Erica Snow and Sam Kestenbaum

Mystical Jewish Renewal Movement Faces Fresh Divisions — 3 Years After Founder’s Death

The spirit of the 1960s, with all its countercultural passion, ecstatic practices and transcendental yearnings, touched American Judaism most of all through the Jewish Renewal movement, which sought to reclaim the religion’s mystical traditions. Throughout the life of its charismatic founder, Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, Renewal’s adherents and admirers wondered how organized and structured it should…