by Brad Sugar

If you’re interested in an informal education experiment, grab a sheet of paper, find the nearest teen or adolescent, and give them one instruction: Draw a Jew. It may sound ridiculous, but over the past seven years – this simple exercise may have taught me more about the state of Jewish life than I care to admit.

Seven years ago, I instructed a group of students at Walter Payton College Prep (in Chicago, IL) to complete this exercise for the first time. Every Monday, students from all backgrounds (Jewish and not) met after school in the foreign language room, under the auspices of a network of Jewish culture clubs across the country (now called “The Jewish Student Connection”). As they converged upon the whiteboard to complete the task, I remember at once being taken aback with their artistic skill yet saddened by their representations of what “Jewish” was. As you might imagine, stereotypes ran rampant. Of course, there was the big nose. The Orthodox rabbi, replete with payot to the ground and a brimmed black hat that would make John Wayne proud. The doctor. The lawyer. The businessman, with a blinged out gold Star of David resting upon his opened shirt button, buried beneath curled hair. Over seventeen drawings in all.

To be sure, this was a “teaching moment” I could not resist.

“What’s missing from this picture?” I asked. A student then ran up the board, and amended his picture of the businessman by inserting a bagel in his hands. Not the answer I was looking for.

There were a lot of things missing from the picture, of course, but perhaps most egregious was the fact that not a single female had been drawn, despite more than half of the artists at the board being young Jewish women themselves.

I was also curious as to why none of the participants had drawn themselves, or someone that wasn’t an obvious caricature or stereotype. Here they were, in a self-selecting Jewish club, clearly identifying as being Jewish – yet no one “regular” was represented on the board. This really bothered me, and I spent the next hour after the meeting had finished asking each student about his or her representation of a Jewish person.

As it turns out, most of them fell back on stereotypes because there were no significant Jewish leaders in their lives other than immediate family. Few belonged to synagogues, and fewer went more than once a year. Jewish camp was not on the radar, Hebrew school was anathema and the acronyms of the local Jewish youth groups were simply gibberish to them. As teenagers, they had no true Jewish heroes. No immediate Jewish role models to emulate, to seek out, or to spend time with. The best representation of Jews to them was the stereotypical male Rabbi.