hebrew education in the united states: historical perspectives and future directions

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Hebrew Education in the United States:Historical Perspectives and FutureDirectionsSharon AvniPublished online: 14 Aug 2014.

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Journal of Jewish Education, 80:256–286, 2014Copyright © Network for Research in Jewish EducationISSN: 1524-4113 print / 1554-611X onlineDOI: 10.1080/15244113.2014.937194

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

SHARON AVNI

This article sketches the trajectory of Hebrew education in theUnited States from the early 1900s to the present. Attending to thehistoriography of Hebrew education, it shows how current curric-ula and pedagogical approaches have been stamped by historicalconsiderations and language ideologies, how goals and strategieshave changed (or remained the same) over time, and how the evo-lution of the field has been driven both by internal dynamics withinthe Jewish community and by changes in the broader social andpolitical context of the United States. It concludes with a frameworkfor constructing a meaningful research agenda for the future.

Scenario 1: It is a Friday afternoon in May 2006 and I am on a bus headingtoward Jerusalem with over 25 eighth graders from two non-Orthodox dayschools in the New York area. Visiting Israel on a 12-day whirlwind trip—aculminating event before graduating and dispersing to various private andpublic high schools—the students were relaxing after a rigorous few daysin the Negev. Max, who was sitting next to me, asked our Israeli counselor,in English, how much longer the journey would be because he was gettinghungry. When I asked Max why he wasn’t speaking Hebrew while in Israel,given that I had extensively observed him and his classmates converse inModern Hebrew at a fairly high level at their school in the United States,1

he turned to me and responded, “I am wearing my kippah, I go to a dayschool, I keep kosher. I’m in Israel now and I’m getting ready to celebrateShabbat in Jerusalem. Isn’t it enough? How much more Jewish do I needto be?”

Scenario 2: On March 27, 2012, Nathan Englander and Jonathan Safran Foerappeared on National Public Radio’s (NPR) Morning Edition to discuss their

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

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

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newly published New American Haggadah, the well-known Passover ritual-istic text they had translated from Hebrew and Aramaic into English. Whenasked why they felt the need to undertake this project, Foer answered that,growing up, his family had not been traditionally observant and had notspoken Hebrew, so they had relied on the English text of the Hagaddah atthe Seder. The impetus for this new project, he noted, came from recogniz-ing that the available English translations represented a “kind of diminishedstandard” that were “unintentionally ambiguous” or “not clear or faithfultranslations of the Hebrew” (NPR, 2012, para. 9, 10). Englander, who wasraised Orthodox and knowledgeable in Hebrew, added that the existingEnglish translations did not capture the beauty of original. Weeks later, in hisreview of the New American Haggadah, Leon Wieseltier (2012), literary edi-tor of The New Republic, lambasted the book as “awkward, ugly, or wrong”(para. 3). While acknowledging that “translation is an ancient Jewish activ-ity” (para. 1), he trenchantly critiqued the very idea that “the Jewish traditionmay be adequately received, developed, and transmitted not in a Jewishlanguage” (para. 1). And with particular disdain for American Jews’ lack ofHebrew literacy, Wieseltier caustically added that “no Jewry has ever beenas pathetically dependent upon translation as American Jewry” (para. 1).

Scenario 3: On an especially warm and humid September evening in 2013, Iparticipated in a meeting with the religious school principal and the copres-idents of the Board of Education at a moderate size Conservative synagoguein central New Jersey about integrating more Modern Hebrew into the cur-riculum. I arrived early and had several moments to talk with the principal,an Israeli woman with over 20 years of synagogue education experience.When the two other board members rushed into the air-conditioned office,laughing that they couldn’t understand our Hebrew chit-chat, we immedi-ately switched to English and began discussing some of the challenges ofteaching Hebrew fluency when the curriculum was already jam-packed. Theprincipal lamented the fact that several years prior she had had to removelessons on writing Hebrew in cursive in order to spend more time teach-ing the words and melodies of the Shabbat liturgy. Acknowledging the timeconstraints of the religious school program, the fact that the teachers werecompeting with extracurricular activities, and the inability of many parentsto assist their children at home, the four of us brainstormed ways to “infuseHebrew” in classroom activities. The principal stated: “Parents are tellingme that they just want their kids to know enough Hebrew for their barmitzvah.”

Scenario 4: In 2010, Dr. Elaine Cohen, executive of the then-Solomon Schechter Day School Association (now Schechter Day SchoolNetwork), wrote an editorial titled “Hebrew Charter Schools A Very RealConcern” in the Conservative Movement quarterly magazine, CJ: Voices of

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Conservative/Masorti Judaism (Cohen, 2010).2 Facing a calamitous drop inSchechter school enrollment—a 35% decline between 1998 and 2008 (Schick,2009)—Cohen addressed one of the causes for the exodus of students: theemergence of Hebrew language charter schools. Cohen acknowledged thatthese schools are primarily focusing on oral fluency and that “Hebrew charterschools most likely will succeed in achieving their goal of teaching Hebrewas an expressive language” (para. 2). However, she also claimed that theincipient growth of these schools is causing anxiety among advocates ofJewish day school education because the schools are publicly funded, theyattract non-Orthodox families who might not be looking for a highly reli-gious program, and they have opened in neighborhoods or districts whereJewish day schools have existed for years. Whether Hebrew charter schoolsmay be a threat to Jewish day schools, she wrote, is a pressing question thathas “implications for the long-term future of our Jewish young people, whomay master Hebrew but lack any personal connection to religious traditionor identity anchored in Jewish literacy” (para. 13).

I begin this article with these particular scenarios because they representto me refractions of an articulation currently underway between contem-porary liberal Jewish education and Hebrew language education in theUnited States. All of these scenarios represent moments—albeit in vastlydifferent scales—in American Judaism’s attempt to negotiate the dialecticalrelationship between Hebrew language and Jewish life. Perhaps not surpris-ingly, they also take place at a historical moment at the turn of the 21stcentury, a time in which widespread social, economic, technological, andcultural changes are having an enormous impact on how religion is under-stood and talked about. Capturing a sociolinguistic phenomenon regardinghow American Jews are deploying Hebrew and reacting to its use (or lackthereof), they also underscore the fact that Hebrew language learning isnot simply language acquisition in the generic sense, but rather a distinc-tive set of social, political, economic, and religious practices that are deeplyembedded in the complex tensions that inevitably play out in educationalefforts to determine what constitutes American Jewishness. For the boy onthe bus, Hebrew was just another aspect of Jewish performance; for Foerand Englander, as well as for Wieseltier, it was about the legitimacy of trans-lation in Judaism; for the Conservative synagogue school board members,Hebrew was one contested element in defining the goals of supplementaryJewish schooling; and for day school leadership, Hebrew represents authen-tic Jewish learning. All in all, these four scenarios represent only a fraction ofthe ways in which debates about Jewish life in the United States are occurringon the terrain of Hebrew language education.

