JULY 6 • 2023 | 11

Philadelphia looked at what 
the Protestants were doing, 
and they saw that Protestant 
Sunday schools were 
providing very accessible 
places where kids could go 
and get a basic primer in 
their religious tradition.
What happens at the 
beginning of the 20th 
century, with the arrival 
of Eastern Europeans 
with different models for 
Jewish education?
A new generation tries to 
reform Jewish education, 
led by a young educator 
from Palestine named 
Samson Benderly, who 
leads the New York Bureau 
of Jewish Education. He 
tries to change American 
Jewish education to make it 
more professionalized, but 
to bring more traditionally 
inclined Jews on board he 
has to convince them that he 
doesn’t want to make more 
Sunday schools, because 
Sunday schools by the end of 
the 20th century had become 
very much associated with 
the Reform movement in a 
way that they weren’t when 
they were founded and for 
much of the 19th century.

What lessons did you 
learn about Sunday 
school and Hebrew 
school education in the 
20th century that relate 
to your research into the 
19th century?
The move that is so decisive 
for shaping American Jewish 
education is suburbaniza-
tion. The place that you go 
to get your Jewish education 
is the synagogue supplemen-
tal school, which becomes 
the dominant model for 
American Jewish education 
up until today. 
Today’s model is really 

a religious model. And by 
that I mean students go to 
Hebrew school primarily 
to kind of check a religious 
box, to learn about the thing 
that makes them distinctive 
religiously, and to achieve 
a religious coming-of-age 
marker, which is the bar, 
bat or b mitzvah. Certainly, 
the curriculum today is 
more diverse, embracing 
more aspects of traditional 
Judaism then you would 
have seen in a 19th-cen-
tury Sunday school: more 
Hebrew, more of a sense of 
Jewish peoplehood, ethnic 
identity and Zionism, of 
course. But the question that 
American Jews are increas-
ingly asking themselves is, 
is this a model that they still 
want? So you may have seen 
that the Jewish Education 
Project published a report 
recently on supplemental 
schools, which saw that 
enrollment has really, really 
declined.
Sunday schools are based 
on a vision of Judaism as a 
set of a religious commit-
ments that American Jews 
actualize through belonging 
to a synagogue and sending 
their children to a synagogue 
or a religious school, where 
they will learn primarily a 
set of religious skills: the 
ability to read from the 
Torah, the ability to decode 
Hebrew, the ability to navi-
gate the siddur.
Is that still the vision that 
most American Jews have 
for what Judaism means to 
them? I think increasingly 
the answer seems to be no. 

Andrew Silow-Carroll is editor at 

large of the New York Jewish Week 

and managing editor for Ideas for 

the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

For reservations please contact:
michigan@fidf.org | 248.926.4110
www.fidf.org/events/womenofvalor23/

Congregation Shaarey Zedek
27375 Bell Road
Southfield, Michigan 48034

11:00am Registration & Silent Auction
12:00pm Lunch & Program

Please join us for the

Benefiting the IMPACT! Scholarship Program

Granting Academic Scholarships to Combat Veterans in Need 

Wednesday, August 2, 2023

Women of Valor 

Susie Pappas

Honoring

Nancy 
Spielberg

Guest Speaker

Luncheon

n

FRIENDS OF THE ISRAEL DEFENSE FORCES
MICHIGAN CHAPTER

THEIR JOB IS TO LOOK AFTER ISRAEL.
OURS IS TO LOOK AFTER THEM.

Co-Chairs
Pam Bloom • Elaine Robins

