Fifty years ago the great Jewish thinker Simon Rawidowicz (1897-1957) wrote the memorable essay “The Ever-Dying People,” in which he noted that from Abraham to the most modern demographers, Jews have feared, “With me the tradition dies.” But the past half century in North America should lead us to call the Jews “The Never-Dying People.”

Today we witness the renewal of Judaism—or “Torah” as Rabban Yohanan ben Zakkai would have said. Synagogues are crowded Saturday mornings, not only for bar and bat mitzva celebrations, not only in Orthodox settings. Growing up in West Hartford, Connecticut, I cannot remember ever seeing a sukka; today there are competitions for the most elaborate ones.

The college campus shows the change dramatically and I marvel at the transformation. In 1950, the only students who kept kosher were Orthodox (a handful) and the children of Conservative rabbis. Hillel formed a refuge for the observant (again, mostly Orthodox). The few dynamic Hillel rabbis and directors were outnumbered by the many disheartened ones. Few students knew Hebrew beyond liturgical forms, if that; fewer still had been to Israel—the Jewish state had scarcely registered. The Holocaust had yet to form a presence in their consciousness. The building blocks of a self-sustaining culture of Judaism were not in place.

All that has changed. Judaism, the religion—in all its systems—flourishes on campus.

What are the engines of change? Religious institutions and programs, and ethnic ones that draw on originally religious narratives. Afternoon, Sunday and day schools, summer camps, youth groups, museums, summers spent in Jewish service, trips to Israel, the outreach of Jewish community centers, the advent of a rabbinate that reaches out—all these efforts have produced results

Why? The third generation, the Jews who came to maturity in the 40’s and 50’s, wanted to be Jewish and married Jewish. But that generation did not want to be too Jewish—to be unable to find a place in an undifferentiated common culture.

Their children rejected the uneasy compromise that had yielded an inert and ambivalent Jewish community. Many opted out; many others signed on. Jack of the third generation—so named by his father of the second generation after his grandfather Yankele of the first generation—signed on. But Jack then called himself Jacob and named his children, the fourth generation, Samuel, Eli, Noam and Margalit.

The effect of this Jewish renaissance shows. Sustained by Torah (broadly construed), those who will it form the never-dying people, eternal Israel—and they want their children to be sustained as well.

What of the secular Jews, who place themselves outside the framework of religion? That is a different story, one told by demography, not theology. Secular Jewishness has yet to fabricate for itself a counterpart to the Torah, a life-sustaining content to the “being Jewish” that secular Jews stand for. But I have no doubt that secular Jewishness, building on the cultures of the Jews, will match the success of religious Judaism in time to come. For all of us, the starting point is Jerusalem, which stands for the never-dying people.

Rabbi Jacob Neusner is research professor of religion and theology at Bard College. His most recent book is Judaism: An Introduction (Penguin).