If you are a parent, educator, clergy, or youth worker, you’ve almost certainly been wondering lately about boys. The anecdotal stories are everywhere: while the honor roll is 70 percent girls, the kids in detention are 70 percent boys; vast numbers of boys are diagnosed with ADHD or behavioral problems; far more girls than boys are signing up for youth groups, and applying to college (undergrad and beyond). Are boys really having trouble?  If so, why? And what should we do about it?

In The Trouble With Boys: A Surprising Report Card on Our Sons, Their Problems at School, and What Parents and Educators Must Do, former Newsweek journalist Peg Tyre offers an insightful and provocative introduction to this important — and politically explosive — issue. The book is clear, well-researched, and chock full of stories and insights that are sure to leave you challenged, pensive, alarmed, and inspired. 

Tyre begins with the facts. Her overview of relevant research eliminates any doubts about  anecdotal stories. Boys are achieving less than girls in all subjects and in every grade level across the spectrum of socioeconomic status; and the gap is significant and growing.

Tyre does a great job of alternating between macrolevel statistics and microlevel tales from the front lines. She presents data describing the considerable gap between the literacy levels of boys and girls in elementary school, and then describes a classroom where a teacher is constantly chastising boys for being too fidgety and unfocused. She describes college attendance rates that are approaching 60 percent female/ 40 percent male, and then introduces us to a young man admitted into a particular college as part of a special program designed to even out the gender ratio. Is it fair that this underachiever got in when women with better grades were rejected? These are the questions that make any exploration of the trouble with boys so controversial.

Tyre offers a compelling explanation of the history that informs the heated debate.  Not so long ago, girls achieved less than boys particularly in math and science. A generation of feminist scholars and activists fought long and hard to unravel systems of instruction and funding that privileged boys over girls. Although the data suggest that feminists have succeeded beyond their wildest dreams at transforming schools into places that support female achievement, many remain committed to a stance that appears to be growing outdated.

Tyre repeatedly argues against a feminist notion that current efforts to address how schools fail boys represents an attempt to dismantle the hard-won gains made by girls. She believes that gender achievement is not a zero-sum game, in which every gain made by boys results in an equal loss by girls (and vice versa). Rather, she urges us to imagine win/win educational environments that support the success of all students. 

Tyre does an impressive job of honoring the complexity of the issue. She explores recent findings from neurology, psychology, intriguing educational interventions like all-boy schools and all-boy classes in coed schools, and surprising cases of literacy and math instructional methods that have proven to work particularly well with boys. By debunking some popular trends (you may want to rethink Michael Gurian’s work on the “minds of boys” after reading this) and highlighting promising practices (check out the Scottish septuagenarian’s innovative literacy approach), Tyre brings much-needed clarity to a complicated debate.

Tyre notes that despite the overwhelming evidence that boys are falling behind, there is remarkably little research focused on rigorously exploring the problem — perhaps because of the controversial nature of the subject. Given the magnitude of the problem presented here, this status quo is clearly not acceptable.

Ultimately, however, Tyre is an optimist. In the past 30 years, feminists successfully transformed American education by insisting upon viewing educational practices through the lens of gender. No one can doubt that norms, values, funding patterns, and best practices in the world of education can be changed to more effectively ensure the academic achievement of an underperforming gender. The time has come to take on a new gender challenge; this work begins with a thoughtful, energetic, and informed national dialogue. With this important and insightful book, Peg Tyre has kick-started that discussion in a powerful way.

We are living in a time of great transition, with almost as many women as men in the workforce, and more men actively involved in parenting. Yet popular culture sends contradictory messages about masculinity and femininity: Despite gains over the past three decades, products are still sold with highly sexualized images of women, and our society’s definition of masculinity is often conflicted. On the one hand, boys are encouraged to get in touch with their feelings; on the other, popular culture pushes a hypermasculine, “gangster” image. Teens need help reading culture and constructing gender identity across a full spectrum, rather than from restrictive polar opposites.

In addition, teens need help making positive life choices. Fostering a meaningful and lasting connection with Judaism is valuable not only for its own sake; research suggests that connecting to religious communities correlates with higher grades, lower levels of drinking and drug use, and other dimensions of healthy development. However, the Jewish community by and large is missing this golden opportunity.

