The other day I saw a friend whose kid or kids go to a Jewish day school. I generally think that's great/fine. Everyone do their own thing, make their own choice. I don't tell young Jews to do what I did and marry a gentile. Assimilation has produced a counter-movement of Jewish revival, and I say, fine, more power to 'em. The same way I feel about the Amish.
That said, the Jewish day school movement isn't strictly a Jewish revival, it draws on the larger idea of "culturalism," in which per Clifford Geertz, people's cultural background is supposed to be "thick," while their personal identity is "thin." David Bromwich of Huffpo/Yale (a new brand) wrote a famous essay for Dissent some years ago, forever defenstrating this stuff, calling Culturalism the "Euthanasia of Liberalism," and taking on Michael Walzer et al and saying–I can't find my copy of the thing right now–that the idea that we are defined by our tribe or culture more than say our individual choices in a liberal democracy is a confining claustrophobic idea. I agree; and so for myself: I'm a writer, a husband, I love the outdoors, stories, great music (saw Ray Davies last night!), a few close male friends, leftwing political polemics, and I dip into a very sophisticated city once or twice a week… You don't see the word Jewish on that list. Though yes, I'm also a proud Jew and reader. But my identity is pretty diverse; and I can weep reading Nakba tales, and weep for civil rights/Obama, as I wept over the Holocaust when I was a mere sprat.
This is going somewhere. The other day I was watching the bailout discussion on television in the afternoon, then Chris Matthews, and I did my usual tribalist thing of counting the Jews. In the congressional discussion, I saw a guy named Altman from a school in New York, Felix Rohatyn, someone named Friedman, and ye olde Barney Frank. Then Andrea Mitchell and I forget who, a Jewish guy, then later, Chris Matthews with my old friend Jim Cramer, followed by Howard Fineman and Ron Brownstein.
A lot of Jews. We're all over the new establishment, it goes without saying. Or at least the media always goes without saying! My point here is, What if all these guys sent their kids to separate Jewish schools (as NY Congressman Jerrold Nadler did with one of his sons anyway)? It would be unsupportable. What if Obama just announced that he was sending his kids to public school–something I wanted him to do–because he wanted his girls to grow up with other black kids so that they would identify black and marry black? I think it's problematic. That's all. I'm not saying, Tear the schools down or anything. But it's problematic to have a lot of political/cultural power and be ethnocentric. It doesn't wash. Just something to think about. And I would say that Obama's atribal values are going to forever alter these cultural politics, in my direction.
The next thing Bromwich might try is actually criticizing Jews who claims to act on behalf of Jews, and promote some solidarity among oppressed peoples. If he doesn't want to walk the walk, at least talk the talk.
In fact, it is invariably the case that intra-class economic differentials drive the movement for denominational schooling. Within the lower middle classes, which cannot afford entirely private schooling, there is incessant and intense competition to attract at least matching funds from the state for confessional schooling for the 'devout', i.e. the children of 'more respectable families'.
I suppose I'm being naive – I should be imagining trendy, "Secular Jewish" day schools for the children of affluent, progressive, liberal Jewish parents who just happen to agree that it's more fun for their kids to learn with other Jews, not for religious reasons or anything heavy like that, but just, y'know, more fun, more relaxing.
Actually in this day and age in America, ethnocentric gravitation is
praised–except when it comes to whites. But everyone knows that.
Obama's assimilated nature carries a lot on his slim mutt shoulders.
And how about all them Catholics going to Catholics schools, just so they can get away from the non-believers?
But, oh, those Catholic school girls!
Actually, Obama made the point, in "Dreams from my Father" that he couldn't marry a white, and rejected his half-brother who rejected the black world, and went to work in the ghetto in Chicago, and joined Wright's church, and married Michelle just so he could be authentically black. He wanted to help his people. (Not his mother's people.)
Probably he has "grown" since then.
The best people for tracking the significance of jewish schools in terms of social class are probably JTA, they excel in this kind of commentary:
Jews from the northern suburbs who are wealthy enough to live in Paris are moving to eastern Paris and its suburbs, where anti-Semitism is minimal and Jewish schools are available. Since 2000, nearly 40% of Noisy-le-Sec’s school-aged Jewish families have pulled their children from area public schools and enrolled them in Jewish institutions. This shift to Jewish schools is apparent in many places in France, albeit to a lesser degree than in Noisy-le-Sec. Patric Petit-Ohayon, the director of the education department at the Jewish community social welfare umbrella group, the Jewish Unified Social Funds, says Jewish school enrollment in the northern Paris suburbs increased rapidly during the 2000-2005 period. In moving their children to Jewish schools or their families out of the suburbs, many Sephardic families make a direct comparison between this migration and their families’ flights from North Africa some 40 years ago. “They chased us from Algeria and they followed us here,” Robert Sebbane, 81, says of the North African Muslims responsible for much of France’s anti-Jewish crime…
Jewish day school, and even vouchers for Jews (or anybody else) to cashier at higher-up religious schools are fine, but in the case of the Jewish schools, a firewall would have to be maintained between Jewish instruction and Zionist indoctrination.
