Why Can’t the Jews Teach Their Children How to Speak Hebrew?

American Jews do a lot to teach their children Hebrew. Dozens of Jewish day schools teach Hebrew grammar and vocabulary. Some use Hebrew as the language of instruction for classes about Jewish texts. Synagogue-run Hebrew schools teach children what they need to make it through their bar- and bat-mitzvah services. A new group of charter schools, Hebrew in form and non-parochial in content, is now teaching Hebrew to hundreds of secular and non-Jewish students. By my calculations, the bill for all this Hebrew teaching over the last century exceeds $100 million. I cannot imagine any other American community has expended so much to teach its children a language other than English.

And it is a truth (almost) universally acknowledged that these efforts have failed. The Israeli-American literary critic Hillel Halkin wrote in 2008 that he had “yet to meet a graduate of a day school who, on the basis of his or her schooling alone, could conduct more than a rudimentary Hebrew conversation.” During months of citing Halkin’s judgment to Jewish foundation executives and professional Hebrew educators, I heard the strongest disagreement from David Gedzelman, who runs the Steinhardt Foundation for Jewish Life: “There are people who defy Hillel Halkin’s characterization, but they’re the exception.” Gedzelman’s more generous view fits my own experience studying for twelve years at a Hebrew-teaching Jewish day school, and then for four post-collegiate years at an Israeli yeshiva with about 150 students from America. I estimate that Halkin would’ve been satisfied with three young people per class at each institution.

But even if America’s Modern Orthodox, Conservative, and community day schools annually graduated 500 students fluent in Hebrew, that’d be a success ratio of just 15 percent. And the denominator of that low ratio wouldn’t include the thousands of students at black-hat Orthodox schools in Brooklyn and Lakewood, graduates of synagogue-run Hebrew schools, and children who never study Hebrew to begin with. Hebrew education is therefore a double embarrassment for American Jews—a pricey failure where it is most seriously tried, and not seriously tried by most.