Riv-Ellen Prell spent eighteen months of participant observation field research studying a countercultural havurah to determine why these groups emerged in the United States during the 1970s. In her book, she explores the central questions posed by the early havurot and their founders. She also examines the havurah as a development of American Judaism, continuing-rather than rejecting-many of the previous generations' ideas about religion. Combining history and ethnography, Prell uses current theories about ritual and prayer to understand men's and women's struggles with their religious tradition and their desire to create community.

The rise of Jewish feminism, a branch of both second-wave feminism and the American counterculture, in the late 1960s had an extraordinary impact on the leadership, practice, and beliefs of American Jews. ""Women Remaking American Judaism"" is the first book to fully examine the changes in American Judaism as women fought to practice their religion fully and to ensure that its rituals, texts, and liturgies reflected their lives. In addition to identifying the changes that took place, this volume aims to understand the process of change in ritual, theology, and clergy across the denominations.The essays in ""Women Remaking American Judaism"" offer a paradoxical understanding of Jewish feminism as both radical, in the transformational sense, and accomodationist, in the sense that it was thoroughly compatible with liberal Judaism. Essays in the first section, Reenvisioning Judaism, investigate the feminist challenges to traditional understanding of Jewish law, texts, and theology. In Redefining Judaism, the second section, contributors recognize that the changes in American Judaism were ultimately put into place by each denomination, their law committees, seminaries, rabbinic courts, rabbis, and synagogues, and examine the distinct evolution of women's issues in the Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, and Reconstructionist movements.Finally, in the third section, Re-Framing Judaism, essays address feminist innovations that, in some cases, took place outside of the synagogue. An introduction by Riv-Ellen Prell situates the essays in both American and modern Jewish history and offers an analysis of why Jewish feminism was revolutionary.""Women Remaking American Judaism"" raises provocative questions about the changes to Judaism following the feminist movement, at every turn asking what change means in Judaism and other American religions and how the fight for equality between men and women parallels and differs from other changes in Judaism. ""Women Remaking American Judaism"" will be of interest to both scholars of Jewish history and women's studies.

"Gutsy and imaginative . . . convincingly engages a range of complex issues about how men and women, Jews and gentiles, perceive one another." -Kirkus Reviews "Her exaggerated coiffure, with its imitation curls and soaped curves that stick out at the side of the head like fantastic gargoyles, is an offense to the eye. Her plated gold jewelry with paste stones reveals its cheapness by its very extravagance." This description of a "ghetto girl" was printed in the American Jewish News in 1918, but with slight variation it might easily be mistaken for a description of our current pernicious and pejorative stereotype of Jewish womanhood, the "JAP." What are the origins of these stereotypes? And even more important, why would an American ethnic group use racist terms to describe itself? Riv-Ellen Prell asks these compelling questions as she observes how deeply anti-Semitic stereotypes infuse Jewish men's and women's views of one another in this history of Jewish acculturation in the twentieth century. "While Jews and feminists have over the years repeatedly debated whether the JAP is 'real' or not, Prell's research breaks new ground because she examines the class anxieties underlying the image. . . . Fighting to Become Americans] will challenge any reader's preconceptions about who is and is not an American and why." -Laura Brahm, The Women's Review of Books "Well-written and lively." -Jewish World "A definitive and fascinating history of the complex relationships between Jewish men and women in the twentieth century." -George Cohen, Booklist " S]hows how the stereotypes we accept and create about ourselves mirror our anxieties in American society. . . . Prell's] analyses are telling and original." -Ruth F. Brin, St. Paul Pioneer Press Riv-Ellen Prell is author of Prayer and Community: The Havurah in American Judaism, winner of the National Jewish Book Award. She is currently professor of American studies at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis.