Expansive Opportunities on the American Scene: A New Culture of Jewish Education

• In Event: Issues and Methods in the History and Philosophy of Jewish Education

Abstract

America constituted a new model of democratic civic society, grounded in the prior European separation of church and state but with greater latitude for ethnic identification. This new model attracted massive numbers of immigrants in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, including millions of Jews seeking new homes and better lives. The coinciding dynamic of an evolving American society along with a newly expanded Jewish community facilitated the ability of American Jews to quite rapidly find their place in general society and to create a voluntary Jewish communal structure and culture. The emergent American Jewish culture became a noteworthy component of the broader American culture as well as an informal educative force for America’s Jews.

The creation of a voluntary American Jewish educational system was an especially important item on the agenda of the twentieth century American Jewish community. The nature of this new Jewish educational system was significantly influenced by the theory and practice of the twentieth century American public school. The primary form of American Jewish education has been—and remains—the part-time Jewish supplementary or religious school. Toward the second half of the twentieth century, the Jewish day school emerged in response to changes in American public schools, and offered a sector of American Jewry more intensive Jewish schooling. The nature of the twentieth century formats of formal Jewish schooling reflect the complexities of providing meaningful Jewish education within a dramatically new society and worldview.

Indeed, a distinctive culture of American Jewish schooling evolved over the twentieth century. The term “culture” implies here that 1) Jewish schooling became an essential element of American Jewish culture and a rite of passage in which most American Jews participated in one way or another at some point in their lives, and 2) Jewish schooling is itself an American Jewish cultural artifact that embodies a set of social, political, and intellectual mores, traditions, customs, and beliefs about how the ideal young member of the American Jewish community should think, feel, and act. In both these senses, Jewish schooling signifies an American Jewish paideia, that is, a culture that has always affirmed the centrality of formal education to the community.

Selected Bibliography
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Carlson, Robert A. The Quest for Conformity: Americanization through Education. New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1975.
Cremin, Lawrence A. American Education: The Metropolitan Experience, 1876–1980. New York: Harper Collins, 1988.
Krasner, Jonathan B. The Benderly Boys and American Jewish Education. Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2011.
Diner, Hasia R. The Jews of the United States, 1654–2000. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006.
Whitfield, Stephen J. “Declarations of Independence: American Jewish Culture in the Twentieth Century.” In Cultures of the Jews: A New History, edited by David Biale. New York: Schocken Books, 2002.
Wiese, Christian, and Cornelia Wilhelm, eds. American Jewry: Transcending the European Experience? London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2016.

Author

• Barry Chazan, Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Spertus College, Chicago