Introduction

The lack of contact between researchers of Jewish education and their contemporaries is part of a larger problem faced by ethnic, minority, and indigenous groups. As Caesar knew well, creating divisions among ones’ opponents is vital to the strategy of a conqueror. The universality to which liberal Western cultural hegemony strives in general and to which postmodern sensitivities preach in particular lead those inside and outside of academia who are attempting to promote cultural sustainability to look inwards, each to their own ethnic experience, accepting the liberal claim that they are “particular” or “unique” and it is the public sphere of liberal society that is “universal.” The analytical result is a failure to recognize that the sum total of “particular” experiences has a universal quality and, indeed, is intertwined into the very fabric of public life in all but the most authoritarian of societies. The practical result is dichotomization and division and the complete failure of academia to produce meaningful tools and resources for those whose

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change the frames of analysis scholars use in their work on issues of multiculturalism. When concepts such as “mainstream” or “liberal society” are portrayed as standing in a zero-sum relationship with the attempts of minority and other groups to sustain their particular cultures, we come up against a fiction that must be dismantled. The fiction is the universal/particular dichotomy. We will see in this book that the life ways pushed forward by these “particularistic” groups are often highly integrated within Western and liberal society, but are always, at the same time, distinct counter-cultures that offer resources to their members to empower them in the attempt to live rich and full human lives.