The Columbia History of Jews and Judaism in America

From the earliest days of Jewish settlement in the Atlantic colonies to the modern-day presence of Jews in every corner of the United States, religious education has been a communal concern. No single model of American Jewish education ever cohered, and, indeed, at any given moment, many Jews in America probably did not have access to or even interest in sustained religious education. Still, Jewish education in one form or another has existed in America for centuries and deserves closer examination. This essay will focus on three major themes in the history of Jewish education in America: the debates about the form, content, and results of Jewish education, the steady expansion of student populations, and the use of Jewish education as a means of formulating American Jewish identity. There are, of course, many other angles from which to view American Jewish education, but these themes resonate particularly well with both historical and contemporary perspectives.

Before the emergence of the common school movement of the 1820s and 1830s that brought free public education to ever increasing numbers of American children, Jewish children typically attended pay schools in their communities. Many of these private institutions were affiliated with local congregations. From at least 1700 forward, Jewish parents made a concerted effort to provide their children with some form of religious education. Small colonial Jewish communities found that including girls in student bodies helped ensure the schools’ viability. At the time, the observably high intermarriage rates of the tiny numbers of Jews in America provided all the rationale needed. Furthermore, most schools in colonial and early national America were essentially religious schools operated by denominations or churches for the children of their adherents. Jewish schools developed no differently.

Education was thus a concern of many Jewish families during the colonial period but was rarely seen as a formal communal function. Community development in the coastal cities of New York and Newport, and, later, Baltimore and Philadelphia, among others, generally followed a pattern that proceeded from cemetery to congregation to synagogue building to ritual bath and only then—if at all—to religious school. Unlike many European congregations, the duties of ritual leaders did not automatically include teaching the members’ children. Early synagogue constitutions, such as that of New York’s Shearith Israel in 1728, made no mention of religious education. Newport’s Congregation Jeshuat Israel, however, solicited for funds to start a school, appealing, “How unhappy the positions must be of the children and their parents, who are through necessity educated in a place where they must remain almost totally uninstructed in our most Holy and Divine Law, our Rites and Ceremonies.”¹ Although a few congregations did make some attempts to provide religious education, there were not enough teachers or students to stabilize schools prior to 1800. Private instruction in the home of some families remained an important source of religious education for Jewish children.

In 1803 Shearith Israel opened the Polonies Talmud Torah to boys and girls, an educational gambit that achieved only tentative success. The new school constitution included in its mission both moral schooling in general and Jewish education in particular. Even at this early stage, direct religious instruction was not the only goal of the community in providing Jewish education. The school opened and closed and changed formats for the next few decades. A group of concerned congregation members eventually formed a society for educating children that contributed to the breakaway of Congregation B’nai Jeshurun in 1825.

With the advent of public schools during the mid-nineteenth century, American education changed fundamentally. Although public schools were almost always Protestant in nature, they were still less sectarian than the denominational pay schools of the past because they aimed to educate all American children as a necessary public service and fundamental common good. Most Jewish parents did not want their children to be excluded from this vision of a unifying childhood experience for all American citizens. The free tuition supplied an additional incentive. As the American Jewish community began to develop after the American Revolution and then explode in population during the mid-nineteenth-century immigration of Jews from central and western Europe, the desire to integrate into American society grew stronger. The theory of public education for all children seemed to promise Jewish parents a path directly toward safe and natural acculturation.

Two major problems persisted. One was the undeniably Protestant, even missionary, nature of most early American public schools. The other was the continuing concern with Jewish education, which obviously would not be provided by the public school system. These two issues became the central concerns of nineteenth-century Jewish education in America and led to ongoing debate in Jewish communities throughout the country. Jewish parents were faced with a choice between what historian Jonathan D. Sarna has called the “Catholic model” or the “Protestant model.”² Recognizing that they shared with Catholics grave reservations about the mission of the public schools as either godless or Protestant, some American Jews opted to continue sustaining separate schools for Jewish children. Like the Catholic schools whose model they followed, these Jewish schools received some state funding through most of the nineteenth century.

The Jewish schools featured all the fundamentals of a public school education but included religious instruction as a part of daily lessons. The religious environment would protect Jewish children from evangelizing public schools and help them sustain deeply ingrained commitments to living as Jews in America. Given the already fractured nature of Jewish religious communities in the United States, there was little hope of developing semicentralized educational systems along the same lines as Catholic parish schools, but communities and synagogues all over the United States did sponsor Jewish alternatives to public schools. Jews of all religious persuasions who immigrated from central and western Europe brought with them the idea of private day schools and sometimes attached such schools to their congregations.

Jewish schools achieved limited success. At Cincinnati’s Talmud Yeladim, founded in 1849 and led by Reform leader Isaac Mayer Wise for many years, the school day was long enough to accommodate both religious and secular subjects, but the school closed in 1867 due to high rates of teacher turnover and lack of students. Some private Jewish institutions, such as Max Lilienthal’s school in New York during the 1840s and 1850s, thrived free of congregational control. The religious education at these schools was tenuous at best. Joseph Sachs demonstrated his priorities during the 1870s by removing Hebrew from the English, French, and German curricula in the private Jewish school he had founded in 1859. During the mid-nineteenth century the apparent success of Christian missionaries in appealing to poor Jewish children in New York led to the founding of the Hebrew Free School. An examination of the pupils revealed that they were learning Hebrew, prayers, holidays, law, and rituals at satisfactory levels. Similar institutions appeared in other urban areas with sizable Jewish populations. However, the absentee rate was high, and the opposition of some Jews to the all-day format led to financial problems. The day school division closed in 1872, leaving only branch afternoon schools behind.³

Despite the continued presence of such Jewish schools, the Protestant model of education appealed to much larger numbers of American Jews. According to this model, public schools taught secular subjects and left religious education up to the family and home. In theory, at least, public schools would provide common training for (white) children of all backgrounds, and particularist education of any kind would not come under their purview. American Jews seized enthusiastically on the assurance that the rapidly expanding public schools were not religious schools. They believed the promise of social integration for their children outweighed any other risks. They feared segregation in Jewish schools was shortsighted and bound to cause needless division and resentment in their local communities. The majority of Jews in nineteenth-century America opted for the Protestant model, cementing the foundation of a century-long love affair between Jews and public education. By the mid-1800s, important precedents in American Jewish education had been set: a divide between secular and religious education, the solution of supplementary religious education, and the low status of Jewish educators.⁴

Once they decided to send their children to public schools, Jewish parents then had to determine how and whether to provide religious training. When Rebecca Gratz started the Hebrew Sunday School Society in Philadelphia in 1838, she understood that most American Jews did care about religious education, but in a subordinate role. Gratz also noted a decrease in home observance. If children were not going to get religious training at school and did not learn about their religion organically through home-based observance, some supplementary form of Jewish education was critical to the survival of Judaism in America. The Protestant Sunday schools provided an obvious model for structuring American Jewish education. However, the inherently supplementary nature of all children’s Jewish education that took place outside the Jewish schools run on the Catholic model spoke volumes about the place Jewish parents accorded religious education. It was necessary and important, but not central.

As Gratz and her supporters intended, Jewish Sunday schools, or Sabbath schools, would provide a basic knowledge of Judaism to students otherwise ignorant of all but the most elementary home-based rituals. Weekly attendance at a religious school would also provide a social space for Jewish children who were otherwise so outnumbered in their public schools. When Gratz and others put the plan for the Hebrew Sunday School Society into action in Philadelphia, the relatively small Jewish population of the United States found the chance to meet and mingle provided by religious classes a major benefit. Another benefit of the religious system accrued to the women whom Gratz insisted would run the program and, even more significantly, teach the classes. This feature of Sabbath school education marked the first time in America that women had systematically been given a formal religious role as community educators. Women remained the primary instructors in Jewish Sabbath schools for more than 150 years.⁵

Criticism abounded in spite of the popularity of Sabbath schools for both the practical reason of providing systematic religious education to more children and the ideological reason of doing so within a supplementary framework. One to two hours of instruction once a week, critics charged, was hopelessly inadequate for the task of teaching Jewish children about their centuries-old religious tradition, culture, and heritage. Even those who applauded the attendance rates of both boys and girls expressed concern over the Sabbath schools’ exclusive focus on young children. Gratz’s decision to make the Hebrew Sunday School Society an independent body with no congregational ties, a precedent not followed in every locale, provoked hostility and confusion in an American Jewish community gradually dividing along lines of traditionalism and reform. Congregations responded by creating their own Sabbath school programs, many of which included confirmation as a ritual acknowledgment of the coming of age of their adolescent members.

