Judaism in America

The first colonial American synagogues were formed on the Atlantic seaboard in the second half of the 17th century. A colonial synagogue represented a kehillah kedosha , or holy community, bringing together and fulfilling many social and religious...

In the 18th century, many Jewish synagogues adopted American Christian forms of worship and organization. Jews democratized synagogue leadership and began employing hazzans , spiritual leaders who had less traditional authority than rabbis and whose roles...

More Ashkenazi (Central and Eastern European) than Sephardic (Iberian) Jews immigrated to the U.S. in the 19th century, leading to the fracturing of singular synagogue-communities into multiple congregations with varying levels of Americanization. The...

After the Civil War, many German-born rabbis immigrated to the United States, where they helped to organize and solidify the Jewish Reform movement. They sought to align the Jewish and the American experience and to loosen many traditional rules and...

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, many Jews emigrated from the Pale of Settlement, a large Polish and Russian territory in which Jews were allowed to live in impoverished shtetls (small Jewish villages). Most immigrant Jews from these areas had...

After World War II, many American Jews moved to the suburbs and further assimilated into American culture. While Jewish institutions rose in prominence during this period, Jewish religious practice diminished. Additionally, the recognition of the horrors...

In the second half of the 20th century, American Jews expressed a growing sense of Jewish peoplehood through support for Israel and for Soviet Jews. Simultaneously, some American Jews found new opportunities for spiritual expression in Jewish mysticism...

While many Jewish institutions define themselves as specifically Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, or Reconstructionist, contemporary American Judaism contains a strain of intra-Jewish pluralism, in which Jewish identity is not solely defined by...