Jewish girls growing up in the United States have had access to a broad range of educational opportunities. Pioneering innovations such as the Hebrew Sunday school opened up doors to religious education, while in public schools, training schools, and the hallways of higher education, American Jewish girls have pursued secular studies as well. In the contemporary era, the landscape for American Jewish education has increasingly expanded beyond the classroom to include a range of experiential educational opportunities alongside more formal classroom-based instruction.

The Jewish community in America planted its roots during the colonial era, and an educational infrastructure slowly began to germinate. Public schools did not become widely available in the United States until the mid-nineteenth century. Until then, parents looked to private institutions for the education of Jewish children, both in secular as well as in Jewish subjects. Day schools and boarding schools run by enterprising educators offered curricula that combined secular instruction with a curriculum for Jewish studies, typically focusing on basic Hebrew, biblical history and catechism. Some were co-educational, others were single-sex, like the Misses Palanches School in New York City, which offered a boarding school and a day school for Jewish girls. Congregational Hebrew schools also offered a full-day curriculum focusing on Jewish studies, usually taught by the community’s rabbi or cantor, but were typically limited to boys.

Most Jewish private schools prior to the twentieth century had only a short-lived existence. Enrollment was a perennial challenge, and schools were chronically short of funds. Wealthy parents often opted for private tutors who could teach the rudiments of general studies, alongside the heritage languages of Hebrew, German, Spanish, and Portuguese. Tutors also prepared boys for bar mitzvah, teaching mechanical Hebrew reading and Jewish liturgy for leading public prayers. In this period, girls did not celebrate Lit. "daughter of the commandment." A girl who has reached legal-religious maturity and is now obligated to fulfill the commandmentsbat mitzvah in the synagogue. They may have learned some Hebrew from private tutors, but more typically Jewish girls obtained their Jewish instruction from domestic life, learning the rhythms of the Jewish calendar, the organization of a Term used for ritually untainted food according to the laws of Kashrut (Jewish dietary laws).kosher kitchen, prayer-book Hebrew, and the performance of home-based Jewish rituals from their mothers, grandmothers, and aunts.

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Most of the educational institutions that emerged within American Jewry during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries took for granted that Jewish learning was to be a part-time rather than a full-day endeavor. In the first decade of the twentieth century, it was estimated that more than 90% of Jews living in New York City attended public schools, and that Jewish children made up nearly 40% of the city’s total elementary school population. The public schools were attractive to Jewish parents who arrived in America as immigrants. They were free, open to girls as well as boys, and signaled the Jewish community’s commitments to American public culture. American Jewish girls benefitted from the opportunities offered by the American public-school system and from the possibilities for social advancement that education could provide. By the latter half of the nineteenth century, increasing numbers of American Jewish girls had begun to attend high school.

In the nineteenth century, class and economic mobility impacted girls’ access to higher learning as much as, or indeed more than, their identities as Jews. For wealthy American Jewish girls, the landscape for post-secondary education extended beyond American shores and could include finishing school and educational travel in Europe. Jewish girls nurturing ambitions of making it in America could enroll in vocational training courses, evening classes, or normal schools to train as teachers. Teaching was a popular occupation for Jewish girls. The rhetoric of the cult of true womanhood described teaching as an extension of women’s innate capacity to nurture the young, and it offered an acceptable career outside the home. It was not until later in the mid-twentieth century that Jewish girls attended college in numbers comparable to their male colleagues. In 1916, 3.6 Jewish boys attended college out of every 1000 people, compared to only .4 Jewish girls.

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