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Recently in Salon Mothers Who Think

The Borrowers
They're not looking for a lifetime commitment. They're just looking for a kid to come out and play with them.
By Eve Pell
[09/20/99]

Eric: Hold your breath, 1946
An excerpt from "Why She Left Us."
By Rahna Reiko Rizzuto
[09/17/99]

The things we carry
You have 30 minutes and two garbage bags: How do you pack for a disaster?
By Cynthia Gorney
[09/16/99]

Why they never told us
First novelist Rahna Reiko Rizzuto talks about the silence surrounding the Japanese internment camps, being "stealth Japanese" and writing herself into two children.
By Kate Moses
[09/16/99]

Backtalk
"Ophelia Speaks," a book by teens for teens, talks back to adults who think they know what's up. This teen says it doesn't speak to her.
By Lillie Wade
[09/15/99]

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Yet not everything was the same. The noise of weekday city life was enhanced by the sounds of children playing outside because public schools, like my Jewish parochial school, canceled classes for Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year and Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement.

And that, to me, was thrilling.

I felt the same thrill whenever I read the president's annual High Holiday greetings in the Jewish newspaper or heard the traffic reporters on WINS radio mangle the transliterated names of Jewish festivals when explaining why alternate-side parking rules were suspended. To this young Jew, it meant we had made it.

I never felt the sting of anti-Semitism or the slightest alienation from American life and, like my friends, I was able to proudly rattle off a list of American-Jewish heroes, from Albert Einstein to Sandy Koufax. Yet, there also was no mistaking that we were, when all was said and done, a religious minority group in America, which was to me a Christian country despite the First Amendment.

Public-school closings, like parking rule suspensions and presidential proclamations, were a sign of Jewish strength and importance, a signal that we were important enough to the fabric of our civic society to warrant special arrangements for our holiest of days. So it is no surprise to me that Muslim and Hindu parents in Ohio are going to court to seek the same special arrangements for their children. The American Civil Liberties Union is suing the Sycamore school district in Blue Ash, claiming that its decision to close for Jewish holidays unfairly favors that religion. The suit seeks to have all religions treated equally in the district.

Considering the dramatic changes in America's religious makeup, it makes sense that a growing number of Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist and Sikh schoolchildren are experiencing the opposite emotions from my childhood thrills. They are forced to choose on their holy days between school or religious observance. And their parents resent it.

"I see Sycamore as the future," says Gino Scarselli, associate legal director of the ACLU of Ohio, which filed the federal lawsuit late last month.

Only in the course of the last century did our Protestant nation finally acknowledge the Catholics in its midst and then integrate Jews into its consciousness. And now the old Judeo-Christian paradigm no longer fits. With the number of Muslims in America estimated to be around 6 million, they now surpass Jews as the largest religious group in the nation after Christians.

Adding to the religious mix are large numbers of Hindus, Buddhists, Sikhs and others. These groups have established houses of worship, community centers and political organizations in communities across the nation.

As this demographic change accelerates, schools will increasingly face questions about much more than just holiday closings. Muslims, for example, are required to pray five times a day, attend services in a mosque Friday afternoons and fast from dawn to dusk during the month of Ramadan. Schools must figure out how to accommodate these needs or justify their decisions not to.

The court-approved justification for closing school on religious holidays is that it is nearly impossible to teach on days of widespread absenteeism. But few, if any, districts have enough Muslim or Hindu students to justify closing on those grounds. New immigrants are not as concentrated in certain cities as Jews and Catholics once were, and even when a specific urban school has a large percentage of Muslims, the district as a whole may not have enough to justify closing.

And besides, closing schools, regardless of the legal justification, is about more than empty desks, as I learned as a child. Closing schools is inevitably taken as a sign of communal priorities, values and self-identification. "It is recognition of religious diversity and a sign of respect for people's faith to acknowledge a religion's seminal day of the year or a religious holiday by closing schools," says Shirin Sinnar of the American Muslim Council.

Next page | Opening school raises a ruckus