Word: herberger
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Dates: during 1950-1950
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...Judaism seems to be experiencing a powerful revival. Synagogues and seminaries are expanding, congregation membership and attendance figures are rising, and more & more young faces are turning up at Sabbath worship. But according to Jewish free-lance scholar Will Herberg, Jews should not mistake these facts as signs of a religious awakening. After six months of study and interviews on the subject, Herberg has concluded that the revival must ground itself in religion or it will not amount to much...
...April issue of the Jewish monthly Commentary, Author Herberg says that the synagogues have benefited from a new pride felt by U.S. Jews in their faith. During the past two decades, the horror of the Nazi persecution and the triumph of the new state of Israel "have helped reverse the trend toward assimilation." To identify themselves with Jewish culture, Herberg suggests, more & more U.S. Jews have turned to the synagogues: "America does know a free variety and plurality of religions, and it is as a member of a religious group that the great mass of Americans understand the status...
...Herberg finds the divisions in contemporary Judaism insignificant compared to "the great gulf that today separates the synagogue as a whole from the vital areas of Jewish life." Though there are nearly 5,000,000 U.S. Jews, no more than 1,500,000-less than a third-"have even the remotest connection with the synagogue." And most of these, says Herberg, find the center of their interest as Jews not in religious but in secular concerns such as "Zionism, labor unionism, philanthropy, social service, 'anti-defamation.' . . . Religion is, in fact, often regarded as a kind of leisure-time...