The Policy Paths to the Jewish Schools of the Future

Eric Cohen’s insightful essay envisions profound changes in Jewish education in America, built on the possibilities afforded by relatively new technologies that have been made ubiquitous by the coronavirus pandemic. Yet Cohen is likewise sensitive to the trade-offs of virtual learning, which cannot truly replace the bond that students form with their teachers and each other in physical settings. As he observed, “real community is not virtual.” And yet, when used to supplement rather than replace in-person instruction, virtual learning has great potential to expand access to high-quality Jewish education.

The changes that Cohen envisions are necessary because of the numerous constraints Jewish education faced even before COVID-19. The high cost of private education—especially for Jews with large families living in expensive areas like New York and Los Angeles—imposes burdensome costs on the community that go beyond the annual tuition fees. As Rabbi Aryeh Klapper has detailed, these include parents spending more time at work and less time with their children, the transformation of families into net-recipients of charity instead of net-contributors, and families opting to have fewer children. For many families, particularly but not exclusively among the non-Orthodox, these costs are too high; instead they opt to send their children to a secular school rather than provide them with an immersive Jewish education.

Geography is another constraint. As Cohen described, so-called “out-of-town” Jewish communities often lack access to a sufficient number of high-quality teachers who can also serve as living examples of how observant Jews should live and behave. Many communities lack even a sufficient number of students to make a Jewish school sustainable.