Historiography of American Jewish Education: A Case for Guarded Optimism

Abstract

In his 1998 article “American Jewish Education in Historical Perspective,” originally delivered at the 1997 annual conference of the Network for Research in Jewish Education, historian Jonathan Sarna took note of the relative dearth of scholarship, in terms of both quality and quantity, on the history of Jewish education. Sarna estimated that only about 2% of the entries in Norman Drachler’s comprehensive Bibliography of Jewish Education in the United States (1996) focused on the history of Jewish education, and “Sadly, even those 2% consist for the most part—significant exceptions notwithstanding—of parochial and narrowly conceived studies, long on facts and short on analysis.” Sarna went on to argue that the study of the history of American Jewish education could provide substantial fodder for American Jewish social historians. After all, “schools serve as a primary setting, along with the home, where American Jews confront the most fundamental question of American life: how to live in two worlds at once, how to be both American and Jewish, part of the larger American society and apart from it.”