While they were a successful group, what did it mean to be a Jew in America? Very little, some Jews feared. By 1964 surveys indicated that weekly religious attendance at synagogue or temple was only 17 percent, compared to the 42 percent weekly church attendance among Christians. Some Jewish observers wondered if those figures reflected the weakness of the Jewish faith and culture. They noted that Hanukkah, a minor Jewish holiday, had become the most celebrated holiday among Jews, and even the High Holidays did not attract significant numbers of worshipers.

The Problem of Assimilation.

In The Dilemma of the Modern Jew (1962) Rabbi Joachim Prinz warned that the danger to Jews in the United States was not the anti-Semitism of the past but assimilation. His fears seemed confirmed in a study by Erich Rosenthal that appeared in the American Jewish Yearbook in 1963. Rosenthal discovered a growing rate...