In the early 1970s, American Jews were, on the whole, centrist and conventional. Most were married, and most to other Jews. Their largest religious denomination was the Conservative movement, with its bland, spacious suburban synagogues, representing the middle ground between fusty tradition and full-forced reform. This was a community that seemed to have settled into a comfortable status quo, steadily assimilating in the postwar years and ascending into the middle class.
Still, there were signs that when it came to actual religious practice, a younger generation, coming of age during the 1960s, found this stability stultifying. The desire for change could be felt bubbling from below. In 1972, the first female rabbi was ordained. Two-thirds of Jews under 30 belonged to no synagogue at all. But in cities such as Boston, New York, and Washington, D.C., groups of young, well-educated Jews had begun informally worshiping and studying together, eschewing institutional supervision and their parents’ conformity.
At one such communal gathering, known as Havurat Shalom, just outside Boston, three 20-somethings decided to produce a religious book that would be unlike anything anyone had ever seen: a lively, crowd-sourced compendium of how to live a Jewish life. It reimagined ancient ritual through a counterculture sensibility, challenging both the traditionalists on the right, whose ideology framed Judaism as a strict, all-inclusive package of rules and expectations, and the reformists on the left, who largely rejected ritual for a less demanding, less distinctive religious identity.
Published in 1973 by the Jewish Publication Society, The Jewish Catalog became a surprise best seller and has been in print ever since—this year, it celebrates its 50th anniversary. Only JPS’s translation of the Bible has sold more copies for the publisher. The Catalog’s bright-red cover, distinctive design, and whimsical illustrations empowered generations of Jews to experiment with new forms of practice and community, becoming the ultimate manual for those alienated and estranged from the tradition and seeking a more meaningful alternative. Today, when organized religion is beset by tumult and disengagement, The Catalog serves as a case study in how a grassroots effort to modernize religious life can succeed in profound and lasting ways, even as a question remains all these years later about how sustainable its changes actually were.
The 320-page book, and its two sequels, emerged as the social unrest and political violence of the 1960s were giving way to a do-it-yourself counterculture epitomized in the publishing industry by the Whole Earth Catalog, which offered product reviews and practical resources extolling self-sufficiency. But although The Jewish Catalog started as a Jewish version of the Whole Earth Catalog, by the time its editors, Richard Siegel, Michael Strassfeld, and Sharon Strassfeld, signed with JPS, they had created something even more revolutionary.
By Richard Siegel, Michael Strassfeld, and Sharon Strassfeld
Until they began their project, the classic text describing how to live a Jewish life was written in the 16th century by Joseph Caro: the Shulchan Aruch, which literally means “the set table,” an established, widely accepted code of Jewish law. By contrast, The Jewish Catalog offered an à la carte menu, encouraging readers to create for themselves a Judaism that was flexible, informal, and proactive. Want to observe the Sabbath but the prayers and laws don’t resonate? All you want to do is bake challah once a week? Well, here’s a recipe or two, along with hand-drawn depictions of several ways to braid the ceremonial bread.
“You can plug in wherever you want,” the editors wrote in the introduction.
Chaim Potok, by then an acclaimed novelist famous for The Chosen, was JPS’s top editor, and although he immediately grasped The Catalog’s potential, he faced a tough sell with some members of his board, who were aghast at publishing such an untraditional, at times irreverent work. But he persisted. “Chaim was a visionary,” Sharon Strassfeld told me.
At the time, the Strassfelds (who were then married) and Siegel (who died in 2018) were members of Havurat Shalom, a lay-led community that was among the pioneers of an egalitarian, participatory form of worship, learning, and ritual practice. The Catalog reflected those values. “We were writing about the lives we were living,” Sharon Strassfeld said.
The editors of The Catalog explicitly critiqued conventional Judaism as “prefabricated, spoon-fed, nearsighted.” They even titled one chapter “Using the Jewish Establishment—A Reluctant Guide.”
But overall, the tone and presentation were playful, inclusive, affirming. Fuzzy photographs of barefoot men and women clasping hands and circle-dancing were juxtaposed with an ultra-Orthodox bride and groom at their wedding; long-haired hippies were on one page, long-bearded Hasids on another. In Adrianne Onderdonk Dudden’s design, the pages had a Talmudic feel, with commentary and explanations wrapped around the main text. Stu Copans’s captivating line drawings were both instructive and cheeky; so were the editorial notes. (The recipe for cholent, a long-simmering stew, says it will feed 10 normal people or two Hungarians.)
