Jewish Education and American Jewish Education, Part III

Jonathan Krasner

This is the last in a series of articles exploring the history of Jewish Education magazine, later known as the Journal of Jewish Education, with a particular emphasis on its intersection with the history of American Jewish education and, more generally, American Jewish life. Major themes and issues that preoccupied the magazine’s editors and writers are isolated and analyzed as to how their discourse sheds light on their individual aims, values and philosophical outlooks, as well their collective efforts at educational reform. Particular attention is paid to how educator Samson Benderly’s disciples sought to reinterpret their mentor’s vision in a changing American Jewish environment and why this vision was, at best, only partially realized.

This article was downloaded by: [Krasner, Jonathan] On: 3 November 2008 Access details: Access Details: [subscription number 768128367] Publisher Routledge Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK Journal of Jewish Education Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/title~content=t714578333 Jewish Education and American Jewish Education, Part III Jonathan Krasner Online Publication Date: 01 May 2006 To cite this Article Krasner, Jonathan(2006)'Jewish Education and American Jewish Education, Part III',Journal of Jewish Education,72:1,29 — 76 To link to this Article: DOI: 10.1080/00216240600581591 URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00216240600581591 PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE Full terms and conditions of use: http://www.informaworld.com/terms-and-conditions-of-access.pdf This article may be used for research, teaching and private study purposes. 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Journal of Jewish Education, 72:29–76, 2006 Copyright © Network for Research in Jewish Education ISSN: 1524-4113 print / 1554-611X online DOI: 10.1080/00216240600581591 Jewish Education and American Jewish Education, Part III 1554-611X 1524-4113 UJJE Journal of Jewish Education Education, Vol. 72, No. 01, February 2006: pp. 0–0 Downloaded By: [Krasner, Jonathan] At: 06:27 3 November 2008 Jewish Education Journal of Jewish Education and American Jewish Education, Part III JONATHAN KRASNER1 This is the last in a series of articles exploring the history of Jewish Education magazine, later known as the Journal of Jewish Education, with a particular emphasis on its intersection with the history of American Jewish education and, more generally, American Jewish life. Major themes and issues that preoccupied the magazine’s editors and writers are isolated and analyzed as to how their discourse sheds light on their individual aims, values and philosophical outlooks, as well their collective efforts at educational reform. Particular attention is paid to how Benderly’s disciples sought to reinterpret their mentor’s vision in a changing American Jewish environment and why this vision was, at best, only partially realized. INTRODUCTION Samson Benderly and his “boys” revolutionized American Jewish education, in part, by shifting the emphasis from heritage or content transmission to social environment adjustment. In the 1960s, as the Benderly era was drawing to a close, the formulation of the purpose of Jewish education shifted yet again to identity construction and reinforcement. The new emphasis on survival reflected a wider realignment within the organized Jewish community. As in America generally, by the late 1950s there was restlessness in the air. The anomie of suburbia, exacerbated by the hollowness of the postwar religious revival and the culture of conformity, left many searching for meaning. American Jews also were only beginning to come to grips with the implications Jonathan Krasner is Assistant Professor of American Jewish History at Hebrew Union College – Jewish Institute of Religion in Cincinnati. 1 The author would like to thank Samuel Dinin, Gil Graff, Carol Ingall, Cherie Kohler-Fox, Sara Lee, Alvin Schiff, Susan Shevitz, and Jonathan Woocher for their willingness to share their memories and offer their perspectives on American Jewish education in the twentieth century. He would also like to thank Jonathan Sarna, Carol Ingall, and Michael Zeldin for reading earlier drafts of the articles in this series and providing invaluable comments and suggestions. 29 Downloaded By: [Krasner, Jonathan] At: 06:27 3 November 2008 30 Journal of Jewish Education of the Holocaust and the creation of the State of Israel. For some, this dawning consciousness brought to the surface anxieties about assimilation and attenuated Jewish identification among the younger generation. Social adjustment and group survival needed not be opposing ends. Indeed, for Benderly, Mordecai Kaplan, and their circle, a key component of the adjustment project involved the reconstruction of Judaism on American soil so as to stave off its ossification. They also were avowed cultural Zionists, and if their appreciation of Zionism as an agent of American acculturation was, at best, unconscious, they understood a Jewish cultural center in Palestine to be critical to the long-term vitality of Judaism in North America.2 But Benderly soon recognized that the two sides of the adjustment equation were unequal; the process of forging integrated Jewish Americans was complicated and even undermined by the overpowering allure of American culture relative to Jewish tradition. American Jewish educators, he asserted, would need to play a major role in compensating for this imbalance.3 Educators learned a strangely elusive lesson that should have been evident to any student of John Dewey’s child-centered pedagogical approach: “Active adjustment of the environment to the needs of Jewish education must be made not only by the teacher but more so by the individual taught; it is he who must know himself as a Jew, must want to live as a Jew in the modern setting, and be ready to adjust his environment to that purpose.”4 Thus, it is no wonder that veteran Jewish educators in the 1960s generally were heartened by the new emphasis on Jewish identity and did not view it as a repudiation of the Benderly revolution. As Alexander Dushkin explained: “We know that this is not a completely new phenomenon, but rather bringing to a boiling point what has been simmering in American Jewish life over many years.”5 Jewish educators, including the editors and writers of Jewish Education magazine, eagerly trimmed their sails to catch the prevailing winds. As the troubled decade wore on, they expressed their concerns about Jewish continuity with an increasing sense of urgency that sometimes bordered on hysteria. However, the changing environment created unforeseen challenges for the Jewish education establishment. As the survivalist agenda encouraged more engagement in Jewish education on the part of communal service professionals and lay leaders it threw a spotlight on the weaknesses of the existing system. National Council for Jewish Education (NCJE) members, 2 For Benderly and his protégés, education as adjustment also meant tapping into the American environment and applying the latest educational concepts, approaches and technology to the Jewish school. 3 Samson Benderly, “The School Man’s Viewpoint,” address delivered to the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, Cleveland, 1927. Reprinted in Jewish Education 20, 3 (Summer 1949), 88. 4 Alexander Dushkin, “Israel and the Teaching of Jewish Identity,” Jewish Education 42, 2–3 (1973), 21. 5 Dushkin, “Israel and the Teaching of Jewish Identity,” 22. Jewish Education and American Jewish Education, Part III 31 themselves habitual critics of the status quo, were nevertheless placed on the defensive. The escalating sense of impending disaster can be traced in the editorials and articles of Jewish Education during the tenure of its sixth editor, Samuel Dinin (1961–1970). To some extent, the atmosphere was a spur to productivity, including the most significant curricular reform initiatives since the 1910s. But it also elicited resentment and the very natural tendency to circle the wagons. Dinin was the last of the Benderly Boys to edit the magazine. By his retirement it was clear that American Jewish education had entered a new phase. Downloaded By: [Krasner, Jonathan] At: 06:27 3 November 2008 “A MILE WIDE AND AN INCH DEEP” Jewish educators’ shifting mood over the decade closely tacked that of American educators more generally. Shocked out of their relative complacency by Russia’s launch of Sputnik, the first artificial satellite, in October 1957, American educators rushed to strengthen science and mathematics curricula in the public schools and threw their support behind the National Defense Education Act of 1958, which stimulated education, training and research in the sciences, and “eventually did more to pump federal dollars into the educational establishment than anything in previous history.”6 Coming on the heels of the publication of John Kenneth Galbraith’s The Affluent Society, a stinging critique of America’s consumption-oriented society, many interpreted Sputnik as “a rebuke to America’s material self-indulgence.” Edward Teller, “the father of the hydrogen bomb,” reportedly called Sputnik, “a technological Pearl Harbor.” Once roused, the education establishment did not limit its attention to science and math. An initially overlooked book by Rudolph Flesch, entitled Why Johnny Can’t Read, began flying off bookstore shelves.7 It was in this environment that Alexander Dushkin embarked on a year-long project to analyze the findings of the First National Study of Jewish Education and write a summary report. Conducted under the sponsorship of the American Association for Jewish Education (AAJE) by Uriah Engelman and Oscar Janowsky, the study surveyed 33 Jewish communities of varying sizes.8 Dushkin’s report also synthesized data from a roughly analogous study of New York City, also conducted in the mid-1950s, by 6 William Chafe, The Unfinished Journey (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 139. John Patrick Diggins, The Proud Decades, America in War and Peace, 1941–1960 (New York: W.W. Norton, 1988), 312; David Halberstam, The Fifties (New York: Villard Books, 1993), 625–626. 8 A description of how the study was organized and designed appeared in Jewish Education‘s fall 1958 issue. See Uriah Engelman, “The First National Study of Jewish Education,” Jewish Education 29, 1 (1958), 3–9. For Dushkin’s recollections about his involvement in the study see his memoir, Living Bridges (Jerusalem: Keter, 1975), 238–242. 7 Downloaded By: [Krasner, Jonathan] At: 06:27 3 November 2008 32 Journal of Jewish Education Israel Chipkin and Louis Ruffman for the Jewish Education Committee of New York (JEC). The findings of the National Study would set much of the Jewish educational agenda for the next decade. The picture Dushkin painted was devastating, if not entirely surprising. With painstaking detail, he revealed the ineffectual state of the elementary congregational schools— the backbone of the Jewish educational system. Despite rising enrollments, improved facilities, greater availability of quality teaching materials and even increasing parental engagement, the teaching and learning process in these schools was fundamentally broken.9 Approximating the discourse in the general education world, the summary report was unflinchingly frank but hardly defeatist. Indeed, Dushkin summed up the attitude that pervaded the study as follows: “We must know the worst to do our best. For it is only in light of facts, in light of knowledge, that value judgments and social policies can be properly formulated and their attainment sought and validated.”10 Echoes of the national post-Sputnik conversation about education were similarly palpable in the response to and analysis of the National Study. The 34th Annual NCJE Conference was almost entirely devoted to it, and many of the papers subsequently were printed in Jewish Education. Society for the Advancement of Judaism’s Rabbi Jack Cohen charged that American Jewish education failed to take “full cognizance of the complex environment within which American Jewry seeks its creative survival” and respond to that environment with “an imaginative, yet disciplined reworking of the Jewish tradition.” Cohen was thinking particularly about the fallout from the new space race between the United States and Russia. The Jewish school “will have to take science seriously in all its manifestations,” he argued. It will have to create a revolution in Jewish thought no less profound than that stirred up by Maimonides when he sought to recast the mind of the Jew to meet the threat of rationalism. . . . Can we afford to have as Hebrew teachers men and women who have never grappled with the philosophy of science or have never thought about how the Bible might be interpreted in the light of archeological evidence or who have never been confronted with the thought that the normative sciences might offer a challenge to traditional ethics?11 Cohen’s concern about the failure of teachers and schools to engage with the challenges posed by science was part of a larger critique of the lack of relevance in the school curriculum. Writing at a time when Jewish defense organizations like the American Jewish Congress were heavily involved in 9 Alexander Dushkin and Uriah Z. Engelman, “Jewish Education in the United States,” Jewish Education 30, 1 (1959), 4–23, 33. 10 Dushkin, Living Bridges, 242. 11 Jack Cohen, “Our School and Our Society,” Jewish Education 31, 1 (1960), 4, 15–16. Downloaded By: [Krasner, Jonathan] At: 06:27 3 November 2008 Jewish Education and American Jewish Education, Part III 33 litigation to shore up the disputed legal doctrine of church-state separation, Cohen insisted that American Jewish education needed to “explore the meaning of American democracy from the perspective of Jewish life.” He also argued that the American Jewish school curriculum needed to become more “global,” fostering closer ties between American Jews and World Jewry, especially the Jews of Israel. But most directly to the point, he asserted that the Jewish educational enterprise needed to be animated by “an ideal purpose to capture the imagination of our youth. American Jewry needs an equivalent of halutziut to hold its youth. Personal fulfillment must somehow be tied in with social purpose.”12 Jewish Education‘s editor from 1956 to 1960, Louis Ruffman, devoting an entire section of his paper to the question of “relevance,” advanced a somewhat different spin that presaged the community’s shifting concern from adjustment to survival. Conceding that much Jewish content was probably not inherently relevant to the everyday lives of a considerable segment of the Jewish school population, Ruffman contended that the challenge was for the teacher and the school to make the material relevant by actively engaging the students in the learning process. Ruffman took note of the “current emphasis on the role of science and technological advancement in our space age.” But rather than urging educators to teach a Judaism in harmony with the zeitgeist, he suggested that they acknowledge and even exploit the tension between the two worldviews. He characterized Jewish values as “essentially humanistic” in character, in contrast to science’s emphasis on empiricism.13 Whereas Cohen wondered aloud whether the outcome of progressively fast-paced scientific advancement would be heightened human piety or hubris, Ruffman regarded the latter as far more likely and believed that, “the values inherent in a Jewish way of life are as cogent now as ever—if not more so—for establishing a proper balance in the individual’s personal orientation to the contemporary world.” He argued that Jewish educators could no longer rely on the popular adage that “values are caught, not taught,” but must instead create a Jewish environment where values could be modeled. The Jewish environment in which most of our children are growing up may offer very little for them to catch in view of the superficiality and vagueness of the Jewish home and the wider community. . . . This vital element in the Jewish educational process, which in other times and circumstances, could safely be taken for granted, has now become a major 12 Cohen, 16–18. Louis Ruffman, “Curriculum Development and Pupil Achievement,” Jewish Education 31, 1 (1960), 28–30. 13 34 Journal of Jewish Education Downloaded By: [Krasner, Jonathan] At: 06:27 3 November 2008 responsibility of the Jewish school which must provide for it consciously in its curriculum.14 There was an “old wine in new skins” quality to this line of argument, in that it was reminiscent of the rhetoric that underpinned many of the Benderly Boys’ projects in the 1920s and 1930s. Were not Albert Schoolman’s efforts to create an intensively Jewish environment in summer camp and Emanuel Gamoran’s credo, that rituals and customs should be lived rather than merely taught in the classroom, borne of the same conviction? Indeed, shortly after becoming executive director of the Reform movement’s Commission on Jewish Education, Gamoran explicitly justified the introduction of new subjects like history, current events, customs and ceremonies, and singing into the Jewish school curriculum on the grounds that they facilitated the transmission of “Jewish ideas, ideals, habits and attitudes,” what he called “Jewish values.”15 But the discussions about the need for curricular “relevance” and “values education” had far more traction in the Jewish community of the late 1950s than it had a generation or two earlier. In fact, Cohen, Ruffman and other critics of the AAJE’s National Study anticipated the centrality of these issues to the Jewish educational discourse of the 1960s. NEW LOOK IN VETERAN HANDS In 1961, Jewish Education literally moved westward—to Los Angeles, California. The relocation was occasioned by a change in editorial hands, but it also telegraphed recognition on the part of the NCJE that the future of American Judaism was being built amid the palm groves and sandlots of the Sun Belt as well as the “crabgrass frontiers” of the Northeast and Midwest. The new editor, Samuel Dinin, was called to Los Angeles in 1945 to head its burgeoning Bureau of Jewish Education. He left behind the security of a faculty position at the Jewish Theological Seminary’s Teachers Institute energized by the challenge of building a new institution and promoting a transpartisan vision of Jewish communal life. His new position afforded him a front row seat from which to witness one of the most significant internal Jewish migrations in United States history. Within a few months of Dinin’s arrival, the rate of Jewish immigration to Los Angeles skyrocketed—approximately 500 new Jewish residents were arriving each week. Between 1942 and 1948, the estimated Jewish 14 Ruffman, 28–30; Cohen, 16. Emanuel Gamoran, “Recent Tendencies in Jewish Education and their Application to the Jewish School.” Reprinted in Samuel Grand (ed.), Emanuel Gamoran: His Life and his Work (New York: Emanuel Gamoran Memorial Fund, 1979), 58–61, esp. p. 59. 