Ilana M. Horwitz is Assistant Professor in the Department of Jewish Studies and Sociology at Tulane University, where she serves as Fields-Rayant Chair in Contemporary Jewish Life.

Max was raised in a Conservative Jewish household in Florida where his mother was the driving force behind everything Jewish. She was deeply involved in Hadassah and B’nai B’rith, and she made sure her children grew up steeped in Jewish life. Max was actively involved in synagogue throughout his youth. “Any holiday that came around, I’d take time off from school to go to temple and learn all the prayers,” he told me. He had a bar mitzvah, joined United Synagogue Youth (USY), and during his senior year of high school, traveled to Israel. “Visiting the Holy Land, hearing the sirens go off on Friday nights [for the start of Shabbat], knowing the whole country was observing Shabbat—it’s something I think everyone should experience at least once in their life.”

USY gave Max friendships that have lasted decades. “There was a group of about fifteen of us, and most of us still keep in touch. We were at each other’s weddings.” When his wife died of cancer five years before we spoke—leaving him to raise three children, ages 6, 10, and 14—those friends showed up. “When my wife passed away, they came to be supportive during the funeral.”

If you were designing a case study of Jewish education working exactly as intended, Max’s youth would be Exhibit A. Preschool, synagogue, Hebrew school, bar mitzvah, youth group, Israel trip—a cumulative sequence of experiences that cultivated Jewish knowledge, attachment, and social bonds that endured across decades and sustained him through the worst period of his life.

After his wife’s death, Max—now a single father earning about $50,000 a year driving a truck—found himself on the other side of the institutions that had once shaped him. He reached out to Jewish organizations for financial assistance and was told he earned too much to qualify. He felt out of place at a synagogue where most families had two parents and more money. “I’m nowhere near as affluent as the average Jewish family,” he said. “I don’t feel like I can do as much for my kids as my parents did for me.”

Max's story contains a paradox that I believe is at the heart of an underexamined challenge in Jewish education today. The Jewish educational pipeline—from early childhood through adolescence—did its job beautifully for Max. It deepened his knowledge, cultivated his attachment, and wove him into a network of relationships he could draw on decades later. But the very same communal ecosystem that educated him could not accommodate the life he actually ended up living. And Max’s life, marked by the death of a spouse, single parenthood, economic precarity, and career instability, is not an outlier. It is increasingly common.

To understand why Jewish education succeeds for some people and fails to hold others, we need a concept that the Jewish communal world has not yet seriously reckoned with: the life course.

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The Life Course: A Different Way of Seeing

Sociologists use the term “life course” to describe the sequence of roles, transitions, and events that make up a person’s life over time. It is a deceptively simple idea with profound implications. A life course is not the same as a biography. It is the pattern—the structure—of how a life unfolds: when someone finishes school, whether and when they marry, whether and when they have children, what kind of work they do and how stable it is, whether they face health crises or caregiving responsibilities, and how all of these events interact with each other and with the lives of the people around them.

Several features of the life course concept matter for thinking about Jewish education. First is timing—the age at which key events occur. Having a child at 22 and having a child at 38 are not just different dates on a calendar; they create fundamentally different relationships between a parent and the institutions that serve families with young children. Second is transitions—the processes of change caused by life events. A divorce is not a moment; it is a transition that reshapes housing, finances, social networks, and daily routines, often for years. Third is linked lives—the principle that our lives are entangled with those of others. A parent’s job loss is also a child’s disruption. A spouse’s illness is also a caregiver’s career change. And a partner’s connection to Judaism—or lack of one—shapes the entire family’s engagement. Fourth is trajectory—the long-term pattern of stability and change. A person who moves through education, career, marriage, and parenthood in a relatively smooth sequence has a different trajectory than someone who cycles through unemployment, housing instability, and family dissolution.

Here is the insight that should change how we think about Jewish education: The life course is not random. It is profoundly shaped by socioeconomic status—and in turn, reshapes it. People with more economic resources tend to have more predictable, more stable life courses—they finish school, establish careers, marry, and have children in a sequence that aligns with the institutional infrastructure of American Jewish life. People with fewer economic resources tend to have more disrupted, more unpredictable life courses—they face earlier parenthood or much later parenthood, more divorce, more health crises, more caregiving burdens, more job instability, and more geographic dislocation. But Jewish educational institutions, from preschool through adult learning, have been designed almost entirely around the first kind of life course, leaving them ill-equipped to serve those living the second kind.

