June 5, 2008

Philanthropist Michael Steinhardt has announced he will submit an application for a publicly funded charter elementary school that will be centered on Hebrew language and Israeli culture. Steinhardt and his daughter, Sara Berman, a trustee of his foundation, say the school will teach neither Zionism nor Judaism. The Brooklyn-based school will be open to children of all religions. Students will include Israelis, Latinos, African-Americans, and Russian immigrants.

Planners would love to avoid the controversy that has followed the establishment of the Ben-Gamla Hebrew Charter School in Hollywood, Fla. Civil libertarians say Ben-Gamla, whose director is an Orthodox rabbi, is a legal fiction meant to get taxpayers to support Jewish education. Jewish critics say such schools can only dilute and distort Jewish identity and culture in order to pass constitutional muster.

Berman acknowledged that it is difficult to draw the line between Jewish and Israeli “culture” and religion. But, she told the New York Jewish Week, “we in no way will promote or teach religious devotion in this school.”

The Jewish community is desperate for ways to control the soaring costs of day school education. Remarkably generous, Steinhardt has led the search for solutions, especially in his support of the Partnership for Excellence in Jewish Education, the national consortium of Jewish day schools.
Yet Jewish identity is a tapestry, whose individual threads include belief, action, identity, and peoplehood. The pattern has included Yiddishists and humanists who could not accept belief in a supernatural God — nevertheless, they fostered an identity with Jewish culture and history that we call peoplehood.

Similarly, Israel has a dual-track school system for the religiously observant and the secular. Yet even the most fervently secular school beats to the rhythms of the Jewish calendar, is in constant conversation (like Hebrew itself) with holy texts, teaches the Bible as history, and builds identification with all Jews, religious, secular, and everything in between.
The charter schools are proposing to tease out religion from culture, in part to qualify for public funding and in part to promote their founders’ own Jewish self-understanding. But considering the complexity of the Jewish tapestry, it is hard to see how they would succeed — and what exactly would be gained in the attempt.

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