15 Downloaded By: [Krasner, Jonathan] At: 06:27 3 November 2008 Jewish Education and American Jewish Education, Part III 35 population in Los Angeles rose from 125,000 to 225,000. Just a few years later, Los Angeles surpassed Chicago as the second largest Jewish community in the United States, and, by 1961, the metropolitan area had about 435,000 Jewish residents.16 But if the Jewish community was unmistakably on the move, the vast majority of NCJE members still hailed from locales like New York City, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Cleveland. Thus, Dinin was careful to strike a collegial, even modest tone in his introductory editor’s note. Acknowledging the novelty of an editorial board based on the West Coast, Dinin quickly added: “It is a responsibility we take on with a great deal of trepidation, and one we shall be able to discharge only with the generous help” of their colleagues in the east.17 But the magazine’s new cover design, developed by Ted Shenkman, with its lollypop-colored banners, artsy masthead font and more open layout, conveyed a radically different message. Taking its cue, perhaps, from the changing cultural mood signified by the recent election of the dashing, young John F. Kennedy to replace the staid and grandfatherly Dwight D. Eisenhower, Jewish Education‘s bold new look was charged with a youthful energy that seemed pregnant with future possibilities. At 59, Dinin was no spring chicken. But his editorial team, headed by L.A. Bureau colleagues Walter Ackerman and Irwin Soref, was younger, and though greatly influenced by the “Benderly Boy” generation was less beholden to its orthodoxies. The most astute, like Ackerman, were capable of subjecting to withering critique the ideas and deeds of their mentors.18 But here, too, the new packaging promised more than it delivered. In its format, content, and perspective the magazine exhibited a great degree of continuity with the past. The balanced diet of editorials, articles on educational practice, research findings, NCJE conference proceedings, and book reviews remained unchanged. To be sure, prevailing conditions in L.A. shaped Dinin’s editorial lens, much as, in the 1930s, the Chicago scene had influenced Dushkin’s. Yet, the magazine’s relocation to Los Angeles did not result in a marked increase in articles focusing on Jewish education in the western United States. Perhaps the impact of the move was mitigated by the fact that by the 1960s the flight to suburbia and the Sunbelt was hardly a new story. If anything, it was the dysfunctionalities of suburban living that were increasingly garnering attention. 16 Deborah Dash Moore, To the Golden Cities: Pursuing the American Jewish Dream in Miami and L.A. (New York: Free Press, 1944), 23, 80–81; H. S. Linfield, “The Jewish Population of the United States,” American Jewish Year Book 45 (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1943), 577; Ben Seligman and Harvey Swados, “Jewish Population Studies in the United States,” American Jewish Year Book 50 (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1949), 672; Alvin Chenkin, “Jewish Population in the United States, 1961,” American Jewish Year Book 63 (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1962), 139. 17 “From the Editors,” Jewish Education 32, 1 (1961), 3. 18 See, e.g., Walter Ackerman, “The Americanization of Jewish Education,” Judaism 24, 4 (1975), 416–435. Downloaded By: [Krasner, Jonathan] At: 06:27 3 November 2008 36 Journal of Jewish Education The most obvious reason for the lack of innovation at the magazine was the relative stasis within its sponsoring organization, the NCJE. By the mid-1960s, the organization had grown to over 350 members. In 1958, the first professional staff person, Samuel Borowsky, was hired, on a part-time basis. Yet, the organization remained relatively ineffectual. Moreover, a survey of NCJE members conducted by Zalman Diskind in 1961 confirmed what was evident to anyone who attended the organization’s annual meetings or perused its executive committee registers, which were published on the inside cover of Jewish Education: The membership of the NCJE was aging. The survey, which had a respectable 21% return rate, found that the mean age of NCJE members was 47, with only 30% of respondents under the age of 40. Fifty-three percent were born overseas and over one-half reported being in their current positions for over nine years. Ideologically, most identified with the Conservative and Reconstructionist movements. The occupational make-up of the organization had changed little since the early 1950s. Congregational school principals made up a plurality of the membership, with the second largest occupational group comprised of bureau directors and consultants. Ominously, while the day school world was far and away the fastest growing sector of the American Jewish educational universe, none of the respondents were day school educators. Although the magazine was largely sympathetic to all-day schools, and about one-half of NCJE members educated their children at such institutions, the day school phenomenon had largely passed the NCJE by.19 Dinin expressed concern about the graying of the NCJE in a 1968 editorial entitled “The Task Before Us.” He was particularly dismayed by the lack of young blood at the central agencies. The younger generation of educators, he lamented, did not have “the same approach to and feeling for the community aspects of Jewish education shared by the veteran members of the NCJE.” Their affiliations and loyalties were with the movements. He also pointed out that bureau work tended to pay considerably less than congregational school administration in the larger synagogues.20 Arguably, the most glaring statistic was the virtual absence of female members. In fact, Diskind reflexively used male pronouns when presenting a membership portrait and repeatedly referred to the “the wives of members.” It did not even occur to him to provide a gender breakdown of the membership, although executive committee registers indicate that at least a few women, including Cleveland Fairmount Temple educator Libbie Braverman and Gratz College Assistant Professor of Education and Coordinator of Student Activities Elsie Chomsky were active members. A complete 1971 19 Zalman Diskind, “A Profile of Seventy-Five NCJE Members,” Jewish Education 34, 1 (1964), 43–50. Diskind did not explicitly address whether his respondents were representative of the membership as a whole. 20 Samuel Dinin, “The Task Before Us,” Jewish Education 38, 1 (1968), 3–5. Downloaded By: [Krasner, Jonathan] At: 06:27 3 November 2008 Jewish Education and American Jewish Education, Part III 37 membership list includes the names of 33 women out of a total membership of 384.21 Women who participated in the annual conferences, including some with serious credentials as educators, often officially attended in their capacity as spouses of NCJE members. This group included women like Rebecca Aronson Brickner, Libbie Suchoff Berkson, Leah Konowitz Horowich, and Mamie Goldsmith Gamoran22 who had worked in various capacities at Benderly’s Bureau of Jewish Education in the 1910s but, upon marriage, bowed to convention and placed their professional ambitions behind their responsibilities as wives and mothers. Indeed, the nature of their continued involvement in Jewish education, whether as congregational school managers, summer camp directors, or textbook writers was often dictated by their husbands’ career paths, spousal obligations or financial necessity.23 In recent years, some researchers have gone to great lengths to rescue the so-called “Benderly Girls” and other female educators from obscurity. While such scholarship has often been illuminating, care must be taken not to obscure the profession’s long-intact glass ceiling. By the early 1960s, two-thirds of Sunday school teachers and one-third of afternoon school teachers were women. Yet, the number of female principals was miniscule, and female bureau chiefs were nonexistent. According to a number of sources, as late as the mid-1970s, a young woman who joined the NCJE was treated either as a threat or a plaything.24 The magazine’s most notable innovation was its move in 1963 to a quarterly publishing schedule. The frequency of double issues, however, meant that, more often than not, Jewish Education continued to be published three times a year. Another constant was the magazine’s precarious financial situation, a reflection of the poor fiscal health of both the NCJE and the AAJE, which provided its budget. In 1966, the magazine was forced to cease publication for six months. It was a sad commentary on the NCJE that the business meeting at its fortieth anniversary conference was dominated by a discussion of the organization’s financial straits. At one point during the meeting, Dinin took the floor to vent his frustration. Dinin threatened that if a more efficient business management strategy were not put in place, 21 NCJE members were listed in the back of a Summer-Fall 1971 tribute issue to Alexander Dushkin, in honor of his eightieth birthday. See Jewish Education 41, 1–2 (1971), unpaginated. Among the more prominent female members, aside from Libbie Braverman, Elsie Chomsky, and Mamie Gamoran, were Fannie Chipman, Sara Feinstein, Adina Katzoff, Leah Klepper, Rebekah Kohn, Dvorah Lapson, Deborah Pessin, Asenath Rosenberg, Bea Stadler, and Dorothy Zeligs. 22 Mamie Gamoran eventually joined the NCJE independently of her husband Emanuel Gamoran. But it is unclear from the available records if this occurred prior to his death in 1962. 23 For insight into how at least one of these women managed her role as helpmate, see Shuly Rubin Schwartz’s excellent “Rebecca Aronson Brickner: Preacher, Teacher and Rebbetzin in Israel,” American Jewish Archives Journal 54, 1 (2002), 65–83. See also Mamie Gamoran’s description of her professional life and how it intersected with that of her husband, Emanuel Gamoran, in “A Family History,” unpublished manuscript, American Jewish Archives. For another interesting study, see Harriet Feinberg, “Elsie Chomsky: A Life in Jewish Education,” available online at http://www.brandeis.edu/hbi/wp5.pdf. 24 Susan Shevitz, interview with the author, November 18, 2005; Carol Ingall, interview with the author, October 20, 2005. Downloaded By: [Krasner, Jonathan] At: 06:27 3 November 2008 38 Journal of Jewish Education he would use the occasion of an upcoming sabbatical in Israel to relinquish his editorship of the magazine.25 Despite his threats, Dinin remained at the helm for four more years and managed to publish the magazine on a more punctual schedule during the remainder of the decade. 26 He tirelessly advocated for a more professionalized NCJE: “We cannot continue to operate our Council in this jet age with an old agalah [wagon] no matter how dedicated the baal agalah [wagon driver] is.”27 Even in its fourth decade of publication, not all NCJE members appreciated the purpose of Jewish Education. At the 1962 NCJE conference, Dinin found himself defending the magazine against complaints that it failed to provide “more concrete guidelines to classroom teachers in matters of methods and techniques, and to principals and educational directors in matters of administration and supervision.” In the following issue, he reminded readers of the existence of three other magazines—the NCJE-sponsored Shevilei Ha-Hinukh, the Union of American Hebrew Congregations’ Jewish Teacher, and the United Synagogue’s Synagogue School—that were designed explicitly to aid teachers. Jewish Education boasted a broader readership, which included bureau staff, rabbis, Hebrew teacher college faculty, and concerned lay leaders. “To cater to the needs of all of its readers, Jewish Education must be catholic in its interests and tastes and offer comments and articles which will reflect the totality of Jewish education.”28 In his capacity as editor, Dinin promoted the organization of joint conferences between the various Jewish education professional organizations, including the NCJE, the Educators’ Assembly of United Synagogue, and the National Association of Temple Educators and the formation of an umbrella organization that would have the authority to speak effectively for the profession in the wider Jewish community and beyond. The first joint conference was convened in May 1961, but a unified national association of Jewish educators never materialized.29 THE YOUTH CRISIS Outgoing editor Ruffman penned the lead editorial in the first issue under Dinin’s management, a reaction to a symposium, entitled “Jewishness and Younger Intellectuals,” in the April 1961 issue of Commentary. If Ruffman was looking to substantiate his fears that Judaism as a way of life was becoming increasingly irrelevant to the younger generation, the Commentary symposium 25 Leon Spotts, “40th Anniversary Conference Proceedings,” Jewish Education 37, 1–2 (1967), 27. Alvin Schiff remembers assuming much of the day-to-day operations of the magazine beginning in 1969, as Dinin entered his late sixties. Alvin Schiff, interview with the author, July 21, 2005. 27 Samuel Dinin, “Forty Years of the NCJE,” Jewish Education 36, 1 (1965), 4. 28 Samuel Dinin, “Editorial Notes,” Jewish Education 33, 1 (1962), 4. 29 Samuel Dinin, “A National Association for Jewish Education,” Jewish Education 32, 1 (1961), 7. 26 Downloaded By: [Krasner, Jonathan] At: 06:27 3 November 2008 Jewish Education and American Jewish Education, Part III 39 was a damning piece of evidence. “They see nothing unique in Jewishness to which they can feel personally attached and committed,” he wrote. “What is more disturbing is the attitude of disdain and even contempt which a good many of them show towards Jewish community organizations and their leadership, including the synagogue” because “they fail to express the basic values which they, if only vaguely, recognize as a major contribution of Judaism and a possible justification for its continuation.” Ruffman renewed his call for schools to create a social and cultural environment that would make Jewish education “meaningful and relevant.” But he also warned that the schools could not work in a vacuum. If the “prevalent attitude and practices of the Jewish community are inimical to the goals and program of Jewish education,” what hope did the school realistically have to effectively transmit “Jewish values?”30 Ruffman was not alone in decrying the superficiality and disingenuousness of American Jewish society. Moreover, his critique was not substantively different from that which was being lodged at the time about the general culture by academics and artists, from C. Wright Mills in The Power Elite (1956) to James Dean in Rebel Without A Cause (1955). As Jack Cohen understood, the American Jewish condition was symptomatic of American Jewish embourgeoisement. If anything, Jews’ eagerness to acculturate had resulted in an American Jewish culture that exaggerated the consumerist, “other directed” tone of the wider culture. . . . American Jewish society is a conglomeration of promotional campaigns. . . . But after the promotion—emptiness. For in the truest sense, culture cannot be promoted; it can only grow out of the depths of experience. The shallower the experience, the poorer the culture. And middle class America, Jewry included, is today a surface culture.31 No one better understood Cohen’s point than Philip Roth, whose satirical novella Goodbye Columbus (1959) skewered the American Jewish middle class. Although Roth was not among the young intellectuals included in the Commentary symposium, he became for many, a poster child for the “self-hating” young intellectual.32 If Jewish educators were not unanimous in viewing the alienation of Jewish youth as the inevitable product of a suburban Jewish dystopia, all believed that a “serious [Jewish education] program, having the dimensions of breadth and depth” coupled with a Jewishly warm home environment, would forestall the assimilationist drift exemplified by the materialistic Brenda Patimkin and her social climbing paramour Neil Klugman. 30 Louis Ruffman, “The ‘Commentary’ Symposium,” Jewish Education 32, 1 (1961), 5. Cohen, 7–8. 32 For example, while Abraham Duker does not cite Roth by name, he certainly had him in mind when he complained, in 1960, about the return of “Jewish self-hate fiction” in the context of a larger lament about the alienated younger generation. See Duker, “Some Limits of Jewish Education in American Society,” Jewish Education 31, 1 (1960), 19. 31 Downloaded By: [Krasner, Jonathan] At: 06:27 3 November 2008 40 Journal of Jewish Education Once in the proper mindset, the editors seemed capable of finding signs of assimilation under every rock and behind every tree. Walter Ackerman seized upon the publication of theologian Emil Fackenheim’s “Paths to Jewish Belief”—arguably the most significant effort to distill the fundamentals of Jewish faith into an adolescent textbook since Emanuel Gamoran decried the teaching of “theology to tots” in the 1920s—as a symptom of the Protestantization of Judaism and increasing Jewish cultural poverty: “There was a time when one took for granted that a familiarity with Jewish sources would naturally lead to Jewish belief, that belief came through action and could be taken for granted. No longer.”33 The publication, in 1964, of Look magazine’s “The Vanishing American Jew,” an exposé about the rising rate of intermarriage, helped push the editors and other communal leaders over the edge into full-blown crisis mode. “It is time we awoke to the dangers of the internal crisis facing Jewish life and Jewish education in America and the other lands of the Diaspora and applied to it the same energies, the same resourcefulness we have applied to the work of rehabilitation, relief and rescue, and to the problems of defense and discrimination,” Dinin urged.34 That summer, in the pages of Jewish Education, evidence of what historian Jonathan Sarna characterizes as the shift from universalism to particularism became more pronounced.35 Ruffman’s call in 1960 to accentuate Jewish difference found an enthusiastic chorus, including Cleveland lay leader William Goldfarb, whose attack on “creeping assimilation,” which he attributed to “unconcern or even complacency,” and “the momentum towards conformity,” culminated in a entreaty to educators to stress the dissimilarities between Jewish and American culture: “If we are going to preserve the Jewish group,” he wrote, “it must be done by stressing the differences and counteracting the tendency towards similarity.”36 Survivalism had long been a feature of the magazine’s discourse, but those contributors who affirmed the American Jewish community’s enduring viability had favored an organic formulation (e.g., “creative survival”) that presupposed an integrationist dynamic. Writers in the mid-1960s began to problematize “integration,” to recognize and even mine the dissonances between American and Jewish values, and to “relocate” the boundaries between Judaism and American culture.37 Writing in the same issue as Goldfarb, Horace 33 Walter Ackerman, “Book Review: Paths to Jewish Belief by Emil Fackenheim and With Mind and Heart by Howard Singer,” Jewish Education 32, 2 (1962), 115–117. 34 Samuel Dinin, “Jewish Education and the Crisis in Jewish Life in the Diaspora,” Jewish Education 34, 4 (1964), 219. 35 Jonathan Sarna, American Judaism: A History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 306. 36 William Goldfarb, “The Goals of Jewish Education—A Layman’s Point of View,” Jewish Education 34, 4 (1964), 236. 