On Rockingham Street explores, in memoir form, how assimilation of Jewish immigrants arriving from Eastern Europe was shaped and affected by the culture of Southern suburbia in the 1950s and 1960s. It probes the key questions of Jewish survival, including whether American Judaism has left many Jews unable to answer the question "Why are we Jewish?" and whether the education of Jewish youth by the modern American synagogue is adequate to maintain Judaism as a distinctive and meaningful voice.