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. Critical examination of Jewish life in the small community would seem to be alogical extension of research in the study of American Judaism and the nature of Jewish-Gentile relations. Being strangers in a Gentile world, many respondents appear to be more conscious of being Jewish than their urban cousins who live in the centers of ethnic communities. Rural communities are those communities with fewer than 10,000 permanent residents, in non-metropolitan counties of New York State, excluding all towns in the Catskill mountain region, in Westchester County, and on Long Island. Small-town Jews are persons identifying themselves as being Jewish living in 'rural communities' having 10 or fewer Jewish families.
