The following is a transcript of Episode 8 of the Perfect Jewish Parents Podcast. Note: This is a lightly edited transcript of a conversation, please excuse any errors.

Masua: Hello and welcome to Perfect Jewish Parents, a new podcast from the Shalom Hartman Institu te about the joys and always of raising children Jewishly. I Masua Sagiv, I’m scholar in residence for the Shalom Hartman Institute, and my kids are ages 14, 11, eight, and three.

Josh: And I’m Joshua Ladon, director of Education for the Shaham Hartman Institute, and I’ve got a 10 year old, an eight year old, and a four year old.

Masua: So Josh, I don’t remember if it was before I had kids or when my older kids were very young, but I remember having a conversation with my dad about my kids’ educations, and I proudly told him that I have no doubt in my mind that I’ll send my kids to a public school. And my wise dad, he smiled and he said, we’ll see.

Josh: Wait, what does that mean? Like you’re from Israel? I don’t know if we have the same system. 

Masua: So we don’t have the same system, and Israel is basically a public school system. But in this specific case, it fits the situation here as well, because there are a lot of other options, semi-private or private, to raise your children. And what I mean by this story is that as my kids got older, I realized, in this too, that parenting is not black and white. And that’s especially true about Jewish parenting because when you want to raise your children Jewishly, you often need to navigate conflicting commitments. You wanna raise your kid Jewishly, but that has costs both monetary but also a cost to be to being a part of our larger society, the American public square, if you will, and being status concscious.

Josh: Yeah, it’s interesting, was thinking about, well, what does it mean to raise my kids Jewishly? Is it what I do in the home? Is it about sending them to like camp or day school or, oh, we belong to a congregation, or, you know, that like, sort of bigger question of what does it actually mean to be Jewish?

Masua: Yeah, so we invited Ilana Horwitz to have a conversation with us. Ilana is the Fields-Rayant Chair in Contemporary Jewish Life at Tulane University’s Stewart and Suzanne Grant Center for the American Jewish Experience. Last year, Ilana published a biook titled God, Grades and Graduation: Religion’s Surprising Impact on Academic Success, and we’ve talked with Ilana about the Jewish version of that question.

What does it mean to raise and educate a child Jewishly or religiously? What is the relationship between Judaism, religiosity, and community? What is the complex role of religious or Jewish institutions in the upbringing of our kids?

Josh: We’ll be back with this conversation in a moment.

Masua: We are joined by Ilana Horowitz, assistant Professor of Jewish Studies and Sociology, and the Fields-Rayant Chair in contemporary Jewish Life at Tulane University.

It’s great to have you today.

Ilana: Thanks so much for having me. 

Masua: So, Ilana, you are a sociologist of religion and education, and you study about what it means to be religious in America, and separately about what it means to be Jewish in America, but you’re not just an academic, but also a person, and why don’t you tell us a bit about who you are and the makeup of your family.

Ilana: Yes. So I have two girls. One is about to be 10 and the other one is six and a half. And I am married to a wonderful guy named Robbie.

Josh: And Alana, just to dive deeper into what it means for you to be a Jewish parent, if your parenting style was a Jewish holiday, what would it be and why?

Ilana: Wow. You know, it might be Yom Kippur.

Masua: Oh, wow. That I did not expect. 

Ilana: Because, let me see if the thought comes out in the way that I imagine. There are so many times, you know how Yom Kippur, right, you want to eat, but you can’t. Okay. There are so many times where I wanna be a certain kind of parent and I just can’t be that kind of parent because my kids won’t let me be the kind of parent I wanna be, because they’re kids and they wanna do their own thing.

Josh: It’s so amazing. That’s such a good answer. I thought you were gonna say something like, oh I forgive them all the time and I’m giving them like,

Masua: It should be, I forgive myself all the time because of the, Yom Kippur.