37 I am borrowing this terminology from Sylvia Barack Fishman. See her discussion of boundary “relocation” and “resealing” in Jewish Life and American Culture (New York: SUNY Press, 2000), 16–18 and 26–28. Jewish Education and American Jewish Education, Part III 41 Kallen argued for a Jewish education that embodied the value of K’lal Yisrael (Jewish peoplehood). But if survival required an articulation of difference it did not necessitate segregation: Downloaded By: [Krasner, Jonathan] At: 06:27 3 November 2008 For survival we need an education which shall enable our American Jewish generations to hold themselves as freely and fully and devotedly Jews as Americans; to believe in themselves and in Jews everywhere as the heirs and carriers of the total Jewish tradition, in honor, dignity and free reciprocal service the equals of the heirs of mankind; living out their differences without penalty, pooling them without invidious advantage and doing this in such teamwork with the others that each is freer, safer in and for itself than it ever could be by isolating itself and struggling for survival alone.38 Kallen, after all, had long envisioned the retention of ethnic differences within the American society. As the decade wore on and the idealism of the early 1960s gave way to rebellion, hedonism, and violence, Jewish youth’s disproportionate involvement in the civil rights movement, the antiwar movement, and the counterculture, left many Jewish educators shaking their heads in dismay. “Fighting for civil rights and for just social causes is a good and honorable activity. It is, in fact, in the true spirit of Judaism,” Alvin Schiff wrote in July 1969. “Unfortunately, Jewish college radicals ‘do their thing’ as a rejection of Judaism, as a substitution for it, and in revolt against the middle-class, value-free life to which they have been exposed.” Schiff, who became associate editor of the magazine in 1968, believed that “the ‘turned off’ generation of Jewish youth was never really ‘turned on’ Jewishly.” They grew up in Jewishly impoverished homes, “void of Jewish values,” and were never sufficiently challenged or stimulated by their Jewish educational experiences. “They never acquired Jewish concerns and were not motivated to identify with Jewish causes.” He concluded that Jewish students were drawn to participate in the campus rebellion in part because they were searching to fill a spiritual void in their lives, but also because it was a convenient outlet for their pent up energy.39 Schiff’s generalizations about Jewish youth contained elements of truth. But in depersonalizing the students, allowing little room for their multiplicity of backgrounds, motives, and attitudes, Schiff only succeeded in telegraphing his distance from them. In fact, as Balfour Brickner pointed out, in the October 1969 issue, the black separatist movement had spurred some of the Jewish rebels to (re)engage with their ethnic and religious heritage and form havurot and political groups like Jews For Urban Justice. Whether the 38 Horace Kallen, “Jewish Education and Jewish Survival,” Jewish Education 34, 4 (1964), 228. Alvin Schiff, “The Campus Rebellion, Jewish Youth and Jewish Education,” Jewish Education 39, 3 (1969), 6. 39 Downloaded By: [Krasner, Jonathan] At: 06:27 3 November 2008 42 Journal of Jewish Education nascent Jewish ethnic pride movement could withstand the centripetal forces of the dominant culture was an open question. Brickner was hopeful, but he cautioned educators that in an open society allegiances could no longer be commanded. They would be won or lost on the issue of authenticity. Like Cohen, Brickner believed that rabbis and Jewish theologians needed to confront the challenges to Judaism posed by science and technology. He also argued that it was essential to develop an updated Jewish sexual ethic based on the Jewish conception that humanity was created in the Divine image.40 In 1968, the magazine opened its pages to a voice from the university campuses, Eric Meyers, at that time a doctoral student at Harvard University.41 Meyers painted a dismal picture of Jewish youth that confirmed the worst fears of his readers. But echoing the critiques of Brickner and Cohen he was quick to insist that the problems were symptomatic of wider American Jewish social ills. “American Jewry is in a serious crisis because it has failed to incorporate realistically the vital dimension of social justice into its organizational and theological framework, and it stands to reason that Jewish academic youth find little or no relevance in their religion.” He had a special word of criticism for the Jewish educational system, which was veritably M.I.A. from the high school years, when students were best equipped to discuss complex ideas. But Meyers had some encouraging news about the salutary effect of the growth of university-level Jewish Studies on Jewish college students, a movement that in the 1960s was still in its infancy. Moreover, he extolled the work of campus Hillels, which had learned how to reach out to students in their own idiom, nurturing “meaningful Jewish dialogue” between students and rabbis, and between students and community leaders. Meyers called for greater egalitarianism in the Jewish synagogue, a more meaningful siddur, and extending the age of Bar Mitzvah to 16. In the area of Jewish education, he made a plea for the development and growth of Hebrew high schools and the development of a Bible curriculum “which not only takes into account modern scholarship but also makes for exciting learning and religious stimulation.”42 THE DELIVERY SYSTEM Many educators were seized with a new sense of urgency to improve Jewish education—both the delivery system and the curriculum. For those who concentrated on the former goal there was interest both in intensifying 40 Balfour Brickner, “The Challenge of Community Pressures,” Jewish Education 39, 4, 33–40. At this writing, Meyers is Bernice and Morton Lerner Professor of Judaic Studies at Duke University. 42 Eric Meyers, “The Jewish Student Today: Patterns and Prospects,” Jewish Education 38, 3 (1968), 30–35. Meyers was somewhat familiar with the experimental Bible curriculum work of the Melton Research Center, although it is unclear from the article whether he saw it, and the associated work of Nahum Sarna, as a model. The Melton Center is discussed further within this article. 41 Downloaded By: [Krasner, Jonathan] At: 06:27 3 November 2008 Jewish Education and American Jewish Education, Part III 43 elementary education (8–13 year olds), which accounted for about 82% of enrollments,43 and widening the window of educational opportunity. Relatively speaking, the magazine’s attention shifted from the elementary age congregational schools to full-time Jewish education, camping, and the high school years. Earlier articles in this series have explored the magazine editors conflicted attitudes toward the congregational schools. Perhaps, a grudging acceptance of bureaus’ limited influence over the structural components of supplementary education encouraged magazine editors and writers to turn their attention to strengthening other parts of the larger Jewish educational system. Elementary congregational-based education was addressed most directly by a continued attention to teacher recruitment. Many curricular initiatives, particularly around Bible and Jewish Values, were targeted to the congregational schools. Partisans of the day school system, like JEC consultant Alvin Schiff, vociferously championed its cause. Defying virtually all expectations, day school education grew rapidly in the postwar era. According to Schiff, by 1962 there were about 300 all-day schools in North America enrolling approximately 50,000 students. In New York City, home to the largest Orthodox and Hasidic communities, day schools and yeshivot proliferated like kudzu. Forty-Five percent of North American day schools operated in the five boroughs. But day schools could be found in 108 communities. Schiff presented some preliminary findings of an extensive study of the day school movement at the NCJE’s 1962 conference, and his paper was published in Jewish Education the following fall. He explored the reasons for the growth of day schools, their impact on the American Jewish community, and the financial challenges they presented. Schiff’s study became the basis for his volume The Day School in America, which was published in 1966 by the JEC and remains the authoritative work on the early history of the twentieth century North American day school movement.44 If the day school continued to find its detractors within the American Jewish community, it had long since proven its value and staying power to Jewish educators. Even long-time opponent Isaac Berkson, the steadfast if quixotic champion of a common-core supplementary school system, had turned supporter. In his 1937 New York survey, he grudgingly allowed that progressive day schools had some value. Twenty-five years later, he even defended the more separatist day school varieties: 43 Dushkin and Engelman, 8. Alvin Schiff, “The Jewish Day School and the Jewish Community,” Jewish Education 33, 1 (1962), 29–41, esp. pp. 29–30. Schiff presented a précis of his book at the NCJE’s 40th anniversary conference in 1966, which was published as “An Appreciation of the Jewish Day School in America,” in Jewish Education 37, 1–2 (1967), 69–83. By that time, Schiff estimated that there were 67,000 pupils in 330 day schools across North America. 44 44 Journal of Jewish Education Downloaded By: [Krasner, Jonathan] At: 06:27 3 November 2008 We need the intensive Orthodox Day Schools—the yeshivot—with their religious and educational intensity. We need them, realizing full well that many of them do not make accommodations. We need their strong conviction and commitment. They are going to persist and they should persist.45 In the 1960s, attention turned to supporting day school growth in the nonOrthodox sector and the debate over how they should be subsidized. Schiff, with much justification, presented the more modern day school (especially outside of New York City) as heir to the communal Talmud Torah. Lines of continuity could be traced both in terms of curriculum and religious ideology. Both kinds of schools tended to be ideologically (modern) Orthodox but were populated by a religiously diverse mix of students. But to call the modern day schools “communal schools” because they received some Federation funds, as Schiff did, was a stretch. In response to Schiff, Los Angeles BJE staff member David Bridger argued that a truly communal school should be ideologically pluralistic and provide for the educational needs of all its students. He encouraged Jewish communities to establish such institutions wherever they enjoyed a critical mass of support. While Bridger did not explicitly argue that Federation monies should be earmarked for community schools to the exclusion of Orthodox ones, he clearly believed that subsidizing community schools was more in keeping with Federation’s (and the bureaus’) traditional transpartisan philosophy.46 In 1961, NCJE members debated and adopted a resolution advocating Federation support for day schools. It recognized “the singular contribution of the all-day school to raising the sights and goals of Jewish education and meeting this growing need for intensive education” and the “unique 45 Quoted in Schiff, “An Appreciation of the Hebrew Day School in America,” 75. David Bridger, “Discussion: An Appreciation of the Hebrew Day School in America,” Jewish Education 37, 1–2 (1967), 84–85. The larger question of whether the communal Talmud Torahs were themselves true “community schools” was debated in a symposium on “The Jewish Communal School,” Jewish Education 35, 2 (1965), 67–95. According to Dinin, “At best, most of the early communal Talmud Torahs were non-congregational, established by voluntary groups in a section of a local community, either by those interested in a ‘national-Hebraic’ or traditional-religious approach, or both. But in almost no case were these schools operated and financed by the organized community as a whole or by any organized area or region within the community” (p. 68). Joseph Diamond added: “The supposed uniformity of the Jewish community of a generation ago, and its acceptance of a ‘communal’ Talmud Torah was more a sign of indifference than an expression of ideological solidarity. . . . [A]t no time did that institution represent the total or even the majority of the Jewish community in a consensus of its educational philosophy, motivation and direction. In most cases these Talmud Torahs were either neighborhood schools in a larger community, or a single school in a small community, sponsored and directed by a group of like-minded individuals who were interested in raising Jewish children of their community in their own image, and without any regard for the wishes of the parents who were mostly unconcerned with the philosophy of the school to which they entrusted their children. This ‘communal’ Talmud Torah, usually national-Hebraic, but always of an orthodox character, reflected the religious orientation of its chief sponsors, despite the fact that many of its parents as well as of its Board of directors [sic] were very far from orthodox belief or practice” (p. 73). 46 Downloaded By: [Krasner, Jonathan] At: 06:27 3 November 2008 Jewish Education and American Jewish Education, Part III 45 promise it [the day school] holds for training and providing an intellectual spiritual leadership in the Jewish community.” It was also careful to emphasize “the American democratic milieu which sanctions legally and morally the fostering and maintenance of such educational programs . . . .” Finally, it called upon the bureaus to extend their services to day schools and actively foster their growth.47 Day schools were effectively barred from receiving Federation subsidies in many communities because of allocation rules that denied subsidies to any organization or group that engaged in independent fundraising. Even the most generous Federation allocation could not meet the budgetary needs of most day schools. Dinin wrote an editorial endorsing the resolution and expressing dismay that the matter needed to be raised at all.48 Far more contentious was the question of whether the Jewish community should support federal aid to parochial schools, including Jewish day schools. The issue, which was debated in the pages of Jewish Education in 1962 by two avid day school supporters, and Orthodox Jews, New York University education professor William Brickman and Ramaz School principal Rabbi Joseph Lookstein, was hardly academic.49 Congress, at that time, was poised to act on President Kennedy’s $5,600,000,000 aid-to-education program, which promised to pump an unprecedented amount of federal money into the public schools.50 Many parochial school supporters, pointing to the soaring cost of education, wanted their schools to benefit from the government’s largesse. Dinin noted that after years of broad community support for church-state separation, the issue of federal aid to parochial schools had created a fissure, with some Orthodox day school supporters taking a position in favor. While upholding the right of these dissenters to take part in the political process and lobby for their position, Jewish Education editorialized strongly in favor of upholding the community’s traditional strict separationist stance.51 47 Alvin Schiff, “The Jewish Day School and the Jewish Community,” 40, fn. 2. Samuel Dinin, “The Jewish All Day School: Federal or Federation Aid,” Jewish Education 32, 3 (1962), 133–134. 49 Brickman took the position in favor of federal aid to parochial schools, while Lookstein opposed it. See William Brickman, “Public Aid to Schools Under Religious Auspices,” Jewish Education 32, 3 (1962), 147–154, and Joseph Lookstein, “Federal Aid to Parochial Schools,” Jewish Education 33, 1 (1962), 24–28. 50 The bill was ultimately defeated. President Lyndon Johnson’s Elementary and Secondary Education Act, which was signed into law in 1965, tried to skirt the contentious issue of federal aid to parochial schools by avoiding general grants to schools, concentrating instead on equalizing educational opportunity for the poor. The Act created Title I, “Education of Children of Low Income Families,” which provided services to students in sectarian nonpublic schools—like the purchase of books for the nonreligious portion of their program—through funds granted to the public school districts. Proponents argued that since government officials controlled the money, the separation of church and state was maintained. See Julia Hanna, “The Elementary and Secondary Education Act: Forty Years Later,” Ed. Magazine (June 2005), available online at http://gseweb.harvard.edu/news/2005/0819_esea.html. 51 Dinin, “The Jewish All-Day School: Federal or Federation Aid,” 133; Samuel Dinin, “Editorial Comments,” Jewish Education 35, 3 (1965), 132. 48 Downloaded By: [Krasner, Jonathan] At: 06:27 3 November 2008 46 Journal of Jewish Education The editors lent their strong support to day schools even if they realized that the movement would continue to serve a minority of Jewish students, at least for the foreseeable future. So, too, they remained strong advocates of educational camping and encouraged Federations to make Jewish camping a funding priority. The Winter 1966 issue, dedicated to Cejwin founder Albert Schoolman on the occasion of his seventieth birthday, was explicitly designed to present educational camping to lay and professional leaders as “a new dimension of vital force in the intensification of Jewish life and education,” and advocate for its financial support.52 Articles explored the positive impact of educational camping on character development and values clarification, Hebrew language acquisition, and intensifying emotional attachment to Judaism and Israel. One of the few sour notes in the otherwise congratulatory coverage was sounded by Walter Ackerman, whose article, “Camp and School—Year Round Education,” pointed to the dissonances between camp culture and Jewish home and school life. Even movement camps, he acknowledged, often operated in a vacuum, severely complicating children’s re-integration into their home communities. Parents could not hope to recreate the artificial camp environment, which often revolved around rituals and activities that were utterly foreign to the average first-time camper. Ackerman warned that, “A sensitive youngster will often feel that he has been used and will feel an aching emptiness as he attempts to recapture the spirit and mood of camp at home.” Schools, he argued, needed to provide returning campers with support and make provisions for “their heightened enthusiasm and newly acquired skills.”53 Increased attention, in particular, was lavished on Jewish secondary education. As early as 1930, Samson Benderly determined that Jewish educators needed to refocus their attention from the elementary school to the high school. Adolescents, he reasoned, could appreciate and engage with a far more sophisticated interpretation of Jewish life.54 But over 30 years later, the potential of secondary Jewish education hardly had been tapped. The 1959 National Study found that high school students accounted for only 7.7% of Jewish school enrollment. Just 14% of American Jewish youth were receiving any formal Jewish education.55 These figures were a scandal in the opinion of longtime Baltimore bureau chief Louis Kaplan. In a powerful address at the 1965 NCJE conference, Kaplan threw down the gauntlet: 52 In 1968, the Council of Jewish Federations and Welfare Funds’ educational planning committee adopted Jewish summer camping as a priority. Bernstein, To Dwell in Unity, 119–120. 