Let's stop pretending

The jig is up. Rabbi Eric Yoffie has us figured out, and the time has come
to `fess up.

Delivering his presidential keynote sermon at the Reform movement's biennial
convention earlier this month, Rabbi Yoffie attacked supporters of school
vouchers who "claim that their goal is to help the poor and improve public
education by creating competition" when their "real aim is to secure funding
for their own schools." And, Rabbi Yoffie revealed, it's not only
Protestant and Roman Catholic groups whose pro-voucher stance is founded on
parochial interests, but also (gasp!) "Jewish organizations that have
supported vouchers, or remain silent, hoping to secure funding for yeshivas
and Jewish day schools."

Well, all right, we'll admit it (though we've never pretended otherwise):
The organization I represent, Agudath Israel of America, supports vouchers
primarily because we think they will help Jewish schools and Jewish
families. We also think they will help other segments of the American
population, especially the inner-city poor who desperately seek but are
unable to afford an alternative to the failing public schools to which their
children are consigned. But, to be perfectly frank, that consideration is
only of secondary significance in our admittedly self-interested
calculation.

Indeed, if the factor of self-interest were removed - if all Jewish schools
were on firm fiscal footing, if all Jewish parents who would want to enroll
their children in Jewish schools could afford to do so - we might well
disengage from the entire voucher debate.

But the reality is that many Jewish schools are struggling mightily -
sometimes unsuccessfully - to meet skyrocketing budgets. Some of the most
outstanding teachers are being driven away because paychecks are skimpy and
late. Facilities are often inadequate, basic maintenance and repairs
frequently neglected, educational materials in short supply, resource rooms
and other special education services few and far between - all for a
shortage of funds. Worst of all, despite extremely generous school
scholarship policies, all too many children are being turned away because of
their parents' inability to pay tuition.

Frankly, if we had our druthers, we would much prefer not having to look to
government to help address these problems. Our first choice would be to
rely on Jewish communal sources of support for what is, after all, a
precious Jewish communal resource. Unfortunately, while Federations across
the United States have supported Jewish schools to some extent, the reality
remains that the schools continue to be woefully underfunded.

And so self-interest is very much a factor in considering the question of
vouchers. If we stand accused of formulating our positions on educational
policy with a primary focus on how they might help our choking schools, and
how they might impact on parents seeking a Jewish education for their
children, we plead guilty.

Rabbi Yoffie is "embarrassed and ashamed when [he] hear[s] such arguments
coming from Jews" - because, after all, "the public schools were the ladder
that we used to climb from poverty to affluence in American life, and how
dare we deny it to others." However, we wear our commitment to Jewish
schools as a badge of Jewish pride, not shame. And we question whether
public school education is as closely aligned with Jewish interests as Rabbi
Yoffie thinks.

It is not difficult to understand why so many of our parents and
grandparents embraced the ideal of American public education. They arrived
in this country, having escaped persecution, pogroms and even Holocaust,
determined to ensure that life in America would be different. Their
children, they resolved, would be part of the great American mainstream,
fully integrated in American society, shedding once and for all the burden
of being outsiders. Their children would attend school with children of
other faiths, develop friendships with children of other faiths, and
eventually share equally in all the wonderful opportunities America had to
offer.

The plan succeeded - but it succeeded too well. Jews in the United States
have today become accepted in virtually every nook and cranny of American
society. But immersion in the American melting pot, whose fires were stoked
at the doors of the public schools, has robbed the large bulk of American
Jewry of the religious identity and heritage that is its most precious
possession. With intermarriage rates soaring, with so many Jews feeling
entirely disconnected from their roots and heritage, Jews in the United
States are, G-d forbid, at risk of disappearing.

We stand at a moment in American Jewish history when the crisis in Jewish
continuity is broadly acknowledged as the single largest problem facing our
community. What should be causing us embarrassment and shame - and,
frankly, sleepless nights - is the sorry state of Jewish knowledge and
Jewish commitment, and the prospect that our children or grandchildren may
grow up without any sense of meaningful Jewish identity.

If public schooling was the antidote to the problems our forebears faced
when they arrived in this country, religious schooling is the antidote to
the problems we face today. As the Louis Guttman Israel Institute of
Applied Social Research concluded in a 1993 study, "Jewish day schools are
the best vehicle for implementing Jewish involvement and are the only type
of Jewish education that stands against the very rapidly growing rate of
intermarriage" in the United States.

To his credit, Rabbi Yoffie does appear to recognize the essential link
between Jewish education and Jewish continuity; he used his convention
platform to call on his movement to establish new day schools and strengthen
after-school "Talmud Torah" programs for public school children, calling
religious schools "critical to our future." Yet despite that recognition,
he rails against Jewish groups whose position on vouchers is motivated
principally by concern for that very Jewish future.

To be sure, Americans of all faiths have a stake in improving education for
all children. Reasonable people can differ whether expanding parental
choice through vouchers will advance or inhibit that cause. But whatever
the outcome of that debate, let's not lose sight of the fact that our most
urgent Jewish priority today must be the strengthening of our own
educational institutions.

And let's stop pretending that there's anything shameful about Jewish groups
formulating public policy positions with a focus on Jewish interests -
especially when what's at stake is nothing less than Jewish survival.

AM ECHAD RESOURCES

[David Zwiebel is Agudath Israel of America's executive vice president for
government and public affairs. This article appears in the current (January
4, 2002) issue of the Forward.]