Back to School: Jewish Day School in the Lives of Adult Jews

Acknowledgments

Acknowledgments This was supposed to be a book about teachers, but it has ended up as one about parents. Parents, we have come to learn, constitute the great unexplored frontier for Jewish day-school education. Such a profound reorientation of interests bears witness to a fruitful and always enjoyable collaboration between two people who brought together two different sets of concerns and created something new from their combination. One of the authors is a scholar of Jewish education, the other a sociologist of Jewish identity . We wrestled many times with the conceptual frame of the work. Is it a study in education? Is it an inquiry into Jewish identity ? In the end we hope it contributes to both areas, while situated broadly in the sociology of contemporary Jewish life. The reorientation of our inquiry not only reflects a productive long-distance collaboration but also is testament to the many ways in which we have benefited from the guidance and encouragement of colleagues. Foremost among these have been our colleagues at York University in the Centre for Jewish Studies and the Faculty of Education. At York, we owe a special debt of gratitude to Michael Brown and Marty Lockshin for their mentorship and friendship. Colleagues at Hebrew University’s Melton Centre for Jewish Education have always been generous with their wisdom and support . We are particularly grateful to Michael Rosenak and Howie Deitcher for their interventions at strategic moments in the development of this project. Many chapters were first presentations at the annual meetings of the Network for Research in Jewish Education. The sympathetic but critical responses of colleagues in this forum have served as the furnace in which our ideas have been forged. Among our Network colleagues, Carol Ingall, Joe Reimer, and Michael Zeldin had a special influence on the work that has emerged here. xi This project would not have been possible without the financial support provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. In addition, data from “Centreville,” discussed in chapter 6, were collected with funding provided by the AVI CHAI Foundation. Chapter 2 was written thanks to financial assistance provided by the Research Unit of the education department of the Jewish Agency for Israel. Kathryn Wildfong, our editor at Wayne State, merits special thanks for her interest and encouragement from the first time we met and then over subsequent months. Jack Wertheimer, too, has been an example and guide in this project and others. We are flattered by his readiness to contribute a foreword to this volume. Finally, we owe special thanks to a number of people at the heart of the study. We are profoundly grateful to the parents, teachers, and children at the Paul Penna Downtown Jewish Day School for welcoming us into their midst over a four-year period. We owe special thanks to Elysa Cohen, Michaele-Sue Goldblatt, and Janet Nish-Lapidus for facilitating our entry into the school, and then for allowing us to stick around even at difficult moments. We thank the parents of six other day schools who agreed to be interviewed as a comparative sample. The work that emerged benefited greatly from the wisdom and goodwill of Dafna Ross, who served as research assistant for the project over a two-year period. Acharon aharon haviv, last but not least, Alex Pomson would like to thank his wife, Tanya, for her extraordinary dedication to his work and their family. Her support has been greater than any reasonable person could expect. As for Anna, Ori, Ittai, and Shifra, it has always been a joy to see their puzzlement at how Daddy could spend so long working on the same book. Randal Schnoor would like to thank his wife, Marsha, for her continual support of his work. She put up with countless evenings alone with their newborn daughter as her husband spent time “at the school” and in the homes of school parents. He will keep the lessons of this work in mind as he chooses a Jewish day school for Jaeli and her new brother, Shea. xii Acknowledgments ...