American Jewish teens today, like their parents, have access to all aspects of society — where they work, live, and play — which enables them to choose whether and how to participate in Jewish life. If we want teens to choose Jewish activities and build connections to Judaism that will carry into adulthood, we need to provide meaningful experiences that serve and engage them. Unfortunately, teens are voting with their feet. Teens drop out of formal Jewish education steadily after bat and bar mitzvah; by their senior year of high school, only 24 percent of girls and seventeen percent of boys participate. Even Jewishly active teens are dissatisfied with much of what they find — boys more so than girls. As Jordan, a teen, said, “At this age we want to dig more and learn more about things. We need a deeper meaning.”

We’ve learned that girls are drawn, for example, to Rosh Hodesh groups* — experiences that are fun and also intellectually challenging. The groups draw on Jewish text and tradition to explore the issues girls grapple with daily — body image, friendship, sexuality, and academic pressure, to name a few. Meeting girls where they are with creative engaging activities, significant conversations that touch them personally, and Jewish values and traditions that help them explore the issues they care about most, demonstrates how we might approach engagement with boys.

Ironically, boys are given fewer opportunities than girls to consider gender and the possibilities of adulthood, including what roles work and relationships will play in their lives.

The Jewish community should help both teenage boys and girls navigate this terrain. We must start from an understanding of who boys are, what they enjoy doing, and what issues inspire and engage them. By helping teens steer their way through adolescence, and by helping them filter our culture’s often limiting messages about gender — about what it means to be a man or a woman — we will demonstrate that Judaism has a place in their lives, now, and into their adult years.

* Moving Traditions (movingtraditions.org) operates Rosh Hodesh: It’s a Girl’s Thing and manages several research projects and focus groups on gender and education.

Hot educational topics tend to resurface in cycles, and the discourse of a “boy crisis” once again permeates discussions of American and Jewish education, offering challenges and opportunities. The current concern about the drop-off of male participation in formal Jewish educational programming could focus attention on targeting “Jewish boys” as a uniform constituency with identical issues and needs, and launch discussions about the types of programming that are perceived to attract all boys to Jewish life. Focus on a “boy crisis” can undermine the necessity of creating vibrant educational programming as a conduit to Jewish communal living and participation for all adolescents. Deborah Meyer notes that today’s youth are bombarded with messages regarding how they are supposed to think, feel, and act.

The heightened attention in Jewish education to gender issues can become an opportunity for educators to reexamine how we engage male and female teens with curricular content material. Organizations such as Moving Traditions and the JTS project “Addressing Evaded Issues in Jewish Education” are working toward systemic change in how Jewish youth educators are trained to relate Jewish texts, rituals, and practice to learners’ lives.

Curricular plans often exclude formal discussion with adolescents about the pressures weighing heavily upon them day-to-day, and ironically, some of these very pressures often keep them from deepening their participation in Jewish study and practice. Jewish teenagers today feel quite comfortable, as Deborah Meyer notes, “voting with their feet.” Many teens have pulled away from participating in Jewish programming to instead prioritize activities they and their parents perceive as better helping them advance academically or deepen their social connections. While we cannot address all the pressures teens face, we can create programming that meaningfully integrates issues that are part of their lived realities. Several curricula now exist that help Jewish educators explore a range of topics that both boys and girls face, including: pressures to succeed and fears of failure; competition with friends; the balance between self-assertion and sensitivity to the needs of others; the quest for perfection; sexuality and mixed messages; and explorations of gender identity and roles (e.g.; Hineini, Keshet Boston; Life Choices, Tzelem; Love Shouldn’t Hurt, Shalom Bayit; Strong Girls, Good Guys Initiatives, JWI; Rosh Hodesh: It’s a Girl’s Thing).

Jewish educators have new opportunities to help teens connect Jewish content and their daily lives. Through these encounters, we will better focus our energies on the teens who show up in our classrooms, camps, after-school programs, youth groups, and service learning projects. Our discourse will move from a language of crisis to a language of opportunity; our discourse will focus on new possibilities for adolescent programming and Jewish education.

How has the gender ratio of your rabbinical school changed over the past decade?

Mordecai Schwartz: While there has been some cyclical flux, JTS seems to continually come back to a balance of sexes that is quite close to 60 percent men, 40 percent women in the rabbinical school. But our commitment to addressing issues of gender and sexual identity goes beyond the numbers. The Jewish Women’s Foundation of New York has funded a project by Dr. Shira D. Epstein (see page 2) of the Davidson School of Jewish Education that is charged with naming the issues and initiating systemic change in the field of Jewish education by focusing Jewish educators on critical, unaddressed needs pertaining to gender.

