American Jewry, Present and Future:
Part I: Present
In The flurry of assertions about the future occasioned by the tercentenary of the American Jewish community, virtually no one, it would seem, took a real look at that community before beginning to prophesy. Rabbis and scholars were prone to start with a latter-day version of the conception of the Jews as the Chosen People. Optimistic leaders pointed to synagogue attendance statistics and the growth of a new Jewish day school as heralding the end of cultural and religious assimilation.
The sociologist attempts to take a more comprehensive view, focusing on the behavior of all members of the community, before he allows himself to speculate on future trends. Also, looking for similarities with other groups rather than for distinguishing characteristics alone, the sociologist must note that the five million American Jews are primarily an ethnic group resembling other ethnic groups in America, but with a culture—I use the word in the anthropological sense—in which a distinctive religion has been dominant, and with a rather special social relationship to the non-Jewish world.
Consequently, a sociological analysis would attempt to draw inferences from the long-term trends that have been affecting ethnic groups in this country, although taking due note that the religious and social distinctiveness of the Jews affects, and perhaps deflects, these trends in their case. I for one feel that while the Jewish religion has a distinctive character, the religious life of American Jewry—that is, the elements which most of the people have selected out of the total Judaic culture and religion for themselves—is no longer so different from the religious life of other ethnic groups as it once was. At the same time, there have been changes tending to lessen social distinctiveness.
As we know, American Jewry today is made A up in large part of the children of the immigrants who came here between 1880 and 1920. These I shall call the second generation, with the qualification that I use the term to describe a cultural rather than a chronological generation. No one has yet straightened out the chronological components of what now constitutes American Jewry, but we can say with some assurance that the majority of adult American Jews today were brought up in an immigrant culture. Chiefly for reasons of space, I shall confine my attention to this group, ignoring the older German Jewry, recent refugees, and small-town Jewry in general.
The second generation has climbed the socio-economic ladder into the middle and upper middle class, and now averages a family income well above the $3,500-$4,000 that is median for American urban residents. Only in our very largest cities can the remnants of a Jewish working class still be found.
The pattern of social mobility followed by the Jews differs significantly from that of the other ethnic groups who came to this country in the late 19th century, as the studies of Leo Srole, Nathan Glazer, and Oscar Handlin have demonstrated. The latter suggested in his book The Uprooted that while many of the other immigrants were frightened peasants, the Jewish newcomers knew some of the requirements of urban life by the time they arrived on these shores. Furthermore, as Nathan Glazer pointed out in his “Social Characteristics of American Jews, 1655-1954” (American Jewish Year Book 1955) the Jews, unlike their fellow ethnics, had always been more or less middle class. Many of them had been plummeted into the working class by the advance of industrialism in East Europe, and remained in that class for a while after coming to this country, but their traditions, predispositions, and their willingness to postpone current pleasures enabled them to make the most of every opportunity to return to the middle class.
Such opportunities were soon found. Rarely looking to non-Jews for social recognition, they were free to go—and often had no choice but to go—into low-prestige but relatively profitable occupations. They sold clothing and general merchandise to other newcomers, Negroes and poor whites, dealt in liquor, credit, loans, junk, etc., etc. They engaged in speculative ventures like low-rental housing, or went into the then low-prestige field of the movies and other forms of popular entertainment. And, of course, they operated stores and garment factories. These fields were attractive because they required little capital investment; and Jews moved into them at a time when the economy was expanding rapidly, so that the long-term increase in the demand for consumer goods, and especially the buying booms of the 1920’s and the 1940’s, made many of them wealthy.
However, to explain adequately the present status of American Jewry—the direction which their mobility took, and the opportunities they accepted—I must deal with another factor, the upbringing of the second-generation Jew.
The second generation grew up straddled between two cultures. Its East European Jewish tradition featured an Orthodoxy often felt as inhibiting, or else it stressed an equally strict and almost equally Jewish, if secular, ethic of self-improvement. The America that the second generation first came to know intimately was, on the other hand, the exciting and “permissive” culture of the sidewalk and the news stand, as well as the more status-conscious atmosphere of the public school. Most of the first generation that had come here in their maturity adopted only as much of American culture as was necessary to shelter their transplanted European Jewish way of life. Their children, however, were for the most part exposed more openly to the American way and, as they grew up, were variously affected by the split between the culture they knew at home and the one they met in the outside world. The second-generation Jew thus developed a new, though often ambivalent, perspective on both cultures that loosened or entirely cut off his emotional allegiance to many of the values and codes fostered by either.