53 For the camping issue, see Jewish Education 36, 2 (1966), including Ackerman, “Camp and School—Year Round Education,” 93–96, 120, esp. pp. 93 and 96. On camping see also, Shlomo Shulsinger, “Hebrew Camping—The Creator of a Hebrew World,” Jewish Education 37, 1–2 (1967), 6–14. 54 Samuel Dinsky, “A Program for Secondary Jewish Education in the United States,” Jewish Education 32, 1 (1961), 8. 55 Dushkin and Engelman, 8; Dinsky, 9. Jewish Education and American Jewish Education, Part III 47 Downloaded By: [Krasner, Jonathan] At: 06:27 3 November 2008 So long as Jewish education remains primarily elementary Jewish education, it must, of necessity, fail. It may be dangerous to make such a statement, and some of my fellow educators may be alarmed by its baldness and boldness. I am convinced, however, that it is high time we had the courage to say to the American Jewish community, ‘You cannot expect us to cure the malignancies of despair, alienation, intermarriage, delinquency, and all the plagues that beset modern Jewish life, including vulgarity, triviality, etc. – with a few vitamin pills administered in early childhood.’56 That Kaplan’s sentiments resonated with communal professionals was reflected in the Council of Jewish Federations and Welfare Funds’ decision, later that year, to make secondary education one of the two priorities of its newly established committee on educational planning. Of course, as Reform leaders had recognized generations earlier, the nemesis of the Hebrew high school was the bar and bat mitzvah. Retired JEC executive director Azriel Eisenberg, among others, rued “the evil and suicidal idea” that Jewish education culminated with the bar or bat mitzvah ceremony.57 But few were foolhardy or intrepid enough to recommend its abolition. Under lay pressure, the ceremony had lately been resurrected in the Reform movement, and, in many synagogues, it was almost single-handedly keeping the pews filled on Shabbat.58 JEC consultant Samuel Dinsky’s snapshot of Hebrew high school education in the early 1960s emphasized the importance of community responsibility and collaboration. Since most congregations could not support secondary school divisions, two models prevailed: the bureau sponsored community high school and the intercongregational school.59 Echoing the cry for “relevance,” Dinsky laid out what he believed to be the key components of a “sound” high school program. They included, understanding students “needs, interests and problems” and giving “adequate consideration . . . to the student’s personal self-fulfillment and creative self-expression through serious Jewish study, meaningful Jewish group experiences and the Jewish way of life.” He added that, “The adolescent must see and feel a personal need and high purpose in the secondary program. It therefore must be significant, vital, relevant and close to the individual student—not abstract, remote, boring or mechanical.”60 56 Louis Kaplan, “Jewish Education and the Community,” Jewish Education 36, 1 (1965), 11. Azriel Eisenberg, “The Hebrew High School—Issues, Problems and Opportunities,” Jewish Education 37, 1–2 (1967), 58. 58 Jack Wertheimer, A People Divided: Judaism in Contemporary America (New York: Basic Books, 1993), 10. 59 The trend toward intercongregational high schools was accelerated later in the decade by local Federations’ pressures on synagogues with low enrollment numbers to merge their schools. Charles Zibbell, “Federations and Jewish Education,” Jewish Education 38, 4 (1968), 34. 60 Dinsky, 10–11, 14–16. 57 Downloaded By: [Krasner, Jonathan] At: 06:27 3 November 2008 48 Journal of Jewish Education Among the more creative thinkers about Jewish secondary supplementary education was Norman Schanin, the educational director of the Forest Hills Jewish Center in Queens, New York. He stressed education as “process” and advocated greater parity between formal and informal education in the Jewish high school. The latter was all but ignored in many institutions, or relegated to Sunday mornings, while the “serious learning” occurred on weekday afternoons or evenings. But Schanin argued that in allowing for the experiential as well as the cognitive and facilitating group cohesion, informal or cocurricular education created “a climate for maximum learning.” He added that it was often more effective than formal education in nurturing within youth “a spirit of Jewish idealism.” An effective cocurricular program included regularly scheduled informal activities like music or school newspaper, guided by a specialist-teacher, as well as kinnusim (assemblies, trips, weekend retreats) and scheduled time for club and youth group meetings.61 By the late 1960s and early 1970s, the Forest Hills Jewish Center model and other experiments, some influenced by the open classroom movement in the public schools, were winning converts, especially in educationally progressive synagogue settings. Federation leaders were thrilled. But many old-school Hebraist educators were nonplussed or even antagonistic to Schanin and Dinsky’s proposals. They espoused an unashamedly elitist view of Hebrew high schools as seedbeds of future leadership, and could not countenance a non-Hebraic centered school program.62 In cities with more centralized education systems, bureau directors viewed an intensive Ivrit b’Ivrit program in the central Hebrew high school as essential to maintaining high standards of achievement in the elementary feeder schools. Bureau directors’ purism only reinforced Federation leaders perceptions that they were ineffectual and out of touch with reality. Indeed, the crisis atmosphere in the 1960s–1970s reinforced the tendency of some educators to romanticize the 1910s and 1920s, the heyday of the Talmud Torahs, as a golden age of high standards, when Hebraism and cultural Zionism held sway over the curriculum. They dismissed “relevance” as nothing more than a code word for watering down the linguistic-based curriculum: “To make the curriculum relevant would mean to denude it of its essential content and inherent character,” one veteran intoned.63 These educators seemed to forget that even at their height, the modern Talmud Torahs only enrolled a fraction of the Jewish school population, and had a mixed record of achievement. 61 Norman Schanin, “Informal Education for Secondary Age Groups,” Jewish Education 32, 1 (1961), 20–26, esp. pp. 21–23. 62 Eisenberg, 58–61. 63 William Chomsky, “American Jewish Life and Education in Retrospect and Prospect,” Jewish Education 40, 4 (1971), 20–25. Jewish Education and American Jewish Education, Part III 49 Downloaded By: [Krasner, Jonathan] At: 06:27 3 November 2008 “THE RUSH TO RELEVANCE” Most Jewish educators remained committed to some form of Hebrew language instruction, and Jewish Education included several articles in the 1960s that publicized or evaluated various Hebrew language curricula, including former Chicago bureau superintendent Edward Nudelman’s report on the oral-aural centered “Chicago Program.”64 But the direction of curricular reform was unmistakably away from the Hebraic curriculum. Arguably, the boldest curricular research and experimentation was emanating from two outfits that were created in the wake of the 1959 National Study: the National Curriculum Research Institute (NCRI) of the AAJE, and the Melton Research Center (MRC) at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America (JTS). Taking note of “the existing educational shallowness,” the National Study had called for creating conditions “for educational deepening and enhancement” and specifically recommended the establishment of the NCRI. According to popular lore, the impetus for the MRC was more personal, stemming from Minna and Michael Melton’s uninspired Hebrew school experience in Columbus, Ohio. Both the NCRI and MRC were funded by family foundations—the NCRI by the Rosenthal family of Cleveland and the MRC by Samuel Melton of Columbus—and in retrospect ushered in a trend toward foundation funded educational initiatives that reached full flower in the 1990s.65 Neither the NCRI nor the MRC initially focused on Hebrew or even viewed the continued use of the Ivrit b’Ivrit method in supplementary school classrooms as an educational priority.66 Writing only months after Israel’s victorious Six Day War, JTS Vice Chancellor Simon Greenberg apologetically explained that The Melton Center and the United Synagogue Commission on Education have not abandoned the conviction that Hebrew is an indispensable element in Jewish education, both as a tool and for its own sake. But we have finally adjusted ourselves ideologically and emotionally to the fact that except for a very small but by no means negligible percentage of American Jews, Hebrew will never be a language either of daily intercourse or literary 64 Edward Nudelman, “The Teaching of Hebrew—Another Look Ten Years Later,” Jewish Education 36, 3–4 (1966), 133–142; From earlier in the decade, see also, William Chomsky, “Another Look at the Problem of Teaching Hebrew in Our Schools,” Jewish Education 33, 1 (1962), 45–51; Samuel Glasner, “The Silent Reading Method,” Jewish Education 33, 4 (1963), 231–234; and Samuel Grand, “The New Outlook for Hebrew in Reform Jewish Education,” Jewish Education 34, 2 (1964), 103–108. 65 Judah Pilch, “The National Curriculum Research Institute,” Jewish Education 37, 4 (1967), 152; Barbara Sofer, “Philanthropist of Jewish Education” on the Jewish Theological Seminary Davidson Graduate School of Jewish Education website: http://www.jtsa.edu/davidson/melton/sammelt.shtml. 66 By the late 1960s, however, the MRC conducted some initial experimentation with Hebrew teaching materials in the Ramah camps, and the following decade pioneered a five-year Hebrew language program for supplementary schools that sought to integrate the teaching of Bible, prayer book, history, history, mitzvoth, and community. 50 Journal of Jewish Education Downloaded By: [Krasner, Jonathan] At: 06:27 3 November 2008 expression. The overall majority of them, if they will use it at all, will use it as the language of prayer.67 The change in outlook was due to a variety of factors including a record of disappointing student outcomes and the shortage of qualified teachers. But what emerges from the pages of the magazine is that the goal of cultivating Modern Hebrew fluency as a sine qua non was simply out of step with the drive for curricular relevance. Given most students limited oral, aural and reading Hebrew skills, Ivrit b’Ivrit was perceived as a straitjacket that precluded exploration and debate of complex ideas.68 The “rush to relevance” was hardly peculiar to Jewish education and should be contextualized within the wider “neo-progressive movement” of the 1960s. Lawrence Cremin traced the return to the fore of child-centeredness and social reform to the publication of A. S. Neill’s Summerhill in 1960. Neill soon was joined by a chorus of public school critics who condemned the prevailing system for stultifying students’ creativity with “deadening routines, tyrannical authority, and passive learning.”69 Contending with the public’s increasing loss of confidence in government, the antipoverty and antidiscrimination ethos of the Great Society, the 1960s youth culture, and the impact of desegregation and immigration on the makeup of their classrooms, “teachers adopted ‘relevance’ as their watchword.” In classrooms across America, “problems” courses that addressed contemporary social ills replaced the study of traditional social science disciplines, and “values clarification” became all the rage as schools married a concern for fostering student autonomy with a desire to promote greater social responsibility. As one disapproving historian remarked, “The student as academic inquirer was replaced by the student as social activist in search of an individual or group identity.”70 Many Jewish educators eagerly seized upon the notion that relevance was a handmaiden to identity. Though they adopted very different foci and 67 Simon Greenberg, “New Approaches in Jewish Education,” Jewish Education 37, 4 (1967), 167. Greenberg went on to say, “It is of the utmost importance that the average Jew know enough Hebrew to feel at home in the synagogue, to use it in the performance of Jewish rituals in the home, and to carry on a Hebrew conversation, even if it be on the most elementary level, when he visits Israel.” In the 1970s, the United Synagogue Commission on Jewish Education adopted a new afternoon school curriculum that abandoned the Hebraic curriculum for all students but included an optional intensive Hebrew track. See A Curriculum for the Afternoon Jewish School (New York: United Synagogue Commission on Jewish Education, 1978). On the goals of the Melton Hebrew Language Program see Miles Cohen, Preliminary Teachers Guide (New York: MRC, 1982), 1–2. 68 See for example Alexander Kohanski, “Origin and Function of Modern Tenets in Jewish Education,” Jewish Education 36, 3–4 (1966), 154. 69 Larry Cuban, How Teachers Taught: Constancy and Change in American Classrooms, 1880–1990 (New York: Teachers College Press, 1993), 151. 70 Gary Nash, Charlotte Crabtree, and Ross Dunn, History on Trial: Culture Wars and the Teaching of the Past (New York: Knopf, 1998), 86–89; Frances FitzGerald, America Revised (Boston: Atlantic-Little, Brown, 1979), 192; Hazel Whitman Hertzberg, quoted in Nash et al., 88. Downloaded By: [Krasner, Jonathan] At: 06:27 3 November 2008 Jewish Education and American Jewish Education, Part III 51 approaches, both the NCRI and the MRC accepted this truism as a guiding principle, as did numerous writers who meditated on Jewish curricular reconstruction in Jewish Education. “Sound Jewish education is instruction in how to live as a Jew in whatever environment the Jew finds himself,” Alvin Schiff wrote. “Judaism in this sense, begs to be relevant, to be made relevant.” The NCRI’s director, Judah Pilch, asserted that, “a relevant curriculum is the heart of survival.”71 Still, there was an undercurrent of concern, especially from Hebraist bureau directors and immigrant teachers that standards would be compromised. Shraga Philip Arian, for example, lamented what he saw as the bifurcation of “education” and “identity” as a postwar phenomenon, a byproduct of the move to the suburbs and the decline of the “Jewish neighborhood.” He stressed schools’ traditional role as disseminators of content, not identity. Schools, he insisted, should not compromise their standards and water down their programs. Arian, and other supporters of this position like Eisig Silberschlag in Boston and Alexander Kohanski in Verona, New York, had their analogue in the “Back to Basics” movement. But even more thoughtful critics of “relevance” like Arian agreed that teachers should seriously develop ideas with their students rather than mouth the time-worn answers of previous generations of teachers.72 Broadly speaking, the curricular reform efforts described during this era in Jewish Education fell into two categories, those that put the Torah at the center and those that focused on what Jonathan Woocher called the “civil religion” of American Jews.73 To be sure, both approaches were designed to promote “values clarification” and address contemporary Jewish “problems.” The MRC initiative exemplified the more intellectual “Torah” approach, which tended to resonate with the JTS crowd and other Conservative leaders. According to Greenberg, it posited that in an open society allegiance to Judaism could no longer be assumed but, rather, was chosen freely. Students must be intellectually won over to their tradition. It is through a deep engagement with the Biblical text that the modern Jew will reengage emotionally and spiritually with the tradition. Jewish self-identification with the Jewish community and the Jewish religion will for an increasing number of American Jews be rooted in, and nurtured and sustained by the intellect, or it will either disappear or be 71 Alvin Schiff, “The Reconstruction of Jewish Education,” Jewish Education 39, 2 (1969), 20; Pilch, 153. 72 Shraga Arian, “Structuring A New Bureau of Jewish Education for the 70’s,” Jewish Education 42, 1–2 (1972–73), 34–37; Philip Arian, “A Program for the Teaching of Jewish Concepts,” Jewish Education 36, 3–4 (1966), 162–166, esp. p. 163. Note Arian’s advocacy for realigning the curriculum to reflect the theories of Jean Piaget on concept formation in children. For a “back-to-basics” approach that, nevertheless breaks with the orthodoxy on Ivrit b’Ivrit, see Alexander Kohanski, “Origin and Function of Modern Tenets in Jewish Education,” Jewish Education 36, 3–4 (1966), 143–154. 73 See Jonathan Woocher, Sacred Survival: the Civil Religion of American Jews (Boomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), esp. pp. 63–103. 52 Journal of Jewish Education Downloaded By: [Krasner, Jonathan] At: 06:27 3 November 2008 tenuously peripheral. This means that an increasing number of American Jews will want to be rationally convinced that they possess in their heritage as Jews, values, ideals and patterns of personal, family and community life which are intrinsically of surpassing worth and which can add the dimensions of aesthetic delight and spiritual substance to their own lives.74 Greenberg asserted that the Bible was an ideal resource to anchor this intellectual conversation, which he assured readers, would foster well-adjusted and deeply identified Jews. Likewise, United Synagogue’s educational director Morton Siegel enthusiastically championed the Torah-centered approach. “If Torah is the core, then the American Jewish community has viability,” he argued. “If it is not, then the American community becomes unviable, with defense as its main function, and eventual disappearance its inevitable end.”75 The NCRI’s curricular projects, which included the publication of the first textbook to treat the Holocaust and experimental units on contemporary Jewish life and basic Jewish concepts, epitomized the “civil religion” approach. It emphasized Jewish unity; American Jews’ connection with Israel; the enduring value of Jewish tradition; and philanthropy and social justice. Just as the MRC embodied the JTS approach, so too, did the NCRI reflect AAJE and CJFWF’s devotion to a transpartisan, ethnic Judaism that elevated K’lal Yisrael to a first principle. According to Pilch, the NCRI sought to re-orient the school curriculum to place greater emphasis on contemporary problems. He emphasized that the NCRI had no interest in displacing the study of classical texts, only to bring the curriculum into balance. Most of its curricular materials were designed for adolescents, and Pilch regarded shifting the emphasis in Jewish education from elementary to high school as one of its major goals. “It is during the high school years that a youngster develops profounder understanding of problems that confront him as a human being and as Jew and attacks them earnestly and with keener sense of responsibility,” Pilch wrote. MRC, in contrast, focused much of its energies on 8–13 year olds, although some of its publications, including Nahum Sarna’s Understanding Genesis, were aimed at teachers.76 Clearly, the NCRI’s initiatives were conceived as a response to the perceived youth crisis. They also were meant originally to counterbalance what bureau people perceived as an inordinate emphasis on denominationalism and religious expressions of Judaism in the congregational school curriculum. A frequent complaint in the mid- to late-1950s and early 1960s was that 74 Greenberg, 165. Greenberg, 164–165; Morton Siegel, “Comment,” Jewish Education 39, 4 (1969), 28–29. 