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A New York Jewish childhood at the Dalton School where privilege met progressivism
I am what is called “a Dalton lifer.” I was born in Manhattan on Dec. 1, 1943, at Lenox Hill Hospital and was a New Yorker all my life before I married and moved away. For 14 of those years, from when I was 3 (going on 4) until I was 18, I attended the Dalton School.
My parents chose Dalton because it was a progressive school that was comfortable for Jewish children, who made up about one-third of the school’s population, and it admitted Black students. There were a number of such schools in Manhattan at the time; influenced by the educational philosophy of John Dewey, they believed learning should be taught by doing, and that education should include active inquiry and problem solving. (My father, in fact, had attended the University of Chicago Lab School that Dewey created in 1896.)
When I was little, I often walked with my older brothers from our apartment at 81st and Park Avenue to 89th where Dalton was located between Park and Lexington. On the way, we would pass a stationery store where adults would put down some change on top of the newspaper pile and take one or two of the papers that the shopkeeper had neatly arranged on a wooden bench outside of the store front. As a child, I sometimes stole some of that change and to this day I am horrified at myself.
By the time I was eight, I would walk back home by myself on Lexington Avenue, which formed the western boundary of Yorkville between 72nd Street and 96th. Yorkville was then populated by Germans and German-speaking immigrants such as Hungarians and Czechs. During the 1930s and World War II, it had been the headquarters of the German Bund. It was less than a decade after the end of World War II, and as Jews, my parents were keenly aware of Yorkville’s past. While they shopped on Lexington, they warned us it could be dangerous, and indeed, one of my brothers got held up there. My parents were reluctant to allow me, as a girl, to walk east of 86th and Lex – where there were still dance halls and beer parlors and clubs that seemed to me both alien and alluring.
Nevertheless, I strode down Lexington by myself, entranced by the wonderful shops. There was a fabulous marzipan store; I loved that candy, molded into tiny figurines small apples and lemons, hand-sculpted dogs and statuettes, and seasonal Christmas and Easter pieces. Near 82nd Street, there was a drug store with a soda counter that sold sandwiches and drinks where my mother would always order an egg salad sandwich and a coffee milkshake. There was an old-fashioned health-food store that sold specialty items such as nut bread, yogurt and whole grains.
Lexington was still a two-way street, and the bus price had recently gone up from a nickel to a dime. Later, when we were in high school, we would cheat on both the bus and subway and shove a whole bunch of us through without paying for everyone. But fixed in my memory is that contrast between the still-living fear of American Nazis that my parents embodied and the richness of store life on Lexington Avenue.
A privileged childhood
Of course, memories are tricky, and mine are probably filled with biases and mistakes. We misremember to be sure. And we imagine our childhood recollections through the prism of who we were. I was from a privileged German-Jewish family. At the time I did not think of myself as especially fortunate. It was just who I was.
When I went to college, I encountered the wonderful post-Civil-War writer, Henry Adams. Near the beginning of his masterpiece, The Education of Henry Adams, he tells the story of being about 5 or 6, and playing on the grounds of his grandfather John Quincy Adams’ house. Adams’ gardener declared that young Henry probably believed that he would grow up to be president too. Henry recalled that it had never occurred to him that he would not become president; that’s what his family did.
Not only are my recollections filtered through an unconscious perception of privilege, they are also intertwined with my identity as a young Jew. When I was a student in Dalton’s lower school, I don’t remember if I was aware of the double luck of having been born into money and what we then called culture; and into an America with no close relatives who had been murdered in the Holocaust. My grandmother worried about some of her family back in Europe; she’d been told some of them were still alive, but she could not find them.
In the 1940s and 1950s, America was still a country made up largely of white European nationals and Blacks whose grandparents or great-grandparents had been born into slavery. The distinctions between European nationalities defined much of my world. I knew I was not Irish, Italian, or Polish Catholic, nor was I German-Lutheran or Scandinavian Most of the white children — other than the Jews — who attended Dalton were WASPs and I wasn’t one of those either. I remember only one boy who was Catholic, Fitzhugh Seamus MacManus Mullin whose father’s family was Irish and whose mother’s family was Spanish. His grandfather would come to Dalton, sit on a chair in our wonderful theater, and enrapture us by reciting Celtic tales. I assume that he was Seumas MacManus, who according to Wikipedia was considered by many to be the last great seanchaí, or storyteller of the ancient oral tradition.