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

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As these scenarios underscore, these tensions are also defined throughcharged encounters with difference: diaspora versus Israel; tradition versusmodernity; Modern Hebrew versus Biblical Hebrew; religious versus sec-ular; fluency versus text-based practices, authenticity versus inauthenticity,Hebrew versus English—sets of oppositions that historically permeate thefield of Hebrew education. More concretely, a host of compelling ques-tions surround these encounters with difference when they are projectedonto pedagogical concerns regarding how, why, where, and which Hebrewshould be taught to American Jews. These questions include: Does knowingor using Hebrew have anything to do with an individual or collective senseof Jewishness? Can an “authentic” Jewish experience be attained in Englishor other languages? Should Jewish educational institutions focus on religiousliteracy or Modern Hebrew? Is Hebrew knowledge still an effulgent symbolof being Jewish? The answers to the questions are complex, conditional,and increasingly less about pedagogical “how-to” and more about Hebreweducation as a social activity deeply grounded in frameworks of value andpriorities.

More often than not, the popular discourse surrounding the teachingand learning of Hebrew takes on two overlapping but competing forms,both of which are saturated with affect and passion. The first representsthe emotionally laden attachments that individuals have to the language, orhave experienced through learning and teaching it to others. This is theHebrew of self-discovery (Stavans, 2008) and love (Scheffler, 2009) and spir-itual sustenance (Wieseltier, 1998), most often evoked through the genreof first-person narrative. The second discourse (curiously often semanticallymarked by the third person plural we and our) erupts in the form of amoral panic with emotionally charged reactions of profound disappointmentin American Jews’ lack of Hebrew linguistic competency, along with prog-nostications about Jewish identity, the demise of American Jewry, and Jewishilliteracy (Shaked, 1993; Wisse, 1993; Wieseltier, 2011; Cohen, 1993). Fromthis perspective, Hebrew learning in the United States seems to be entangledin a Sisyphean discourse of failure. “We are people of the book who cannotread the book in its original language” one scholar laments (Lipstadt, 1993, p.309) while others anecdotally recall Hebrew school as the place where theydid not learn Hebrew. As the Pew Research Center’s (2013) recent study con-firms, American Jews spend more time talking about Hebrew than readingor talking in Hebrew.3 Indeed, the discourse about Hebrew and reactions tothe Hebrew learning experience in the United States widely represent twosides of the same coin: sentimentality and fear, or the ideation and the reailty.

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

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The purpose of this article is to synthesize the research on Hebrew edu-cation in the United States from the past 80 years in order to make senseof where the field has been, where it is today, and where it might be inthe future. It also aims to demonstrate how the enterprise of Hebrew edu-cation is an expression of American Jewry’s beliefs and ideologies about theHebrew language more broadly. A major assumption running through thisarticle, already touched upon, is that the purposes and practices of Hebreweducation cannot be isolated from the sociohistorical context in which thelearning takes place. At times, for example, advocates for Hebrew educationhave been reactionary, emphasizing the need to improve Hebrew languageinstruction as a means of buttressing Jewish particularity in the face of soci-etal secularizing and homogenizing forces (Schiff, 1996; Zisenwine, 1997). Inthis light, debates about Hebrew education reflect enduring concerns aboutthe essential nature of American Jewishness: that is, how to be a part ofthe larger American fabric and apart from it (Sarna, 1998). If indeed, asSarna persuasively argues, schools are sites in which this tension is nego-tiated, and where the “central drama of American Jewish life is introducedand rehearsed” (p. 10), then this article aims to analyze Hebrew educationin the United States as a central character in this ongoing, persistent, andunresolved performance.

SURVEYING THE STATE OF RESEARCH ON HEBREW EDUCATION

In defining the broad-based objective of this article, I recognize severalimmediate challenges. First, while there has been a recent surge of schol-arly and nonscholarly attention in Hebrew language education as a mediumof religious and spiritual identification and as a mode of expressing diasporicconnections to Israel, recent efforts to understand Hebrew education in theUnited States are hampered by neglect of the field’s history. The question ofhow to teach American children Hebrew—a language that has never beena language of wider communication in the United States nor a vernacularof American Jews—is not unique to Jewish educators today. Rather, it is fairto say that the Hebrew teaching enterprise since the early 1900s has alwaysbeen fraught with complexity and ambivalence. Indeed, Hebrew educatorstoday echo longstanding concerns about finding and training qualified teach-ers, developing and implementing curriculum, identifying materials, anddealing with the supplemental nature of Jewish schooling in which the major-ity of Jewish youth in the United States are educated (Nevo, 2011). Despitethe perennial nature of these concerns, how and why Hebrew educationevolved as it did is a consideration that often is overlooked in pedagogi-cal and theoretical discussions. Attending to the historiography of Hebreweducation can show how current curricula and pedagogical approaches arestamped by historical considerations, how goals and strategies have changed

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(or remained the same) over time, and how the evolution of the field hasbeen driven both by internal dynamics within the Jewish community and bychanges in the broader social and political context of the United States.

The second challenge to surveying the research on Hebrew educationis the glaring lack of a substantial and cohesive body of empirical research.While the topic of Hebrew education is not absent from scholarly litera-ture, much of what has been written is anecdotal or polemic in nature;that is, it exists in the abstract empyreal realm of proclamations rather thanthe empirical realm of investigations. Indeed, very few of the articles onHebrew education in The Journal of Jewish Education (hence JJE) are basedon empirical research, but rather represent mostly impressionistic “state ofthe field” papers that prescribe visions of what ought to be. To some degree,this is due to the origins of the journal as a mouthpiece for the views andresearch of members of the National Council for Jewish Education—a pro-fessional organization organized by Samson Benderly and his followers inthe early part of the 20th century—rather than as a strictly academic jour-nal, per se. Nonetheless, much that is written about Hebrew education evennowadays still hovers in the theoretical space of desideratum. Indeed, thetitles of some of the seminal works of the field, including William Chomsky’s(1957) Hebrew: The Eternal Language, reflect deeply rooted ideologies aboutHebrew learning and knowledge as the sine qua non of Jewish educationand Jewish life in general. The portentous implications of a reliance on pre-scriptivism, along with a paucity of systematic and empirical data on whatHebrew education in the United States looks like, leaves us in a “spacebetween disciplines, perspectives, and definitions” (Feuer, 2009a, p. 1) withlittle data to support any assertions or claims. Ironically, this present articleis itself yet another iteration of the “state of the field” genre, and regrettablycannot be otherwise, until there is more empirical research.

Yet these “state of the field” works are not merely historical artifacts;rather, they are important cultural products that articulate and (re)presentlanguage beliefs that have shaped Hebrew education over time. Followingare but a handful of paeans to Hebrew:

Hebrew is the fountainhead of our intellectual and emotional life. Withoutit our curriculum has no challenge, no substance. (Eisenberg, 1949, p. 57)

To retain the continuity of Jewish character and culture and to preservethe bond with Jewry and Judaism of the past and the present, we mustmake every effort to cultivate and promote a knowledge of the Hebrewlanguage and Hebrew literature. (Halkin, 1950, p. 53)

If there is any hope of the American Jewish community preserving itsidentity as an ethnic sub-community, it must be through transmitting tothe younger generation or at the very least to a select portion of it – the‘key’ to the Jewish treasure house furnished by the Hebrew language.(Shulsinger, 1967, p. 8)

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[Hebrew] is the vehicle of the sacred past of internal Jewish values. Atthe same time, it is a major expression of contemporary Jewish vitality.(Schiff, 1981, p. 2)