Sabbath schools functioned as the primary form of Jewish education in America for most of the nineteenth century. However, another system of religious education also achieved prominence by providing remedies for the weaknesses of its predecessor. Talmud Torahs appeared several decades after the Jewish Sabbath school movement began. They owed their development in part to the post–Civil War revival of interest in Jewish learning among a cadre of influential American-born Jews centered in Philadelphia and New York.⁶ Talmud Torahs also grew in number and size in response to the immigrants arriving in America after 1880, many of whom were determined to provide their children with a more intensive Jewish education than was available in even the best Sabbath schools.⁷

Talmud Torahs required more of students and of teachers alike. They were often affiliated with local community bodies and therefore lent themselves to greater centralized control, a larger student body drawn from the broader community, and a curriculum that would satisfy a more demanding group of parents and local leaders. Whether they were centralized local institutions or affiliated with specific congregations, Talmud Torahs typically met weekday afternoons and on weekends. They offered classes for older students as well as grade school children, automatically increasing the number of students in attendance. In the largest, most successful networks of Talmud Torahs, such as those run by the Board of Jewish Education (BJE) in New York, the teachers were professionally trained and knowledgeable about both Judaism and modern educational theory.

Talmud Torahs resembled the Sunday schools in their inherently supplementary nature. Samson Benderly, the most influential American Jewish educator of the first half of the twentieth century, maintained his support for public education. However, he also believed in major investments of time and community resources to serious Jewish education.⁸ In the Talmud Torahs Benderly ran through the New York BJE, students met every day for several hours after public school ended and then again on weekends. He made a particular point of attracting adolescents, especially girls who might later become teachers themselves. The students who stayed in Talmud Torahs throughout their school lives emerged with a firm knowledge of Jewish history, texts, literature, customs, and rituals. The Talmud Torahs also incorporated a significant amount of Hebrew into their curricula, unlike most of the Sabbath schools. Benderly and other leaders in the Talmud Torah system, many of them Zionists, believed that knowledge of the holy and historic language of Judaism was critical to all religious education. At the Indianapolis Talmud Torah in 1912, for instance, the school was in operation four afternoons a week and on Sunday morning. Hebrew was the language of instruction for all subjects, including Bible with commentary, Prophets, Jewish history, and laws and customs.⁹ The professionally run Talmud Torahs of New York and other large Jewish cities like Baltimore, Cleveland, and Chicago provided a model for other communities. As Frieda Gass recalled her busy childhood schedule in Portland, Oregon, “We would go to school, come home from school, go to Hebrew School and come home from Hebrew School, from Monday through Thursday, never on Fridays, and again on Sunday.”¹⁰

Advances in religious education notwithstanding, resistance remained. Institutional backing was by no means assured for Jewish education. Sabbath schools during the 1800s were usually poorly funded, and communities were slow to establish organized support for Jewish education. Regardless of denomination, the success of congregational schools depended heavily on the whims of the affiliated synagogue members. The early twentieth-century debate over communities’ responsibility for Jewish education illustrated the issues involved. After 1900, Jewish communal bodies in American cities began to affiliate formally with each other. The federation movement, as this was known, brought a variety of Jewish organizations under one umbrella, with each city’s federation acting as a central coordinating and funding institution while leaving daily administrative functions to the individual agencies. In cities like Baltimore, the Associated Jewish Charities, founded in 1921, included the Hebrew Sheltering Home, Hebrew Free Loan Society, Hebrew Burial Societies, and other community organizations. All these agencies had their counterparts in other federations around the country and were included as a matter of course.

Whether Jewish education should be encompassed in federations of Jewish charities was a more contentious issue, one that was decided variously in Jewish communities. Baltimore’s federation leader Louis Levin consulted with a number of prominent Jewish citizens. Some, like educator Henry Berkowitz of Philadelphia, believed that Jewish education, even if not a charity by definition, was a communal responsibility and should therefore be included. As Berkowitz wrote, charitable functions “should not be limited to meeting physical needs alone—but those of the whole man—mind, heart, and soul as well.” Others, like Ludwig B. Bernstein, the executive director of Pittsburgh’s federation, argued that Jewish education was vitally important but as a religious matter did not fit the definition of need served by other agencies. In the end, Baltimore’s federation, unlike most other cities’ central Jewish organization, did include an educational agency.¹¹ The question of community funding for Jewish education persisted over the twentieth century. In many cities, even those with large, thriving federations, Jewish education still received only limited funding from central communal organizations.

Another form of resistance came from the most traditionally observant parents, who often viewed Jewish education outside the home as either unnecessary, especially for girls, or wholly inadequate, especially for boys. Sons of some eastern European immigrants continued to attend private cheders run by individual melamdim. Benderly and other professional Jewish educators condemned cheders, deploring the practice of one teacher per forty or fifty students paying lip service to studying Bible, Mishnah, and sometimes Talmud in dank, crowded rooms. Daughters frequently received no formal Jewish education at all, on the assumption that they would learn what they needed to know at home from their mothers. These attitudes led to structural differentiation in boys’ and girls’ education, sometimes even within the same family. What was good enough for girls was not always adequate for boys. By the turn of the century Jewish educators in New Jersey acknowledged the discrepancy, reporting that parents, “being less particular about the education of girls are willing to send them to the community school but entrust their boys’ education primarily to the Yiddish-speaking melamed.”¹² The same dynamic affected the Hebraic curriculum so favored by most professional Jewish educators of the pre–World War II period. Schools with Hebrew curricula usually enrolled more girls because, as the BJE’s Alexander Dushkin pointed out, “it was easier to get Jewish parents to permit the teaching of these modern ‘fads’ to girls than to boys.”¹³

Except for a few boys attending yeshiva-type schools in New York, immigrant children from observant families generally attended public schools. It might have been expected that the sometimes more traditional Jewish immigrants pouring into the United States from the 1880s through the 1920s would start their own Jewish schools, but they rarely did during that period. They may have grumbled about the vapid lessons of Sabbath schools or the inattention of the Hebraic curriculum at Talmud Torahs to Talmud itself, but the children went to these schools anyway. Religious education as supplementary education reigned supreme.

Supplementary religious education carried its own dangers. The most pernicious problem faced by Jewish education was apathy. Especially for middle-class children, Jewish education became just one of many competing extracurricular activities. Jewish educators from the mid-nineteenth century on found it difficult to convince parents that religious education was as important as piano lessons or athletic activities. At most, fifteen thousand out of nearly fifty thousand Jewish children got any kind of formal religious education in 1880.¹⁴ The preference of many parents and children for developing nonsectarian interests reflected the overriding concern for social integration. As one Chicago Jewish educator wrote in 1914 of her failed plan to start a religious school, “Money can be had for everything; for music and dancing; but when it comes to Jewish education only excuses are offered. How cheap Judaism has become to many of our parents.”¹⁵

This complaint resounded throughout the twentieth century. Despite the BJE’s best efforts, in 1921 only 25 percent of the Jewish children of school age in New York received any form of religious instruction.¹⁶ A 1932 study found that of the 45 percent of Jewish children in Philadelphia who attended Jewish schools, the majority of those students received less than one hundred hours of religious instruction per year.¹⁷ In 1936 a study of Jewish school enrollment in Cleveland found that overall numbers of students had dropped and that even those students who remained attended the congregational Sabbath schools rather than the community Talmud Torah schools.¹⁸ The Depression made it difficult for religious educators to convince a financially strapped and sometimes fundamentally disinterested American Jewish public that religious education was important. In part because of the expenses associated with religious education and in part because of a growing trend of Jewish education as preparation for specific life cycle events, post–bar mitzvah dropout rates increased during the 1930s. It may have been the case that some American Jewish parents felt secure in the Jewishness of their home and family life and saw little need for formal religious instruction. It is more likely, however, that as most American Jews moved further away from traditional observance and retained Jewish identity largely through ethnic rituals, they simply did not consider religious education important enough to sacrifice anything else for.

