Jewish integration into American life has been so successful, it is easy to forget that it came at a terrible cost. With historical fact and personal remembrances of his own years in public school, Rabbi Wein captures the pressures on Jews to assimilate into "the melting pot." Out of this environment grew the Conservative movement whose aim was to preserve traditional Judaism for fear it would disappear altogether. Though those dire predictions were wrong and Jews today can express their Jewishness freely, this lecture will remind every American Jew that even in the not-too-distant past, our existence here was not so rosy.

• the six-day work week - what lack of Shabbat did to the Jewish people
• Baruch Litvin - an ex-Communist's court battle to preserve the mechitza
• Zecharias Frankel, Solomon Schecther and the birth of JTS
• the backdrop of the 1930's - With immigration quotas all over the world, where were the Jews of Europe to go?