Room, Board — And ‘Jewish Peoplehood’

A student carries a lulav, above, across the campus of eco-friendly buildings at the American Hebrew Academy, below.

A student carries a lulav, above, across the campus of eco-friendly buildings at the American Hebrew Academy, below.

by Carolyn Slutsky
Staff Writer

Greensboro, N.C. — In the depths of the 88,000-square-foot athletic facility at the American Hebrew Academy here, the “wave-less pool” assures that, with no wake and no fast lane, no swimmer has an unfair advantage when competing in a race.

The pool, and the Jewish values it reflects, may be the perfect metaphor for the sense of acceptance inherent in everything that happens at AHA, the country’s only non-Orthodox Jewish boarding school.
In a way, AHA, now in its seventh year, is a typical high school with classrooms, a cafeteria, extracurricular activities and the usual frenzy over SATs, AP exams and college applications.
But it is also a unique experiment, a work in progress that raises a series of tantalizing questions about Jewish

education in this country:

Will enough Jewish families prove willing to ship their teenagers away to a Christian-centric corner of North Carolina for four years to keep the school viable?

Is the future of Jewish education, at least for the non-Orthodox, the kind of pluralistic, can’t-we-all-just get-along model practiced here?

And just what kind of Jewish identity is being fostered here — a mushy, “Just Jewish” variety or a clear-eyed multi-denominationalism where teenagers, unmoored from the increasingly archaic notions of Judaism’s branches, can craft a postmodern Jewish identity that will equip them for life on today’s college campus?

In many ways, the AHA seems poised to take advantage of one of the most telling trends in Jewish life today: the drift, especially by young people, away from the designations Reform, Conservative and Orthodox.

The school’s leadership seems to understand the tightrope it is walking.
“What the academy has created is a Jewish community in which it’s safe for teenagers to explore — as well as remaining committed to —traditional customs and practices of worship if that is what speaks to them the most,” says Glenn Drew, AHA’s executive director, who says the school fills a niche that the American Jewish community hadn’t realized it needed.

“What’s so important to the academy,” Drew continues, “is not to dictate one denominational value over another but to provide as many options [as possible] for children to engage Jewishly.”
And since 2001, AHA has been doing just that, not defining a clear Jewish role for its students but creating an environment in which they can come to their own Jewish identities and go on to college and the wider world with experience and a deep commitment to, as Drew puts it, “Jewish peoplehood.” That, and the ability to do their own laundry.

The academy was found in 2001 by Maurice “Chico” Sabbah, a Sephardic Jew and Zionist who trained as an agronomist and made a fortune in the aviation reinsurance business after living in Israel and settling in Greensboro.

When his business partner sent his children to boarding school, Sabbah joked that he wanted to create in his adopted hometown a “Jewish Exeter,” after the tony and academically rigorous New Hampshire boarding school. The academy as he envisioned it would provide a high school option for Greensboro’s Jewish teens and would draw a critical mass of students from communities like Greensboro around the South and in other regions of the country where Jewish day school was not a feasible option.
After Sabbah (anonymously at first) donated approximately $100 million toward the school, whose board includes mega-philanthropist Michael Steinhardt, Sabbah’s company was sued. He and his partner had to pay some $400 million to settle the suit, regarding the company’s coverage of claims for the planes destroyed in the 9/11 terrorist attacks. While the school’s viability was threatened for a time, the issue was settled and did not affect the financial stability of the school, according to officials.
Observers praise the school for its vision and find a salient goal in its commitment to pluralism, but have reservations about whether the boarding model, alien to most Jewish parents, would work if replicated.
“The dream clearly was a noble dream, to create a training ground for future Jewish leaders,” said Steven Bayme, national director of Contemporary Jewish Life for the American Jewish Committee. “The reality here is that most parents are not prepared to send their children to boarding school. In that respect, it’s not the wave of the future.”

Said Rabbi Joshua Elkin, executive director of the Partnership for Excellence in Jewish Education: “It’s a unique institution; the funders were visionaries and thought big and bold. It fulfills an important need, and they’re on a campaign to grow and expand.
“It’s not for everybody but it’s good to have as an option.”
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Built on 100 verdant acres by architect Aaron Green, a protégé of Frank Lloyd Wright, the American Hebrew Academy’s eco-friendly buildings have signature green-tiled roofs and are mostly accessible by foot, bicycle or golf cart. The dining hall, which serves organic, kosher food and local produce, can hold up to 1,000 people, a good sign for a school that grew by 20 percent from last year to this and now educates 165 students from 28 states and 11 countries; the school hopes to eventually have a student body of 800 to 1,000, though the growth rate in the first seven years makes that figure highly unlikely. Tuition this year is set at $26,340 for boarding students and $14,200 for day students. Children of rabbis and Jewish professionals get a one-third reduction, and scholarships are available as well.

In the school’s beginning there was a perceived lack of hospitality among the larger Greensboro community, a church-centered city of nearly 250,000. To combat this AHA opened its campus to gardening clubs, church groups and all community residents. The school also shares a close relationship with Greensboro’s other Jewish institutions, including Reform and Conservative synagogues and a K-8 community day school, Bnai Shalom.

Everything here is designed with intent. On the academic side of the campus the trees are North Carolina scrub pine, while on the residential side there is hardwood, all chosen to nurture the mind, body and soul. In the academic buildings, potted Devil’s Tongue plants line the hallways to remind students not to speak lashon hara. The campus’ geothermal energy center, the largest of its kind in the country, is color-coded with a computerized system so students and visitors can understand the various workings of the giant complex stowed away beneath the outdoor bleachers.