Knowing the Hebrew language is a sign of identifying with that reli-gious and literary tradition, which continues to form Jewish identity. Therecognition of this reality should be the primary motivator for the studyof Hebrew. (Zisenwine, 1997, p. 56)

From these gleanings we see that the enterprise of Hebrew educa-tion is based more often on religious and ideological considerations thanon strictly linguistic and pedagogical factors. Moreover, these articulationsreveal the conceptual metaphors that have shaped the role of Hebrew inJewish education and how Jewish educators implicitly and explicitly con-ceptualize a language philosophy and an epistemology of Jewish learning.Linguistic anthropologists talk about the power of language ideologies—the “self-evident ideas and objectives a group holds concerning roles oflanguage in the social experiences of members as they contribute to theexpression of the group” (Heath, 1977, p. 53)—in order to demonstrate howthese beliefs posit fundamental linkages among such apparently diverse cul-tural categories as language, epistemology, authenticity, tradition, and nation(Gal, 1998). This construct helps us to see how Jewish educators over timehave identified Hebrew as an indispensable component of Jewish identityand the linchpin of intergenerational Jewish transmission, arguing that thelanguage (in all its varieties) has a synecdochic relationship with Jewishlife and continuity. Broadly speaking, Hebrew ideologies are guided by asurvivalist criterion that sees language as one of the antidotes to Jewishendangerment. To draw on Anderson’s (1983) evocative notion, Hebreweducation has been largely rooted in “imagining” the past to ensure a futurefor American Judaism.

Yet, these ideologies have also played a part in closing down criticalanalysis of Hebrew, limiting the scope of research, and constraining thesalience of certain questions. Linguistic anthropologists have also shown thatlanguage ideologies transform the social and material reality they commenton (Woolard, 1998). In other words, language ideology is so potentially pow-erful as an agent of cultural production and reproduction because “ideologycreates and acts in the social world while it masquerades as a description ofthat world” (Eagleton 1991, p. 19). With this in mind, if value-laden convic-tions about the Hebrew language are taken by educators and the public asculturally bounded and/or theoretically grounded absolutes, then questionschallenging their underlying assumptions become political landmines andtherefore much harder to ask. If Hebrew is regarded as a linchpin of Jewishvitality, a Jewish boundary marker (Waxman, 1999), and one of the key indi-cators of a successful Jewish education, then it becomes much more difficultto ask questions that look at the roles of other languages in the expression

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and practice of Judaism and Jewishness, the ways in which school and class-room language policies and curriculum prohibit or complicate an individual’sconnection to modes of Jewish engagement, or how much Hebrew a personneeds to know in order to be a successful Jewish citizen, among other mat-ters. In this case, Hebrew instruction becomes a ritual no longer in need ofjustification, or perhaps even critical investigation.

The ideological representation of Hebrew as “the eternal language”has not only stymied or hindered the development of a robust and crit-ical research agenda, but it has led to another shortcoming within thefield of Hebrew education. Like Kugelmass’s (1988) contention that muchof the ethnographic research on diaspora Jewry “consists for the mostpart of research done by Jews to be read chiefly by Jews” (p. 1), thesame can be said about Hebrew education research. It is largely writtenby strong proponents of Hebrew (with a high degree of Hebrew compe-tency) for readers who have similar passions, beliefs, and linguistic abilities.Though occasionally the contrarian voices (Bekerman, 1987, 1999; Shohamy,1999) emerge and challenge the fundamental premise that Hebrew educa-tion is the template for guaranteeing Jewish identity, the field has mostlyclosed itself off to any real paradigmatic change. This foreclosure also hasresulted in a deficit of non-Jewish scholars examining Hebrew education forthe sake of comparative analysis with other heritage, diaspora, and sacredlanguages.

With all of these caveats in mind, my method for surveying the fieldincluded archival research in JJE, in which I identified approximately 90 sub-stantive articles over the course of its 80-year history that had something tosay about teaching and learning Hebrew to American Jews. I also extensivelysearched the article database on the NYU Berman Jewish Policy Archivewebsite and did extensive searches on Google Scholar to identify news-paper articles, manuscripts, and dissertations on Hebrew education fromoutside the pages of the Journal of Jewish Education. Norman Drachler’s(1996) A Bibliography of Jewish Education in the United States was also acentral resource for locating relevant literature. I read and coded each articleaccording to thematic categories. My efforts offer a comprehensive body ofscholarship that represents work by leading figures in the field as well aslesser known scholars.

LAYING THE FOUNDATION

I trace the roots of contemporary Hebrew education to Samson Benderlyand his coterie known as the “Benderly Boys” who sought to modernizeand professionalize Jewish education in the United States through the useof secular and progressive educational philosophies and practices. Hebrewfigured centrally in the efforts of this group to bring about a Jewish national

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and cultural renascence and to change Jewish education in the United States(Krasner, 2011, p. 4). Prior to the emergence of the Benderly boys, mostof Hebrew teaching to American Jewish youth had relied on rote learningand mechanical Hebrew recitation, and had focused mainly on facilitatingsynagogue literacy. As a cultural Zionist and disciple of Ahad Ha’am’s phi-losophy of cultural Zionism, Benderly set his sights on transforming Hebrewlearning and saw the promotion of conversational Hebrew as one of his coremissions.

Already in 1910, Benderly’s emphasis on conversational Hebrewinstead of literacy skills stressed the natural method, and he believed,as did leading linguists at the time, that one could learn a second lan-guage by imitating the way children learn their first language—that is,directly and without explanations of grammatical points and using onlythe target language. Benderly wholeheartedly adopted this approach inhis educational reforms and implemented a language-centered curricu-lum, Ivrit b’Ivrit, which focused on the teaching of Hebrew languagethrough Hebrew-only content and instruction (Goelman, 1971). Taking4

advantage of progressive Deweyian educational approaches, this new cur-riculum mandated that teachers focus on oral and aural comprehensionthrough the aid of pictures, objects and activities, and only later introducethe literacy skills of reading and writing.

In addition to transforming how Hebrew was taught and for what pur-pose, Benderly directed his attention on who should be the focus of hiseducational reforms and where. In an article in JJE from 1932, Benderly force-fully argued for shifting “the center of gravity of formal instruction” to theages of 11 to 20 (p. 15). Like others at the time who were beginning to rec-ognize adolescence as an important developmental stage, Benderly believedthat this age period—the “dawn of understanding” (p. 16)—was when thepressure of American society was greatest, and therefore in need of the mostattention. Always an advocate of public schooling, he fervently argued tointegrate Hebrew language and culture into the curriculum of secondaryschools and colleges “wherever Jewish students constitute a fair propor-tion of the register” (p. 16). A 1941 JJE article by Judah Lapson, Director ofthe Jewish Culture Council of the Bureau of Jewish Education, proclaimedthe success of this integration, boasting that over 3,173 students studiedHebrew in 17 junior and senior high schools throughout the city (p. 34).Efforts directed at adolescents and young adults also spawned high schoolclubs—partially conducted in Hebrew—whose main goal was acquisition

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

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and advancement of Jewish culture through performances, radio broadcast-ing, arts and crafts exhibitions, literary publications, and award ceremonies(Lapson, 1941).5

