Inside America’s First-Ever Classical Jewish School

On Sunday, about forty students, aged 10 to 14, were seated front and center at the Spanish and Portuguese Synagogue on the Upper West Side. Everyone in a navy blazer. Boys in ties and button-down shirts. Girls in blue dresses.

These kids are the guinea pigs at Emet Classical Academy—the first Jewish classical school in the country, which aims to blend the study of the Torah with a rich liberal arts program steeped in the Western tradition. Its handful of leaders had been thinking about creating the school for two or three years—a dual reaction to Covid and wokeness in schools—but it didn’t come together until late last year.

That was when a space finally became available, inside a synagogue on the Upper East Side, and the talent and money came together, and applications from parents hungry for somewhere else to educate their children flooded in.

Now, everyone was here, inside the old synagogue with the capacious ceilings and Corinthian columns and mahogany pews. The first tranche of students—ranging from fifth to ninth grades—looked sharp, eager, attentive. Music floated through this storied, stained-glass synagogue that houses the oldest Jewish congregation in the country.

The music, Albert Markov’s “Psalm of David,” felt like a metaphor for Emet, which means truth in Hebrew. Searching, troubled, beautiful, anchored to ancient knowledge and, ultimately, hopeful.

It “will take courage” to “speak the truth out loud,” the Princeton political philosopher Robert George, who is affiliated with the school, told the crowd of roughly 200. He meant pushing back against the current moral relativism. It was, perhaps, odd for a Catholic to address the students of a Jewish school built around Jewish values. But that was the point: Those values were not separate from his own; they descended from the same Western lineage. 

“We’re excited about bringing together what usually goes under the label of classical learning with the great tradition of Jewish learning,” George said during the two-hour convocation. 

“Lying before you is a great and wonderful adventure,” he added. “While only you can form your character to be a courageous person, this school will support you in building that kind of character.”

It’s true that New York City has lots of schools, but it’s also true that most, if not all, of those schools—including the city’s most elite private schools—have succumbed to a progressive-identitarian culture that de-emphasizes the Western heritage, and encourages a racial splintering and even antisemitism. That was the lesson of the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel and, more importantly, the reaction of so many young people to it.

The leaders of Emet—which includes seventeen faculty overseen by academic dean Chana Ruderman, who received her PhD from the University of Chicago’s Committee on Social Thought—believe they have the answer to that. 

October 7 “was a wake-up call on many, many fronts, in terms of pedagogy, education that parents had been desensitized to,” Rabbi Abe Unger, Emet’s head of school, told me. “Kids weren’t learning to write, they weren’t reading the canon, they weren’t reading, you know, To Kill a Mockingbird anymore. Educators privately would confide in me, because I’m in that world, ‘We can’t teach anymore because we’re told to teach ideology.’ ”

Though Emet was created by a conservative nonprofit called the Tikvah Fund, it insists it’s not political as much as anti-political. Anti-ideological.

Its academic program includes ancient Hebrew, Latin, and Greek, and a smattering of modern languages; mathematics; science; and literature, art, and philosophy. Plus classical music and Krav Maga. 

At Emet, Unger said, “There is no creative spelling. Students master grammar and how to write, they cover traditional math and learn the scientific method. It is a place where skills matter, where merit matters.”

It’s also something of a throwback: At 8:15 every morning, students shuffle into a big conference room, shake Unger’s hand, and say the Pledge of Allegiance, which most schools in the city have abandoned. The school is expressly anti-tech: No devices are allowed in class. All iPhones, smartwatches, and laptops are checked at the door before class starts. And the walls are festooned with prints of Rembrandt and Mark Chagall, and images of Plato, Aristotle, Ludwig van Beethoven, Albert Einstein, Abraham Lincoln, and Winston Churchill, among others. 

The school is part of a classical-education movement that has spread across all fifty states and comprises more than a million students of all races, religions, ethnicities, and economic backgrounds. By 2028, Emet administrators expect 250 students to be enrolled, starting in fifth grade and ending in twelfth.

