Most American Jews came from the lower middle classes, and therefore they brought with them not a lot of Jewish culture. The American Jewish story starts with Ellis Island, and the candy store in the Bronx.

" Citing demographic studies he contended that the proliferation of courses on the Holocaust would not be sufficient to stop a large number of Jews from leaving the Jewish community. Baron Hertzberg accepted the hypothesis that cultural and religious identity in America would exist in the future "only if they were redefined and reconstructed. He began his career as the director of the campus Hillel for Amherst College and the University of Massachusetts Amherst and taught at Princeton Rutgers Columbia Hebrew University and Dartmouth.