Hymns, Psalms and Prayers. Prepared by <<Isaac M. Wise>> and others.

<<The final volume that completes Wise’s “Minhag America” series.>> “In post-Civil War America Isaac Mayer Wise was the best-known Jew and a well-regarded leader in American liberal religious circles. He believed that in time Judaism would become the religion of all enlightened men, but first it had to be modernized, democratized, and most important of all, Americanized. Wise was a leading exponent of a moderate, pragmatic Reform Judaism, responsive to the exigencies of contemporary American life.” (JVL). Wise’s uniquely American prayer book “Minhag America,” of which this volume of Hymns was a supplement, was not just an attempt to issue another Reform prayer book, but rather to create a new form of Reform Judaism unique to American Jewry. Just as there were Jewish prayer books specific to Germany, Spain and Poland, so too there would now be a prayer book unique to America and a newly developing, vibrant form of American Judaism. See Centenary Papers and Others by David Philipson (Cincinnatti 1919) pp. 25, 49-51; and J.G. Heller, Isaac M. Wise; His Life, Work and Thought (1965) p. 660.