76 Pilch, 155; Greenberg, 165. The first edition of Sarna’s, Understanding Genesis was published by JTS in 1966 as volume 1 in the MRC’s Heritage of Biblical Israel series; later editions were published by Schocken (1970). 75 Downloaded By: [Krasner, Jonathan] At: 06:27 3 November 2008 Jewish Education and American Jewish Education, Part III 53 denominationalism and the congregational-centered model of Jewish life were watering down the ethnic components of Jewishness. These fears were lent credence by the publication of Will Herberg’s Protestant-Catholic-Jew in 1955, which popularized the notion of America’s religious-based “triple melting pot.”77 By the mid- to late-1960s, the American scene appeared to be awash in ethnic pride movements, and Herberg’s much touted analysis was dismissed as wide of the mark. Moreover, considered analysis of congregational school curricula pointed to an astonishing degree of uniformity that hardly registered any sense of meaningful ideological distinctions between the non-Orthodox movements. The halls of the rabbinical seminaries may have been resonating with passionate discussions about the conflict between the halakhic regime and American society’s worshipful attitude toward individual autonomy, but they were largely echo chambers. On the congregational level, what passed for ideological differences had been largely reduced to the mundane realm of kippot, kashruth, and synagogue choreography. One long-time observer concluded in 1968 that “the socalled denominational differences are merely figments of the imagination of the leadership of the denominational organizations, or of the official establishment in the rabbinical seminaries . . .” Synagogues were in actuality “social rather than religious institutions,” and affiliation was motivated primarily by economic, social, and geographic considerations, as well as the perceived quality of the synagogue school and the reputation of the rabbi. Even ritual differences often were confined to the public sphere of the synagogue.78 An NCRI survey of 1286 rabbis, synagogue educators, parents, and lay leaders revealed that fears about the decline of a K’lal Yisrael ethos in the synagogues were greatly exaggerated.79 The NCRI eagerly took advantage of the new mood, which especially resonated with its targeted youth demographic, and can be viewed as part of the 1960s trend toward inventing identities and traditions. THE SIX DAY WAR AND ISRAEL EDUCATION Ultimately, the “civil religion” approach to Jewish education became anchored on American Jews’ growing attachment to Israel and the heightening of 77 See Will Herberg, Protestant-Catholic-Jew: An Essay in American Religious Sociology (Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Co., 1955), especially pp. 6–71 and 172–210. 78 William Chomsky, “Responsibilities of the School and Community in Jewish Education,” Jewish Education 38, 2 (1968), 27–28. See also Hyman Chanover, “Central Organization of Jewish Education— A Concept and Mechanism,” Jewish Education 35, 4 (1965), 218–221. Not everyone agreed with this analysis. See, for example, Alexander Schindler, “Comments,” Jewish Education 35, 3 (1965), 190–192. 79 Pilch, 156. The decline of ideological distinctions between the movements, certainly on the lay level, also was noticed by Herberg, who wrote of “a notable convergence between the three groups or ‘denominations,’ in American Judaism, in everything at least except their institutional affiliations and loyalties. All were becoming American and therefore more and more like each other.” Herberg, 193. Downloaded By: [Krasner, Jonathan] At: 06:27 3 November 2008 54 Journal of Jewish Education Holocaust consciousness in the mid-1960s. In December 1960, Otto Preminger’s epic film Exodus opened in American theatres. Based on the 1958 best-selling novel by Leon Uris, the movie was a financial success, grossing four times its production budget. But if it proved to be a crowd pleaser in America’s heartland, it had special resonance for American Jews. Not only did it cast the young State of Israel in a sympathetic light, it remade the Jew in the image of the American frontiersman, as personified by the strapping, blue-eyed (and half-Jewish) Paul Newman. The popularity of both the book and film confounded and horrified members of the Jewish intelligentsia who viewed it as overly sentimental and simplistic. But more insightful critics, like Frank Cantor, recognized that American Jews had unconsciously seized upon Exodus as a vehicle for shoring up their selfesteem, living vicariously through the exploits of Ari Ben Canaan and his comrades. Cantor understood that “while dealing ostensibly with Israel, Exodus is actually an American book, which portrays Israel through American eyes.” It told “a new kind of story about a new kind of Jew.” An Israeli reporter made the point more bluntly: “Ari Ben Canaan is not a Jew . . . [but] the very ideal of true blue American manhood [or] . . . the stereotype of the Anglo-Saxon white Protestant.”80 The reception accorded Exodus both reflected and encouraged modest efforts in the early 1960s to initiate or intensify Israel content in mainstream educational settings. Early experimentation with teen summer trips to Israel, high school, college, and rabbinical school semester-in-Israel programs; school-wide Israel Independence Day celebrations, and teacher exchange programs all predated the Six Day War. In 1964, the Union of American Hebrew Congregations (UAHC) published its first textbook on Israel, Israel Today by Harry Essrig and Abraham Segal. Moreover, by the mid-1960s, almost one-fourth of the teaching force in day schools and supplementary schools were Israeli émigrés (derogatorily known as yoredim).81 Yet, the strength and momentum of this dawning interest in Israel education should not be overstated. As late as the winter of 1966–1967, the mood among veteran American Zionist educators was close to despondent. The NCJE’s fortieth anniversary conference, held in Jerusalem July 15–29, 1966 was poorly attended, while the tenor of the meager coverage in the Israeli media only seemed to underscore the considerable gulf that separated Israeli and American Jews. According to a report on the conference in Jewish Education‘s Winter 1967 issue, the Israeli media expressed little interest in the admittedly generic conference theme, “Half a Century of Jewish Education in the United States: Retrospect and Prospect,” or the individual 80 Both Cantor and the Israeli correspondent, Yehuda Lev, are quoted in Deborah Dash Moore, To the Golden Cities: Pursuing the American Jewish Dream in Miami and L.A. See also Moore’s account of the making of the film and its reception, pp. 247–258. 81 Samuel Dinin, “The Jerusalem Conference,” Jewish Education 37, 1–2 (1966–1967), 4–5. Downloaded By: [Krasner, Jonathan] At: 06:27 3 November 2008 Jewish Education and American Jewish Education, Part III 55 sessions. Instead, they used the conference as an opportunity to call attention to the growing number of Israelis teaching in American Jewish schools and to lambaste the American Jewish community for its anemic rate of aliyah. “To us it seems that Israelis know neither the possibilities nor the realities of American Jewish life,” lamented editor Dinin.82 The sour Israeli mood that American conference delegates experienced was attributable, in part, to worries about the sluggish Israeli economy and a sharp rise in Israeli emigration to the West. Dinin struggled to empathize with Israelis’ fears of a “brain drain,” and expressed a view widely held by American Jewish educators that an American Jewish education system dominated by Israeli teachers was far from ideal. He endorsed “organized, orderly [teacher] exchanges, preceded by orientation courses on American Jewish life and education,” and acknowledged that the root of the problem was the inability to satisfy staffing demands from the current American candidate pool. The plethora of Israeli teachers in American Jewish schools also complicated efforts to promote aliyah, as they were hardly the ideal heralds of halutziut. But, in any case, Dinin adamantly rejected calls to promote aliyah in American Jewish classrooms. Reminding his readers that Jewish schools were populated overwhelmingly by elementary school aged children, he asked rhetorically, “Is it desirable or possible to implant in the hearts and minds of young children a feeling of insecurity, a basic disaffection with America and American Jewish life, a desire to leave home and family and land to settle in their ‘own’ land?” Of course, the debate among NCJE members about the efficacy and appropriateness of actively encouraging aliyah in American Jewish schools was longstanding, predating the creation of the Jewish State. It is indicative of the educational and social climate within the American Jewish community vis-à-vis Israel in the early 1960s, however, that even supporters of education for halutziut recognized that the argument was moot. At best, a concerted effort to promote aliyah among American Jewish youth and college students would produce “[n]ot a mass aliyah, but that of scores of halutzim who will leave their comfortable homes and their native country to go to Israel to lend a hand,” wrote Judah Pilch, director of the National Curriculum Research Institute of the AAJE, in 1962.83 Pilch presented his colleagues with a modest education program to promote halutziut among Jewish teens and college students. But the bulk of his article reads almost as an apologia for the lack of aliyah from North America, a fact that deeply pained him. The Vice President of the Cleveland Bureau of Jewish Education, William Goldfarb, wrote in a similar vein two 82 Samuel Dinin, “Editorial Comments: The Jerusalem Conference,” Jewish Education 37, 1–2 (1967), 3–5, quote p. 4. 83 Dinin, “Editorial Comments: The Jerusalem Conference,” 4; Judah Pilch, “Education for Halutziut,” Jewish Education 32, 1 (1962), 81. Downloaded By: [Krasner, Jonathan] At: 06:27 3 November 2008 56 Journal of Jewish Education years later.84 The reasons these writers offered were familiar to any student of the American Jewish experience, and could be subsumed under the title of historian Ben Halpern’s well known 1955 Midstream article: “America is Different.”85 Jews experienced a level of security in North America unprecedented in Jewish history, arguably, since Late Antiquity—and even if they often behaved like an ethnic group, they tended to self-identify in religious rather than national terms.86 Interestingly, Pilch took a far more optimistic view of American life than Goldfarb. Where Pilch saw an America increasingly tolerant of its cultural diversity, Goldfarb chafed at an America that stifled difference, especially along ethnic lines. Where Pilch took comfort in “a free America, built on biblical idealism,” committed to “tikkun haolam,” (repairing the world, social justice) Goldfarb lamented the deleterious impact of an open society on Jewish group cohesiveness. There was truth in each perspective, and both writers were unmistakably influenced by the zeitgeist. Pilch was taken with the spirit of idealism engendered by President John F. Kennedy’s New Frontier, which he recognized as a further impediment to motivating aliyah, while Goldfarb was picking up on the backlash against the postwar culture of conformity.87 But both testified to the pessimism with which proponents of Israel education viewed the prospects of effecting change. Six days in June 1967, and the anxious weeks that preceded them, changed all of that. The euphoric mood of the editorial board and NCJE members more generally was summed up by the title of Samuel Dinin’s editorial in the Fall 1967 issue: “The New Face of Israel in Jewish Education.” Even Dinin, who constitutionally was adverse to great flights of fancy, struggled to temper his sense of enchantment. He was elated with “the overwhelming response of Diaspora Jewry to the call of Israel for men and money,” and especially was heartened to see so many American Jewish youth volunteering for service in Israel. He cited a recent Commentary magazine article by Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg, which posited a correlation between this volunteerism and “intensity” of Jewish education. Hertzberg’s conjecture that Jewish education played “a far greater role than ever attributed to it in implanting a love for the people and land of Israel in the hearts of our children” was welcomed news.88 Dinin believed that educators could ride the momentum and increase the profile of Israel in the Jewish school curriculum, and intensify the study of Modern Hebrew. They could encourage more students to participate in work 84 William Goldfarb, “The Goals of Jewish Education—A Layman’s Point of View,” Jewish Education 34, 4 (1964), 230–237. Although Goldfarb’s article was published in July 1964, it was originally delivered as an address to a Cleveland Bureau of Jewish Education dinner on June 3, 1963. 85 Reprinted in Ben Halpern, The American Jew: A Zionist Analysis (New York: Schocken, 1983), 11–33. 86 See Will Herberg’s analysis of contemporary American Judaism in Protestant-Catholic-Jew, 27–45, 186–195. 87 See especially Pilch, “Education for Halutziut,” 80, and Goldfarb, 236. 88 Actually, Dinin’s editorial amounted to a (willful?) misreading of Hertzberg, who was much less certain about how to interpret American Jewry’s response. See Arthur Hertzberg, “Israel and American Jewry,” Commentary (August 1967), 73. Jewish Education and American Jewish Education, Part III 57 Downloaded By: [Krasner, Jonathan] At: 06:27 3 November 2008 and/or study programs in Israel and in organized touring trips. But he also cautioned against unrealistic expectations among educators about the longterm impact of the War on aliyah, even as he held out the possibility that Israel could become a magnet for disillusioned Jewish youth: The restless, rebellious Jewish youth may come to see and to serve for shorter periods of time, but whether they will ultimately settle in Israel will depend on the kind of society they will find there. They will want a kind of society different from that in which they live, a society which they find so frustrating and aimless, and far from the Great Society envisaged by the President of the United States. In its anguished struggles for sheer survival . . . Israel has not had the time to give sufficient thought to the shape of the new society emerging in the new State. It needs a new vision of the City of God and the City of Man, a vision which will enlist the loyalty and the dedication of youth all over the world seeking a new way and a new life. But even if there is a significant immigration of Jewish youth from the Western countries to Israel, the vast majority of the Jewish people [will] still remain outside of Israel.89 Dinin, whose passion for social justice and tolerance for protest-style politics can be traced at least as far back as we have 1930s, evinced sympathy for the idealism of the young radicals. But, as we have seen, others appeared less sanguine about the radicalization of the civil rights and antiVietnam War movements and the general tenor of the counterculture. If many educators were favorably predisposed toward intensifying Israel education, there seems to be little doubt that fears about the alienation of Jewish youth helped to reinforce the receptive climate.90 Organized initiatives to intensify Israel education in American Jewish schools took on greater urgency on the eve of the June war. The increasingly tense geopolitical environment in the Middle East in late May 1967 and the concomitant elevation of American Jews’ collective anxiety level induced NCJE members to form an ad hoc Emergency Committee of Jewish Educators devoted to mobilizing colleagues for volunteer and aid initiatives, and developing a comprehensive program to mainstream the teaching of Israel in the school curriculum. A suggestion to set up a permanent national Commission on Teaching about Israel in America, offered in the war’s immediate aftermath by Azriel Eisenberg, executive director of the World Council on Jewish Education, won enthusiastic approval. The envisioned Commission, tasked with creating a comprehensive program for the teaching of Israel in American Jewish schools, and producing a range of curricula, textbooks, teachers’ guides, and other teaching materials, was to operate under the 89 Samuel Dinin, “Editorial Comments: The New Face of Israel and Jewish Education,” Jewish Education 37, 4 (1967), 147–148, quote on p. 148; See Hertzberg, 1967. 90 See for example Irwin Soref, “The Challenge of Israel,” Jewish Education 39, 4 (1969), 48. Downloaded By: [Krasner, Jonathan] At: 06:27 3 November 2008 58 Journal of Jewish Education aegis of the American Association for Jewish Education. But efforts to get the project underway foundered due to difficulties in raising an $180,000 start-up budget. When AAJE Executive Director Isaac Toubin reported on the lack of progress at the May 1968 Annual NCJE Conference, delegates, including Eisenberg, registered their deep dismay by unanimously endorsing a resolution charging the NCJE’s Executive Committee to “take prompt action” in the event that the Commission’s work was not in progress by September 1968.91 Given the propensity for NCJE initiatives to whither on the vine, the momentum behind organized efforts to intensify Israel education was striking. Indeed, by the fall of 1968, the Commission was up and running and, although it was continually plagued by budgetary problems before it became dormant around 1972, managed to produce a series of guidelines about the teaching of Israel and a set of units on Israel suitable for advanced junior high school and high school students. Although the Commission was only one of a number of initiatives undertaken by various agencies (both Israeli and American Jewish) and denominational groups to stimulate the growth of Israel education in this period, it helped to set the agenda, thereby contributing to the most significant transformation of the religious school curricula since the introduction of the Hebraic curriculum.92 Among the Commission’s more noteworthy achievements was the drafting of a Statement of Objectives, which was approved by the Governing Council of the AAJE in May 1969, and subsequently, by its affiliate agencies. The statement was published in a special issue of Jewish Education devoted to Israel in American Jewish Education, timed to coincide with the Israel’s twenty-fifth anniversary in the spring of 1973. It singled out five basic goals, including helping students “to consider favorably the various opportunities of aliyah to Israel.”93 Given that the American Zionist movement historically had eschewed calls to include aliyah among its stated aims, and that only a few months earlier, even the strongest proponents of teaching for halutziut among Jewish educators acknowledged that their efforts were probably quixotic, the adoption of a pro-aliyah plank by a group of lay leaders was significant. Not because it signaled a change in the behavior patterns of American Jews—in fact, modest increases in the rate of aliyah from the United States in the war’s immediate aftermath were short-lived—but the lifting of a taboo. To be sure, the political and social climate of the 1960s facilitated American Jews’ receding fears about charges of dual loyalties. But it was the Six Day War that elevated aliyah to the realm of possibility, albeit a distant one, for most American Jews. If educators who supported education for 91 Alvin Schiff, “Israel in American Jewish Schools: A Study of Curriculum Realities,” Jewish Education 38, 4 (1968), 23; “Proceedings of the 42nd Annual Conference of the National Council for Jewish Education,” Jewish Education 38, 4 (1968), 50–51. 