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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.
— 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.
This title offers a window into the formation of the American Jewish community. A very well-researched book of interest to anyone who ever attended or sent their child to a Jewish Sunday school.
Yares skillfully details early framings of nineteenth-century American Judaism while placing those framings within the context of American religion. Jewish Sunday Schools will provoke and inform those thinking about current issues in American Jewish education.
— Karla Goldman, author of Beyond the Synagogue Gallery: Finding a Place for Women in American Judaism
Jewish Sunday Schools offers a fascinating, clearly written look into how American Jews navigated their place in the United States through the concept of religion.
The original research in Yares’ book provides a more nuanced and embedded understanding of the 19th-century American Jewish experience in relation to issues of Jewish identity, the role of women in Jewish education, and Jewish life in a society dominated by Protestantism. As such, this book will be of interest to not only scholars of Jewish history and education, but also to the field of historical religious education more generally.
Clear, well researched, and ‘revisionist’ in the best sense of the word.