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A new book made me appreciate Jewish Sunday schools — and the volunteer women who have powered them
(JTA) — As a kid I went to Sunday school at our Reform synagogue. I didn’t hate it as much as my peers did, but let’s just say there were literally dozens of other things I would have preferred to do on a weekend morning.
As a Jewish adult, I had a vague understanding that Sunday school was a post-World War II invention, part of the assimilation and suburbanization of American Jews (my synagogue was actually called Suburban Temple). With our parents committed to public schools and having moved away from the dense urban enclaves where they were raised, our Jewish education was relegated to Sunday mornings and perhaps a weekday afternoon. The Protestant and Catholic kids went to their own religious supplementary schools, and we Jewish kids went to ours.
In her new book “Jewish Sunday Schools,” Laura Yares backdates this story by over a century. Subtitled “Teaching Religion in Nineteenth-Century America,” the book describes how Sunday schools were the invention of pioneering educators such as Rebecca Gratz, who founded the first Sunday school for Jewish children in Philadelphia in 1838. As such, they were responses by a tiny minority to distinctly 19th-century challenges — namely, how to raise their children to be Jews in a country dominated by a Protestant majority, and how to express their Judaism in a way compatible with America’s idea of religious freedom.
Although Sunday schools would become the “principal educational organization” of the Reform movement, Yares shows that the model was adopted by traditionalists as well. And she also argues that 20th-century historians, in focusing on the failures of Sunday schools to promote Jewish “continuity,” discounted the contributions of the mostly volunteer corps of women educators who made them run. Meanwhile, the supplementary school remains the dominant model for Jewish education among non-Orthodox American Jews, despite recent research showing its precipitous decline.
I picked up “Jewish Sunday Schools” hoping to find out who gets the blame for ruining my Sunday mornings. I came away with a new appreciation for the women whose “important and influential work,” Yares writes, “extended far beyond the classrooms in which they worked.”
Yares is assistant professor of Religious Studies at Michigan State University, with a joint appointment in the MSU Program for Jewish Studies. Raised in Birmingham, England, she has degrees from Oxford University and a doctorate from Georgetown University.
Our conversation was edited for length and clarity.
Tell me how your book came to be about the 19th century as opposed to the common 20th-century story of suburbanization.
There’s a real gap in American Jewish history when it comes to the 19th century, chiefly because so many American Jews today trace their origins back to the generation who arrived between 1881 and 1924, the mass migration of Jews from from Eastern Europe. So there’s a sense that that’s when American Jewish history began. Of course, that’s not true at all.
The American Jewish community dates back to the 17th century and there was much innovation that laid the foundations for what would become institutionalized in the 20th century.
Sunday school gets a very bad rap among most historians of American Judaism. If they’ve treated it at all, they tend to be dismissive — you know, there was no substance, they just taught kids the 10 Commandments, it was run by these unprofessional volunteer female teachers, so it was feminized and feminine.
But there’s also a lot of celebration of Rebecca Gratz, who founded the first Sunday school for Jewish children.
That’s the first indication I had that there might be more of a story here. Rebecca Gratz is lionized as being such a visionary and being so inventive in developing this incredible volunteer model for Jewish education for an immigrant generation that was mostly from Western Europe. And yet, by the beginning of the 20th century, [Jewish historians] say it has no value. So what’s the story there?
Two other things led me on the path to thinking that there was more of a story in this 19th-century moment. I did my Ph.D in Washington, D.C. And as I was searching through the holdings of the Library of Congress, there were tons and tons of Jewish catechisms.
“Sunday school gets a very bad rap among most historians of American Judaism,” says Dr. Laura Yares, author of the new book, “Jewish Sunday Schools.” (Courtesy of the author)
A catechism is a kind of creed, right? It’s a statement of religious beliefs. “These are things we believe as Jews.”
So Jewish catechisms had that, but they were also philosophical meditations in many ways. Typically, the first question of the catechism was, what is religion? And then the second question is, what is Jewish religion?
And then I started reading them. They were question-and-answer summaries of the whole of Judaism: belief, practices, holidays, Bible, you name it, that the children were expected to memorize. This idea that you’ve got to cram these kids with knowledge went against this historiographic dismissal of this period as being very thin and that kids were not really learning anything. The idea that children had a lot to learn is something that Sunday school educators actually really wrestle with during this period.
What was the other thing that led you to pursue this subject?