The kind of upbringing received by many a second-generation American Jew was what sociologists describe as “marginal.” It forced him to find his own solutions, but at the same time it also provided him with the drives and incentives of one who feels himself handicapped, though not insuperably so. Maturing, he attempted to select or develop new values and ways of living for himself. In the process, he found at least three major orientations; these define some of the special roles the Jew plays today in American society and help to distinguish him from the members of other ethnic groups: the consumer-oriented producer and promoter, the intellectual, and the socially conscious reformer.
But before discussing these orientations, we should note that the type of personality developed by this “marginal” upbringing was not altogether an American product; for the impact of Enlightenment on Orthodox tradition had already exposed Jewish children in 19th-century Eastern Europe to similar cultural conflicts. A good number of the immigrants were virtually “second-generation marginals” before leaving for America; indeed, they were perhaps the ones most likely to emigrate to the New World of freedom and opportunity in the first place.
Release from traditional values had the effect of heightening certain sensitivities in many Jews that were of great advantage in commercial pursuits. One of these, a distinguishing quality of many Jewish businessmen, was a lively awareness of changing consumer needs and tastes, no matter in what field or trade. Often coupled with this was an enterprising spirit and a willingness to take risks, especially in areas shunned by others for status reasons.
A marginal upbringing acted in other cases to stimulate curiosity about relations between people, and the workings of society and the world. Moreover, liberation from absolute and traditional values opened new perspectives, reduced ethnocentric biases, and fostered an uncommitted, relativistic outlook. All this helped to attract many Jews to the frontiers of basic research, especially in the new social sciences—sociology, anthropology, and psychology. Others pursued a similar intellectual bent in the less open humanistic and natural science disciplines.
With still other Jews, the clash of values, the handicaps they experienced early in life as members of a minority, and the personal problems that resulted therefrom, nourished a consuming interest in values themselves, and in the application of ethical ideals to concrete situations of many kinds. This concern, which we have come to call “social consciousness,” has manifested itself in welfare and reform activities.
I do not want to suggest that such inclinations on the part of the second generation define character types, or that most Jews are either business promoters, intellectuals, or reformers. Rather, these should be understood as orientations of American Jewish life that are frequently found (sometimes combined in one and the same person) in typical American Jews at a level of intensity entirely compatible with their ordinary middle-class goals, and serving to distinguish them only slightly from their neighbors and colleagues.
However, there remained a significant minority of Jews whose marginal upbringing left them with strong inferiority feelings, or otherwise affected egos, which stimulated an inordinate need to prove themselves, whether by acquiring wealth or power, by winning fame or attention, or by amassing knowledge. Hence the driving, and on occasion undisciplined, energy so conspicuous in some second-generation Jews.
This account has squeezed a great many facts into the two categories of mobility and marginality, and oversimplified fifty years of history. But we are searching for the main trends that will provide some ground on which to explain the present as well as predict the future of American Jewry.
To Describe properly the effect of mobility and marginality on the second-generation American Jew’s attitude towards his Jewish world, I must first distinguish between two aspects of Jewish life, Judaism and Jewishness. By Judaism, I mean the Jewish culture (using that word, again, in its anthropological sense). But the term Judaism itself has two applications; we can speak of a traditional or of a symbolic Judaism. Traditional Judaism embraces a great complex of sacred and secular, ceremonial and everyday codes and behavior patterns, and its most authoritative example for American Jews is the style of life followed by their forebears in Eastern Europe up to the 20th century. The religious theme central to it was once all-pervasive under Orthodoxy but is now less so under the Reform and Conservative redefinitions. Nevertheless, my definition of traditional Judaism does include contemporary Conservative and Reform institutions. (Symbolic Judaism will be defined in another place.)
Jewishness, on the other hand, refers to one’s sense of identity as a Jew, and the concomitant sense of identification with other members of the Jewish community. Primarily a feeling of belongingness, Jewishness has been an effect, rather than a cause, of the cohesion of that community.
