Articulates a new, post-ethnic American Jewishness

This powerful memoir chronicles the life of one of America’s most celebrated rabbis—Rabbi Zalman M. Schachter-Shalomi, or “Reb Zalman” as he is fondly known to friends and followers. The book traces his life from a youth in the shadow of the Nazis through the tumultuous 1960s in America to his position as a renowned religious leader today. Often controversial for his attraction to cultural mavericks and religious rebels, Reb Zalman’s colorful lifetime includes a striking cast of characters across faith traditions, including Timothy Leary, Abraham Joshua Heschel, Thomas Merton, the Dalai Lama, and more. The book traces Reb Zalman’s work creating the vibrant Jewish Renewal movement that emphasizes spiritual experience and continues to touch Jews around the world today. Reb Zalman often illustrates his talks with anecdotes from his life, and My Life in Jewish Renewal brings together the life story of this beloved leader for the first time. Reb Zalman often illustrates his talks with stories from his life, and My Life in Jewish Renewal brings together the complete life story of this beloved leader for the first time.

Lerner maintains that there are two voices in the Torah that have contended with each other throughout Jewish history: the voice of accumulated pain and cruelty that is passed from generation to generation and that masquerades as a patriarchal god, and the voice of God, whose massage of healing and compassion insists the world can be fundamentally transformed. Neoconservatives and some right-wing Israelis have used the Holocaust to justify a Judaism that is cynically "realistic" and demeaning of non-Jews. But that tendency to do unto others what was done to us can be overcome, Lerner says, and Jewish renewal attunes us to the voice of God and strengthens our ability to recognize the image of the divine in every human being.

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.

An anthology that explores religious and social revival in American Judaism in the 19th century

The Handbook to Jewish Spiritual Renewal: A Path of Transformation for the Modern Jew contains millennia of sage advice in an easy-to-read step-by-step process for recapturing your Jewish spirituality

Winner of the National Jewish Book Award in American Jewish Studies—an engaging firsthand portrait of American Judaism today American Judaism has been buffeted by massive social upheavals in recent decades. Like other religions in the United States, it has witnessed a decline in the number of participants over the past forty years, and many who remain active struggle to reconcile their hallowed traditions with new perspectives—from feminism and the LGBTQ movement to "do-it-yourself religion" and personally defined spirituality. Taking a fresh look at American Judaism today, Jack Wertheimer, a leading authority on the subject, sets out to discover how Jews of various orientations practice their religion in this radically altered landscape. Which observances still resonate, and which ones have been given new meaning? What options are available for seekers or those dissatisfied with conventional forms of Judaism? And how are synagogues responding? Offering new and often-surprising answers to these questions, Wertheimer reveals an American Jewish landscape that combines rash disruption and creative reinvention, religious illiteracy and dynamic experimentation.

A riveting study of a generational transition with major implications for American Jewish life

Explains such life-cycle events as birth, marriage, midlife, sickness, religious conversion, and mourning as viewed, experienced, and treated from a Jewish perspective.