Growing up in the sixties and seventies was confusing, to say the least. Our "baby-boomers" post-war generation knew no Depression, and it was assumed we'd continue the material success spiral upwards. In this we were fully American. The Jewish part was the source of the confusion. Yes, we should completely assimilate in our public schools. But go to Hebrew School afterwards. We were taught to get along with everyone-- but don't date non-Jews. The message I received growing up was schizophrenic. I was expected to act like everyone else but to feel Jewish

At home, we ate chicken soup on Friday night, but the chicken wasn't always kosher. And everyone ate pizza out. If you "kept kosher" you just told them to hold the pepperoni.

This nebulous Jewish identity seemed to suffice for our parents' generation. They still remembered a parent or grandparent with stronger ties to Judaism, memories of anti-semitism had left their mark, and nostalgia for the 'old neighborhood' they had left for suburbia. Jewish food was part of the heritage, so chicken soup from non-kosher chicken was okay if the schmaltz floated on top.

But our generation scoffed at schmaltz; my peers rejected our parents' ersatz Judaism, leading many to reject their Judaism altogether. Some of us have since rediscovered the source of our parents' emotions and the kashrut that had been rendered into mere schmaltz

We kept kosher, went to Hebrew School, and attended Temple Friday night and Saturday morning. My mother lit candles every Friday night at six o'clock -- summer and winter.

My father believed in G-d and wanted us to believe in Him too. But if his faith was purer because it lacked intellectual understanding, it was poorer in transmitting it to his children.

I knew that I was different because I was Jewish. I wanted to read about Jewish things, but the local public library had few Jewish books. At age nine, I tried to write a Jewish version of the Bobbsey Twins. I only wrote two pages and quit. A book has to have action; and while I knew that the Jewish Bobbseys would feel different than the originals, I didn't know how they would act differently.

When I was in high school, the initial 'Sixties' message wasn't bad: One should find absolute truths and guide one's life by them. This message then it developed into generalities like peace, love, and brotherhood. The final equation looked like this:

Peace = burning down the campus

Love = indiscriminate distribution of one's bodily favors

Brotherhood = rejection of established morality/religion as a divisive factor.

The social law established in the sixties was: Thou shalt not follow any rules.

On the one hand, intellectuals pursued the absolute truths of social science. On the other hand, one could prove himself only by proving that someone else's absolute truths were false. Belief in anything higher than one's own intellectual ability was a badge of shame. Finding reason to disagree with anything and everything was the ultimate sign of brilliance.

As I entered college in 1973, I hoped to be intellectually successful. But world events collided with my plans, and feelings I had never understood took over.

I was influenced by the Sixties. I knew my parents did riot possess absolute truths and therefore I had to find my own -- with the arrogance, stubbornness and obnoxiousness of my generation.

Jewish youth had produced it's own particular issues. Meir Kahane with his shout of "Never Again!" led us to recognize that we were part of a people. Elie Wiesel was my personal choice. While his books never advised Jews to act differently, they were based on the assumption that the Jewish experience made Jews feel differently and ask different types of questions.

Acting on those feelings I dropped out of college in my first semester and went to Israel to be a kibbutz volunteer in wartime. Ten thousand American kids went that year, most against the wishes of their parents who thought such Jewish identification a bit extreme. But our people were in trouble and we chose tobe with them. Ahavat Yisrael drove us, although we boned up on Zionist philosophy to claim a rational basis to our actions.

Our parents still identified more with America than with other Jews, Their hopes were pinned on their children achieving professionally and financially, and they were uneasy about the prospect that we might decide to stay there.

I spent six months on a communist kibbutz as an act of Jewish identification. I had thought that Israel is where I could feel relaxed as a Jew, but the kibbutz ideology was to rid the Jew of any feelings of being different. I acted less Jewish on the kibbutz than I had in America.

So it was with a secret sense of relief that I went home to my angry parents, and back to school. I felt Jewish -- but wished I could feel better about it.