The second-generation Jew has been drifting away from traditional Judaism as I have defined it. This has by no means been the result of a conscious, deliberate decision; what has happened is that his rearing has detached him from traditional codes, and the aspirations he acquired from his own background and the world around him have directed him into a way of life largely incompatible with the traditional mores. While the first generation concerned itself mainly with achieving a standard of living, giving up on the whole only those elements of tradition which interfered with its economic goals, the second generation has aspired not only to the income but also to the way of life of the larger American middle class. The sensitivity he acquired from his marginal upbringing combined with the historic Jewish predilection for middle-class habits and mores to help the second-generation Jew adapt quickly to the demands of American life. True, his tastes may be somewhat more nouveau riche or “modern,” his reading slightly more highbrow, and his politics somewhat more liberal than those of his non-Jewish middle-class counterpart, but these differences, it should be emphasized, can be attributed almost as much to the sheer fact of his marginality as to the historical and traditional inclinations of Jewry.
As a result of the pressures, the training, and the rewards offered by American society at large, traditional Judaism has ceased to be a living culture for the second-generation Jew. Parts of it, however, have remained active in the form of habits or emotions; these are now providing the impetus for a new “symbolic Judaism” still in process of development.
Unlike other ethnic groups, in which the gradual disappearance of the traditional ethnic culture has been accompanied by social assimilation, American Jews have tended to maintain a community of remarkable cohesiveness, partly because they hold many values in common, but also because of their minority status and the separatism of the non-Jewish majority groups. Generally the Jew still lives in what are called Jewish neighborhoods—or now, Jewish suburbs; his best friends are almost certain to be Jewish; and his wife likes to have the children play with other Jewish children wherever possible. Jews are inclined to go into business with other Jews, quite often relatives, thus preserving some aspects of the clan-like nature of the Jewish family. Intermarriage, one of the most effective disintegrating forces in any society, seems never to have gone over the 10 per cent mark for Jews in this country.
Like much of his private life, the community activities of the second-generation American Jew are only a special, quasi-ethnic version of American middle-class community pursuits in general. The second generation’s organizations, its lodges, committees, and veterans’, professionals’, and women’s clubs-even its Zionist groups—are much like their Protestant middle-class counterparts in form, and in many cases even in substance.
The same applies even to the synagogue, though to a lesser extent. Reform, Conservative, and even some East European Orthodox congregations have created a quasi-Protestant division between secular and sacred activities. They have introduced “decorum,” choirs, and Sunday schools, and have assigned rabbis the duties and status held by ministers in middle-class Protestant churches.1
In the process of making these adaptations the second-generation Jew has gradually abandoned the kind of Jewish community in which his immigrant parents moved, while taking over and altering the one set up by the German Jews when they came here in the middle of the 19th century.
Furthermore, like most Americans, the second-generation Jew who has “arrived” seeks recognition in social, cultural, or quasi-cultural terms. On the whole, he tends to look for this (or may only be able to get it) within the Jewish community. There, religious learning and piety no longer count for as much as they did among the first generation, so that we find the second-generation Jew accepting and living by the same criteria of prestige as his non-Jewish neighbors. He joins country clubs (mostly Jewish), is politically active, acquires “culture,” admires doctors, powerful lawyers, or celebrities, and looks down on the unsuccessful, the nonconformist, and even on the scholar, just the way everybody else does.
The departure from traditional Judaism, and the correlative Americanization of the Jewish community, did not significantly affect the Jewishness, as distinct from the Judaism, of the majority of second-generation Jews. Like their immigrant forebears, they could actually envisage no alternatives to being Jewish, and their Jewishness was similarly submerged and unconscious, entirely beyond the realm of choice. There were, of course, some who did grow up questioning the culture of their homes and rebelling against their minority status, but the very intensity of their effort to repudiate their Jewishness reflected the degree to which it had unconsciously taken hold of them.
Some writers have regarded the flight from the Jewish community as typical for a large part of second-generation Jewry. However, while many intellectuals may have tried to escape, the great mass of Jews in this country never even considered the possibility. They became middle class almost as a matter of course, assimilating culturally to the majority, but continuing to live among Jews without questioning their own Jewishness or its ineluctability.
In The last fifteen years or so, domestic prosperity and security, not to mention Hitler and the State of Israel, have given the second generation a new and vivid consciousness of their Jewishness. But an even more important factor in the development of this awareness has been the arrival of children.