In the wake of the post–World War II baby boom, Jewish education seemed to become associated with children alone, a development that later critics termed “pediatric Judaism.”¹⁹ The average student in a Sunday school stayed there four years, and the average student in a weekday afternoon school stayed there three years.²⁰ The post–bar and then bat mitzvah dropout rate was immense, and even synagogues that substituted or added confirmation classes for teenagers failed to keep adolescent students in religious schools. There were a number of factors involved, but one thing was clear. Jewish education in America was not only supplementary but temporary. Religious educators and synagogue leaders argued that adolescence was the most crucial period in identity formation, but to no avail. Even children in religious schools who, when questioned, had generally positive feelings about Jewish education still exhibited little interest in continuing into high school. There would be other priorities then.

Professional Jewish educators fought against these trends as best they could. In 1952 Emanuel Gamoran, a Samson Benderly protege then heading the Reform movement’s Commission on Jewish Education, argued that most Jewish children between the ages of four and eight should go to foundation schools where they could be socialized into the Jewish community. After third grade they should supplement public schooling with religious education at least three times a week, preferably in two-hour sessions, and attend Jewish or Hebrew summer camps. The 10–15 percent most interested in and best suited for Jewish leadership should stay in a network of “liberal-cultural” day schools for advanced Jewish education.²¹ Gamoran’s plan never went into effect, but his concerns about the religious education of American Jewish leaders were well founded. A 1953 survey of Conservative lay leaders found that only 27 percent could understand most of a service conducted in Hebrew—13 percent could not follow the services in their own synagogues. A commentator on this survey tried to distinguish between “realistic goals” and “noble sentiments” in reference to Hebrew skills, but it was difficult to sustain optimism in the face of such numbers.²²

Starting from the middle of the twentieth century, commissions on Jewish education attempted to respond to these systemic problems. New York’s BJE became the Jewish Education Committee in 1939. Under the initial leadership of Alexander Dushkin, the Jewish Education Committee successfully provided professional services to Jewish educators and schools, but found it difficult to resolve the central question of how to define Jewish education in the modern world. Several new national commissions on Jewish education appeared during the 1940s in addition to the already existing Reform and Yiddishist commissions. These included the Lubavitch Merkos L’Yinyonie Chinuch (1941) and the Conservative movement’s Commission on Jewish Education of the United Synagogue (1949). All the commissions published textbooks, established professional organizations for teachers, and sponsored journals for teachers, parents, and pupils. All agreed that intensification of religious education was necessary, but the required course of action was less certain. The Commission on Jewish Education of the United Synagogue tried to implement a plan by which Conservative synagogues would offer Sabbath school classes only to children under eight years of age, with all older children required to attend Talmud Torah-type classes three times a week. In some congregations this plan worked, but in others the number of students above eight years old who attended the religious schools dropped in response to the new requirements.²³

It was hard to know how to gauge the results of Jewish education. Widespread disappointment among professional Jewish educators and some parents led to a declension model of Jewish education that has persisted ever since. The conviction that fewer students were receiving any kind of religious schooling and that the content of their Jewish education was diluted compared with past instruction became so prevalent that it dominated most thinking about American Jewish education from at least the mid-twentieth century forward. However, the situation was more complex than the mournful tones of the Jewish educational establishment would seem to indicate. In terms of sheer numbers and groups of people, American Jewry actually achieved some success in expanding the reach and scope of American Jewish education.

A relentlessly optimistic view of the history of Jewish education in America would be no more appropriate than a pessimistic one. Still, it was generally the case that the number of people receiving some form of religious education steadily increased. One critical factor explaining this increase was the inclusion of girls in nearly all models of Jewish education. The earliest confirmation classes in America, established by congregations like Baltimore’s Har Sinai and Charleston’s Beth Elohim, included both girls and boys from their inception as they prepared Jewish adolescents for ceremonies affirming their adult membership in the Jewish community.²⁴ Rebecca Gratz and her colleagues at the Hebrew Sunday School Society in Philadelphia took it for granted that girls as well as boys should participate in religious schooling. As Sabbath schools all over the country followed the Philadelphia model, they naturally ran coeducational classes. Samson Benderly, too, set the religious education of Jewish girls high on his agenda. Benderly’s success at widening the female student base in all kinds of Jewish schools was the most immediately visible of his accomplishments. All the model Talmud Torahs operated by the BJE were for girls. These schools, known as Hebrew Preparatory Schools, served more than eleven hundred students between eleven and fifteen years old at three different locations in New York. The girls’ schools offered Hebrew language, Bible, modern Hebrew literature, Jewish history, and Jewish activities in music, arts and crafts, dance, and drama.²⁵

Confirmation classes, Sabbath schools, and Talmud Torahs faced a fundamental problem that eventually led to the further expansion of religious educational opportunities for girls and women. All forms of education shared the dilemma of a scarcity of trained teachers. Female Sabbath school teachers were especially likely to come under fire for ignorance and lack of preparation for taking charge of Jewish education, but the problem was not merely a function of gender. It had proven very difficult to launch higher Jewish education in America. Maimonides College was founded in Philadelphia in 1867 to train rabbis and teachers, but, despite a distinguished faculty, few students enrolled; the school closed in 1873. New York’s Temple Emanu-el tried to start a theological school, beginning in 1865 with intermediate students who could then continue their studies in Europe. Future American Jewish leaders like Bernard Drachman and Felix Adler attended the Emanu-el Theological Seminary, which convened a national conference on Jewish education in 1876 and sparked some new interest in religious education in large Jewish communities. In its first incarnation in 1886, the Jewish Theological Seminary provided teacher training for traditional Jews opposed to the Reform movement, but the school suffered from poor organization and finances.

The state of higher Jewish education remained poor. Hebrew Union College, the Reform rabbinical seminary founded in 1875, was less interested in producing classroom educators and administrators than pulpit rabbis and scholars. Yet in 1898 it did not limit admission to students able to read the Bible in the original Hebrew.²⁶ During the 1910s the recently reorganized Jewish Theological Seminary of America in New York became more open to the possibility of training Jewish educators, largely due to the influence of Mordecai Kaplan. With Kaplan’s cooperation the BJE offered a particularly demanding yearlong course to young women between the ages of seventeen and twenty-one who had a high school education and some knowledge of Hebrew. Convinced that at least half the future teaching staff in religious schools should be women, Benderly expected these students to continue studying once they began to teach.²⁷

New teachers colleges aimed to provide qualified religious educators. Gratz College in Philadelphia, Hebrew Teachers College in Boston, and the Teachers Institute of the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York: all were rooted in the turn-of-the-century call for more and better prepared Jewish educators. They were founded and staffed by a cadre of communal leaders and educators, including many early American Zionists, who believed in the importance of both a Hebraic curriculum and the cultural aspects of Judaism. Whether as teachers or as parents, the founders of these teachers colleges reasoned, knowledgeable men and women would be better able to sustain commitments to Judaism and Jewishness. However, the teachers colleges also helped deflect the possibility of a widespread push for women’s rabbinic ordination, as for the first time women could obtain an intensive Jewish education at these institutions of higher learning.

Like the original Hebrew Sunday School Society in Philadelphia and many of the Talmud Torahs, most of the Hebrew teachers colleges were communally supported rather than denominational. New Hebrew teachers colleges appeared nearly every decade from the 1890s on. Most, such as Baltimore Hebrew College (now Baltimore Hebrew University) and the College of Jewish Studies in Chicago (now the Spertus Institute), still exist. The number of students rose steadily. A 1935 study counted 600 students in nine Hebrew teachers colleges. In 1949 a follow-up study found 705 students in eight schools. Nearly twenty years later, 1,800 students attended eleven institutions.²⁸

Although the Hebrew teachers colleges were an important expression of the expansion of Jewish education to female and adult audiences, the majority of religious educators never attended Hebrew teachers colleges. For the many religious educators who taught at Sabbath schools, the primacy of Hebrew language and literature at the teachers colleges, though reflected in the curriculum of most weekday and day schools, was inappropriate and irrelevant to their primary tasks of teaching basic tenets of Jewish religion and culture, sometimes without much reference to any form of Hebrew.

