Hebrew Education in the United States: Historical Perspectives and Future Directions

Abstract

This article sketches the trajectory of Hebrew education in the United States from the early 1900s to the present. Attending to the historiography of Hebrew education, it shows how current curricula and pedagogical approaches have been stamped by historical considerations and language ideologies, how goals and strategies have changed (or remained the same) over time, and how the evolution of the field has been driven both by internal dynamics within the Jewish community and by changes in the broader social and political context of the United States. It concludes with a framework for constructing a meaningful research agenda for the future.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to thank the editor of the Journal of Jewish education, Michael Zeldin, for inviting me to write this article, and for his guidance and advice throughout its preparation. I would also like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful and thorough feedback. I am indebted to Ben Jacobs for his critical and reflective comments on an earlier draft, and to Zvi Bekerman for sharing his insightful thoughts.

Notes

¹ This scenario is taken from ethnographic data I collected between 2004 and 2006 (Avni, 2009).

² The Schechter Day School Network is an association of Conservative-affiliated Jewish day schools spanning 19 states in the United States and two provinces in Canada; the Network operates under the umbrella of the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism.

³ Pew found that 52% of American Jews knew the Hebrew alphabet and 10% could carry on a conversation in Hebrew. Among those who attended yeshiva or Jewish day school, one-third of the respondents said they could converse in Hebrew. The number rose to 64% for those with 10 years or more of day school education.

⁴ Jonathan Sarna (1998) traces the roots of the Ivrit b’Ivrit method to the European educational reform movement in the late 19th century that produced the Jewish school known as the heder metukkan. When some of these educational reformers immigrated to the United States, they established schools in which Hebrew was taught as a revitalized “living” language. The earliest is Shaaray Zion School in Brooklyn, established by Zvi Hirsch Neumann in 1893 (Sarna, 1998).

⁵ Mordecai Lewittes (1980) was still optimistic about its potential in 1980 when he wrote in JJE: “the study of Hebrew in our public high schools still has great potential and should be encouraged in every way possible” (p. 9).

⁶ An article in JJE by Abraham Katsh (head of the National Association of Professors of Hebrew, founded in 1950) states that in 1950, 206 colleges and universities taught Hebrew to approximately 7,206 students (Katsh, 1950).

Additional information

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Sharon Avni

Sharon Avni is Assistant Professor in the Department of Developmental Skills at Borough of Manhattan Community College, CUNY, The City University of New York. E-mail: [email protected]