American Jews do a lot to teach their children Hebrew. Dozens of Jewish day schools teach Hebrew grammar and vocabulary. Some use Hebrew as the language of instruction for classes about Jewish texts. Synagogue-run Hebrew schools teach children what they need to make it through their bar- and bat-mitzvah services. A new group of charter schools, Hebrew in form and non-parochial in content, is now teaching Hebrew to hundreds of secular and non-Jewish students. By my calculations, the bill for all this Hebrew teaching over the last century exceeds $100 million. I cannot imagine any other American community has expended so much to teach its children a language other than English.

And it is a truth (almost) universally acknowledged that these efforts have failed. The Israeli-American literary critic Hillel Halkin wrote in 2008 that he had “yet to meet a graduate of a day school who, on the basis of his or her schooling alone, could conduct more than a rudimentary Hebrew conversation.” During months of citing Halkin’s judgment to Jewish foundation executives and professional Hebrew educators, I heard the strongest disagreement from David Gedzelman, who runs the Steinhardt Foundation for Jewish Life: “There are people who defy Hillel Halkin’s characterization, but they’re the exception.” Gedzelman’s more generous view fits my own experience studying for twelve years at a Hebrew-teaching Jewish day school, and then for four post-collegiate years at an Israeli yeshiva with about 150 students from America. I estimate that Halkin would’ve been satisfied with three young people per class at each institution.

But even if America’s Modern Orthodox, Conservative, and community day schools annually graduated 500 students fluent in Hebrew, that’d be a success ratio of just 15 percent. And the denominator of that low ratio wouldn’t include the thousands of students at black-hat Orthodox schools in Brooklyn and Lakewood, graduates of synagogue-run Hebrew schools, and children who never study Hebrew to begin with. Hebrew education is therefore a double embarrassment for American Jews—a pricey failure where it is most seriously tried, and not seriously tried by most.

I

American Jews, are intelligent, wealthy, and obsessed with education. How do they get so poor an educational result as the one they’ve gotten with Hebrew?

It is one thing for a school to offer Hebrew classes; it is another for a school to demand that Hebrew be mastered. A February 2023 report published by the educational non-profit Hebrew at the Center quantifies the decline in hours of Hebrew instruction over the careers of students at more than 80 Jewish day schools. First grade is the peak, with an average of 220 minutes per week, and that declines to 160 minutes per week in high school. Hebrew teachers decline from 18 percent of the faculty in elementary school to 11 percent of the faculty in high school, when Hebrew typically becomes just one subject among many, rather than the language in which several subjects are taught. I wrote to faculty and administrators at some top Jewish schools to confirm this decline. Here is what they said: at Yeshiva University’s High School for Boys, at the high school at Manhattan’s Ramaz, at Kohelet Yeshiva high school in Philadelphia, and at DRS Yeshiva High School for Boys on Long Island, no Jewish text classes are taught in Hebrew. The same is true of the high school at Charles E. Smith Jewish Day School in Rockville, Maryland (of which I am an alumnus), and another pluralistic high school in the northeast that asked not to be named. The high school at Maimonides in Boston offers one class outside the Hebrew language department that is itself taught in Hebrew; Berman Hebrew Academy in Maryland offers two.

Things are a bit better at the Bronx’s SAR, where the high school’s most advanced Jewish text classes are taught in Hebrew. But compare with SAR’s elementary school and preschool classes, where at least half of what all students hear from teachers is in Hebrew. It is simply harder to teach older students in foreign languages than it is to teach younger students—harder to find teachers to do the teaching, and harder for students to absorb what they’re being taught. “At what age do you say, ‘this is not fair?’ There are values that compete with each other,” SAR’s principal Binyamin Krauss tells me in his office. Krauss’s own middle-school Talmud class illustrates the point. Krauss asks a young man to read the day’s Talmud passage, which the young man does, while Krauss conveys the Talmud’s Aramaic and his own interpretations in Hebrew. Then Krauss starts asking and fielding questions in Hebrew, but he doesn’t compel students to respond in kind. Actually, Krauss himself is inconsistent. As the lesson goes on, Krauss tends to mention terms in Hebrew, rather than use Hebrew to instruct the students. The conceptual heavy-lifting is done almost exclusively in English—as Krauss tells me later, “I’m losing a lot by forcing the Hebrew.”