Jewish education at teachers colleges was actually less supplementary in nature than the religious schooling offered to most children. Even students at Hebrew teachers colleges who pursued secular degrees concomitantly with their advanced Jewish education saw their two curricular tracks as complementary and devoted equal time to them. In New York Benderly urged Jewish girls to attend Teachers Institute instead of Hunter College, not as a weekly extracurricular activity but as their primary educational training center.²⁹ Even though relatively few people attended the Hebrew teachers colleges full time, the colleges’ existence in a community usually guaranteed trained Jewish educators and professionally run Jewish schools. Women attended these centers for adult Jewish education with great enthusiasm and acceptance, although men typically took charge of community institutions of religious education.

The growth of religious education for both girls and women affected every segment of American Jewry, including the most traditionally observant. Formal religious education of girls was still controversial in parts of the Orthodox community, since many felt that learning from their mothers was all girls needed. Still, it seemed clear to parents and leaders that religiously educated girls would be better prepared to maintain Orthodoxy in America. Orthodox families watched with interest as in 1923 several giants of European Torah scholarship approved Sarah Schenirer’s Bais Yaakov movement, which expanded into a network of religious girls’ schools across Europe. The idea took off more slowly in America. Vichna Eisen Kaplan, a student of Schenirer’s, started a Bais Yaakov in Williamsburg in 1937 with seven girls around her dining room table. Kaplan, like Schenirer, stressed the importance of training teachers to promulgate the Bais Yaakov movement and thus began her educational quest with older girls.³⁰ The first all-day Bais Yaakov opened in Williamsburg in 1944. The school grew very slowly. Suky Rosengarten, one of the twenty pupils present on opening day, looked askance at the poor physical facilities and unaccredited secular program and at first wanted to return to her public school class. Kaplan and others convinced all the girls that environment was as important as learning in their life journeys toward committed traditional Judaism, and surprisingly few students left. As word spread, Bais Yaakov opened a dormitory for out-of-town students and eventually a summer camp.³¹ At the Bais Yaakov schools that eventually opened in communities from Baltimore to Denver, teaching toward traditional observance was always paramount. Even Orthodox girls’ schools with no formal affiliation owed something to the Bais Yaakov movement, which irrevocably established the necessity of offering girls as rigorous a religious education as boys. By extending religious education to girls, Orthodoxy in America greatly expanded the student population of the most traditionally oriented Jewish schools.

The twentieth-century combination of denominationalism and suburbanization also contributed to the growth in numbers of students receiving some form of Jewish education. Congregational schools gradually made gains over communal Talmud Torahs. From 1917 to 1927 the total enrollment at congregational schools in New York increased 150 percent.³² Perhaps in response to events overseas, religious schools expanded their reach during and after World War II. In 1941 60 percent of all Jewish children received some kind of religious education in New York, a percentage that might have been even higher if cheders and home tutors had been factored in.³³ As American Jews moved from the cities to the suburbs, they joined the synagogues mushrooming in the new areas of Jewish settlement. Conservative Judaism became the fastest growing denomination. Reform and Orthodox congregations, too, began to relocate. A mid-1950s study found that rising Jewish synagogue affiliation was linked to parents’ interest in religious education for their children.³⁴ As a result, both the percentage of Jewish children receiving a religious education and the percentage of religious education obtained in congregational schools increased. From 200,000 in 1937, to 266,000 in 1950, to 533,600 in 1959, the total number of students rose steadily. Of the 1959 number, more than 90 percent of the students attended weekday afternoon and Sunday schools.³⁵

The Jewish educational establishment applauded the rise in attendance but expressed concern about the community divisiveness that accompanied the denominationalism of congregational schools, believing that Jewish education should follow public education in consolidating resources and facilities to achieve the best results.³⁶ In some cities, such as Detroit, consolidated religious schools were already successfully in place, complete with communal busing.³⁷ Smaller Jewish communities, which would have benefited the most from such consolidation, sometimes had the most trouble achieving it. With suburbanization also came a hardening of denominationalism in American Judaism. A small community might well have three synagogues that offered distinctive approaches to Judaism. They were unlikely to agree on the form religious instruction should take and rarely joined forces to provide Jewish education. In larger communities it was more possible for all the Reform or all the Conservative synagogues to provide joint religious education to their members. As congregational affiliation became one of the primary expressions of religious identity for many American Jews, there was less incentive for individual congregations to give up their autonomy by acting in concert with others. The end result of the fragmentation of Jewish education along denominational lines, however, was noticeable growth in the number of students attending religious schools.

Denominational religious schools included the Orthodox day schools run under the auspices of Torah Umesorah, founded in 1944. Backed by influential lay leaders and a rabbinical council, Torah Umesorah set out to start new day schools all over the United States. The organization also trained qualified teachers for day schools, provided funds to existing schools for expansion, and consulted with affiliate schools on curricular and managerial matters. By 1952, due largely to Torah Umesorah efforts, thirty thousand boys and girls attended 157 day schools, half of them in New York City. Torah Umesorah also served Jewish children who did not attend day schools by publishing Olomeinu, a children’s magazine with worldwide circulation of ten thousand during the 1960s. From its inception, Torah Umesorah was created, staffed, planned, and rabbinically supervised by members of the Orthodox community. However, it succeeded in part because it wanted day schools to appeal to nonobservant parents and based levels of both secular and religious education on local conditions. The organization extended rigorous Jewish schooling to thousands more children than had ever had access to such an education before.³⁸

As more American Jewish children had at least a minimal religious education, the call for adult Jewish education also grew louder. Renewed interest in Jewish education for growing numbers of adults resulted in the rise of Jewish studies at the college level, which defined Jewish education more broadly than had previously been the case. As historian Arnold J. Band has explained, a number of factors during the 1960s and 1970s led to the growth of collegiate Jewish studies. One was the more general expansion of racial and ethnic consciousness in the United States, with Americans of all backgrounds reclaiming their particular heritage without rejecting their American identities. Another was the academic development of area studies beyond languages and texts to culture, society, and history. A third was a new confidence that American Jewry was the center of the Jewish Diaspora. Finally, the emerging acceptance of academic religious studies as a scholarly field helped to legitimate Jewish studies. The expansiveness of the field was symbolized with the 1968 establishment of the Association of Jewish Studies, which encompassed all time periods, all languages, and all disciplines of Jewish studies.³⁹

The same expansiveness that widened the modern field of Jewish studies, as opposed to earlier permutations like Semitic philology or a Wissenschaft focus on intellectual history and premodern Judaism, eventually displaced older traditions of the study of Hebrew on campuses. Hebrew continued to be taught on campuses large and small all over the United States, with enrollments growing every year (as they now do in Yiddish classes as well). However, earlier models that focused on Hebrew language and literature were subsumed into the broader rubric of Jewish studies. At Rutgers University, for instance, the Bildner Center for the Study of Jewish Life, established in 1996, over a transition period of a few years replaced the department of Hebraic studies with a department of Jewish studies. Faculty members were generally retained, but the focus and mission of academic inquiry about Judaism on campus expanded markedly. Jewish students without previous religious education often took Jewish studies courses while attending college, comprising another growing audience for Jewish education.

