In this first interpretive historical account of the American Orthodox Jewish experience, Jenna Weissman Joselit investigates the ways in which pious Jews reconciled the requirements of religious tradition with the freedoms of interwar America. Through its focus on representative American Jewish institutions such as the synagogue and the rabbinate and on the sacred ritual life of Orthodox women, New York's Jewish Jews reveals how a self-consciously modern, American, and decidedly middle class Orthodoxy evolved before 1945.