When I was beginning to research my dissertation, I was working as a Hebrew school teacher in a large Reform Hebrew school in Washington, D.C. And I remember very distinctively the rabbi coming in and addressing the teachers at the start of the school year. He said, “I don’t care if a student comes through this Hebrew school and they don’t remember anything that they learned. But I care that at the end of the year they feel like the temple is a place that they want to be, that they feel like they have relationships there and they have an (he didn’t use this word) ‘affective’ [emotional] connection.”
And so I’m sitting there by day at the Library of Congress, reading these catechisms that are saying, “Cram their heads with knowledge.” What is the relationship between Jewish education as a place where one is supposed to acquire knowledge and a place where one is supposed to feel something and to develop affective relationships? The swing between those two poles was happening as far back as the 19th century.
You write that owing to gaps in the archives, it was really hard to get an idea of the classroom experience. But to the degree that there’s a typical classroom experience in the 1860s, 1870s and you’re the daughter or grandchild of probably German-speaking Jewish immigrants, maybe working or lower middle class, what would Sunday school be like? I’m guessing the teacher would be a woman. Are you reading the Bible in English or Hebrew?
You are probably going for an hour or two on a Sunday morning. It’s a big room, and your particular class would have a corner of the room. It’s quite chaotic. Most of the teachers were female volunteers. They were either young and unmarried, or older women whose children had grown. Except for the students who are preparing for confirmation — the grand kind of graduation ritual for Sunday schools. Those classes were typically taught by the rabbi, if there was a rabbi associated with the school.
There would be a lot of reading out loud to the students with students being expected to repeat back what they had heard or write it down so they had a copy for themselves. Often the day would begin with prayers said in English, and often the reading of the Torah portion, typically in English, although in many Sunday schools, we do have children reporting they learned bits of Hebrew by rote memorization. Or they memorized the first chapters of the book of Genesis, for example, but I’m not sure that they quite understood what they memorized. “Ein Keloheinu” is a song that often children tell us [in archival materials] that they had memorized in Hebrew. They probably would have learned at least Hebrew script, and a little bit of Hebrew decoding. But it is fair to say that if they were reading the Bible, they were reading it mostly in English, because you have to remember that most of the women who were volunteering to teach in these schools came of age in a generation where Hebrew education wasn’t extended to women.
What’s the goal of these Sunday schools?
The Sunday school movement arose because there was a whole generation of immigrant children who did not have access to Jewish education, because their parents didn’t have either the economic capital or the social capital to become part of the established Jewish community. They couldn’t afford a seat in the synagogue, they couldn’t afford to send their children to congregational all-day or every-afternoon schools [which were among the few options for Jewish education when Gratz opened the Philadelphia Sunday school]. Sunday schools are really a very innovative solution to a problem of a lack of resources.
You also write that the founders of these supplementary schools want to defend children against “predatory evangelists.”
That was how Rebecca Gratz described her goal when she created the first Sunday school. She was very, very worried about the Jewish kids who were not receiving any kind of Hebrew school education. She talks about Protestant missionaries and teachers who would go out onto the street ringing the bell for Sunday school and offering various kinds of trinkets, and Jewish kids would get kind of swept into their Sunday schools. There was a very concrete need to give Jewish children somewhere else to go.
So Gratz and the people who created the first Hebrew Sunday school in Philadelphia looked at what the Protestants were doing and they saw that Protestant Sunday schools were providing very accessible places where kids could go and get a basic primer in their religious tradition.
The approach was to teach Judaism as a religion, as opposed to Judaism as a people or culture, to demonstrate that being Jewish was as compatible as Protestantism with being wholly American.
That is certainly part of it. It’s a demonstration that Judaism is compatible with American public life. But I think there’s actually a much bigger claim that the Sunday schools are making. The claim is not only that Judaism is as good as Protestantism, but that Judaism does religion better than Protestantism. These rabbis who were writing catechisms and teaching confirmation classes were saying that Judaism does liberal religion better than liberal Protestants, liberal Catholics and other kinds of liberal denominations. You see the same sentiment in the Pittsburgh Platform as well, which is the foundational platform of the Reform movement written in the 1880s. Sunday schools take that idea and bring it down to a grassroots level.