I knew there were barriers between Jews and Christians, but they never impeded upon my sense of self. Park Avenue apartment buildings were either Jewish or gentile, and my building, 941 Park Avenue, was occupied entirely by Jewish families. The only non-Jews with whom I interacted in my building worked for one the families who lived there, or for the building itself; they were maids and supers and doormen, and they were white and largely Irish.
When I was little and in the lower school, I did not think about religion. Most of my family had come from Germany and had been in America since before the Civil War. They were not observant, in fact quite the opposite. My parents believed that religion was the opiate of the masses, and we ate shellfish and ham. My father banned uncured pork as in pork chops, so my mother often served lamb chops, which was unusual in the America of that time. Both of my parents grew up in Chicago, my mother in the northern suburb of Kenilworth, my father on the south side of the city near the University of Chicago. My mother’s family was wealthy and lived in a very large house where I happily played as a child and where my best companion there was the son of my grandparents’ chauffeur, whose family lived in an apartment above the garage.
Their world was German-Jewish, and my grandfather was one of the founders of that communities’ local country club. My grandparents, seeking spiritual meaning in their lives, followed Christian Science, but they still considered themselves Jewish, though as members of the upper-class German-Jewish world they would never have considered joining a Conservative or Orthodox community.
My father’s family was split between Eastern and Central Europe. His father was Lithuanian and Orthodox, his mother was German and reform, and that divide contributed to my paternal grandparents’ divorce. After my parents had married and moved to New York, our father would take us on excursions to the Lower East Side where we would buy challah, which we never ate on Friday night. I understood — without knowing the word — that we were part of what the larger Jewish world called Yekke. That is, we were of German and Central European descent and our grandparents and their parents before them did not speak Yiddish. This was in contrast to the Jews from the areas of Eastern Europe where Jews did speak Yiddish, who had not yet assimilated into American culture and language as we had, were often poorer, and were looked down upon by the Yekke.
My parents may have disliked organized religion, but they certainly felt Jewish. In the late 1930s, my mother and her mother sponsored Jews trying to get out of Germany. My mother had a letter from Albert Einstein, written in German and addressed to Fraulein Spiegel (her maiden name) thanking her for trying to help a Jewish family of mathematicians. And in retrospect, their Jewish identity must also have been reinforced in 1948 by the establishment of Israel, then a small, scrappy, underdog state. Like most American Jews, they thought of Israel as a symbol of survival: Hitler had not wiped us off the face of the earth.
Later I learned that my parents’ largest contribution every year was to the United Jewish Appeal (UJA). But this was true of the vast majority of Jews of their generation, and I would guess was so for the parents of virtually every Jewish child in Dalton’s lower and middle school. One of the girls in my Dalton class was Elizabeth Rosenwald (Varet), the daughter of William Rosenwald (and granddaughter of Julius Rosenwald) who, along with much of his family, helped found the UJA. Another was Ruth Slawson, daughter of John Slawson, who was director of the American Jewish Committee from 1943 to 1968. But, in the lower school I felt simply part of my environment, and a very large part of that environment was Dalton.
A world of progressives and universalists
When we were in kindergarten, our schoolroom had its own sandbox: Dalton allowed us to play and simply grow. When we started 1st grade, however, we were meant to learn how to read. But I had no interest in reading except for comic books, especially Tarzan. Not knowing how to crack the code to read all those words contained in the bubbles attached to each character’s head, I happily made up my own stories. A group of us remained illiterate until the fall of 3rd grade, when we attended a remedial class and I learned how to decode letters and symbols. When we each finally conquered the art of literacy, we were given a very small penknife clad in mother of pearl. Comics were never the same.
Each lower school grade was split into two classes, each with its own teacher. The lower school teacher I remember best was Ellie Seeger, a fabulous storyteller who regaled our class with stories until the other second grade class got so jealous she had to stop. Her husband was John Seeger, brother of Pete Seeger. John Seeger taught middle school geography where we made papier mâché maps, something I adored doing. He would sing for us sometimes, and although I became a great fan of Pete Seeger, I think John was just as good.
School at Dalton would frequently begin with a morning assembly. We would march into our wonderful proscenium theater with red-covered theater seats to piano music. It was there that John Seeger sang for us. It was there that we put on plays and made costumes in a wonderful anteroom space. And it was also there that Dalton held its Christmas Pageant, a re-enactment of the birth of Jesus and the story of the wisemen from the east, to which none of our Jewish parents objected.