To think about lives as “life courses” is to recognize that the sort of events that disrupt a life are not randomly distributed across the population but fall into distinct patterns. They cluster along lines of class, and they interact with institutional structures in predictable ways. This means that the exclusion they produce is not accidental—it is, in a sense, designed in. This is not because anyone intended to exclude struggling families, but because institutions built around one kind of life course will, as a structural matter, fail to serve those living another. The exclusion is a feature of the design, not a failure of individual will or communal values.

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The Pipeline That Assumes a Life Course

Consider the architecture of Jewish education as it actually exists. (I am focusing here primarily on the non-Orthodox educational ecosystem, which serves the majority of American Jews and is where the life course mismatch is most acute.) It is sequential and cumulative, organized around a series of age-linked experiences that assume a particular kind of family moving through a particular kind of life. Jewish preschool from ages 3 to 5. Synagogue membership that begins when children are young. Supplementary Hebrew school starting around age 7 or 8. Bar or bat mitzvah preparation intensifying around 11 or 12. Jewish summer camp during the elementary, middle, and high school years. Youth group in high school. A Birthright trip to Israel in the late teens or early twenties. Then, in theory: a Jewish wedding, children enrolled in Jewish preschool, and the pipeline turns over for a new generation.

This architecture has a history. It emerged over the course of the twentieth century, built by and for a community undergoing a remarkable socioeconomic transformation. In 1910, three-quarters of Jewish men worked in crafts and blue-collar trades; by the late twentieth century, Jews had ascended the occupational ladder faster than nearly any other ethnic or religious group. As Carmel Chiswick notes in Economics of American Judaism (2008), by 1990, 65 percent held high-status occupations, nearly six in ten had college degrees, and two-career couples had become the norm. The communal infrastructure that emerged—day schools, camps, youth movements, synagogue programming—reflected the life course that this upwardly mobile community was living.

The architecture worked, and continues to work, for families living this kind of life. But it has a hidden dependency: It requires this particular life course to function. When the life course deviates from the expected pattern, the architecture breaks down. Not because the education itself is flawed, but because the on-ramps, the timing, the cost structures, and the social assumptions are all calibrated to a life that many Jews are not living.

* * *

What Economic Vulnerability Reveals

From 2022 through early 2025, I was part of a research team that conducted one of the most extensive studies ever undertaken of economic vulnerability among American Jews. Funded by the Weinberg Foundation and based at Tulane University and Rosov Consulting, we surveyed nearly 2,000 Jewish adults and conducted 175 in-depth life course interviews, along with interviews with 38 human service professionals. The study, published as On the Edge: Voices of Economic Vulnerability in U.S. Jewish Communities, was designed to understand Jews’ lived experience of economic precarity—not just its demographics, but how it reshapes every dimension of life, including Jewish life.

What struck me most, as I spent hundreds of hours in conversation with people across the economic spectrum, was not simply that economic vulnerability creates financial barriers to Jewish educational participation, though it certainly does. It was that economic vulnerability produces a fundamentally different life course, and that different life course puts people out of sync with the entire rhythm of Jewish institutional life.

Let me make this concrete through the people I met.

When Everything Shifts at Once

Annabelle is a single mother in her 30s who squeezed in our interview during her baby’s naptime. She didn’t grow up Jewish. Raised in a middle-to-upper-middle-class secular Christian household, she developed a curiosity about Judaism in her early twenties. “I started getting interested in Judaism and the sense of community,” she said. By 25, she had converted through a Reform synagogue. A few years later, after a Birthright trip, she underwent a second conversion through modern Orthodoxy, seeking broader acceptance within the more observant community. Annabelle is someone who chose Judaism deliberately, twice—exactly the kind of person Jewish institutions should be designed to hold.

For a while, it worked. She moved to New York, married a modern Orthodox man, had a daughter, and was embedded in a community. Then her marriage fell apart. She became a single mother. The pandemic cost her a full-time job in a legal office. She enrolled in a master’s program in translation, relying on unemployment benefits and student loans. She made the decision to have a second child on her own, using a sperm donor, knowing her window was closing. Her older daughter was diagnosed with ADHD and is on the autism spectrum. “Her behavior has been very challenging over the years,” Annabelle told me—the trial and error of finding the right medication, the slow work of figuring out what helps. “It's always a work in progress.”

