Jewish Lives—A Long Look at Unfolding Stories

This first chapter introduces life course study, the theoretical framework for our work, alongside the various inspirations that led to the launch of this project. We make explicit what life course studies bring into view and what kinds of planned and unplanned questions this framework has allowed us to explore. We introduce our sample; a cohort that includes more than 1000 students and their parents from Jewish secondary schools in London and Manchester, alongside a comparison group of 50 families whose children did not attend a Jewish secondary school. We describe our data-gathering methodologies, including surveys of the entire sample and biennial interviews with 120 families whose members we have interviewed five times over ten years. We frame the study within the period in the UK during which the student sample was growing up, as well as giving some historical context about faith schooling, and specifically Jewish schooling in the UK. Finally, we provide an orientation to the chapters that follow.