Unified Religious School brings Dara Horn’s teachings on Jewish identity to students
Goal is for students to leave classroom 'feeling aware and empowered'
Beit Kulanu’s Rabbi Dan Fellman returned to Pittsburgh inspired by last spring’s Re-CHARGING Reform Judaism Conference in New York City.
A major source of that inspiration, Fellman said, was the opportunity to hear from author Dara Horn.
The novelist, whose non-fiction work “People Love Dead Jews” received the 2021 National Jewish Book Award in the Contemporary Jewish Life and Practice category, delivered the conference’s keynote address.
In her remarks, Horn described how individuals and groups routinely invoke a fictitious trope about Jews.
“The big lie against the Jewish people is always the same,” she said. “The big lie is that Jews are destroying what your society values the most.”
Although that lie has persisted across generation, she explained, by reframing the Jewish story, and teaching about the basics of Jewish civilization and its commitment to nonconformity, change is possible.
Both at the conference and in her writing, Horn — whose new book on responding to antisemitism is titled “The Final Solution to the Jewish Question: A Love Story for the Living” — described that change and what “the moment demands of us.”
“Our responsibility, not only as Jews but as members of the liberal West descended from Jewish civilization, is to make people curious about that dramatic story to which we owe our world,” she wrote in Sapir, a magazine exploring the future of the American Jewish community. “Jews are among the first groups in history to stand up to tyranny, and to this day they continue to do so.
No one can defuse the lie of antisemitism without understanding that story, because it explains how people who want to dominate need that lie as a tool to stop curiosity and crush dissent.”
Further conveying these ideas is The Tell Institute, a group founded and directed by Horn, which creates curricula.
After hearing about the institute and its resources, Fellman spoke with Rabbi Larry Freedman about bringing the curricula to the Unified Religious School — an afterschool and Sunday morning learning program for students from Beit Kulanu and Congregation Beth Shalom.
Freedman, the religious school director, reviewed the materials and found them thought-provoking.
What’s particularly interesting is the premise that Jews are a “tiny countercultural group whose groundbreaking ideas shape world history,” Freedman told the Chronicle, while flipping through the materials. “I think there’s a lot of Jews who are not triumphalists, and we might be a little embarrassed to have such a grand concept.”
Freedman said he received training from The Tell Institute and further warmed to Horn’s ideas. “It’s kind of true — maybe those countercultural ideas really are things that stick in the craw of others.”
Rabbi Seth Adelson, Beth Shalom’s senior rabbi and an educator at URS, joined Freedman in reviewing the curriculum and completing the training.
“It is essential for the Jewish future that our young people are prepared for the range of falsehoods that are being told about the Jewish people online and in other unfriendly places,” Adelson said. “This curriculum is designed to help our students understand who the Jewish people are and what we stand for, and to help inoculate them against those who promulgate what Dara Horn refers to as ‘the Big Lie,’ that is, that the Jews are trying to destroy whatever it is that you value the most.”
What the curriculum makes clear, Freedman said, is “what Jews writ-large have stood for and that these things are a threat to whatever the ruling party is of the day.” Depending on where Jews live, “we’re either rapacious capitalists or we are godless communists. We’re always the thing that people hate the most.”
By weaving that concept through millennia of Jewish life, it actually helps middle schoolers and teens appreciate “why we’re in this mess right now,” he added.
URS has about 200 students ranging from K-12.
Amid rising antisemitism and growing online discourse about Zionism and anti-Zionism, Fellman said he is eager to introduce new teachings.
What this curriculum and the religious school’s other offerings reiterate is an “understanding of our identity through the positive aspects of who we are and what we stand for,” he said. Along with grasping how to live a “life of Jewish observance and Jewish practice,” it’s imperative for young learners to reckon with the questions of “Why be Jewish? Why is it important to be Jewish? What are the blessings that come from being Jewish?”
Both for teens, parents and others — Beit Kulanu will offer related classes for adults during its Monday Meetups series — it’s crucial to “help the current generation recognize and understand what’s happening and to see how our Jewish identities can help us build and respond to all of this stuff from a position of pride, and joy and blessing, and not from hate and distrust and fear,” Fellman said.
As much as school is a place for sharing information, education can bolster identity, Freedman said. “Maybe it would be nice if our seventh graders, our high school students, sort of got a little bit of a little shot in the arm. Like, I am part of this group of people that has historically stood up to tyrants wherever they are … that it’s not some other guy, but my people don’t bow down. My
people argue about reality and text. My people don’t just take whatever’s fed to us. My people have stood for something important.”
That realization transforms academic exercises into personal values. The goal, he continued, is for students to leave the classroom “feeling aware and empowered.” PJC
Adam Reinherz can be reached at areinherz@pittsburghjewishchronicle.org.
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