Americas Jews

4. Religion without Religiosity: The Third-Generation Community

4. Religion without Religiosity: The Third-Generation Community If the second generation was the era during which American Jews were largely acculturated but remained structurally isolated, the third generation was one of increasing acculturation and decreasing structural isolation imposed from outside; yet they remained a people apart. At the same time, the self-definition of the group underwent acculturation ; American Jews in the third-generation community increasingly defined themselves as a religious group, rather than an ethnic one. In an intensive study of Protestants, Catholics, and Jews in the city of Detroit, Lenski found the religious associations of Jews became greatly weakened while their communal bonds remained stronger than for the other groups. In terms of religious associations, 12 percent of the sample of Jews reported that they attended no synagogue or temple services at all; 56 percent reported attendance only on the High Holy Days, or a few times a year; 20 percent reported attending at least once a month; and only 12 percent reported weekly attendance (Lenski, 1963, p. 36). In terms of communal bonds, however, the evidence indicated that those of the Jews were stronger than for any other groups surveyed. Of the Jews reporting 96 percent said that all or nearly all of their relatives were Jewish, and 77 percent reported that all or nearly all of their close friends were. Also, all the married Jewish respondents reported that they were "lifelong Jews married to a lifelong Jewish spouse" (ibid., p. 37). These findings led 81 82 America's Jews in Transilion Lenski to conclude that "the vigor of Jewish communalism more than compensates for the weakness of the religious associations" (ibid., p. 319). Ironically it was precisely in terms of the weakest element in their group bonds, the religious, that Jews defined themselves as a group in the third generation . Suggestions about why and how this developed are found in Gans's study on the origin and growth of the suburban Jewish community of Park Forest (Gans, 1958). The years following World War II witnessed a great housing boom, and during the late 1940s and 1950s America's middle class became suburbanized. Park Forest, a suburban community thirty miles from downtown Chicago, started in 1948 and was incorporated as a village in 1949. The community numbered about 1,800 families, of whom about 150, or close to 9 percent, were Jewish. Of these, twenty families, three-quarters of whom involved mixed marriages (between Jews and non-Jews), had no connections with the formal Jewish community, and another 30 families were too new to the community to have developed strong ties. Gans studied a sample consisting of 44 of the remaining 100 families and found them to be young-the median age for the husbands, the male heads of households, was 35, and of their wives, 30; highly educated-only 9 percent of the male heads and 25 percent of the wives had no college education; and of middle to upper-middle income status. Of the sample 36 percent were professionals and 48 percent were in business and industry, though only 14 percent of these were owners (Gans, pp. 206-8). When those who were active in the formation and leadership of the Jewish community were compared with the inactive members, the actives tended to have slightly more and older children, to have slightly higher mean incomes, and to be of somewhat higher educational and occupational status. Culturally, the Jews of Park Forest were virtually indistinguishable from the non-Jews. Moreover, in contrast to the residential patterns of the second-generation community, not only did they live like others in Park Forest, they also lived with them. Park Forest had no distinctively Jewish section. "The Jewish families were scattered at ran- Religion without Religiosity 83 dom, and only rarely were two Jewish families to be found in adjacent houses" (Gans, p. 209). The informal Jewish community developed in four stages: "contact, recognition, acquaintance, and friendship" (Gans, p. 210). The formal organizations were set up largely through the efforts of the several men among the early residents in the community who worked for American Jewish organizations and agencies. Their professional involvement in Jewish organizational activity provided them with a special incentive to form Jewish organizations in Park Forest. They invited a group of their friends and acquaintances to a meeting and, because most of those there had no special interest in any particular organization, they...