Educator Calls Campus ‘disaster Area’ Alienating Jewish Youth

The American campus is a “disaster area” for Jewish youth and Jewish collegians in the United States are showing “estrangement” from traditional Jewish values which requires a “Center for Jewish survival” to offset such alienation, a Jewish educator said here today.

Addressing the commission on Jewish Affairs of the American Jewish Congress, Rabbi Irving Greenberg of the Riverdale Jewish Center, who is associate professor of history at Yeshiva University, declared that Jewish youth on the campus faced a clash between the bourgeois Jewish home and the “swinging” college atmosphere. This conflict, he added, often leads to “moral and emotional recoil” from Jewishness. The center he proposed, he declared, could enrich the Jewish content and experience on the campus and could develop and publish textbooks and college level courses in Judaism. He called existing college Judaica courses “inadequate.”