Josh: It’s so good. When I was joking with Masua about that question beforehand, I was like, oh, we should ask Ilana, like, what plague does she want to enact on her children? And Masua was like, you cannot ask that question. 

Masua: I said, it is a highly inappropriate question to ask our guests. 

Ilana: Yeah, I like the modification. But yeah, I think, we try to be our best selves on Yom Kippur and say what we’re gonna be the next year and how we’re gonna be. And sometimes I even, unfortunately, you have to tell one of my kids, like, you are making it hard for me to be the kind of parent I want to be. And I say that in a very exasperated voice, and then I feel really bad for saying that to her.

Josh: Oh, of course. Feeling bad after being exasperated at your children. Like what else is Jewish parenting, if not that?

Masua: Oh, yeah. I’m struck by the fact that we are even talking about, so you study religion and I come from Israel, this is my second year here in America. And the concept of being religious or raising religious children is so different because in Israel, religious means observing. Basically it doesn’t really matter if you believe in God or if you don’t believe in God. What matters is the fact that you raise your children, and you live your life, in a certain way. 

Josh: And a certain community,

Masua: And a certain community. But you don’t have to be a part of the community. You just have a set of rules that you have to live by.

And in a sense, at least that was my impression when I came here to America, the concept of being religious, or living as a family or raising religious children felt much less rigid and more, a sense of belief or, like a connection with God. And I don’t know. It just struck me when, when we think about religious.

Ilana: Yeah. So religion, in some sense of the word, right, could have something to do with God, a belief in God. Interestingly, when I met my husband on our second date, I said to him, by the way, I will not marry somebody unless they’re willing to send our children to Jewish day school. So if you’re not on board with that, like we should not move this forward. Sending my kids to Jewish day school was the most important thing to me, and it actually has nothing to do with religion from the perspective of belief in God. In fact, the other day my kids were talking to me about, what do I believe and what does my husband believe in?

I was like, I feel fairly agnostic about God. My husband doesn’t believe in God. But being Jewish isn’t necessarily about believing in God the reason, right, you might be wondering, why do I care so much about Jewish Day School, is that I immigrated here from Russia and I grew up in a environment under communism where being Jewish was completely forbidden. I had no Jewish education whatsoever growing up. I don’t think I even knew what the term Jewish meant until we moved here. And when we came to the United States, I got a very high dosage of Jewish education, thanks to lots of  philanthropic dollars. I went to day schools, I went to Jewish summer camps. I was really involved in youth group, I even went to college having never met another non-Jewish person, which is kind of remarkable. 

But there was this moment that happened when I was in day school that stood out to me and it is the reason I send my kids to day school. And so, when I was 14, my father was killed in a car accident. The guy behind him had, yeah, 

Josh: Oh god, I am so sorry.

Ilana: Yeah. I appreciate that, rather. The guy behind him had a seizure. And it was a really, really difficult time for my family, as you can imagine. We were like working class immigrants. We were pretty financially constrained and we had never experienced, that kind of loss and been able to do anything with it through a Jewish lens. And I had actually just learned in my eighth grade class about the Jewish rituals of death and mourning. And I had said to my mom like, oh, we’re gonna need to sit shiva. And she’s like, you want me to like stop working for seven days? I won’t be able to feed you. We can’t possibly do that. 

And all this seemed really foreign to us and it was just like a very difficult time. And my school rallied around my family in a way that I cannot, even explain to you. I’ll share one brief story. I lived an hour from my school and every morning at 6:00 AM, kids would show up to my school to get on a shuttle bus to come to my house so that we could have a morning minyan, and they had to show up to my house by 7:00 AM so that they could get back to school by 8:30.

And that’s why I know that they weren’t doing this just to get out of school. Like they had to really wake up early. There was something about that experience that stuck with me and I always said to myself one day, when I have kids, if something were to happen to my family, like , a crisis like this, I want, my kids to have the kind of community that I had. And that is why I send my kids to a Jewish day school.