In 1951, we went on a trip to Otis, a farm in Massachusetts. We crossed over a gully or a stream on a log. I still have a photo of myself milking a cow into a metal bucket
I was friends with a Black girl named Judy Walker and we had sleepover dates. She would come with us to our summer house in Connecticut, and I went with her to the vacation home her family was building, and to her home in Harlem. Her father was a chemist and one morning at her house I woke up to music, thinking it was the theme to the Lone Ranger. Her parents must have liked classical music because it was the William Tell Overture.
The biggest event of 5th grade was the Greek Festival — a very Dewey-inspired production. Tessie Ross was our teacher, and we loved her. She taught at Dalton for 43 years beginning in 1944 after she had fled to the U.S. from Belgium and she led the Greek Festival, which took place in the gym and had carriages and spears and shields and armor. We played at being Greeks — Athenians against the Spartans, with parents as our audience.
In high school, I had one other teacher who was a refugee from Europe, our history teacher Nora Hodges. Mrs. Hodges was born in 1899 as Nora August Warndorfer, from Vienna. She came from a family of wealthy Jews, and fortunately she got out of Vienna many years before the Anschluss. She went back to Austria in the mid-1930’s and told us how she had listened to the radio, and, hearing a magnetic voice come over the air, felt captivated — until she learned that it was Adolph Hitler.
In the lower school, girls got to wear pants on Fridays. That was a big deal then because girls still wore skirts and dresses. Always. I remember mine as being corduroy with an elastic waist. I believe that going casual on Fridays, however, was not simply a symptom of Dalton progressive philosophy, but an indicator that it was populated by well-off families. Of course, the America of the 1950s was not as divided between rich and poor as it is now, and those who were upper middle class, or even rich, were not inclined to be ostentatious. But many families had either country homes or were members of country clubs. So, the school allowed girls to sport trousers on Fridays so they would be dressed to go to their second homes.
Not that all families were wealthy. Robert Newman, whose daughter Hila was a class or two above me, was a radio-drama playwright turned children’s book writer. Wally Shawn’s father WIlliam was the editor of The New Yorker, so he was very well-known but wasn’t paid a banker’s salary. Bettye George Dockery’s father was a dentist. Michael Lerner’s father, Max Lerner, was a writer, professor, and public intellectual, and also famous, but not wealthy. Pebble Baker’s father was a journalist for Time.
We ended our school year with a festival called “Arch Day.” Each class went through an arch on the auditorium stage. We went in as part of one grade and exited as part of the next. There were skits as well. My brother Paul finished 8th grade in 1954, when so many Americans were obsessed with the McCarthy hearings, so Paul’s class put together a skit entitled “Point of Order.”
Most Dalton students, and I assume most of the teachers, were liberal, but establishment liberal. We all assumed Alger Hiss was innocent. His son Tony went to Dalton and was a few years ahead of me. One of his lawyers was Helen Buttenweiser. The Buttenweiser children went to Dalton. She and her husband Benjamin were wealthy German Jewish New York philanthropists..
But while we were all aware of Joseph McCarthy, of the House Un-American Affairs Committee (HUAC), and of Alger Hiss, we never talked about Ethel and Julius Rosenberg. Ethel Greenglass was a secretary and a member of the Young Communist League. Julius’ parents were immigrants from Russia who grew up on the Lower East Side and he also was a communist. Alger Hiss was accepted by much of German Jewish Yekke Manhattan, though he himself was not Jewish, but the Rosenbergs were not. They were the wrong kind of Jews — the ones who would never have sent their sons to Dalton.
That divide, between Hiss and the Rosenbergs, perhaps illuminates my Dalton world in the 1950s. We were comfortable progressives and post-World War II universalists. We believed in Civil Rights and the future of Blacks in the United States. We supported John Lindsay for congress and mayor. My father once chaperoned me and a friend to a Pete Seeger concert, and he was terrified by how Pete Seeger could whip up a crowd — it reminded him too much of Adolph Hitler.
In the 7th or 8th grade, I read The Diary of Anne Frank. I devoured it one summer when I was at my parents’ vacation house in Martha’s Vineyard. There was a great tick scare that summer, so I lay in my bed, clenching my teeth to ward off any ticks, reading Anne Frank and refashioning my identity.
By middle school, questions of my own identity began to intertwine with my Dalton childhood. My mother once told me that some of the girls whose parents sent them to Dalton in the lower and middle school did so in order to provide their children with a diverse environment but then put them elsewhere for high school so that they would not become romantically attached to a Jewish boy or too acculturated into Jewish (or at least Yekke) life.
