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.
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