January 9, 2018
Dear Parents of Ninth Graders:
I am excited to work with your children this semester in our new ninth grade core course, “Name That Jew,” here at Congregation Beth Israel. I joined this community in 2016, when my daughter started at the preschool, and this is my third semester teaching at CBI on Tuesday evenings. Previously, I lived on the East Coast, where for fifteen years I taught middle school English and U.S. history.
This course contains two layers: the gimmick and the insight. The gimmick is simply that it’s fun to chat about famous people, and it’s especially interesting when they share your own religious, ethnic, or cultural background and you can potentially find similarities between their stories and your own.
The insight, lying just below the surface, is that the stories of these American Jews highlight different strands — sometimes radically divergent strands — of what it means to be a Jew in our modern society. We can learn quite a bit by contrasting the journalistic approaches of CNN anchors Jake Tapper and Wolf Blitzer, or the philanthropic strategies of billionaires Michael Bloomberg and Mark Zuckerberg, or the odes to America by Irving Berlin and Paul Simon. How does Bernie Sanders’s outside track as a firebrand measure up to his colleague Chuck Schumer’s inside track as a legislative deal-maker? How does Superman’s mission to uphold “truth and justice” exist in tension with fellow Jewish-created superhero Batman’s ongoing quest to avenge the murders of his parents?
Each of these contrasts, along with the others listed in the attached curriculum sequence, sheds a different light on the paradox of contemporary American Jewish identity: We are afforded great privilege yet are perennial outsiders. Most of us are considered “white” but are also uniquely “ethnic.” We carry with us the calm, reasoned tones of the ancient rabbis alongside the restlessness of the revolutionaries who star in our holiday stories. Many of us are wealthy yet reflexively identify with the poor and the shunned. We look out for the little guy… except, maybe, when the little guy is calling out the actions of fellow Jews, because we also look out for the tribe. Unless we’ve become so assimilated that there isn’t even a tribe anymore.
The gimmick of famous Jews, then, serves as a vehicle for much deeper discussions about who we ourselves are as Jews — and which strands of our Jewish character and values we most wish to emulate.
As your children and I embark on this journey, it is important to me that the classroom be safe — a place where we aren’t ostracized for asking a “stupid” question or for expressing an unpopular idea or theory. My own role is not to convince the students to see things the way I do but rather to facilitate conversations that help them learn, question, debate, and find inspiration in others’ stories. If I do my job well, your children will want to come back to class each week. If that is not happening, please don’t hesitate to reach out to me and discuss how we might get things back on track.
I will update our course website each week with a recap of what we did in class. I encourage you to continue these conversations with your children during the week and send me any feedback that might be helpful. Thank you for the opportunity to work with your children this year!
Sincerely,
Mike Fishback