On This Night: The Secret to Jewish Survival

I am the mother of three young children enrolled in a Jewish day school and the board chair of that same institution. It has been forging Jewish leaders in San Diego for 63 years. I have a cognitive science degree but chose to build a career around Israel and the Jewish people. As a day school alumna myself, I know what those classrooms produce. I am now watching this school, and schools like it around the country fight to survive, simply because we no longer prioritize them.

Every year at the Seder table, Jews around the world stop everything to teach our children. The entire Haggadah is an immersive education, with questions and answers, songs and stories, dipping and reclining, all designed so that the next generation doesn’t just hear our story, but lives it. Today, the very institutions that carry out that sacred mission every single day of the school year are struggling to survive. Millions of philanthropic dollars flow toward fighting the hatred of those who would erase us, rather than building the children who will outlast them. This Passover, while Jews in Israel run to bomb shelters and Jews in Europe and North America worry whether their synagogues, schools or community centers may be the next target of an antisemitic attack, the stakes for the next generation have never felt higher.

This is not a new observation. In May 2025, Dan Senor delivered the State of World Jewry address at the 92nd Street Y in New York. He expressed confidence in Israel’s resilience and cut directly to American Jewish life, stating that it “hangs in the balance.” Senor’s prescription was day schools, summer camps, adult education and gap years in Israel. “It is time,” he said, “for a recalibration in favor of our community’s needs.”

Bret Stephens made the same case even more forcefully in February 2026. The fight against antisemitism, he argued, consumes tens of millions of dollars annually in Jewish philanthropy and is “a well-meaning but mostly wasted effort.” What would he do differently? Build more Jewish day schools. “We have superb Jewish day schools,” he said, but we need many more of them.”

The data on what actually scaffolds Jewish identity is unambiguous. A Prizmah analysis of data from Dr. Eitan Hersh’s three-year study, conducted with College Pulse, found that 81% of Jewish day school alumni on college campuses say Jewish identity is very important to them, compared to just 35% of Jewish students who did not attend day school. Day school alumni are nearly four times more likely to feel a strong connection to Israel. Fifty-six percent feel very close to the Jewish community, compared to just 19% of their peers.

One need not agree with every word of either speech to recognize the core truth that they share. The strongest response to forces that want to diminish us is a generation that proudly knows exactly who it is.

Let me make this concrete. For generations, San Diego Hebrew Day School has been quietly doing what the Jewish community is now urgently debating. It produces Jewish leaders who are successful and proud, who love their Judaism, who lead with strong values, and who carry their identity as a source of strength, not as a burden. It is an institution that holds itself to the highest standards of both academic excellence and deep Torah learning that is rigorous, joyful and inclusive. Half its student body is Orthodox, half is not. It is a haven where religious and nonreligious Jews stand shoulder to shoulder, learn together and build a strong Jewish identity that is both equipped to absorb pressure and anchored in moral clarity. 

Its graduates reflect that foundation. Tova Winick, Class of 2013, stood in IDF uniform and briefed then-U.S. Secretary of Defense Mark Esper on the capabilities of Israel’s Iron Dome missile defense system, alongside Israel’s then Defense Minister Benny Gantz. Gantz later wrote, “Tova, I’m proud of you. You are a great example of Zionism.” Scores of other alumni have served as lone soldiers in the IDF. Others serve on the executive teams of national Israel advocacy organizations and major Jewish community foundations. Today, grandchildren of alumni are students at the same school their grandparents attended.

This is what Jewish day schools produce. Not just proud Jews. Jews who show up.

And yet, close to 80% of the school’s families require financial assistance. This is aid that school cannot afford to provide, and cannot afford to withhold. The demand is there. The funding is not.

This is not a San Diego problem, or a Southern California problem. It is a national one. What is missing is the communal will to treat Jewish education as the strategic priority it has always been.

Jewish identity does not fill itself in. It is taught deliberately and with intention, or it leaves a space for someone else to fill. Sheryl Saperia, a national security professional writing recently in eJewish Philanthropy, made the case that the same psychological and social forces that make people vulnerable to extremist recruitment are operating on Jewish students at universities today. These forces pull Jewish kids into ideological ecosystems that normalize antisemitism, antizionism and Jewish shame. When Jewish identity is thin, students become susceptible both to internalizing hostile narratives and to actively advancing them. We have seen this play out on elite campuses across the country since Oct. 7, 2023. Young Jews, untethered from their history and their people, are pressured to disavow Israel, hide their identity, and perform their own erasure as the price of belonging.

Strong Jewish education is the antidote. It prepares children to stand upright in the world. We have to choose actively, financially and urgently, to teach our children who they are before the world teaches them for us. This is a decision we are making right now, whether we intend to or not.

Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks said it best: “To defend a country you need an army. To defend a civilization you need education.”

We have the army.  Now we need to invest in the civilization that makes it worth defending.

The Seder has been telling us how for 3,000 years. This Passover, let’s finally listen.

Miriam Belsky currently serves as Western U.S. Regional Director of The Washington Institute for Near East Policy and is Chair of the Board for the San Diego Hebrew Day School.