92 Abraham Gannes, “Israel’s Role in American Jewish Education,” Jewish Education 42, 2–3 (1973), 8. 93 Commission on Teaching About Israel in America of the AAJE, “Israel and the Jewish School in America: A Statement of Objectives,” Jewish Education 42, 2–3, 69–70. Jewish Education and American Jewish Education, Part III 59 Downloaded By: [Krasner, Jonathan] At: 06:27 3 November 2008 halutziut still faced a resistant American Jewish public, mainstream agencies and commissions were sufficiently emboldened by both the war and American Jews’ reactions to it to embrace aliyah as an educational goal.94 In the years between the 1967 and 1973 wars, the appropriateness of education for aliyah remained a hotly debated topic in the pages of Jewish Education. An indication of its sensitivity can be gleaned from the 1969 Statement’s carefully worded elaboration on its objectives, which purposely obfuscates on the question of “the appropriate age” to introduce a discussion of aliyah, and adds: The needs of Israel and the needs of the people in America require that we explore the critical question of how the individual Jew can best fulfill himself—whether by the enrichment of his Jewish life in America and/or by aliyah to Israel. Anything less than such a frank exploration of these options and opportunities may produce some warm sentiments about Israel as peripheral decoration both to the school curriculum and to life itself—but little more.95 For the older generation of educators, the contours of the debate remained virtually unchanged since the interwar period. Supporters of education for halutziut, including long-time adherents to the doctrine of shelilat ha-galut (negation of the Exile) like the former director of the Jewish Agency’s Department of Education and Culture, Samuel Blumenfield, wrote frankly of their lack of faith in a vital American Jewish future. If much of Blumenfield’s argument had a familiar ring, so, too, did Dinin’s insistence in a June 1968 article that the primary purposes of the Jewish school must be the socialization of American Jewish children into the American Jewish community and the cultivation of “Jewish values.” While eager to see the intensification of formal and informal Israel education, Dinin insisted that Israel could not become the centerpiece of the Jewish school curriculum, as some of his colleagues were demanding. The younger generation was hardly of a single mind. But what distinguished many of the supporters of encouraging aliyah in the schools from the likes of Blumenfield was their unwillingness to ground their stance in a “Negation of the Exile” ideology.96 Jewish Education’s fervently Zionist editors and readers played a significant role in catapulting the study of Israel to a desideratum in American Jewish schools. Whereas in the late 1950s few schools taught Israel as a 94 Schiff, 23. Commission on Teaching About Israel in America of the AAJE, 70. 96 Samuel Blumenfield, “Israel and Jewish Education in the Diaspora,” Jewish Education 38, 4 (1968), 29–30; Samuel Dinin, “The Role of Israel in American Jewish Education,” Jewish Education 38, 3 (1968), 6–11. For a “pro-aliyah” education argument from the younger group, see for example, Schiff, 23–24. For an argument against encouraging aliyah in the schools, see Sara Feinstein, “The Challenge of Israel: Comment,” Jewish Education 39, 4 (1969), 50–52. 95 Downloaded By: [Krasner, Jonathan] At: 06:27 3 November 2008 60 Journal of Jewish Education separate subject, by 1968 the number had jumped to 50%. A decade later, Israel studies in the Jewish school had become the norm.97 But the “great aliyah debate” in Jewish Education was something of a red herring. Rhetorical support for aliyah within the organized Jewish community was evidence of the shifting concern from adjustment to survival; yet, at its core it was a symbolic gesture. Ultimately, Israel served a two-fold purpose in the school curriculum, as it did in American Jews’ civil religion: It was “a symbol and a source of renewed Jewish vitality” and a focus for the preoccupation with survival. The educators’ strong emotional attachment to Israel may have contributed to an initial misreading of the American Jewish public’s reaction to the May crisis and the June war. As Arthur Hertzberg recognized as early as August 1967, in the article enthusiastically cited by Dinin, American Jews’ emotional outpouring in May–June 1967, on one level, was only tangentially about Israel. Instead, it was all about the Holocaust. May’s anxiety about Israel’s very survival followed by June’s lightning victory over the Arabs was a cathartic experience for many who at first were seized by the determination to never let “it” happen again, then suddenly unburdened of the toxic image of Jewish powerlessness during World War II.98 Hertzberg’s hunch was confirmed by sociologist Marshall Sklare’s early 1968 interviews with Jewish residents in suburban Chicago. Sklare found that the May crisis and the June 1967 war had little or no “real impact on the levels of pro-Israel support” and concluded that, “the response of May–June was not a response to Israel in the conventional sense but rather a response to the events of Jewish history from the 1930s onward.”99 Only in the 1970s did educators like Michael Rosenak, Jack Cohen, Barry Chazan, and Walter Ackerman begin to seriously problematize the teaching the “real” Israel versus the “symbolic” Israel. HOLOCAUST EDUCATION As in the case of Israel education, the thrust toward introducing Holocaust education in the Jewish schools was occasioned by current events, but deeply driven by a communal agenda that by the early 1960s had shifted from socialization to “identity” building. Early articles on Holocaust education in Jewish Education testified to the impact of the 1961 trial in Israel of Adolf Eichmann through multiple references and allusions. Also significant in spurring the public conversation was the spate of books on the Holocaust, both academic and popular, published in the United States in the early 97 See Alvin Schiff, “Israel in American Jewish Schools in the 1960’s,” Jewish Education 52, 4 (1984– 1985), 5–14; Barry Chazan, “Israel in the Jewish Schools in the Mid-70’s,” George Pollack, “Israel in American Jewish Schools in the 1980’s,” Jewish Education 52, 4(1984–1985), 5–14. 98 Hertzberg, 72. 99 Marshall Sklare, “Lakeville and Israel: The Six Day War and Its Aftermath,” reprinted in Marshall Sklare, Observing America’s Jews (Hanover, NH: Brandeis/University Press of New England, 1993), 126–127. Downloaded By: [Krasner, Jonathan] At: 06:27 3 November 2008 Jewish Education and American Jewish Education, Part III 61 1960s, particularly Elie Wiesel’s Night (1960), Raul Hilberg’s The Destruction of the European Jews (1961) and Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963). By the mid-late 1960s, Wiesel had achieved near iconic status within Jewish educators’ circles as the emblematic survivor and a voice of moral conscience. According to the proceedings of the 1968 NCJE Conference, the audience sat spellbound as the author read excerpts from his books and spoke of the Nazi Holocaust and the plight of Soviet Jewry.100 Wiesel played an integral role in fashioning a rationale for Holocaust education along “identity” lines; but he was preaching to a willing choir. What united virtually every magazine article on Holocaust education in the 1960s was the conviction that the shoah should not be taught merely as an historical event. Lessons must be distilled that would bolster students’ self-esteem, their connection to the Jewish people, or at the very least, do no harm to their faith. It is difficult not to read these early articles in light of the contemporary historiographic controversy over Holocaust consciousness in the postwar era. The traditional position, staked out in recent years by Peter Novick and Alan Mintz, among others, traces a “shift from silence to salience” of the Holocaust in American Jewish life. “In the depths of the 1940s and 1950s, at a time when the term Holocaust as we now use it had not been invented, when survivors were silent and stigmatized, and when the destruction of European Jewry did not figure in public discourse, who could have predicted that the Holocaust would move so forcefully to the center of American culture?” Mintz marveled.101 But other scholars have been chipping away at the popular notion that a wave of amnesia about the genocide overtook American Jews in the late 1940s, only to lift with the Eichmann trial or the June 1967 war. They complain that scholars have accepted the conventional narrative as a truism without examining the empirical evidence. Upon citing numerous examples of Holocaust commemoration and discourse from the postwar era, historian Hasia Diner concluded that, “American Jews in the late 1940s and the 1950s, exactly the years historians have claimed that they sat quietly and refused to acknowledge the Holocaust, found opportunities to do exactly what they supposedly did not do.”102 How does the discourse in Jewish Education contribute to this scholarly debate? On one level, it is certainly significant that Holocaust education was not discussed in the magazine until 1963, the same year that the NCJE 100 Leon Spotts, “Proceedings of the 42nd Annual Conference of the National Council for Jewish Education,” Jewish Education 38, 4 (1968), 49. Elie Wiesel, Night. Translated by Stella Rodway (New York: Hill & Wang, 1960); Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews (Chicago: Quadrangle, 1961); Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York, Viking, 1964). 101 Alan Mintz, Popular Culture and the Shaping of Holocaust Memory in America (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2001), 3. Mintz develops his argument about the role played by popular culture in spreading Holocaust awareness on pp. 3–35. See also Peter Novick, The Holocaust in American Life (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999). 102 Hasia Diner, “Post-World-War-II American Jewry and the Confrontation with Catastrophe,” American Jewish History 91, 3–4 (2003), 466. See also Michael Staub, Torn At the Roots: The Crisis of Jewish Liberalism in Postwar America (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002). Downloaded By: [Krasner, Jonathan] At: 06:27 3 November 2008 62 Journal of Jewish Education first devoted a session to the subject at its annual conference. One of the presenters, Los Angeles BJE consultant Zalman Ury, categorically stated that, “[t]here was a time, immediately after the Catastrophe and the ensuing decade, when lay people and even professionals refrained from discussing the shoah, let alone teach it to our children. Under such conditions it would have been rather difficult to teach this subject in our schools.” Ury went on to recognize a recent change of attitude “as witnessed by the willingness of many educators to incorporate this tragic event in the curriculum of our schools.” Another conference speaker, Herzl Foundation program administrator Sara Feinstein, was even more specific in pinpointing the relatively swift shift in communal attitude toward teaching about the Holocaust to the Eichmann trial. Feinstein recalled that upon returning to the United States from a study program at Yad Vashem in 1959, she initiated multiple, futile meetings with Jewish communal and educational leaders representing the three major religious movements and a wide array of agencies and organizations, in which she tried to get the Holocaust onto the educational agenda. A couple of years later, she explained, the reception was entirely different.103 Based on the educators’ accounts, it is fair to say that “the Holocaust” as a discrete subject with its attendant concerns was born in the early 1960s. Nevertheless, one should not conclude from Ury and Feinstein’s recollections that, prior to 1961, the shoah was ignored in Jewish schools. A variety of widely disseminated children’s magazine stories, textbooks, and other educational material from the late 1940s and 1950s dealt with various aspects of the Holocaust. At least some Hebrew schools also held annual memorial programs commemorating the anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. Anecdotal information also suggests that by the late 1950s, reading Anne Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl was a virtual rite of passage for many young Jewish adolescents.104 Nor was the shoah ignored in the pages of Jewish Education. Once word of the Final Solution reached the American Jewish public in late 1942, the editors and other NCJE members used the 103 Zalman Ury, “The ‘Shoah’ and the Jewish School: Response,” Jewish Education 34, 3 (1964), 168; Sara Feinstein, “The ‘Shoah’ and the Jewish School: Response,” Jewish Education 34, 3 (1964), 165–166. 104 Rona Sheramy, ““Resistance and War”: The Holocaust in American Jewish Education, 1945–1960,” American Jewish History 91, 2 (2003), 287–313; Jonathan Krasner, “Constructing Collective Memory: The Re-Envisioning of Eastern Europe as Seen Through American Jewish Textbooks,” Polin 19 (forthcoming, November 2006). An English translation of Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl was first published in the United States by Doubleday in 1952. The Diary was adapted into a Broadway stage play by Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett in 1955, and a film, directed by George Stevens and starring Millie Perkins, Shelley Winters, Lou Jacobi, and Ed Wynn (Twentieth Century Fox, 1959). The book’s popularity among Jewish teens in the late 1950s is suggested by an informal survey, conducted by the author December 2005 through January 2006, of 20 women and men in their late fifties and early sixties, currently residing in the New York, Boston, and Cincinnati metropolitan areas. Some critics, including Robert Alter, have argued that the Diary‘s popularity in the 1950s stemmed in large part from its relatively antiseptic view of the Holocaust. While this argument may have validity, it does not negate the role of the book, stage play, and film in promoting awareness and discussion of the Nazi genocide. See Robert Alter, “An Obsession with Anne Frank: Meyer Levin and the ‘Diary,’” New Republic, December 4, 1995, pp. 38–42. Downloaded By: [Krasner, Jonathan] At: 06:27 3 November 2008 Jewish Education and American Jewish Education, Part III 63 magazine to help mobilize their colleagues, encouraging organized protests and other awareness-raising activities in the schools. In the genocide’s aftermath, they meditated on its implications for the American Jewish community and on the American Jews psyche. Moreover, the discerning reader could detect the Holocaust’s obliquely acknowledged shadow in articles devoted to tolerance education and “intergroup relations.”105 Still, precious little is known about how the subject actually was approached in classrooms, summer camps, and other educational venues. It can be surmised from the 1960s articles, however that there was probably little uniformity of approach; it also is fair to conclude that the post-Eichmann educational ventures were of an entirely different order of magnitude. The 1963 NCJE Conference session was scheduled to coincide with the twentieth anniversary observances of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. Over the next year, Jewish Education published nine articles on Holocaust education, including the conference papers, two editorials, a book review of Hilberg’s The Destruction of the European Jews, and an address by Rabbi Harold Schulweis of Oakland, California. The burst of attention alone attests to the validity of viewing the early 1960s as a turning point. In their diversity of approaches, the articles underscore the novelty of Holocaust education and contextualize discussions of content and pedagogy within the wider discourse reflecting the dawning of Holocaust consciousness among American Jews: How, where, and when should the Holocaust be commemorated? Can and should one look to Jewish history and tradition to make meaning out of the horrific events? What, if anything, does the shoah teach us about our humanity? Our Jewishness? For Judah Pilch, who delivered the lead paper at the 1963 conference, the cosmic significance of the destruction of European Jewry to Jewish history and destiny demanded that its commemoration become institutionalized on the Jewish calendar. He urged the across-the-board acceptance of the Israeli Knesset’s designation, in 1959, of 27 Nisan as Yom Ha-shoah V’ha-gevurah, Holocaust and Heroism Memorial Day, and endorsed other liturgical and ritual innovations, including the breaking of two glasses under the wedding canopy, in commemoration of both the “hurban [destruction] of old” and the twentieth century hurban. “Individuals and groups become conscious of the meaning of historic events through the observances which make for a strong bond with the past,” Pilch asserted. His interactions with American Jewish youth solidified this conviction, as their knowledge of Jewish history and life was shaped primarily by the rituals and ceremonies associated with holidays and life-cycle events. “I submit that remembering the events of the last half a century is as important as the effort not to forget 105 See Jonathan Krasner, “Jewish Education and American Jewish Education, Part I,” Journal of Jewish Education 71, 2 (2005), 174–175; Jonathan Krasner, “Jewish Education and American Jewish Education, Part II,” Journal of Jewish Education 71, 3 (2005), 289–294. Downloaded By: [Krasner, Jonathan] At: 06:27 3 November 2008 64 Journal of Jewish Education the tragic experiences of the remote past,” he insisted.106 Zalman Ury, in contrast, was more wary about modifying the traditional calendar and instead supported the position espoused in some Orthodox circles that an already fixed fast day, like 10 Tevet, should be the expropriated to commemorate the Nazi genocide. “Neither stone monuments nor even special days of commemoration will [e]nsure the perpetuation of the memory of our six million k’doshim (martyrs), but education most certainly will.”107 Pilch and Ury’s disagreement was based on more than religious propriety. It signaled a fundamental difference in the way each located meaning for the Holocaust within the corpus of Jewish tradition. For Pilch, the magnitude of the shoah and its proximity to the creation of modern Israel amounted to nothing less than an iteration of the age-old Jewish metatheme of “from bondage to deliverance”: “It was in these last three decades that Jewish suffering was the greatest in history, and that Jewish yearning for deliverance was finally realized. Memory of the past transformed despair into hope, darkness into light,” he wrote. Linking the shoah and the Jewish restoration to the ancestral homeland to the historic bondage–deliverance cycle exemplified by holidays like Passover and Purim strengthened Pilch’s argument for institutionalizing their commemoration. The Nazis, he contended, were a modern incarnation of the Israel’s biblical nemesis Amalek, whose baseless hatred, God commanded, must be seared into Jewish memory. It also alleviated on some level the need to struggle with the why of the Holocaust. In the Bible, the wandering Israelites did nothing to provoke or warrant the genocidal intentions of the Amalekites, just as Haman’s decree against the Jews of Persia was equally without foundation.108 Ury, likewise, implored educators to treat the shoah “within the framework of our essential theological concepts” and “the nature of Jewish existence.”109 He too emphasized the concept of netzah yisrael, the eternality of Israel. But, unlike Pilch, he also invoked traditional beliefs about reward and punishment: A lesson can and should be learned from the shoah. Man must train himself to ask as did the Joseph’s brothers: ‘What is this that G-d hath done unto us?’ . . . All the admonitions contained in the tokhaha [the Deuteronomistic curses] have been fulfilled in good measure throughout Jewish history and particularly through the shoah. Yet, we have somehow refused to draw the logical conclusion that it is G-d that is beckoning to us through flame and fury to return to Him.110 106 Judah Pilch, “The ‘Shoah’ and the Jewish School,” Jewish Education 34, 3 (1964), 162–165. Ury, 169. 108 Pilch, 163–164. 109 Ury, 169. 110 Ury, 170, 172. 107 Downloaded By: [Krasner, Jonathan] At: 06:27 3 November 2008 Jewish Education and American Jewish Education, Part III 65 Given Ury’s penchant for viewing the Holocaust as part of the continuum of Jewish history, it is not surprising that he discouraged teaching the Holocaust as a separate subject. Pilch, on the other hand, who viewed the midtwentieth century as a moment of rupture, the at once terrible culmination and awesome shattering of galut [the Exile], insisted that the Holocaust (and Zionism/Israel studies) deserved a special and separate place in the Jewish school curriculum. For the student whose worldview was shaped on the anvil of modernity, neither Pilch nor Ury’s wrestlings with theodicy provided much satisfaction. Ury probably realized this, for he also included a couple of incongruous lines about human freedom of choice, designed to absolve God of culpability for the Holocaust. Writing in a similar vein and with greater conviction, Harold Scheulweis declared: “It is not easy these days to speak for man. It is easier to believe in God than to believe that man is in His image.” Intent upon initiating a process of “constructive repentance,” Schulweis devoted much of his address to recovering the “spark[s] of human decency” in “this period of impenetrable darkness.” The prophetic exhortation to “defend the honor of the father together with the honor of the son” demanded the uncovering of evidence of the human capacity to ascend “but little lower than God himself.”111 What united the contributors to Jewish Education was an eagerness to find “lessons” in the shoah. Sara Feinstein was blunt: “Any Jewish educator who can let the savage night pass without taking some personal lesson from it is not equipped to approach this topic.”112 All agreed that raising the level of Holocaust consciousness among Jewish youth could potentially strengthen their sense of identity. Perhaps, anticipating historian Yosef Yerushalmi’s observation that in the modern era, which has “witness[ed] a sharp break in the continuity of Jewish living and an ever-growing decay of Jewish group memory . . . history becomes what it had never been before— the faith of the fallen Jew,”113 Judah Pilch insisted that “if we fail to impress our children with the Jewish struggle for equality in the immediate past and with the shoah, the marginality of their lives as Jews will become greater from year to year, and their descendants may have little or no concern for their people’s future.”114 But the authors also feared that, poorly handled, Holocaust education just as effectively could promote feelings of Jewish alienation. “The problem of making the Jewish child feel part of his group in joy as well as in sorrow, is indeed the educational issue of our times,” Feinstein wrote. Jewish young people, warned Schulweis, do not want to 111 Ury, 171; Harold Schulweis, “The Bias Against Man,” Jewish Education 34, 1 (1963), 9. Feinstein, 167. 113 Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1982), 86. 114 Pilch, 163. 112 Downloaded By: [Krasner, Jonathan] At: 06:27 3 November 2008 66 Journal of Jewish Education feel a sense of resignation about so-called “Jewish fate.” They recoil at the notion that “suffering is the badge of Jewish identity,” and often “seek to break the ‘curse’ through passive acts of non-identification.”115 There was widespread agreement that in order to be effective Holocaust education must stress the many acts of Jewish physical and spiritual resistance in the face of the Nazi terror. A poster from the Bialystok Ghetto, dating from the eve of its liquidation, publicizing a celebration to mark the borrowing of the 100,000th book from the ghetto’s library should be studied alongside the text of the final letter of Warsaw Ghetto fighter Mordecai Anielewicz. Feinstein was an early proponent of the prominent use of documents when teaching about the Final Solution and Jewish resistance. “It really is the only path of truth that we have in an era of falsification, of deception and of fraud, that constituted the Nazi operation.” She also stressed the importance of studying eastern European Jewish life and culture prior to the war, alongside the events of the Second World War. “The best commemoration that any community or school can offer the victims of the Nazi Holocaust is to study one of the 25,000 kehillot [Jewish communities] that were destroyed,” she stated.116 Of course, efforts to use inspirational history in difficult times as a balm for the damaged young Jewish psyche predated the 1960s. In the 1930s, Horace Kallen advocated the teaching of Jewish history for similar purposes in the pages of the magazine when he feared the nefarious effects of antisemitism on Jewish self-esteem. Likewise, as the Nazi reign of terror gained momentum in the late-1930s, textbook editor Emanuel Gamoran argued that writers had a special responsibility to “give courage to our young people.” But, if this trend seemed to crest in the early-mid 1940s, it remained a powerful subtext in many of the educational initiatives surrounding the 1954 American Jewish Tercentenary, and welled up again, with new force, in the Holocaust and Israel education of the 1960s and 1970s as educators battled against the prevalent and disturbing image of Jews herded to the gas chambers like sheep to the slaughter.117 115 Feinstein, “The ‘Shoah’ and the Jewish School,” 165; Schulweis, 7. Feinstein, 167–168. Both Feinstein and Pilch were early creators of Holocaust teaching materials. In 1962, Feinstein published under the auspices of the JEC of New York, Flame and Fury, a booklet intended to aid teachers in creating commemoration ceremonies for Holocaust and Heroism Memorial Day and designing Holocaust curricula for their classrooms. As director of the AAJE’s National Curriculum Research Institute, Pilch edited and published the first full-fledged American Jewish textbook on the Holocaust, The Jewish Catastrophe in Europe (1968). 117 Krasner, “Jewish Education and American Jewish Education, Part I,” 165–175; Jonathan Krasner, “Representations of Self and Other in American Jewish History and Social Studies Schoolbooks: An Exploration of the Changing Shape of American Jewish Identity,” Ph.D. dissertation (Brandeis University, 2002), 387–388, 298–316; Rona Sheramy, “Defining Lessons: The Holocaust in American Jewish Education.” Ph.D. dissertation (Brandeis University, 2001), ch. 1–2. Jonathan Krasner, “Teaching Israel to American Jews: An Analysis of Religious School Textbooks, 1948–2003,” Unpublished paper, delivered at the Midwest Colloquium in Jewish Studies, April 27, 2003. 116 Jewish Education and American Jewish Education, Part III 67 To some extent, educators’ emphasis on spiritual as well as physical resistance in the 1960s represented a departure from the earliest shoahrelated children’s stories and teaching materials, which focused primarily on heroes like Anielewicz and parachutist Hannah Szenes.118 A few educators, like Ury, even put a primacy on spiritual resistance: Downloaded By: [Krasner, Jonathan] At: 06:27 3 November 2008 Youth that has no faith in a G-d and His Torah recognizes only one form of heroism, namely, physical resistance and retribution. . . . Our youth must be taught that there are other forms of heroism that are superior to physical strength. . . . Jewish tradition promulgates a higher form of heroism—kiddush hashem [the sanctification of God’s name]. . . . The Jewish teacher must be able to transmit this concept to his students, that any Jew who was murdered because of his Jewishness is a kadosh and a martyr. Martyrdom, he believed, amounted to “a higher form of heroism.” But the pinnacle of kiddush hashem, according to Ury, was the Jews’ resistance of Nazi attempts at their dehumanization. “If we teach the shoah this way, need we be apologetic about the lack of mass resistance? Most obviously not. For there was the greatest show of mass resistance—a resistance of a higher order . . .”119 Ury warned against teaching about the Holocaust “with an emotionalism that precludes any objectivity whatsoever,” for fear that it would lead to distortion and oversentimentalism.120 But in truth, each of the authors, Ury included, viewed the Holocaust through their own political and theological lenses. Read together, the articles exemplified an emerging divide within the Jewish community between universalists and particularists, those who derived from the Holocaust a cautionary message for humanity about the consequences of silence in the face of injustice, and those who were, first and foremost, concerned about ensuring Jewish survival. While both camps were committed to using Holocaust education to bolster Jewish identity, one charted a path guided by the belief that Israel’s role was to be “a light unto nations,” while the other was confirmed in its conviction that Israel was and must remain “a people apart.” The former category included Schulweis, who viewed tikkun olam, the repairing of the world, as the highest Jewish calling, the ultimate expression of “the theistic humanism and activism of our tradition.” He believed that in educating Jew and non-Jew alike about the Holocaust it was of utmost importance to recount the stories of the so-called “Righteous Gentiles,” those non-Jews who defied the Nazis and rescued Jews, often at great risk to themselves: 118 Rona Sheramy, “Defining Lessons,” 25–54. Ury, 170, 171. 120 Ury, 169. 119 68 Journal of Jewish Education Downloaded By: [Krasner, Jonathan] At: 06:27 3 November 2008 Our first temptation may be to condemn the conspiracy of silence which insulated the ghettos and crematoria from the conscience of men, to implicate the nations of the world. For who indeed is guiltless? But consider both the wisdom and morality of such an attack. . . . Wisdom calls for a moral otology: How to make one hear the unpleasant truth without destroying his sensitivity to the still, small voice of conscience and hope. . . . The acts of these hasidei umot ha-olam, these righteous non-Jews, lend a needed dimension to the revelations of atrocity. The purpose of the telling is neither to sadden, nor frighten, nor embitter the young, but to strengthen them with a mature understanding of man; his limitations and his potentialities.121 In 1963, Schulweis founded the Institute for the Righteous Acts (later reborn as the Jewish Foundation for the Righteous). Feinstein, too, sought to advance in Holocaust education a two-pronged message that balanced identification with the Jewish heritage and concern for human welfare. Delivering her remarks only months after the 1963 March on Washington, she believed that the lessons of the Holocaust were particularly germane to the African American civil rights struggle. Noting that Blacks, not Jews, were the targets of most neo-Nazi activity in the United States, she asserted that fascism and racism was not a peculiarly Jewish problem, but a human problem. “Any awarenesses, any insights that we are able to gain from the Nazi era help us to understand our own times—to strengthen democracy and contribute to the welfare of future generations.”122 Ury and Pilch were in the latter category, and both wholeheartedly subscribed to a theocentric conception of Jewish history, agreeing with historian Yitzhak Fritz Baer that the Jews stood outside of “the realm of all causal history,” that Jewish history operated under the laws of God rather than those of nature.123 Pilch, striking a markedly different pose than Schulweis, went as far as suggesting that Holocaust education “may even be one of the best antidotes to intermarriage; for in dealing with non-Jews we should remember their indifferent attitude to our woes in the days of the shoah, which should be forgiven, but never forgotten.” Teaching about the Holocaust, he stated, “makes for a better appreciation of what makes a Jew a Jew.” Ury saw the Holocaust as an indictment of Western civilization, and suggested that educators utilize it as a mechanism for cultivating within Jewish youth a more critical approach to American values and mores. Why, he wondered, should a people with their own venerable tradition, remain in thrall to such a flawed culture?124 121 Schulweis, 14, 10–11. Feinstein, 166. 123 Baer quoted in Lucy Dawidowicz, What is the Use of Jewish History? (New York: Schocken, 1992), 18–19; See Yitzhak F. Baer, Galut (New York: Schocken, 1947), translated by Robert Warshaw. 124 Pilch, 164; Ury, 171. 122 Jewish Education and American Jewish Education, Part III 69 Attempts by editors and other contributors to hash out a survivalist agenda for Jewish education effectively turned the magazine into a front in a wider debate among intellectuals, professionals, and lay leaders over Jewish liberalism. As historian Michael Staub discovered, in this dispute few issues succeeded in generating the passions of all sides than the use (and perceived misuse) of the Holocaust.125 Downloaded By: [Krasner, Jonathan] At: 06:27 3 November 2008 THE MIXED BLESSING OF FEDERATION ENGAGEMENT The shifting communal agenda from adjustment to survival had deep implications for the relationship between Jewish educators and the Federation system. Arguably, the Benderly Boys’ greatest frustration was the perceived cold shoulder that they received from communal leaders and professionals. A cynic might argue that 30 years of proposals, entreaties and exhortations in Jewish Education about the need for community responsibility for Jewish education amounted to little more than spitting in the wind. Of course, that would be a gross exaggeration. More accurately, Jewish educators and communal leaders were often at loggerheads because they lacked a shared vision of the role for the organized Jewish community. Federations and community chests were conceived as social welfare organizations, vehicles for noblesse oblige, which allowed the wealthy minority to care for the health and security needs of the impoverished immigrant masses. To the extent that Federations were involved in Jewish education, it was largely to ensure that no child was turned away from school because of an inability to pay the tuition. Community funded school systems and school grants were indirect ways of meeting this basic need. Funding for bureau activities like school consultation, teacher training, high school programming, and educational publishing was justified along similar lines. Federations in larger communities funneled money to the schools through bureaus in order to ensure for school quality control. In tough economic times, the logic behind Federation’s raison d’etre dictated severe cuts in educational funding in order to sustain more basic needs like food, medical care, and shelter. New York Kehillah veterans Judah Magnes, Mordecai Kaplan, Samson Benderly, and their disciples had a much more expansive conception of the role of the Federations. For better or worse, they recognized Federation as heir to the Kehillah, and viewed the promotion of culture and education— the content of Jewish life and its perpetuation—as integral to its mission. This basic disagreement resulted in much misunderstanding and accounted for the bitter mistrust that many stalwart educators like Dushkin and Israel 125 On the larger debate over Jewish liberalism see Staub, 2002. Downloaded By: [Krasner, Jonathan] At: 06:27 3 November 2008 70 Journal of Jewish Education Chipkin harbored for communal service professionals and lay leaders, whom they regarded as amaratzim—Jewish know-nothings.126 By the late 1950s, however, Federation leaders were re-envisioning the role of their organizations in ways that effectively brought them closer to the Magnes-Kaplan-Benderly vision. As Jonathan Woocher explains, the embourgeoisement of the Jewish community effectively erased the distinction between contributors and beneficiaries. In the words of one Federation’s annual report, the very meaning of the term “welfare” had shifted: “Until a generation ago, welfare service was something the well-to-do provided for the poor. Nowadays welfare services is something that all of us provide for ourselves.”127 There were other forces at work in encouraging this metamorphosis. In the wake of the Holocaust, American Jewry as the largest and wealthiest community, felt an added obligation both to recover what had been lost and to engage in cultural renewal and regeneration. Increasing government involvement in welfare activities, a trend that continued with Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society in the 1960s, also facilitated the shift in emphasis.128 Federation work became more about creating Jewish meaning; philanthropy became an “instrument of Jewish self-expression and development for the community as a whole.” In 1960, the Council of Jewish Federations and Welfare Funds (CJFWF) founded the National Foundation for Jewish Culture. That same year, at the General Assembly, CJFWF executive director Philip Bernstein publicly affirmed Federations’ commitment to Jewish education. As communal leaders in the early 1960s were influenced by the same social trends that so alarmed Jewish educators, what some might call the “Judaization” trend within the American Jewish polity accelerated. According to Woocher, by the mid-1960s “the issue of Jewish identification and commitment—especially of young Jews—was a fixture at General Assemblies.” Federations had embraced the shift in community emphasis from adjustment to survival.129 126 My treatment here is based primarily on Jonathan Woocher’s treatment in Sacred Survival: The Civil Religion of American Jews (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 22–62; Philip Bernstein, To Dwell in Unity: The Jewish Federation Movement in America Since 1960 (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1983), 107–110; Charles Zibbell, “Emerging Changes in Planning for Jewish Education,” Jewish Education 34, 1 (1963), 15–22; and Alexander Dushkin’s account of his interactions with Federation leaders over the years in Living Bridges. For the definitive book on the New York Kehillah, see Arthur Goren, New York Jews and the Quest for Community (New York: Columbia University Press, 1970). 