Overview

73rd National Jewish Book Awards Finalist Charts how changes to Jewish education in the nineteenth century served as a site for the wholescale reimagining of Judaism itself The earliest Jewish Sunday schools were female-led, growing from one school in Philadelphia established by Rebecca Gratz in 1838 to an entire system that educated vast numbers of Jewish youth across the country. These schools were modeled on Christian approaches to religious education and aimed to protect Jewish children from Protestant missionaries. But debates soon swirled around the so-called sorry state of “feminized” American Jewish supplemental learning, and the schools were taken over by men within one generation of their creation. It is commonly assumed that the critiques were accurate and that the early Jewish Sunday school was too feminized, saccharine, and dependent on Christian paradigms. Tracing the development of these schools from their inception through the first decade of the twentieth century, this book shows this was not the reality. Jewish Sunday Schools argues that the work of the women who shepherded Jewish education in the early Jewish Sunday school had ramifications far outside the classroom. Indeed, we cannot understand the nineteenth-century American Jewish experience, and how American Judaism sought to sustain itself in an overwhelmingly Protestant context, without looking closely at the development of these precursors to Hebrew School. Jewish Sunday Schools provides an in-depth portrait of a massively understudied movement that acted as a vital means by which American Jews explored and reconciled their religious and national identities.

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9781479822270

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Fills a major gap in the history of Jewish education in America. This is the first detailed study of the decades between the founding of the first Jewish Sunday School in 1838 and the development of the alternative model of the Talmud Torah during the earliest years of the 20th century. A significant contribution to the fields of religion, education, and history. -- Melissa R. Klapper, Rowan University Meticulously researched and elegantly written. Featuring tremendous original historical research and vivid prose, this is an engaging and impressive addition to the study of religion in the United States and American Jewish history. -- Jodi Eichler-Levine, author of Painted Pomegranates and Needlepoint Rabbis: How Jews Craft Resilience and Create Community

Fills a major gap in the history of Jewish education in America. This is the first detailed study of the decades between the founding of the first Jewish Sunday School in 1838 and the development of the alternative model of the Talmud Torah during the earliest years of the 20th century. A significant contribution to the fields of religion, education, and history. -- Melissa R. Klapper, Rowan University Meticulously researched and elegantly written. Featuring tremendous original historical research and vivid prose, this is an engaging and impressive addition to the study of religion in the United States and American Jewish history. -- Jodi Eichler-Levine, author of Painted Pomegranates and Needlepoint Rabbis: How Jews Craft Resilience and Create Community Jewish Sunday Schools is an engrossing, cohesive history of the unsung, integral role of women in American Jewish religious education. * Foreword Reviews *

Author Information

Laura Yares is Assistant Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at Michigan State University.

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