[The] way in which you conducted yourself stands in complete contradiction to moral values and its approach towards educating for family values…You being a single pregnant woman constitutes an ethical violation that from our perspective is a red line.

A comprehensive discussion of this question from a halakhic standpoint has been written by Devora Ross and published in Jewish Legal Writings by Women. An article influenced by her article and written by Rabbi Chaim Steinmetz can be found here. Rabbi David Golinkin wrote a more conservative responsum on the subject which can be found here.

For an interesting discussion of challenges facing the Jewish family see this article by Chaim I. Waxman. A discussion of infertility treatment in the Israeli context can be found in Susan Kahn’s Reproducing Jews: A Cultural Account of Assisted Conception in Israel.

It is difficult to conceive of two books in American Jewish history more different in their assumptions and conclusions than The Death of an American Jewish Community and Urban Exodus. Levine and Harmon argued that the demise of the Jewish community in Mattapan, the southern part of Dorchester, during the 1960s was caused by an unholy alliance of real estate interests, banks, and politicians, eager to benefit from the federal government’s largesse in subsidizing of urban development programs. These “elusive forces,” organized into the Boston Banks Urban Renewal Group, directed Boston’s growing Black population into Jewish areas rather than into Irish, Italian, and other ethnic enclaves. Jews, they believed, would be less resistant to the racial transformation of their neighborhoods and less prone to violence.

Gamm strongly disagrees, and Urban Exodus focuses on another aspect of this story–the different rates by which Jews and Catholics left Boston. In Boston, as elsewhere, “the exodus from Jewish neighborhoods occurred earlier, faster, and more thoroughly than the exodus from Catholic neighborhoods–and with much less violence” (p. 13). By the 1970s, Jewish Boston had become part of the Black ghetto. The G&G delicatessen, the center of Jewish Mattapan, indicated this when it added bacon and eggs to its breakfast menu. But this transformation had begun decades earlier. During the early and mid-1950s, a time when the Jewish community of Roxbury-Dorchester was still viable, five important Jewish institutions left the area for Brookline and Newton: Hebrew Teachers College, the Maimonides day school, Orthodox congregations Beth El and Atereth Israel, and Conservative synagogue Mishkan Tefila. “These institutions,” Gamm writes, “relocated once their leaders had become convinced that the urban exodus posed threats to institutional survival, but before those threats were fully manifest” (p. 233).

According to Gamm, who teaches politics and history at the University of Rochester, the difference between the demographic mobility of Jews and Roman Catholics stemmed from the different institutional structures of the two groups. As a result of a close examination of church and synagogue records, census data, newspaper accounts, Boston government records, and other primary source material, Gamm argues that “what primarily distinguishes Jews from Catholics is not a different capacity for racist behavior but a different attachment to territory. Catholics have a strong sense of turf, regarding their neighborhoods as defended geographical communities (pp. 15-16).” And this, in turn, has been shaped by how synagogue and church view urban space.

The institutions of the authoritarian and parish-based Roman Catholic Church were anchored deep into the soil of Boston and were there to stay. The Catholic laity were loyal to the territorial churches and schools they had known since youth, and were loath to leave the cozy and familiar confines of the parish. Catholics who lived the furthest from the parish church were the most likely to leave Boston for the suburbs, while the Catholics who lived the closest, the heroes of Gamm’s book, stayed and maintained the stability and prosperity of Roxbury and Dorchester. The parish, Gamm writes, “was a fortress for old- time residents, stoutly maintaining familiar rituals, social events, and the neighborhood’s disappearing ethnic character. Its pastor and curates continued to provide vigorous leadership, reinforcing for white Catholics the permanence of the parish’s commitment to the neighborhood. In a time of change, the parish offered stability” (p. 239).

Jewish institutions, by contrast, were less constrained by residential factors, and, except for Orthodox synagogues, could be relocated easily. “The inability of Jewish institutions to define and anchor neighborhoods is based,” Gamm writes, “in the rules that separate synagogue sites from members’ homes, rules that make synagogues portable, and rules that locate institutional authority in the congregational membership” (p. 93). Their institutions, including synagogues, were lay-controlled, and permission to move them did not require approval from a higher religious authority. The migration of Jewish institutions to suburbia had a snowballing effect, encouraging other institutions and individuals to flee also. The evidence, Gamm concludes, supports the thesis that the respective histories of their institutions explain why Catholic and Jews have responded differently to urban change.

