Religious Studies ReviewVolume 44, Issue 4 p. 482-483 Short Reviews of Recent Publications: Judaism: Modern Coming of Age in Jewish America: Bar and Bat Mitzvah Reinterpreted. By Patricia Keer Munro. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2016. Pp. xiii + 211. N.p. Eric Caplan, Eric Caplan McGill UniversitySearch for more papers by this author Eric Caplan, Eric Caplan McGill UniversitySearch for more papers by this author First published: 18 December 2018 https://doi.org/10.1111/rsr.13739Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat No abstract is available for this article. Volume44, Issue4Special Issue: Religion and ScienceDecember 2018Pages 482-483 RelatedInformation

Religious Studies ReviewVolume 44, Issue 2 p. 233-233 Short Reviews of Recent Publications: Judaism (Modern) SINGING GOD'S WORDS: THE PERFORMANCE OF BIBLICAL CHANT IN CONTEMPORARY JUDAISM. By Jeffrey A. Summit. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016. Pp. 293. $27.95. Eric Caplan, Eric Caplan McGill UniversitySearch for more papers by this author Eric Caplan, Eric Caplan McGill UniversitySearch for more papers by this author First published: 09 August 2018 https://doi.org/10.1111/rsr.13495Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat No abstract is available for this article. Volume44, Issue2June 2018Pages 233-233 RelatedInformation

The thoughts of Mordecai Kaplan and Michael Rosenak present surprising commonalities as well as illuminating differences. Similarities include the perception that Judaism and Jewish education are in crisis, the belief that Jewish peoplehood must include commitment to meaningful content, the need for teachers to teach from a position of authenticity, and the importance of developing the inner life. The differences lie primarily in their divergent understandings of what in Judaism obligates, of the importance of reckoning with the Schwabian "milieu" when educating, of the acceptable boundaries of textual interpretation, and of the need to engage with families when educating children.

Kaplan’s Approach to Prayer Appreciated and Challenged Eric Caplan Introduction Mordecai M. Kaplan (1881–1983), the ideological founder of Reconstructionist Judaism, is an important figure in the development of American Jewish liturgy. Kaplan and his closest followers—Eugene Kohn and Ira Eisenstein among others—coedited the New Haggadah (1941), the Sabbath Prayer Book (1945), the High Holiday Prayer Book (1948), the Festival Prayer Book (1958), and the Daily Prayer Book (1963). Prior to the publication of these works, Kaplan oversaw the publication of two collections of readings to be used to enrich prayer services. How can we account for Mordecai Kaplan’s obvious interest in liturgy? The most common way of responding to this question is to point to Kaplan’s famous desire for intellectual honesty in prayer. Kaplan believed that “In religion, as in everything else, we must not say what we do not mean.”1 Having concluded that it is no longer possible to believe, among other things, that the Bible was revealed, that God will send a personal messiah, and that the dead will be physically resurrected in the future, he could no longer pray the traditional liturgy and believed that many contemporary Jews were in a similar position. This explained, he thought, why so many stayed away from the synagogue. Kaplan’s liturgical efforts were definitely motivated by his desire to put into congregants’ hands a text that reflected modern belief and thereby made prayer more possible for them. But the desire for intellectual honesty only partially explains Kaplan’s liturgical efforts. It does not explain, for example, why over half of Kaplan’s prayer books were devoted to supplementary readings, the majority of which do not serve as a counter voice to prayers that Kaplan found theologically troubling. It also does not provide any insight into why Kaplan was so concerned, in the first place, that Jews continue to pray. After all, he could have responded to the empty pews of his time by seeing the death of communal prayer as simply another stage in the natural evolution of Jewish practice. Sacrifices, too, were once an essential component of Jewish ritual life but ceased after the destruction of the Second Temple in 70CE. Not every component of Jewish tradition that dies needs to be revived. Mordecai Kaplan, however, could not stand idly by while Jews abandoned traditional prayer because he believed that prayer was essential to the realization of religion’s primary purpose: motivating people to strive for a more just world order. And it is this belief in the importance of prayer that provides the most comprehensive explanation for Kaplan’s liturgical creativity. For Mordecai Kaplan, “The problem of serious‐minded religionists is not: how can we get people to become religious? But, How can we get religion to make people better?”2 Kaplan wanted religion to serve both as a catalyst for individual moral growth and for inspiring collective progress in the “struggle against poverty, disease, ignorance, oppression and war.”3 He recognized that achieving progress in these areas was not easy and believed that to persevere in the task an individual needed to have strong faith that the world and its people could indeed be perfected. Fostering that faith is an essential function of religion. It requires the cultivation in people of two complementary states of mind: appreciation of the world’s blessings—for if the world already has good within it there is reason to believe that this good can be expanded—and the conviction that there exists a Force in the universe (God) that supports the human quest to achieve a better world and thus makes this goal attainable. As Kaplan explains, Every experience of success in overcoming the misery of cowardice, envy, hate and greed is an experience of God. Faith in God is faith in the possibility of such achievements, without which we inevitably sink into moral defeatism. That is why religious belief, in the sense of faith in the Power that makes for salvation, is indispensable to modern man no less than it was to his forefathers, as reinforcement for ethical living.4 The purpose of prayer For Kaplan, engaging in prayer is of great help...