But by not forcing the Hebrew, Krauss is losing Hebrew. Rare is the child—rare is the human!—who prefers to use a foreign language when her mother tongue will do just as well. We need inducements. Ideally, those inducements would be cultural, part of the unspoken code of students, like not snitching on your classmates or not dating your best friend’s crush. Lacking that, proficiency in Hebrew—like proficiency in math or history or anything else—will be required from the front of the classroom or it won’t be required at all.

The Hebrew principal of Ben Porat Yosef in New Jersey (another well-reputed Hebrew-teaching school) describes the K-8 school as “as close to Israel as we can get,” and hopes that students finish middle school speaking like Israelis, slang and all. A middle-school Bible class taught in Hebrew by an Israeli teacher does not support these hopes. The class is a sequence of interactions that I saw a half-dozen times at the schools I visited: the teacher will ask a question, and a student will give a brief and topical answer in which the central nouns “Mosheh,” “Yehoshua,” “Hashem,” “Yisrael”—and basic verbs are in Hebrew, while the prepositions, conjunctions, filler words (like, well, umm), and more complicated thoughts are in English. Sometimes an Israeli teacher will prompt a student to Hebraize some term or other—the Bible teacher at Ben Porat Yosef happens not to do so—but less so in the upper grades. I don’t exactly blame either students or teachers for this. Most people who aren’t small children find it irritating or embarrassing to be publicly corrected for their word choice and grammar. They’d rather speak quickly in partial English than slowly in stuttered Hebrew. And the teachers, by the way, have lesson plans to get through. So as students get older, less Hebrew is demanded, but less can be demanded, because the material gets harder, and so students’ Hebrew diminishes, and here we are, in an American Jewish community where Hebrew is not needed and not spoken.

I visited five Hebrew-teaching institutions—SAR, Ben Porat Yosef, the Jewish Community Day School in Boston, and the Hatikvah and Sela charter schools in New Jersey and Washington, respectively—that received very high praise from people in the Hebrew-education business. In the hopes of finding a youngster who might give Halkin some hope for the future of American Jewry, I asked teachers at all these schools to introduce me to their best Hebrew speakers without an Israeli parent. I chatted with the kids about themselves, their families, what they like doing for fun, what they’re doing in their Hebrew-language classes—things they’d know how to talk about in Hebrew if they knew how to talk about anything at all. And I stayed in Hebrew unless the kid got really flustered.

With exceptions I can count on one hand, the dozens of kids I spoke to sounded like Hebrew parodies of Ernest Hemingway: “I have a mother. Her name is Amy. I have a father. His name is Bob. We like skiing. I like TV. Different shows. We’re learning about colors.” Nouns basic, sentences mostly one clause. An evident desire to speak as little as possible even about subjects that weren’t really private, like what was just taught in a lesson they saw me observe.

I enjoyed speaking to one young woman at SAR high school after an impressive lesson about a poem by the Hebrew poet Hayyim Nahman Bialik. We discussed the poem’s meter and imagery in Hebrew, meandered into the Haskalah (Jewish Enlightenment) and the Dreyfus affair, and though my interlocutor’s speech was punctuated by “likes,” she spoke with animated fluency about herself, her school, and her plans for after graduation.

I was also impressed by two students at JCDS in Boston, which, besides Jewish subjects, teaches music, art, and dance in Hebrew. The school also benefits from a number of children of Israeli parents, who study in a “heritage” class that especially skilled American-born students can be promoted into. One such sixth-grader gutturalized her reishes in lexically rich, multi-clause sentences about teaching herself to read from the Torah from YouTube videos. A classmate of hers was nearly as good. To be sure, the news from JCDS wasn’t all fantastic. One student explained that he had just finished a unit in Hebrew class about the Holocaust, and had to be reminded of the meaning of the term Shoah. But the other two were quite good. Actually, they sounded almost Israeli. But why are such students so rare, and why can no school manage to produce more than a few?

