For much of the mainstream Jewish community, a book emphasizing the importance of Hebrew might seem somewhat odd and certainly removed from the normal pressing concerns of Jewish life. This seems particularly ironic, when one of the most celebrated recent innovations in Jewish life is the Birthright Israel program, which provides short-term Israel travel opportunities to Jewish young adults. The organized community helps young American Jews discover the attractiveness of Hebrew culture, in the hope of strengthening its institutions back home where Modern Hebrew is rarely spoken! Sooner or later, I believe, this large investment in identification with Israel will force a re-examination of the role of Hebrew in American Jewish life.

The existence of Hebrew Americans not only challenges what we think the Jewish community should be, but also what America as a whole should be – for both ourselves and for other ethnicities. As the current debate over the Ben Gamla School illustrates, the anti-assimilation values of many Hebrew Americans often differ from the traditional, “integrationist” approach to American life that has typified mainstream Jewish life for many decades. While it is impossible to generalize based on one incident, this controversy over a bilingual charter school may be just the first of many debates to come regarding the way Jewish identity should be publicly expressed in a culturally diverse United States. While the divisions between Orthodox and non-Orthodox Jewry are currently much more visible, those divisions are linked to the broader rift between religious conservatives and liberals in the US throughout all of the major religions. However, as the cultural divisions between “integrationists” and “multiculturalists” become even more prominent in the broader American landscape, probably eclipsing the attention devoted to the long-established religious rifts, these new divisions will come more to the fore within the Jewish community as well.