JPS: The Americanization of Jewish Culture, 1888–1988

by Jonathan D. Sarna

Jonathan Sarna’s meticulously documented centennial history presents the personalities and the controversies, the struggles and the achievements behind a century of publishing by America’s foremost publisher of Jewish books in English.

Sarna’s engaging blend of anecdote and analysis contextualizes the Jewish Publication Society within American Jewry’s evolving social, political, and cultural history. He demonstrates that the society has been a major factor.

Sarna recounts the inspired struggle of the Jewish Publication Society’s founders, a group of genteel Philadelphia philanthropists including Cyrus Adler and Mayer Sulzberger, who believed fervently in the need to educate their immigrant coreligionists with Jewish books in the new vernacular.

He also tells the story of Henrietta Szold, best known for her later achievements as the founder of Hadassah and Youth Aliyah. Szold worked doggedly for twenty-three years as the society’s first editor until a shattered love for a JPS author became the catalyst that led her to Palestine and Zionist leadership. Here too are fascinating accounts of the long deliberations and intense work that produced the authoritative JPS Bible translations of 1917 and 1985, translations acceptable to all major branches of Judaism.

Sarna also recounts the controversy surrounding the 1973 publication of The Jewish Catalog , a project developed by the bold JPS editor Chaim Potok. The Catalog , embodying the spirit of the Jewish counterculture, not only became the best-selling JPS book after the Bible, but it also showed that JPS could meet the challenge of a new generation as it moved toward its second century.

Genres: Jewish

430 pages, Hardcover

First published July 1, 1989

About the author

Jonathan D. Sarna is the Joseph H. and Belle R. Braun Professor of American Jewish History at Brandeis University and chief historian of the National Museum of American Jewish History. He has written, edited, or co-edited more than twenty books and is best known for the acclaimed American Judaism: A History, which received the Jewish Book Council’s Everett Family Foundation Jewish Book of the Year Award in 2004. He lives in Massachusetts. His latest work, When General Grant Expelled the Jews, was published in March of 2012. The PBS documentary Jewish Soldiers in Blue & Gray, which features Jonathan Sarna, explores the hidden stories of American Jews during the Civil War. Presented by the Shapell Manuscript Foundation, it is available for purchase on DVD at www.shapell.org.