None of these events, taken individually, is unusual. Divorce, job loss, single parenthood, a child with special needs—these are ordinary disruptions that millions of Americans navigate. But from a life course perspective, what matters is how they compound. Annabelle’s life shifted, in the space of a few years, from the trajectory the Jewish educational pipeline was built for—two-parent household, stable income, communal embeddedness—to one it was not.

And the consequences for Jewish education were immediate and concrete. Annabelle now juggles freelance translation work, SNAP (food stamp) benefits, and rent assistance. She still celebrates the holidays and teaches her children Torah portions and Hebrew at home. Getting to synagogue, though, requires planning a bus ride or a 20-minute walk with a baby—“a whole extra planning level,” she said, “of getting there and getting back.” Hebrew school, though not expensive in absolute terms, is hard to justify on a strict budget. She’s hesitant to approach the synagogue’s new rabbi because she doesn’t feel comfortable sharing her financial situation with someone she doesn’t yet know. For now, Jewish life comes mainly through the kitchen table and the monthly PJ Library books that arrive in the mail. Annabelle is doing Jewish education—at home, on her own—despite the institutional system, not because of it. The system that welcomed her when she was a convert on Birthright, a bride under a chuppah, a mother in a two-parent household, has no mechanism to support her now that she is a single mother on SNAP teaching her kids Judaism at the kitchen table.

Four Dimensions of the Problem

Annabelle’s story, and the stories of the many others we interviewed, reveal how the life course framework illuminates what pure cost-of-participation analyses miss.

The timing is off. Jewish institutions are organized around the assumption that major family milestones, such as marriage, children, children reaching school age, happen within a particular window and in a particular order. But people with less economic stability often experience these milestones earlier or later, or in a different sequence, or not at all. Annabelle had her second child as a single woman in her mid-thirties, entering the early-childhood-education years without a partner, without a stable income, and without the institutional relationships that intact families build over time. A woman who has children at 20 encounters a Jewish preschool world designed for parents in their thirties. A man who doesn’t marry until 42 has missed two decades of synagogue programming aimed at young families. In each case, the education exists—but the person’s life course doesn’t align with its assumptions.

The transitions are disruptive. Among the people we interviewed who are currently or recently experiencing economic vulnerability, most arrived there through situational vulnerability. This means sudden, unexpected events like job loss, health crises, divorce, or the death of a spouse. These transitions don’t just reduce income; they upend daily life. And they have a cruel tendency to strike at precisely the moments when Jewish educational institutions are most relevant. A job loss coincides with bar mitzvah tutoring fees. A divorce reshapes the family structure just as children enter Hebrew school. A health crisis forces a mother to choose between medical bills and synagogue membership. Each of these moments represents a potential on-ramp to Jewish education that is instead experienced as a wall.

Jeremy, a 50-year-old father of two, described how this played out in his family. After his daughter was born, his synagogue dues at the congregation where his wife had grown up, had her bat mitzvah, and held her mother’s funeral, jumped from $1,200 to $5,000. When he and his wife later asked whether their two daughters, three years apart, could share a joint bat mitzvah ceremony because two separate celebrations were too expensive, the education director refused to even discuss it. It took a change in rabbinic leadership before anyone would entertain the idea.

The linked lives are different. The life course concept of “linked lives” recognizes that no one navigates institutions alone—our engagement is shaped by the people we are connected to. For economically stable families, linked lives tend to reinforce Jewish educational participation: a spouse who shares the commitment, parents and in-laws who help with costs, friends whose children are in the same Hebrew school class. For economically vulnerable families, linked lives often work in the opposite direction. Max’s wife—a convert who had been his partner in raising their children Jewishly—died, and suddenly he was navigating Jewish institutions alone, relying on his own mother to help his children maintain their Jewish identities. Annabelle’s ex-husband remarried and started a new family in another state; the Jewish life she had built as a couple was now hers to sustain solo, without the social infrastructure that comes from being part of a recognized family unit in a synagogue community. “Sometimes it feels really lonely,” she admitted. “I’m always navigating life feeling different, and it’s exhausting.”

