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5 Learning to Be a Part-Time! Jew David Schoem Nowhere is the ambivalence which North American Jews feel towards their heritage better illustrated than in the way in which Jewish educational institutions are supported. Hebrew schools can constitute a large part of congregational budgets. Yet Jewish schools, both day and afternoon, are underfun,jed and the teachers are underpaid. Jewish children are forced tel attend while the parents subvert the lessons of the schools. Schoem's ethnography of a West Coast Hebrew school shows how such equivocality is communicated to children preparing for bar and bat mitzvah. He also compares this Hebrew school to other such ethnic educational institutions and finds that the contradictory pattern of seeking to impart the ancestral heritage while striving to conform to the American way of life is shared. Sociological studies suggest that what Schoem has found on the West Coast exists throughout North America. "What is a Shofar?'" asked the Jewish afternoon school teacher at the start of the new school year. The seventh grade class sat without emotion, no one attempting to identify this symbol of the Jewish New Year season. "I know," one student finally called out." A Chauffeur2 (sic) is the person who drives your car around." Caught in the pull of two cultural worlds, the teacher and the student speak in two different languages. Although the student's answer is inappropriate for this :lesson at the Jewish afternoon school (or Hebrew School), it is the more meaningful term to both the teacher and the student once they leave class at the end of the day. For them, what occurs each day as they enter the complementary Jewish afternoon school is an uncomfortable "stepping in and out" of cultures. Although as Jews they share a history and tradition spanning thousands of years, it is not the teacher's "shofar" but the student's "chauffeur" that plays a more significant role in their lives in America. This paper examines the conflicts and dilemmas that the Jewish people in America face as an ethnic minority group3 in their attempt to survive in their struggle to bal.ance ethnic authenticity with societal 96 I. Identities and Identification 97 integration. Employing the assumption that schooling serves as an agent of cultural transmission (Spindler 1976) and that it reflects the society in which it exists, the study focuses on a Jewish school and its community. The Jewish afternoon school is an example of the complementary ethnic and/or religious school. Berkson (1920) has explained the functioning of the complementary school, saying, "Each system of schools would insure the integrity of the community which supports it; the public schools would further the society of the state; the religious and ethnic schools, the society of minority communities." Research Methodology Choosing a school raises difficult though important conceptual and methodological questions. In thinking about studying a school, one obviously does not wish to study the school per se but rather the school within a much broader socio-cultural context. To begin to correctly define the school, one needs to go beyond its physical and written attributes to the people themselves, their thoughts, and their actions. The principal, the teachers, and most important, the students were all part of what constituted the school. In addition, the interaction of these individuals and groups with one another and with the material units of the school added the substantive "living" element of what this school was and what it was about (Blumer 1969). Nevertheless, these official, or perhaps, contractual partners of the school still represented only a partial picture of even the immediate social fabric. It was necessary to study each of these segments of the school or what one might refer to as the "community of the school" in order to develop a holistic view. Not to be forgotten were the school board, who acted as overseers of the principal; the synagogue and its board of directors, which ultimately operated and funded the school; the rabbi, who had substantial formal and informal influence on the school; the parents, who chose to send their children to the school; and the regional and national educational networks and organizations with which this school was associated. Finally, the many components of the school and its community were influenced by elements of an even broader social-cultural context essential to the study of the Jewish people. It was important to understand the religious and ethnic traditions and the history of the Jewish people as well as...

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