Abram S. Isaacs, Educating Jews for Character and Continuity

ABSTRACT Abram S. Isaacs (1852–1920), editor, intellectual, university professor, and rabbi, was a moral educator dedicated to making American Jews more knowledgeable and more virtuous. His role model was his father, who founded and taught in the Jewish day school that young Abram attended. While embracing the blessings of American life, Isaacs was deeply troubled by the corrosive American values of individualism and materialism. In the late nineteenth century, as Jewish day schools were no longer an option, Isaacs turned to writing family literature, hoping to substitute the home for the day school as the locus of character education.