Benderly’s fealty to the public school and his disdain of all-day Jewishschools, along with his rejection of the Protestant Sunday school model,resulted in a dual-school system in which students studied a full dayin English at their local school and then attended communal afterschoolprograms in which they were immersed in Hebrew language learning forseveral hours. This supplementary school framework placed a considerableburden on its students. Despite these hardships and challenges, Benderly andhis coterie (many of whom were as passionate if not more about advanc-ing the call of American Hebraism) were transformative in bringing abouta Hebraist-Zionist takeover of American Jewish education in the 20th cen-tury, which they fervently believed would lead to a new form of AmericanJudaism (Sarna, 1998, p. 10). While the Ivrit b’Ivrit movement was ultimatelyunsuccessful in reaching its goals of creating a Jewish cultural revolution(Krasner, 2009), it did garner some impressive achievements (Sarna, 1998). Itreplaced—some might say “kidnapped” (Mintz, 1993b, p. 64)—the TalmudTorah communal schools and it refashioned the curriculum of Jewish edu-cation by turning Hebrew learning into the primary aim and relegating thelearning of sacred texts to the role of furthering language acquisition. In theseprogressive Jewish schools, curricula emphasizing hands-on activities relatedto modern Jewish life—such as celebrating holidays and festivals, learningabout Jewish history and heroes, singing, dancing, and staging plays, cre-ating arts and crafts, performing acts of charity, and more—took emphasisover the traditional drudge and toil of text study, Hebrew grammar, andthe like (Jacobs, 2009). Finally, it contributed to the professionalization ofJewish education, replacing rabbis and other traditional teachers with trainedHebrew-speaking educators who perceived their mission of making Hebrewinto an idiom of American Judaism as “a vocation, a calling, and a sacredmission” (Sarna, 1998, p. 12).

That Hebrew became the backbone of the most widespread form ofJewish education in America is in fact surprising since this progressiveagenda was at odds with the social context in which the largely immigrantJewish community was living (Mintz, 1991; Goren, 1970). Namely, the immi-grant subculture in which his students’ families lived allowed for limitedtime for Modern Hebrew acquisition, devalued traditional Hebrew teach-ers (Krasner, 2011, p. 26), and “wanted their children (at least the boys)to acquire, by rote, the minimum tokens of ritual literacy . . . [and] to betaught (in English, of course) the basic tenants of the Jewish religion” (Mintz,

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

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1993a, p. 17). Historian Jacob Rader Marcus (1993) aptly captured the tensionbetween Benderly’s vision of Hebrew and the desire of Jewish parents strug-gling to integrate into American society when he wrote that “the cultivationof the Hebrew language and literature had little or no appeal to a bright boywho had his eyes on New York’s tuition free City College” (p. 372). At thesame time, as Jonathan Krasner (2011) argues, Benderly’s staunch dedicationto creating a modern Americanized Hebrew curriculum using progressiveapproaches turned off both the traditionalists and the diehard Hebraists. Inshort, the Hebrew movement was caught between stronger forces. Its secu-larism was not able to support the social radicalism of one part of the Jewishcommunity, or resist the religious orthodoxy of another, nor did it providethe spark needed for the large mass of American Jewish immigrants (Spolsky,2009).

THE MOVE TOWARD TEXT-CENTERED HEBREW

The Benderly’s boys Hebrew transformation was never solely about languageacquisition—that is, “how to” teach the components of a language (i.e., itsphonology, grammar, syntax, pragmatics, and semantics)—but rather it wasfunctionalist and ideological—seeing Hebrew learning as a means of identi-fying with Jewish peoplehood, and language policy as a means of alteringwhat constituted Jewishness in a fast-changing, secularizing, modern society.When viewed against the backdrop of the broader struggle regarding howJews would be distinctively unique and yet integrated into American society(Sarna, 2004), we see that in many ways Hebrew education became one ofthe fault lines on which battles over what constituted acceptable integrationin American society was fought. Prioritizing language over religious prac-tices, Benderly saw Hebrew education as the means to socializing AmericanJewish children to a belief that the key to Jewish survival in the UnitedStates was Jewish unity grounded in cultural Zionism. Focusing on conver-sational Modern Hebrew, Benderly also saw language learning as a meansof socializing Jewish youth to a new American Jewishness.

Though Benderly and his gang reframed the conversation on Hebreweducation, there was a significant part of the Jewish community that didnot agree with his approach or focus. William Chomsky (1938) argued ina JJE article that the Hebrew curriculum of elementary schools should betext-centered and renounced efforts that inadequately taught students thelinguistic skills to deal with the grammatical and lexical difficulty of thebiblical text. Indeed, Chomsky urged educators to provide a “firm grasp ofthe essential biblical vocabulary” (p. 88) and to redirect the focus to youngerchildren. In what seems to be a direct repudiation of the natural method andprogressive approaches, Rosen and Chomsky (1940) wrote,

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What a tremendous waste has been going on in the teaching of Hebrew,in failing to recognize that the problem is not only how to teach Hebrew,but what to teach. In overemphasizing the ‘how’ we have been guiltyof trying to do well, that which we should not have been doing at all.(p. 98)

In the postwar period of the 1940s and 1950s, as synagogue-baseddenominational schools started to replace the communal Talmud Torahs,there was deep concern about the future direction of Hebrew education.In an article in JJE, Uriah Engelman (1953) feared that the autonomousand competitive nature of congregations would have detrimental effects onHebrew education. Equally important, there was a significant retreat fromthe natural method of Hebrew instruction, signaling a renewed commitmentto privileging text-based Hebrew over the acquisition of Modern Hebrew. Itis possible to see how radically the field had shifted over several decadeswhen reading Jacob Golub’s (1940) article in JJE, in which he argued for aresearch agenda that was ambitious even by today’s standards. He proposedexamining: the correlation between intelligence and Hebrew success, thebenefits of a phonetic approach to reading versus a holistic word and sen-tence method, the use of the translation method, the efficacy of individualinstruction, the need for evaluating the difficulty of textbooks, the writingof Hebrew textbooks with restricted vocabularies, the short- and long-termvalue of vocabulary memorization, determining what children like to read,developing tests to pinpoint what types of errors children make in Hebrew,and studying the optimum age for learning Hebrew. By midcentury, thepedagogical turn toward a reliance on translation and vocabulary memoriza-tion, silent reading, word lists, and mechanical exercises was firmly in place(Benathen, 1959; Brown, 1959; Chomsky, 1953, 1959, 1962; Eisenberg, 1949;Mark, 1959; Nahshon, 1959; Nudelman, 1966; Rappaport 1950; Spotts, 1959;Yudel, 1959).

