American Jewish History

"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...