Shapiro ends his review with a question.

But the question remains: what distinctive historical and psychological factors persuaded Boston’s Jewish leaders to so readily uproot their institutions?

Something interesting to think about when the Jewish community ponders its future and that of its educational institutions.

R. Zera says: The merit of attending a lecture lies in the running. Abaye says: The merit of attending the Kallah sessions lies in the crush. Raba says: The merit of repeating a tradition lies in [improving] the understanding of it. R. Papa says: The merit of attending a house of mourning lies in the silence observed. Mar Zutra says: The merit of a fast day lies in the charity dispensed. R. Shesheth says: The merit of a funeral oration lies in raising the voice. R. Ashi says: The merit of attending a wedding lies in the words [of congratulation addressed to the bride and bridegroom].

The first three statements directly concern learning, but what is also clear is that the origins of the merit or reward described in the first two statements has nothing to do with any type of comprehension, “running” and “the crush”. This is even more surprising being that all of these statements describe the attendance of sages at the pirka and kallah.[2] Rashi’s commentary on the first statement makes clear why, in his opinion the merit or reward is for running and not comprehension, most people couldn’t fully understand what was being taught so the reward was for the performance itself, not the actual understanding of what was being taught. (עיקר קבול שכר הבריות הרצים לשמוע דרשה מפי חכם – היא שכר המרוצה, שהרי רובם אינם מבינים להעמיד גרסא ולומר שמועה מפי רבן לאחר זמן שיקבלו שכר למוד ).
In a Jewish context, the performative and social aspect of learning has been described by Sameul Heilman in his The People of the Book. Returning to the post at Seforim, maybe the ubiquity of the Artscroll Talmud,[3] and the “Artscroll phenomenon” in general, signifies a paradigm shift in Talmud study. While in the past some people were exposed to the aggadot of the Talmud through such works as Ein Yaakov,[4] or such compilations such as Hok le-Yisrael (update: which doesn’t only contain aggadic selections from the Talmud), it is my unscientific guess, which could be wrong and shouldn’t be based on generalizations, that many Jews never saw a page of Talmud, and if they did, they didn’t understand much of what they read. Maybe the modern parallel for public events which involve lots of running and crushing is the SOY Seforim Sale-תבב”א.

[1] See Ephraim Kanarfogel, Jewish Education and Society in the Middle Ages, pp. 171-172 n.49 for a list of sources.
[2] I. Gafni, Yehudei Bavel be-Tekufat ha-Talmud, p. 209.
[3] I would also include similar undertaking in Hebrew such as Hevruta.
[4] Marjorie Lehman is currently completing a book on Ein Yaakov which will enrich this discussion.

We conclude that three or more years of Catholic high schooling decreases the likelihood that young people leave the church later in life. At least with regard to Mass attendance, it may have little additional impact on religious participation among those who do remain Catholic. In other words, Catholic high schooling affects religious identification more directly than it affects religious practice. Conversely, attending CCD (the equivalent of afternoon Hebrew school, MM) during the high school years produces no effect on Catholic identification but does increase the likelihood of weekly Mass attendance among those who remain Catholic. Our data cannot determine the mechanisms behind these effects, but the contrast between attending Catholic high school and CCD leads us, like other researchers, to speculate about social networks. Attending Catholic high school occupies a large portion of day-to-day life and seems likely to enmesh one in an array of close, dense, social ties-creating an experience of living in a Catholic community. Such an experience might make it important to young people to remain Catholic for the sake of maintaining the network of Catholic relationships in their daily lives-though not necessarily important to attend Mass since the parish is not the primary locus of such relationships. Furthermore, the experience might lead Catholics to continue seeking such relationships throughout their lives, a desire that would presumably manifest itself in their choice of spouses. Attending CCD, which typically involves no more than a few hours a week, might also establish important social ties but seems unlikely to create the same density of ties or sense of community. Moreover, because CCD takes place in a parish setting, attending Mass might be important for sustaining the types of social ties created there.

So maybe we shouldn’t be worry so much about the content of the curriculum, just that Jewish youth spend as much time together as possible, enjoying themselves, and studying a little Torah in the process.

Source:

Paul Perl and Mark M. Gray, “Catholic Schools and Disaffiliation from Catholicism”, Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, vol. 46, no. 2, June 2007.