There are many, many fewer Jews in America in much of the 19th century, before the waves of Eastern European immigrants arrived beginning in the 1880s They didn’t really have strength in numbers, or the kind of self-confidence to have a system of day schools, yeshivas or heders, the elementary schools for all-day or every day Jewish instruction.
And this is also a community that has grown up at the same time as the birth of public education in America, independent of churches. That really emerged beginning on the East Coast in the 1840s.This generation of Americans really believes in the power of public education to craft an American public. It’s a project that 19th-century American Jews believe in and want to sustain. So Sunday schools don’t just become the preferred Jewish model because of lack of resources, but because American Jews really believe in the idea of public education.
What happens at the beginning of the 20th century, with the arrival of Eastern Europeans with different models for Jewish education?
A new generation tries to reform Jewish education, led by a young educator from Palestine named Samson Benderly, who leads the new New York Bureau of Jewish Education. He tries to change American Jewish education to make it more professionalized, but to bring more traditionally inclined Jews on board he has to convince them that he doesn’t want to make more Sunday schools, because Sunday schools by the end of the 20th century had become very much associated with the Reform movement in a way that they weren’t when they were founded and for much of the 19th century.
A painting of Philadelphia philanthropist and Jewish education activist Rebecca Gratz by Thomas Sully. (The Rosenbach of the Free Library of Philadelphia)
Benderly is surveying the scene of recent immigrants living in New York City [tenements] and other kinds of downtown environments, and his proposal is to create these community institutions for these dense communities, where children can be taught Hebrew in Hebrew. His disciples also created Jewish camps as a way to get children out of the inner cities and develop the muscular Zionist ideal of healthy bodies and a robust sense of Jewish collectivity.
You write that Benderly’s vision is a sort of masculine response to the “feminizing” perception of the Sunday schools.
These women teachers are recognizing that they’re being criticized for the kind of thinness of the Jewish education that they’re teaching in comparison to other models, but in periodicals like The American Jewess women are writing back and saying, “But you didn’t teach us Hebrew! I didn’t get that opportunity as a woman, so what do you expect?” It’s really important to note that the women did the best that they could in the time that they had available, and that they were the product of opportunities that were denied to them.
What lessons did you learn about Sunday school and Hebrew school education in the 20th century that relate to your research into the 19th century?
The move that is so decisive for shaping American Jewish education is suburbanization. Rather than having a large immigrant generation who are living in these tight ethnic enclaves, you have American Jewish children who are predominantly growing up in the suburbs, and socializing with children from all sorts of different backgrounds who are attending public schools. The place that you go to get your Jewish education is the synagogue supplemental school, which becomes the dominant model for American Jewish education up until today. Benderly might reflect that it looks a lot more like the Sunday school movement of the 19th century than his vision.
Today’s model is really a religious model. And by that I mean that students go to Hebrew school primarily to kind of check a religious box, to learn about the thing that makes them distinctive religiously, and to achieve a religious coming-of-age marker, which is the bar, bat or b mitzvah. Certainly the curriculum today is more diverse, embracing more aspects of traditional Judaism then you would have seen in a 19th-century Sunday school: more Hebrew, more of a sense of Jewish peoplehood, ethnic identity and Zionism of course. But the question that American Jews are increasingly asking themselves is, is this a model that they still want? So you may have seen that the Jewish Education Project published a report recently on supplemental schools, which saw that enrollment has really, really declined.
Sunday schools are based on a vision of Judaism as a set of a religious commitments that American Jews actualize through belonging to a synagogue and sending their children to a synagogue or a religious school, where they will learn primarily a set of religious skills: the ability to read from the Torah, the ability to decode Hebrew, the ability to navigate the siddur.
Is that still the vision that most American Jews have for what Judaism means to them? I think increasingly the answer seems to be no.
How else did experience in a Hebrew school classroom influence you? Did you access anything else when you were writing the book?
I think about the number of college kids and graduate students and empty nesters who are either volunteering or earning minimum wage, working at Hebrew schools, all over the country. That’s the labor force of American Judaism. These people also bring so much to the table. There are a lot of skills, dispositions and knowledge that don’t tend to get taken very seriously because this is a workforce that just gets kind of put into the category of “oh, they’re part time.” That made me look really closely in the historical archives to see if I could find anything out about the women who are volunteering to teach in Sunday schools. And what I found out was that [many] were public school teachers. And they brought a lot to the table. It was women in fact who were really pushing to make the Sunday school curriculum more experiential and to move away from rote memorization.
