“To feed the hunger for knowledge that exists among American Jews, we need education that doesn’t talk down to people or make them feel like children”

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Today’s Jews, he [Rabbi Arthur Green] said, are better educated in general education, which makes the gap between their Jewish knowledge and their general knowledge more striking.  Consider “the percentage of Jews we have with graduate degrees, who then get up in the synagogue and try to have an aliyah [reading from the Torah] and are illiterate.”  Knowledgeable Jews feel embarrassed about their ignorance in Jewish settings, and this sense of inadequacy drives them away.  To feed the hunger for knowledge that exists among American Jews, we need education that doesn’t talk down to people or make them feel like children.

Edgar M. Bronfman and Beth Zasloff, Hope, Not Fear: A Path to Jewish Renaissance (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2008), 63-64.

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