I went to a Christian school. More accurately, I went to a school with, “A Christian Foundation catering for all denominations.” That’s far from unusual where I grew up in England, as there are very few non-religious schools in the country. Indeed, with the legally enshrined secularism of the U.S. and much of Western Europe, the U.K. stands out as one of the final bastions of the faith school in the Western world.
It wasn’t the easiest of things to come from a traditional Jewish background and be thrust into a Christian environment; especially at a young age where I didn’t yet have the rhetorical skills to explain to my ruddy-faced and classically English school teachers why it was that a nice Jewish boy wasn’t going to be singing his hymns at the annual Carol Service, even if they “don’t mention Jesus at all,” and I was certainly met with a lot of suspicion about my need to take time off for all the holidays; “Mintz,” my teachers would say, “I can’t help but feel that you’re beginning to make these things up a little just to avoid a bit of school,” even though I only tried to pull that one once, I promise!
It all got a little tricky and my parents and I decided (as much as an eleven year-old can decide things) I should move to another school. We looked into both a non-religious school and a nearby Jewish school. My parents were very enamored by the Jewish option – the Kosher lunches and traditional atmosphere fit right in with what they wanted for me. “Come on, Josh,” they said in an attempt to sway me, “the girl who gave the tour was very pretty wasn’t she?” I didn’t fall for it. Not because she wasn’t pretty (she may well have been), but because something just felt wrong to me about the place.
However, it took me a long time before I was able to understand what it was about Jewish faith schools in particular that made me so uneasy. Sure, I’ve always opposed faith schools, and I held all of the usual faith school reservations; the non-critical approach to teaching the school’s chosen religion, the social isolationism, the impact that religious teachings have when crossed over with history and the sciences, but I always felt that there was something else amiss with Jewish schools that their Christian, Muslim and Hindu counterparts were lacking.
Simply put, Judaism is more than a faith, more than a way of life, more than a religion. It is a matrilineal race. Therefore, Jewish schools like the one that I looked at with my parents, which discriminate against applicants that Halacha rules as not Jewish (those without a Jewish mother) are not making their entry decisions on religious grounds, but rather ethnic ones. This is not the classic issue of ‘who is a Jew,’ but rather an act of racism. While the schools may well be willing to offer places to those who convert to Judaism or whose mothers’ have done so, the bottom line is that those applicants with mothers born of a particular ethnic group are given preferential treatment. This doesn’t happen in any other religion’s faith school system and is a dangerous trend that would never be accepted were it any other race.
Although, by law, all faith schools are open to applicants of any religion, they are allowed to show preference to applicants of the same religious ilk as the school when spaces are limited and the school is oversubscribed. The limited number of Jewish schools and high demand for the few available places means that these schools are de-facto closed to people who aren’t born Jewish.
As such, I insisted on going to the school with no religion. Funny thing is, it was absolutely stuffed full of Jews.
Josh Mintz is completing his degree in International Relations and Middle Eastern studies and is the communications director at Friend a Soldier, an NGO that encourages dialogue with IDF soldiers.
