My elementary school, Solomon Schechter Day School of Queens, is turning Orthodox. It will become Queens Hebrew Academy. Apparently, an influx of Orthodox Bukharian Jews boosted Schechter’s numbers but changed its worldview.

American Jewry is diversifying demographically. It’s no longer the overwhelmingly Democratic and Eastern European community of my youth. Just look how many Queens Jews voted for Donald Trump.

Solomon Schechter’s transformation after 68 years tells an ideological tale, too. It’s a story of the rise — and now fall — of a school, and school network, that embodied the peoplehood-centered, deeply Zionist, patriotic and achievement-oriented Judaism that made American Jewry great. Schechter offered an extraordinary education, raising proud Jews, proud Americans, proud Zionists — and proud Queens kids, too.

America’s network of Conservative Jewish day schools honored the Jewish Theological Seminary’s Romanian-born second president, Rabbi Solomon Schechter (1847-1915). He believed that collectively “committed,” literate Jews, whom he called “Catholic Israel,” could gradually update Jewish law through academically rigorous rabbinic processes. But Schechter warned that embracing “the spirit” of the tradition without “the letter” of the law created “nude souls” because Judaism without the Torah “is absolutely incompatible.”

This anchored juggling act inspired Jews in Queens and Philadelphia in 1956 to name the first Conservative Jewish day schools after him. New York Jewry then was all about living the Enlightenment dream, American-style: Be a normal New Yorker on the street, and a Jew at home. By 1993, over 50 Solomon Schechter Schools steeped 17,500 young Americans in Jewish tradition too.

Last year, while researching my new book, “To Resist the Academic Intifada: Letters to My........

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