Jonathan B. Krasner's The Benderly Boys and American Jewish Education, winner of a 2011 National Jewish Book Award, comprehensively documents and analyzes a vital component of American Jewish history and culture: Jewish religious education, which only recently has become a major subject of inquiry for historians of the modern Jewish experience. By examining the extremely influential group of people centered around pioneering educator Samson Benderly, whose influence extended far beyond American Jewish education, Krasner demonstrates definitively why Jewish education matters.

Three chronologically overlapping sections of the book cover, respectively, the professionalization of American Jewish education from the beginning of the twentieth century to World War II, the developing relationship between Jewish education and practice over roughly the same period, and the effect of growing denominationalism on both theoretical and practical aspects of American Jewish education during the first two postwar decades. Krasner takes great pains to rely on descriptive as well as prescriptive material and to try to incorporate, when possible, the voices of subjects beyond those in leadership roles, on whom analysis necessarily centers. Though much of the book focuses on formal classroom instruction and the structures of educational organization, Krasner is at his best when analyzing education beyond the traditional. This is entirely befitting the nature of his subject, since the educators he writes about worked diligently to overthrow traditional, exclusive forms of Jewish education and promulgated a vision of American Jewishness extending far beyond even the most modern lesson plans and textbooks. The chapter on the origins of the Jewish culture camp exemplifies Krasner's great strengths in expanding the definition and impact of education.

The influence of Samson Benderly, a would-be physician born in Palestine who found his destiny utterly altered by his late nineteenth-century encounter with the chaos of American Jewish education, looms appropriately large. As the head of New York's Bureau of Jewish Education from 1910 on, he drew on Progressive Era ideas about teaching and learning, advocated for a new model of American Jewish education (the Talmud Torah), included girls as a central part of his vision, established model schools, professionalized teacher training for Jewish educators, integrated music and the arts into religious education, emphasized the importance of Hebrew literacy, wrote widely to explain his ideas to a variety of audiences, insisted on the importance of a communal rather than a denominational base for Jewish education, encouraged the publication of Jewish children's books, pioneered summer camp for Jews, and supported the Jewish community center movement. The Benderly Boys and American Jewish Education deals with all these innovations. From Krasner's perspective, however, Benderly's most lasting legacy was the development of “the Benderly Boys,” a coterie of talented protégés that included women as well as men. Though ultimately many of the Benderly Boys revised or even rejected some of their mentor's ideas and programs, they occupied positions of importance in Jewish education across the United States and Israel. Their names—a partial list would include Alexander Dushkin, Isaac Berkson, Rebecca Brickner, Libbie Braverman, Samuel Dinin, Albert Schoolman, and Emanuel Gamoran—read like a roll call of figures who played a transformative role in shaping ideas about American Jewish identity during the early and mid-twentieth century.

The Benderly Boys and American Jewish Education is one of several works written over the past decade, often by young scholars trained as historians of education and American social historians, that examine the complex history of American Jewish education. It is an unfortunate—though hardly fatal—feature of Krasner's book that the somewhat ungenerous endnotes rarely acknowledge similar work done by others. Perhaps these omissions, along with the absence of a bibliography, were dictated by a press already concerned about the book's considerable length. But the cumulative effect is a book that in terms of its own content is productively concerned with historical context but, in terms of its place in the literature, seems less concerned with scholarly context. A similar dynamic is at play with regard to the treatment of the women who formed an integral part of the Benderly Boys. Krasner deserves a great deal of credit for his serious effort to include these women and recover their stories, particularly in the first section of the book; as a result, no one in the future will be able to ignore the integral role they played in the development of American Jewish education. But without attending much to either the substantial scholarship on gender in the history of American education or the burgeoning literature on American Jewish women's history, Krasner misses the opportunity to provide a sustained gender analysis of the concepts, structures, and visions that became encoded in the DNA of American Jewish education in ways that continue to affect religious instruction in all its contemporary variety.

A final strong point of the book is its careful attention to the events and circumstances that inevitably affected the development and growth of professional Jewish education in America. From the economic challenges of the Depression to postwar suburbanization, the familiar tropes of American Jewish history played a role in the successes—and failures—of new ideas about Jewish education. Much to the frustration of all the Benderly Boys, so did the constant, continuous disinterest of the majority of American Jewish parents in providing religious education for their children. The very processes of acculturation that yielded uniquely modernized and professionalized forms of American Jewish education also led to its marginalization. The declension model often applied to the history of Jewish education is rooted in this inescapable reality, though, as Krasner ably demonstrates, there is significant mythologizing embedded in the idea that American Jewish education was ever much better—or much worse—than today.