AMERICAN JEWISH EDUCATION IN HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE JONATHAN D. SARNA Brandeis University In this paper, I want to offer some preliminary thoughts on the history of American Jewish education and how it might be reconceived and reconceptualized to transform it into a useful history— one that sheds light on issues of significance to contemporary Jewish edu- cators. In surveying this literature, I find myself somewhat in the situation that histo- rian Bernard Bailyn did when he reviewed the history of American education for his influen- tial volume entitled Education in the Forming of American Society: Needs and Opportuni- ties for Study (I960). Whathe saidthenseems to me to apply in great measure to American Jewish education today: The role of education in American history is obscure. We have almost no historical leverage on the problems of American education. The facts, or at least a great quantity of them, are there, but they lie inert; they form no signifi- cant pattern (p. 4). Add the word "Jewish" to this analysis, and the situation is one that anyone who attempts to study the extant literature on the history of American Jewish education will easily recog- nize. Just as Bailyn found in his survey, so too in American Jewish education, there is no dearth of books and articles for scholars to read. Norman Drachler' s remarkable Bibliography of Jewish Education in the United States (1996) boasts almost twenty thousand entries! Jonathan D. Sama is the Joseph H. and Belle R. Braun Professor of American Jewish History at Brandeis University. Revealingly, though, only about two percent of those entries deal directly with the history of American Jewish education, and that num- ber includes primary sources. Sadly, even those two percent consist for the most part— significant exceptions notwithstanding — of parochial and narrowly conceived studies, long on facts and short on analysis. No full-scale history of American Jewish education has been attempted since 1969, when two significant volumes appeared: Judah Pilch's A History of Jewish Education in the United States and Lloyd P. Gartner's Jewish Education in the United States: A Documen- tary History.' Pilch described his volume as a "brief survey" and hoped that it would stimu- late further historical research (pp. xi-xii). Gartner dismissed earlier writings in the field as "largely inadequate" and calledfor "serious research, within the double framework of American and Jewish educational history" (pp. 33, 40). Neither summons, nor a subse- quent one by Michael Zeldin (1988), was subsequently heeded. As a result, the revolu- tion that transformed the historical study of American education scarcely impacted upon its American Jewish counterpart. Two unstated assumptions underlie much of what passes for the history of Jewish educa- tion in the United States and may be consid- ered the field's regnant paradigms. The first, which might be labeled the RodneyDangerfield paradigm, holds that Jewish education has always been the stepchild of the American Jewish community. Throughout American Jewish history, so the argument goes, it "got no respect." According to this trope, the American Jewish community was beset by so 8