Adult religious education became another factor in the expansion of American Jewish education. As the Jewish leaders of the late nineteenth century pointed out, childhood religious instruction guaranteed no identification with the Jewish community or knowledge of Jewish culture, tradition, rituals, and text. Maintenance was key, as campaigns for adolescent and adult Jewish education signified. One reason for confirmation’s popularity as a rite of passage for Jewish adolescents was that it prolonged religious education beyond the tender years of bar mitzvah for boys and (later) bat mitzvah for girls. Because specialized programs of adult Jewish education were even less rooted in either American Jewish experience or Jewish tradition, they tended to take on the cast of “informal” education. The Jewish awakening of the late nineteenth century that Jonathan D. Sarna has described in part followed from the establishment of the Reform Hebrew Union College and contributed to the establishment of the Conservative Jewish Theological Seminary and even the Orthodox Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary.⁴⁰ These rabbinical seminaries unquestionably educated the elite (men) of the day. However, most adult Jews interested in religious learning found it in alternative venues, such as the National Council of Jewish Women or the Jewish Chautauqua Society. No wave of formal adult Jewish education appeared during the early 1900s, although alternative forms of Jewish learning were continuously available. The real expansion of adult Jewish education classes came later in the twentieth century, as symbolized by the founding of the University of Judaism in Los Angeles in 1947. Its mission was not only to educate Jewish professionals but also to offer higher education to American Jews.⁴¹

Hebrew teachers colleges continued to make Jewish education available to adults who sought it out. By the 1950s the Hebrew teachers colleges were already coming under fire for devoting more of their resources to postsecondary Jewish studies in general and less of their resources to explicit teacher training. Beyond even such common events as community lecture series and book clubs, adult Jewish education came to include ongoing learning opportunities. Synagogues established centers for adult learning and provided space for everything from traditional text study to informal classes in Jewish liturgy and life. Jewish community centers at the turn of the century had supplied facilities for other institutions’ Hebrew schools for children. By the end of the twentieth century they were developing original programming. Large organizations like Hadassah created academies for their lay leadership to study Jewish subjects more intensively. Every major Jewish organization, from the Anti-Defamation League to the American Jewish Congress, boasted an education department. Melton Adult Mini-Schools and Me’ah programs required serious time commitments over two-year periods to interactive text study on the postgraduate level, with the Melton program focusing largely on life cycle events and the Me’ah program on Bible, rabbinics, and modern Jewish history. These formal programs of Jewish education and others like them represented another stage in the continuous growth of religious education in America, reaching groups not previously included.

Adult education efforts formed the basis of outreach, another important trend in contemporary American Jewish education. The Lubavitch community’s unwavering commitment to outreach spurred the creation of thirty-three hundred Chabad centers all over the world, with an influence particularly felt on college campuses and areas with small Jewish populations.⁴² The popularity of the National Jewish Outreach Project’s (NJOP) crash courses in reading Hebrew, which NJOP claimed to have reached more than four hundred thousand adult learners, testified to growing interest in adult Jewish education at the end of the twentieth century.⁴³ The Internet provided further opportunities for a less formal but possibly even more common Jewish learning experience, with organizations like Aish HaTorah reporting a million hits on its Web site every month.⁴⁴ The concept of outreach was exemplified by these Orthodox institutions but was taken up by all denominations. Growing communal concern over the swiftly rising number of unaffiliated, uneducated American Jews made Jewish education seem more important than ever—indeed critical to the survival of American Judaism. Adults became a crucial target for Jewish educational outreach because only interested, knowledgeable adults were likely to affiliate with the believing Jewish community and provide religious education to their children. The Orthodox had long since operated on the model of family education in prioritizing lifelong study. The move away from youth-oriented Judaism was somewhat more recent a development for less traditionally observant American Jews.

The most traditional yeshivas began to establish kollels, centers for intensive Jewish learning, in communities across America. Much of the day for the men in the kollel consisted of studying Talmud and other Jewish texts with each other, but they also gave classes and formed study partnerships with individuals in the community. The men and women, generally husbands and wives, of the kollel also often taught in the local day schools, injecting a strictly Orthodox outlook into Jewish education where none might have existed locally before. In the Conservative movement, adult b’nai mitzvah classes, requiring one to two years of regular study before a public ceremony, grew popular. Conservative synagogues also established adult outreach programs of their own. Reform synagogues began Kallah programs that ran four-day adult educational workshops on particular topics and themes. The Reform movement also issued manuals suggesting ways to increase personal observance and distributed weekly Torah commentaries.⁴⁵ All these efforts demonstrated that the growth of outreach in the last quarter of the twentieth century transcended denominational bounds. Ideas about what it meant to be Jews in America shifted as knowledge of Jewish history, religion, and culture reclaimed its place next to ethnic ties.

The steady expansion of numbers and programs of religious education is not really surprising, given that Jewish education in America always had at least two goals. One was the direct goal of religious instruction, though it was variously defined, developed, and delivered. The other, no less weighty, was the indirect goal of using religious education as a vehicle for adapting to American life. At times of crisis or intense feeling, such as mass Jewish migration during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the latter goal took priority. The general struggle of modern Jews to integrate into their host society and culture without forsaking religious tradition and ethnicity found expression in programs of Jewish education that promised to deliver the key to successful acculturation while staving off complete assimilation. In 1890, for example, 56 boys and 119 girls attended religious classes at the Hebrew Free and Industrial School Society of St. Louis. These students, the institutional report noted, not only “obtain[ed] an acquaintance with our sacred literature, but also receive[d] a fundamental knowledge of the language of this country.”⁴⁶ The St. Louis classroom was a model of how to reach simultaneously the complementary goals of religious instruction and acculturation.

Educational materials for Jewish schools reflected commitments to an agenda of both social integration and religious identity. As historian Jonathan Krasner has argued, the main goal of American Jewish schoolbooks was always to socialize students. At the turn of the twentieth century the chapters on American Jewish history written by Cyrus Adler and Henrietta Szold and inserted into Lady Katie Magnus’s Outlines of Jewish History for the American audience promoted religious harmony among all Jews. Since Talmud Torahs, in particular, theoretically served whole communities, supplementary Jewish schools found it practical to adopt a textbook that stressed the importance of Jewish unity in coming to terms with America. Magnus’s book sold tens of thousands of copies. Samson Benderly worked closely with Mordecai Kaplan on the production of Jewish textbooks, although Kaplan favored more outright religious content. Among the results of BJE work on textbooks were Elma and Lee Levinger’s 1928 The Story of the Jews, which tried to present a balanced view of all the denominations in America, and Dorothy Zeligs’s 1938 A History of Jewish Life in Modern Times, which used two fictional characters arguing over joining a Reform temple to represent ongoing Jewish debates about assimilation, acculturation, and group loyalty.⁴⁷ Boys who drew on the 1931 English translation of Kalman Whiteman’s prepared speeches for bar mitzvahs delivered perorations explaining, “Here we have found absolute security, and the best Americans acknowledge the benefits we bring to the country. . . . I will endeavor to know and cherish the laws and institutions of this country but never shall there be any weakening of my love for our religion, for our people, and for everything that Jews hold dear.”⁴⁸ This explicit syncretization of values typified American Jewish educational materials.

Coeducation represented another adaptation of American educational values into Jewish education. At virtually all supplementary religious schools except a few Talmud Torahs in large cities, Jewish education was coeducational. Confirmation classes also tended to be coeducational and likewise resemble American secondary schooling. Coeducation offered another way in which Jewish education signified Americanization, as religious schooling intentionally emulated public schooling in its (theoretical) commitment to all children. This also helps explain why girls outnumbered boys in confirmation classes, as they did in public high schools. Boys still had the option of having bar mitzvah ceremonies in many congregations and then often stopped their Jewish education at age thirteen. Boys were also much more likely to be working full time by sixteen, the typical age of confirmation. It was certainly possible for a working boy to continue his religious education, but it was unlikely. Supplementary religious education marched in tandem with public education. When the latter came to an end, the former usually did too. Since girls, with fewer employment options, often stayed in high school for longer periods, they were also more likely to stay in religious school.

Adopting the “Protestant model” of supplementary religious education was the most obvious and structurally most significant statement that American values as inculcated in public schools would be of primary importance to Jews in America. But other values remained important as well, and the various types of Jewish education illuminated major philosophical debate over American Jewish identity. Language became one indication of this debate. At various times, Jewish schools offered education in German, English, Yiddish, Ladino, and Hebrew, illustrating the widely divergent backgrounds and interests of differentiated groups within American Jewry.