A story worth preserving
When I went through the arch in June of 1957, I entered as an 8th grader and emerged as a high school student. Four years later, in 1961, I graduated — 65 years ago. America was a different world then. The gap between rich and poor was not as yawning, and the wealthy were not as excessive. For Jewish children today, the memory of the Holocaust is often a nearly untouchable past that they learn about in Hebrew School; the story of Anne Frank is recalled from a school assignment; and secular Jews like my family have left the emotional ghetto in which my parents still lived. Our public and private contexts have changed. And so I have decided to tell my story of one German Jewish child living in Manhattan in the 1940s and 1950s, attending one progressive grade school, during one slice of time that I feel is worth preserving.
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A great Jewish intellectual understood the Kafkaesque horror of Tennessee’s botched execution
Two days ago, the state of Tennessee tried to kill Christa Pike, the Death Row prisoner who, in 1995, was found guilty of the torture and murder of her classmate Colleen Slemmer. After spending more than 30 years on death row, Pike was strapped to a prison gurney and, as journalists watched through a window, an execution team cycled through at least a half-dozen syringes before finding a vein suitable for the injection of pentobarbital.
Or so they thought.
After Pike herself tried to help the team find a vein, they injected her with a supposedly lethal dose of the barbiturate. Though it caused an intense burning sensation in Pike’s arm, the dose failed to do its job, leading the executioners to empty a second dose into what they thought was a vein but turned out to be the surrounding tissue. Shortly thereafter, a curtain was drawn across the window and, for an hour, the journalists heard Pike continue to breathe and snore. Pike’s legal team eventually learned that their client, barely but still stubbornly alive, had been rushed to the emergency room of a nearby hospital.
While Pike’s physical prognosis is uncertain, there is nothing uncertain about the ethical diagnosis of this event. At least this would be the case for two earlier journalists who wrote at length on the death penalty: Arthur Koestler and Albert Camus. Long after they both became celebrated novelists and intellectuals, the two men each wrote essays on state-sanctioned killing, which were combined and published in France with the title Réflexions sur la peine capitale, or Reflections on the Death Penalty.
These reflections are as relevant in our own age of drug-induced executions as in Koestler and Camus’ era of where the delivery system of death was a noose or the guillotine.
Born into a secular Jewish family in Budapest, Koestler was, as the phrase goes, a child of his century, one convulsed by catastrophic wars, murderous ideologies, and multiple genocides. Described by his friend George Orwell as an “outstanding figure” of his time, Koestler, like Orwell, fought in and reported on the Spanish Civil War. As a member of the Spanish republican forces, he was captured by Franco’s intelligence service and sentenced to death — a fate Koestler escaped when, after several months of imprisonment, he was released in a prisoner exchange.
Yet this experience deeply marked him. In the mid-1950s, he rallied to the campaign to end capital punishment in Great Britain, penning the essay “Reflections on Hanging.” Serialized in two newspapers, the essay galvanized public opinion and played a pivotal role in the parliamentary vote that, while not entirely abolishing the death penalty, severely limited it. Given the clarity and ferocity of Koestler’s writing — which, Rebecca West observed, was as historically misleading as it was rhetorically moving — this sea change in the public’s attitude and parliament’s position is not surprising.
One passage seems especially relevant for the recent events in Tennessee. “There is indeed a Kafkaesque horror attached to an execution,” Koestler writes, “which goes beyond the mere fear of death or pain or indignity. It is connected not with the brutality but with the macabre, cold-blooded politeness of the ceremony, in which the person whose neck is going to be broken is supposed to collaborate in a nice, sensible manner, as if it were a matter of a minor surgical operation…it is present in the delinquent’s knowledge that in the embarrassed stares of the officials he is already mirrored as a dead man with a blue face and ruptured vertebrae; and that what for him is the final, violent termination of life is for them merely an unpleasant duty, followed by a sigh of relief and a plate of bacon and eggs.”
Did the unnamed doctor, I wonder, stare with embarrassment as he repeatedly tried but failed at killing the — perhaps this is not the best word — patient? How, I also wonder, should readers respond to the description of Pike’s attempted execution? (With embarrassment, I admit while I was revulsed, I also continued sipping from a mug of coffee as I read the New York Times’ account.)