Aaron Panken: With respect to students, HUC has admitted about ten percent more females than males in the last decade. Gender balance has varied over the past few years, but appears to be leveling off at 55:45 now. We expect that future classes will be more balanced genderwise. Of 20 new emerging scholars appointed to the faculty within the past fourteen years, half have been women. Our current chair, Barbara Friedman, is the first woman chair in the history of the board of governors of HUC-JIR. And our president, Rabbi David Ellenson, has inducted more than a dozen leading women philanthropists onto the board of governors during his tenure.

Amber Powers: RRC has about fifteen percent more female students than we had ten years ago, five percent more female faculty, 25 percent more women within the administration, and our board has added ten percent more women.

Sara Zacharia: Our rabbinical program at Hebrew College has only been in existence for six years, and our classes have maintained close to 50:50 men to women.

Aaron Alexander: The Ziegler School has remained mostly steady at about 60 percent men and 40 percent women since it began as a full ordination program. Of course fluctuation occurs; some years we begin with a class that is heavily female, and some years heavily male. Overall though, the trend has been that there is no trend; the numbers tend to even out.

Gottesman: Do you recruit specifically for a more balanced ratio in terms of students, faculty, and administration?

Powers: A diverse student body and faculty have enhanced our educational experience.  RRC is fully committed to admitting the best candidates to our rabbinic program and we would not compromise our standards by admitting less-qualified male applicants in order to create more gender balance. And it would not serve the Jewish people to turn away well-qualified female applicants. We’ve benefited greatly in all of our recruitment efforts from our long-standing reputation as a fully welcoming environment for all Jews committed to egalitarianism and feminism.

Schwartz: We at JTS do actively recruit women and we hope to increase the numbers of women in our rabbinical school. We would not, however, adopt a quota system.

Panken: At HUC we’re opposed to a quota system; it would imply sacrificing quality students for specific gender counts. As for the administration and faculty, we likewise recruit scholars and leaders who are at the top of their fields, and we work to welcome women who might serve as important female role models to our students, the Reform movement, and the Jewish community at large.

Alexander: We now live in a time in Jewish history that demands powerful, bright, articulate, and passionate Jewish religious leaders. Our goal has always been to admit the most qualified candidates.

Zacharia: Our students are self-selecting and we do not recruit with gender in mind. Rather, we focus on candidates who are passionate about our program, who identify themselves as, and want to serve the Jewish community through, a pluralistic and transdenominational lens. We also have included transgender students in the mix. So we no longer look at gender through a binary breakdown; this, in fact, begins to make “gender” less important.

Gottesman: Danny Boyarin has said the most important change in the last 100 years is that men and women are studying together. How has this affected either admissions to your school or the school itself?

Alexander: We recently brought together the entire student body at the Ziegler School to talk about that question and a similar question — what it means for rabbis-in-training to engage in the study of machloket, disagreement, and how that impacts the way in which we speak to people once we leave our seminaries. What we’ve noticed is that it means something very different for men and women. Men and women argue, for the sake of God, differently; they listen and speak to each other in different ways, and they handle themselves differently when their adrenaline starts to kick in. Men are more comfortable with argument for the sake of argument — meaning, sitting down with the talmudic text and saying: it’s not my job to necessarily prove that I’m right, but it’s my job to prove that your argument is wrong. And that often means not really listening to the other side. Women are more interested in the process and the discussion and less so in how the argument concluded. As a rabbinical school, we’d like people to be clearer about what the process of studying machloket can do for rabbis in the Jewish world.

Zacharia: It doesn’t impact admissions decisions, but rather decisions about curriculum and programming. When students choose their chevrutah, sometimes men are studying with men and women are studying with women, or it’s all mixed up. Those study pairs become extremely close throughout rabbinical school. We ask our students to change it up, to not choose one person to study with for five years because that wouldn’t take advantage of a variety of student learning styles. The beit midrash is the center of our program, so students are in the mode of machloket a minimum of two hours daily.

Schwartz: JTS has changed pretty radically since 1985 when the first woman was ordained.  We used to run on a hierarchical, European graduate school model; we’re less hierarchical now, more responsive to student needs. It’s a warmer place. Is the admission of women to the rabbinical school responsible for that change? I think it probably had a major role in shifting the institutional culture. Boyarin is absolutely right that a major change in Judaism, as it’s practiced, is the fact that men and women study together. This is true across the board, and also increasingly within the more liberal elements of Orthodoxy. Keeping women out of the central ritual of rabbinic and Jewish life — of rabbinic Judaism, which is engagement with God through the study of sacred texts — is history. What effect will this have? We don’t yet know.

