In Witness from the Pulpit, Marc Saperstein, a leading expert on the art of Jewish preaching in medieval and modern times, took on the personally rewarding and professionally challenging task of assembling, editing, and commenting upon the sermons of a twentieth-century American Reform rabbi, of “mid-level” national leadership stature, who had “a rather extraordinary personal involvement . . . in twentieth-century Jewish history.” The reward was to make available for scholarly consideration the homiletic messages that Harold Saperstein delivered during his forty-seven years (1933–1980) as spiritual leader of Lynbrook, New York's Temple Emanu-El as a source for understanding how a rabbi communicated with, and educated, his community about the great crises that the Jewish people faced in that tumultuous time-span. The challenge was to present and analyze objectively what his own father had done, without an almost understandable degree of filiopietism. Happily, Saperstein fils chose well in documenting how one rabbi attempted to raise worshipper consciousness about the destruction of European Jewry, the rise and perils of the State of Israel and the struggles for Soviet Jewry, as well as central post-war American issues like the battle for Civil Rights, McCarthyism, civil unrest and the tragedy of Vietnam, and more. Harold Saperstein's views are introduced with calm, dispassion, and clarity.