Helena Miller’s scientific contributions

This chapter explores the one common denominator that unites our main cohort—how they came to attend a Jewish secondary school. We explore the considerations parents and their children weigh when choosing Jewish secondary schools and why the members of our comparison group have not made such choices. This provides a chance to unpack various misconceptions about why families choose faith schools. Thanks to the longitudinal frame we employ, we explore how parents have felt about their choices over the passage of time, what they have found most satisfying about their choices, and what has ended up being sources of challenge. Until now there has never been a systematic examination of the school choices of Jewish parents in the United Kingdom, this chapter helps reveal what those who choose such schools see as their purpose. As others have found when studying families who have the luxury of choosing schools for their children, we see that parents’ school choices reveal much about the identities of those making these choices.

In this chapter, we present a portrait of the Jewish education teenagers experience at Jewish secondary schools in the UK, in their classrooms and in other school settings. First, we describe what schools advertise themselves as offering students, publicly communicated in detailed curriculum outlines. Then, drawing on the reflections of both students and their parents, provided in the course of multiple interviews, we reconstruct what students experience in their classrooms and in other settings around the school. We sharpen this portrait by comparing it with what those enrolled in non-Jewish schools recount about their experiences of Jewish education. In the course of this exploration, we probe the dissonance many children notice between what they’re taught in Jewish schools and (the topic of our next chapter) the Jewish lives they lead at home. We identify what students derive from these experiences to construct their Jewish lives. We conclude that, ultimately, what students take away from Jewish schools, and what they value most, is largely consistent with what were their parents’ priorities when they first enrolled them, as described in the last chapter.

Jewish schools are frequently criticised for functioning as ghettos that separate young Jews from mainstream society, or as contributing to an insular mentality. This chapter tests those claims employing a well-established model for the study of societal acculturation, distinguishing between integration, participating in and absorbing majority culture while preserving a distinct minority culture; assimilation, immersion in and adoption of the majority culture while discarding a distinctive minority culture; and separation, rejecting the majority culture in service of sustaining a rich and full minority way of life. From the beginning of the study, we have paid close attention to how students in British schools view themselves as British citizens and the extent to which they get involved in larger causes in the UK. We have found, as we show, that Jewish school graduates have indeed been engaged in British civic life; their schools have empowered them to play an engaged role as British citizens. And, yet, as we also reveal, encounters with antisemitism, which many experienced for the first time once they reached university, have profoundly undermined the sense of the UK as home for many of the study’s participants.

This first chapter introduces life course study, the theoretical framework for our work, alongside the various inspirations that led to the launch of this project. We make explicit what life course studies bring into view and what kinds of planned and unplanned questions this framework has allowed us to explore. We introduce our sample; a cohort that includes more than 1000 students and their parents from Jewish secondary schools in London and Manchester, alongside a comparison group of 50 families whose children did not attend a Jewish secondary school. We describe our data-gathering methodologies, including surveys of the entire sample and biennial interviews with 120 families whose members we have interviewed five times over ten years. We frame the study within the period in the UK during which the student sample was growing up, as well as giving some historical context about faith schooling, and specifically Jewish schooling in the UK. Finally, we provide an orientation to the chapters that follow.

Relationships with friends are generally the most important relationships beyond the family as sources of companionship, positive regard and validation, and for the development of moral sensitivities. Attending schools informed by a strong sense of community and oft-celebrated shared values, those relationships acquire special force and become a precious life resource. This chapter explores how the social networks of those who attended Jewish schools have taken shape in ways that are different from their Jewish peers who attended non-Jewish schools, and how, in turn, the social dynamics formed at school have shaped dating choices and then social opportunities and social choices at university. We find that the friendship networks formed at Jewish schools are tremendous assets for their graduates once they leave home and head to university. These networks facilitate the transition to university and provide a platform on which to build adult Jewish life. We find that three years after graduating secondary school large proportions of Jewish school graduates report that their school friends still make up most of their closest friends. We show that while Jewish school graduates do not share the same principled commitment to dating Jewish and marrying Jewish as their parents’ generation, they are still more inclined than their peers who graduated non-Jewish schools to date and marry other Jews.

