AJC Parley is Told Jewish Hippies Feel Elders Abandoned Essential Religious Values

Today’s middle-aged Jews in America, who lead the community’s religious life, have “failed” the younger Jewish people, thus impelling them to become “hippies” who. in effect, tell their parents “that our kind of modernity is old-fashioned and unsatisfactory,” a scholar said here today at the opening session of the annual national executive meeting of the American Jewish Committee’s Western region.

The meeting will continue through Sunday. Among the highlights of the session will be addresses by Mayor Jerome P. Cavanaugh, of Detroit, on last summer’s racial violence in various cities, including his own; Morris B, Abram, president of the American Jewish Committee, and Shimon Peres, Israel’s former Deputy Minister of Defense who is now secretary-general of the Rafi Party.

Basing some of his facts on a survey made recently here by the United Jewish Community Centers, showing that 20 to 25 percent of the “hippies” in San Francisco’s notorious Haight-Ashbury section are Jewish, Milton Himmelfarb, director of the AJC’s Jewish Information Service, and author, held that “the hippies, our romantic young, show an unfamiliar thirst for spirituality and religion.” But those among them who are Jews, he maintained, “feel that their elders, who lead the synagogues, have let them down.”

Two generations ago,” said Mr. Himmelfarb, “young people in effect were telling their elders to become modern. But now the young are telling us that we went too far. They are telling us to backtrack and recover some of those things that we thought were useless ballast but that we see now were no less essential than those things we retained. The hippies are not saying that religion and spirituality, or even ‘mysticism” are a lot of baloney. They are saying they respect those things and may even want them for themselves.”

Mr. Himmelfarb declared that “these young people are telling us that we have foolishly, cleverly and arrogantly abandoned precisely those values that a human being needs for maintaining his humanity in the midst of bigness and impartiality and machinery.”

In a panel discussion that followed, Mr. Himmelfarb’s address, two university graduate students disagreed with the speaker, while a third agreed with his major theses.

RELIGION NOT SEEN AS FACTOR IN DETERMINING ATTITUDES ON BUSINESS CAREERS

Results of a study on career motivation made for the American Jewish Committee by Prof. Rose K. Goldsen, Cornell University sociologist, were presented to the conference. They indicated that Jewish young men and women seeking business careers in large corporations today, by and large, share “the attitudes of their non-Jewish contemporaries toward money, leadership, risk-taking and other aspects of business life.”

Religious identity, said Dr. Goldsen, “plays only a subordinate role in shaping attitudes toward business – in some cases none at all. The values and attitudes a prospective businessman will bring to his work are determined chiefly by the particular career choice he has made,”

Another AJC study made public here today dealt with “the many faces of anti-Semitism,” urging social scientists to give further, profound study to the roots of mass psychopathology “as the next frontier to pursue the fight against anti-Semitism.” In this study, the writers. Rose Feitelman and George Salomon, of the AJC staff, and the author of a preface. Prof. Nathan Glazer, said that overt anti-Semitism in the United States and various other countries “appears to be at a low ebb today.”

The study warned, however, that “no one knows what the future may hold for the relationship of Jews and Christians in America. History, as the Jews have had occasion to learn many times over, attaches no time guarantee to ‘golden ages.”