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The Wonders of America: Reinventing Jewish Culture, 1880-1950. By Jenna Weissman Joselit. (New York: Hill and Wang, 1994. xviii, 349 pp. Cloth, $23.00, ISBN 0-8090-2757-7. Paper, $14.00, ISBN 0-8090-1586-2.)
Located somewhere between cultural anthropology and social history, this book examines the evolution of life cycle events and their accompanying ritual processes that together make up what is Jewishness in America. Included is everything from birthing rituals to courting patterns to memorialization rituals and all that happens in between. Jenna Weissman Joselit discovers that in the dynamic atmosphere of America these processes are "protean social constructs" that serve as fingerprints to the dynamism of the change process American Jewry has experienced. Untroubled by problems of constancy or consistency, American Jews periodically "reinvent" what normative Judaism is. Sometimes...