The Covid-19 pandemic touched every aspect of our cohort’s lives. While our work has been oriented by an interest in the long-term processes these young people experience, at almost every phase of our work we found ourselves needing to give attention to how our cohort was living through contemporary events of significance (the resurgence of antisemitism in Europe, conflicts in Israel, political turmoil in the UK). No instance was more dramatic than the Covid-19 pandemic. Most of our cohort members were already at university by this point in their lives. Our data, as reported in this chapter, provide a real time view of what our cohort experienced and of how they perceived Covid-19 would shape their futures. The picture formed gains a special depth against the backdrop of the data we had gathered from the same individuals over the previous four rounds of data collection. We are struck by the resilience of many sample members despite the extent to which their life trajectories have been disrupted. At the same time, we note how those who were already experiencing mental health challenges have been sorely tested. Finally, we draw attention to the extent to which these young adults have been deprived of what are known to be formative experiences that have incubated generations of Jewish leaders. This leaves us to ponder what will be the longer-term consequences for how they will develop as active Jews.

As the previous chapter makes clear, the life of a Jewish teenager is punctuated by rituals and rites of passage heavily centred on the family and the family home. This next chapter looks at the rhythms of Jewish life through the eyes of our cohort, establishing what changes as young people age and what stays the same over time. The focus of this chapter, “what it means to be a Jewish young person today,” is actually one of the key themes that runs through every chapter of this book. What marks this chapter as distinct is that we look at some of the key events and opportunities outside of school during which and by means of which young people construct their lives’ Jewish meaning. At these special life-stage moments, what it means to be a young Jewish person comes into heightened focus. These moments include their bar/bat mitzvah coming of age celebration, their involvement with Jewish youth movements, their first visit to Israel, their transition onwards from a full-time Jewish educational institution, and finally their participation university based Jewish activities.

Decades of social scientific research in the UK show that British Jews typically feel strongly disposed towards the State of Israel and its security, even while many experience and express unease about many of its policies. In this chapter, we seek to explain how Israel is a compelling component of Jewish identity for young people even while some are ambivalent about its policies and actions. We explore how connections and commitment to Israel take shape over the adolescent years, and identify the contribution of Jewish schools to what the young people in our study think and feel about Israel, the country and the State. We see the special influence of the Israel trips that schools provide for students prior to the participation of many of the same young people in youth movement Israel tours, a long-standing component of the educational landscape in the UK. Finally, we explore what happens when study participants encounter sharp expressions of anti-Israel sentiment at university. We find how for most of them, their emotional attachment to the Jewish state proves sufficiently robust to resist the corrosive potential of the worst criticisms aimed at Israel. This finding supports our conclusion that Israel’s significance for these young Jews is personal rather than political. Israel inspires them in ways that few other facets of contemporary Jewish life do.

The majority of our cohort were close to the end of their time at university during the last phase of data collection. They were on the edge of independence, but not there yet. In this final chapter we explore what we have learned about them and what we don’t yet know. We reflect on the answers to two key questions that have been at the core of our study: (1) What, over time, have been the consequences for young people and their families of attending a Jewish secondary school rather than a non-Jewish one? (2) What has the longitudinal design of our research enabled us to see that we would have missed had we only collected retrospective data at a single point in time? We conclude that attending a Jewish school has contributed to strong personal connections to Israel, unusually strong friendships that helped social adaptation at university, and a positive sense of connection to and comfort with the Jewish community. Our study’s longitudinal design reveals the resilience of close family relationships over the course of the adolescent years, evolving understandings of what it means to be feel at home in the UK, and finally how slowly change occurs in families and in individual Jewish lives.

Drawing on concepts from prior research that identify the various dimensions of family systems in shaping the emerging Jewish lives of young people, this chapter explores specific dimensions of family systems that contribute to and express how the young people in our study think of themselves as Jews. The chapter underlines the role of family ritual in forming and performing who people are as Jews, and how such rituals underpin the tempo of Jewish life in the UK. Unlike the other chapters in this volume which combine both quantitative and qualitative data, this chapter focuses on the multiple interviews conducted with six families purposefully selected to include a wide range of the characteristics of those who participated in the study. The chapter probes the themes that surface when these families’ stories are examined side by side. Because our data encompass a long period when study participants were being raised at home and also the first years when they were living away from home, at university, we explore the ways in which the family’s role in young people’s lives evolves when they are much less frequently present in their parents’ houses.