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Alone No More: Jewish Students Thrive at Southern Universities
November 04, 2004Comments (0) | Add | E-mail this to a friendGrowing up Jewish to Marcia Eisenstein meant leaving her home in Glasgow, Ky., early every Sunday morning to drive two hours to Nashville. She'd attend religious school at Temple Ohavai Shalom. After class, she, her brother and her mother then would drive back home to the small town where the Eisensteins were the only Jews.
"The entire day was schlepping to Nashville and back," Eisenstein, now 20, recalls. "Every once in a while it was annoying but I realized I was there for the right reasons."
Those reasons included learning about her heritage and perpetuating her religion.
But she often felt lonely and left out since she lived so far away, Eisenstein says. "I didn't have a sense of Jewish community at the time," she says, "but I didn't even know that being Jewish meant that, so it didn't bother me."
When it came time for college, Eisenstein wanted to go somewhere with other Jews. Today, she is a junior at Duke University, where about 11 percent of the population is Jewish and she serves on the board of Hillel. Eisenstein has finally found her community. "I loved it from the beginning," she says. "Ninety percent of my friends are Jewish. That's what being Jewish means to me the most."
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