II

Some of the professionals think the bias in favor of native Israeli teachers is not helpful. Andrew Ergas, CEO of the aforementioned Hebrew at the Center, suggests that many day-school Hebrew teachers are fly-by-night hires. If you’re an Israeli expat looking for employment, you show up to a day school, the day school sees that “you speak Hebrew, and you don’t have a rap sheet” and then puts you in front of a classroom. And maybe Ergas has a point. Native fluency in Hebrew doesn’t qualify someone to teach Hebrew any more than early mastery of the violin qualifies someone to teach music. “We need to shift from having Hebrew-language speakers to having Hebrew-language educators,” Ergas says.

A dean of such educators is Vardit Ringvald. She helped start both Hebrew at the Center and JCDS (the school I visited in Boston), and founded a graduate program for Hebrew teachers at Middlebury in 2008. Ringvald herself began many years ago as an “accidental teacher” in Uruguay. She is Israeli, had a teaching degree at the time (though not in the Hebrew language), and her husband was a university student—“What does a good wife of a student do? Go and teach Hebrew!”

Ringvald’s subsequent experience teaching Hebrew at Brandeis led her to propose in a 2003 article in the Journal of Jewish Education that Hebrew-language educators adopt the “proficiency approach” widely used in American second-language teaching. Rather than learning the rules of a language—conjugations, syntax, lists of individual words—students should be prompted, with correction, to make use of the language for chatting about sports and politics and movies, writing stories, and so on. I am certain that this would improve on the soporific workbook exercises to which I was subjected in elementary school.

Ringvald’s Middlebury program has now graduated 200 teachers, which is a decent start but less than 10 percent of the Hebrew teachers in America. But why is a non-sectarian college the host of the only such program in America? Why—as Ringvald asks—is the ability to teach in Hebrew not part of what minimally qualifies someone to teach Jewish subjects in Jewish schools? Yeshiva University’s Azrieli School of Education trains its students to teach their subjects in English, and only in English. To my knowledge, that is standard practice in analogous programs in the other denominations. If day schools were serious about teaching Hebrew, they would demand that their teachers teach in Hebrew. They don’t. If the American Jewish community were serious about its children learning Hebrew, it would demand that they be taught in Hebrew. But it doesn’t.

And here I’d like to make a point.

There are many things for which Hebrew is very useful, like watching Israeli television or following Israeli news or living as a religious Jew. But Fauda and Shtisel can be streamed with English subtitles. The Times of Israel, the Jewish News Syndicate, and the Middle East Media Research Institute tell you most of what you need to know. And all over America people pray, study, and raise pious Jewish children who don’t know Bialik from borscht.

But there are two things for which Hebrew is not just useful but indispensable. You need biblical and rabbinic and medieval Hebrew (plus Aramaic) to master Jewish texts. The Bible and some major commentators, the Talmud, Maimonides’ Code, and certain modern theological texts have been translated into English. These texts are where you start, but they are not where you end. Most of the Jewish legal, mystical, and poetic tradition is still unavailable outside the original. In fairness, studying these texts requires only passive proficiency, not speaking or writing, and some religious schools teach passive proficiency well. What no American school teaches well is the Hebrew you need for a second task: being Israeli. There are, it is true, communities in Israel where English is enough to schmooze at kiddush and order sushi. But for health insurance, car repairs, directions from strangers, help with your children’s school, listening to the radio, serving in the IDF, understanding college courses, or just wandering around and chatting with people, you need Hebrew.

III

As it happens, the prospect of a child becoming Israeli isn’t so attractive to those who pay for Hebrew-teaching day schools. In March 2017, Jack Wertheimer and Alex Pomson published a study titled Hebrew for What? for which they interviewed more than 3,000 parents of children at Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, and pluralistic schools. Wertheimer and Pomson asked these parents why it mattered that their children learn Hebrew. Out of eleven options the survey provided, that Hebrew “prepares my child to make aliyah (move to Israel) in case s/he wants to” ranked third-to-last for Orthodox parents and dead last for non-Orthodox parents. Having a connection with Israel and enabling visits to Israel scored highly for everyone. But English alone is enough for connecting to Israel or for visiting Israel—it is not enough for staying in Israel.