As a historian formed by feminist methods, I find it really important to recognize that these women were giving over what they had, as opposed to critiquing them for not teaching in a more traditional way. I think we need to pay attention when women are being scapegoated for problems that are described as problems of Jewish continuity. It blinds us to the role that women’s volunteerism has played in American Jewish life. This whole Sunday school movement was possible only because these women volunteered their time and largely were not paid.
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A Jewish philanthropist funded this pioneering school for Black students. Now it’s getting a second life.
A small Kentucky town has saved a piece of Black history, with a little-known Jewish connection.
This summer, Sadieville, Kentucky — population 320 — opened an exhibit in a one-room schoolhouse that served Black students during segregation.
Built between 1917 and 1920, the school was partly funded by Jewish philanthropist Julius Rosenwald, an owner of Sears, Roebuck and Company who gave much of his fortune away as part of a collaboration with the influential Black educator Booker T. Washington.
The Sadieville school was one of 5,000 schools for Black students across 15 states that Rosenwald helped fund. The schools transformed Black education across the rural South during the Jim-Crow era, dramatically improving students’ literacy rates and economic mobility.
But today, many of the schoolhouses are in danger of abandonment. As preservationists seek federal recognition of Rosenwald schools in Congress through a proposed national park, the residents of Sadieville took matters into their own hands.
“It is one of our little special treasures that we have here, because there are so few of them remaining in the United States,” Laura Centers, Sadieville’s city clerk, told the Forward. “We want to protect our history.”
Recently introduced legislation in both the House and Senate would help protect that history nationally, but both bills have languished in committee. To pass, they will need Republican support — at a time when the National Park Service is already dealing with staffing shortages and a slim budget. So far, Rep. Rob Wittman of Virginia is the only Republican to sign on.
Sadieville would not be included in the proposed national park, which would initially cover three schools in Maryland, South Carolina and Virginia, along with a headquarters in Chicago. But Dorothy Canter, a retired biophysicist who leads the Rosenwald national park campaign, said local preservation efforts are still essential to the broader movement.
“It helps the campaign because it’s a part of history,” Canter said. “It’s part of Sadieville history.”
As one of more than 150 Rosenwald schools in Kentucky, the Sadieville school operated until integration in 1954 — the year of Brown v. Board of Education. Pioneering journalist Alice Allison Dunnigan, the first Black woman to receive White House press credentials, taught at a Rosenwald school in New Hope, Kentucky.
Getting the Sadieville school in shape for visitors was not easy. During a 14-year renovation of the schoolhouse, the town dealt with termite damage, replaced the pine floors, restored the building’s foundation, patched the drywall on the walls and ceiling, rehabbed windows, and replaced doors.
The town also added historically accurate furnishings, including a chalkboard, desks scattered across the room, and a coal stove for heat. Because the school lacked electricity, large windows provided natural light. The sparse decor includes a photo of Abraham Lincoln and a book about Nicodemus, Kansas, a Reconstruction-era Black farming town founded by a group of formerly enslaved people who fled Kentucky seeking land ownership.
The project was funded by a combination of community donations and national support, with a $10,000 grant from Toyota Motor Manufacturing Kentucky, $7,000 from the National Trust for Historic Preservation, and $2,000 from Friends of Sadieville, Inc.
Staffing the exhibit in such a small town is also a challenge, Centers said. The school opened to the public for only two days this summer. After the initial unveiling on June 19 — in honor of Juneteenth – it will open again on August 15.
But Centers hopes those two days will generate enough interest to justify opening for more days next summer.
The exhibit is meaningful for the entire town, she said, but especially for Rosenwald students’ descendants.
“We just want to get the word out there that we do have this,” Centers said. “It’s important to a lot of people’s history.”
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‘Time to double down’: Why AIPAC sees El Sayed’s win as a sign to spend still more
Abdul El-Sayed’s narrow victory over Rep. Haley Stevens for an open Michigan Senate seat prompted an immediate split reaction as the Democratic Party endures a historic internal fight over U.S. support for Israel.
To progressives, the result showed that even more than $60 million in outside spending — including more than $30 million by AIPAC, the largest investment it ever made in a single race — could not stop a candidate who made opposition to Israel and its U.S. lobby a defining theme of his campaign.
To AIPAC and its allies, the one-point margin proved that their spending kept what could have been a much bigger defeat within reach and prevented a broader progressive landslide.
