This article examines how ultra-Orthodox Jewish elementary schools in America construct and maintain a distinct religious identity through the production of an all-encompassing communal worldview. The author argues that ultra-Orthodox schools model cultural engagement with secular American society by conceptually isolating secular education within a larger framework of religious study--one that extends beyond the classroom to include students' home lives. Schools thereby subvert students' potential existential experience of the world as secular (within which Judaism must be accommodated), into one that is dominated by a culture of religious study, within which secular society can (if necessary) be accommodated. (Contains 15 footnotes.)