Call it the Zionism deficit—the refusal, conscious or not, linguistically to equip Jewish children raised in the diaspora to leave it. Day-school students spend dozens of hours each week studying ancient, medieval, and modern Jewish history and Jewish texts from the Bible to the present. They may even study Israeli history. As David Gedzelman puts it, these schools may be ideologically “pro-Israel,” but “Zionism is about the complete transformation of the Jewish soul. It’s about owning your Jewish destiny,” as a free people in its land, and in its living, spoken language.

If American Jews don’t want their children to leave for Israel, perhaps it’s because Jews have found paradise here in America. In this respect, the Jews are just like everyone else (only more so, given the history of Jewish persecution). I asked John McWhorter, Columbia linguist and informal language consultant to the Jews, whether any American group that is not cloistered—as the Hasidim are with Yiddish and as the Amish are with German—successfully transmits a language other than English to its children. Here is McWhorter’s written reply: “I am aware of no such cases. The simple fact is that language acquisition is usually based on necessity, and in the U.S. English can get you anything.” That last point seems right, and we should read “in the U.S.” broadly—American power, a partial inheritance from the English-speaking power across the Atlantic, has made English the most useful language in world history. Even in countries that aren’t former British colonies, clerks, waiters, and cab drivers know enough English to get by, as do many people who aren’t in the hospitality business. English is often the language of choice for locals speaking to visitors not from English-speaking countries. Of course, many Americans do learn foreign languages. They work in diplomacy or national security or international commerce, or they just want to read Chinese or Spanish literature in the original. But making it in America requires learning only English, so that’s all most anyone—Jewish or Gentile—learns.

IV

Historically, the study of Hebrew in the diaspora has demanded much more anxiety than afflicts America’s comfortable Jews. A century ago, Hayyim Nahman Bialik lamented that teaching Hebrew outside its native land of Israel was a “beautiful vision, without potential.” Jews in Poland between the world wars proved him wrong and established the Tarbut school network. Founded in 1919, these non-religious institutions taught about 125,000 working- and middle-class Jewish children Hebrew under the hostile supervision of the newly independent Polish state. Modern Hebrew had been invented in the lifetimes of the students’ parents. The resurrected language was taught, not in the Ashkenazi pronunciation of a Yiddish-speaker’s liturgical Hebrew, but in the Sephardi pronunciation then used by pioneers in Palestine, to which 60 percent of Tarbut alumni immigrated.

Tarbut’s efforts benefited from violent Polish national pride, unfettered by the collapse of the Russian empire after more than a century of foreign rule. Jews were often excluded from Polish schools and universities. Boycotts of Jewish businesses and Jewish professionals and Poland-wide economic woes made it hard to make a living. Many Jews rejected Zionism for leftist or Orthodox reasons (the more Jewish things change, the more they stay the same). But in the elections for the Polish constituent assembly in 1919, the Zionist-aligned parties won 90 percent of the Jewish vote in western Galicia (now southeastern Poland) and a majority of the Jewish vote in the central part of the country, where half of Polish Jews lived. The Tarbut schools spread quickly, finding the best-prepared ground in the northeastern area traditionally known to Jews as Lithuania. Zionism was strong there, Polish culture and language less dominant, and many people already spoke two or three languages.

Tarbut schools normalized Hebrew as a language of instruction for the arts and sciences, as well as for Jewish subjects. An official program of study printed in the independent Israeli scholar Eli Bir’s dissertation shows elementary and middle-school students doing six hours a week of Tanakh, three hours a week of holy land geography, four hours of mathematics, and five of natural philosophy, all in Hebrew. This in addition to nine hours of week of instruction in the language itself for first graders, declining to four by middle school. Just Polish geography and history were taught in Polish, which was used in other subjects only when adequate Hebrew teachers could not be found. The Tarbut high schools were just as rigorous, and a 1934 program of study for the one in Vilna lists biology, mathematics, physics and chemistry, vocational training, Tanakh, Talmud, and Jewish history among the subjects taught in Hebrew. The instructors for these subjects were often homegrown in Tarbut’s Warsaw and Vilna teachers’ colleges.

