But public schools rely more heavily on Jewish support than the numbers would suggest, in part because Jewish organizations, fearful of any breakdown of the wall between Church and State, have traditionally lobbied hard against school vouchers and other government aid to private schools. As awareness grows that voucher programs might benefit financially strapped Jewish schools, that opposition may diminish. Today most non-Orthodox Jewish groups still reject school choice. But Rabbi Robert Abramson, the education director of the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism, says that the Conservative movement is revisiting the issue. In New York, where Governor George Pataki last year signed a law that permits charter schools, some Jewish leaders are proposing the first ever government-funded school of Jewish culture.
T HERE is another, even more sensitive issue lurking behind the Jewish-school phenomenon.
Earlier generations of Jews, according to Eduardo Rauch, of the Jewish Theological Seminary, in New York, sent their children to public school not simply as a means of ascending into the middle class but as a show of national loyalty. Today, in contrast, parents are willing to consider Jewish schools in part because they no longer fear being viewed as outsiders. They take their integration into mainstream America as a given. In South Africa and Australia, where most Jews send their children to separate schools, discrimination is hardly pervasive, but the lack of a melting-pot ideology means that Jews remain more communally separate than they do in the United States. In fact, when discussing issues like Afrocentrism and bilingual education, American Jewish leaders sometimes bemoan the demise of the melting-pot ideal in this country.