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12 Rebuilding, Renewal, and Reconciliation in the Postwar Era
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375 c h a p t e r 1 2 Rebuilding, Renewal, and Reconciliation in the Postwar Era the jewish arrival in suburbia portended significant shifts in Jewish educational patterns. As early as 1950, sociologist Will Herberg proclaimed that a ‘‘religious revival’’ was underway: A synagogue building boom that dwarfed even the construction activity in the 1920s was in full swing; Jewish families were a≈liating and sending their children to Jewish schools in significantly greater numbers than in the 1920s or 1930s; and the child-centered atmosphere that sociologist Herbert Gans detected in a postwar Jewish bedroom community outside Chicago was becoming a hallmark of postwar life.∞ Jewish educators who might have been expected to welcome the postwar trends were considerably more skeptical than Herberg and Gans. Los Angeles Bureau chief Samuel Dinin reminded Jewish Education readers in 1955 that behind the seemingly rosy picture was a far less encouraging set of statistics. Over half of the Jewish population remained una≈liated, and many of those who did belong rarely attended services. Nor did the increase in membership bring about ‘‘as yet a Above: A science class at the Ramaz School during the 1950s. Setting the pattern for other modern day schools, Ramaz alternated general and Judaic studies classes throughout the school day rather than teaching Judaic studies in mornings and secular studies in the afternoons. Courtesy of the Ramaz School. 376 Between K’lal Yisrael and Denominationalism corresponding increase or improvement in observance or piety or ethical behavior .’’ As for Jewish education, the 40 percent attendance rate at any given time was a vast improvement over the 25 percent rate of a generation earlier, but it masked the ‘‘deterioration of intensive weekday Jewish education,’’ the steady growth of Sunday schools at the expense of afternoon schools, and the reduction of teaching hours per week in the latter institutions. Sunday school was an accepted part of the suburban ritual. Jews built synagogues and sent their kids to religious school in order to fit in with their gentile neighbors. Gans’s data suggested that parents wanted a school that instilled ethnic pride in their children as an inoculation against antisemitism, while declining to make demands about Jewish observance in the home.≤ Some of the trends that took hold in the postwar era actually began to crystallize in the mid- to late 1930s, including the sinking fortunes of the community Talmud Torah and the concomitant ascent of the congregational school; the move from five-day-a-week to three-day-a-week instruction in the afternoon school; and the gradual replacement of the Hebraic curriculum with a Hebrew reading/ English translation, content-driven curriculum. ‘‘Is the Talmud Torah Doomed?’’ asked the uncharacteristically sensationalist title of a November 1946 Jewish Education article by jec educational consultant Judah Pilch. His answer was, to a large extent, yes. The extent of student hemorrhaging reached the point where most schools were unable to o√er a graded program and/or ability-based grouping. Meanwhile, the schools’ greatest strength, their intensive curriculum, was also being watered down. Pilch’s gloomy diagnosis was based on a number of social and demographic factors that would only become exacerbated over the next ten years, including the increase in native-born parents; the influence of Americanization ; the rise of an aggressive ultra-Orthodoxy that eschewed public education and had no use for the nationalistic curriculum of the ‘‘Treifa [non-kosher] Talmud Torah’’; the embourgeoisement of the Jewish community, which, among other things, steered its orientation toward leisure-time activities; and the movement of Jews to less dense, middle-class, religiously heterogeneous neighborhoods.≥ One area of the country where the Talmud Torahs held out a little longer was the Mississippi Valley. Schools in a dozen or so small and midsize communities survived into 1960s and 1970s. Local conditions encouraged cooperation across denominations. Moreover, many of these communities were too small to support day schools and continued to look to the communal school as the only intensive educational option. Still attenuation was inevitable, for the Midwest was not immune from the forces that hastened the Talmud Torah’s decline in cities such as Philadelphia and Baltimore. By the 1950s even the venerable Minneapolis Talmud Torah, which maintained strong enrollment figures, had cut its extracurricular [44.192.132.66] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 23:51 GMT) Rebuilding and Reconciliation 377 program, reduced its hours, and saw its academic standards decline. Only the United Hebrew Schools of Detroit, under Albert...