Reviving American Jews’ Hebrew Literacy

Since talmudic times, familiarity with the Hebrew alphabet was considered the most basic building block of Jewish education. For many centuries, Jews across the globe wrote letters and kept records using a variety of languages written in the Hebrew alphabet, since they knew no other. Even in America, where there has never been an assumption that Jews could comprehend Hebrew, there has long been an expectation that Jewish children who attend synagogue and have a bar or bat mitzvah would acquire the ability to read the alphabet. Saul Rosenberg, based on his own experience as a bar mitzvah tutor along with numerous interviews, shares his observations on the disappointing realities:

Most of the b’ney mitzvah [I tutored] chanted their haftarah by rote, because they couldn’t read Hebrew and didn’t know the trop, the ancient Masoretic cantillation signs that follow the syntax of the even more ancient text. You could tell: the rote learners sounded like time-traveling tourists to ancient Israel, working from a well-thumbed Berlitz phrase-book—which, in a way, they were.

Now, it’s one thing not to teach trop. But teaching the text by rote seemed like telling an illiterate he would be declaiming the first ten pages of Huckleberry Finn in public in nine months and working to help him memorize it, rather than teach him to read.

Generally, in Anglophone countries, Hebrew-school students to the left of Modern Orthodox—essentially, Conservative, Reform, and their international counterparts—do not learn to read Hebrew accurately, let alone fluently, unless they go to Jewish day school. Even this exception does not hold everywhere: in England, most Jewish children go to state-funded Jewish schools and still don’t learn. Canada does somewhat better than elsewhere, perhaps because the country has a long tradition of bilingualism, and certainly because it has a far greater proportion of Jewish students in day school. This means the pool of non-readers is small and there are plenty of certified day-school teachers to teach Hebrew school—and, consequently, higher communal expectations. Based on preliminary inquiry, South Africa is a bit like Canada and Australia a bit like London.

Why is it that Hebrew schools are failing at even this most basic of tasks? Rosenberg points to several reasons, among them:

In my conversations [with rabbis and educators], I heard “supplementary school” nearly as often as “Hebrew school.” This is a nod to the fact that some schools focus their limited time on Jewish and Israeli culture, history, Bible stories—anything and everything other than Hebrew reading. They want to give kids positive Jewish experiences and so avoid rote teaching that might well alienate, the power of early experience being what it is.

I . . . think it is long past time we got over our allergy to rote learning. Repetitio est mater studiorum is an idea so deep in ancient Roman culture that I can’t track it to a source.

Read more at Sapir

More about: American Jewry, Hebrew, Jewish education

What a Strategic Victory in Gaza Can and Can’t Achieve

On Tuesday, the Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant met in Washington with Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. Gallant says that he told the former that only “a decisive victory will bring this war to an end.” Shay Shabtai tries to outline what exactly this would entail, arguing that the IDF can and must attain a “strategic” victory, as opposed to merely a tactical or operational one. Yet even after a such a victory Israelis can’t expect to start beating their rifles into plowshares:

Strategic victory is the removal of the enemy’s ability to pose a military threat in the operational arena for many years to come. . . . This means the Israeli military will continue to fight guerrilla and terrorist operatives in the Strip alongside extensive activity by a local civilian government with an effective police force and international and regional economic and civil backing. This should lead in the coming years to the stabilization of the Gaza Strip without Hamas control over it.

In such a scenario, it will be possible to ensure relative quiet for a decade or more. However, it will not be possible to ensure quiet beyond that, since the absence of a fundamental change in the situation on the ground is likely to lead to a long-term erosion of security quiet and the re-creation of challenges to Israel. This is what happened in the West Bank after a decade of relative quiet, and in relatively stable Iraq after the withdrawal of the United States at the end of 2011.

Read more at BESA Center

More about: Gaza War 2023, Hamas, IDF