Back to School: Jewish Day School in the Lives of Adult Jews.

Ross, Renee Rubin

Back to School: Jewish Day School in the Lives of Adult Jews. By Alex Pomson and Randal F. Schnoor. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2008. xii + 184 pp.

What impact does organizational affiliation have on individuals? This question is at the heart of Alex Pomson and Randal F. Schnoor's recently published ethnography of parents' connections to a non-Orthodox Jewish day school in Toronto. After a preliminary study suggested that parents' connections to the school were significant, the authors spent three years conducting ethnographic observation and interviews at the Downtown Jewish Day School (DJDS) in Toronto.

The DJDS is a revealing case study since it diverges from research about which families choose Jewish day schools. (1) DJDS families do not live in a particularly Jewish neighborhood and may not be affiliated with other Jewish institutions. In fact, the authors suggest that in this case, the day school replaces a synagogue for these families, functioning as a "shul," a house of worship, study, and assembly for parents (ix).

Back to School comes alive with Pomson and Schnoor's "thick description" of the voices of the DJDS families. For example, in their discussion of day school choice, they cite a father's ambivalence about what kind of education would be right for his daughter. "I always considered myself Jewish but it wasn't a prominent part of my life," the father explains. "But you see your kids get to the point where ... you know that this is the time to offer Judaism to your child and you have to ask yourself how important it is to you. And I decided at that point that this was important enough to me to reintegrate Judaism in to my life to send her to a Jewish school" (57).

Quotes such as the one above anchor the discussion in the concrete experience of less observant Jewish parents struggling with Jewish educational choices. In listening to the DJDS parents, we hear the voices of families in our communities encountering Jewish organizations and considering what their connections to those organizations will be.

As mentioned at the beginning, the question at the heart of this book is what impact organizational affiliation has on individuals; the book explores how the school influences parents' Jewish identity. However, while affiliating with a day school creates the possibility for individual Jewish journeys, Pomson and Schnoor could have broadened their analysis by using an organizational frame. Individuals (the DJDS parents) are shaped by their affiliation with an organization, but this is not only a story about individuals' Jewish identities. Instead, it is a story about how a place (DJDS) opens up possibilities for new ways to be Jewish together, in other words, to act as a group. Considering how DJDS is similar to other organizations that foster affiliation might have expanded the analysis from whether and why a day school is or is not a shul to what kinds of affiliation different day schools foster, and the degree to which day schools are able to foster these affiliations, and even the process by which this affiliation is created and maintained.

For example, in their chapter on "What are Parents Doing at School," Pomson and Schnoor explore the reasons for the "sometimes contradictory, sometimes paradoxical" messages about parent involvement (68-69). They suggest that parents' individual motivations to be involved with the school are often in opposition with one another. But the authors also could have considered the parents' actions as a group in terms of socioeconomic class, linking their work to a larger conversation about different parenting styles; they are describing ways that middle-class parents act. Similarly, in their chapter on motivations for choosing the school, the authors argue that school choice is an individual matter, whereas, in fact, their data could suggest the opposite. There are a finite number of paths that bring families to DJDS; and what is sociologically worth more analysis is the fact that Jewish education has broadened the possible paths so that DJDS families can affiliate with a Jewish organization.

The strength of this book, and this research project, is that it has opened up a conversation about the richness of Jewish life that is taking place in Jewish day schools, not only within classrooms and offices but "around the school." This is a critical conversation for researchers attempting to understand better changing educational and religious configurations as well as practitioners reaching out to and working with families.

Yet this book pushes the reader to think about the right unit of analysis for understanding Jewish participation and affiliation. As important as it has been to understand the individual Jewish journeys of adults and families, those individual journeys must be placed within a set of finite possibilities for organizational involvement.

Renee Rubin Ross

New York University

(1.) Steven M. Cohen and Shaul Kelner, "Why Jewish Parents Send Their Children to Day Schools," in Family Matters: Jewish Education in an Age of Choice, ed. Jack Wertheimer (Waltham, MA, and Hanover, NH: Brandeis University Press/University Press of New England, 2007).