We can guess how Lucien Camus might have responded. His son, Albert Camus, told and retold the story in his writings of his father who, having witnessed a public execution by guillotine, returned to the house, vomited in the sink, and never spoke about the experience. In the essay “Reflections on the Guillotine,” which accompanied Koestler’s, Camus suggested that rather than telling the condemned man or woman that they will pay the ultimate price or their debt to society for their crime, they instead be told the truth. “If you kill you will be imprisoned for months and years, torn between impossible death and constantly renewed terror, we shall slip into your cell…tie your hands behind your back [and] bind your arms with a strap to that you are forced to stoop [and] then carry you through the corridors [and] seize you by the seat of your pants and throw you on a board [then] let fall from a height of seven feet a 120 pound blade that will slice off your head like a razor.”
What, then, did the judge overseeing the 1995 trial tell Christa Pike when the sentence was rendered? The delivery system for death then was the electric chair and, to the judge’s credit, she did inform Pike that she would be subjected to a degree of electroshock sufficient to kill her. I do not know when the agent of death shifted from electroshock to pentobarbital nor do I know if a judge explained to Pike how the drug would act on her brain and organs to bring about her death. But I am pretty certain that none of the judges informed Pike of one legal scholar’s assessment of this form of death: “It is not the most humane, it is the most humane-looking.” I am even more certain they did not inform her, in case she survived another botched execution by the state of Tennessee, which boasts a history of such botches, that her brain would be irreversibly damaged.
Finally, I am most certain that, whether strangled by a tightened noose, decapitated by a sharpened blade, or injected by what was possibly an expired dose of pentobarbital, the sheer barbarism exercised by officials wearing white coats remains constant.
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‘East of Eden’ was my family Bible — until I read the real one.
I didn’t know until recently whether the house I grew up in had a Bible, but I always knew we had a first edition of John Steinbeck’s East of Eden.
It’s my mother’s, gifted to her by her boss at Brattle Book Shop, an antiquarian book store in Boston, where she worked in college. Its dustjacket shows a pastoral scene, a simple rendering of a valley in greens and ochres. Were I to inherit it, and were it in better shape, it would be the most valuable thing I own. (In 1975 it went for $25.)
I never picked it up to actually read it: too precious. My own copy was a paperback with deckle edges. I left it behind on a communal shelf at a hostel in London for some other traveler 12 years ago during my first trip to Europe.
The novel, about three generations of the Trasks and how they struggle to earn their father’s approval, urges us to consider what we carry with us and what we discard. The question of legacy was certainly in the mind of Steinbeck, who considered it his masterpiece. While the author includes his mother’s side of the family, the Hamiltons, as characters, I’m not quite sure if he consciously linked his biblically-inspired epic to his paternal side’s short residence in the Holy Land.
Steinbeck’s grandfather Johann Adolf Großsteinbeck helped to establish an agricultural community, Har Hatikvah, outside of Jaffa in the 19th century. The community, made up of Christians who believed the end times were at hand, disbanded in 1858, after Johann’s brother Friedrich was killed in a raid by the locals.
Zoe Kazan’s Netflix adaptation of the book is hyper-aware of her own paternal grandfather, Elia Kazan, who adapted the film in 1955 with a smoldering star named James Dean. At the heart of her response is the word “timshel,” absent from her grandfather’s adaptation but central to Steinbeck’s book.
It’s not a real Hebrew word, but a poor transliteration that Steinbeck incompletely translated as “thou mayest.” To the characters, reading it from a verse in Genesis, it signifies an open path. In reintroducing the word to the story — a more holistic, and by my lights better, telling — Kazan has said she is showing that we have choices.
We can choose, for example, not to name names before the House Un-American Activities Committee as Elia Kazan did and, more to the point, we can opt to be different from our families and learn from their mistakes.
One line, spoken by the character Lee and tweaked slightly for the series, earns a new dimension with Zoe Kazan penning the script: “It’s easy to excuse yourself because of your ancestry, but whatever you do, it will be you who does it.”
Steinbeck, for his part, did not follow his forebears in settling Ottoman Palestine as a messianic Christian. He visited in 1966, when it was Israel, on assignment from Newsday to document the development of the new country. (His impressions, coming a year before the Six-Day War, were highly favorable; his pitstops included Masada and the remnants of his family’s settlement.)
My own differences from the older generation —I was the one who told my disappointed mother that Steinbeck botched his Hebrew — has been a process.
