David Ellenson has written numerous important essays in the field of modern Jewish thought, and he has gathered here an impressive collection of some of his more important articles. After working through twenty-three essays ranging from interreligious disputes about organs in synagogues to Marcia Falk's Book of Blessings, a reader gains a deeper appreciation for both the significance of Jewish thought in Germany and Israel and the academic range and intellectual candor that Ellenson brings to his studies. Although Ellenson writes for a liberal Jewish audience, these essays, which date back to 1995, bear witness to his sympathetic concern for Orthodoxy and the ways in which the non-Orthodox can expand their religious horizons through a sensitive engagement with other denominations. There is much to be gleaned in these texts for specialists and novices alike—perhaps even more for those who understand religious traditions as firmly embedded within social and cultural forces.

By the end of the nineteenth century, the pressures of modern civilization had become so exigent that alienists were decrying the prevalence of “neurasthenia,” and William James would soon diagnose the “sick souls” whose anguished quest for relief from existential despair marked not only an enduring religious archetype but also the widening incompatibility between the demands of industrial and urban society and the needs of the psyche. One proposed remedy was Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures (1875), whose author claimed divine revelation for herself. By 1911, Mary Baker Eddy's movement had attracted so many Jews that the B'nai B'rith had to prohibit its members from subscribing to Christian Science, which Isaac Mayer Wise felt compelled to denounce as “pure quackery” that risked becoming “an epidemic delusion” (27). Another Reform rabbi, Max Heller, blasted Jews for joining a sect that was marred by the “unintelligible twaddle which [their] female savior has managed to spin around the simplest utterances” (28).

Bibliographers, archivists, and librarians supply the materials without which the work of historical scholars would not be possible. Yet too often, their enterprise is simply taken for granted. We forget that the vocations in which they engage possess their own history and that their most outstanding practitioners deserve remembrance when we write of the development of Jewish scholarship. At Hebrew Union College, Jacob Rader Marcus and Herbert Zafren used to give a course for graduate students on Jewish bibliography, displaying and discussing all of the classical works in the field from the seventeenth century onward. The orientation it gave the students was invaluable. Today, we have the two very helpful volumes by Shimeon Brisman—A History and Guide to Judaic Bibliography (1977) and A History and Guide to Judaic Encyclopedias and Lexicons (1987)—yet I wonder how many graduate students have looked at them carefully.

Chaim Waxman's study of American Jewish baby boomers is one in a series of books whose data are derived from the 1990 National Jewish Population Study. This rich data set draws on a large sample of American Jews and provides a benchmark for understanding many of the critical issues in American Jewish life.

The year 1926 was a very good year … if you were a Yiddish writer passionate about communism. By that year, the communist utopia had turned the corner economically and socially, making the Soviet Union increasingly attractive to those who believed in a revolutionary future. The Soviet Union in 1926 was also a great place to be a socialist Jew, as the state had lifted all prerevolutionary restrictions on Jews' movement, employment, education, and residence while providing financial and political support to a whole network of Jewish social, cultural, and political institutions. Yiddish writers who had left Russia after the devastation of world war, civil war, revolutionary war, and ideological war began to trickle back. They saw the Soviet Union as a place where a Yiddish writer had respect, could earn a living, and had the power of the state at his fingertips (yes, it was primarily men's fingertips doing the communist Yiddish writing).