HEBREW IN POSTWAR AMERICA

Arguably, the Benderly group’s Hebrew agenda was largely abandoned inresponse to a range of sociological conditions and demographic changesoccurring in the American Jewish community in the post-WW2 period thatsubstantially changed how and where American Jews practiced Judaism(Sarna, 2004). As more Jews moved from urban centers to middle-classreligiously heterogeneous neighborhoods in suburbs, the synagogue increas-ingly became the only place where children needed knowledge of Hebrew.By the 1960s, Hebrew Schools, which had been devoted to Hebraic flu-ency and cultural literacy, became to call themselves religious schools,signifying in their name the shift in ideology and priorities away from

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Hebrew fluency (Wertheimer, 1999; Friedman, 1969). In this new synagogue-centric context, Hebrew education was left up to each denomination, andeven further, to each individual synagogue. In 1958, the United SynagogueCommission on Jewish Education, a subgroup of the congregational armof the Conservative movement, issued its “Objectives and Standards of theCongregational School,” stating:

[Hebrew] language study should constitute the principal area of instruc-tion in the elementary division. At the junior high school the Bible andrelated content should be foremost. The materials should make activeuse of Hebrew to fortify language skills. At the same time, the con-tent and ideals of the Torah must receive constant emphasis. With aHebrew emphasis permeating both levels, students should derive livingand meaningful experiences from their study of Hebrew. (p. 10)

Likewise, in 1963, the Union of American Hebrew Congregations (nowknown as the Union for Reform Judaism) adopted a resolution at its 47thBiennial Assembly, stating:

Whereas, the aims of Reform Jewish education as articulated by ourCommission of Jewish Education, include the preparation of the studentto participate meaningfully in worship service and to derive religious andspiritual enrichment from our classic religious literature . . . be it rec-ommended that, among the requirements for confirmation in any of theReform religious schools there be included a reading knowledge of theHebrew language, sufficient at least to read and comprehend the Hebrewportions of the Union Prayerbook and the Union Haggadah, as well as aminimum knowledge of Hebrew terminology dealing with religious life.(Grand, 1964, p. 108)

On a policy level, these statements—reflecting the shift from the homeor Talmud Torah to the synagogue as the center of Jewish life—effectivelyput an end to conversational fluency. Later as the bar/bat mitzvah ceremonygrew in importance, Reform and Conservative religious schools shifted atten-tion toward Hebrew decoding skills so that children could lead the serviceand publicly chant the Torah portion. In this way, Hebrew education wascoopted as a primary means of bringing families into the synagogue andguaranteeing synagogues a vital income stream for their growing congrega-tions (Arons, 1995; Schoenfeld, 1987). Yet, privileging form (decoding) overcontent (comprehension and/or use) was not without its critics. Aaron Sovivnoted in a 1973 JJE article that this focus on decoding shortchanged whathe believed a meaningful Hebrew education was about. Moreover, in 1977,Shimon Frost lamented the fact that in focusing on the bar mitzvah, reli-gious schools were “opting for Hebrewless curriculum” that met “the needs

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and desires of the lowest common denominator of the parent constituency”(p. 11).

In addition to the growth of the synagogue and the rise of the denomi-nations, the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948 also forced AmericanJews to reflect on the objectives of Hebrew education (Halkin, 1950; Grand,1964). Judah Pilch’s (1948) talk titled “The Place of the Hebrew Language inthe School,” presented at the annual National Council for Jewish Educationconference in 1947 (reprinted in the JJE), touched on balancing support forJewish nationalism alongside a commitment to building a thriving AmericanJewish community. However, Pilch took his argument in a different directionfrom Benderly and acknowledged the reality that not all children were inter-ested in a pure Hebrew curriculum. Rather, he argued that not all Jews “needto be prophets” (i.e., Hebrew literate), and proposed teaching Jewish con-tent in the vernacular and sprinkling in Hebrew expressions to create “a newJudaised vernacular—this time in English” (p. 21). This diglossic approach,he believed, would result in raising a generation of “friends of Hebrew”(p. 22).

Hebrew in Camps and in Higher Education

While I have focused mainly on Hebrew education in communal orsynagogue-based programs throughout the early and mid-20th century,Hebrew education was also becoming institutionalized in Jewish summercamps and in universities (Band, 1993; Jakar, 1995; Bekerman, 1987).6 Spacelimitations prevent a complete review of these areas for our present pur-poses; however, it is important to remember that Hebrew-speaking campswere a product of Benderly’s progressive approaches to Jewish educa-tion because of their immersive nature (Shulsinger, 1967). With a focuson oral fluency through Ivrit b’Ivrit methodologies and cultural Zionism,camps provided a counterpoint to the text-centric experience of the post-war denominational synagogues. Likewise, the growth of Jewish studiesand Hebrew language programs on American (secular) college campusesin the mid-1900s was a significant shift in Jewish education (Band, 1993;Glinert, 1993; Jacobson, 1993; Mintz, 1993a, 1993b; Morahg, 1993, 1999, 2002;Raphaeli, 1993). These departments and programs attracted young Jewishadults who wanted to study Modern Hebrew and literature as part of theirpostsecondary academic experiences, but were often unconnected to othereducational initiatives and synagogue-based programs within the Jewishcommunity.

6An 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 7,206students (Katsh, 1950).

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FROM CRISIS TO CONFERENCES: 1970–2000

The end of the 20th century was witness to a renewed interest in Hebreweducation, brought about by a confluence of dynamic conditions. Kickedoff by Ackerman’s (1969) watershed essay “Jewish Education—For What?”Jewish educators entered in the “period of demoralization” (Wertheimer,1999) as the Jewish student population precipitously declined and a seriesof reports highlighted the failings of supplementary school education(Wertheimer, 1999, p. 38). Hebrew education was not exempt from thetorrent of criticism. Ackerman (1969) lambasted the minimalist approach ofHebrew education, arguing that “even when pupils complete the require-ments established by the curriculum, they have no recognizable fluencyin Hebrew and cannot understand more than carefully edited texts basedon a limited vocabulary” and that graduates have a “capability in Hebrewwhich hardly goes beyond monosyllabic responses to carefully wordedquestions” (pp. 21–22). In the early 1980s, David Schoem’s (1989) influ-ential ethnographic research also pointed to the supplemental schools’failure in teaching Hebrew and making the language meaningful to thestudents. Others revisited questions addressing the goals of Hebrew lan-guage instruction (Goldman, 1981; Schachter, 1983), its significance withinJewish education (Schiff, 1981), and curricular decisions and implementation(Schremer, 1986).

Rather than flounder on the shoals of paralysis, the collective sense ofurgency led to a renewed interest in Jewish day schools. Unlike supplemen-tal schools which were limited to only a handful of hours of educationaltime per week, educators believed day schools could change the way indi-viduals felt about being Jewish, which would ultimately result in a strongercommitments to Jewish life in America. Increasing their enrollment in the1980s and 1990s, as the Reform and Conservative movements also embracedthis educational paradigm, these schools presented themselves as modernand pedagogically forward educational alternatives that could provide a newform of Jewish learning experience (Krasner, 2006).

Yet, despite the fact that day schools at the end of the 20th centurywere the centerpiece of Jewish educational efforts, very little research lookedspecifically at Hebrew education. Schachter (1983) and Ofek’s (1996) arti-cles in JJE are two of the few to directly examine Hebrew educators inday schools. Even today, despite knowing that day schools spend anywherebetween one third to one half of the day on Judaic studies, very little isknown about Hebrew language policies, programs, curriculum, pedagogy,assessments, and materials. What can be gleaned anecdotally is that for manyparents who are seeking a more rigorous and meaningful Jewish educationfor their offspring than they themselves might have experienced, Hebrewlanguage education is a factor in the decision to enroll their children in dayschools (Gordon, 2013), particularly for the children of Israeli expatriates. It

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is also clear from the emergence of various Hebrew curricula approaches(i.e., NETA and TalAM), that the field is undergoing a process of profession-alization and standardization (Ringvald, 2013). Yet overall, the glaring lackof publicly available empirical research on Hebrew education in the broadarray of day schools leaves many questions unanswered, along with a glaringgap in comparative data of how different schools vary in their approaches,and to what end.