The younger second-generation parents were faced, virtually without preparation, with the question of whether or not they wanted to raise their children as Jews. The answer has been overwhelmingly in the affirmative. To be sure, what seemed in the 30’s an “ideological” choice between two possible alternatives—assimilation or identification—was not really that at all. Even those Jews who answered in the negative, or who wanted to let their children choose for themselves, discovered that it was not exactly a matter of free choice, that society was labeling their children Jews anyway. The real question became, then, how to make them feel that they were Jews. At this point, many parents realized for the first time the extent to which they had absorbed the unconscious Jewishness of their first-generation progenitors. But by that time they had given up the traditional Judaism of their parents which they assumed had been the source of their own sense of Jewishness. Could they inculcate a similar “reflexive,” or unconscious Jewishness by bringing back traditional Judaism? They were often urged by rabbinical voices to try. But culturally and psychologically, they were neither able nor willing to do so.
How they solved the problem by shifting the burden to the Jewish school will be shown in my concluding article. What we have to notice here is that in their concern with the problem, amidst confusion and ambivalence, the young parents began to glimpse more clearly the shape of their own feelings. Not by study or reflection, but in the making of practical decisions and in the coping with particular situations these feelings gradually evolved into a partly conscious, partly unconscious set of Jewish feelings that has guided the second generation arranging for their children’s Jewish education.
Though second-generation Jewishness penetrates into all phases of life, the very tenuousness of its hold on the second-generation Jew makes him feel the need to assert or confirm it, on secular as well as sacred occasions, in various material and non-material ways that have been newly devised or lifted from their traditional, Old World context. The forms and materials of this new expression of Jewishness I call “symbolic Judaism,” which, in my opinion, is rapidly supplanting traditional Judaism in this country. I use the term “symbolic” because one of its major functions is to serve as a symbol for the expression of Jewishness.
Symbolic Judaism has been developing ever since the second generation began having children, but the sharp fall in the birth rate during the depression concealed its first emergence. The baby boom that began in the early 40’s and reached its height after the war, by intensifying and accelerating the changes at the root of the need for symbolic Judaism, brought it finally to the foreground of our attention. So it was only over the last decade that the American Jewish community discovered that a “religious revival” had come about, with what seemed dramatic suddenness.
Closer observation will show, however, that the “Jewish revival” is not a return to the observance of traditional Judaism, but a manifestation In the main of the new symbolic Judaism. Nathan Glazer’s article in the December 1955 Commentary showed how it also reflects postwar prosperity, the multiplication of new families, and the exodus to small-townish suburbs where one is under the obligation to identify oneself with some group or other. I agree with Mr. Glazer’s analysis. But my point here is that within this new social environment, the people who flock to the synagogues go there not so much to practice the traditional Judaic religion, as to feel and express their Jewishness-both for themselves and their children.
Contemporary symbolic Judaism—unlike traditional, all-embracing Judaism—functions as one element among many making up the middle-class way of life of the second-generation Jew. It comes to the fore especially on holidays, at family gatherings, and on other special occasions. Far from being an original creation, it has developed out of, and includes, traditional elements. But it does not form an integrated culture; rather, it appears as a combination of barely related themes. I shall describe three of the more important of these themes. For the sake of clarity, they will be treated as if they constituted separate cultures.
The first is a Jewish “objects culture” that consists in the collecting and displaying of traditionally Jewish symbols and physical objects adapted to American tastes. The second is a new “Jewish popular culture” that “Judaizes” themes taken from current American popular culture. The third is a “problems culture” that permits the expression of Jewishness by defining cultural problems as moral issues.
Jewish “objects culture” developed out of a complicated set of circumstances. When second-generation Jews turned away from traditional Judaism, no longer accepting its codes as guides to a way of life, the latter ceased to be a living culture for most of them. Since then, and especially during the current Jewish revival, some of the practices and norms of traditional religion, once carried on more or less unconsciously and habitually as part of a relatively coherent whole, have been lifted out of their original context and given a new and independent existence as “customs” or “ceremonies” that people observe self-consciously and strive to maintain in order to feel Jewish.
The first-generation Jew had no need to decorate his house with Stars of David or hang pictures of a rabbi on the wall in order to give a Jewish “feel” to his world. Nor did he require the presence of physical objects in order to live his culture; these were there only because tradition and religious law prescribed them, and they were strictly secondary. But the second-generation Jew, who has kept a custom here and a ceremony there from a once living complex, yet wants to experience them as “richly” and “fully” as if they were still the vital habits of old, has had to seek symbols, or tangible representations, outside himself in order to endow what he has preserved with concrete reality. These symbols have now become the appurtenances of what might be called an “objectified” Judaism.
