Lecture and discussion on Dr. Laura Yares’s recently published book: Jewish Sunday schools: Teaching Religion in Nineteenth Century America

Wednesday, November 15, 5.30-7:00pm,
B-342 Wells Hall

Laura Yares will discuss her book, Jewish Sunday Schools: Teaching Religion in Nineteenth Century America, (NYU Press, 2023).

It chronicles the development of the Sunday school as a mechanism for Jewish education in America, and analyzes its distinctively religious curricula. The first Jewish Sunday school in America was founded by a pioneering group of women in 1838. It soon grew to an entire system, led by women, that educated vast numbers of Jewish youth across the country. Debates soon swirled, however, around the so-called sorry state of “feminized” American Jewish supplemental learning in Sunday schools, and the schools were taken over by men within one generation of their creation. It is commonly assumed that the critiques were accurate and that the early Jewish Sunday school was feminized, saccharine, and overly dependent on Christian paradigms. Tracing the development of these schools from their inception through the first decade of the twentieth century, this book shows this was not the reality. Jewish Sunday Schools argues that the work of the women who shepherded Jewish education in the early Jewish Sunday school had ramifications far outside the classroom. Indeed, we cannot understand the nineteenth-century American Jewish experience, and how American Judaism sought to sustain itself in an overwhelmingly Protestant context, without looking closely at the development of Jewish Sunday school education.

Dr. Yares is an Assistant Professor of Jewish Studies and Religious Studies at Michigan State University.