127 Federation of Jewish Agencies of Greater Philadelphia Annual Report, 1965, quoted in Woocher, 53. 128 Arthur Goren, “A ‘Golden Decade’ for American Jews: 1945–1955,” in Jonathan Sarna (ed.), The American Jewish Experience, 2nd ed. (New York: Homes & Meier, 1997), 305; Charles Zibbell, “Emerging Changes in Planning for Jewish Education,” Jewish Education 34, 1 (1963), 15; Alexander Dushkin, “Fifty Years of American Jewish Education—Retrospect and Prospects,” Jewish Education 37, 1–2 (1967), 52–53. 129 Woocher, 52, 59. Downloaded By: [Krasner, Jonathan] At: 06:27 3 November 2008 Jewish Education and American Jewish Education, Part III 71 In the 1959 AAJE sponsored National Survey, Dushkin and Engelman recommended that Federations become more directly involved in educational planning both on the national and local levels.130 Thus, one might have expected educators to react ecstatically when, in 1965, the General Assembly resolved that CJFWF establish a committee for Jewish education planning. The AAJE consulted closely with CJFWF on the committee’s composition, and helped to craft its agenda, which initially focused on postelementary education and teacher recruitment and training. Instead, as AAJE executive director Isaac Toubin lamented, there was little acknowledgment or response from the bureaus. Toubin vented his frustration in a 1967 Jewish Education editorial. “What is significant about the CJFWF committee,” he emphasized, “is its sponsorship. And Jewish educators, as well as lay leaders of Bureaus of Jewish Education and congregational schools, would do well to take cognizance of the new spirit that prevails in community Federations and Welfare Funds.”131 The split between the national bureau and the local education agencies was attributable to a number of factors including the deeply ingrained distrust of Federation that permeated the culture of the bureaus. Many longtime educators resented the very idea of sitting around the policymaking table with (what they perceived to be) a bunch of amaratzim. There also was seething resentment against the Federations, in some quarters, because they refused to join the bureaus’ ongoing struggle against “the divisive denominationalism and congregational parochialism which threaten the integrity of the Jewish community.” Federation was perceived as a natural ally against the perceived threat of “rising imperialism, or clusters of imperialism” from the movements’ national educational commissions, seminaries, and regional educational offices. Walter Ackerman singled out ongoing bureau-synagogue antagonism as the most important challenge facing the central educational agencies, and implored his bureau colleagues to reconcile themselves to the realities of American Jewish life.132 The AAJE, meanwhile was heavily subsidized by the CJFWF. But AAJE leaders’ enthusiasm for a partnership between educators and CJFWF stemmed as well from the organizations’ shared community vision. As the AAJE’s Hyman Chanover explained, both organizations were forces for unity in Jewish life, champions of K’lal Yisrael, and, as such, counterweights to synagogue denominationalism. Chanover also admitted that Federation had proven itself to be a more potent and effectual force in Jewish life than the bureaus. If the bureaus were serious in their desire to promote change, they had best 130 Dushkin and Engelman, 17. Isaac Toubin, “The Council of Jewish Federations Committee on Jewish Education—An Appraisal,” Jewish Education 37, 3 (1967), 102. 132 Louis Kaplan, “Jewish Education and the Community,” Jewish Education 36, 1 (1965), 5–6; Walter Ackerman, “Comment,” Jewish Education 35, 3 (1965), 176–179. 131 72 Journal of Jewish Education Downloaded By: [Krasner, Jonathan] At: 06:27 3 November 2008 partner with Federation.133 What he and Toubin did not explicitly say was that if bureaus did not step up to the plate, they could be passed by. However, Toubin implied as much when urged bureaus to get off “the old tiresome treadmill” and become partners in the community planning process. [Bureaus] cannot wait until Federation’s devise their own schemes and then react to these schemes. They may not merely respond to congregational pressures that sometimes threaten to destroy communal effort. Bureaus must affirm their role and anticipate their problems in a concerted effort. Moreover, they must replace their insular preoccupation with a sense of national purpose. . . . The fact of the matter is that the Jewish community as a whole, is at last seized of the importance of Jewish education and there is a positive desire to accord to Jewish education a priority which it has long merited. In addition there is available, at last, to Jewish educators, a resource of top communal leadership which heretofore sought other more socially desirable offices of community leadership.134 But skeptical bureau directors countered that while Federation allocations to education were rising in real dollars, education was not receiving a significantly larger percentage of the overall pie than it had in previous decades. The largest subsidies continued to be earmarked for defense and welfare groups at the expense of education and culture. “One would think that the Jews of 1965 are the helpless immigrants of a half century ago, in need of social and economic relief instead of spiritual and cultural sustenance,” Samuel Blumenfield caustically remarked.135 Longtime CJFWF executive Charles Zibbell, who devoted much attention to promoting Federation-bureau cooperation, was at great pains to explain to educators that Federations’ consensus driven decision-making approach necessarily made any shift in funding priorities excruciatingly gradual. But, he added, that Federations recognized that education was a complex enterprise, much of which was controlled by local congregations. “Is it possible to do planning in a field crisscrossed with national competing ideologies, autonomous local congregations which proliferate without apparent study and operate with almost total anarchy?” he wondered aloud.136 Bread and butter issues aside, the deeper reason why the bureaus did not enthusiastically jump on the Federation bandwagon was that, reluctant as they were to admit it, they saw Federations’ newfound interest in Jewish education as a threat to their autonomy and even survival. Baltimore BJE 133 Hyman Chanover, “Central Organization of Jewish Education—A Concept and Mechanism,” Jewish Education 35, 4 (1965), 220–229. 134 Isaac Toubin, “Comments,” Jewish Education 35, 3 (1965), 192–193; Isaac Toubin, “The Council of Jewish Federations Committee on Jewish Education—An Appraisal,” 102. 135 Samuel Blumenfield, “Comments,” Jewish Education 35, 3 (1965), 181. 136 Zibbell, 15. Downloaded By: [Krasner, Jonathan] At: 06:27 3 November 2008 Jewish Education and American Jewish Education, Part III 73 executive director Louis Kaplan acknowledged the uneasiness in a joint meeting of educators and communal servants. Even as Federation leaders had accepted communal responsibility for Jewish education as a given, they were increasingly questioning the rationality of current bureau programs and wondering “if the real needs in Jewish education today are being met by a continuation of the current organization and expenditures,” he said.137 Bureau directors could point to ominous signs. In Pittsburgh, the Federation disbanded the Council of Jewish Education in 1960 and transferred to itself all of the bureau’s activities, with the exception of the College of Jewish Studies. In Buffalo, the Community Chest engineered the integration of the community Talmud Torah students into the congregational school system and then promptly chopped 11.5% from the Bureau of Jewish Education’s budget.138 More difficult to read was the situation in Los Angeles, where a proposal was pending to fold the L.A. bureau into a larger Federation sponsored Department of Education and Cultural Programs. The plan had the warm support of Mordecai Kaplan who welcomed it as a concrete indication of the Jewish Federation-Council of Greater Los Angeles’ commitment to educational and cultural programming as part of a survivalist agenda. But his disciple, Dinin, fearing a weakening of the bureau’s autonomy, was more circumspect.139 Fears were heightened in 1970, when the CJFWF set up an Institute for Jewish Life, independently from the existing web of institutions, to create experimental programs designed to strengthen the quality of American Jewish life. Of the 44 projects that the Institute undertook, 22 were devoted to strengthening Jewish education. Many were targeted to youth, including a Hebrew high school curriculum, a residential program for high school seniors emphasizing Jewish living, experiments in informal education and the open classroom method. These only seemed to underscore the bureaus’ relative impotence in effecting change in this area. While the Institute was eventually disbanded precisely because it was stepping on too many institutional toes, the bureaus were effectively placed on notice that Federation was willing to work around them if necessary.140 Just as Jewish educators harbored misconceptions and half truths about Federation people, so, too, did communal workers and lay leaders hold their own stereotypes about educators. Jewish educators were dismissed as impractical dreamers or old-world melamedim with a messianic view about the role of Jewish education that reflected a severe case of tunnel vision.141 Educators’ unwillingness to let go of unrealistic dreams about the revival of 137 Louis Kaplan, “Jewish Education and the Community,” Jewish Education 36, 1 (1965), 5. Aaron Intrater, “Emerging Changes in Planning for Jewish Education,” 23–25. 139 Dinin, “Jewish Education, Jewish Culture and the Jewish Community,” 68. 140 On the Institute for Jewish Life, see Philip Bernstein, To Dwell in Unity, 133–139. 141 Zibbell, 17. 138 74 Journal of Jewish Education a system of community schools or an elitist view of Jewish education that did not serve the needs of the majority only succeeded in playing into these prejudices and hastened the decline in the bureaus’ relevance. By the 1980s, it was clear that the road to the bureaus’ survival lay in their ability to reinvent themselves and act in partnership with Federations and independent philanthropists. Downloaded By: [Krasner, Jonathan] At: 06:27 3 November 2008 CONCLUSION In retrospect, the 1960s seemed to be both the best of times and the worst of times for Jewish education. The shifting communal agenda, from adjustment to survival, meant that Jewish education was elevated to a communal priority. Its star would only continue to rise in the 1980s and 1990s as the community was jolted by grim intermarriage statistics. But education’s rising profile meant that existing educational agencies and institutions were placed in the community spotlight and charged with defying the forces of nature—stemming the assimilationist drift in an open society. Alvin Schiff, just a wee child of 4 when the magazine was founded and 17-years-old when Benderly died, replaced the retiring Dinin as editor of Jewish Education in 1970. An astute reader of the relationship between developments in Jewish education and wider educational trends, he drew a connection between the public school reform in the 1960s and the experience in Jewish schools. In both cases reform initiatives stemmed in large measure from the fact that the schools had been charged with addressing social ills. And in both cases, the reforms fell short and the public’s attention became focused on the appalling conditions in the schools. In the case of the Jewish schools, “they were providing neither the necessary inspiration nor the needed models for Jewish living that Jewish children required.” The scapegoats, said Schiff, became the central agencies for Jewish education just as city boards of education bore the brunt of the criticism for America’s failing public schools.142 If the decade in Jewish education properly began in 1959 with the release of the National Study, it was bookended by Walter Ackerman’s 1969 American Jewish Year Book essay, “Jewish Education for What?” Ackerman had little use for educational fads, but even less patience for educators who were paralyzed by their inability to face the realities of changing times. His essay, which was written in tight, biting prose, revealed that a decade of initiatives and reforms had failed to substantively change fundamental conditions. In particular, the underlying weaknesses in the congregational school system had received little attention and remained the single most formidable challenge. The “academic aspirations” of the mostly Reform one-day-aweek schools were dismissed as “either a colossal joke or an act of cynical 142 Alvin Schiff, “In Search of Educational Solutions,” Jewish Education 42, 1 (1972–1973), 3–5. Downloaded By: [Krasner, Jonathan] At: 06:27 3 November 2008 Jewish Education and American Jewish Education, Part III 75 pretentiousness,” while graduates of the three-days-a-week school, typical of the Conservative movement often had little to show for their efforts. They demonstrated “only the most infantile notions of biblical thoughts and ideas, and a capability in Hebrew which hardly goes beyond monosyllabic responses to carefully worded questions.” In some respects, more ominous was the utter lack of evidence for a cause-and-effect relationship between Jewish education and enhanced Jewish identity. Education had been elevated in many minds to a magic bullet for the plagues of alienation and assimilation. Were not Jewish educators being set up for failure, as Schiff warned? “Educators, for their part must learn to avoid extravagant claims,” while “[c]ritics of Jewish education must come out from behind the shield of exaggerated demands whose fulfillment is beyond the power of any school.” What was needed, he concluded, was “candor” about the realistic limitations of the schools, and a redefinition of education in the public mind to encompass a wide range of informal as well as formal activities and programs. Ackerman also harshly criticized the “rush to relevance” that drove so much of the decade’s reform initiatives. Jewish tradition, he cautioned does not provide pat answers to contemporary problems. “The search for ‘relevance’ . . . can distort the meaning of Judaism and impose connotations never intended.” Finally, he implored, bureaus needed to once-and-for-all adjust themselves to the reality of a congregational school system, let go of their “inspectorial” role and concentrate instead on research and experimentation in partnership with Federations. Jewish educators needed to overcome their reflexive distrust of Federations and acknowledge Federations’ legitimate prerogatives in the area to educational planning.143 With a touch of irony, perhaps, Ackerman suggested that the “most legitimate and vital use for community funds is the establishment of model schools, supervised by a bureau of Jewish education together with a Hebrew teachers college, where one exists.”144 It was precisely this function that was abdicated by Alexander Dushkin at the JEC. Surely this recommendation must have evinced a chuckle from septuagenarian Isaac Berkson. But Ackerman’s recommendation was meant not as a repudiation of Dushkin and the bureau model that he and his colleagues helped to spread, but rather as a cautionary reminder that the conditions that were responsible for birthing and shaping the bureau system no longer existed, and institutions must adjust to the times.145 Dushkin’s insistence that the lay leadership of 143 Walter Ackerman, “Jewish Education—For What,” American Jewish Year Book 70 (1969), 19–20, 23–25, 27–29. Bad news for Jewish educators came also in the form of declining enrollment statistics. In the initial years, much of the drop off was probably due to declining birthrates, but attrition could also be blamed on assimilation. An AAJE census identified a 6% decline between 1962 and 1966, which was reported in a 1968 article. The issue did not become a major concern for educators until the 1970s. See Azriel Eisenberg, “The AAJE’s National Census of Jewish Schools,” Jewish Education 38, 3 (1968), 5. 144 Ackerman, 30. 145 Walter Ackerman, “Comments,” Jewish Education 35, 3 (1965), 178–179. Downloaded By: [Krasner, Jonathan] At: 06:27 3 November 2008 76 Journal of Jewish Education the JEC in 1940s would never have allowed him to create the kind of model school system he wanted was likely true then—but not anymore. As Philip Bernstein wrote, “The pupils were no longer ‘someone else’s children.’ They were the children of the board members themselves—of the federations, bureaus and synagogues.”146 The era of the Benderly Boys was over. If Ackerman’s indictment indirectly pointed to what the Benderly Boys and their circle had left undone as well as those aspects of their program that had, by 1970, outlived their usefulness, Dushkin’s oration at the 40th Anniversary Conference of the NCJE told a story of achievement. In 40 years, the infrastructure of Jewish education had been transformed; the principle of community responsibility for Jewish education had at long last been unequivocally embraced; progress had been made toward professionalizing the field; a modern curriculum responding to the exigencies of a postemancipation world and the birth of the Jewish national home in Palestine had been developed; a panoply of formal and informal educational programs and movements, from educational camps and youth groups to Jewish foundation schools and Hebrew high schools had been created; and the value of K’lal Yisrael had been elevated to first principle in the American Jewish civil religion.147 To be sure, credit for many of these achievements did not rest on the shoulders of the Benderly Boys alone. But for a half century or more they had been the dominant force in American Jewish education. Not least of their achievements was the establishment of Jewish Education, renamed in 1994 the Journal of Jewish Education and lately transformed and given a new lease on life by the Network for Research in Jewish Education. The Journal has outlived its parent, the NCJE, which sadly never did rise to the challenge set for it in 1961 by Azriel Eisenberg: to “become more than an organization, more than a professional organization . . . [but] a movement, a moral force, the educational conscience of the community.”148 But the magazine surely realized the highest expectations of its founders. As Alexander Dushkin and the founding editorial team had promised, the magazine had served as a remedy for an “illiterate” profession, replacing the “‘lip worship’ of Jewish education,” with “authoritative information as well as inspiration.”149 146 Philip Bernstein, To Dwell in Unity, 108. Dushkin, “Fifty Years of American Jewish Education—Retrospect and Prospects,” 44–57. 148 Azriel Eisenberg, “The National Council for Jewish Education Faces the Future,” Jewish Education 32, 1 (1961), 42. 149 “By Way of Introduction,” Jewish Education 1, 1 (1929), 1–2. 147

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Jewish Education and American Jewish Education, Part III

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