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This chapter addresses the emergence of Jewish homemaking guidebooks, with particular attention to their description of sabbath preparation, that culminated the feminization of the American Jewish sabbath. It argues that the feminization of the sabbath was seen as necessary to ensure the survival of Judaism in America through a contextualized understanding of the changes in sabbath observance. It also mentions the agency of Jewish Sisterhoods that promoted a female-driven synagogue life, as demonstrated through their self-published guidebooks. The chapter recounts how east European Jews negotiated with German American Jews on facing the diasporic problem of maintaining cultural continuity within a dominant society that held conflicting values and norms. It describes Jewish spirituality saw a drastic shift between 1920 and 1945 due to assimilation pressures.

This chapter analyzes the impact of the second wave of feminism on American Judaism and Jewish life. In the United States, women's activism revitalized Jewish connections within the lives of Jewish women and men. At the same time, in Israel women were in the process of confronting the status quo, posing critical challenges in areas that profoundly affected the lives of Israeli Jewish men and women. Thus, rather than being passive recipients, women shape and transform Jewish life today. The chapter ends with a challenging question: as women have moved to the forefront of Jewish spirituality, have men been left behind? If so, what are the implications for the future of Jewish religious culture?

This chapter describes Polish attitudes towards Jewish spirituality during the eighteenth century. The chief characteristic of the Polish conception of the Jewish religion, at least as it was captured in writing, was that it was not a specifically Polish construct but was imported from western Europe or had migrated to Poland with the Jews themselves. The official Christian doctrine was formulated in literary works written by clerics, polemic and homiletic literature, pastoral epistles, and synodal legislation. The popular Christian conception of Judaism, which differed substantially from official Church doctrine, was also practically identical in all its components to the popular, stereotypical view of Judaism widespread in the West. This conception was formulated mainly in works written by burghers, who used popular religious stereotypes in their attacks on their economic competitors, the Jews.

This chapter discusses contemporary Jewish spirituality from an Ignatian perspective. It explains the influence of a March 1963 meeting in New York chaired by Abraham Joshua Heschel to the Second Vatican Council's Nostra Aetate. This dialogue was attended by Augustin Cardinal Bea, head of the Vatican Secretariat for Promoting Christian Unity, and his assistant Monsignor Jan Willebrands. This chapter explains the relevance and similarity of Jewish spirituality expounded by Jewish writers Martin Buber and Abraham Joshua Heschel to the Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius of Loyola.

This chapter studies the contemporary tensions and transformations created by immigrant arrivals for the predominant character of Franco-Judaism. The study stresses how the disruptions of the Shoah and World War II did not necessarily overturn all traditional internal notions of difference, but rather laid the conditions for an accommodation of the equally dramatic development of French Jewry following further immigrant influx arising in particular from France’s decolonizations. Ultimately, the study isolates two key factors in this transformation which also acted as a profound influence on the entire French nation in the postwar period: the general “Americanization” that was accelerated by JDC funding, and which challenged and overtook older sectarian divisions; and the dramatic revitalization of French Jewish spirituality by North African immigration.

This chapter shows how, during the period beginning in the latter part of the seventeenth century, works that popularized kabbalistic ideas in homiletic and ethical treatises and in regimens of daily life appeared in substantial numbers. This reflected the significant increase in interest in popular kabbalistic teachings at precisely this time. This increased interest generated a growing market for the large number of books of conduct and other works informed by kabbalistic teachings that were published in these years. And the literature itself served to stimulate further interest in popular kabbalah. Many of the publications in question were essentially inexpensive pamphlets written in accessible language and guiding the reader through prayer services and rituals associated with the life cycle. All these were imbued with mystical significance. In this way the individual could feel privy to the esoteric realm and attain the conviction that they were indeed acting in accordance with God’s will. Moreover, the spread of this popular literature created a constituency for the emerging kabbalistic elite.

This chapter concerns Nahman Krochmal (1785–1840), a key figure in the development of Jewish spirituality in central and eastern Europe. It examines the extent to which Krochmal’s writings were influenced by the gaon of Pumbedita in Babylonia, Sherira (c.906–1006). Krochmal summed up his spiritual life and work in his incomplete study, Moreh nevukhei hazeman (‘guide of the perplexed of the time’). Its central theme is the Oral Torah, one of the pillars of rabbinic Judaism. In Krochmal’s time the Oral Torah was subjected to heavy criticism. But almost 850 years before Krochmal’s Moreh nevukhei hazeman, Sherira wrote a letter as a response to a series of questions concerning the formation of the Mishnah, the Tosefta, the Talmuds, etc., posed to him by Jacob ben Nissim on behalf of the holy community of Kairouan in North Africa.