The race was widely viewed as the clearest test yet of the Israel advocacy campaign group’s political influence after months of progressive victories by candidates who have condemned Israel and made inflammatory rhetoric — including using the terms “genocide” and “apartheid” to describe its conduct. But instead of getting to a decisive verdict, Tuesday’s primary left each camp more convinced than before they are on the right path.
For El-Sayed’s supporters, simply defeating an incumbent backed by the Democratic establishment and AIPAC was historic. Citizens Against AIPAC Corruption, known on social media as “Track AIPAC,” declared the primary season “a repudiation of the idea that our democracy is for sale” by the power of grassroots organizing.
Former Rep. Andy Levin — who lost his own primary in 2022 to Stevens because of AIPAC mass spending — said Democratic voters are increasingly frustrated with special-interest money and that El-Sayed effectively turned opposition to AIPAC into a winning political message. “It worked,” he said.
But AIPAC and its allies see no reason to rethink their strategy.
AIPAC President Bernie Kaminetsky struck a defiant tone in an email to members after the race was called on Wednesday morning. “This narrow loss stings,” he wrote, “but her defeat doesn’t change our principled opposition to the dangerous policies El-Sayed wants to bring to the U.S. Senate.”
Kaminetsky called the fight “generational,” telling supporters that the organization remains committed to defeating El-Sayed in November and defending what it contends should be a bipartisan pro-Israel consensus. “Our conviction will not be measured in a single race or a single cycle,” Kaminetsky wrote. In a fundraising email, AIPAC used the phrase, “When we get knocked down, we get right up and back in the fight,” before adding: “It’s time to double down.”
That response suggests AIPAC views Michigan less as a repudiation than as evidence that its intervention still mattered — preventing what could have been a far more decisive rejection by voters of the Democratic establishment. The group’s super PAC, United Democracy Project, is reportedly weighing additional spending in the general election to boost Republican Mike Rogers against El-Sayed. It would likely be joined by other groups, including the centrist Democratic groups Third Way and Welcome PAC, as well as the Republican Jewish Coalition.
However, backing a Republican in one of the nation’s most important swing states would also carry political risks. It would reinforce critics’ argument that AIPAC has effectively picked sides in partisan politics. The group has already become increasingly controversial among mainstream Democrats for backing pro-Israel Republicans who joined President Donald Trump’s crusade to question the 2020 election results. The Gaza war has only intensified that backlash, as Democratic voters have increasingly rejected U.S. policy supporting Israel.
If AIPAC is signaling it will double down, El-Sayed is doing the same. In media appearances Wednesday after clinching the nomination, he gave the progressive base that carried him to victory more red meat.
In a CNN interview Wednesday night, he said his opposition to U.S. military aid for Israel also extends to defensive systems such as Iron Dome, arguing there is no meaningful distinction. “I don’t believe that there’s really a difference between offensive or defensive weapons,” he said. Israel’s Iron Dome first started under the Obama administration in 2011 and is credited with saving countless lives, intercepting most of the short-range rockets and missiles fired indiscriminately at civilians by Hamas, Hezbollah and other Islamic terror groups. El-Sayed said American tax dollars should be spent on priorities in Michigan rather than “fund foreign militaries.”
CNN commentator Van Jones argued that El-Sayed’s support for a complete military embargo on Israel gave Israel’s advocates a legitimate reason to oppose his candidacy. “This guy is saying that the U.S. government can’t even sell defensive weapons to Israel, which would make Israel completely defenseless,” he said on an election night politics panel. “Now that would be a reason for a group of people who care about Israelis to say this is not our guy.”
Echoes of Mamdani, but a different electorate
The reaction to Tuesday’s results echoed the approach many Jewish organizations and moderates took after Zohran Mamdani won the Democratic primary for New York City mayor last June.
Mamdani’s campaign roiled the Jewish community more than any mayoral contest in recent memory. He faced the most scrutiny for refusing to outright condemn the slogan “globalize the intifada” and for saying he doesn’t recognize Israel as a Jewish state. But he didn’t back down. Mamdani’s stance on the conflict in Gaza resonated with a majority of voters. He also enjoyed support among progressive and younger Jews who saw his criticism of Israel as compatible with Jewish values of justice. Mamdani was elected in November with just over 50% of the vote and has repeatedly come under scrutiny from Jewish leaders over his handling of antisemitism and anti-Israel protests.
