When the 20th century began, American Jews had created a rich array of schools—ranging from wholly secular to Orthodox, from full-times institutions to afternoon and Sunday schools. A general, across-the-board effort to reform these institutions emerged in the 1910s and 1920s. Jenna Weissman Joselit writes:

A wholesome environment was key to whatever success Jewish educators might enjoy. It didn’t take much to realize that a brightly lit, well-ordered, and colorfully decorated room would attract, where a dark, dank, and dreary one would deter. And yet, for far too long, the Jewish classroom remained an inhospitable space. Improvised rather than intentional, it “chills enthusiasm and is detrimental to the welfare of both teachers and pupils,” observed Alexander Dushkin, a leading proponent of modern Jewish education, in 1918.

His teacher, Samson Benderly, who, arguably, did more than anyone in the United States to elevate the status of Jewish education in the prewar era, put it more starkly: “What can our children think of Judaism if after their stay in the modern public-school buildings, we offer them Jewish classrooms which are badly ventilated and poor lighted and which are very often not kept clean?” His answer: not very much. Jewish children were “bound to interpret the entire heritage of our people in the terms of the physical side of the classroom.”

Negative associations like these were not the exclusive purview of the young. New York City’s Department of Health felt the same way. Acting in 1915 on an anonymous tip about the lamentable physical conditions that obtained in many of the city’s Jewish educational institutions, it investigated the matter and discovered that germs were just about everywhere, especially in what passed for the bathroom. The absence of cleanliness and proper hygiene in these facilities was so striking, the inspectors reported, that they “would not bear very favorable comparison with the Southern school privy, against which sanitarians hold up their hands in horror.”

As Joselit recounts, the modernizing movement that began with cleanliness didn’t stop there, and also included efforts to introduce the latest pedagogic trends—efforts that came under trenchant critique from Midge Decter in 1951.

When he called upon Hamas to end the war and release the hostages last week, the Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas was also getting ready for a reshuffle within his regime. On Saturday, he appointed Hussein al-Sheikh deputy president of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), which is intimately tied to the PA itself. Al-Sheikh would therefore succeed Abbas—who is eighty-nine and reportedly in ill health—as head of the PLO if he should die or become incapacitated, and be positioned to succeed him as head of the PA as well.

Al-Sheikh spent eleven years in an Israeli prison and, writes Maurice Hirsch, was involved in planning a 2002 Jerusalem suicide bombing that killed three. Moreover, Hirsch writes, he “does not enjoy broad Palestinian popularity or support.”

Still, by appointing Al-Sheikh, Abbas has taken a step in the internal reforms he inaugurated last year in the hope that he could prove to the Biden administration and other relevant players that the PA was up to the task of governing the Gaza Strip. Neomi Neumann writes:

Abbas’s motivation for reform also appears rooted in the need to meet the expectations of Arab and European donors without compromising his authority. On April 14, the EU foreign-policy chief Kaja Kallas approved a three-year aid package worth 1.6 billion euros, including 620 million euros in direct budget support tied to reforms. Meanwhile, the French president Emmanuel Macron held a call with Abbas [earlier this month] and noted afterward that reforms are essential for the PA to be seen as a viable governing authority for Gaza—a telling remark given reports that Paris may soon recognize “the state of Palestine.”

In some cases, reforms appear targeted at specific regional partners. The idea of appointing a vice-president originated with Saudi Arabia.

In the near term, Abbas’s main goal appears to be preserving Arab and European support ahead of a major international conference in New York this June.