Montgomery Blair HS Teacher, MCPS Debut Jewish History Elective

“Why are Jews so rich?” “Do they really control Hollywood?” These are some of the questions Marc Grossman has heard students ask at Montgomery Blair High School in Silver Spring.

Grossman noticed that some students and fellow teachers at Blair held misconceptions about Jewish people. So he decided to set the record straight.

Wanting students to engage in history from a different vantage point, Grossman designed and teaches a social studies elective titled “Jewish Peoplehood Throughout History” at Blair, the first of its kind in Montgomery County Public Schools.

The one-semester elective, submitted for MCPS approval as a pilot course in May 2023, aims to introduce students to the origins of the Jewish people and their historical experience throughout the world. This is the first semester that Grossman and Blair have offered “Jewish Peoplehood,” and Grossman hopes there’s enough interest in the curriculum to branch off into other MCPS schools.

“It’s an opportunity for kids to do a deep dive in understanding the Jewish experience through building blocks of world history: ancient Greece, ancient Rome, the beginning of Christianity, the beginning of Islam, the impact of the Enlightenment,” Grossman said. “I want to demystify the Jewish experience and the history of the Jews.”

He said this “demystification” is more necessary today as the Israel-Hamas war has made the political climate “more heated.”

Grossman tries to help students understand Judaism from the perspectives of race, ethnicity, culture and religion in this discussion-based class. At the beginning of the semester, Grossman began with the fundamentals of Judaism, such as “What is Judaism? What makes somebody Jewish?” said Charlotte Goldberg, a senior at Blair taking the course.

Grossman uses traditional foods as a way to teach about the destruction of the Temple — his students made challah dough in class — and plans to incorporate contemporary Yemenite music into the course. Ari Joshi, a senior in the class, said this hands-on approach to learning is “really fun” and a good strategy since there are only about a dozen students in the class.

Goldberg said she often wondered how the historical events she learned about in other classes related to the Jewish community because “that’s a part of my identity.”

She added that the general public’s knowledge about Jewish history is limited: “A lot of what people know about Jewish people is about the Holocaust.”

“I think [Jewish Peoplehood is] a great opportunity to learn about a community that we don’t often see in classes outside of a Holocaust perspective — we mostly only see Jews in a victim position,” Goldberg said. “It’s really important to be able to learn more about the Jewish community because they make up a pretty good percent[age] of MCPS, there are a lot of Jewish kids at Blair. It’s always good to learn about these communities for cultural awareness as well.”

Although most of the students in the class are Jewish, with the exception of one student, Joshi said non-Jewish students should sign up too, as the material is culturally relevant. Goldberg said this knowledge is important at a time when Jewish people frequently appear in the news.

“It’s really important to know our history, because we’re a small group, but we get a lot of media attention as a group,” Goldberg said. “People seem to be very focused on Jews.”
Hillel Tulchin, a junior at Blair taking the class to learn more about Jewish history, said the topic is widely misunderstood, such as the assumption that all Jews are Ashkenazi — in reality, one in every five Jews worldwide is non-Ashkenazi.

“In some cases, [people] don’t understand why Jews came to America in such large numbers, and also the fact that Jews are not just this group that came out of Europe in the 19th century — that they are, in fact, this group that has been all over the world for thousands of years,” Tulchin said.

Grossman’s students are currently doing a research project about the Jewish Diaspora. Joshi chose to focus on the Bene Israel of Mumbai, the oldest and largest Jewish group in India.

Joshi said they mentioned a traditional recipe of the Bene Israel, and a classmate researching a different Diaspora group brought up an unrelated recipe that was very similar to Joshi’s.

“It’s fun to see how the traditions are the same and how they differ between communities,” Joshi said.

They added that the curriculum is structured globally across time and place.

“We’re covering a lot of Jewish history while still focusing on the Jewish traditions and culture at the heart of it, and it’s very cool to see how it all fits together,” Joshi said.

Students have appreciated the representation they’re seeing in the curriculum, something that is new to them.

“I really love the representation and having myself be seen in one of my classes,” Goldberg said. “I know I can go into that class and I can talk about my identity, and I don’t feel like I have to censor myself in any way. It’s just a great community.”

“It’s such a good feeling to see my people represented in a way that isn’t two sentences in a textbook, where it’s like, ‘And then they kick the Jews out of this place.’ That’s how it is in every other class,” Goldberg said. “It’s really, really nice to be able to learn about my people, and I feel more connected to my identity when I see that.”

[email protected]