At the beginning of the twenty-first century a growing concern about assimilation provoked calls for reform of Jewish education. These calls for reform of Jewish education mimic similar calls for reform of public education within the United States. The purpose of this dissertation is to explore the uptake of general social and educational discourses within the field of Jewish education and to examine (re)configurations of American Jewish childhood that have emerged as rules and standards of reasoning have shifted. In this "history of the present" I examine the mobilization of mainstream educational and social knowledge within the field of Jewish education and argue that shifting reasoning about childhood, Americanness, and Jewishness have effects of (re)constituting American Jewish childhood as the same as, but also as acceptably different from, normal American childhood. This dissertation is divided into three parts: Section One discusses the theoretical framework as well as an a priori , but shifting, relation of difference through which Jewishness constitutes itself and is constituted by others. Section Two examines Jewish educational literature of the mid-nineteenth century and the turn of the twentieth century. Section Three explores American Jewish educational literature in the decades after the Second World War, and in the present. The analysis focuses upon the uptake of shifting social and educational discourses by Jewish educational reformers such that the American Jewish child has been (re)constituted as a normal American child, whose Jewishness is within parameters of acceptable religious difference. Examination of the discursive formations of childhood, Americanness, and Jewishness, and the interactions between the discursive trajectories, within Jewish educational literature makes visible the ranking and ordering of populations inscribed within educational discourse and re-inscribed into notions of American Jewish childhood. Thus, the constitution of a same, but acceptably different American Jewish child has also had effects of constituting Jewish childhoods that are neither the same, nor acceptably different.Thesis (Ph.D.)--The University of Wisconsin - Madison, 2008.School code: 0262