The successes of the Tarbut schools were formally acknowledged in 1933 by the union of Hebrew teachers in Palestine, but the students’ Hebrew gained from time outside school hours as well. Tarbut students founded B’nei Yehuda societies, members of which took a pledge to speak only Hebrew. Many shopkeepers had to learn the basics of commercial Hebrew to avoid losing Tarbut students as customers. One account from Dawidgródek, in present-day Belarus, describes a little girl refusing her mother’s entreaties to speak to her grandmother in Yiddish on the grounds of her oath.

Hundreds of thousands of Tarbut-affiliated Jews prepared for life elsewhere because Jewish life in Poland was a cheap stock of deteriorating value. Violence and anti-Semitism degraded an impoverished stability into a dangerous instability. The post-World War I pogroms were bad in Poland and far worse in neighboring Ukraine, where at least 100,000 Jews were killed during the Russian civil war. America had closed its gates to immigrants. Germany and Austria—once common destinations for Jews leaving Eastern Europe—no longer promised either greater tolerance or better economic prospects. Moving to Palestine and starting a new life in a Hebrew-speaking Jewish homeland was practically and ideologically appealing. Availing oneself of it meant learning Hebrew.

No Zionist evangelized the political significance of Hebrew with greater eloquence than Ze’ev Jabotinsky, founder of the Revisionist Zionist movement and a frequent guest of honor at Tarbut events. Jabotinsky was himself an accomplished Hebraist. To pick just one example: Jabotinsky managed to Hebraize not just the meaning but the rhythm of Edgar Allen Poe’s “Annabel Lee.” He spent much of 1912 speaking to Jews all over Russia about the importance of teaching their children Hebrew.

Even before his tour, Jabotinsky had been developing his Hebraic nationalism for some time. “With nationalist education,” Jabotinsky announced in a previous speech to a Zionist convention, “language is the central thing. Content is peripheral.” Jewish children should be immersed in Hebrew as they were immersed in life itself. A skeptic of moral education in schools (“every child arrives with a particular character already having taken root”), Jabotinsky proposed that a school that taught only in Hebrew would induce every child to learn it—the kind of school established by Polish Tarbut (and its short-lived Russian predecessor), and the only kind of school which Hebrew is daylong need.

But what would induce a Jewish child to want to attend a Hebrew-teaching school in the first place? What would induce a Jewish parent to send her there? In an early lecture on Hebrew, Jabotinsky speaks of the “crisis” that shocked Jewish nationalist youth out of assimilation. The Russian society in which they’d be urged to succeed was closed to them. The Pushkin they’d be taught in school wasn’t truly their Pushkin. They abandoned the ways of their “cosmopolitan” parents to become proud Jews. Jabotinsky’s candidates for successful Hebrew education in the diaspora were the Jews whom the diaspora decided it did not want, and who decided, in return, that they did not want the diaspora.

We shouldn’t exaggerate. American Jews are not, as of this writing, suffering pogroms, though an elderly man in California was killed by a pro-Hamas protestor early in the Gaza war. Jewish students are not excluded from universities. They just get assaulted and harassed, have their mezuzahs ripped off their doors, and walk to class through quads filled with keffiyeh-swaddled occupants and deranged chanting. The professions do not exclude Jews, even if Jewish law and medical students have to be a bit quieter about their politics. Public and private schools still accept Jewish students. They and their parents just have to endure some anti-Zionist teachers and lessons. Notwithstanding the Israel-haters in the House of Representatives and in the elite studentry and professoriate, the Democrats still basically support Israel.

But things are getting worse, and as they get worse, life in Israel will look better. That is probably what it will take for the Hebrew education of American youth to improve. Not an aspirational Zionism of hope, but a sober Zionism of fear. Or rather, a Zionism that hopes for something more for Jews than sober fear in America.

Such a Zionism will not create itself. Even in Europe, where anti-Semitism was much worse, Zionism demanded the ceaseless labors of the most committed Jewish minds—to raise political and linguistic consciousness which could be embodied in new schools, new charities, new funds, new institutions of all kinds.

Much is required to build such things America. It would be good to have a new—albeit very different—Ze’ev Jabotinsky.