In addition to the surge in day school enrollment at the end of the20th century, other factors also precipitated a renewed interest in Hebreweducation in the United States. Often overlooked, but no doubt of centralimportance was the explosive growth of the discipline of second languageacquisition (SLA) in the academy. A stepchild of linguistics and psychologyfor many years, SLA really came into its own in the 1970s and 1980s, devel-oping its own methodologies and theoretical frameworks to account for thedifferences between learning a first (L1) or second (L2) language. As SLA the-orists moved away from behaviorist and cognitive approaches of languagelearning to communicative and sociocultural models, the surge of scholarshipin this newly established discipline had an immediate impact on the teachingand learning of many majority and minority languages. Moshe Nahir (1981)noted that at the time of compiling his book in the early 1980s he knew “ofno textbook or reader in the theory or methodology of teaching Hebrew as asecond language to have been published in North America in recent decades(p. 7). One of the first to address how the “recent innovations and resultsin the research in the field of second language acquisition may be adoptedand/or utilized” in Hebrew teaching, Nahir’s collection covered such topicsHebrew teaching methodologies and strategies of learning Hebrew based ona deeper understanding of its linguistic structures.

Israeli and/or Jewish applied linguists and applied psychologists werealso critical in bridging the fields of second language learning and Hebreweducation and turning scholarly attention to the conditions and practicesof American Hebrew education. Their work focused on the assessment ofHebrew language learning (Shohamy, 1982; Ravid, 1983), the developmentand orthographic and cognitive factors of L2 learners of Hebrew (Geva &Siegel, 2000), and the language attrition of Israeli Hebrew speakers in theUnited States (Kaufman, 2000). A subfield of applied linguistics, languagepolicy was also applied to the context of Hebrew education (Brosh, 1996;Spolsky, 1986, 2009; Shohamy, 1999a, 1999b). Most recently, the focus onHebrew education in the United States has examined assessment practices(Goldberg, Weinberger, Goodman, & Ross, 2010) and reading Hebrew andbehaviorial problems (Goldberg, 2005).

At the turn of the 20th century, the topic of Hebrew in America reached alevel of importance whereby several conferences (which resulted in publica-tions) addressed the historical considerations of the Hebraic movement andHebrew on American campuses (Mintz, 1993a, 1993b), practical concerns of

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Hebrew language policies in American Jewish schooling (Ringvald & Mintz,1999), and Hebrew in the era of globalization (Nevo & Olshtain, 2007).Additional initiatives have targeted the advancement of Hebrew within theNorth American Jewish community, including The Memorial Foundation forJewish Culture launching Hebrew in America in 2005 and the National Centerfor the Hebrew Language establishing a Council of American Ulpanim in2003.

Yet, the renewed interest in Hebrew education paradoxically has over-lapped with a more critical stance toward the endeavor, as well as a healthydose of skepticism about the goals of teaching Hebrew. Joshua Fishman(1976), a leading figure in the sociology of language, captured this paradox,writing, “We continue miraculously, generation after generation, to raise chil-dren who venerate, respect, and value the Hebrew language even as wehave failed to give them speaking, reading, or even praying facility in thelanguage” (p. 3). Equally important, leading figures in Jewish (and Hebrew)education, like Alvin Schiff, expressed concerns about the limits of languageto ensure a meaningful attachment to Judaism. In 1981 he wrote:

Notwithstanding its pivotal role in the school, Hebrew is not a cure-allfor an ailing Jewish education enterprise. It does not replace the Jewishhome, nor the ‘yiddishe gass,’ nor religious experience. It is not a sub-stitute for instruction in Jewish life and values; though it can serve themadmirably. (p. 3)

Overall, the end of the 20th century was marked with a recommitment tothe field of Hebrew education, as well as a rethinking of its underlyingassumptions.

CONTEMPORARY VISIONS OF HEBREW EDUCATION

Hebrew and Israel Education

In more recent years, two parallel strands have developed in Hebrew educa-tion. The first strand has emerged out of a growing interest in Israel education(Grant, Marom, & Werchow, 2013; Kopelowitz & Grant, 2012). Recent callsfor research in this new area have encouraged scholars to address howthe purposes and practices of Hebrew education shape, and are shapedby, the purposes and practices of Israel education (Avni, Kattan, & Zakai,2013; Rodman, 2003). Indeed, this bidirectional line of inquiry underscoresthe dialectical relationship between Hebrew education and Israel education,questioning how contributions and potential challenges of Hebrew to Israeleducation, as well as those of Israel education to Hebrew education canadvance both fields’ objectives.

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Another aspect of Hebrew learning as it pertains to Israel educationrevolves around building upon the success of the Birthright (Taglit) program.According to Gidi Mark and Barry Chazan (2011), Birthright represents apowerful venue for building interest among American young adults to studyand learn Modern Hebrew after they have breathed “Hebrew oxygen” inIsrael (p. 6). Though there is some empirical research (Chertok, Sasson, &Saxe, 2009) showing a Taglit Hebrew effect—that is, that American youngadults are fired up to learn Modern Hebrew as a result of their travel experi-ences, not enough is known if they are actually doing so, and if this linguisticprocess is affecting how they feel and act as Jews. However, the belief is thatthe right initiatives and programs could result in “a major new national TaglitHebrew ulpan community that would spread across North America” andeven produce the “new Eliezer Ben Yehudas of Hebrew in North America”(Mark & Chazan, 2011, p. 6).

Finally, Hebrew language charter schools are also making a con-nection between Hebrew education and Israel education. In 2008, theAreivim Philanthropic Group, a Jewish funding partnership established byMichael Steinhardt and William Davidson, identified Hebrew language char-ter schools as representing a tremendous opportunity for “furthering Hebrewand Israel education” (Berman, 2011). The Hebrew Charter School Center(HCSC), led by Steinhardt’s daughter Sara Berman, has helped establish 5Hebrew language charter schools in Harlem, Brooklyn, Washington, DC, EastBrunswick, NJ, and San Diego, and aims to open new schools in the comingyears reaching up to 24,000 children. Representing a stark discontinuity inhow Hebrew education has been traditionally conceived and implemented(Avni, 2014b), these publicly financed schools offer an immersive dual-language Modern Hebrew/English curriculum for all children regardless ofreligious, ethnic, or linguistic background. In their words, bringing Hebrewinto the public sphere will make “it that much more attractive for AmericanJews to embrace Hebrew if they know that others are interested in the lan-guage as well” (Gedzelman, 2011, p. 4). While the HCSC argues that vastmajority of American Jews “perceive Hebrew as parochial,” Hebrew charterschools can change the language’s image and promote it as the vernacu-lar of Israel—“a modern, economically vital and burgeoning member of thecommunity of nations” (p. 4) that can “offer added value to anyone excitedto learn it” (p. 4), which will lead more Americans “to develop a personalappreciation for Israel, its life and culture” (p. 4). Ironically, Hebrew lan-guage charter schools may ultimately materialize one of Benderly’s goals: toteach children Hebrew so that they could bring the language back to theirfamilies and spread it through the greater community. Only in this case, thebroader community includes Jews and non-Jews.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the Jewish educational world has perceivedHebrew charter schools as threats and has trenchantly critiqued and rejectedthe assumption that Hebrew can be untethered from Judaism and Jewishness

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(Cohen, 2010). Though their emergence may rattle the world of Jewish edu-cation, Hebrew language charter schools have also blurred the lines of whatclassifies as Hebrew advocacy. As recently as November 2013, the WorldZionist Organization, along with the Israeli Ministry of Education and otherAmerican Jewish groups (including the Steinhardt Foundation), establishedthe Hebrew Language Council in an effort to promote Modern Hebrewfluency among American Jewish youth and for students at Hebrew lan-guage charter schools. Among the goals of this effort are making Israeliculture accessible to Americans, stemming the tides of assimilation andintermarriage, and reaching second- and third-generation Israelis in theDiaspora and “keeping them Jewish” (Sokol, 2013).

