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(2011) International handbook of Jewish education, Dordrecht, Springer.

Historiography of American Jewish education

a case for guarded optimism

Jonathan Krasner

pp. 117-141

In his 1998 article "American Jewish Education in Historical Perspective," originally delivered at the 1997 annual conference of the Network for Research in Jewish Education, historian Jonathan Sarna took note of the relative dearth of scholarship, in terms of both quality and quantity, on the history of Jewish education. Sarna estimated that only about 2% of the entries in Norman Drachler's comprehensive Bibliography of Jewish Education in the United States (1996) focused on the history of Jewish education, and "Sadly, even those 2% consist for the most part—significant exceptions notwithstanding—of parochial and narrowly conceived studies, long on facts and short on analysis." Sarna went on to argue that the study of the history of American Jewish education could provide substantial fodder for American Jewish social historians. After all, 'schools serve as a primary setting, along with the home, where American Jews confront the most fundamental question of American life: how to live in two worlds at once, how to be both American and Jewish, part of the larger American society and apart from it."In the 10 years since Sarna's essay was published, a new generation of American Jewish historians has come on the scene and has taken up his challenge.1 Taking various aspects of the history of American Jewish education, broadly defined, as their central interest, their analyses have been heavily informed by the work of leading historians of the general American educational scene, as well as recent scholarship in the fields of gender, cultural anthropology, ethnic studies, and cultural history. In addition, significant new contributions have been made by general historians of the American Jewish experience, in a subset of American Jewish historical works that use the history of education as one of many lenses through which to understand a particular historical period. While the authors of these works2 are typically not interested in "doing" the history of Jewish education per se, their works richly contextualize the American Jewish education within the broader social, political, economic, and cultural trends. Here, too, the methodological approach is often informed by the appropriation of relatively recent theories in related disciplines. The oldest of these volumes, including Arthur Goren's New York Jews and the Quest for Community, Jeffrey Gurock's When Harlem was Jewish, and Deborah Dash Moore's At Home in America, date as far back as the 1970s and early 1980s. But the past 15 years has seen their number proliferate.This state of the field essay will examine these recent trends within the history of Jewish education and how they diverge from an earlier generation of scholarship.3 It will focus in particular on notable contributions to the field, highlighting not only how they have furthered our knowledge and understanding, but also analyzing the extent to which they have been informed by methodologies and theories from other disciplines. It will also explore thematic similarities that run through many of these volumes. Finally, the chapter will raise the question of intended audience and ask whether the work of historians of education can and should be made more explicitly relevant to practitioners in the field.

Publication details

DOI: 10.1007/978-94-007-0354-4_8

Full citation:

Krasner, J. (2011)., Historiography of American Jewish education: a case for guarded optimism, in H. Miller, L. Grant & A. Pomson (eds.), International handbook of Jewish education, Dordrecht, Springer, pp. 117-141.

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