Emily Sigalow - American JewBu: Jews, Buddhists, and Religious Change

THIS BOOK was made possible through the support and encouragement of so many people to whom I am deeply indebted. My inspiration for American JewBu came from a conversation with Wendy Cadge during my first semester in graduate school in winter 2009 after I read her first book, Heartwood: The First Generation of Theravada Buddhism in America. In it, she writes about how nearly a third of the people she interviewed at the Cambridge Insight Meditation Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts, were of Jewish background. Intrigued, I spent summer 2009 poking around various different Jewish and Buddhist meditation centers in the Boston area to see what I could find. By the end of that summer, I was convinced that there was an interesting story there that I wanted to tell. Wendys dedication to this project, from its conception to completion, has been beyond generous. She saw what this project could offer a range of different audiences and encouraged me to expand and sharpen my arguments accordingly. I am grateful to her for her support, guidance, and mentorship.

I am deeply indebted to all the wonderful Jewish Buddhists who warmly accepted my presence, offered me their time, and shared their personal stories with me. I want to especially thank Alison Laichter and the other meditators at the Jewish Meditation Center of Brooklyn for generously opening their doors to me. I cannot thank all of them enough for their patience in answering so many of my questions. I hope some will find these pages and recognize their tales within them. And even more, I hope that these pages might help answer for them the question about how their Jewish pasts mattered to their Buddhist trajectories.

I am grateful to my dissertation committee at Brandeis University for encouraging me to think about my dissertation as a book from the beginning. Sylvia Barack Fishman served as a critical commentator on all chapters of the dissertation and has been wonderfully supportive of me and this project. She also has a keen editorial eye, for which I am immensely thankful. Jonathan Sarnas deep and broad knowledge has always inspired and challenged meand continues to do so. I am greatly appreciative of his intellectual guidance and enthusiasm for this project. I am also deeply grateful for his mentorship and support more generally. And to David Cunningham, who joined my dissertation committee near the finish, and Tom Tweed, who read from afar, thank you for your probing questions, generous commentary, and support.

This book benefited enormously from the critical engagement of various friends and scholars. Nicky Fox, Casey Clevenger, and Dana Zarhinthree friends and colleagues from Brandeischeered me on throughout the writing of this book and helped me refine the arguments within it. I am grateful for the feedback and critical insights that Jeff Wilson, Shaul Kelner, Richard Seager, Janet Jacobs, Jaime Kucinskas, Cara Rock-Singer, Rodger Kamenetz, Jeff Guhin, and Shari Rabin offered on various chapters of this manuscript. I also want to thank Rachel Gordan, Jenny Caplan, Arielle Levites, Ilana Horwitz, Matt Williams, and Michelle Shain for their academic friendship and encouragement. The unwavering encouragement and support of two friends, Aisha Baruni and Ophira Stramer, has kept me anchored. I also want to thank Sydney Schweber for all her hard work formatting the citations in this manuscript. Finally, I want to thank Alicia Deane, Gladys Cazares, Deb Holmes, and Amparo Ulloa as well as Lexington Playcare Center and Old Hill Childrens Day School for taking exceptional care of my children so that I had the time and quiet to focus on this book. This book would not have been possible without this village around me.

A number of institutions also generously supported the writing of this book. The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Research Circle on Democracy and Cultural Pluralism, Berman Foundation Dissertation Fellowship, and Hadassah-Brandeis Institute all provided generous funding for this project, for which I am deeply appreciative. The Perilman Postdoctoral Fellowship at Duke University gave me the time and space to focus on writing as well as revising chapters, enabling the transformation of my dissertation into this book.

At Princeton University Press, I have had the privilege of working with Fred Appel, who expertly shepherded this book into production. I am also grateful to Cindy Milstein for her fine copyediting, which sharpened the writing and structure of this book. This book owes a great debt to the two anonymous reviewers whose generous and incisive feedback substantively improved both its structure and arguments.