Josh: So, Ilana, that’s a profoundly powerful story. Like you are a immigrant child, working class, who had the opportunity to go to Jewish day school. Most American Jews do not have that opportunity, nor do they do such a thing. But then you’ve written this very thought-provoking book, and it’s an academic book, it’s not a parenting how to book, but asks, oh, what’s the relationship between religion and religiosity and success in academic settings, success in school. 

And one of the things that your story makes me wonder is the notion of religion that you just articulated? Oh yeah. I’m a agnostic American Jew. My husband is basically atheist. My kids were asking me questions. We can go into that in a whole nother time, how does that translate to the American context, which you were talking about religion, like is American Christianity or the broad conception of religiosity in America the same as what you’re talking about? How do you understand religious here?

Masua: Can I just add to that, before you, respond, Ilana, because what you said if you would have described me the same situation in a different context, I would say this is a story about community and not the story about religion.

Josh: Hmm. Good question.

Ilana: Yeah. So for me actually, religion and community very much go hand in hand. One of the ways in which religion functions in America and why it has an influence on the academic outcomes of children, and it depends on the religious community and the social class of the children, but broadly, religious institutions function as a form of social capital. It’s a place where young people and their families go where they develop not just social ties with other people, but they also become part of this web of intergenerational support. 

Sociologists call this network closure. Basically, it means that if I’m going to a religious institution, right, I go to synagogue, I go to church, people in the community start to know me. Other parents start to know me. Grandparents start to know me. Ministers start to know me. And so when I’m out with my friends, let’s say hanging out at the mall or something, and maybe I have some sort of inclination to do something slightly deviant, something that teenagers do, maybe somebody from my religious community sees me and I see them and I’m like, oh, I know I’m not supposed to misbehave right now because there are a set of eyes on me that weren’t there before. Right? 

So religious communities partly function as these sources of social capital. And this is largely, in my research, what makes them such effective agents of socialization. So it’s, there is a part of it that’s about, belief. In my book I talk about how for kids who are raised in really religious Christian homes, the idea that God is actually watching over them and watching what they do and evaluating them. I argue that it makes them behave in ways that are very conscientious and very cooperative. Cause if you believe that God is really evaluating what you do, you wanna be really well behaved. You wanna be kind to others because that is what they believe, God, Jesus is going to reward them for and potentially, right, that they’ll have like, a better place in the afterlife. And so it makes them feel more motivated to behave well. 

And that translates to getting better grades. Because what do teachers love? Teachers love kids who are well behaved. So there is both a belief and belonging dimension to it in Christianity. In Judaism, I think it functions, at least in my research, a little bit different, more from a belonging and social institution kind of way.

Josh: Right, the language that I really love, Donniel Hartman’s language of how to understand like, oh, Judaism has both, this inherited notion of family, you’re born into being a Jew or you’re converted into being a Jew. He calls that Judaism of being, and you’re just like a Jew. It doesn’t matter. You can always come back. Oonce you convert, you can’t be pushed out.

And then there’s also the Judaism of becoming, which is like, oh wait, we’re part of this covenant community, God or our rabbis, or the community has this, I’m speaking in like pluralist, multi-denominational language there of these things we’re supposed to do. Some people call those mitzvahs, some people call them good deeds. But you have the aspirational piece and the being piece. 

First of all, it’s hard to remember sometimes when you’re dealing with people, like, oh, your notion of what you think Judaism might be and my notion might be really different because we don’t have this necessarily shared language and we’re living in a Christian milieu in which belief matters so much.

And that’s certainly with the conversation with my kids, is constant, like, they’re trying to wrestle with, what are the boundaries of our community and what counts as being a Jew? And if that person does this thing, are they Jewish? And I’m like, oh, well actually Judaism has this component that’s a little more complex in intention. 

Masua: It’s so interesting to see it also as, I mean, when you’re talking, Ilana, I’m thinking about my kids and I’m trying to see, so I have a 13 year old and then a 10 and a seven and a three year old, almost three year old, in a week, I’m three! She’s very the excitement is, is is very high. 

