In Defense of the Isolationist Jew

Eric Cohen and Rabbi Mitchell Rocklin have presented a compelling vision for revamping Jewish day-school education in order to produce cultured and sophisticated “Menorah Jews,” able to synthesize fruitfully their Jewish heritage with that of Western culture and lead a wider cultural revival. A Jewish classical education would, I presume, include John Keats’s line “Beauty is Truth, and Truth is Beauty,” and there is much in their bold essay that is true as well as beautiful. Their debunking of the false promise of progressive education cuts to the very heart of the modern educational malaise. They have, too, correctly discerned that the crucial cultural battleground lies not in the media, or even in the universities, but in the schools where plastic young minds are molded and formed. What is more, they hit the nail firmly on the head in their description of the “Isolationist Jew” who “believes that it is better to ignore (or downplay) the West than to open up young, impressionable Jews to its temptations.” I will attempt here to make the case for that circumspect Isolationist Jew and argue that, while the revival of classical education in wider America is to be welcomed, its importation into Jewish schools is unlikely to bear the fruit Cohen and Rocklin promise.

To do so, I will start with perhaps the most elementary of observations: a system of schooling that aims to produce a particular type of Jew, or a Jew groomed for a specific task, must first ensure that it is producing any type of Jew at all. If the last 200 years of Jewish history teach us anything, it is that converting Jewish children into Jewish adults is no mean feat, one that requires an emotionally compelling immersion into a culture and worldview that envelopes the life of the child through his or her development. In the Jewish classical school, however, the focus and purpose of education is to expose pupils to “the past heights of human excellence” scaled by non-Jews—and specifically Christians—based on the premise that “Western history, literature, and culture are the heritage and responsibility of every Jew.” What this means in practice is that these impressionable Jewish children will learn, in great detail and breadth, that another civilization is vastly superior to the one they are being instructed by their teachers to identify with and remain loyal to.

It is absolutely correct to observe that, at an early stage of its formation, the injection of Judaic ideas into Greco-Roman civilization produced a new, and unexpectedly brilliant, hybrid vigor. From that point onwards, however, the Jewish contribution to Western civilization has been marginal. If judged by the standards of art, philosophy, science, or culture, Judaism stands justly condemned, not only as a historical laggard, but as an ongoing shackle on its members. Those Jews who have made contributions to the arts and sciences, be it a Heine or a Kafka, an Einstein or a von Neumann, did so, almost without exception, after they or their parents had left Jewish observance and peoplehood behind.