Rachel Bergstein views Jewish history as the “connective tissue” of a Jewish day school, which is why she aims to foster a love of the subject among high schoolers.
The Silver Spring resident has taught Jewish history at Charles E. Smith Jewish Day School in Rockville for 14 years and counting.
“I see Jewish history as the central component of every Jewish day school education, whether or not it’s realized in that way,” Bergstein said.
She designed all of her courses at CESJDS, including two classes on the United States: American Jewish history through film and literature, and contemporary American Jewish society. As the department chair, Bergstein helps supervise fellow Jewish history teachers, liaises with the school administration, assists with student placement, holds parent-teacher conferences, coordinates guest speakers for classes and supports communitywide programming.
She has been recognized as an outstanding educator on multiple occasions, including by the Jewish Federation of Greater Washington in 2016.
Bergstein also founded and directs the CESJDS Center for Excellence and Engagement in Jewish History, a hub for Jewish history consulting, training and learning after noticing a “real need” in schools: “There’s a lack of knowledge of Jewish history.”
The way school subjects are taught can be isolating, she added.
“You go from science to English to math to language, and they don’t connect,” Bergstein said. “In the Jewish history classroom, we’re connecting all the different pieces. So we are connecting to what [students have] learned in their history classes, what they know from Hebrew language, what they know from their Jewish text courses and what they know from their lived Jewish experiences. And all of that comes together in the Jewish history classroom.”
In addition to discussing current events, Bergstein talks a lot about “what’s going on today and how we got here.”
“What’s fun about our courses: everyone sees that they fit into it — it’s about themselves. It’s about their family members,” Bergstein said. “It’s about how they ended up sitting in my classroom in Rockville from all the different places they come from.”
One of her first classroom activities is having students mark their families’ earliest traceable place of origin on a world map.
“Just from our classroom, you start to see trends,” Bergstein said. “You start to see that American Jews are American, but they’re from elsewhere. They have the sense of themselves [as] from elsewhere. That’s what I’m always teaching.”
Although they’re all Jewish, CESJDS students come from many different backgrounds and Jewish experiences.
“They share those experiences and learn from each other, so they’re part of the story, and that’s what’s engaging about it,” Bergstein said. “I think that our students really understand that. Certainly, over the last several years as antisemitism rises, they realize that what we’re learning here and what we’re talking about, it’s not old — it’s very current.”
She spoke to a lack of quality Jewish history education in many schools: “A lot of other schools teach Jewish history either through general Judaics … or the other model is integrated into ‘regular’ history.”
“Usually what happens is it’s sort of like a regular history class, like American history, and then you learn about a few Jews,” Bergstein said. “It’s not so here in our school. Our students all have requirements, both in history and Jewish text and Jewish history, which means they’re getting a lot more content in Jewish history than they do in other places.”
“We are probably the biggest, most robust Jewish history department in the country,” she said.
CESJDS also has four full-time faculty members in the Jewish history department, which Bergstein said is unique.
“The goal of the Center for Excellence and Engagement in Jewish History is really to share that knowledge, both in professional development and [to] help support other schools in their Jewish history curriculum and teaching, and to also offer some of what we do to a larger, more general audience,” she said.
Bergstein, who has spent this year working on adult education classes, taught her film and literature course at B’nai Israel Congregation in Rockville. She’s also teaching that course to current CESJDS high school parents.
In fall 2023, a few weeks after Oct. 7, Bergstein spearheaded a teen summit for 100 high school students from across the greater Washington area to learn the history of modern Israel, the Arab-Israeli conflict and rising antisemitism in America.
“[It] was a way to really bring together and help support Jewish students [from] whatever high school they went to, especially responding to the events of Oct. 7 and giving them a place where they could learn and delve into the subject in a safe environment,” Bergstein said.
Bergstein said she’s been interested in Jewish history since her early upbringing in Allentown, Pennsylvania, where she attended a Jewish day school through eighth grade.
“I wanted to go to a Jewish high school, but there wasn’t one in the area,” she recalled.
She pursued Jewish studies as an undergraduate, studied Jewish history in graduate school and spent part of a gap year studying at Hebrew University: Hebrew, modern Israeli history, Jewish mysticism and Israeli literature.
“These are all the subjects that I have always loved,” Bergstein said. “I definitely wanted to continue that.”
She said she enjoys challenging her students and seeing them make connections between their lessons and their own lives. In a lesson on 19th-century Germany and the emergence of Reform Judaism, Bergstein taught about confirmation services being “borrowed” from Protestantism. A majority of students in the room had never heard of confirmation, but one student who was enrolled in a confirmation class explained the concept to her peers.
“It’s history, but it’s super, super relevant, and I love engaging with [my students],” Bergstein said.
