A guide to help you invigorate your Seder, create lively discussions, and make personal connections with the Exodus story today. For many people, the act of simply reading the Haggadah no longer fulfills the Passover Seder's purpose: to help you feel as if you personally had gone out of Egypt. Too often, the ritual meal has become predictable, boring, and uninspiring. Creating Lively Passover Seders, Second Edition, is an innovative, interactive guide to help encourage fresh perspectives and lively dialogue. With three new chapters, this intriguing Haggadah companion has been revised, updated, and expanded, and offers thematic discussion topics, text study ideas, activities, and readings that come alive in the traditional group setting of the Passover Seder. Each activity and discussion idea aims to: Deepen your understanding of the Haggadah Provide new opportunities for engaging the themes of the Passover festival Develop familiarity with the Exodus story, as well as the life and times of the people who shaped the development of the Haggadah Reliving the Exodus is not about remembering an event long ago, but about participating in a conversation that provides hope and strength for the struggle to make tomorrow a brighter day. With this complete resource, you can create more meaningful encounters with Jewish values, traditions, and texts that lead well beyond the Seder itself.

Historians have long debated whether the mid-nineteenth century American synagogue was transplanted from Central Europe or represented an indigenous phenomenon. Alternatives to Assimilation examines the Reform movement in American Judaism from 1840 to 1930 in an attempt to settle this issue. Alan Silverstein describes the emergence of organizational innovations such as youth groups, sisterhoods, brotherhoods, a professionalized rabbinate, a rabbinical college, and a national congregational body as evidence of Jews responding uniquely to American culture, in a fashion parallel to innovations in American Protestant churches. Silverstein places the developments he traces within the context of American religious and cultural history. He notes the shifting roles of American women, children, and ethnic groups as well as America's changing receptivity to trans-Atlantic cultural influences. He also utilizes census records, as well as congregational and national archives, in synthesizing a view of the Reform movement from its local temples and nationwide organizations. By offering a viable response to American culture's rampant secularization and to its pressure on Jews to relinquish their distinctive traditions and commitments, the Reform movement also inspired emerging Conservative and Orthodox Jewish movements to offer their own constituents tangible institutional alternatives to assimilation.