How does a Jewish community in a free, open, pluralistic society create a mode of communal group survival that is not just continuing, but beneficial to the individual and broader society? This is the question that drives Karp’s book. Jewish Continuity in America focuses on the three major nodes of American Jewish life: The shul, the rabbinate, and pluralism. Karp considers the ways that America’s Jewish community have worked apart and together, in ways that we often underappreciate.

American Judaism has gone through a significant amount of change over the last century. Although the fundamental faith has remained the same, the way Jews have related to and engaged with this faith has a distinct flavor today, which Jack Wertheimer set out to explore. Wertheimer goes to the front lines of religious observance to find the heart of the contemporary experience of American Judaism, finding in it a story of experimentation, learning, and significant renewing possibility. To more fully understand the story of Judaism in America, you may want to read this work alongside Michael R. Cohen’s The Birth of Conservative Judaism: Solomon Schechter’s Disciples and the Creation of an American Religious Movement, and Sefton D. Temkin’s Creating American Reform Judaism: The Life and Times of Isaac Mayer Wise. These works flesh out the histories of Conservative and Reform Judaism in America, without which the state of American Judaism as we know it would be entirely different.