My interviews with teen-agers confirmed this portrait of the weakening of religious and ethnic bonds.
Jewish identity was often confused with social and economic strivings.
"Being Jewish gives you tremendous drive", a boy remarked.
"It means that you have to get ahead".
When I pressed for a purely religious definition, I encountered the familiar blend of liberal piety, interfaith good will, and a small residue of ethnic loyalty.

"I like the tradition", a girl said.
"I like to follow the holidays when they come along.
But you don't have to worship in the traditional way.
You can communicate in your own way.
As I see it, there's no real difference between being Jewish, Catholic, or Protestant".

Another teen-ager remarked: "Most Jews don't believe in God, but they believe in people -- in helping people".
Still another boy asserted: "To be a good Jew is to do no wrong;
it's to be a good person".
When asked how this was different from being a good Protestant, the boy answered, "It's the same thing".

This accords with the study by Maier and Spinrad.
They discovered that, although 42 per cent of a sample of Catholic students and 15 per cent of the Protestants believed it important to live in accordance with the teachings of their religion, only 8 per cent of the Jewish students had this conviction.
The most important aims of the Jewish students were as follows: to make the world a better place to live in -- 30 per cent;
to get happiness for yourself -- 28 per cent;
and financial independence -- 21 per cent.

Nevertheless, most of the teen-agers I interviewed believed in maintaining their Jewish identity and even envisioned joining a synagogue or temple.
However, they were hostile to Jewish Orthodoxy, professing to believe in Judaism "but in a moderate way".
One boy said querulously about Orthodox Jews: "It's the twentieth century, and they don't have to wear beards".

The reason offered for clinging to the ancestral faith lacked force and authority even in the teen-agers' minds.
"We were brought up that way" was one statement which won general assent.
"I want to show respect for my parents' religion" was the way in which a boy justified his inhabiting a halfway house of Judaism.
Still another suggested that he would join a temple "for social reasons, since I'll be living in a suburb".

Intermarriage, which is generally regarded as a threat to Jewish survival, was regarded not with horror or apprehension but with a kind of mild, clinical disapproval.
Most of the teen-agers I interviewed rejected it on pragmatic grounds.
"When you marry, you want to have things in common", a girl said, "and it's hard when you don't marry someone with your own background".

A fourteen-year-old girl from the Middle West observed wryly that, in her community, religion inconveniently interfered with religious activities -- at least with the peripheral activities that many middle class Jews now regard as religious.
It appears that an Orthodox girl in the community disrupted plans for an outing sponsored by one of the Jewish service groups because she would not travel on Saturday and, in addition, required kosher food.
Another girl from a relatively large midwestern city described herself as "the only Orthodox girl in town".
This is, no doubt, inaccurate, but it does convey how isolated she feels among the vast army of the nonobservant.

The older teens

One of the significant things about Jewish culture in the older teen years is that it is largely college-oriented.
Sixty-five per cent of the Jewish teen-agers of college age attend institutions of higher learning.
This is substantially higher than the figures for the American population at large -- 45.6 per cent for males and 29.2 per cent for females.
This may help explain a phenomenon described by a small-town Jewish boy.
In their first two years in high school, Jewish boys in this town make strenuous exertions to win positions on the school teams.
However, in their junior and senior years, they generally forego their athletic pursuits, presumably in the interest of better academic achievement.
It is significant, too, that the older teen-agers I interviewed believed, unlike the younger ones, that Jewish students tend to do better academically than their gentile counterparts.

The percentage of Jewish girls who attend college is almost as high as that of boys.
The motivations for both sexes, to be sure, are different.
The vocational motive is the dominant one for boys, while Jewish girls attend college for social reasons and to become culturally developed.
One of the significant developments in American-Jewish life is that the cultural consumers are largely the women.
It is they who read -- and make -- Jewish best-sellers and then persuade their husbands to read them.

In upper teen Jewish life, the non-college group tends to have a sense of marginality.
"People automatically assume that I'm in college", a nineteen-year-old machinist observed irritably.
However, among the girls, there are some morale-enhancing compensations for not going to college.
The Jewish working girl almost invariably works in an office -- in contradistinction to gentile factory workers -- and, buttressed by a respectable income, she is likely to dress better and live more expansively than the college student.
She is even prone to regard the college girl as immature.

The lower-middle class college student

One of the reasons for the high percentage of Jewish teen-agers in college is that a great many urban Jews are enabled to attend local colleges at modest cost.
This is particularly true in large centers of Jewish population like New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia.

What is noteworthy about this large group of teen-agers is that, although their attitudes hardly differentiate them from their gentile counterparts, they actually lead their lives in a vast self-enclosed Jewish cosmos with relatively little contact with the non-Jewish world.

Perhaps the Jewish students at Brooklyn College -- constituting 85 per cent of those who attend the day session -- can serve as a paradigm of the urban, lower-middle class Jewish student.

