For girls, the overprotection is far more pervasive. Parents will drive on Friday night to pick up their daughters after a sorority or House Plan meeting. A freshman girl's father not too long ago called a dean at Brooklyn College and demanded the ``low-down'' on a boy who was going out with his daughter. The domestic tentacles even extend to the choice of a major field. Under pressure from parents, the majority of Brooklyn College girls major in education since that co-ordinates best with marriage plans -- limited graduate study requirement and convenient working hours. This means that a great many academically talented girls are discouraged from pursuing graduate work of a more demanding nature. A kind of double standard exists here for Jewish boys and girls as it does in the realm of sex.

The breaking away from the prison house of Brooklyn is gradual. First, the student trains on his hapless parents the heavy artillery of his newly acquired psychological and sociological insights. Then, with the new affluence, there is actually a sallying forth into the wide, wide world beyond the precincts of New York. It is significant that the Catskills, which used to be the summer playground for older teen-agers, a kind of summer suburb of New York, no longer attracts them in great numbers -- except for those who work there as waiters, bus boys, or counselors in the day camps. The great world beyond beckons. But it should be pointed out that some of the new watering places -- Fire Island, Nantucket, Westhampton, Long Island, for example -- tend to be homogeneously Jewish. Although Brooklyn College does not yet have a junior year abroad program, a good number of students spend summers in Europe. In general, however, the timetable of travel lags considerably behind that of the student at Harvard or Smith. And acculturation into the world at large is likely to occur for the Brooklyn College student after college rather than during the four school years.