Rosenthal's study attracted much attention in the mid 1960s among Jews and the general public. General circulation magazines such as Time, Look, and Newsweek wrote of the vanishing American Jew. Yet non-Jewish observers wondered at the issue as they saw the large new Jewish religious centers in the suburbs with their numerous classes and activities. But some Jewish observers believed that these centers demonstrated that their coreligionists saw Judaism only as a religion and not as the vital culture their parents had brought with them to the United States. Because Jewish institutions had failed to inculcate traditional values in the young, Jewish college students found themselves alienated and open to secularization and new religious cults.

Problems of Secularism.

In 1968 Irving Greenberg, rabbi of an Orthodox congregation in New York and professor at Yeshiva University, published a bitter lament about the dangers to Judaism...