I hadn’t yet read Genesis when I first read East of Eden. Now that I have, I see many biblically mixed metaphors. The first patriarch Cyrus Trask — who perhaps ironically, given his inflated record as a Union soldier, shares the name of the king who liberated Jews from Babylon — lost a leg in the war, which could recall the injury Jacob sustained fighting the angel. In accepting the gift of one son and not the other, Cyrus also stands in for God the Father.
His sons are Adam and Charles (the first letters of their names tell us who’s Abel and who’s Cain), who are in fact half brothers like Isaac and Ishmael. Adam’s wife, Cathy, is the serpent — and Eve, Lilith, Satan, Jezebel and perhaps simply the concept of evil.
Adam and Cathy’s sons, Caleb and Aron, are twins, like Jacob and Esau, but their story replays that of Cain and Abel. The book’s title, taken from Genesis, refers to where Cain was cast out, is misleading. The book begins in Connecticut, Adam moves West to Salinas, California. Charles stays put and dies at home, never experiencing exile.
I didn’t grow up knowing all these beats from the Tanakh, and it’s beside the point, really, and yes, pedantic. Steinbeck’s genius is not in how closely he hews to the biblical narrative, but in how he finds the echoes that are there in the origin story of mankind and the Jewish people.
The dynamics we see in Cain and Abel travel down to Ishmael and Isaac, Jacob and Esau, Joseph and his brothers. In each of their stories is betrayal, favoritism and the common theme, as expressed by Sam Hamilton, the character modelled on Steinbeck’s grandfather, that when it comes to love “no one ever had enough,” a feeling that can induce even fratricide.
I never felt I lacked love, but there are less dramatic ways to disappoint one’s parents. I might have left my mother’s first edition in London instead of my ratty paperback. I’m sure I’d have been forgiven, but it’s better as an inheritance.
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Is this Vermont farm the American kibbutz? I camped out there during Sukkot — and got a taste of Judaism’s ancient agrarian roots
Sukkot, the Jewish harvest festival, can feel a little abstract for Jews like me who live in big cities, far removed from the agricultural cycle that gave rise to the holiday. Typically, the extent of my fall harvest consists of buying a pumpkin from Trader Joe’s.
But last weekend, sleeping in a tent at Living Tree Alliance, a Jewish farm and co-housing community in rural Vermont, I found myself much closer to Sukkot’s agrarian roots. Rows of colorful produce stretched across the 93-acre property, much of it destined for the “stone soup” that would become our dinner the following night. Plants grown on the farm formed the sukkah’s schach, or roof covering.
“I forgot scissors,” Melanie Grubman, one of Living Tree’s founding members, told me as she cut yellow flowers off their stems with her teeth for material to decorate the sukkah.
About 16 people, including a few families with children, live on this bucolic property year-round, in what may be the closest American equivalent to an Israeli kibbutz. Residents are expected to volunteer between 8 and 16 hours per month, doing farm chores, serving on committees, managing the on-site AirBnB and keeping common spaces clean. All disagreements are resolved through a system of “sociocracy,” a governance model based on consent; decisions are made only when no one objects. On Shabbat, that work ceases, and chickens raised by residents are butchered kosher-style for dinner.
By living closer to the land, their food supply, and each other, residents say they feel closer to Judaism, too.
“It’s hard for me to pray not in the garden,” Grubman said. “I have no desire to sit inside when holiness is blowing on me.”
The Founders
Sephirah Oshkello, 54, barefoot and wearing a long purple tie-dye dress, swayed back and forth with the rhythm of prayers. As we went around the circle naming those in need before reciting the Mi Shebeirach, the prayer for healing, she offered, “Mama Earth.”
Oshkello, a Hebrew priestess, or kohenet, also works as a holistic nutritionist when she isn’t gardening or leading prayers.
This free-spirited lifestyle is a far cry from the environment in which she grew up. Oshkello was raised in Great Neck, New York, where she attended Temple Israel, a Conservative synagogue.
But after college at University of Maryland, she joined a community service program in Tzfat, Israel, where she got a taste of Jewish communal living, studied Jewish tradition, and spent her days hiking. From there, she spent a year living on an Israeli kibbutz.
“From then on, I felt like, I want to create something like this in the States,” Oshkello said. “Because when I went to Israel, my mom said, ‘OK, go, but you better come back.”
She returned to Great Neck and attended an Orthodox synagogue, but quickly realized it wasn’t the right fit.
“Judaism is connected to the land, and when the Jews got kicked out of their land, it became a culture of the book,” Oshkello said. “I do love to study words, but it only serves one part of our being, right? In Kabbalah, we talk about body, mind, spirit.”
