SAN DIEGO, CA (special) -- How many times have you heard it said, perhaps by a relative, that Latinos and other immigrant groups ought to imitate the Jewish immigrants who came to America in the early part of the 20th century, and learn English, excel at school, and become Americanized? 

Well, that argument is just too smug, and does nothing to build good relationships between Jews and Latinos, according to Rabbi Gary Greenebaum, Los Angeles regional director of the American Jewish Committee.

The rabbi spoke at the AJC's offices in the La Jolla section of San Diego last Thursday as part of the Agency for Jewish Education's two-week long Festival of Jewish Learning.

While it's true that Jews "assimilated into the American society faster and better and stronger than any other recognizable group that came to our shores," Jews paid a big price for that success, according to Greenebaum.

"We are bereft of what we left behind at Ellis Island, or wherever we came," the rabbi/ communal leader told approximately two dozen attendees at a "lunch and learn" session. "Now we have all kinds of groups at (United Jewish) Federations trying to deal with Jewish identity, Jewish knowledge and Jewish continuity."

Jews have romanticized their assimilation process, Greenebaum continued. True, "Jews went to college two or three generations before almost any other immigrant group....but we also did something else: we threw the 13-, 14-, 15-year-old grandparents of ours into public schools to sink or swim. We all have the great stories of our relatives who swam. But, folks, back there in the immigrant story are a lot of folks who sank. There was a lot of suicide, a lot of abandonment of families, a lot of negative stuff that went on..."

Greenebaum also said that immigrant Jews really had nothing to draw them back to Eastern Europe. "There was no going back to czarist Russia; there was no going back to the pogroms," he said.

"There was nothing in Russian culture-- nothing in that type of society -- that we really wanted to preserve because it was oppressive. It was negative. It was pretty bleak and miserable, and it was a pretty horrible freighter ride across so the Atlantic."

Except for those Jews who made enough money to travel home as tourists, the immigrants were "cut off" from their previous culture, Greenebaum said. 

In contrast, today, if a Mexican immigrant "wants to go visit the family back in Mexico, you hop in the car; you jump on a plane. Or if you want to visit in another way, you use e-mail.

"For someone to want to hang onto their primary language and their primary culture, I don't condemn anyone for it," the rabbi said. "If we had held on a little more strongly we wouldn't be spending the percentage of Federation money on trying to create back for ourselves what we happily gave up. It is a complicated issue."

Beyond that, he said, it is stereotypical to say that Mexican immigrants don't want to learn English. "The fact is that the ESL classes--the adult English classes that are taught at high schools at night all over the state -- are jammed with people from Spanish-speaking countries. They can't learn fast enough. They know that if they are going to survive in this society that they are going to have to learn English."

* * *

Generally, American Jews credit the public school system for helping them in the transition from being East Europeans to Americans. There's a tendency to think that if the schools were good for our grandparents and great-grandparents, they also ought to be good for the Latino immigrants of today.

The rabbi characterized the position of some Jews who "care about public education" as follows: "We wouldn't exactly put our kids in it right now, not today, but we believe in it because it 'Americanizes.' We are already Americanized so we don't need public education, but you guys who are mostly speaking Spanish, you need to be Americanized."

He said a "Latino parent who can only afford public education is not really interested in your or me pontificating on great concepts of public education while their child is being ruined for life because of the lack of equality in the public schools. 

"San Diego is better off than Los Angeles right now, but I would beg, borrow or steal if I had a child who was 5-6 years old right now, to either move to another community or get my child out of public school."

Numerous political candidates have urged the establishment of a voucher system in which parents could choose to use a certain amount of public funds to educate their children in private schools. 

Greenebaum said he strongly opposes this idea. One reason, he said, is the traditional Jewish communal concern that such a plan would involve public financial support for religious schools, and thereby violate the concept of separation of church and state.

"Number two, it is so anti-poor," he said. "It is the most grossly anti poor thing I know of practically in my lifetime. And it is covered over with all kinds of lovely rhetoric but the fact is that the poorest families are going to be the ones left in public schools, which will be totally devoid of any kind of funding or facilities or upkeep or anything else. It will be one of the great shandas (shames) of American public life to see what the public schools will become, and everybody who can, will run away.

"And we then will have a bunch of well-educated Jews, and well-educated mainline Protestant kids who are going to academies and schools, and you are going to end up with a bunch of kids, millions of kids, being poorly educated in religious and fundamentalist schools teaching creationism and all kinds of stuff, because they can, and it is going to go on and on. To me it is the final separation of society by class and there will be no going back."

However, he said, "if what vouchers is, is the only alternative to what we have now.... I don't know. What I say in the face of vouchers is that we need more ideas. There has got to be a better way than really dismantling the whole system across the country."