Yiddishist schools, for example, incorporated political and national values into Jewish education, which they took pains not to equate with religious instruction per se. Still, as one proponent of Yiddishist schools explained, “The rising Jewish generation should as a matter of course grow up as good American citizens, part and parcel of the great American nation [and] the Jewish children should not at the same time be strangers to the Jewish people throughout the world.”⁴⁹ These goals of integration differed little from those of other kinds of religious schools. At least three different kinds of Yiddishist schools flourished briefly. The National-Radical schools, established in 1910 in New York, used Yiddish as the language of instruction for Jewish history, literature, customs, ceremonies, music, socialism, and, sometimes, Hebrew. From 1917 on, these schools were generally called folkshuln. Teachers trained at the Idisher-Lehrer Seminary treated religion ethnographically in folkshuln. Sholem Aleichem schools, founded in 1916 in the Bronx, claimed independence from labor affiliations and taught nationalism and Zionism in Yiddish. The Sholem Aleichem Folk Institute and Camp Boiberek were supporting institutions. The Arbeter-Ring schools, emerging out of a 1918 convention, initially focused on fostering children’s Jewish working-class consciousness rather than Jewish peoplehood. Eventually, class difference remained paramount largely in theory, as Jewish unity in the face of threats at home and abroad became increasingly important.⁵⁰

The 1930s saw a major decline in secular Yiddish schooling, which persisted but was never again a significant factor in American Jewish education. Secular Yiddish schools decreased precipitously in enrollment and cultural power as Yiddish became the language of the Old World to the American-born children of immigrants. Even in the largest Jewish communities, independent Yiddish schools, despite their strong connections to labor activism and socialism, found it difficult to justify their cultural outlook when the culture they championed was disappearing into the iron maw of a melting pot most American Jews favored strongly. It proved impossible in the long run to separate Yiddish education from Judaism, and by the 1930s the folkschuln and other secular Yiddish institutions had largely succumbed to perceived irrelevance.

Yiddish still retained some force in the cheders and yeshivas functioning as educational centers for the most traditionally observant Jews in America. These schools provided Jewish education in the same language as the political radicals but to very different ends, arguing that religious training should innoculate Jewish children against the perils of secular Americanization. A few yeshivas, institutions of full time Talmudic study, were already in place in New York, including the Etz Chaim school for boys, founded in 1886, and the Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary, a yeshiva founded in 1897. Torah Vodaath expanded into a post–high school yeshiva in 1929. During the 1930s, as Orthodox rabbis and observant students fled to America, yeshivas began to proliferate. Ner Israel in Baltimore (1933), Telshe in Cleveland (1941), and others became important preservers of European-style Orthodoxy. At Torah Vodaath Yiddish replaced Hebrew as the language of instruction in Talmud, and at European-based yeshivas, like Beth Midrash Gavoha in Lakewood, New Jersey, secular study played no role in Talmudic learning grounded in Yiddish.⁵¹ Enrollments in the Lakewood yeshiva went from one hundred young men in 1946 to two hundred in 1964 and approximately one thousand by the 1980s.⁵² After World War II Hasidic refugees created communities in which Yiddish continued to be the native language and sign of separatism.

As these schools demonstrated, there were always those for whom Jewish education was central, not peripheral, to Jewish practice and observance. Still, few American Jews desired the stark separatism of the yeshivas and Hasidic schools. The great question became how to develop a comprehensive educational system that would integrate American and Jewish identity. To the most traditional Jews in America, often first- and second-generation immigrants before World War II and survivors and refugees after World War II, the model of supplementary Jewish education was anathema. Some Orthodox parents joined their less traditional Jewish neighbors in sending their children to public schools. Free tuition, after all, remained a draw, as did the promise of adjustment to American life. However, for the first time since the 1870s, a variety of day schools offered other options. From separate schools for boys and girls to coeducational, modern institutions, day schools slowly but steadily became schools of choice and then of necessity for the Orthodox community. Living as observant Jews required total immersion in Jewishness and deep knowledge of Judaism of a kind that even the best weekday afternoon schools found impossible to teach in such a limited time. The refugee and survivor communities of Orthodox and Hasidic Jews, wary of involvement with anything state sponsored, opened their own schools as soon as they arrived in the United Sates, although they could not compel attendance. Fears about perceived dangers inherent in the youth culture of the 1950s, with its juvenile delinquency and rock and roll music, also led parents to consider the possibility that separate schools might be the only way to transmit their values and preserve their knowledge and tradition. The existing day schools started to look like viable models of education, proving the best of both worlds in dual curriculum settings. The fundamental concern, as always, was not separation but appropriate integration. For Orthodox Jews, day schools supplied the central answer to the question of how to live as committed Jews and committed Americans in a rapidly changing world.

Day schools succeeded in large part because they claimed not to move Jewish students out of American society. The National Association of Hebrew Day School PTAs affiliated with Torah Umesorah stated in 1949 that its objectives included “equipping our children to live creatively as Jews and as Americans.” At the Torah Umesorah annual dinner in 1954, day school students speaking about “What a Yeshiva Education Has Meant to Me” emphasized the congruence of American values and Jewish education. Solomon Braunstein explained that he enjoyed sports and hobbies like other American boys but that he believed only day school education would enable him to live a committed Jewish life. “I feel very lucky,” his speech concluded, “to have been given this wonderful chance to grow up as a good Jew and a good American.”⁵³ This rhetoric appealed to Jewish parents concerned with preserving Jewish culture and customs if not all forms of ritual observance. The high scholastic standards of most Torah Umesorah schools met with general approval, and the central organization knew how important it was to keep those standards high enough to attract parents with many educational options. Not all motives were so rosy; in some cities, particularly in the urban Northeast and the South, the schools also served the default function of alternative schools for parents unhappy with desegregated public school systems.⁵⁴

Other schools also demonstrated the consonance of Jewish and American values. Defending Hasidic schools from accusations of a lack of patriotism, educator Joseph Kaminetsky explained that “loyalty to America is not underplayed by any means,” even while the major curricular emphasis was placed upon the religious studies.⁵⁵ A post–World War II description of the Talmudical Academy of Yeshiva University, founded in 1916 to provide secular secondary education to boys devoted to studying Talmud in a traditional setting, claimed that the school’s goal was “to raise generations of American youth imbued with a love and respect for the country of their birth or adoption, and for its institutions.”⁵⁶ Yeshiva University, which had its roots in both precollegiate and yeshiva education, offered the self-styled Modern Orthodox community a unique philosophy of Torah Umadda, or “Torah and Science.” Students spent long days learning yeshiva-style at the Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary and attending college courses at Yeshiva College. Graduates might be rabbis, doctors, or both. When Stern College for Women opened in 1954, everything was in place for Yeshiva University to become the central address for the creation and maintenance of an American Orthodoxy that would blend the best of old and new worlds.

Many non-Orthodox Jews reacted with horror to the development of the day school movement, which seemed to them to counter a century of benefiting from the ethnically (if not racially) diverse classrooms of the American common school. A heated debate raged for much of the 1950s and 1960s, with the Reform movement, in particular, staunchly reaffirming its commitment to public education. Torah Umesorah schools sometimes managed to garner the support of local Conservative rabbis and congregants. Accusations flew back and forth, indictments of ghettoization and assimilation countering each other and changing few minds. During the 1950s nearly all day schools were under Orthodox auspices. By the 1960s Reform and Conservative Jews also worried that most of the highly qualified Jewish educators available to teach in their congregational schools were the products of Orthodox day schools and did not share their religious values. With such high stakes in play, tensions unsurprisingly continued to run high.

On one level no meeting ground seemed possible. Jewish education was either supplementary or central. However, the two sides may actually have had some effect on each other. The percentage of Jewish children receiving any kind of Jewish education grew during the course of this debate, particularly among Conservative Jews, possibly reflecting in part the impact of Orthodox arguments about the importance of Jewish education. By the late 1960s the Conservative movement had established twenty-eight Solomon Schechter day schools.⁵⁷ The day schools became more modern in outlook and tone, possibly reflecting in part the concerns Orthodox parents shared with Reform and Conservative parents about acculturation into American life.

As day school education became more prevalent among the Orthodox, for the first time in Jewish history intensive training in Jewish texts became the province of the laity and not just the elite, including girls. To be sure, the standards were mixed at these schools, and not all students in all schools learned the same thing. But extensive knowledge beyond basic familiarity with liturgy and home-based rituals became the norm not just in yeshivas and Bais Yaakovs but also for average day school students. Most of the hundreds and then thousands of Orthodox day school graduates did not go into the rabbinate or Jewish education, and they represented many kinds of Judaism. They gradually constituted an expanding group with a significant knowledge of texts and ritual and a commitment to lifelong study within traditional communities. The widespread nature of this Orthodox Jewish learning transformed an important element of American Jewish life and helps explain why, contrary to sociologists’ gloomy predictions of the 1960s, the Orthodox Jew never did vanish.