There is, to begin, an important sex difference.
Typically, in a lower-middle class Jewish family, a son will be sent to an out-of-town school, if financial resources warrant it, while the daughter will attend the local college.
There are two reasons for this.
First, the girl's education has a lower priority than the son's.
Second, the attitude in Jewish families is far more protective toward the daughter than toward the son.
Most Jewish mothers are determined to exercise vigilance over the social and sexual lives of their daughters by keeping them home.
The consequence of this is that the girls at Brooklyn College outnumber the boys and do somewhat better academically.
One can assume that some of the brightest boys are out of town.

Brooklyn College students have an ambivalent attitude toward their school.
On the one hand, there is a sense of not having moved beyond the ambiance of their high school.
This is particularly acute for those who attended Midwood High School directly across the street from Brooklyn College.
They have a sense of marginality at being denied that special badge of status, the out-of-town school.
At the same time, there is a good deal of self-congratulation at attending a good college -- they are even inclined to exaggerate its not inconsiderable virtues -- and they express pleasure at the cozy in-group feeling that the college generates.
"It's people of your own kind", a girl remarked.
"You don't have to watch what you say.
Of course, I would like to go to an out-of-town school where there are all kinds of people, but I would want lots of Jewish kids there".

For most Brooklyn College students, college is at once a perpetuation of their ethnic attachments and a breaking away from the cage of neighborhood and family.
Brooklyn College is unequivocally Jewish in tone, and efforts to detribalize the college by bringing in unimpeachably midwestern types on the faculty have been unavailing.
However, a growing intellectual sophistication and the new certitudes imparted by courses in psychology and anthropology make the students increasingly critical of their somewhat provincial and overprotective parents.
And the rebellion of these third generation Jews is not the traditional conflict of culture but, rather, a protest against a culture that they view as softly and insidiously enveloping.
"As long as I'm home, I'll never grow up", a nineteen-year-old boy observed sadly.
"They don't like it if I do anything away from home.
It's so much trouble, I don't usually bother".

For girls, the overprotection is far more pervasive.
Parents will drive on Friday night to pick up their daughters after a sorority or House Plan meeting.
A freshman girl's father not too long ago called a dean at Brooklyn College and demanded the "low-down" on a boy who was going out with his daughter.
The domestic tentacles even extend to the choice of a major field.
Under pressure from parents, the majority of Brooklyn College girls major in education since that co-ordinates best with marriage plans -- limited graduate study requirement and convenient working hours.
This means that a great many academically talented girls are discouraged from pursuing graduate work of a more demanding nature.
A kind of double standard exists here for Jewish boys and girls as it does in the realm of sex.

The breaking away from the prison house of Brooklyn is gradual.
First, the student trains on his hapless parents the heavy artillery of his newly acquired psychological and sociological insights.
Then, with the new affluence, there is actually a sallying forth into the wide, wide world beyond the precincts of New York.
It is significant that the Catskills, which used to be the summer playground for older teen-agers, a kind of summer suburb of New York, no longer attracts them in great numbers -- except for those who work there as waiters, bus boys, or counselors in the day camps.
The great world beyond beckons.
But it should be pointed out that some of the new watering places -- Fire Island, Nantucket, Westhampton, Long Island, for example -- tend to be homogeneously Jewish.
Although Brooklyn College does not yet have a junior-year-abroad program, a good number of students spend summers in Europe.
In general, however, the timetable of travel lags considerably behind that of the student at Harvard or Smith.
And acculturation into the world at large is likely to occur for the Brooklyn College student after college rather than during the four school years.

Brooklyn College is Marjorie Morningstar territory, as much as the Bronx or Central Park West.
There are hordes of nubile young women there who, prodded by their impatient mothers, are determined to marry.
It is interesting that, although the percentage of married students is not appreciably higher at Brooklyn than elsewhere -- about 30 per cent of the women and 25 per cent of the men in the graduating class -- the anxiety of the unmarried has puffed up the estimate.
"Almost everybody in the senior class is married", students say dogmatically.
And the school newspaper sells space to jubilant fraternities, sororities, and houses (in the House Plan Association) that have good news to impart.
These announcements are, in effect, advertisements for themselves as thriving marriage marts.
There are boxed proclamations in the newspaper of watchings, pinnings, ringings, engagements, and marriages in a scrupulously graded hierarchy of felicity.
"Witt House happily announces the engagement of Fran Horowitz to Erwin Schwartz of Fife House".

The Brooklyn College student shows some striking departures from prevailing collegiate models.
The Ivy League enjoys no easy dominion here, and the boys are as likely to dress in rather foppish Continental fashion, or even in nondescript working class manner, as they are in the restrained, button-down Ivy way.
The girls are prone to dress far more flamboyantly than their counterparts out of town, and eye shadow, mascara, and elaborate bouffant hairdos -- despite the admonitions of cautious guidance personnel -- are not unknown even in early morning classes.

Among the boys, there is very little bravado about drinking.
Brooklyn College is distinctive for not having an official drinking place.
The Fort Lauderdale encampment for drinking is foreign to most Brooklyn College boys.