The Women Who Reconstructed American Jewish Education, 1910-1965

10. Sylvia C. Ettenberg: A Portrait in Practical Wisdom

฀ 1917–
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mm^g[^k` 205 carol k. ingall S ylvia Cutler Ettenberg was the force behind Kaplan’s Teachers Institute (ti) of the Jewish Theological Seminary (jts) and many of its most innovative educational initiatives in the post–World War II era: Camp Ramah, the Leadership Training Fellowship (ltf),1 the Melton Research Center, and the Prozdor (a supplementary Hebrew High School). Although she never received the title Dean of the Teachers Institute, it was she who expanded and professionalized the school, integrating it into jts, and transforming jts in the process (Kaufman, 1997). In his excellent history of the Teachers Institute, Kaufman maintains that Ettenberg’s association with men bearing the titles and degrees she lacked often obscured her achievements. Like so many other women who could not aspire to the rabbinate, she became instead a Jewish educator and an “educated layperson.” Ettenberg was a Jewish woman who made a difference. In an age when women may become rabbis and scholars, the story of Sylvia Ettenberg and the Teachers Institute ought to remind us of the vital contribution of those who toil in the vineyards of Jewish education: the teachers (most of whom remain women). (620) Using portraiture, the methodology popularized by Sara LawrenceLightfoot and Jessica Hoffman Davis (1997), I take up Kaufman’s invitation to convey Ettenberg’s milieu, personality and her accomplishments, placing her in the foreground of the canvas, rather than in the background, behind Moshe Davis and Seymour Fox. I also examine the constraints on her career and, responding to Kaufman’s challenge, examine the role gender played in Ettenberg’s long and varied professional journey. Middleton (1993), drawing on the work of Foucault and Bourdieu, uses the term “intellectual genealogy” to examine the contexts that transformed the women she studies. Having mined those environments and experiences, she then draws “life histories” of her collaborators. A life history is subtly different from Lagemann’s (1979) “educational biography”; it conjures up a reciprocal element, in which the subject constructs as well as receives the educational events of her life. For someone like Sylvia Ettenberg, who routinely elicits adjectives like forceful, indomitable, and indefatigable from those who know her, a conceptual framework that privileges interaction with as well as response to education is preferable. Building on interviews, artifacts, and the existing research literature, I draw a life history of Sylvia Ettenberg, placing her against a backdrop of American and Jewish history, educational history, and the Jewish Theological Seminary, reflecting on how she shaped those domains. 206 ingall Home, Family, and School Sylvia Cutler began her love affair with Zionism and the Hebrew language through her father’s matchmaking. Mordechai (Max) Cutler figures prominently in her narrative. I was born in East New York, in Brooklyn. . . . One side of the tracks was Brownsville, and the other was East New York. It was the better side of the tracks, but there was a lot of communication with both sides. My father—let’s see—I would say he was a maskil [literally, enlightened one; someone well-read in Western culture who hoped to reinvigorate Hebrew as a modern language]. He was a very active Zionist. But that was not his work. . . . When he came here, he worked in millinery. . . . I must say he disliked it intensely and was quite unhappy about it. So his happiness came from all the Zionist activities that he had. He was an officer in the B’nai Zion group, which is still in operation now. And he was very active in the Parent Teacher’s Association of the Talmud Torah that I went to. (Ettenberg, 2005a) Isa Aron (2006), Sylvia’s daughter, remembers her grandfather as a man who prized Jewish learning, “My grandfather died when I was seven, so I have very limited memories of him. I remember this very sweet man. . . . His great pleasure was to have me sit on his lap and read Rashi to him.” Aron knew her grandmother much better than her grandfather since her grandmother lived with the Ettenbergs after suffering a stroke in 1961. Aron (2006) describes Rochel Malkah (Amster) Cutler as more modest and retiring than her husband and recalls her reading Yiddish novels. Ettenberg refers to her mother as a homemaker who took in sewing to make ends meet, much to her husband’s embarrassment...