The school’s first big test will come in three years, when this year’s freshman class will apply to college. The city’s most prominent private schools—Dalton, Collegiate, Chapin, and Horace Mann, among others—specialize in placing their graduates at the Ivies. The question facing Emet is: Can it do the same?

“I think the families that have made the choice to leave those more established brands behind feel secure enough with our brand, that we’re still on a trajectory toward that kind of success,” Unger said. “We haven’t left that vision behind. We’re just doing it, I think, with more substance.”

Natalya Murakhver, who has a daughter in the fifth grade at Emet, told me she pulled her kids out of magnet school and was fine enrolling them in a less prestigious private school, because, among other things, she was no longer so sure she wanted her kids going to a so-called elite university. 

“Long before the college campuses erupted,” Murakher said, referring to the pro-Hamas encampments that engulfed Columbia, Brown, Harvard, Princeton, and other universities, “I told my kids I didn’t want them going to Ivy League schools. I saw that the campuses were becoming much more illiberal. I am very much a liberal, progressive New Yorker, and I want my kids to have more than what’s available at the Ivies right now.”

Naomi Schoenkin, the mother of a fifth- and sixth-grader who previously attended “an elite private school” in Manhattan and who are both now at Emet, said she is not especially worried about the future. “I think this school will place these kids,” Schoenkin said. “I think the reputation of the school will really speak for itself. I think the colleges will like it.”

It does not hurt that Emet is competitively priced: Its high school tuition runs $46,000 per year—about $15,000 less than what most of the city’s best-known private schools charge. On top of that, Emet offers financial aid and, unlike the vast majority of secondary schools, merit-based scholarships. Though Emet’s leaders wouldn’t tell me how many applications they received, Unger told me he was “pleased” with the fact they had to turn some candidates down, because it showed a demand for this new style of education.

Meir Soloveichik, a senior fellow at Tikvah Fund who studied under George at Princeton, said many parents see Emet as a crucial bulwark against the problem of our times. “This has been a very difficult year for the Jewish people, but it’s also been a clarifying one, and one of the ways in which it has been illuminating is the way in which it made clear the profound lack of wisdom in so many corners of education today,” Soloveichik told the crowd at the convocation.

His point was clear to everyone in the room: There was something missing in American schools, public and private, and it wasn’t just a matter of books or subjects, but mission. Once upon a time, American schools—most of them, at least—could be relied upon to produce solid American citizens who knew there was an objective reality: a right, a wrong, facts, lies.

But contemporary American culture—which feels desiccated and hollowed out and unsure of what it is and, more importantly, what it is supposed to be—can no longer be depended on to generate consistently excellent teachers who worry about cultivating our children’s souls. Who don’t confuse education with vocational training—the development of critical faculties with the acquisition of marketable skills like (God help us) coding. Who know that screens do not belong in the classroom, and that the only thing that does is a timeless knowledge that infuses us with empathy and meaning and depth.

Soloveichik, in his remarks, seemed to intuit as much. He recalled the story of the great, cosmic Torah scroll, which traveled from the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp to Tel Aviv to the space shuttle Columbia to a muddy field in Texas. That was where Israeli astronaut Ilan Ramon’s charred diary—filled with “Hebrew letters describing his hopes and dreams” inspired by the Torah scroll—came to rest. An ancient knowledge inscribed on parchment, passed from one generation to the next, across land and sea and thousands of miles of space.

“There is no story like the Jewish story,” Soloveichik told the audience. “It is one that links us all together.”

He added: “To engage in the pursuit of emet, the pursuit of truth, is to join oneself to the legacy of those letters that are the embodiment of eternity.”

Peter Savodnik is a writer and editor for The Free Press. Follow him on X @petersavodnik, and read his piece, “The Kids vs. the Empire.”

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