We Shall Build Anew

“In We Shall Build Anew, Shirley Idelson has combined the discipline and knowledge of a skilled academic researcher with the talents and style of a master narrator to provide a comprehensive and compelling tale of Stephen S. Wise and his Jewish Institute of Religion against the backdrop of an evolving twentieth-century American Jewish world. In so doing, Idelson has made an original contribution to American Jewish history and presented an instructive model of rabbinic leadership that resonates profoundly today. We Shall Build Anew will deservedly command a readership of scholars and laypersons alike!”
—David Ellenson, author of Rabbi Esriel Hildesheimer and the Creation of a Modern Jewish Orthodoxy
 
“The Jewish Institute of Religion, founded and led by Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, played a central role in the reinvention of twentieth-century liberal Judaism. In this deeply researched and engagingly written volume, Shirley Idelson provides a warts-and-all history of JIR, including its ongoing legacy and conspicuous shortcomings. A welcome contribution both to the study of American Judaism and to our understanding of America’s seminaries and divinity schools.”
—Jonathan D. Sarna, author of American Judaism: A History
 
“We Shall Build Anew meticulously and compellingly reconstructs a critically important facet of Stephen S. Wise’s remarkable career that has, to date, received too little attention—his astonishing effort to establish and maintain, against all odds, a new American rabbinical seminary in New York City.”
—Gary Phillip Zola, Edward M. Ackerman Family Distinguished Professor of the American Jewish Experience at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion
 
“We Shall Build Anew is a much-needed in-depth study about the Jewish Institute of Religion and its underappreciated impact on American Jewish religious and social life.”
—Tobias Brinkmann, author of Sundays at Sinai: A Jewish Congregation in Chicago