Excerpt from Isaac Mayer Wise, the Founder of American Judaism a Biography
In 1846, when Isaac Mayer Wise arrived in America, he found the Jews in this country with but little secular culture, many of them drifting away from Judaism, and what religious institutions they had, entirely unorganized. Their religious life was an intolerable imitation of that which existed in the old Ghettos of Europe - a condition so inconsistent with the spirit of American institutions as to make positively impossi...