Toward an understanding of Hebrew language education: ideologies, emotions, and identity

Abstract

This paper focuses on the practices of teaching and learning the Hebrew language at a non-Orthodox Jewish day school, showing the ways that Hebrew language ideologies intersect with categories of emotions, affect, and identity. Drawing from a corpus of ethnographic data collected over an 18-month period, this paper examines the ways in which local interpretations of what being Jewish entails for seventh and eighth grade students and their teachers are intricately tied to their feelings and beliefs regarding the Hebrew language. While predominant language ideologies explicitly support the importance of Hebrew at their school and within the Jewish community at large, and identify Hebrew as a marker of Jewishness, in practice feelings about the language are complex and entangled with conflicting beliefs about how Jewish identity is expressed in a variety of languages and practices. Ethnographic investigation of language use in religious educational settings is crucial to providing a lens through which to view these complex interrelationships between ideologies of languages, modes of representation, and religious identity.