And I’m thinking whether I can point to any one of them who has a consciousness about a god or a being that is controlling of our world, or maybe it’s in the subconscious of just like thinking of how things work in the world. I can’t tell you, even though, I mean, we’re holding an observant household, my kids are not thinking, oh, well, there’s God, and he’s gonna intervene if I don’t behave at art class today.

Ilana: Well, I was gonna weigh in on this question of consciousness that you brought up. As a sociologist, I spent a lot of time with this notion of the habitus, which is not a term that normal people use. What the habitus is, it’s like the air that you breathe and it includes the sort of habits of mind, the dispositions that make us act, the way in which we evaluate the orientations we bring to make evaluative decisions.

And all of that operates largely outside of our consciousness, and it reflects our life experiences, and it makes us wanna reproduce the kinds of situations that generate those experiences. So by that I mean the social class we grow up in the geographic area that we grow up in, all of that shapes our habitus. And sociologists have long known that social class, impacts it, right?

And by the way, if you ever wanna become cognizant of how habitus shapes our life and how it plays out, walk into a community of a totally different social class, you’ll see people carry themselves differently. They have a different posture, they just have a different way of being. That is the habitus of social class sort of rearing its head. And when we have class conflict, it has to do with this habitus that we’ve grown up in being very different. It makes us see the world in a very different way.

And so some of my research is arguing that religious subculture, not just class, also influences habitus, which sociologists before me haven’t really thought about. And so in one article about, women being raised by Jewish parents and their rates of educational attainment, it’s largely a story about how religious subculture, and particularly the gender egalitarian nature of American Judaism matters for educational outcomes.

Josh: Well, so how does this translate into, you said, oh, I send my kids to day school, in part because you want them to be part of a community, but if habitas is something, habitus, I always, you know, sorry, my French pronunciation is like my French. Non-existent. Like, what does it mean to know that and be aware of that as a parent? And there’s like a big critique of that in America these days of like, wait, are we comfortable with social class? And especially in Judaism that, that becomes a determinate factor of where we live in America. So how do you navigate that?

Masua: Not to mention the fact that the monetary cost, right?

Josh: The monetary cost is huge.

Ilana: Yeah.

Josh: So how do you navigate that or, and how do you put into practice in your own life as a parent?

Masua: And by the way, even belonging to a Jewish community, even if you don’t send your kids to day schools, it’s also, I mean, it’s costly.

Josh: Right, most people don’t. Right, it’s costly.

Ilana: Yeah. This is something I grapple with. It happens to be that the New Orleans day school, there’s two day schools in New Orleans. One is for the orthodox population, and one is the community day school. When I say it’s more affordable than the average day school, like our tuition is 10 and 13,000, per kid. So the kinds of families that are able to send their kids there, you don’t have to be quite as affluent, as you do in other communities. It is a much affordable day school and as a result it is more diverse based on class, based on race, there are some non-Jewish families who send their kids there. So that does make me feel like my kids are being exposed to not just like a very, very affluent kind of milieu. 

But, you know, yeah, I also send my daughter to Ramah, and I know that that is largely a upper-middle class population. I think it’s really hard to sort of try to raise my kids in a very Jewish space and recognize that it is a very, very sort of privileged space. And so in our home, we try to do as much as we can to make them class conscious. And we do that in all sorts of ways.

Masua: I have a clarifying question, which may be more than a clarifying question. Would you use Jewish, and religious interchangeably? 

Ilana: I think it depends on the context. Because for me religion is more than just believing in God. I do think of it as religiously, and it doesn’t necessarily mean that they grow up believing strongly in God. It could mean that they grow up, being very involved in Jewish life and engaged in Jewish life, from that social belonging perspective and really like, giving philanthropically to the Jewish community and, doing some sort of education work in the Jewish community like that for me is all encompassing of what it means to raise my kids Jewish. It also means like knowing Jewish history and listening to Jewish songs, like we listen to a lot of Jewish music. 

