The Jewish Family Who Changed American Schools hidden Jewish history Jewish resilience stories

Added: 2026-06-03

[00:00:00]In 1962, a group of parents in New York sued to remove prayer from public schools and spent the next decade receiving death threats for it. The case was called Engel vs. Vitale. Several of the families who brought it were Jewish.

[00:00:12]The lead plaintiff was a man named Steven Engel. They argued that state-sponsored prayer in public schools violated the constitutional separation of church and state. The Supreme Court agreed. School prayer was ruled unconstitutional. The reaction was immediate and violent. Their homes were vandalized. They received death threats by mail and by phone. One family's child was beaten at school. A congressman called the decision the most tragic in American history. Billy Graham said it was an insult to God. What almost nobody mentions is why these families brought the case in the first place. As Jewish children in American public schools, they had spent years sitting through Christian prayers that made clear every single morning that they were guests in someone else's country. They didn't bring the case to attack religion. They brought it because they were tired of being made to feel like outsiders in the nation their families had built. So, tell me, do you think they were right or did they go too far?