Like Mamdani’s rise in New York, El-Sayed’s victory demonstrates that candidates running to the left of the Democratic establishment can overcome intense opposition.
Speaking with reporters on Wednesday, Mamdani said: “I am proud to be part of a movement of politicians and candidates who are looking to put working-class Americans back at the heart of our politics.”
But the comparison has limits. New York City is overwhelmingly Democratic, where the primary is often the race that decides the election. Mamdani also benefited from a fractured opposition and an unpopular rival. El-Sayed faces a different political reality. Michigan remains a politically divided state, and Republican Mike Rogers — who narrowly lost a Senate race in 2024 — held a small lead versus El-Sayed in several polls conducted before Tuesday’s primary. El-Sayed has no guarantee of winning the general election.
Amid the uncertainty of the ultimate outcome of the Michigan Senate race, neither side is retreating.
El-Sayed’s narrow margin has set up the next phase of the fight over the direction of the Democratic primary and U.S. support for Israel with fodder to claim to speak for a majority of voters and new ammunition.
The test of who’s right won’t end in November. Progressive activists are increasingly turning their attention to toppling Democratic leadership, arguing that House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries and Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer are too closely aligned with AIPAC and out of step with the party’s base. Schumer embraced El-Sayed only after the primary and said he was looking to lead a “big-tent” party to victory. Jeffries has not publicly weighed in.
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Is it time for a Wendy Wasserstein renaissance?
Is it time for a reassessment of Wendy Wasserstein’s 1997 An American Daughter, which she described as “darker” than her 20th century hits? On Aug. 11, when La Femme Theatre Productions opens the first major New York revival at the Signature Center’s Irene Diamond Stage, audiences will find out.
Wasserstein was among the most commercially successful female theater artists of the 20th century. Along with Lorraine Hansberry and Lillian Hellman, she was one of few women to open a play directly on Broadway. According to an interview with Wasserstein in The Paris Review, she received the biggest advance ever given to a straight play for 1992’s The Sisters Rosensweig. (It lost the Tony for Best Play to Angels in America.)
And yet since her death from cancer at age 55 in 2006, (the same year as Betty Friedan, who scolded her about the end of her 1989 play, The Heidi Chronicles, where Heidi gives up her career to adopt a child) she has been sidelined. In the 1980s and early 1990s, Heidi, and her other big plays, An Uncommon Woman and Others, Isn’t It Romantic?, and The Sisters Rosensweig were considered paradigm changing. They told the stories of elite women navigating the enormous social changes second-wave feminism wrought. No other American playwright so consistently created worlds in which women — Jewish and not — juggled relationships and careers.
Written in the mid-1990s, An American Daughter is different. Sometimes described as Wasserstein’s most political play, it was her first work to be set outside of New York. The Beltway comedy-drama emerged out of her frustration at the backlash against feminism and the scandals tanking women in the Clinton era, such as Hilary’s Cookiegate and Zoe Baird’s Nannygate. And while An American Daughter is, like Wasserstein’s earlier work, autobiographical, it sounds different. Angrier. While Wasserstein was writing it, she was struggling to have a child as her sister, Sandra, was battling cancer. (A year after An American Daughter, she would conceive.)
The Hilary/Zoe figure is Lyssa Dent Hughes, a nominee for surgeon general whose life gets overturned by a media scandal after she admits on camera that she ignored a jury summons. The DC types who line up or fall away include her best friend, her husband, her father, a pro-life senator from Indiana, her best friend, a Black Jewish oncologist, a gay conservative modeled after Andrew Sullivan and a third- wave feminist modeled after Naomi Wolf.
Jean Lichty, the artistic director of La Femme, who plays Lyssa in the revival, believes An American Daughter deserves another look. “This is a deeply felt important play about social, political and class divisions,” she said in an interview.
Maybe so. Although the play’s politics sound quintessentially 1990s, it also anticipates our mob and media driven politics. After Lyssa describes her mother in an interview as “an ordinary Indiana housewife,” women in Indiana turn against her. It doesn’t matter how great her liberal policies are.
Still, I wonder if this production can overcome Wasserstein’s conflicted reputation. The critic Adam Kirsch pointed out years ago that she “is a descendant not just of Neil Simon but of all the family playwrights of the 1950s.” Yet unlike Simon and, say Arthur Miller, during her lifetime, critics derided her for being too glib. About her 1992 play, The Sisters Rosensweig, the critic and director Robert Brustein said “wisecracks come too easily to her.” A 1994 New York Times article wondered how a play about “bickering middle aged Jewish sisters” was selling out.