Objectification is not unique to American Jewry; it goes on among all ethnic groups. The new prominence of objects usually provokes those still living the culture in its more or less original form to complain that artificiality and commercialism are setting in. There is some truth in this, for objects detached from their original functions do tend to become museum pieces and collector’s items. But for second-generation American Jewry, the symbols and tangible objects are not at all functionless and are certainly not confined to museums: they have the important purpose of expressing Jewishness, especially in religious moods and situations.
Jewish “objects culture” is all around us. A relatively large amount of business is now done in things whose main function is to be “Jewish” or portray something Jewish: doilies and tablecloths with the Star of David, pictures, books, and records depicting Jews (usually conspicuously pious ones), and dreidls whose faces are crammed with Jewish history.
Many of the objects of this “culture” owe their existence, of course, to the fact that the Jewish holidays have become children’s holidays, and the ways in which they are now celebrated are designed to induce the children to feel Jewish. But in order to be made attractive, the holidays have to be Americanized. Thus Passover themes are put into coloring books and embroidery kits, others into “religious objects dominoes,” and so on. A highly inventive commercial culture has developed here.
But adults also respond to the “objects culture.” For them, it is perhaps expressed more intangibly, in attempts to create a Jewish “atmosphere” or Jewish “cultural environment” (to use the tags Jewish resorts and camps frequently advertise with), and in the “cultural evenings” sponsored by Jewish organizations. Rabbis, writers of holiday manuals, and housewives intent on creating a “real” Friday night have selected from the overflowing warehouse of religious tradition those features calculated to appeal most to the second as well as to the young third generation. Not prayers and study, fasting and waiting six hours between meat and milk, but Friday night candles, the shofar, Chanukah lamps, matzoh, and various other holiday foods characteristically convey the new Jewishness in its religious moods.
Jewish food companies publish brochures on the history of festivals, the food customs, and their rituals, while furnishing glossaries of the words to be used, recipe-fashion, in observing them. This quasi-anthropological attitude has the effect of permitting those for whom Jewishness is only one allegiance among many, or for whom it means something strictly for the children, to maintain a certain detachment from the proceedings.
In recent years, some aspects of Israeli life have been taken into the “objects culture.” Imported Israeli religious objects, jewelry, movies, and especially Israeli songs and dances have become vicarious symbols for a sometimes joyful, pioneering, and—most important—youthful Judaism.
The “objects culture” is, however, primarily an adaptation of religious forms, and given the compartmentalized role played by religion in the life of the American Jewish middle class, it can nourish only a part of the total complex needed to embody second-generation Jewishness. On the secular level, the second generation patronizes “Jewish popular culture,” which adds a Jewish flavor to popular American fare.
A candy manufacturer molds chocolate in matzoh form and it becomes “Jewish candy.” A meat packer prepares smoked beef and sells it as “Jewish bacon.” Cocktail napkins are available bearing cartoons m “fractured Yiddish,” and there are Jewish Mother Goose rhymes, Father’s Day cards, and greeting cards with idiomatic Yiddish expressions in Roman-letter transliteration. Songwriter Mickey Katz can take an American hit tune, replace its romantic lyrics with a mixture of Yiddish and English phrases about Jewish cooking, add a Jewish wedding music arrangement, and the song becomes Jewish. Jewish comedians of national fame entertain the primarily second-generation Jewish audiences of big-city night clubs by “Judaizing” some of the same material they present in a neutral form over radio or television.
Much of this Jewish popular culture is comic, and often satiric, in vein. The emphasis on comedy may be partly a reaction to the second generation’s early view of Judaism as something serious and often repressive. But comedy is also used to mask a furtive nostalgia, or to vent guilt feelings over the departure from Judaic traditions, or to air problems and conflicts in an atmosphere sharply divorced from everyday realities.
But perhaps most important of all, Jewish popular culture, comic and otherwise, affixes a Jewish label to American culture, turning its consumption into another expression of Jewishness. An aside in Yiddish on TV by, say, Milton Berle constitutes an assertion of the right of Jewishness not only to exist, but to be displayed as publicly and as freely as other styles of American feeling.
