Rethinking the Education of Cultural Minorities to and from Assimilation: A Perspective from Jewish Education

Abstract

Education and assimilation seem intimatelyconnected; education either supports assimilation or thwarts it. But these paradigms assume a model of cultural vitality that depends on what one scholar aptly terms “tenacious adherence,” over time, to an unchanging cultural or religious tradition. Taking the example of the Jewish community and Jewish education and drawing on Jewish history and contemporary sociology of the Jews as well as other scholarship, this article presents the argument that this model is untenable. Instead, the goals of Jewish education ought to be reconceptualized, and the aim should instead be for “responsible assimilation,” that is, the cultivation of the capacity to creatively and responsibly assimilate external norms and practices in the service of the growth and vitality of Jewish culture.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Sharon Avni, Sarah Benor, Rahel Berkovits, Avi Bernstein-Nahar, Steven M. Cohen, Tsafrir Goldberg, Bethamie Horowitz, Ted Sasson, Michael Shire, Shira Zeliger, and Ezra Zuckerman all contributed to this article, as well as the anonymous reviewers. None, of course, are responsible for my errors.

Notes

¹ Nagel (1994), Kazal (1995), and Alba & Nee (1997) all describe the decline of a prior, 1960s-era conception of assimilation in the American context, in which immigrants conform to a pre-existing, static, normative Americanness.

²For the present purposes, I intend to focus on assimilation itself, not exogamy, and to maintain the distinction between those two terms in a way that public Jewish discourse fails to do. To put the point another way, an endorsement of healthy cultural assimilation should not be misinterpreted as complacency in the face of the demographic challenges facing the American Jewish community.

³Cf. the original, slightly different version of the midrash in Leviticus Rabbah 32:5 and Song of Songs Rabbah 56:6.

⁴The opinion is attributed to Rabba, son of Rabbi Isaac in Tractate Sanhedrin 74a–b.

⁵See Responsa Hatam Sofer Part A, Responsum 28. Ironically, taking this phrase out of its original context was itself a startling interpretive innovation.

⁶Examples of scholars and the phenomena that they study—including the influences on those Jewish practices and those forms of Judaism that appear most “traditional”—are too numerous to mention. Interestingly, Baumgarten and Rustow (2011) argue that innovation in Jewish tradition has often been accompanied by a “culture-wide complicity in accepting innovations as traditional” (p. 210).

⁷ Reisman (1997) proposes to distinguish assimilation, in which members of the minority “take on the values and customs of the majority culture” (p. 135), from acculturation, where they also seek to maintain their identification with the original culture. But the distinction is of limited usefulness and contradicts the usage proposed by Gordon (1964) in his classic work on assimilation, in which acculturation is one form of assimilation.

⁸More recently, Charmé and Zelkowicz have critiqued the “the utopian dream … to devise a precise and systematic yardstick of Jewishness against which Jews’ identities could be diagnosed” (Charmé & Zelkowicz, 2011, p. 165).

⁹See Horowitz in Charmé et al (2008), and cf. Tsolidis and Pollard (2010): “Our theoretical lens seeks to privilege ‘bottom-up’ perspectives … We believe that students whose identification leads them to study Greek language and culture in Melbourne, with increasingly distant and sometimes fractured connections with Greece as a nation, can tell us about Greekness in unique ways” (p. 150).

¹⁰The quote is a paraphrase by Jeff Kress, of Gergen (1972), located in Charmé et al. (2008). The contrast may be overdrawn: one can extol the virtues of an adaptive, evolving identity without opposing a healthy degree of stability and continuity.

¹¹Hybridity is often framed in terms of linguistic usage. Thus, while identity has sometimes been framed in terms of a linguistic choice between the minority language and the majority language (see, for example, Heilman, 1981, p. 236), a more nuanced perspective notices the fluidity and blending of language in the enactment of identity (see Benor, 2010)

¹²Traditionalists may cite Gans' (1979) concept of “symbolic ethnicity,” a kind of residual ethnicity that replaces the thick ethnicity of new immigrant groups (see, e.g., Ritterband, 1995, p. 390). But transformationists wonder why Gans privileges some ethnic practices over others (see, e.g., Kaufman, 2006, p. 172).

¹³ Cohen (2010) emphasizes that Liebman is an “instrumental essentialist” (i.e., that he is not committed to any particular conception of the essence of Judaism). Also see Cohen (2001).

¹⁴See also, more recently, Liebman (2001): “the challenge to traditional measures of Jewish identity [rests on] the notion that there is no system of beliefs or behaviors that is useful in defining higher or lower, stronger or weaker Jewish identity” (p. 106).

¹⁵Liebman closes his essay by talking about his “fear … that the transformationist view unwittingly serves those who would transform American Judaism by severing it from both the Jewish tradition and the rest of world Jewry” (1988, p. 72). Also see Liebman (2001).

¹⁶Cf. Baumgarten and Rustow, 2011, p. 226.

¹⁷Kaplan borrows the concern for imitative culture from Ahad Ha'am. See Kaplan (1937), chapter 10.

¹⁸Cf. the discussion in Eisen, 1997, p. 28–29.

¹⁹Some may assume that my arguments will be more acceptable to liberal Jewish educators, for whom fidelity to tradition is in any case balanced against the need for appropriate accommodations to modern culture, and may find less acceptance among more conservative Jewish educators, who are more committed to traditional forms of Jewish practice and belief. But there is abundant evidence that liberal Jewish educators may still be in the grip of an image of Jewish education as inoculation, or as building up bulwarks; they may simply think of themselves as employing a weaker vaccine or building a lower bulwark. And so, my point here is that even liberal Jewish educators may need to rethink their assumptions about the relationship between education and assimilation and to orient their curricular and pedagogic decision-making away from a model of fidelity and towards a model of responsible assimilation.

²⁰This point is central to Horowitz' argument in a recent (unpublished) manuscript. Also cf. Waters (1990).