ABSTRACT
For many years, social scientists and historians have been trying to piece together a composite portrait of American Judaism. Owing to their predominant pattern of city residence, research has been focused on urban-dwelling Jews; and the Jews of the United States have been characterized as a metropolitan people. There is, however, a scattered minority of American Jews living in little hamlets and rural villages who do not fully fit this urban image. Such people do not reside in oldstyle ghettos, ethnic neighborhoods, or modern suburbs. Unlike their urban coreligionists, they are not members of ongoing Jewish communities. They are strangers in alien territory.