I decided to major in History, hoping that by knowing the past I could understand my present.

The Holocaust is the obsession of any self-respecting Jewish history buff. But Jewish history in the University curriculum rejects a priori the reality of Judaism. Pursuing the Jewish past, I immersed myself in the Enlightenment movement. The irony of it was that the individuals and movements I studied advocated the rejection of Judaism, while I was trying to find it.

I knew the rabbis at the Chabad House and some of my friends went there. But my academic training indoctrinated me that anybody who could follow a Medieval religion in the twentieth century had to be intellectually deficient or crazy or both. I would have nothing to do with them.

I devoted myself to the writings of Jews who dealt with modernity: atheists, reformists, humanists, communists, etc. Each admitted he was Jewish, but felt that Jews had to be something else in the modern world. Of course I studied anti-semitism. It is paradoxical that I thought I could come to grips with my own identity by wading through the thoughts of intellectuals (some of them Jewish) who had devised new and different ways to revile my great grandparents.

One class shook me to the core. It was a seminar on German-Jewish intellectuals, taught by two eminent Jewish professors who had themselves escaped Germany in the thirties. Towards the end of the semester we read Freud's Moses and Monotheism, theorizing that the Jewish people originated as a low-class rabble led by an incestuous Egyptian, prince.

Something snapped in me. Yes I was a rationalist. Yes I believed in evolution and the A scroll and the J scroll and all the stuff anthropologists said about the Bible. But this was too much. I knew in the pit of my stomach that my ancestors had not suffered for two thousand years because they were deluded by an Egyptian con artist.

"Freud went too far," I said through clenched teeth. The student near me, a German-born son of a Nazi smiled. We had argued all semester and now he had me. "What's the matter?" he sneered. "What are you? A FUNDAMENTALIST!"

The dreaded word of the intellectual world. Everyone gasped in horror. It meant you believed there might actually be something higher than the human mind, even higher than a professor's mind. If I was a f--t then I was an academic heretic.

I took a deep breath. I said nothing. This son of a Nazi had, quite possibly, in his German accent, inadvertently taught me a truth. If he was the opposite of a fundamentalist, mayb e it wasn't such a bad thing to be.

My generation hungered for Jewishness but couldn't believe in G-d. I was taught to pray to Him, but was also taught that the Torah was the figment of imaginative men who invented miracles and an afterworld to make people behave better. If G-d never talked to anybody, why should we believe He existed at all?

Something inside me began to loosen up. I had come to a humbling realization. I began to realize that people who kept the Mitzvot were not necessarily stupid. And just maybe they weren't crazy.

It was two and a half years before I decided to make a firm commitment to Torah Judaism. Somewhere along the way, I began to suspect that when things didn't go right in my life it was because I was doing somethingwrong. The more I associated with Torah-observant Jews, the more I liked the lifestyle. It had order. It made sense. It was better than the other freewheel lifestyle.

So I made a sociological decision to adopt the lifestyle and beliefs of my ancestors. I went to study at Bais Chana Women's Institute in Minnesota so that I could really fit in.

The first few days were wonderful. The classes were interesting, the company was good and the food was great.

Then it hit me. This was not a sociological exercise. After looking for the truth for years, I just came face to face with it.

There really was a Creator who expected us to behave in a certain way. And I had spent the last 23 years not behaving that way. I cried. I was horrified. I survived.

Despite the blow to my ego when I realized that I was not my own clever creator, it was a relief.

I wasn't schizophrenic -- my education was.

America has raised three generations of Jews to feel like Jews, but to think and act like gentiles. So when novelists and filmmakers portray Jews as neurotics they aren't really distorting the picture; they're telling the embarrassing truth.

When one Jew motivates another to act genuinely Jewish, to do a mitzvah, he's promoting mental health.

And that, Dr. Freud, is a fundamental truth.

A freelance writer, Tzipora Unger lives in the Midwest with her husband and four children.