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Hebrew School

Samson Benderly, one might say, had crusading in his blood.  A direct descendant of Jacob Emden, the zealous 18th-century European battler against Sabbateanism, he spent his youth in Palestine before coming to the United States in 1898 with the aim of becoming a physician. 

Relevant Links
An Educational Miracle  New York Times. From tuition to sanitation to acculturation, Benderly’s Bureau of Jewish Education managed a “unique logistical feat.” (January 25, 1914)
Romancing the Heder  Walter I. Ackerman, Judaism. The significance that Benderly attributed to childhood is an Americanization at odds with the traditional center of gravity in Jewish education: the yeshiva. (PDF, 1975)
A “Benderly Boy” Named Rebecca  Shuly Rubin Schwartz, American Jewish Archives Journal. One of the original members of Benderly’s maverick group became the first professional woman in Jewish education.

He taught Hebrew school in order to help pay for his medical education, but he couldn't break the habit even after he became a doctor.  Caught using his examination room at the Hebrew Hospital in Baltimore to tutor some of his Hebrew students, he was forced to choose, as he put it, between healing the body and healing the soul.  He opted for the latter, and spent the rest of his life fighting for Jewish education in the United States.

Benderly grew up in a deeply pious home in Safed, but in the New World he became a cultural Zionist.  Much less of a thinker than a doer, he took his bearings not only from Ahad Ha'am (one of the fathers of cultural Zionism) but from John Dewey, whose progressive educational theories he sought to apply within the framework of the Jewish school.  He concentrated on having students "learning to do by doing," playing outdoors in Hebrew and baking challah, rather than being entirely submerged in a sea of traditional texts. Among other things, he pioneered the Ivrit b'Ivrit style of modern Hebrew immersion that became known as the "Benderly Method."  His overriding concern, as Jonathan B. Krasner puts it in his new book The Benderly Boys & American Jewish Education, was "to simulate as closely as possible" in an era of dislocation and rapid change "the educational process that in an earlier generation took place within the Jewish home and Jewish neighborhood."  Central to the whole operation would be the stimulation of an emotional attachment to (but by no means a resolve to desert America for) the Jewish community in Palestine that was spearheading the worldwide Jewish renaissance.    

Benderly understood very well the constraints within which he would have to operate.  Since most American Jews (and indeed he himself) were enthusiastically committed to the public school system, Jewish education would have to be supplemental.  The number of hours available to Jewish educators would rarely be sufficient to implement a thorough Hebrew program.  It would be hard to find or train the staff for the schools he wished to establish, and the people to whom he would have to turn for financial and institutional support would not always share all of his goals.  His opponents would include Orthodox defenders of the old ways, Reform Jews unfriendly to anything that smacked of Zionism, and parents who cared only about having their boys meet the minimum requirements for a synagogue bar mitzvah.

Benderly's successes in overcoming these obstacles in Baltimore earned praise far and wide (including a laudatory article in Ahad Ha'am's Hashiloah) and, in 1910, an invitation from Judah Magnes to come to New York City to head the newly established Bureau of Jewish Education.  There he assembled the talented young crew of "Benderly boys" who helped to put his constantly evolving ideas into effect. Benderly's program found its fullest expression in Manhattan's Central Jewish Institute, which Krasner characterizes as "the first modern Jewish educational center in the United States," an institution that served as a nationwide model from 1916 to 1944.  Albert Schoolman, one of the "Benderly boys" affiliated with the Institute, founded the Cejwin summer camps, which endure to this day.  Other disciples fanned out to Chicago, Cleveland and other major cities and sought more or less to replicate what was being done in New York. 

But Benderly was better at conceiving than he was at organizing things, and the Depression marked a severe setback to his efforts.  He and his boys were eventually forced to give up their hopes of operating on a community-wide basis and to work instead for the most part within denominational frameworks.   And the numbers of students never quite added up to enough—enough, at least, for these Americanizers of Jewish education who aspired to revitalize their entire community.  Benderly himself died relatively young, and with something other than a full sense of accomplishment, in 1944.  One of his disciples, Alexander Dushkin, who among many other things launched the youth magazine World Over, recalled his ailing mentor confessing to him, "Dushkin, I do not know whether I did you boys any good personally by drawing you into the profession of Jewish education!"  Whether he did or didn't, they did a lot of good together. 

Allan Arkush is a professor of Judaic studies and history at Binghamton University, and the senior contributing editor of the Jewish Review of Books.  

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COMMENTS

Marvin Schick on June 22, 2011 at 10:41 am (Reply)
Whatever Samson Benderly's intentions may have been - and I believe they were not good - his antipathy to Jewish day schools caused enormous harm. The fantasy that he created around supplementary schools, then called Talmud Torahs, turned out to be a mirage, as is clearly indicated by tons of demographic data. This fellow did much harm, and no good and it's time to stop worshipping him.

Marvin Schick
President
Rabbi Jacob Joseph School
Jonathan Krasner on June 22, 2011 at 4:26 pm (Reply)
Marvin,
I agree with you about the value of day schools. But you are judging Benderly with historical hindsight that he did not possess. Remember that he was dealing with an American Jewish community that worshiped the public schools and for whom day schools were a non-starter. It is true that he remained an opponent of day schools until the end of his life in 1944, but it is impossible to know how he would have felt had he been working in the post-World war II era. As I discuss in the book, many of his disciples, including Alexander Dushkin, Israel Chipkin, Leo Honor, Emanuel Gamoran and Azriel Eisenberg became supporters of day schools in the 1940s and 1950s.

Jonathan Krasner
Professor of the American Jewish Experience
Hebrew Union College
Tamar Orvell on June 22, 2011 at 8:39 pm (Reply)
A one-size-fits-all solution is not a solution. No one Jewish educational structure, mission, curriculum, format, style, or worldview can accommodate the wants and needs of families who seek a good fit with their learning goals and expectations, resources (time, money, for instance), and children (temperaments, learning styles, aims, etc.). I am a product of a bicultural-bilingual Jewish primary school, a Hebrew day school, a public high school, and two after-school Hebrew programs (during high school and college). These have served me well in cultivating a habit of lifelong Jewish learning (havrutot/study partnerships, daf yomi groups, as examples). Thank you, Dr. Benderly and "boys" for bringing quality options to America.

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