Reviewed by:

• The Arc of the Covenant: Jewish Educational Success on the Upper Mississippi by Earl Schwartz
• Laura Yares (bio)

"To a disinterested observer," wrote Isaac Leeser in the January 1844 edition of the Occident and American Jewish Advocate, "the state of the American Israelites must present itself as anomalous in the highest degree. There are congregations scattered over an immense surface of country, from the snows of Canada to the tropical heats of Guiana [sic], and one community knows absolutely nothing of the state and the wants of the other." While some "congregations" are today relatively familiar, having been featured extensively within American Jewish historiography as well as in American popular culture more broadly, in the case of others Leeser's description remains, perhaps, still apt. Earl Schwartz's The Arc of the Covenant offers a valuable account of one of these lesser chronicled communities, that of St. Paul, Minnesota, through a study of its Jewish educational institutions. To investigate the contours of regional Jewish experiences, particularly outside major metropolitan centers, the history of Jewish education offers the opportunity to examine how national paradigms have met local realities. The Arc of the Covenant offers an institutional study examining the surprising successes and the challenges of community-sponsored Jewish learning in the upper Mississippi during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Written in part as a historical chronicle in its own right and in part to inform strategic planning for the future of Jewish education in St. Paul, The Arc of the Covenant straddles the domains of local history and communal policy making.

The historical chapters in Part I narrate the surprising successes of St. Paul's communal education initiatives, an account that focuses on fruitful efforts to build and maintain a community sponsored Talmud Torah in the twentieth century. Schwartz's narrative is most compelling when he highlights the local story of St. Paul against national patterns in American Jewish education, reflecting, for example, on how the initiatives of Samson Benderly, conceived in New York City, flourished in this quite different locale. The midsize, midwestern setting, Schwartz surmises, made uniquely possible a regional educational collaboration that brought together "school, shul and community" (31). Chapter two, focusing on the last quarter of the twentieth century, offers an analysis of the dynamics that Schwartz sees as contributing to this successful collaborative effort, inclusive of factors specific to the regional demographics of St. Paul as well as national ideological trends such as increased attentiveness to Israel and Israel education in the aftermath of the Six Day War. The third chapter offers a historical overview of [End Page 474] institutional change during the first decades of the twenty-first century, a less than sanguine tale of decreasing Jewish population in St. Paul combined with a rising average population age, leading to a decline in Jewish enrollment in the community-sponsored Talmud Torah. At the end of his historical account, Schwartz is thus forced to conclude that despite the twentieth-century successes it enjoyed, "a communal school cannot produce a multigenerational, Jewishly knowledgeable and concerned community out of whole cloth" (113). In its place, congregational education, as well as the Jewish day schools planted in Minneapolis in the latter decades of the twentieth century, have taken up the Jewish educational baton. Chapters four through seven, focusing on the current strategic planning progress for St. Paul's communal Jewish educational institutions in the light of this historical narrative, will principally be of interest to scholars invested in the contemporary Jewish educational landscape, as well as to educational practitioners and policy makers.

The chief limitation of this study for students and teachers of the American Jewish historical experience lies in its top-down approach to Jewish educational history. This is overwhelmingly an institutional study, and its chief protagonists are the administrators, policy makers and benefactors of the educational institutions it surveys. Absent from the book are, arguably, its primary subjects: the students, parents, and classroom teachers who animated the enterprise. Schwartz offers little insight into the ways that the titular "covenant" was made...

审核人：

• 盟约之弧：密西西比河上游的犹太人教育成功，伯爵·施瓦茨（Earl Schwartz）
• 劳拉·亚雷斯（生物学）

艾萨克·利瑟（Isaac Leeser）在1844年1月版的《西方和美国犹太倡导者》中写道：“对一个无私的观察者来说，美国以色列人的状态必须以最高的异常状态表现出来。从加拿大的大雪到圭亚那的热带高温，一个社区对州和其他社区的需求一无所知。” 尽管今天有些“会众”相对熟悉，但在美国犹太史学和美国流行文化中得到了广泛的应用，而在其他情况下，Leeser的描述也许仍然合适。伯爵·施瓦茨的《盟约之弧》通过对其犹太教育机构的研究，提供了一个对这些较不那么陈旧的社区之一的有价值的描述，即明尼苏达州的圣保罗。为了研究区域犹太人的经历的轮廓，特别是在主要大都市中心之外，犹太人的教育历史为检验民族范式如何满足当地现实提供了机会。《公约的弧》提供了一项机构研究，研究了二十世纪和二十一世纪密西西比河上游社区支持的犹太学习取得的惊人成就和挑战。一方面是作为历史编年史编写，另一方面是为圣保罗《盟约之弧》中犹太人教育的未来制定战略计划。 跨越地方历史和社区政策制定领域。

第一部分的历史章节叙述了圣保罗的公共教育计划取得的令人惊讶的成功，该报告着重介绍了在二十世纪建立和维护由社区赞助的塔木德·托拉（Talmud Torah）的卓有成效的努力。Schwartz的叙述最引人注目，当他强调圣保罗反对美国犹太人教育中的民族模式的当地故事时，例如反映了在纽约市构思的Samson Benderly的倡议如何在这个完全不同的地方繁荣发展。Schwartz推测，在中西部的中型环境中，独特的区域教育合作成为可能，该合作将“学校，学校和社区”（31）。第二章着重于20世纪的最后25年，分析了施瓦茨认为这有助于成功开展合作的动力，其中包括圣保罗地区人口统计学特有的因素。以及六大战后对民族意识形态的发展趋势，例如对以色列的关注以及对以色列的教育，第三章提供了对[End Page 474]的历史概述。在二十一世纪的前几十年中，机构发生了变化，一个不那么乐观的故事讲述了圣保罗犹太人口减少，再加上平均人口年龄的增长，导致犹太人在社区资助的塔木德律法（Talmud Torah）中的入学率下降了。因此，施瓦茨在其历史叙述的最后不得不得出这样的结论：尽管享有20世纪的成功，但“一所公立学校无法从整体上创造出一个多代，知识渊博，关心犹太人的社区”（113）。取而代之的是，公立教育以及20世纪下半叶在明尼阿波利斯种植的犹太人日间学校已经占据了犹太人的教育指挥棒。第四章至第七章重点介绍了圣保罗市当前的战略规划进展

这项研究对美国犹太历史经验的学生和老师的主要局限在于对犹太教育历史的自上而下的方法。这绝对是一项机构研究，其主要参与者是所调查的教育机构的管理者，政策制定者和捐助者。可以说，这本书中缺少的主要主题是：使企业充满活力的学生，父母和课堂老师。Schwartz对名义上的“盟约”的制定方式几乎没有见识。