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Authoring, Authority, and Authenticity:
The Storying of Jewish Education
TALI ZELKOWICZ
Since the major Jewish immigration wave to America in the 1880s, Jewish educators and communal leaders have argued over
the proper ways to socialize the next Jewish
generations into American society. The integration story is fraught with the tension of multiple and competing values: shifts from outsider
How do we make explicit and transparent
some of the stories Jews tell about themselves,
about the authentic and authoritative, and ultimately
generative, versions of Jewish identity formation?
1 In 1900, Jacob David Wilowsky,
rabbi of Slutsk, Russia, told an
audience in New York that any Jew
who came to the United States was
a sinner. In his view, Judaism had
no chance to survival on American
soil. “It was not only home that the
Jews left behind in Europe,” he said.
“It was their Torah [biblical text and
learning], their Talmud [rabbinic
texts and learning], their yeshivot
[Jewish academies of learning] —
in a word, their Yiddishkeit, their
entire Jewish way of life.”
2 See Jonathan Woocher’s full
argument about all eight types of
brokenness is his (1995) “Toward a
‘Unified Field Theory’ of Jewish
Continuity” in A Congregation of
Learners: Transforming the
Synagogue into a Learning
Community; Isa Aron, Sara Lee,
and Seymour Rossel, eds. (UAHC
Press, New York)
Dr. Tali Zelkowicz is an
assistant professor of Jewish
education at the Rhea Hirsch
School of Education, Hebrew
Union College-Jewish Institute
of Religion, Los Angeles.
to insider and back again and from material
scarcity to abundance, the ongoing dialectics
between universalism and particularism and
between faith and peoplehood, content and relevance, survival and transformation. These
have been the main characters in an ongoing
story whose tensions can be managed, periodically even embraced, but not resolved.
This is the case I make to my Jewish education graduate students each fall, in a course
called the Sociology of Jewish Education. I explain to an initially unnerved classroom that
there are no guarantees for Jewish continuity,
only experiments. Together, we explore how, by
relinquishing belief that we can control the future, we become bold and powerful in the present, especially if we use knowledge of the past.
For example, we investigate the evolution of the
American bar/bat mitzvah — how it became
tied to those infamous “minimum relgious
school requirements” over which parents and
administrators engage in power struggles daily,
who determines what a “real” bar/bat mitzvah
entails, and how such copyrights become established. And through stories and narrative we
uncover the fluid nature of the field — how it
changes and how all the stakeholders in the
field of Jewish education — educators, students, parents, institutional leaders, and philanthropists — are responsible to author or
reinterpret our story.
Most of us have inherited an overarching
and often unconscious master narrative, which
I refer to as the “Humpty Dumpty Narrative.”
With uncanny precision, Humpty’s tragic tale
echoes contemporary American Jewish
communal anxieties about qualitative and
quantitative survival:
Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall
There was a putatively whole, “authentic”
place where Jews once lived and belonged —
namely, Europe (the master narrative is
thoroughly Ashkenazic).
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall
Leaving Europe for America and shifting
homebase to new shores (and not Israel), may
even represent the “sin” of Jewish modernity. 1
But all the king’s horses and all the king’s
men could not put Humpty together again.
American culture and ideology have driven an
unnatural and unholy wedge down the middle
of a once-integrated Jewish life, leaving Jews
and “Jewishness” bifurcated between ethnic
and religious dimensions, hyphenated, truncated, and episodic. 2 In short, American
Jewish identities are broken in pieces. And
now, all the Jewish educators and all the
Jewish professionals cannot seem to put
Jewish life back together again in America.
Was there ever a high, holy place — a
“wall” from which we fell? And are American
Jews expecting just the right educational antidotes and formulae that will (ideally, once and
for all) heal and fix the wounds from our “fall”?
Though besieged with news about the woes
of contemporary Jewish life, today’s students
are rejecting Humpty’s story of loss. They are
experimenting with a new way of interrogating
the narrative of change and loss and, under the
surface, the politics of authenticity surrounding
Jewish identity formation — a key to Jewish education. In class, we’re learning to ask: How
can we as Jewish educators navigate multiple
and competing definitions of authenticity? How
do we relate and respond to the boundary
pushing?” In other words, how do we make explicit and transparent some of the stories Jews
tell about themselves to each other about the
authentic and authoritative, and ultimately generative, versions of Jewish identity formation?
Here’s one way we’re experimenting:
Students identify one artifact of contested authenticity — something that pushes Jewish
boundaries in a controversial, threatening, or
