Jewish Religion in America

Catalog description

Free and religiously-voluntary American society has posed major and persistent challenges to the continuity of Judaism. How Jews have defined that challenge and attempted to reconcile, accommodate or preserve unchanged their religious faith and practice in America will be the focus of this course. Among the specific topics to be considered: differing lay and rabbinic perceptions of what America represents, issues of cooperation and competition among different movements or conceptions of American Judaism; growth and development of religious institutions and their parallels within Christian society.