The idea for Living Tree took shape on Oshkello’s second date with her now-husband, Craig, at a vegetarian restaurant in Seattle in 1997, when she told him about her dream to create an intentional Jewish community. The couple moved to secular co-housing in New Hampshire, where they began scouting property in Vermont and making plans for their own Jewish community.
In 2015, she and Craig bought the 93-acre Living Tree property in Moretown, Vt., then just a field with trees and a sugar shack, and moved there about a year later.
Grubman, a 47-year-old Waldorf teacher and owner of an all-women stonemasonry business in Vermont, was among the first residents. Like Oshkello, Grubman grew up in a suburban Jewish community — in her case, a “ritzy” Conservative synagogue outside Philadelphia. But she never connected with the idea of praying while sitting still inside.
“I was one of these angsty teenagers who was like, ‘Nature is busting through the concrete!’” Grubman said. “‘My heart is crying!’”
At Wesleyan University, Grubman became president of the environmental club and wrote her own eco-Haggadah for Passover. She later helped jumpstart Wilderness Torah, a program reconnecting Jews with the agricultural context of the Hebrew calendar, in Berkeley and Oakland, California.
Along the way, she encountered spiritual leaders who helped her understand that Jewish practice could look different from the Judaism of her childhood.
She remembered one rabbi who arrived for Yom Kippur “in white pajamas, covered in dirt.”
“And we were like, ‘Oh, what’s he doing?’ And he was like, ‘Oh, I was davening in the woods,’” Grubman said. “That’s the opposite of suburban Philadelphia Yom Kippur — when you show up in some fancy dress [that] you went to the mall to buy and gossip.”
Living Tree, Grubman said, offered a way to make Judaism a part of daily life beyond prayer and study.
“I felt like Judaism and like the world in general can be very intellectual. And I am a very intellectual person,” Grubman said. “But the more I link it to what I’m doing with my body and my hands, it just feels like it makes more sense to me.”
‘Shtetl Vibes’
There’s a long history of Jews who have sought to build communal, self-sufficient communities. But turning that ideal into a sustainable way of life has always been complicated.
The first kibbutz was established in Ottoman Palestine in 1910; the movement expanded after Israel’s founding in 1948. But the kibbutz system largely collapsed during the country’s financial crisis in the 1980s, when the utopian socialist model slowly gave way to a privatized version. Kibbutzim retained many of their collectivist values, but residents no longer pooled their incomes, raised their children together, or lived completely off the land.
American Jews experimented with communal living, too. During the back-to-the-land movement of the 1960s and ’70s, tens of thousands of young, college-educated city dwellers moved to rural Vermont as part of a countercultural movement. While few communes were explicitly Jewish, residents included many Jewish hippies. (Sen. Bernie Sanders, who briefly lived on an Israeli kibbutz in his twenties, was kicked off a Vermont commune for allegedly loafing around and talking about politics rather than working the land.)
But few of those experiments lasted as fully communal settlements.
Today, efforts to revive Jewish communal living are taking new forms. Young Jews live together through organizations like Moishe House, where residents get subsidized rent in exchange for planning Jewish community events. In Berkeley, an urban Jewish cohousing community called Berkeley Moshav is under construction; residents will own condos and make collective decisions about shared spaces.
Living Tree Alliance, which operates as both a nonprofit and a homeowners association, has seemed to stand the test of time — it has been hosting residents for over a decade. But like the modern kibbutzim, it’s not a full escape from the trappings of capitalism: Residents, most of whom have day jobs outside their farming responsibilities, don’t share income, and they own their own homes while co-owning the surrounding land.
Grubman, who works three jobs, cringed when I asked if Living Tree sometimes felt like utopia.
“It actually is a lot of work. It’s really really challenging,” Grubman said. “But what else are you going to do? Look at your screen?”
Many of the residents I spoke to were attracted to Living Tree as an escape from modern malaise.
Gil Ben Moshe and Ella Sutherland moved to Living Tree a few months ago with their three children, ages 2, 5 and 14. The couple met at an anarchist community in northern California and co-founded an intentional community in Virginia. After deciding they wanted a Jewish co-housing community instead, they found Living Tree online and moved.
Ben Moshe, wearing a kippah over his long hair, a plaid flannel, and no shoes or socks, has fond memories of living on an Israeli kibbutz until he was 4, when his family moved to the city of Eilat. The transition to urban life was jarring, he said, and he vowed to eventually return to the pastoral life of his early childhood.
