Abstract
My point of departure is the late Alan Mintz’s contention that American Jewish education in the early twentieth century, particularly in the communal Talmud Torahs, was “kidnapped” by a generation of young Hebraists, and that a Hebrew-centered curriculum, guided by the tenets of Tarbut Ivrit, dominated the American Jewish education scene over the next half-century. It is often supposed that with the decline of the communal supplementary schools in the 1940s and 50s, that this ideology was exported to the growing number of modern day schools, where it animated Judaics curricula through the 1970s.
My paper will complicate this narrative by interrogating the articulated ideologies undergirding educators’ support for Hebrew-centric curricula. Extrapolating from the archival record, I will argue that the rhetoric and motivations of Hebrew proponents evolved over time. If early day school educators internalized Hebraists’ view that modern Hebrew was integral to a Jewish cultural revival, they also viewed the Hebrew-centered curriculum as a means of distinguishing day schools from more traditional yeshivas. By the 1940s, day school advocates also championed modern Hebrew and its speakers in Palestine as symbols of Jewish endurance. Israel became even more prominent in the rhetoric of Hebrew advocates in the 1960s and 70s, including proponents of the Solomon Schechter schools. By then, Israel was a key tenet of what Jonathan Woocher called “American Jewish civil religion,” and educators, reflecting the zeitgeist, sought to use Israel and Hebrew culture to spur feelings of identity and ethnic pride within their students.