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The Bible has played a critical
role in the story of Judaism, modernity and identity. Penny Schine Gold
examines the arena of children's education and the role of the Bible in the
reshaping of Jewish identity, especially in the United States in the 1920s and 1930s, when a
second generation of eastern European Jews engaged the task of Americanizing
Jewish culture, religion and institutions. Professional Jewish educators
based in the Reform movement undertook a multifaceted agenda for the Bible in
America: to modernize it, harmonize it
with American values, and move it to the center of the religious school
curriculum.
Through public schooling, the
children of Jewish immigrants brought America home: it was up to the adults to
fashion a Judaism that their children could take out of the home and into
their new lives. Because of its historic role in the development of Judaism
and its cultural significance in American life, Gold finds, the Bible
provided Jews with vital links to both the past and the present. The ancient
sacred text of the Bible, transformed into highly abridged and amended
"Bible tales", was brought into service as a bridge between
tradition and modernity.
Gold analyzes these American
developments with reference to the intellectual history of eighteenth - and
nineteenth - century Europe, innovations in public schooling and social theory.
Protestant religious education, and later versions
of children's Bibles in the United States and Israel. She shows that these seemingly
simple children's books are complex markers of the pressing concerns of Jews
in the modern world.
Penny Schine
Gold is Professor
of History and Chair of the Gender and Women's Studies Program at Knox College. She is coauthor of The
Chicago Guide to Your Academic Career: a Portable Mentor for Scholars form
Graduate School through Tenure, author of The Lady and the Virgin:
Image, Attitude, and Experience in Twelfth-Century France, and coeditor
of Cultural Visions: Essays in the History of Culture.
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