Yiddish Schools

YIDDISH SCHOOLS. East European Jewish immigrants created Yiddish children’s schools in the early twentieth century as an extension of their veltlekhkayt (secularism, from the Yiddish, literally, “worldliness”). Responding to the challenges of modernization by transforming Judaism and Jewishness, Diaspora-oriented Jewish secularists believed that modern Jewish life was not dependent upon religion or territory, but upon the autonomy of Jewish communal institutions and the creation of a secular culture. School activists hoped that the creation of a nonreligious Jewish educational system would ensure the perpetuation of a progressive Jewish nation in the Diaspora. Yiddish, the everyday language of the Jewish masses, was at the center of their ideology.

Of the five school movements (the Jewish National Workers Alliance, the Sholom Aleichem Folk Institute, the Workmen’s Circle [WC], the International Workers Order [IWO], and the Left Poale Zion) that existed in the United States and Canada, only the WC (founded in 1918) and the IWO (founded in 1926) were actively committed to a radical political agenda. They creatively fused either socialism or communism with Diaspora nationalism and were known as the linke shules (left-wing schools). Providing supplementary afternoon and weekend education for thousands of children from kindergarten through high school, the shules of the WC and the IWO flourished in the 1930s, sponsoring publishing houses, summer camps, and a Jewish Teachers Seminary. By 1935 more than half of all Jewish children who received a Yiddish education attended the schools of the WC and IWO.

The curricula of the two left-wing Yiddish school movements, in particular the mix between nationalism and internationalism, evolved over time. In the late 1910s and early 1920s—encouraged by the success of the Russian Revolution—the WC schools emphasized socialism. Classes stressed the history of the international working class and capitalist exploitation. The children’s Yiddish readers highlighted the lives of important socialist figures such as Karl Marx and Jean Jaurès. Marching in the annual May Day parade was a highlight of the school year. Holiday celebration was limited to Passover, Purim, and Chanukah, holidays that could be given a universal, socialist, and secular interpretation.

The IWO schools emerged out of the bitter ideological feuds between the Socialist and Communist Left in the 1920s, which permanently divided politics and the unions into two hostile camps. In 1926 a group of shule activists seceded from the WC, creating the “Nonpartisan Jewish Workers Children’s Schools,” which in 1930 officially merged with the Communist Party’s IWO. From 1926 to 1933 (the “Third Period”) the “Nonpartisan/IWO” schools taught a curriculum of “national nihilism” in which few positive symbols of Jewishness appeared. Proletarian culture and activism was paramount. The school’s magazine contained articles on Soviet life, Spanish Republicans, and American strikers. Children regularly joined their teachers on picket lines.

Hitler’s election in 1933, the growth of fascist antisemitism in Europe, and the effect of assimilation on the schoolchildren challenged activists in both movements to reevaluate the weight given to the national element in their curricula. By the end of the decade, WC and IWO school textbooks and magazines had become increasingly sensitive to antisemitism and Jewish culture.

Yet, important differences distinguished the two movements. Changes in the WC shules’ curriculum were due as much to an internal concern for the perpetuation of Jewish culture as to the external threats of antisemitism. WC activists had already created pedagogical materials in the late 1920s that affirmed the uniqueness of Jewish history and the Jewish people. By the mid-1930s a new biography series included Rashi (1040–1105), a medieval figure of traditional piety and learning. Socialism was still central to the schools’ curriculum, but cultural self-preservation became their highest priority.

Communist Party policy informed the curricular changes in the IWO schools. During the Popular Front (1936–1939) when the Soviet Union made efforts to cultivate political support from among its national minorities, IWO activists put a new emphasis on the teaching of Jewish history. They taught Yiddish as an end in itself (not only as a means to further Jewish proletarian culture) through the works of the Soviet Yiddish writers (e.g., Leib Kvitko, Peretz Markish, and David Bergelson). The Hitler-Stalin Pact in 1939 forced shule activists to vitiate their commitment to Jewish culture. But by 1942, Hitler again the enemy of the Soviet Union, the national element resurfaced to become an essential component in the IWO curriculum. (Their allegiance to the IWO notwithstanding, some teachers resisted Party doctrine when it contravened their own consciences, such as refusing to keep the schools open on Yom Kippur.)

The genocidal destruction of European Jewry during World War II, the linguistic acculturation of the immigrants’ American-born grandchildren, and the upward socio-economic mobility of the Jewish community portended the end of the left-wing Yiddish schools by the 1950s. Yet at their peak they enriched the American Left, embodying a vision of political radicalism in which national and international aspirations coexisted in a taut, but creative, tension.

Buhle, Paul. “Jews and American Communism: The Cultural Question.” Radical History Review 23 (spring 1980).

Frankel, Jonathan. Prophecy and Politics: Socialism, Nationalism, and the Russian Jews, 1862–1917. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981.

Freidenreich, Fradle. Pomerantz. Passionate Pioneers: The Story of Yiddish Secular Education in North America, 1910–1960. New York: Holmes & Meier, 2010.

Goldsmith, Emanuel S. Architects of Yiddishism at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century: A Study in Jewish Cultural History. Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1976.

Sinkoff, Nancy B. “Learning to Be Free: Socialist and Communist Yiddish Education in the 1930s.” Bachelor’s thesis, Harvard-Radcliffe College, 1982.