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The history of educational summer camps in American Reform Judaism
 
The history of educational summer camps in American Reform Judaism. Reform Judaism is not the only religious community in America to make the summer camp experience a vital part of a faith community's effort to impart its values and beliefs to its adolescents, but perhaps no group relied more on summer camp as an adjunct to home and community for this purpose. Summer camp became an important part of Reform group identity, a bulwark against the attraction of assimilation into the greater society and mere nominal Judaism.
 
These essays, which commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the first Reform Jewish educational camp in the United States (Olin-Sang-Ruby Union Institute [OSRUI], in Oconomowoc, Wisconsin) cover a wide range of topics related to both the Reform Judaism movement and the development of the Reform Jewish camping system in the United States. Donald M. Splansky’s chapter on “Prayer at Reform Jewish Camps” documents changes in prayer services that took place both at OSRUI and in the Reform movement in general; Michael Zeldin’s “Making the Magic in Reform Jewish Summer Camps” describes the educational philosophies employed at many camps and analyzes their effectiveness; and Jonathan D. Sarna’s “The Crucial Decade in Jewish

Rabbi Alexander Schindler (1925–2000) was an extraordinarily influential leader in the history of Reform Judaism. From 1973 to 1996, he served as president of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations (today’s Union for Reform Judaism), where his charisma and vision raised the Reform Movement to unprecedented influence. Never afraid to be controversial, he argued for recognizing patrilineal descent, institutionalized outreach to interfaith families and non-Jews, and championed LGBTQ rights and racial equality. He was a tireless advocate for Israel while maintaining diaspora Jews’ right to speak out independently on the Jewish state. In this nuanced biography, historian Michael A. Meyer draws on extensive archival research and interviews to paint a definitive portrait of Schindler’s life. A foreword by Jonathan D. Sarna situates Schindler in American Jewish history, and Rabbi Rick Jacobs’s afterword reflects on his legacy.

The first novel written and published in English by an American Jewish woman
 
Published serially in the spiritualist journal Banner of Light in 1860, Cosella Wayne: Or, Will and Destiny is the first coming-of-age novel, written and published in English by an American Jewish woman, to depict Jews in the United States and transforms what we know about the history of early American Jewish literature. The novel never appeared in book form, went unmentioned in Jewish newspapers of the day, and studies of nineteenth-century American Jewish literature ignore it com­pletely. Yet the novel anticipates many central themes of American Jewish writing: intermar­riage, generational tension, family dysfunction, Jewish-Christian relations, immigration, poverty, the place of women in Jewish life, the nature of romantic love, and the tension between destiny and free will.
 
The narrative recounts a relationship be­tween an abusive Jewish father and the re­bellious daughter he molested as well as that daughter’s struggle to find a place in the com­plex social fabric of nineteenth-century Amer­ica. It is also unique in portraying such themes as an unmarried Jewish woman’s descent into poverty, her forlorn years as a starving or­phaned seamstress, her apostasy and return to Judaism, and her quest to be both Jewish and a spiritualist at one and the same time.
 
Jonathan Sarna, who introduces the volume, discovered Cosella Wayne while pursuing research at the Israel Institute for Advanced Studies in Jerusalem. This edition is supplemented with selections from Cora Wilburn’s recently rediscovered diary, which are reprinted in the appendix. Together, these materials help to situate Cosella Wayne within the life and times of one of nineteenth-century American Jewry’s least known and yet most prolific female authors.