JEWISH RENEWAL MOVEMENT. The Jewish Renewal movement is one of the most recent and creative expressions of Judaism's continued attempt to mold itself to the contours of modernity. It is, in many respects, an indigenous American religious movement but is expanding into a global Jewish phenomenon. This multifaceted development in contemporary Judaism is hard to categorize. It has the audacity of a reformation, the passion of a revival, and the optimism of a renaissance. Its critique and reconstruction of Judaism not only occupies the realm of ideas but reaches down to the organizational structure of Judaism in the Diaspora.

For most of the twentieth century Judaism in America developed along denominational lines. Each denomination has its own autonomy, its own rabbinical academies, its own fund-raising structure. The separation of church and state in America has enabled American Judaism to develop its own institutional and...