Jewish Education – For What? Twentieth Century Answers Compared

Session Submission Type: Panel Session

Abstract

Few issues secure more dollars in donations and provoke more debate and handwringing in the North American Jewish community today than how to secure a Jewish future. It is often held to be axiomatic that it is impossible to achieve Jewish continuity without Jewish education. Yet conceptions of how education contributes to the formation of Jewish identity have not, over the course of American Jewish history, been understood uniformly. The papers in this panel illustrate this diversity by mapping changing American Jewish responses to the axiomatic question: what is Jewish education for?
These three papers compare answers to this question proffered over sixty years. The first examines the integration of early twentieth century pedagogical thought by three Reform educators, and the subsequent formation of a philosophy of education that focused on Jewish education as the cultivation of an individual soul. The second examines the educational philosophy of Kurt Lewin, and demonstrates that by the 1940s, the purpose of Jewish education was increasingly beginning to be conceived in terms of the facilitation of a sense of “group belongingness.” The third discusses approaches to the conceptualization of Jewish education that emerged in the 1950s and 1960s under the influence of developmental psychologist Erik Erikson, and that have led contemporary educators to view Jewish education and Jewish identity as intuitively linked.
These papers provide case studies in the impact of cultural diffusion, borrowing and reinterpretation on paradigms of American Jewish education. Collectively, they illustrate that the perceived purpose of Jewish education has not been axiomatic over the course of twentieth century American Jewish history, but has rather undergone repeated reanalysis and reinvention. This ongoing process of re-conceptualization is a byproduct of creative engagement with contemporaneous currents of thought: with emerging ideas about pedagogy; with conceptions of group belonging, and with the birth of identity politics.

Sub Unit

• Modern Jewish History in the Americas

Chair

• Joseph Reimer, Brandeis University

Individual Presentations

• Towards a Science of American Jewish Childhood: The Impact of Early 20th Century Pedagogy on Reform Education - Laura Tomes, Hillel International

• Accentuate the Positive: Kurt Lewin’s Influence on American Jewish Education - Joshua J. Furman, University of Maryland

• On the Origins and Persistence of the Jewish Identity Industry in Jewish Education - Jonathan Krasner, Brandeis University

• The Anatomy of an "Assimilated Jew": Existential Education in Post War America - Matthew Williams, Stanford University