In this mas­ter­ful and ambi­tious book, Tobias Brinkmann has set a new stan­dard for the writ­ing of con­gre­ga­tion­al his­to­ries. Sun­days at Sinai does much more than trace the life of an impor­tant Amer­i­can syn­a­gogue through peri­ods of inno­va­tion, decline, and revival, but demon­strates how the tra­vails of this con­gre­ga­tion reflects major ten­sions with­in Amer­i­can Jew­ish life. The author threads the his­to­ry of the syn­a­gogue into a dense and col­or­ful tapes­try; he mas­ter­ful­ly inter­weaves Sinai con­gre­ga­tion into the his­to­ries of Chica­go, mass migra­tion, and Amer­i­can reli­gious life. Thought­ful­ly com­posed and flu­ent­ly writ­ten, the book offers a nov­el, nuanced and sophis­ti­cat­ed rein­ter­pre­ta­tion of sev­er­al key themes in Amer­i­can Jew­ish his­to­ry, par­tic­u­lar­ly cen­tral Euro­pean Jew­ish immi­gra­tion to the Unit­ed States and the Amer­i­can­iza­tion of Reform Judaism.