Some producers judged her plays “too New York,” which she retorted was code for too Jewish. Even worse, magazine features regularly mentioned her giggling, her weight, her single status, and her age, as though they explained something. She’s “pushing 40,” Newsweek proclaimed in 1989. A 1993 New York Magazine profile announced: “She’s finally starting to feel comfortable with herself. She recently lost 40 pounds.” These details remind me of the ones used to discredit Betty Friedan. They point to the way the press collaborated in minimizing women writers well after second-wave feminism supposedly eradicated it.
Moving towards a new way of writing
About the 1997 production of An American Daughter, Wasserstein told an interviewer she had wanted to write something that “was not just Jewish jokes.” And in part because the Jewish comedy and characters in it are darker than, say, The Sisters Rosenswieg, some critics judged it to be her strongest play. But it’s ultimately a strange piece of theater. It seems like it is moving towards another way of writing, which we didn’t get to see because she didn’t live long enough.
Like Heidi Holland, Lyssa, the central figure in An American Daughter is not Jewish. She is a fifth-generation descendant of Ulysses S. Grant. And yet the play, which is set during Rosh Hashanah, contains more direct Jewish references than Wasserstein’s earlier ones. The Jewish characters operate differently — the stakes for outsiders trying to be inside are different in political circles of court. But the balancing act feels most acute in one character who is unique in Wasserstein’s oeuvre — Lyssa’s BFF, Judith B. Kaufman, a Black Jewish oncologist (and a convert) who quips that she “has endured every in vitro and hormone treatment known to modern medicine.” (In a 1995 reading of the play, Whoopi Goldberg played this role.)
Wasserstein wrote in the introduction to the published version that Kaufman — one of her few Black characters — is the one “emotionally closest” to her. Daniel Sullivan, who directed the 1997 production, said in an interview that, with Kaufman, “she [Wasserstein] is drawing so much from herself.”
And yet this is not just autobiography plopped on stage. Perhaps she was influenced by Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, which ran on Broadway in 1992. Regardless, Wasserstein engineers some of the play’s most unnerving tonal swerves around Kaufman, swerves that bind questions of gender to those of race in ways that are unlike anything she had ever written. One minute, Kaufman is confessing to Lyssa her failure to drown herself during the Jewish ritual of Tashlich, the festival of regrets, during Rosh Hashanah. The next she is making a joke. And a few lines later, Lyssa is delivering a harsh rebuke that seems more like something from a play of ideas.
This sequence starts with Kaufman recounting to her friend the ritual where Jews throw breadcrumbs into water to absolve their bad acts. As she tells Lyssa, she throws her muffin top into the Potomac chanting “‘…Oh Lord, my God, the Lord is one, I’ve wasted my life,’ and I jump in.” Then she sees a box of donut holes, which cheers her up. She gets out of the water. But here Lyssa seems to snap: “What gives you the audacity to believe you’ve failed if you can’t make life or stop death?”
The moment seems like more than a friend’s rebuke and more like a white paper on the aftermath of feminism. And it may be what made critics of the 1997 production write sharp critiques such as Wasserstein “doesn’t know entirely where she’s heading or how to get there.” But I think such a hairpin swerve — a moment where it’s not clear if you are supposed to laugh or gasp — is exciting. I think Wasserstein wants me to be unsettled by Kaufman. She wants me to ask what it means to be a Jew and what success and failure mean. Such moments are there to show how desperate women are, how hard they are on each other and themselves. And how in the drive to remake the world, we have misunderstood what’s important. And how although there are fewer ways to live than we think, we still have choices.
Another Jewish character, Lyssa’s philandering professor husband, Walter Abramson, is only slightly less unnerving. He studies the sociology of the elites and declares himself agnostic. (“I was Jewish until I was bar mitzvahed.”) He is the opposite of the callow Scoop Rosenberg in The Heidi Chronicles who abandons Heidi Holland for a Jewish girl. Abramson has amplified his assimilation by marrying a non-Jew. And — I wonder if I’m imagining it —Wasserstein seems to link his philandering to his assimilation.
