Aug 9, 2016
For the children of the Soviet Jewish immigrants, “Jewish” remains as much something one is as it is something one does. This notion of ethnicity seems a good deal more rooted in daily life practices and social networks than the largely “symbolic ethnicity” and “symbolic religiosity” Herbert Gans sees as typical of the ethnic identity of most U.S. whites.
Aviva Zeltzer-Zubida & Philip Kasinitz, “The Next Generation: Russian Jewish Young Adults in Contemporary New York” (2005), p. 218