Though it's not something she likes to admit at dinner parties, my mother wouldn't let me apply to Georgetown. "You'll be uncomfortable with all the religious statues," she claimed, "There won't be enough Jews." Sometimes I would catch her logging on to the national Hillel Web site, plugging in names of schools and calculating their Jewish populations. It seemed that, despite my relatively non-religious upbringing, as far as my mother was concerned, religion was supposed to be as important a factor in my college search as academics, social life and location. Penn obviously ranked pretty high.
I, on the other hand, fell in love with Penn itself, and for all I was concerned, Penn could have been a monastery and I still would have wanted to go here. On my prefrosh visit, I loved the variety of people I met - only one of whom was a Jewish girl from the Jersey suburbs. Though I do recall hearing an NSO story about numerous people asking "Which exit?" in regards to where you hailed from, I shrugged this off as urban legend. My mother, of course, was thrilled. "You are going to love it there," she cooed, in rapture at the thought that her daughter would be attending a school that was 40 percent Jewish. What she didn't realize, however, was how much Penn's location, which attracted me so much, would minimize the effects of its largely Jewish population. At a school in what is effectively the fourth state of the tri-state area, Jewish holidays leave the campus eerily deserted. What's a Jewish girl to do when she's not local or religious enough to go home for the holiday? Neither my mother, nor I, was prepared for the cold hard truth of Judaism on campus. Which is to say, that the majority of religious celebrations happen off-campus. I distinctly remember my first Yom Kippur break-fast. The bagels were stale, and I was one of about three people to show up. I ended up breaking fast at Beijing with my non-Jewish hallmates, only to be hungry again (not to mention nauseated) an hour later. And this weekend (as Passover falls on a weekend, just like Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur did in the fall), Penn will be nearly empty of Jews for the third stretch this year.
Of course, Jews aren't the only student group to desert campus on an annual schedule. The halls of St. A's and Phi Delt are awfully quiet come Easter weekend. And it's not that I won't have friends, even Jewish ones, keeping me company on campus this weekend and attending my annual on-campus seder. Yet, the ebbing and flowing of the campus's religious population has an effect on our social lives that was definitely not mentioned in the Hillel college guide. What is absent is the packed social calendar that accompanies a standard Penn weekend, especially the last weekend of the semester, which is usually reserved for Fling. And I have an inkling that this effect is not so tremendous at schools that rank lower on Hillel's online list.