Such firewalls aren’t as necessary in Christian schools. What are they going to separate, Christian instruction from Western civilization indoctrination? They’re the same thing.
I guess that’s why socialists and left-liberals are so opposed to vouchers: they hate Western civilization and want to use the public schools and big government to erode and ultimately destroy it. Ironic, isn’t it, since secularism and liberal “tolerance” are built upon the Christian inclusiveness that is the foundation of Western civilization, and hence they can't survive without it. So not only does the Left bite the hand that feeds, but it’s suicidal as well. A veritable teenage wasteland.
Nooooo, Ed, nooooo ….. you're being insufferably ethnocentric, really. Surely you don't imagine that 'Christianity' and 'the West' are identical? Which 'Christianity'? You have to pick one concrete form, you know, and thereby condemn all the others to being 'enemies within' – there are about 1500 brands of 'Christianity' in the USA alone.
Rowan, I can never tell if you are being sarcastic or serious, which is a deliberate smokescreen set up by socialists so they can backtrack when their unworkable ideas inevitably blow up, and say they were merely being ironic when they demanded them.
Sarcasm is the mark of deep intellectual insecurity and confusion. No wonder it’s the preferred method of discourse for many left-liberals (think Olberman and Rachel Maddow, forever drooling in irony). The whole sneering liberal persona reminds me of a clique of adolescents sitting around ridiculing their various rivals and nemeses.
Take a look at Room, Board, 'Jewish Peoplehood'".
The David Project is all over the Jewish Day School movement.
Charter for Education or Indoctrination? discusses Michael Steinhardt's attempt to create a Jewish Day School within the NY City public school system.
Nooooo, Ed, nooooo ….. you're being insufferably ethnocentric, really. Surely you don't imagine that 'Christianity' and 'the West' are identical?
They're pretty darn hard to separate!
Anyway, I strongly support private schools as long as they meet state standards for general education.
Although I might have trouble finding a Jewish day school that would please me. I would want my kids to learn Biblical Hebrew, prayers, holidays, Tanakh, basic Gemara and Jewish history. On the other hand, I consider Zionist ideology and Shoah-worship to be Avodah Zarah.
There's no reason why a school can't be very Jewish and very American. That was the goal of assimilationist Jews (from Modern Orthodox to Reform) before the Shoah and the massive shift to Zionist ideology.
One does not need to attend a Jewish day school to study Hebrew.
I learned Biblical Hebrew in a very waspish prep school, which had as far as I remember no opinion on Zionism whatsoever.
Biblical Hebrew was just considered one of several classical languages.
I also worked on Syriac and Aramaic mostly on my own but with the supervision of a teacher, who had studied those languages in grad school.
I am against vouchers for private schools mainly because of the harm their usage does to public schools and to the separation of church and state as a principle. Obama is sending his children to a private school and eating away a little at the area of his base where I am. All these neo-con appointments for his security advisers also eat at my heart. Bail out Detroit, but use the bail out to get limits on executive compensation of ALL forms. A project to create jobs in an Interstate-Highway-type program should target light monorail.
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Aloha ~~~ Ozzie Maland ~~~ San Diego
elitism is stifling american politics and media.
and not only that but people apologize for it and to it because of its power.
sucking up sucks.
get a life.
Interestingly, hebrew has never been available as an ordinary modern language to british schoolchildren. It is only available as part of a religious curriculum, at whatever level. I suspect that the reason for this is that the British judeo-masonic establishment (which, after all, still 'runs the Empire') likes to keep knowledge of those splendid-sounding hebrew words to themselves (as indeed they did latin and greek, which were taught only to 'the officer class').
"But it's problematic to have a lot of political/cultural power and be ethnocentric."
This, I think, is the heart of the matter. Although we'd like to treat Amish separatism and Jewish separatism as examples of the same thing, there is something very different about them, and that difference is created by political power.
If it weren't for the great political power he wields, Richard Witty's desire to auto-associate with his tribesmen would be nobody's business but his own. You might criticize it on aesthetic grounds, but not on moral grounds. But when someone is at the same time seeking power over the people he is attempting to separate from, then it becomes a moral question, because we're back to the problem of a hostile elite.
So to discuss the Jewish day school movement we have to be prepared to discuss the level of Jewish power in contemporary American society. (And that of course would be "anti-semitic".)