Athens, Jerusalem, and Manhattan

What does Athens have to do with Jerusalem? Or the Academy with the Church? Or heretics with Christians?” These questions, posed in his On the Prescription of Heretics, are among the most famous utterances of Tertullian, the North African Church Father of the second and early third centuries. Writing in Latin under the Roman Empire, he strongly favored faith over reason and was thus on the side of Jerusalem, believing that wisdom à la grecque gave rise to heresy.

Call me a heretic. If you want to see what Athens has to do with Jerusalem, and with Rome, check out Emet Classical Academy, a Jewish school in Manhattan for grades six to twelve that the Tikvah Fund launched on December 19. Emet—that’s Hebrew for “Truth”—is now accepting applications from rising sixth-graders for the 2024–25 academic year. According to its website, the school is “committed to the pursuit of excellence in every academic and cultural field, the formation of confident Jews and civic-minded Americans, and the preservation of the best of Western civilization.” Every student will study Hebrew, Greek, and Latin; master the trivium (grammar, logic, and rhetoric) as well as advanced science and mathematics; learn to be a responsible American engaged with Israel and Judaism; and use New York as a classroom for “the riches of high culture—art, poetry, music, and architecture.”

This sounds wonderful. It is high time that culturally conservative Jews do what culturally conservative Christians and non-believers have been doing in droves for some years, namely founding and fostering K–12 schools, most of them charter schools, that pay attention to fundamentals, care about truth and beauty, aim to produce upstanding citizens, and do not bow to the DEI deities.

Recent months have revealed to the public on a daily basis just how serious the troubles are at America’s elite universities. Exhibit A is Harvard—motto: Veritas, Latin for “Truth”—where the embarrassing leadership (now, of course, in flux) has been flying its true colors: anti-Semitism (even well before October 7) and a selective understanding of free speech. Meanwhile, prestigious institutions of higher education across the country have been dumbing down the curriculum, including in departments devoted to the Greek and Latin classics. Remarkably, however, “classical academies” are at the very same time on a meteoric rise. Why not have some that teach Maimonides alongside Plato and Seneca?

Three years ago, Bari Weiss tweeted, “If @tikvahfund started a school with a St. John’s style curriculum in NY or LA I think they could charge more than a Dalton or a Harvard-Westlake and still be massively oversubscribed.” In fact, Emet will cost less than Dalton (which I attended for thirteen years) or Harvard-Westlake: $36,000 (with financial aid and merit scholarships available) rather than (for 2023–24) Dalton’s $61,120 and Harvard-Westlake’s $46,900. If I were a Jew living in New York with a child of the right age, I would have submitted an “admissions inquiry” on the spot.

There has been a great deal of handwringing over the intellectual rot at the heart of Dalton, Harvard-Westlake, and many other secular and, increasingly, also religious private schools (Catholic, Episcopalian, and Jewish), especially in New York but also beyond. At the same time, all too many people pretend to celebrate the rot. For a Jewish perspective on the matter, read a 2022 article in SAPIR by Andrew Gutmann, a prominent figure in the resistance. In 2021, he pulled his daughter from Brearley, one of New York’s fanciest private girls’ schools, moved with his family to Florida, and is now running for Congress in the 22nd District. I asked Gutmann whether the family would have stayed if Emet had been around a few years earlier. His answer, which he has kindly allowed me to share: “I would definitely have seriously considered it for my daughter.”

It is understandable that Emet, as it gets off the ground, is admitting only Jewish students (though of any denomination and background). But perhaps down the line it will open its doors to everyone, just as New York’s Catholic schools “welcome children of all faiths.” In the meantime, someone might like to pick up on my idea (“Project Sefer”—that’s Hebrew for “Book”) to create what I call “secular American Yeshivas,” which would offer hungry students regardless of creed a cost-free program between high school and college that introduces them to textual tradition and good-faith argument.

I end with a textual curiosity. The word emet is composed of the first, middle, and last letters of the Hebrew alphabet: aleph, mem, and taw. According to midrash, this demonstrates that truth is all-encompassing: Jerusalem’s answer, as it were, to the alpha-to-omega gamut of Classical Athens. But if you know the most famous version of the story of the Golem, recorded by one of the Brothers Grimm (Jacob) in 1808 and associated especially with Prague, then you know that if that first thing, the primordial element aleph, is removed, the result is met—which means “death.”

Readers of First Things will recall Neuhaus’s Law: “Where orthodoxy is optional, orthodoxy will sooner or later be proscribed.” Let us pray that Emet Classical Academy, unlike so many educational institutions in this destructive age, holds to its cultural orthodoxy. May its commitment be unwavering to veritas—otherwise known as alētheia in Athens, emet in Jerusalem, and truth in Manhattan.

Joshua T. Katz is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. 

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Image by Jorge Láscar via Creative Commons. Image cropped.