote on 4.

  18. 18 On Miriam’s Cup, see The Journey Continues, 15.

  19. 19 Susannah Heschel, “The Definitive Orange on a Seder Plate Story” (2001), published in the Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization, https://www.posenlibrary.com/entry/definitive-orange-seder-plate-story-0.

  20. 20 Joel Gereboff, “One Nation, with Liberty and Haggadahs for All,” in Key Texts in American Jewish Culture, Jack Kugelmass, ed. (Rutgers University Press, 2003), 275.

  21. 21 Roger Horowitz, Kosher USA: How Coke Became Kosher and Other Tales of Modern Foods (Columbia University Press, 2016), 142.

  22. 22 Dianne Ashton, Hanukkah in America: A History (NYU Press, 2013), 232.

  23. 23 Stuart Svonkin, Jews Against Prejudice: American Jews and the Fight for Civil Liberties (Columbia University Press, 1997).

  24. 24 Joshua Eli Plaut, A Kosher Christmas: ‘Tis the Season to Be Jewish (Rutgers University Press, 2012), 165.

  25. 25 Ashton, 262.

  26. 26 Plaut, 163-64. For decades the American Jewish Congress had battled the postal service over its religious-themed Christmas stamps, e.g., a Madonna and child with angels in 1966, The Annunciation in 1968, the Nativity in 1971.

  27. 27 For a history of Soviet Jewry movement see Gal Beckerman, When They Come For Us, We’ll Be Gone: The Epic Struggle to Save Soviet Jewry (Mariner Books, 2010).

  28. 28 Shaul Kelner, A Cold War Exodus: How American Activists Mobilized to Free Soviet Jews (NYU Press, 2024), quote on 48.

  29. 29 Robbie Solomon, “Unveiling the Legacy” https://robbiesolomon.com/leaving-mother-russia/.

  30. 30 Ari Y. Kelman and Jeremiah Lockwood, “From Aesthetics to Experience: How Changing Conceptions of Prayer Changed the Sound of Jewish Worship,” Religion and American Culture 30, no. 1 (2020): 26-62.

  31. 31 Judah M. Cohen, “Debbie Friedman and the Changing Sound of Jewish Liturgical Music,” Contemporary Jewry 35, no. 1 (2014): 19-23; DOI 10.1007/s12397-014-9127-9.

  32. 32 Quoted in Lior Zaltzman, “The Story Behind Debbie Friedman’s Beloved Mi Sheberach Melody,” Kveller July 2, 2024, https://www.kveller.com/the-story-behind-debbie-friedmans-beloved-mi-sheberach-melody/.

  33. 33 Deborah Dash Moore, “Exodus: Real to Reel to Real,” in Entertaining America: Jews, Movies, and Broadcasting, J. Hoberman and Jeffrey Shandler, ed. (Princeton University Press, 1994), 219.

  34. 34 Deborah Lipstadt, Holocaust: An American Understanding, Key Words in Jewish Studies (Rutgers University Press, 2016).

  35. 35 Dara Horn, “On Filling Shoes,” Hadassah Magazine (1992), published in the Posen Library of Jewish Civilization and Culture, https://www.posenlibrary.com/entry/filling-shoes.

  36. 36 Shaul Kelner, Tours that Bind: Diaspora, Pilgrimage, and Israeli Birthright Tourism (NYU Press, 2010).