The case for rejecting the prestige
Once upon a time, not even a decade ago, the most important place in the world to me was a nondescript building on Washington Road in Princeton, New Jersey. Sitting in the shadow of Princeton University’s vaunted eating clubs, the Center for Jewish Life hosted daily prayer services, kosher meals, and most of the memorable conversations that made Princeton so formative for me.
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We Jewish Tigers were legion, and the CJL was our second home. As our orange-and-black paraphernalia would attest, we were fully Princeton. And why not? With hard work and a dusting of admissions-office luck we had emerged from our childhoods as Jews fit to hobnob with the brightest young people in America and the towering lacrosse players whose names ended in numerals. We excelled academically and socially, and we were self-sufficient enough to downplay the routine ways we were excluded from campus life. Sure, most major social events occurred on Shabbat or revolved around non-kosher food, and the most elite literary clubs and secret societies gave off more than a whiff of secularist chauvinism and progressive anti-Zionism. But we had enough intramural sports and musical groups and campus publications to sustain us—and most of all, our CJL.
Continue reading the entire piece here at Commentary
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Tal Fortgang is an adjunct fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a fellow at SAPIR: Ideas for a Thriving Jewish Future.
Photograph by Andrew Lichtenstein/ Corbis via Getty Images