Josh: What’s on the soundtrack? Like what’s the top?

Ilana: The Maccabeats right now for sure, cause Chanukkah’s coming. You know, we also listen to a lot of Octopretzel. 

Josh: Oh, that’s so great.

Masua: What? The first time I’ve,

Josh: Bay Area Kids music. 

Masua: Huh, cool.

Ilana: That has a lot of Jewish music and a lot of non-Jewish music, but we pretty much are obsessed with Octopretzel. We listen to Elana Jagoda, and some Debbie Friedman. Yeah, our time in the Bay Area certainly influenced our music choices. And then I personally listen to a lot of Ian Raichel, although my kids can’t seem to quite appreciate that as much as I do.

Josh: The other day I put on some Safam, which is like 1980s New England Jewish Rock., people should check them out, but it actually speaks to this question of, what does it mean to create a Jewish community that is embodied, that is, not just about, oh, do you believe in something? 

It broke my heart. I sent my oldest to overnight camp and she came back singing, a Jewish song, like they had taken a Miley Cyrus song and changed the lyrics something Hebrew. And I was like, oh God. And then I realized, oh, wait a minute. That’s just what my counselors did. Like that’s actually great that they’re doing that. But there’s something about that that’s about involving my kids in this much broader community. That’s not just about a set of knowledge, it’s not just about a set of beliefs, but it’s about this, as you said earlier, Ilana, the air we breathe.

Ilana: Yeah. And schools are really powerful socializing agents and I’m hoping that the school that they’re sending them to, you know, I’m not in their, on any sort of regular basis to observe this. I’m hoping that they’re sending messages of gender egalitarianism, that the girls that are being raised in that school are learning that they can do all the things that boys can do. Because kids develop ideas in their head about, what’s possible for them in the world very early on. And a lot of it happens in the school domain.

Josh: So you’ve done some research elsewhere also around gender and Jews and how kids learn this, and I wonder if you could speak a little bit more to like, what is that gender component that you’re observing?

Ilana: Yeah. So, you know, it’s well known that in America, Jews are amongst the most highly educated group. The only religious group that does better than Jews is Hindus. That has to do with probably like selective immigration. But if you ask most people, the answer you’ll get is Jews just value education more. And that answer doesn’t sit well for me as a sociologist because it makes it sound like, first of all, there’s something inherent in Jews about, born Jewish, that you’re just, value education. And it also makes it sound like people who aren’t doing as well in terms of their educational attainment, like People of Color, just don’t value education, right?

Oh, if only people, who are Black would just value education more, right, maybe they would do better. Which is a very, very, very problematic way of thinking, because it doesn’t account for all the ways in which social structures enable educational attainment to happen. And so for American Jews, people, don’t think about the long history that Jews have had with being literate, with the need to be literate, with the history of all Jewish boys, right, had to learn to read Jewish texts. And so Jews, if you look at them historically, have had very high levels of literacy. 

And then, if you move, into the period of history during the Enlightenment, the fact that Jews were highly literate allowed them to have the kinds of professions that Christians didn’t wanna have, right? They were money lenders and they worked in fields that Christians thought was a dirty business. But Jews had this literacy and they had these skills and they were able to do these jobs that weren’t prestigious at all. And so the fact that Jews now have those jobs partly has to do with a long history of Jews in that business.

And the way that ties all that back together into this story of, why do Jewish girls think like this, is the Jewish girls in this sample who were coming of age in the 2000, they were descendants of parents and grandparents who sat around the table and shared a lot of stories of, oh, we immigrated here and, you know, schools in America were very, very important for Jews and their socioeconomic mobility. And so the, boys and girls hear these stories, but for girls in particular, hearing these stories combined with really powerful messages from their parents that they can do anything, and then also seeing their mothers going out, right? Like Jewish women in America have gone into the professional world at much higher rates, than other immigrant women. 

