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Introduction:A Retrospective Sometimes decisions of which you are not even aware can have an enormous impact on your life. The autumn of my second year in elementary school was a traumatic time for me. The public schools in Queens must have adopted the educational principles of John Dewey, because in October the classes were split up and new classes were formed. To me, this meant moving from a class full of bright kids to a mixed class in which I was far and away the smartest child. The move toward an equal treatment of all students extended even to reading groups: instead of the groups reading on different levels, we were all expected to use the same second grade reader and write answers to a list of questions before we could do anything else. If the other students had seen me struggle with my own portion as they struggled with theirs, they might have accepted me. Instead, they saw me finish in just a few minutes and then sit reading my own book for fun while they struggled with the difficulties of learning how to read. I was the “whiz kid,” annoying in my smartness and attacked with schoolbags as I left school each afternoon. Going to school became a tormenting mix of intellectual boredom and social anxiety. There was one oasis in my education: Hebrew school, which I attended for two hours each Monday through Thursday and all morning on Sundays. At Hebrew school, no one appeared to care about educational theory—most of the teachers had never heard of John Dewey. They simply wanted to teach Jewish kids enough Judaism and Jewish history to inoculate us against disappearing into the American “melting pot.” These teachers had no ambitions to nurture self-esteem or even social cohesiveness; they just wanted to teach the lesson plan. And they certainly didn’t want to cope with the boredom of a very smart, very eager student. So they kept “skipping” me into higher grades, a xi xii Introduction practice that the public schools had dropped. As a result, I graduated at ten years old together with the thirteen-year-olds in my class. And I was happy. Nobody in class envied or hated me. When they paid attention to me at all, it was with the kind of teasing affection one gives the friends of one’s younger siblings. Hebrew school was a joyous spot in my day: I was accepted socially and stimulated intellectually—certainly not most children’s reactions to Hebrew school. In Hebrew school I first learned how to conjugate verbs, read about the Crusades, the Inquisition, the revolutionary movements in Europe. It was there that I first began to associate religious studies with intellectual challenge and stimulation. I don’t know what the Hebrew school would have done with me after I “graduated.” As it happens, we moved to Israel when I was ten years old. In my public school in Tel Aviv, I was faced with the considerable challenge of learning sixth-grade classes in a language I really didn’t know. I loved Hebrew grammar, though, and even before I began to speak Hebrew fluently I could conjugate a verb as well as or even better than most of the Israeli kids in my class; we all laughed at the 98 I got on the first quiz. I also loved my Bible class. Jeremiah’s Hebrew was far too difficult for me, but it was also difficult for the Israelis. We all had to learn very slowly, and we spent a lot of time on basic comprehension. To me this meant that after I had finished decoding the language, there was still time to concentrate on the prophet’s meaning. Two years later, my mother and I came back from Israel to join my fifteen-year-old sister, who had returned to the United States alone. I didn’t want to forget my Hebrew after I came back and I knew that if I didn’t study I would lose it all. I knew far too much spoken Hebrew and had far too much textual knowledge to fit into a Hebrew high school, so I came to Manhattan to seek a place to study. I visited Herzeliyah, a teacher’s academy, but at twelve years old, I was not interested in becoming a teacher. Ultimately, I landed in the Prozdor program of the Jewish Theological Seminary. Today, the Prozdor is a formal after-school Hebrew...

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