AHA has struggled since its inception with the realization that, before Sabbah’s vision, the Jewish boarding school concept did not exist. As Drew, a nephew of Sabbah, puts it, “What type of Jewish parent is going to send their kid away for school? It [doesn’t] fit the Jewish psyche,” when Jewish parents are used to sending their children away only to attend a fervently Orthodox yeshiva or a school for children with special needs.
But the academy has gained traction from families who live in communities too small to support day schools, with military families who are never in one place for more than a few years and, perhaps most surprisingly, with families from large metropolitan centers in New York, Massachusetts, California and beyond whose children are seeking a different kind of Jewish education. This year 60 percent of students come with no Jewish day school background, a switch from the academy’s first years.

“I was a little tired of the system in New York,” says Ariel Shay, a 17-year-old senior who previously attended Ramaz and SAR, Modern Orthodox schools in New York City. “The religious schools are all about academics. I never liked it and was ready to try something new.”

Since landing at AHA, Shay says she has better learned to manage her time and be independent and has made important strides in her thinking about her own Judaism.

“Because it’s pluralistic I’ve strengthened my Jewish identity,” she says, citing the fact that going to school and living with Conservative and Reform peers has made her think about her Modern Orthodoxy in a way she would never be challenged to do in a more homogenous school closer to home.

“We have debates, so by defending what you believe you strengthen it,” Shay says. “A lot of kids come here and change.”

Marti Goldenberg, a 17-year old senior from Rochester, N.Y., agrees that the chance to live among Jews from every religious and cultural background has enhanced her self-identity.

“Our beliefs and views are challenged,” she says. “So you create your own views instead of taking what you’re told from your community.”

Shay and Goldenberg, vivacious girls who munch on healthy lunches as they sit under a pavilion outside the cafeteria on a late-spring day, both say they sometimes miss their families. But they agree that being away has made them closer to their school friends and strengthened their family ties now that they can’t have Mom’s cooking every night or just walk across the room to say hello.

“I’m learning to use my cell phone more responsibly,” says Goldenberg. “And I don’t need to fight about what most kids fight about with their parents.”

For both girls, as for many students here, AHA provides the Judaic and general studies curriculum they seek with the social environment, whether they realized it or not, they crave.

“High school doesn’t have to be such a terrible thing,” says Goldenberg. “I think most kids here would say these are the best years they’ll ever experience.”
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In Charles Newell’s history classroom, the walls are decorated with Beatles and Blues Brothers posters, pictures of American presidents and an original student painting. A lesson on World War II leads Newell to YouTube, the video-sharing Web site, where he shows a clip of a man playing Woody Guthrie’s “Reuben James,” about the sinking of that ship in 1941 and the death of the American sailors aboard it. His students sit rapt, the folk music enveloping the dark classroom.

Students and faculty members at AHA are given laptop computers that share a server, and each classroom is equipped with SMART boards; when a teacher writes something on the board the information is copied, in his or her handwriting, and easily stored on students’ computers. Newell’s history class sits around Harkness tables, featured in each classroom, teardrop-shaped tables that follow the Harkness teaching method, which erases hierarchy between teacher and student and ostensibly leads to deeper inquiry and involvement from students in a shared, equal environment.

Later in a class on the David Project, a program that trains students to be pro-Israel advocates about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, a heated discussion boils up, and one student’s voice is heard above all others.
“All of us are reading out of a book about how oppressive Arab regimes are,” he says thoughtfully, wondering if their own education is actually as one-sided and anti-Arab as the anti-Semitic curriculum Arab students get.

Judaism is everywhere on campus, either overtly or more subtly through morals and values, and the discussion feels modern and relevant.

“Trying to dictate to teens about one denomination or another is a challenge we don’t need to undertake,” says executive director Drew. “It becomes an impediment to our greater mission, which is to reach Jewish teenagers in whatever way we can. What’s going on upon these 100 acres is learning, on the playing fields, in the dining halls.”

And in the dorms. Each room here is unique, designed to create the feeling of a home, rather than a dormitory. Students who get homesick or overwhelmed by campus life can find solace in the house parents who live in every dorm and from roommates and friends who are always hanging around; those who arrive with no laundry experience are taught.

There is an anything-goes environment at AHA, as long as the anything is educational, fun and harmless. In a classroom where the discussion centers on Judaism and the environment, the 12 or so American kids are notable one morning for their British accents. As it turns out, it is National Speak in a British Accent Day on Facebook, the social networking site. As student after student delivers thoughtful comments on the material in flawless British accents, the teacher nods, unfazed.

It is not only the students and teachers who have increased Greensboro’s Jewish population, now 2,500. Reflecting a broader trend in the boarding school world, some parents have moved to the community where the school is located. Some parents have even become teachers at the school, and the movement between school, synagogue and back is fluid.

As for the future ambitions of AHA’s students, the first graduating class, whose members have gone on to competitive colleges comparable to the admissions successes of other boarding and private day schools, have graduated college and are on to graduate schools, the Peace Corps, Israel and the working world.
Goldenberg says she is hoping to be pre-med in college and ultimately study psychiatry, because she’s good at giving advice.

“And maybe I’ll be the next ‘Good Morning America’ host, but that’ll be later on,” she says with a grin.
Shay is undecided on a college major. But for her, as for all these students, there are moments when all the lessons and pluralism and college preparation and Jewish values education of the academy give way to moments of sheer discovery and charm in this corner of the South.

“I saw my first rabbit the other day,” says Shay, the New Yorker, and she smiled as her eyes opened with wonder.
Email: carolyn@jewishweek.org

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