NEWSLETTER
On the Formation of a Secular Jewish Saturday School in Brooklyn
“The parent-workers didn’t want their children to go to the conservative religious schools, but they did want them to learn Jewish history and socialism. They offered to pay the rent for several meeting rooms every Saturday morning and to provide petty cash—not petty to them—for minimal school supplies. All three friends were enthusiastic about the project, and my mother was asked to plan a curriculum. It proved to consist of the Communist Manifesto, poetry by Blake, Shelley, and Walt Whitman, some Old Testament material (largely ‘Exodus’ and the more troublesome prophets) and (rather surprisingly) Henry Morgan’s anthropology.” —in: Rubinstein, Annette T. “Socialist Sunday Schools,” Science & Society 58 (1994): 331-32. (Submitted by Ralph Dumain to the online Blake group, blake@albion.com.)