"[This] is the important story of how Judaism enhanced America and how America inspired Judaism. Steven R. Weisman tells the dramatic history of how Judaism redefined itself in America in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries--the personalities that fought each other and shaped its evolution and, crucially, the force of the American dynamic that transformed an ancient religion. The struggles that produced a redefinition of Judaism illuminate the...

"The earliest Jewish Sunday schools were female-led, growing from one school in Philadelphia established by Rebecca Gratz in 1838 to an entire system that educated vast numbers of Jewish youth across the country. These schools were modeled on Christian approaches to religious education and aimed to protect Jewish children from Protestant missionaries. But debates soon swirled around the so-called sorry state of "feminized" American Jewish supplemental...