Navigating the upheaval of a generation
Wasserstein’s Jewish roots were, like many Jewish artists and writers born after the Holocaust, complex. She was born in 1950 in Flatbush, the youngest child of immigrant parents. Her father, Morris, ran a successful textile factory with his brother and patented velveteen. In Wasserstein’s telling, her mother, Lola, sounds like a cliché, making Wendy take dance lessons and comparing her unfavorably to her conventionally successful siblings, Georgette, and Bruce, who would become a financier. Less cliché are two half siblings ‚ the children of her mothers previous marriage to her uncle ‚ Sandra, and a developmentally disabled half-brother Abner who she first met in her twenties.
The family moved to the Upper East Side when Wasserstein was 12. She attended The Calhoun School, where she wrote skits to get out of Phys Ed. Next was Mt. Holyoke, where she got terrible grades. In 1973, she was accepted to The David Geffen School of Drama. She was the only female playwright in her class. “I decided I wanted to see an all-women’s curtain call,” she recalled at a moment when hyper-masculine playwrights were all the rage. “There were an awful lot of would-be Sam Shepards, and Wendy felt a little left out,” her friend, the playwright Chris Durang, told The Paris Review.
In 1989, after The Heidi Chronicles won a Pulitzer and a Tony for best play (the next woman to win the Tony for Best Play would be Bess Wohl, whose 2026 play, Liberation, about second-wave feminism, closed early) radical feminist journalists and scholars scorned Wasserstein’s realist dramaturgy, charged her of ridiculing the movement, of writing heroines who were more acted upon than acting. Although after her death some reconsidered when the last major revival of Heidi in 2015, closed early, The New York Times proclaimed that the ideal of “having it all” no longer captured anything about the zeitgeist.
It’s true that Lyssa doesn’t so much rail against the unfairness of the media circus destroying her as tolerate it. Until she doesn’t. (Some critics of previous productions called her a cipher and others that the play was too topical.) But to me it’s real. Moreover, I can’t think of another play showing middle-aged women in a larger context than The Family Drama. Much less one dealing with the backlash against second-wave feminism with multiple Jewish characters.
Moreover, Wasserstein’s realist dramaturgy may be old-fashioned but few American playwrights deal so frankly with daughters — including Jewish daughters —navigating the upheaval of the 60s and 70s and sometimes ending up alone. Wasserstein never underestimates the cost of sticking to your principles. Lena Dunham has said she was fascinated by Heidi.
An old play in a new era
Wasserstein herself thought the negative reviews of An American Daughter were sexist. In 1997, most of the first night theater critics were men. Newsday’s Linda Winer, the only one to review An American Daughter positively, described it as reminiscent of George Bernard Shaw. I think a better comparison is the one Wasserstein herself made. She called Henrik Ibsen her “postfeminist muse.” Like Ibsen’s characters, Wasserstein’s can seem like symbols one minute and real people the next. They often wind up alone with their convictions.
It will be interesting to see how the play is received now, when the chief critics at The New York Times and The New Yorker are women. And interesting too to see how audiences respond to it in a postfeminist world where Jewish plays of the moment are about Oct. 7 or the Holocaust.
Plus ça change is the point of view of Jean Lichty, who became interested in the play after Kamala Harris lost the presidential election. “I was devastated by Hillary. I was twice as devastated by Kamala,” she said in an interview, adding that the play’s rage appealed to her.
Lichty stresses that the cast is older in this production. “I think that raises the stakes.”
But the big difference is that the script is revised from the 1997 one, especially Act II. The production weaves together eight drafts that Wasserstein did during rehearsals of the play in regional productions, including Chicago’s Organic Theatre, and the 2000 teleplay starring Christine Lahti. (It’s worth mentioning that, even revised, the regional productions received mixed reviews.)
The Wasserstein estate approved the changes and Andre Bishop, the former artistic director of Playwrights Horizons and co-executor of the estate, came to rehearsal and gave notes.
Maybe the most notable change is that whereas in the 1997 New York production, Lyssa stays with her cheating husband, the 2026 version ends with the two female friends.
JUDITH: What will you do now?
LYSSA: I don’t know. Same as you. Rise and continue.
She is quoting a letter from Ulysses S. Grant to his wife, Julia Dent Grant, for whom Lyssa is named.
If this ending seems ambivalent it is also real. It gives a consolation that doesn’t seem phony: You have to live with regrets and compromises and go on.
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