Panken: Sally Priesand, the first female rabbi ordained at HUC, acknowledged that the contemporary model of Jewish leadership has moved away from hierarchical leadership to empowering leadership. We must be careful not to be overly essentialist in our approach to the construction of gender. And yet we’ve seen ramifications of the models of leadership that women have put forth over the past few decades. For example, female scholars who teach in rabbinical seminaries demonstrate that the control of knowledge, the dissemination of knowledge, is not only a male thing. Women can and should be full partners in the creation and dissemination of knowledge. And women have taught us new ways of reading text, new lenses through which we can understand our inherited tradition.

Gottesman: At a recent conference on indepen dent minyanim, the following statistic emerged: While women outnumber men in terms of participation, men outnumber women in leader ship roles. Do you think that men have to be privileged — that is, leaders with special access — in order to remain part of the community?

Panken: No. And yet we should re-examine the various sorts of leadership roles available to men in the community and assess how changes in our communities are impacting leadership styles. Women have made enormous progress in developing thoughtful models of leadership for this changed world. Men need to begin to thoughtfully craft new answers that turn away from traditional leadership roles that may not work as well.

Alexander: We don’t believe men need to be privileged or have access to all the traditional power roles in the community. We do need our leadership to think creatively about religious programming so that it not only meets the needs of men and women, but also the elderly, singles, widows and widowers, to name a few. If we give voice and ownership on issues that matter, leadership roles will follow suit.

Powers: There is a growing crisis in progressive Jewish life concerning the engagement of boys and men. Many liberal and non-denominational Jewish organizations are struggling to recruit male candidates for a wide range of volunteer and paid roles — staff for camps and Hillel, religious school teachers, congregational lay leaders, post-college internship and fellowship programs. Most of our rabbinical students are products of those environments. We need to do more to actively engage boys and men, which will then increase the number of male candidates for the progressive rabbinate and other Jewish professional roles.

Zacharia: Men have had access to these roles throughout history. We must think broadly about sharing the vision of Jewish community, and inviting and encouraging both men and women to enter community through their leadership and participatory roles. I pray that one day the gender of the rabbi or lay leader does not matter — that all that matters is who is best suited for the particular position.

The first woman ordained as a rabbi was Regina Joseph in Germany in 1935. Nearly 40 years passed until the Reform movement ordained Sally Priesand; the Reconstructionist movement ordained its first female rabbi in 1974; the Conservative movement in 1985. This edited Roundtable asked the admissions directors of non-Orthodox rabbinical schools about the gender of their applicant pool, about how women and men studying together influence the culture of the schools and rabbinic training; we spoke, hypothetically, about the future.

The admissions directors were generally sanguine about the future, yet they are insiders representing their schools. As an institutional outsider, I wonder what trajectory we, the Jewish people, are on. For example, all five directors were dismissive of “quotas” for male and female rabbinical students. I nevertheless ask: For clal Yisrael, should we work to ensure that both men and women are drawn to the rabbinate? Will the gender spectrum of rabbis — male, female, and transgendered — change how we think about the gender(s) of God? I also want to consider what Judaism would look like if the rabbinate were to become a “women’s profession.” After all, it was a men’s profession for thousands of years — and the Judaism we practice is, in part, a result of that leadership. Stay tuned.

—Sally Gottesman

The issue of how to approach pubescent teen boys enthralled by sex remains a challenging one for educators. There are certain fixed realities to contend with: hormones, the developmental transition away from parents toward peers, sensation-seeking consistent with the appeal of novel experience and the belief that pushing the envelope is an adolescent birthright. In addition there may be drugs, alcohol, and/or mood disorders fueling sexual fantasy and behavior. Importantly, there is also the sociocultural context at work; it drives sexual ambitions in both conscious and unconscious ways toward, not away from, risktaking. And it bathes both sexes in an increasingly sexually explicit and ubiquitous universe.