The trajectories diverge. Perhaps the most important finding from our research, for anyone who cares about Jewish education, is that disengagement is rarely a one-time event. It is a trajectory. A person who drops out of synagogue membership after a job loss doesn’t just miss a year or two of programming. They miss the social connections that might have drawn them back. Their children miss the peer groups that reinforce Jewish identity. The family misses the institutional touchpoints—the holiday programs, the Shabbat dinners, the parent networks—that make Jewish life feel like a natural part of the week rather than an expensive add-on. Over time, the gap widens. The shame of having left compounds the financial barriers to returning. And the community loses not just one member but, often, the Jewish engagement of the next generation.

Carla’s story illustrates where this trajectory can lead. Raised in a Conservative Jewish family in New York, Carla grew up with a father who kept a library of over 2,000 books and discussed Jewish history and culture with her regularly. “I’d say 90 percent of my knowledge comes directly from him,” she told me. But after marrying a non-Jewish military veteran, moving to central Pennsylvania for a more affordable life, and devoting decades to caring for three children, including a daughter with autism, Carla found herself living near the poverty line, far from any synagogue, with no Jewish community around her. Her children never received a formal Jewish education. The richness of her own Jewish upbringing simply could not survive the accumulation of geographic isolation, economic hardship, and caregiving responsibilities. No single event severed the connection. The trajectory did.

One human service professional we interviewed described this pattern with devastating clarity: “As people become more economically stressed, they pull away because they can no longer pay dues and are embarrassed, so it’s not at all uncommon to meet people who were very active in their synagogue but became more isolated because they couldn’t pay dues, or pay for programs, and they didn’t want to ask because of the stigma. Or we find people who were never members of a synagogue because they never thought they could afford to join, so they don’t have that sense of support and so are further and further isolated.”

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* * *

The Shame Engine

If the life course framework explains when and how people fall out of the Jewish educational ecosystem, shame explains why they don’t come back.

This finding surfaced across all three components of our research—the survey, the interviews with Jewish adults, and the interviews with human service professionals. Economic vulnerability in the American Jewish community produces a distinctive and corrosive shame, rooted in the gap between the narrative of universal Jewish prosperity and the reality of individual struggle. Another Jewish communal professional told us: “Shame—it’s shame. One hundred percent hands down shame. The stereotype of Jewish people that we’re supposed to be successful, I can’t tell you how many people say, I dropped out of the Jewish community because we’re so embarrassed.”

Shame does something specific to the relationship between people and institutions: It reverses the meaning of participation. Synagogue attendance, which should feel like belonging, instead highlights what you lack. High Holiday services, which should feel like homecoming, instead remind you that you cannot afford the ticket. Your child’s Hebrew school class, which should feel like investment in their future, instead places you among families whose lives look nothing like yours. Bertha, a 72-year-old woman we interviewed who has been impoverished for 25 years, described returning to services after years away, and finding that going made things worse, not better. “I feel a quiver feeling,” she told me. “It made me feel more alone going, ’cause I was by myself.” Even when people were there to speak to, the experience left her feeling more alienated and isolated. She understood why: Synagogue is, in her words, a place that “should be a sense of community and belonging,” but where people tend to stick to their own cliques and their own families. She has been compartmentalizing ever since. “That's actually really why I don’t do anything,” she said. “’Cause it makes me feel worse.”

Annabelle, who taught herself to navigate welfare offices and SNAP applications, still couldn’t bring herself to share her financial situation with her synagogue’s new rabbi. Carla’s father had kept a letter his entire life proving that his family had never accepted public assistance—and Carla internalized that lesson so deeply that when she finally had to apply for welfare to feed her children, she broke down crying in the county office. “It was so painful,” she told me, “and I can still feel that shame.” Only her best friend knows they use a food bank.

In most American communities, economic hardship is a private misfortune. In American Jewish communities, it is also a deviation from a communal narrative—the story of upward mobility, educational achievement, and collective success that has defined American Jewish self-understanding since the mid-twentieth century. This is what gives economic vulnerability in the Jewish context its distinctive shame: It is experienced not just as personal failure but as a kind of ethnic betrayal.