And so seeing that for Jewish girls sounds really powerful messages about what is possible for them, right? You can only imagine what kind of career you can have if you know other people doing it, like people who grow up working class, they can’t necessarily imagine being doctors because they don’t know that many people in their community who have gone on to do that.

And so if you don’t have that kind of modeling in your own community, it’s hard to imagine yourself doing it. And Jewish girls are getting, the history, the socialization, the messages that they can do it. And also seeing,, and knowing people in their communities who are actually doing that kind of work. And it basically, it matters for education cause it makes them back up into that kind of career by saying, oh, to do that kind of work, right, to be a lawyer, to be a doctor, I need to go to graduate school. To go to graduate school, I need to go to a highly selective college. To go to a highly selective college, I have to do well in high school. They start preparing for these sort of career aspirations really early on in the life course.

Josh: So you’re a mom of two daughters, what do you do?

Ilana: I tell my children all the time, That they can be anything that they can be. But also I make it a really big point that they attend as many public speaking engagements as possible that I have. So for example, recently I was a keynote speaker at Pepperdine University. I was in front of 400 faculty, the university president. And I was adamant that my kids be up there in the front row watching me. I was speaking at the New Orleans Book Festival. They were there. I want them to see their mom on stage and on sort of a public capacity as much as possible because they need to learn that women can have these kinds of public roles and be mothers also.

Josh: That’s so beautiful. And it’s a great parenting hack of like, reminder, take your kids to work all the time. 

Masua: What I hear you, and I think it’s such a great way to conclude our conversation, is the fact that you’re saying what I do at home. It’s part of my upbringing, but it’s also how I fit and belong into my community. It’s like a combination of all of these three aspects.

Josh: So, Ilana, earlier you sort of hinted at, your daughters were asking you all these questions about what you believe. Our final segment is called On One Foot, where we do to our panelists what our children do to us. Namely, we ask them gigantic, philosophical questions and expect them to give coherent answers without any preparation on the spot. But Masua and I will jump in also.

So, this week’s question is coming from a friend in my community here in the Bay Area, and they said, my kid asked the question. What language does God speak? We hand that to you. What language does God speak?

Ilana: So I try to tell my kids when they go for the, like, oh, I don’t think God is real kind of thing, I try to go with like, God is in your heart and it’s about your feelings. So God doesn’t speak a particular language. It’s about the emotion that the feeling of God brings you.

Josh: It’s great. Masua, what language does God speak?

Masua: So if you ask me, I would say the language that I don’t speak because I don’t understand, but kids will ask me, I would say, whatever language you understand.

Josh: Alright, so I may go a little particular, I’m gonna say God spoke both in Hebrew, right? The 10 Commandments or the 10 Utterances are written first in Hebrew. But also in that moment at Sinai, we first hear like, a thunder and there’s a sofar blast. And it’s non-comprehensible language. So that language is both something that helps us communicate and also God speaks beyond our conception.

Thank you so much Ilana, for joining us today and we hope we can have you back again way in the future with, your next work and we love speaking with you. So have a great day.

Masua: Thanks Ilana.

Ilana: Thank you.

Josh: Perfect Jewish Parents is a production of the Shalom Hartman Institute, where we tackle pressing Jewish issues facing Jewish communities, so we can think better, and do better. You can check out our world-renowned faculty, free, live classes, and events at shalomhartman.org. 

Masua: Our producers are Jan Lauren Greenfield and David Zvi Kalman. This epsiode was edited by our production manager, M Louis Gordon. And our theme music is by Luke Allen. Maital Friedman is our vice president of communications and creative. 

Josh: This is a new podcast, so help us get the word out. Hit subscribe, and also rate the show.

Masua: If you have ideas for an episode, parenting questions, or if your kids asked you a question you want us to answer, send us an email to [email protected].

Josh: Thanks for listening, and we’ll see you next time.