Boys also grow up with a certain entitlement to sexual discovery, learned from social scripts that define them as the aggressors and facilitate the idea that they are largely controlled by their biological sex drives. They are possessors of a wondrous organ with, arguably, a life of its own, a personality of its own, often a name of its own. While implied in this brief description that scripts differ by gender and are complex, I wouldn’t want to leave the impression that girls’ scripts today are largely defined by limiting functions in heterosexual practice. Although framing sexual experience and boundary setting remain strong script elements for girls, sexual thinking and the imprint of feminism in the last 30 years has sponsored sexual expectation, expression, and entitlement for girls too, in an unprecedentedly democratic and public way.

Given the overwhelming reinforcing effect of all these factors, the impulse of most educators has been to stick to biology and tell a cautionary tale about pregnancy and disease or to take a moral approach to sex education. Fewer than 10 percent of American students receive a comprehensive sex education (SIECUS). Most are still left to their own educational inclinations from X-rated movies on one extreme to abstinence-oriented programs on the other and whatever other spam or detritus they can sift through.

A cornerstone of good sex education is to avoid a fear-based curriculum or tone. If we approached driver education or sports the way we approach sex, no one would drive or pursue athletics. It’s easy for teens to see the social control agenda in such approaches. The value of adults being able to speak openly, directly, and positively about sex, plays an enormous role in modeling and training adolescents’ approaches toward sexual discovery. 

We need a partnership between educational settings (both formal and informal) and parents to mesmerize teens with talk and reflection about sex rather than reflexive, experimentally driven sexual behavior. Parents should think about what and how they want to convey to their adolescents a sex ethic, Jewish or otherwise. Research indicates that parents who discuss sex with their teens, who are relaxed and comfortable in conversation, believe their kids lack knowledge and want to train them to think maturely and focus on school.

Two additional points need to be made about teaching sexuality. The “hidden curriculum” here is the idea that it is the brain, not the penis, which is the central sexual organ. It mediates, reflects, sifts, and considers its options through the prism of ethics, goals, values, opportunities, and so on. It responds and acts through education and cognitive rehearsal, which is incompatible with automatic and impulsive approaches to sex. When we talk about sex, intimacy, and relationships, we reveal and define ourselves, and in so doing, I think, we can help adolescent boys and girls develop a responsive and responsible sexual and relational self. This area demands extensive curricular elaboration and also requires psychological sophistication and, simply, courage. The yardstick of the parent, genuinely conveyed, is never lost.

After one spends time in Washington D.C. and Philadelphia, the sight of homeless people in American cities becomes normal, just one of the more unpleasant aspects of urban life. Seeing people sleeping in parks and on benches becomes an ordinary sight, one that doesn’t seem disturbing or unusual. However, as Jews and as human beings, we have a responsibility to see the humanity in every single person and to take action to improve the lives of other people. We are all created in the image of God, and therefore, no one should have to sleep outside on a cold evening or go without food for an entire day. There are two approaches we should take to lessen the severity of homelessness: do small acts of kindness and better utilize our government to solve problems.

All human beings have pride and have some sense of self-value. However, when one is forced to beg for food and to live on the street, these feelings are weakened. When I walk by a homeless person in the street, it is important to keep that person’s humanity and sense of self in mind. If I treat that person with the respect and the dignity that I, myself, would like to be treated with, I know I can increase the possibility of having a positive impact on that person’s life. Simply smiling and saying hello can be a great thing for a homeless person to hear. When combining these acts of common courtesy with a small donation, such as some food or clothing, I can make an individual’s life just a bit better. Sometimes, a few encouraging words or a few shirts and pairs of socks help a homeless person survive a little longer.

As a person living comfortably within a stable family, I feel responsible to help a person who does not have what I have, whose life is a struggle. Americans often have the mindset that we don’t give up anything we own, and that each man should fend for himself. Some people hold onto their wealth, feeling that the less fortunate can improve their own lives; they don’t feel an obligation toward the lives of people who had the misfortune of being born into poverty. But I know many people are given comfortable lives by circumstance, by being born into affluent families.

In the book of Genesis we are told that we are all created in the image of God, but these words only have meaning if we act on them. By helping the homeless one person at a time, we are affirming our belief in the divinity of each human and acting more divine ourselves.

Lobbyists for large oil corporations and healthcare insurance companies tend to reinforce the way our government ignores America’s poor. There are no paid lobbyists for homeless people; we must be their advocates. The problem of homelessness is important for everyone, because we, too, might be but one bad decision or one unlucky break away from being homeless ourselves. It is the responsibility of every single person living a comfortable life to try to make the lives of the less fortunate comfortable as well. This is our responsibility as Jews and as human beings.