Since the 1960s, challenges to Jewish tradition and belief have come from feminists, modern Orthodox Jews, lesbians and gay men, and secular Jews seeking to define a Jewish social and political conscience. American Jews have become, in Jack Wertheimer's words, "a people divided" by secularism, political differences, and conflicting visions of Jewish community.
The 1960s became a revolution of sorts within the American Jewish community, a re-mapping of Jewish spiritual and communal life. The Jewish Catalog, a "do it yourself guide" to spiritual practice modeled on the Whole Earth Catalogue, sold close to 750,000 copies by the end of the 1970s, offering advice on everything from baking challah to bringing the Messiah.
Hundreds of young people flocked to havurot, small prayer communities conceived as alternatives to mainstream synagogues. Thousands joined the rank and file of the New Left on campuses across the nation, seeking a way to express their politics Jewishly.
Marching against he Vietnam War, protesting the oppression of Soviet Jewry, discovering feminism or writing their own Passover seder, Jews who came of age in the Sixties helped to create an American counterculture, and at the same time, they shaped new visions of American Jewish identity.