Ideological battles over day schools notwithstanding, by the 1960s there was one issue that American Jews across the denominations agreed on: support for Israel. American Jewish identity had not always incorporated Zionism. The Reform movement’s Pittsburgh Platform of 1885 rejected Zionism, a position not officially changed until the Columbus Platform of 1937. The place of Zionism or even Hebraism in American Jewish education was not assured either. Zionism presented textbook writers with a difficult challenge, generally resolved by conveying the idea that the state of Israel would be a good solution to Jewish problems in Europe even if it was unnecessary for Jews in America. The syncretization of values was most evident in Elma and Lee Levinger’s The Story of the Jew, which borrowed a phrase from Louis Brandeis to describe halutzim as “Jewish Pilgrim Fathers,” neatly synthesizing American, Jewish, and Zionist identity.⁵⁸ By 1936 a study of Jewish education in Cleveland discovered that teaching about Zionism and Palestine was becoming more common. While approving of the renewed interest in Hebrew to which these subjects naturally led, the study observed that, given the time constraints of weekly religious schools, greater attention to current Jewish events meant less attention to religion, customs, and Jewish texts.⁵⁹ When detailing the curricular goals of Reform Sunday schools, one educator listed “acquiring Jewish knowledge” last, after “enjoyment of Jewish fellowship” and “the problems of present-day Jewish life,” such as Zionism.⁶⁰ This new commitment to Zionism among even those who had previously disavowed it reflected the entire American Jewish community’s great concern over the events unfolding in Europe.

Education connected to Israel and Hebrew found another venue in summer camps. From the early twentieth century on, various groups of Jews in America, including radical activists of many stripes, had operated summer camps for both adults and children to strengthen causes ranging from socialism to Zionism to secular Yiddish culture. Summer camps offered social benefits, religious learning opportunities, Hebrew literary development, and ethnic group bonding otherwise unavailable to Jewish students. In 1927 Samson Benderly started Camp Achvah for high school students. Although a firm proponent of supplementary religious education during the regular school year, Benderly and his colleagues placed tremendous importance on Hebraism and believed that summer immersion in Hebrew-speaking environments would deepen students’ attachment to Judaism, promote Hebrew literature, and support Zionism. In 1941 Camp Massad began to set the standard for other camps that adopted Hebrew as their official language. Some of its successors, such as the Conservative movement’s Camp Ramah, foregrounded denominational concerns as well. By 1967 three hundred thousand children enrolled in Jewish camps. Another goal of Jewish camping, like other forms of religious education, was, as the chancellor of Jewish Theological Seminary later put it, “to create a native American elite for the Jewish community.”⁶¹ No matter what the venue, Jewish education kept this goal of integrating American and Jewish identity at the forefront.

After the Holocaust, Israel became a synechdocic form of Jewish identity to the point that, for some American Jews, no religious education was necessary as long as support for the state of Israel stayed strong and reflexive. The focus on Israel in religious schools received further support from an Israeli teacher exchange program set up by the umbrella commission of Jewish education in America, the American Association for Jewish Education. This venture worked so well that during the 1950s 25 percent of the teachers in weekday schools were Israeli.⁶² Widespread support for Israel had a noticeable effect on Jewish education in America. Addressing the Central Conference of American Rabbis in 1955, Rabbi Barnett Brickner commented that Reform Jewish education had already gone through two phases. In the first the focus was largely on the Bible and ethics. In the second the curriculum expanded to include Israel, Zionism, and Hebrew language and literature. “We are now,” he said, “in the third phase, where we realize that the American child must be conditioned to become a reverent and believing Jew, a praying Jew, an observant Jew, one who feels spiritually secure in America.”⁶³ Despite Brickner’s prescient concerns about American Jews placing too much emphasis on Israel, intense sympathy for and identification with Israel continued to have a major impact on religious education in America. Starting in the 1960s, more Jewish youth began spending summers or a semester in Israel, Israeli pronunciation became more common across the denominations, and Israel dominated most religious school curricula.⁶⁴ Symbolically, after 1970, Hebrew Union College students spent their first year of rabbinical training in Israel.⁶⁵

Hebrew language acquisition grew in importance because of its connection to the modern state of Israel rather than to the entire history and culture of Judaism. For many Jewish children Hebrew school became just that—a language school with little religious content. Since it was very difficult to learn Hebrew fluently in a few hours (at most) a week over a few years, Jewish education focused on Hebrew but devoid of the other content of the pre–World War II years suffered from terrible retention and reputation. While generally lauding and supporting Israel across the denominations, religious educators bemoaned the substitution of “Israelism” for Judaism. At the other end of the spectrum, some Orthodox day schools downplayed Zionism except in its religious context. Graduates of these schools tended to have a better command of the biblical Hebrew of their intensive study of Jewish texts and liturgy than the modern Hebrew of the state of Israel. What the focus on Israel did provide, especially after Israel’s 1967 victory in the Six-Day War, was the basis for significant increases in community support for Jewish education, particularly adult education and outreach efforts.

The results of centuries of communal investment in Jewish education are mixed. Paradoxically, more opportunities for Jewish education for people of all ages exist than ever before, but there are also more American Jews today ignorant about their cultural and religious traditions than ever before. The growth of day school education, for example, has yielded an intensively educated cadre of knowledgeable Jewish students and leaders, but, relative to the entire American Jewish population, they form a small group indeed. In 2001 there were five hundred Orthodox, seventy Conservative, twenty Reform, and fifty nondenominational day schools with a total population of only two hundred thousand students.⁶⁶ The fact that the majority of them are Orthodox has contributed to the steady distancing of Jewish denominations from each other. It raises the question whether intensive Jewish education is only possible within the Catholic model of schooling rejected by most American Jews over 150 years ago. What would it mean for notions of American pluralism if American Jewry were to discover that religious, ethnic, and cultural continuity is not, after all, sustainable through supplementary education? The contemporary Jewish educational scene in America also reflects a secular trend of shifting responsibility from parents at home to teachers in school. Just as schools in the twentieth century increasingly performed socialization tasks previously carried out at home—vocational education, ethical training, etc.—so too did the burden of Jewish continuity fall on religious schools. As varieties of Judaism that did not require ritual observance achieved legitimacy in America, religious schools often served as the only sources for Jewish education in either theory or practice. Since religious instruction was entirely optional in civil society, it could not but fail to achieve either of the goals of religious education for Jewish children. In America, at least, voluntarism has been both a blessing and a curse for Jewishness. The blessings of living in a free society are too obvious to require recital, but the curse of “too much” freedom of choice is no less obvious to a minority community concerned with continuity.

There is a head versus hand issue at the core of modern Jewish education in America. What is the purpose of religious education now? Is it to know more or to do more? Most American Jews do not claim increasing Jewish practice as their goal. Yet turning Jewish education into only an intellectual endeavor, as academic Jewish studies does as a discipline, will probably not attract many more American Jews than requiring ritual observance. Other primary forms of American Jewish identity, including Jewish culture and charitable work, do not necessarily require educational programs. This leaves modern Jewish education with a problem of emphasis and content delivery. New models of family religious education try to address the issue by offering integrated approaches to Jewish knowledge and practice, but it is not yet clear how effective this will be in fostering greater Jewish commitment.

American Jews have increasingly positioned religious education as central to Jewish continuity, thus raising the stakes even higher for the dual goals of Jewish education. The average nonobservant American Jew has the opportunity to become significantly more Jewishly educated than his nonobservant grandparents, but he must acquire that religious knowledge by choice. The average observant American Jew will almost inevitably be considerably more learned than her observant grandparents as a consequence of her education in the day school system. These generalizations obscure the huge variety within Jewish education across all denominations in contemporary American Jewish life, but they do underscore both the promise and the perils of the communal focus on education as the means to continuity in an environment where religious education remains voluntary.

1. Quoted in Seymour Fromer, “In the Colonial Period,” in Judah Pilch, ed., A History of Jewish Education in America (New York, 1969), 8.

2. Jonathan D. Sarna, “American Jewish Education in Historical Perspective,” Journal of Jewish Education 64 (Winter/Spring 1998): 11.

3. Hyman B. Grinstein, “In the Course of the Nineteenth Century,” in Pilch, A History of Jewish Education in America, 33, 37–39.

