This article about Catskills mountain resorts — which is quite fun to read by the way — makes it seem that finding a partner to marry was quite a serious problem for jewish people. It has a big emphasis on the singles scene for instance. It seems as if finding someone to marry was a primary reason why people would go to a mostly-jewish resort.
I'm curious why this should be.
The article also talks about these resorts appealing to a specific kind of Jew and their being a generation gap too. Could it be more likely that these resorts just weren't the hip hangouts that singles in the 60s frequented?
Keep in mind that many of the world's young Jewish generation had been murdered by the Nazis only fifteen years previously, and those who remained had dispersed throughout the world -- more specifically to the new state of Israel. Supporting and building the new country was considered the moral and patriotic duty of all Jews, and many young people moved to the kibbutzes in order to do so.
These communes had a reputation for sexual freedom that attracted many young people who might otherwise have remained in the US-- which at the time did not.
Secondly, American Jews in particular tended to be from families that had had the financial wherewithal and social contacts to emigrate to the United States before the war. They were well-established, middle-to-upperclass and necessarily insular, as America in the early 1960s still nursed a strong cultural bias -- if not outright discrimination -- against Jews. (See: "Gentleman's Agreement." ) Thus, marriage "outside the faith" was severely frowned upon for several reasons:
There was a strong political push for Jewish females to bear Jewish-sired babies to "repopulate" the diaspora after the war. (This thinking was also common among the educated WASPs of post WW2 America, to compensate for the presumed higher birth rates of the "less fortunate" socio-economic classes.)
There was -- and still is among the more orthodox -- a strong cultural preference for accomplished, educated, financially secure Jewish mates with whom to do so-- which necessarily limited the available selection. Especially given the discriminatory admissions "quotas" in the professions at the time, there were only so many Jewish doctah doctahs to go around. . . .
Edit: Great piece by Mordecai Richler, btw. Thanks for posting this gem.
Richler is a criminally-underrated writer. Thanks for posting!