“I don’t think we were trying to stick it to the man,” Michael Strassfeld told me. “We had a very different way of seeing Jewish life, and this book was an expression of that. Organizational Jewish life was boring. Suburban Jewish life was boring. We were trying to connect to a more authentic past—trying to recapture something, not destroy the system. We wanted to provide another model.”
And that model exuded the carefree happiness and unconventionality of the broader youth culture. Why do prayer shawls have to come only in black and white? Why can’t they be multicolored? And why can’t women wear them too?
“It’s the notion that you can do this, you can own it,” Beth Wenger, a history professor at the University of Pennsylvania, told me. “You don’t need to go to some institution to do it. It’s yours. That was what was so impactful.”
Without any mass marketing to speak of, aided mostly by word of mouth and a New York Times story, The Catalog immediately sold out its first printing, moving 50,000 copies in its first three months, and 130,000 copies in 18 months. (More recent numbers are not available, though JPS says that total sales are in the many hundreds of thousands.)
For a niche publisher like JPS, those numbers were unprecedented. But this popularity did not come without controversy.
Most notable was a lengthy, scathing essay by Marshall Sklare, then the nation’s preeminent sociologist of Jewish communal life, in the December 1974 issue of Commentary magazine. Titled “The Greening of Judaism”—this was not meant as a compliment—the essay criticized the Catalog editors for exempting “themselves from the central feature of Jewish religious law—its normativeness.”
The Catalog, Sklare summarized, “is rich in ironies, a work in which a genuine familiarity with Jewish sources and Jewish practice has been put at the service of the latest cultural and aesthetic predilections, with results that are funny, vulgar, charming, and meretricious all at once.”
Putting aside the lacerating, demeaning tone, Sklare pointed to a central truth: The Catalog was indeed advancing a Judaism that was focused on beauty and meaning and personal experience rather than on communal obligation and bowing to hierarchy and authority. You were invited to act and think a certain way, not commanded to do so.
But if The Catalog challenged the prevailing orthodoxy of the right, it was also an implicit rebuke to the American Judaism of the left, particularly the highly popular Reform movement, which at the time eschewed religious ritual and overt displays of ethnicity in favor of a more Protestantlike ethic, with many prayers in English and services that were briefer and left little room for displays of prayerful emotion.
So much of what The Catalog gave voice to 50 years ago has migrated from the margin to the mainstream of American Judaism’s liberal denominations, and even some of its more conservative sectors. Today, synagogue worship in general is less formal and more participatory; ritual behavior is continually being reinvented. Egalitarianism has seeped into Modern Orthodoxy. And, propelled by the pandemic, every other Jewish household, it seems, is making challah for Shabbat.
More broadly, Beth Wenger noted, The Catalog’s outlook “is characteristic of American religion, which is largely a menu today.”
Perhaps not even Marshall Sklare, were he still alive, would dispute that The Jewish Catalog had a penetrating and lasting impact on American Judaism. But the big book that seemed to be on everyone’s shelf is now largely a beloved historical artifact. The internet provides in a millisecond what The Catalog’s authors took years to compile. Books meant to be resources are instantly outdated the moment they go to press. Pages and pages of The Catalog’s finely packed chapters listing scholars and references and organizations are now obsolete.
Traditional gatekeepers of knowledge and guidance—be they rabbis or other experts—have barely a supporting role in many of life’s dramas. That is largely due to technological advances, but it’s also because of the diminished importance of religious institutions in the daily lives of American Jews and, indeed, many other Americans.
Whether The Catalog initiated that development or catalyzed it, whether it shifted the direction of American Judaism or gave vivid expression to a shift already in the making, it is hard to imagine contemporary American Jewish life without the permission to experiment that this quirky, oversize book represented.
“The most subversive thing we did, and it was completely inadvertent, is that we were giving people in English tools so that they could build their own Jewish lives,” Sharon Strassfeld said. “Until then, who was writing a Jewish book? Rabbis and scholars. The Catalog’s entire purpose is to give ownership to people of their own Judaism.”
As a book, The Catalog’s origin story had all the ingredients for success: idealistic and knowledgeable editors, a visionary publisher, a moment ripe for disruption. But in order to truly inspire a movement to reinvent religious life, the book also required readers with the skills, passion, and commitment to embrace its DIY ethos. It takes a lot of work to truly own one’s religion, to be responsible for its sustainability. Half a century on, The Catalog’s contributions endure, but so do the lingering challenges of making faith feel relevant and fresh in a modern world.
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