{"id":6643,"date":"2009-02-15T17:18:12","date_gmt":"2009-02-16T00:38:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=6643"},"modified":"2009-02-15T17:18:12","modified_gmt":"2009-02-16T00:38:00","slug":"sharing-your-stories-of-jewish-education","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=6643","title":{"rendered":"Sharing Your Stories of Jewish Education"},"content":{"rendered":"

Some comments in my last post<\/a>, and the positive experience with Richard’s thread on stories of anti-Semitism<\/a>, makes me think it might be good to have a thread sharing stories about what Jewish education (if any) the Jewish folks had as kids (and non-Jews too, if they had any experience with a Jewish education — the younger sister of a Catholic friend of mine spent so much time at the JCC as a kid that she knew more Jewish songs than most of her Jewish friends).<\/p>\n

Starting with me. I went to playgroup and pre-school through my synagogue, then attended Hebrew school for ten years (to the middle of high school — I went to public school, but in a very heavily Jewish area). I never went to any Jewish summer camps.<\/p>\n

My synagogue was Conservative, and I’d say the education was about 1\/2 religious and 1\/2 a mixture of Jewish history and culture (which included discussions on Zionism and Israel). Obviously, we had units on the Holocaust. I don’t actually remember being inculcated with “mistrusting the goyim” — I say that because I had one Hebrew school teacher who clearly was very<\/em> keen on promoting that vision and I recall reacting very strongly against it.<\/p>\n

On Israel itself, the textbooks we read from were pretty one-sided Zionist (a lot of “making the desert bloom” type rhetoric). But it was counter-balanced by the congregation’s strongly progressive bent — we were officially affiliated with Meretz (the Israeli left-wing party), and I strongly recall when Bibi Netanyahu was first elected prime minister in the mid-90s, the prevailing sentiment was shock that Israelis elected a crazy man to the head of government.<\/p>\n

Overall, the congregation was heavily Democratic, and didn’t see its liberal commitments as remotely in tension with being pro-Israel. Nobody mentioned anti-Zionist Jews — they weren’t disparaged, they just didn’t exist. The two-state solution was overwhelmingly popular, but there wasn’t much acknowledgement that Palestinians were legitimately aggrieved about anything. I was taught to feel comfortable as a Jew, but given how much of Jewish history is centering around the moral superiority of getting beaten-up<\/a>, it was tough not to feel at least a vague sense of unease and threat. There was a sense that even if things are good now, they won’t necessarily stay that way. Vigilance and guardedness were the most important things if we were to ward off a new era of anti-Semitism.<\/p>\n

I don’t know how much the education or the environment was typical or not (particularly compared against a Reform, Reconstructionist, or Orthodox upbringing). But I’m curious to find out.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Some comments in my last post, and the positive experience with Richard’s thread on stories of anti-Semitism, makes me think it might be good to have a thread sharing stories about what Jewish education (if any) the Jewish folks had … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":38,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[44],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6643","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-jews-and-judaism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6643","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/38"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6643"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6643\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6643"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6643"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6643"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}