Passionate Pioneers: The Story of Yiddish Secular Education in North America, 1910–1960 (review)

The secular Yiddish schools explored by Freidenreich, not including religious schools such as kheyders or yeshivas, reveal the deep desire to educate the Jewish immigrant youth who came to the U.S. and Canada in the twentieth century. As a work of educational history, the text is quite interesting; however, as a work of oral history, it falls short.

There is much about the packaging and presentation of the work that is unusual. In addition to being well illustrated by photos, postcards, pamphlets, and other documentation, it includes a compact disc that contains fifteen camp and schuln (schools in all their forms) songs performed by a Yiddish folk song club from Israel to piano accompaniment (lyrics and translations of the songs appear in Appendix C). The shape of the book—almost twice as wide as it is tall—sets it apart, as does the page layout—double columns across each page, likely a cultural reflection of the layout common when publishing works reflective of the Torah, such as the Etz Hayim (Tree of Life).

The organization of the work is different as well; the book is broken down into twenty-one chapters organized into five separate parts, each of which would have made a solid chapter in and of itself. Part I, “The Historical and Cultural Background,” makes a solid primer for the gentile or Jewish audience alike, both by detailing the rise of Jewish secularism in the early decades of twentieth century North America and by teaching the Yiddish vocabulary used throughout the book. Part II, “Jewish Schooling in North America,” presents a historic overview of the various forms of Jewish schooling throughout the century. Part III, “Yiddish Secular Education,” details the origins and development of the various types of Yiddish secular schuln and camps through the 1950s and explores the outcomes when these essentially Eastern European institutions encountered the assimilationist theories of North America. Friedenreich accomplishes this by focusing on curricula, publications and conferences, and teachers.

The meat of the work falls within the remainder. Part IV, “Communities and Their Yiddish Secular Schuln,” explores “the schuln identified in each of their 160 communities, and describes their important contributions and the impressive collective imprint they made on Jewish education” (197), while Part V, “Jewish Education Summer Camps,” explores the “cohort of subcategories— Jewish language camps, Jewish cultural camps, and other camps—whose programs offer educational experiences that are identifiably Jewish” (340). Both parts use a mix of documentation and interviews to detail examples of Yiddish secular education programs, reflecting a good balance between Canada and the U.S. These parts, as well as Chapter 13, will be of most interest to oral historians.

Freidenreich is suited to this work: her mother was the poet Pessie Hirschfield Pomerantz, and her father was the cultural activist, author, educator, and board member of the Sholem Aleichem folkschuln (folk school) in Chicago Chaim Pomerantz. Her personal heritage raises insider/outsider questions, an issue acknowledged by Freidenreich: “if I wrote solely from the point of view of my own recollections and experiences … the book would be merely nostalgic and subjective. Although such a memoir might prove interesting, my inner professional voice demanded documentation, through research, and as much objectivity as possible” (xvi).

In order to attempt this objectivity, the author set forth to present “objective reporting combined with personal narratives of those who had been involved; statistics as well as memories; programmatic and ideological declarations; and reports of the long-range effects the schools and camps had upon students and campers” (xvi). While fine in the ideal, the author’s insider bias emerges from time to time. The author uses differing tones when positively describing the Zionist schools of the Midwest and Canadian frontier (which she attended) and somewhat negatively describing the urban schools of the larger cities (which were numerically greater). She also details the influence of the Communist party...