Assimilation, American style

This columnist tells how kids are assimilated into American life in school, even in a Jewish school, learning religion and American customs together. Somehow, it works. - - Donna Poisl

By Jeff Jacoby | GLOBE COLUMNIST

WITH OUR music teacher, Mrs. Feigenbaum, at the piano playing the melody — the Toreador’s Song from the opera “Carmen’’ — and the lyrics handed out to us on mimeographed pages, my fourth-grade classmates and I practiced one of the songs we were learning for our school’s Thanksgiving assembly.

I was a student at the Hebrew Academy of Cleveland, a Jewish day school where half of the curriculum was devoted to religious studies and the school year conformed to the Jewish calendar. Most of the kids in my class came from Orthodox Jewish homes, and many of us were the children of Eastern European immigrants who spoke Yiddish more fluently than English.
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