They have been debating, avidly, for two years, and when their leaders gathered in Pittsburgh, Pa., to settle the matter, discussion dragged on for an unscheduled half a day. But at noon last Wednesday, the domed sanctuary of Pittsburgh's historic Rodef Shalom Congregation rang with cheers. By a vote of 324 to 68, the leadership of the 1.5 million-member Reform movement, the most liberal of American Judaism's three big branches, accepted the inevitability of the yarmulke.
That is a bit of an oversimplification, but American Reform had long defined itself by its distance from what the skullcap represented. Its founders in...
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