For anyone in the business of Jewish education, this should be deeply unsettling. We have built institutions that, for a significant portion of the community, produce the opposite of their intended effect. The very experiences designed to foster belonging can instead deepen isolation.

* * *

Rethinking Jewish Education Through the Life Course

The impulse in Jewish communal life has been to address these problems one at a time—a scholarship here, a sliding-scale fee there, a special program for single parents. But a life course perspective suggests that piecemeal accommodations will always be insufficient, because the problem is not any single barrier but the underlying architecture itself. The question is not how to make exceptions to the system but how to redesign the system so that fewer exceptions are needed. This requires thinking differently about several things at once.

On-ramps, not just pipelines. The Jewish community has invested significantly in creating points of entry—Birthright, PJ Library, OneTable, Moishe House, and others—that sit outside the traditional pipeline of preschool through bar mitzvah. These are real achievements. But most of them share an underlying design assumption: They are built for people who have the time, the stability, the social confidence, and often the geographic proximity to walk through the door.

A life course perspective reveals a different kind of barrier. Annabelle chose Judaism twice, converted twice, and is now raising her daughters Jewishly from her kitchen table—teaching Torah portions and Hebrew on her own—because none of the existing pathways can accommodate a single mother on SNAP without a car. She doesn’t need to be convinced that Jewish life matters. She needs an on-ramp that doesn’t assume she’s already standing on solid ground. What would it look like if Jewish institutions designed entry points not just for the unaffiliated but for the destabilized—people who want to participate but whose circumstances have made the existing pathways inaccessible?

Flexibility around timing. Jewish educational institutions tend to be rigid about when things happen—when children start Hebrew school, when they begin bar or bat mitzvah preparation, when families are expected to join. A life course perspective demands flexibility around timing. Joint b’nai mitzvah ceremonies for siblings whose family can’t afford two separate celebrations. Hebrew school options that accommodate the schedules of single parents or parents working multiple jobs. Adult learning programs designed not just for retirees but for people in their thirties or forties who missed Jewish education the first time around because their lives were in crisis. Jeremy’s synagogue eventually held its first-ever joint bat mitzvah for his daughters, but only because a new rabbi arrived who was willing to bend. That flexibility should not depend on the luck of a rabbinic hire.

Recognition of nontraditional families. Jewish education—from preschool newsletters to family Shabbat programming—often assumes a two-parent, married, economically stable household. Single parents, widowed parents, grandparents raising grandchildren, interfaith families where the non-Jewish spouse is the primary connector to institutional life, adults without children who want to learn and belong—all of these configurations are common in the Jewish community, and all of them are more common among economically vulnerable Jews. Maya, a woman in her forties without children, told us she was at “an awkward age for Judaism”—too old for the young adult programming, too young for the empty-nesters, and invisible to the family-centric institutions that dominate Jewish communal life.

Annabelle’s experience reflects the other side of this: She is a parent, but the wrong kind—single, on public assistance, without a car, navigating a community built around two-parent families. “Sometimes it feels really lonely,” she said. “Being a single mother is so different from how I grew up, with two working parents and a double income.” Designing Jewish education that recognizes and welcomes diverse family structures is not a concession to contemporary trends; it is a prerequisite for reaching the community as it actually exists.

Shame-aware design. Perhaps the most important implication of our research is that Jewish educational institutions need to become conscious of the dynamics of shame they can produce. Sliding-scale dues are a start, but our research found that many people don’t know about them, and many who do are too embarrassed to ask. The real challenge is cultural: shifting from a model where economic struggle is treated as an individual problem to be accommodated through quiet discounts, to a model where economic diversity is acknowledged as a communal reality. This means normalizing a range of economic circumstances in programming, communications, and institutional culture—not through initiatives targeting low-income families (which can themselves be stigmatizing) but through design choices that make participation genuinely accessible without requiring anyone to identify themselves as needing help.

