Jewish education has historically been a male enterprise, led by male teachers and preoccupied with the education of boys. In America, however, the Jewish educational landscape would be shaped not by male rabbis, but by Jewish women engaged in benevolent activity on behalf of their co-religionists. With the opening of the first Hebrew Sunday school in Philadelphia in 1838, Jewish women pioneered a distinctively American model for Jewish education that replicated not only the curricula of contemporary Christian religious schools, but also the assumption that religious schooling was a female domain. This talk will explore how involvement in Jewish education facilitated both new public roles for American Jewish women, as well as new constructions of Jewish masculinity that were shaped by the cultural contours of nineteenth-century public Protestantism.

Laura Yares is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at Michigan State University. Her work focuses on Jews and Judaism in modernity, with particular interests in Jewish education. She received her PhD in Religious Studies from Georgetown University in 2014. Her current research includes a book on the Jewish Sunday School in nineteenth-century America, and a contemporary ethnographic project examining Jewish learning in cultural arts contexts.