Perhaps the most vital of all aspects of contemporary symbolic Judaism is the Jewish cuisine. It is the one aspect of traditional Eastern European life which has not only survived, but seems to have been reinforced and elaborated in this country. Food, we know, plays a significant role in Jewish social, recreational, and religious life in America. For more than a few Jews, holidays become family and eating festivals (no wonder Manischewitz sells more than eighty kinds of Passover food). Through food one can satisfy one’s taste for the pleasurable side of the things associated with the parental home, and as long as such obviously treife items as shellfish and pork are avoided, appetites are not troubled by pangs of conscience. Furthermore, the blossoming of the kosher food industry permits prodigals to restore some kosher items to their menus without pain or effort, and lets them feel they are once again following tradition.
Food best illustrates the selectivity of the new Jewish “popular culture” as well as of the new Jewish “objects culture.” Both tend to salvage from Jewish tradition only those themes, objects, and experiences which bring pleasure and at the same time never conflict with or disrupt the basically American way of life. On the few occasions when self-denial might be demanded, American technology is there to eliminate the inconvenience; thus almost every American diet staple is now available in kosher or Passover form.
Whereas traditional Judaism was restrictive and expected some sacrifice and self-denial, the new kinds of Judaism abroad in this country must, like much else in American leisure culture, be permissive, providing stimulation, enjoyment, and emotional satisfaction without threat of sanction. The source of direction does not come from tradition, or the word of God, but mostly from the audience itself, and if the theme in question is to survive it must remain attuned to changing middle-class tastes—almost like a product sold on the market.
Many of the things named here as components of symbolic Judaism have little religious or intellectual significance. Consequently, they have received scant attention. Yet it is precisely such popular items as these which provide insight into the direction a community is taking.
But the second-generation Jew also expresses his Jewishness in his preoccupation with the problems of being Jewish in America. This is what Samuel Gringauz, a European writer, has called Jewish “problem culture.” Some of the main features of this “culture” are concern over anti-Semitism, intermarriage, irreligiousness, community apathy, cultural or social assimilation, and “social climbing.”
I am not suggesting that these are not real problems, or that they are not being approached as such by many organizations and individuals. But the style in which they have been taken up by many members, rank and file as well as leaders, of the Jewish community is designed less to lead to concrete solutions than to permit Jewishness to be expressed through “right thinking” and approved moral attitudes. Many of these problems cannot be solved by individual action, nor are they altogether amenable to rational choice. But one who may himself be moving away from traditional Judaism can allay his fears, and even strengthen his own sense of Jewishness, by protesting vigorously, on moral grounds, against assimilation. Other problems provide opportunities to take a position that reinforces pride in one’s Jewishness.
As Samuel Gringauz commented on his arrival in this country: “The Jewish culture of Western Europe was neither a pattern of life nor a culture based on experience . . . it was a problem culture—that is, a culture based on the examination and analysis of the problems of Jewish life. And this tendency has been taken over by the Jews of America. . . . Precisely because the life of the American Jews does not develop in specifically Jewish forms, what is specifically Jewish in America is expressed more in intellectual content than in patterns of living . . . and the problem of the Jewish future thrusts historical-philosophical and national-psychological problems to the fore.”2 Dr. Gringauz was speaking mainly of Jewish intellectuals, for whom self-definition can perhaps provide the spiritual satisfactions that others get from Friday night candles.
Many of the changes touched on here are not unique to American Jewry. Other ethnic groups that came to America at the same time as the East European Jews are relinquishing their Old World cultures even more rapidly than they, while assimilating into the larger religious sub-cultures that Will Herberg has described. The difference between these groups and American Jewry has derived largely from the cohesiveness of the Jewish community, which has been based on the distinctiveness of traditional Judaism, and the actual or expected hostility of the non-Jewish majorities.
As a middle-class way of life and the new symbolic Judaism replace traditional Judaism, and as cultural and other differences between Jew and non-Jew fade, the new self-conscious Jewishness of the second generation becomes increasingly important to the cohesion, and indeed the very existence, of the Jewish community. In a concluding article, I propose to discuss the part played by this new self-conscious Jewishness, and the kind of Judaism that accompanies it, in the rearing of the third generation, and to go on from there to speculate about the future of American Jewry as a whole.
1 See Marshall Sklare’s Conservative Judaism: An American Religious Movement (Free Press, 1955)
2 “Jewish Destiny as the D.P.’s See It,” Commentary, December 1947.