“I’ve been so shocked at the discrepancy between people really believing that community is the right way to live, but not actually meaning it when they say it,” Ben Moshe said. “People’s relationship with spirituality is one that resembles more of their shelf with porcelain knickknacks … it’s not their daily bread.”
Arielle Sabot, a 28-year-old who uses they/them pronouns, worked as an apprentice at Living Tree for a year beginning in 2023. They now live in the Boston area, where they attend a traditional egalitarian synagogue and work as an outdoor Jewish educator.
While at Living Tree, they lived in a tiny cabin that lacked running water. During the winter, they chopped their own wood to heat the cabin with a wood-burning stove.
The arrangement wasn’t always idyllic. There were no flush toilets. Dishes, which Sabot had to boil water to wash, could pile up. And living alongside neighbors who were also co-workers could get tense sometimes.
But that proximity, Sabot said, also made some aspects of Jewish life feel more manageable.
“I think it’s easier when your community is right outside your door,” Sabot said. “You don’t have to go somewhere. It was shtetl vibes.”
Getting Outside
Since Living Tree was founded more than a decade ago, organizations explicitly linking Jewish spirituality and the natural world have been “growing exponentially,” Oshkello said.
A 2014 national study helped document the growth of what it dubbed Jewish Outdoor, Food and Environmental Education, or JOFEE, and found more than 2,400 people had participated in immersive Jewish outdoors programs the previous year. In 2025, Adamah, one of the movement’s largest organizations, reported more than 45,000 participants in its programs, including almost 10,000 Jewish teens and college students.
Vermont is especially fertile ground for this kind of experiential Judaism. On Shavuot, Living Tree and the Jewish Community of Greater Stowe hike Mount Mansfield, the state’s tallest peak, carrying a Torah for a small taste of what Moses may have felt ascending Mount Sinai to receive the Ten Commandments. On Tu B’Shvat, Jewish Vermonters snowshoe beneath the full moon, stopping at different trees for reflection, poetry and song. And then there’s “Ski Ride Purim,” when skiers and snowboarders hit the slopes in costume, eating hamantaschen along the way.
“Vermonters are going to be outside as much as we can,” said Beth Liberman, executive director of Jewish Communities of Vermont, the state’s Jewish umbrella organization. “We’re bringing Judaism where it connects for so many people.”
There may be an even larger Jewish constituency to capture: In a 2020 Pew Research Center survey, 51% of American Jews said they derived a great deal of meaning and fulfillment from being outdoors — more than twice the share who said the same about their religious faith.
The Jewish connection with the outdoors was a major draw for Talia Wilk, a 20-year-old spending two weeks at Living Tree through a fellowship program. Wilk said she grew up going to Jewish summer camp, where Judaism felt intertwined with being in nature. Now living in Toronto, she works as a Hebrew school teacher and an educator at an outdoors school. When she heard about the Living Tree fellowship, she jumped at the chance.
“I’ve always had that kind of longing for a space where Jewish holidays and rituals are really connected to the seasons and to the land,” Wilk said.
For Sabot, residing at Living Tree changed their relationship to the Jewish lunar calendar. In Vermont, where the seasonal changes are particularly dramatic — lush greenery in summer, brilliant foliage in fall, mud in spring, and snow in winter — Jewish holidays timed around an agrarian cycle feel more tangible, Sabot said.
Younger Jews in particular, Oshkello said, connect with the idea of getting outside over sitting in pews.
“This next generation, they don’t want to be bored and sit and listen to other people preach,” Oshkello said.
At Living Tree, I began to understand what that connection could feel like. I awoke in my tent around 6 a.m. to the sunrise and roosters cock-a-doodle-dooing as my alarm. Meditating in the sukkah, we took deep breaths and placed our hands on the earth. Eating potluck dinner, we were invited to reflect on the journey of our food, from seed to mouth. On my last day, we learned how to press apples to make hot cider and pickle cabbage.
After three days immersing myself in nature, I headed back toward New York City, eager to take a hot shower and sleep in my own bed.
But the next morning, I found myself missing the fresh air and the feeling of being outside. All weekend, residents had talked about getting Judaism out of their heads and into their bodies. Crammed into the subway on my morning commute, I understood what they meant.
The post Is this Vermont farm the American kibbutz? I camped out there during Sukkot — and got a taste of Judaism’s ancient agrarian roots appeared first on The Forward.
