Growing up in Montreal’s tight-knit Jewish community, my exposure to diversity was limited to distinctions like Ashkenazi or Sephardi, wealthy or working-class. Most of my classmates at the day school I attended until I was 18 years old were, as far as I could tell, affiliated with a synagogue, had two Jewish parents and spoke English or French at home.
When I moved to San Francisco with my (Texan, Methodist-raised) wife and began to contemplate what it might take for two transplants to raise a Jewish child in the city, I was surprised to discover Brandeis, a thriving Jewish K–8 school where families from a wide range of backgrounds were enrolled. The Pride flag flying in the school’s courtyard alongside the American and Israeli ones showed visitors that Brandeis supported the LGBTQ+ community.
Communications from the school included explanations and translations, a subtle way of acknowledging that not every reader was expected to be fluent in Hebrew or Yiddish expressions. Current Brandeis parents spoke casually about celebrating Christmas with extended family. When our son started kindergarten in 2014, he quickly learned that his “non-traditional” Jewish household was utterly unremarkable. However, what he and his friends all had in common was their parents’ commitment to an education scaffolded by Jewish values, ethics and traditions.
Measuring School Demographics
In the spring of 2020, I was hired as the school’s admissions director, and one of my early goals was to develop a sharper understanding of the school’s demographic profile. What percentage of families included a non-Jewish parent or grandparent? What percentage of students identified as biracial or non-white? How many languages aside from English were spoken at home? Remembering the assumptions I had made as a newcomer to the city about the kinds of families that would be welcome at a Jewish day school, I was eager to let the numbers speak for themselves.
My first task was to identify and untangle some gaps in our reporting. Although we consistently gathered household data on mother tongue, country of origin, race and ethnicity, and sexual orientation, much of it remained unpublished and inaccessible to current or prospective families. Additionally, as has been true since our founding, we had a small percentage of students enrolled where neither parent was Jewish. Unfortunately, our promotional materials did not reflect this reality, which surely caused such families to feel sidelined or ignored.
A bigger challenge was that our approach to collecting data on Jewish identity had been inconsistent, particularly concerning non-observant families and interfaith households. Many Brandeis families did not consider themselves religious in any way. Most did not belong to a synagogue. It turned out that a lot of what we knew about our community’s relationship to Judaism and Jewish practice was based on speculation and haphazard surveying.
Many more families than I would have guessed looked exactly like mine: one Jewish parent, one non-Jewish parent, living far from their hometowns or families of origin and excited to have some kind of inclusive, values-oriented infrastructure to assist in the day-to-day work of raising Jewish children. We questioned whether it was accurate to refer to these households as interfaith, as many Jewish institutions do, when only one faith tradition was truly in play. We quickly updated our application materials and parent surveys to create new categories for families to self-identify and invited feedback to ensure they captured the full range of experiences in our community.