Problematizing Assumptions: Hebrew in Practice

The second strand to emerge in recent years is a research strand concernedwith examining what Hebrew education looks like in everyday practices.Drawing from theoretical and methodological approaches in anthropologyand sociology, this strand problematizes the relationship between languageand multiple modes of Jewish engagement, and shares a commitment tousing ethnographic and other qualitative methods to better understand whatis actually happening in Hebrew learning contexts.

One of the first studies in this new approach was Zvi Bekerman’s (1986)ethnographic study of a Jewish overnight camp. Through careful attention tointeractional work at the camp, Bekerman showed that despite the camp’sstaff competency in Hebrew, strong beliefs in the value of Hebrew, and a setof clear rules regarding its use, Hebrew could not by itself ensure a Jewishinterpretation of camp activities. In summarizing his findings, Bekerman(1999) wrote, “Hebrew, although not totally independent of Jewishness, isnot an exact calculus, a script, a finished choreography, that if imposed, exer-cised, or applied, enables Jewishness to be interpreted” (pp. 115–116). Moreimportantly, he argued that it is not necessarily a matter of better Hebrewteachers or curriculum that will lead to “proper transmission” of ethnicity (p.118), but rather a more nuanced reading of how the broader social contextsintersect with ways in which individuals and groups understand themselvesand find meaning in their practices. My own work (Avni, 2011, 2012a, 2012b)has also challenged the prevailing belief that Hebrew can ensure a strongerJewish identity or sense of Jewishness. Employing ethnographic and linguis-tic approaches, I analyzed the intersection of everyday language practices,language ideologies, and language policies at a liberal Jewish day school inNew York City. My findings showed that the language policy of Ivrit b’Ivritworked to define and reify Jewish boundaries; however, the absence or lackof Hebrew in particular activities and contexts also worked to accentuate

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or evoke Jewishness. That is, using English instead of Hebrew did not pre-clude or impede the construction of Jewishness, nor did the employmentof Hebrew always establish or index Jewish beliefs, values, or sensibilities.Overall, my findings indicated that Hebrew could both evoke Jewishnessand be tangential to this evocation.

This strand of scholarship also problematizes the ideology that Hebrewacts as a type of linguistic glue for diverse Jewish populations. In her qual-itative study of undergraduate advanced Hebrew learners at a Canadianuniversity, Avital Feuer (2009a, 2009b) found that Canadian English-speakingstudents and Israeli Hebrew-speaking students used Modern Hebrew as away of negotiating and balancing their lives in the Canadian diasporic con-text as both a unifier (i.e., connecting all Jews) and as a modifying identifier(differentiating among themselves with the Jewish community). Put differ-ently, Hebrew served to structure their Jewish identities in two ways: to be apart of the larger Jewish community and to separate themselves into smallersubgroups of Jews. Likewise, Shlomy Kattan (2009) demonstrated that thechildren of Israeli shlichim (emissaries) deployed Hebrew to define theiroverlapping identities as Israelis, Zionists, transnationals, and as temporaryresidents of the United States. In this analysis, Hebrew did not act as a uni-fier among Jews, but rather as a boundary marker between types of Jews.The Israeli families he studied displayed ambivalence toward affiliation withthe United States by accentuating and emphasizing the linguistic practicesof Israel and mocking Americans’ uses of Hebrew and how they sounded.Judging Israeli pronunciation of Hebrew to be authentic, the families ofIsraeli shlichim legitimized their way of speaking as “native” which servedto reinforce the boundaries between Israeli and American Jews. Also attunedto Jewish differentiation, Sarah Benor’s (2012) extensive study provides aninsightful look at the critical role of language and other semiotic practicesfor ba’alei teshuva—Jews raised non-Orthodox who become frum—highlyobservant religious Jews. Revealing that it is not enough to know and speaka language in a particular way, Benor demonstrates that for these Jews,Hebrew (and Yiddish) are wrapped up in a matrix of social, cultural, andembodied practices that include attire, food, music, and aesthetics and workin complex ways in defining the contours of what is considered authenticallyJewish and by whom.

Collectively these studies suggest that just learning Hebrew does notautomatically ensure intended results and/or lead to stronger feelings ofJewishness or connections with other Jews. In conversation with one another,these studies show that the ways Jews in North America use Hebrew areuniquely configured and are shaped not only by historical, religious, andideological beliefs, but also by uniquely contemporary labile patterns ofmultilingualism and more fluid notions of language, identity, and commu-nity. Attending to practice as the unit of analysis (and focusing on howlanguage is used) offers nuanced portraits of how Jewish individuals and

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institutions deploy Hebrew to define or distinguish diasporic Jewishness inall of its complexity, and questions how (if at all) the varieties of Hebrewwork in interactional and social practices to mark a person or an activity asJewish. Equally important, in re-centering the focus on everyday actions, thisbody of research demonstrates that Hebrew is a signifier of many differentmeanings—depending on who’s speaking to whom, in what context, and forwhat purpose.

CONCLUDING THOUGHTS

I began this article with four scenarios that capture the complexity andambivalence with which students and educators engage in questions overwhat Hebrew represents and symbolizes for liberal American Jews. Sketchingthe trajectory of Hebrew education in the United States through a review ofthe scholarship over the last 80 years, I have argued that debates aboutwhere, how, why, and which Hebrew should be taught have shaped andbeen shaped by competing concerns about what it means to be (and act)Jewish in broader American society. This exploration has offered a com-posite, rich picture of the ways in which American Jewish educators havelooked to Hebrew (over and over again) in their efforts to build and ensurea vital and thriving Jewish presence in North America. This exploration alsoprovides the framework for constructing a meaningful research agenda forthe future. Below is not a specific list of research questions, but rather apresentation of areas of inquiry that can inform an ongoing discussion aboutHebrew education.

Hebrew in and Across Contexts

Considering the scope and breadth of Hebrew education in the United Statesand the varied settings—both formal and informal—in which Hebrew learn-ing is taking place, the field of Jewish education has to take the first andcrucial step of committing itself to undertaking a rigorous research agendathat produces published, publicly available findings. The time has come toinvest epistemological capital and financial resources in the creation of asubfield of Hebrew education in order to create a more holistic and multi-dimensional understanding of what Hebrew is and can be. Not only do weneed to collect basic demographic information about who is teaching andlearning Hebrew and where, but we need to better understand how edu-cational rationales and ideologies guide educators, institutions, and funders’decision-making and policies regarding the variety (or varieties) of Hebrewbeing taught, and equally important, how these decisions are enacted and

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negotiated in practice. Only a more empirically grounded and nuancedexamination of Hebrew teaching and learning will allow researchers, edu-cators, and funders to collaborate in their joint efforts to improve AmericanJewish education.

