Educating for continuity: An ethnography of multilingual language practices in Jewish day school education

The past several decades have witnessed the steady rise in the number of faith-based educational institutions in the United States. Among the proliferation of Christian and Muslim schools throughout the United States, Jewish day schools of various denominations have emerged as the centerpiece of communal efforts to ensure Jewish continuity, catering to an estimated 200,000 students studying in 700 schools. This dissertation investigates the socialization of religious and cultural identification through the extensive ethnographic analysis of one group of adolescents attending a non-Orthodox school in the New York City area. The study draws from theoretical and methodological perspectives in linguistic anthropology, language education, and sociology to examine cultural and religious reproduction through a focus on the discursive practices of daily socializing activities critical to the school's mission of transmitting Jewish identity.;Working within a multi-sited ethnographic analysis of educational practices, I show that the activities of studying sacred texts, learning Hebrew, and participating on a two-week visit to Israel frame and structure the production of Jewish identification for the students, and discursively construct a broad category of Jewishness that the students draw on to give meaning to their own emergent identities. My study shows that these activities are important sites of religious and cultural socialization, and that daily classroom language use provides a crucial lens for understanding these processes. On a broader level, the documentation of the students' experiences highlights the challenges that non-fundamental religious schools face in providing institutional coherency to religious and cultural education. The theoretical framework developed for this dissertation sheds light on how to approach the study of cultural reproduction in religious schooling and reveals how linguistic anthropology, in particular, can contribute to studies of youth practices in anthropological accounts of religious groups and diasporic education.