Reviewed by: Beyond the Synagogue Gallery: Finding a Place for Women in American Judaism Eric Caplan Karla Goldman . Beyond the Synagogue Gallery: Finding a Place for Women in American Judaism. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000. Pp. xii + 275. Karla Goldman's Beyond the Synagogue Gallery surveys the position of women in the American synagogue of the nineteenth century. In addition, attention is given to women's social activism both within and outside the confines of the synagogue, although this does not constitute the book's primary focus. Goldman's main thesis is that American Jews' desire to be aligned with the most respected elements of middle-class society motivated a gradual restructuring of gender roles in worship that served to differentiate the American synagogue from its predecessors. Consequently, the presence of women can be seen as integral to the evolution of this institution even though they did not attain voting rights within it until the first decades of the twentieth century. Much of Goldman's work is devoted to a discussion of the tensions surrounding the women's gallery and its eventual replacement by family pews. Middle-class America saw women as paragons of virtue whose piety was evident in their creation of homes based on Christian values and in regular church attendance. Indeed, American Jewish women of the nineteenth century attended synagogue in great numbers but their relegation to an elevated gallery was interpreted by outsiders as a sign of their marginality within the religion as a whole. More significantly from the Jewish community's standpoint, the lack of a comparable seating arrangement in the American church made the synagogue seem foreign to American soil. To partially defuse this tension, synagogues were built with an open gallery that improved women's ability to view the service. Starting in the 1850s, seats in the gallery were tiered to further enhance women's experience of worship. Ironically, the opening of the gallery served to render it more problematic from the standpoint of American values. Women, "who were supposed to be the guardians of propriety" (p. 105), became a focus of misbehavior undermining Jewish claims to respectability. Worshippers now flirted openly. In addition, non-Jewish observers of the synagogue continuously referred to the "dark oriental beauty" (p. 101) of the women of the gallery, thus sexualizing their presence. Traditional justifications of gender separation in Jewish worship could not be put forth in this milieu because "the rules of public discourse determined that it was inappropriate [End Page 406] to draw attention to even the potential sexuality of respectable women, except to affirm its purity" (p. 120). In this light, it is not surprising that by the 1870s family pews became the norm in the majority of American synagogues. American Jews of the nineteenth century, like their German counterparts, reformed modes of traditional worship to reflect the style of prayer evident within middle-class Protestant churches. American Jews feared that the relative anarchy that typified traditional synagogue worship would undermine their quest for respectability by associating the synagogue with the revivalist churches frequented by America's lower classes. This move to decorum served to alter the position of women in the synagogue. In violation of halakhic prohibitions limiting the use of female voices in public prayer, women were incorporated in the first synagogue choirs instituted to bring order to Jewish worship. Congregational leaders believed that "four-voice choral harmony would foster the spiritual uplift and reverence appropriate to the cultured adherents of a respectable creed" (p. 84). Even traditionalist-leaning congregations did not hesitate to use mixed choirs in services celebrating the dedication of new synagogue buildings to which non-Jews were often invited. Interestingly, Goldman does not believe that this innovation greatly enhanced the position of women in the nineteenth-century synagogue. For while women attained a measure of "symbolic participation and leadership in the prayers of the community" (p. 88), the quest for decorum marginalized individual worshippers. Accordingly, women only "gained the right to join men in the shrinking role of congregant" (p. 134). In time, however, women's participation in the choir, confirmation ceremonies, and synagogue sisterhoods made it harder to justify the exclusion of women from synagogue membership...