Moreover, as much as we need to know more about Hebrew learningat summer camps, JCCs, preschools, supplemental schools, Israel experiencetrips (i.e., Taglit), and adult schools, it is not enough to look at each of thesecontext in isolation. Rather, to advance an understanding of the relationshipsbetween Hebrew education and how Jews imbue their actions and ideas withJewish meaning, it is necessary to carefully examine how Jewish individualsand groups learn, think about, and use Hebrew across contexts. That is, it isparamount to analyze how Hebrew education overlaps and/or is separatedfrom other contexts in which (Jewish) learning and practices take place. Forexample, it might be valuable to consider how Hebrew used at Jewish campsis deployed or built upon in synagogue programs and religious schooling.Another way of exploring these overlaps might be to analyze how Birthrightreturnees look for opportunities to learn Hebrew or seek out opportunitiesto use Hebrew in other educational, professional, or social venues. An inter-context approach could bring together theory, practice, and policy, all thewhile underscoring that language teaching and learning are not confined tothe walls of one classroom, one geographic space, or one period of time.Attending to the lifelong accumulation of Hebrew learning experiences—including in the classroom and on social media, through words on a page(Boyarin 1993; Heilman, 1987), through material culture (Avni, 2014a), andthrough soundscapes (Kelman, 2010)—might offer a generative approachfor conceptualizing Hebrew education within the broader goals of Jewisheducation.

Finally, it is also time to consider Hebrew learning as part of thebroader cultural shift toward American multilingualism. As more and moreAmericans live their lives in multiple linguistic codes, Jewish educators needto also tap into this sociolinguistic moment and embrace Hebrew learningas a type of bilingual education that provides its learners with access tothe cognitive, social, and economic benefits of multilingualism. ReframingHebrew as more than just the language of Jewish thought and tradition mayhave important implications for how the enterprise of Hebrew education isconstrued, validated, and supported. In this regard, looking at how otherheritage, ethnic, and religious languages (i.e., Mandarin, Russian, Arabic)have been repositioned within local communities can be insightful to Jewisheducators.

Hebrew in Practice

A broader lens on Hebrew learning contexts underscores the need for holis-tically grounded and practice-based research. Too much of the scholarship

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on Hebrew education has been driven by a prescriptive mode of argumenta-tion of what an educated Jew is and knows. What the field needs is a seriouscommitment to exploring what is actually happening on the ground whenindividuals and groups learn and use Hebrew in a myriad of contexts, eachembedded within particular social, historical, and physical considerations. Afocus on Hebrew in practice also means shifting from an outcome-centricagenda (the educational act) to a focus on the processes of education andlearning (as social interaction). If we accept Daniel Boyarin’s (2013) defini-tion that “what’s ‘Jewish’ is what people who are called Jews do and say” (p.xiv), then community stakeholders need to stop beating themselves up aboutthe failure of Hebrew education and the lack of Hebrew proficiency amongAmerican Jews (Glinert, 1999), and pay more attention to how AmericanJews use language(s) to infuse their everyday lives with frames of Jewishconsciousness and sensibility. Just speaking Hebrew does not in and of itselfmake someone Jewish nor does it imbue an action with Jewish values ormeaning—just ask Borat, actor Sacha Baron Cohen’s anti-Semitic title char-acter of his 2006 movie who employs Hebrew (for supposedly his nativelanguage of Kazakhstan) to engage in outlandish sexist and homophobicantics. Measuring Hebrew literacy competency is only part of the picture, andruns the risk of ignoring the unique and distinctly modern ways AmericanJewish youth and young adults use language(s) and how they look to alter-native cultural practices, new venues, and cultural syncretism to express andgive shape to their own brand of Jewishness (Cohen & Kelman, 2007).

The Power of Hebrew and Jewish Education Reform

Moreover, as Jewish educators (Horowitz, 2002; Jacobs, 2013; Levisohn, 2013;Prell, 2000) begin to push back against the concept of Jewish identity asthe defining outcome and driver of Jewish educational reform efforts, howHebrew education has been coopted and involved in this process must alsobe critically addressed. This accounting means recognizing that the linksbetween particular types of Hebrew learning and measures of Jewish iden-tity are inexplicably tied to notions of power—what is deemed Jewishlyauthentic or legitimate by whom and when, and for what purposes. If Jewisheducators are seriously interested in rethinking assumptions about the goalsof Jewish education, then they must question whose agenda is served byparticular ways of thinking about and teaching Hebrew language. We cannotcontinue to think that Hebrew instruction and usage is a neutral activity andthat it is not embedded in matrixes of differential power relationships. As crit-ical education theorists have shown us over and again, nothing in educationis value-neutral. Writing about defending “threatened linguistic capital” suchas classical languages in modern-day societies, Bourdieu (1991) argues that“one cannot save the value of a competence unless one saves the market”

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(p. 57). With this in mind, researchers need to examine what the market ofHebrew education is and who are its consumers and producers. Researchto explore these concerns might address questions such as: What is the roleof Hebrew education in a synagogue’s ability to recruit and maintain mem-bers? How does the focus on decoding Biblical Hebrew intersect with andshape how families and communities’ view what qualifies as a legitimateJewish education? Who benefits most from American Jews learning ModernHebrew? What is normative, standard, and authentic Hebrew, and who is itsspeaker?

Coda

Tracing its contemporary roots to the early 1920s, Hebrew education hasnever been solely about the “how to” of teaching a language. Rather, it hasalways been a thread in the larger tapestry depicting how American Jewsin modern times have negotiated their way in American society. Articles inthe Journal of Jewish Education stitch together how these negotiations haveunfolded as Jewish educators have called upon Hebrew to do a wide arrayof “work”—including transmitting Jewish identity, revitalizing and refashion-ing American Jewish culture, strengthening Americans’ connection to Israel,and connecting Jews with their religious heritage and textual tradition. Thehistoriography of Hebrew education in the United States also reveals howcrucial turns in language ideologies and policies have resulted in radicalshifts and cultural disruptions in how Hebrew learning has been construedand practiced. From Ivrit b’Ivrit to bar/bat mitzvah decoding, to day schoolimmersion, to Hebrew charter schools, the trajectory of Hebrew educationhas reflected social and cultural dynamics in the American Jewish commu-nity and in American society. Understanding why this has been the case,and how the project of Hebrew learning can work in promoting, shaping, orinhibiting the goals of Jewish education in the future is a task worthy of ourcollective attention and efforts.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to thank the editor of the Journal of Jewish education, MichaelZeldin, for inviting me to write this article, and for his guidance and advicethroughout its preparation. I would also like to thank the two anonymousreviewers for their thoughtful and thorough feedback. I am indebted to BenJacobs for his critical and reflective comments on an earlier draft, and to ZviBekerman for sharing his insightful thoughts.

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hebrew education in the united states: historical perspectives and future directions

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