4. Fromer, “In the Colonial Period,” 23.

5. See Dianne Ashton, Rebecca Gratz: Women and Judaism in Antebellum America (Detroit, 1997).

6. For more on this revival, see Jonathan D. Sarna, A Great Awakening: The Transformation That Shaped Twentieth-Century American Judaism and Its Implications for Today (New York, 1995).

7. Joseph Reimer, “Passionate Visions in Contest: On the History of Jewish Education in Boston,” in Jonathan Sarna and Ellen Smith, eds., The Jews of Boston: Essays on the Occasion of the Centenary (1895–1995) of the Combined Jewish Philanthropies of Greater Boston (Boston, 1995), provides a clear picture of the distinctions between the two types of religious school systems in his Boston case study.

8. See, for example, Samson Benderly, “The Jewish Educational Problem,” Jewish Comment, June 12, 1903.

9. Louis Hurwich, Memoirs of a Jewish Educator, ed. and trans. Aaron Darsa (Boston, 1999), 20–21.

10. Frieda Gass Cohen, quoted in Kenneth Libo and Irving Howe, We Lived There Too: In Their Own Words and Pictures–Pioneer Jews and the Westward Movement of America, 1630–1930 (New York, 1984).

11. Melissa R. Klapper, “The Debate Over Jewish Education,” Generations: The Magazine of the Jewish Historical Society of Maryland (Fall 1996): 17–18.

12. Quoted in Bernard Ducoff, “Seventy Years of Jewish Schooling in New Jersey,” Jewish Education 51 (Fall 1983): 27.

13. Alexander M. Dushkin, Jewish Education in New York City (New York, 1918), 83.

14. Grinstein, “In the Course of the Nineteenth Century,” 45.

15. Anna Goldberg quoted in Harold Korey, “The History of Jewish Education in Chicago,” 79, M.A. thesis, University of Chicago, 1942.

16. “To Provide Every Child with Religious Education,” American Hebrew, May 27, 1921.

17. Alexander Segel, “A Survey of One-Day-A-Week Jewish Education in Philadelphia,” Jewish Education 4 (April-June 1932): 116.

18. Isaac B. Berkson and Ben Rosen, “1936 Jewish Educational Survey of Cleveland, Part I–Enrollment and Withdrawals,” in Lloyd P. Gartner, ed., Jewish Education in the United States: A Documentary History (New York, 1969), 174–77.

19. See, for example, Eric H. Yoffie, “Remarks to the National Association of Temple Educators Convention, Clearwater, Florida, December 23, 1998,” http://www.uahc.org/yoffie/nate.shtml (July 8, 2004).

20. Judah Pilch, “From the Early Forties to the Mid-Sixties,” in Pilch, A History of Jewish Education in America, 123.

21. Emanuel Gamoran, “Jewish Education in a Changing Jewish Community,” Jewish Education 23 (Fall 1952): 15–16.

22. Oscar I. Janowsky, “Jewish Education,” in Janowsky, ed., The American Jew: A Reappraisal (Philadelphia, 1964), 154, 165.

23. Pilch, A History of Jewish Education in America, 121–23, 135–37.

24. Marc Lee Raphael, Profiles in American Judaism: The Reform, Conservative, Orthodox, and Reconstructionist Traditions in Historical Perspective (San Francisco, 1984), 11.

25. Samson Benderly, Aims and Activities of the Bureau of Jewish Education of the Jewish Community (Kehillah) of New York City (N.p., 1912), 36–37; Alexander M. Dushkin, Living Bridges: Memoirs of an Educator (Jerusalem, 1975), 11–12, 17.

26. Grinstein, “In the Course of the Nineteenth Century,” 43–45.

27. Benderly, Aims and Activities, 25.

28. Walter Ackerman, “A World Apart: Hebrew Teachers Colleges and Hebrew-Speaking Camps,” in Alan Mintz, ed., Hebrew in America: Perspectives and Prospects (Detroit, 1993), 114.

29. Benderly, Aims and Activities, 24–25.

30. Pearl Benisch, Carry Me in Your Heart: The Life and Legacy of Sarah Schenirer (New York, 2003), 437–38, 442, 447.

31. Sudy Rosengarten, Worlds Apart: The Birth of Bais Yaakov in America (Southfield, MI, 1992), 29, 188; Devora Rubin, ed., Daughters of Destiny: Women Who Revolutionized Jewish Life and Torah Education (New York, 1988), 218, 222.

32. Meir Ben-Horin, “From the Turn of the Century to the Late Thirties,” in Pilch, A History of Jewish Education in America, 81–83.

33. Isaac B. Berkson, “Jewish Education: Achievement and Needs,” in Oscar I. Janowsky, ed., The American Jew: A Composite Portrait (New York, 1942), 71.

34. Uriah Zevi Engelman, Trends and Developments in American Jewish Education, 1956–1957 (New York, 1957).

35. Pilch, A History of Jewish Education in America, 121–23.

36. Engleman, Trends and Developments in American Jewish Education.

37. Daniel J. Elazar, “The National-Cultural Movement in Hebrew Education in the Mississippi Valley,” in Mintz, Hebrew in America, 133.

38. Doniel Tzvi Kramer, The Day Schools and Torah Umesorah: The Seeding of Traditional Judaism in America (New York, 1984), 11, 38, 40, 66, 13, 36–37.

39. Arnold J. Band, “From Sacred Tongue to Foreign Language: Hebrew in the American University,” in Mintz, Hebrew in America, 179–82.

40. Sarna, A Great Awakening.

41. Raphael, Profiles in American Judaism, 115–16.

42. See http://www.chabad.org (July 22, 2004).

43. See http://www.njop.org/html/stats.html (July 22, 2004).

44. See http://www.aish.org (July 22, 2004).

45. Marc Lee Raphael, Judaism in America (New York, 2003), 113, 81.

46. Report of the Hebrew Free and Industrial School Society of St. Louis to the Central Committee of the Baron de Hirsch Fund, December 17, 1890, Baron de Hirsch Fund Papers, I-80, American Jewish Historical Society.

47. Jonathan B. Krasner, “Representations of Self and Other in American Jewish History and Social Studies Textbooks: An Exploration of the Changing Shape of American Jewish Identity,” 3, 70, 77, 113, 125, 150, 261, 316, Ph.D. diss., Brandeis University, 2002.

48. Kalman Whiteman, Bar Mitzvah: Speeches Based on the Sidra and Haftarah of Every Sabbath in the Year, trans. Maximilian Hurwitz (New York, 1931), 33–34.

49. A. Glanz, “The National Radical Schools,” American Hebrew, June 16, 1916.

50. Ben-Horin, “From the Turn of the Century to the Late Thirties,” 104–10.

51. For more on these institutions, see Moshe D. Sherman, Orthodox Judaism in America: A Biographical Dictionary and Sourcebook (Westport, 1996).

52. Raphael, Profiles in American Judaism, 167.

53. Solomon Braunstein and Judith Myrun, “The Children Speak,” Jewish Parent 6 (February 1955): 18.

54. Kramer, The Day Schools and Torah Umesorah, 79–80, 68.

55. Joseph Kaminetsky, “The Program and Effectiveness of the All-Day School,” Jewish Education 27 (Winter 1956–57): 41.

56. Shelly R. Saphire, “The Talmudical Academy of Yeshiva University,” Jewish Education 20 (November 1948): 40.

57. Raphael, Profiles in American Judaism, 120–21.

58. Krasner, “Representations of Self and Other,” 3, 70, 77, 113, 125, 150, 261, 316.

59. Berkson and Rosen, “1936 Jewish Educational Survey of Cleveland,” 174–77.

60. Abraham N. Franzblau, “Toward the Reorientation of Jewish Religious Education,” in Gartner, Jewish Education in the United States, 185–86.

61. Ackerman, “A World Apart,” 115–25. Full treatment of Jewish and Hebrew summer camps is unfortunately beyond the scope of this essay.

62. Pilch, A History of Jewish Education in America, 153–57, 173.

63. Quoted in Krasner, “Representations of Self and Other,” 224.

64. Jack Wertheimer, A People Divided: Judaism in Contemporary America (New York, 1993), 304.

65. Raphael, Profiles in American Judaism, 63.

66. Raphael, Judaism in America, 124.