Education that follows the life course. The Jewish community is not without adult education opportunities. Synagogue learning programs and initiatives like Melton, Limmud, and others serve adults who want to deepen their Jewish knowledge. But most adult Jewish education is designed for people who are already connected to a synagogue, already embedded in a community, and already have the stability to commit to a regular class schedule. It is, in other words, built for the same life course as the rest of the pipeline—just extended into adulthood. What our research reveals is a different gap. Max made a promise to his mother after his wife’s death: He would make sure each of his children attended Sunday school and continued learning through their bar or bat mitzvah. He kept that promise. And his daughter’s bat mitzvah preparation has, in fact, drawn him back into the synagogue, where he has begun to attend services and participate in Jewish life more actively—slowly rebuilding a connection that grief had nearly severed. But this re-entry happened only because Max’s life course intersected with the pipeline at exactly the right moment. For those whose timing doesn’t align, no equivalent pathway exists.

Consider Jerry, a 61-year-old man now living in a low-income neighborhood in Florida, surviving on Social Security Disability benefits after a career in financial editing was cut short by a brain tumor, multiple cancers, and a devastating accident. Jerry was raised in a comfortable Jewish household and was preparing for his bar mitzvah when his mother died of cancer. He was twelve. He kept postponing the ceremony. It never happened. His father remarried a woman who became a synagogue president—the exposure was there—but the institution never found a way to reach a grieving boy whose connection to Judaism had been bound up with the parent he lost. By high school, Jerry had stopped attending synagogue. By the time we spoke, he had no Jewish friends, no communal ties, and could not recall a single moment when Judaism had been important to him. Due to his health challenges, his world had contracted to a one-mile radius around his apartment. Jerry’s trajectory is not a story of indifference. It is a story of a rupture at exactly the wrong moment—during the very rite of passage the pipeline is organized around—that no institution recognized or repaired.

And even for Max, whose timing did align, the system’s reach is limited: The pipeline delivered Jewish education to his daughter, but who is educating Max? Who is helping a single father with a high school education and a truck driver’s salary navigate Jewish life for himself, not just as a parent shepherding his children through milestones, but as a person seeking meaning and community in the aftermath of loss? One Jewish communal professional we interviewed suggested a concept that I think gets at what is missing: a “navigator”—a volunteer or professional who helps people find their way into Jewish communal resources when a crisis has left them disoriented. This is not adult education in the traditional sense. It is something more basic: the recognition that when a life comes apart, people need someone to help them find the pieces—including the Jewish ones—and that this, too, is a form of education.

* * *

The Stakes

Our survey found that 58 percent of currently or recently economically vulnerable Jews reported that financial considerations had prevented one or more forms of Jewish engagement in the past five years. Among those with children, 43 percent said costs had prevented Jewish educational experiences for their kids—day school, supplementary school, camp, youth group, or a teen trip to Israel. These are not small numbers. They represent a significant portion of the community for whom the entire architecture of Jewish education is functionally inaccessible.

But the numbers, as striking as they are, do not capture what is really lost. What is lost is the Max at 45 who has no institutional home. The Jerry at 12 whose bar mitzvah never happened because no one knew how to reach a grieving boy. The Annabelle who chose Judaism twice and now teaches her daughters Torah at home because no institution can reach her. The Carla in central Pennsylvania whose father’s library of 2,000 Jewish books could not be passed on because the infrastructure wasn’t there.

Each of these people wanted to be part of Jewish life. They were not indifferent or hostile. They were locked out—not always by cost alone, but by a system designed around a life course they were not living.

The sociological research on the life course tells us something that the Jewish educational world has been slow to absorb: The stable, sequential, economically secure life course that our institutions were built around is becoming less common, not more. The contraction of the middle class, the rise of nontraditional family structures, the increasing prevalence of caregiving responsibilities, the gig economy, the opioid crisis, the soaring costs of housing and healthcare—all these forces are reshaping the life courses of Americans, including Jewish Americans. If Jewish education continues to be designed for the life course of the mid-to-late twentieth century, it will serve an ever-narrower slice of the community.

The good news is that nothing about this is inevitable. The architecture of Jewish education was built by human beings to serve a particular moment. It can be rebuilt—by human beings—to serve this one. But doing so requires a shift in perspective: from asking “how do we get more people into the pipeline?” to asking “what kinds of lives are people actually living, and how do we meet them there?” The life course lens does not provide a program model or a budget line. What it provides is a way of seeing—a way of understanding that the barriers to Jewish education are not only financial and not only about content but are embedded in the very structure of when, where, and for whom we offer the chance to learn, to belong, and to connect.

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