What Do We Give Our Children?

I am a young father now, watching my own children grow up and I find myself asking what it is, exactly, that I hope to pass on.

The obvious answers present themselves readily enough: a Jewish identity, a connection to Israel, a respect for history, a loyalty to family, perhaps a handful of rituals sturdy enough to survive adolescence and indifference. These are worthy inheritances. But the older I get, the less convinced I am that any of them, by themselves, are sufficient.

Parenthood has a way of exposing the limits of instruction. Children do not necessarily inherit what we tell them to value. They inherit what they see us value. They notice which subjects animate us, which books remain open on the table, which questions we pursue after everyone else has moved on. Long before they understand our ideas, they absorb our habits of mind.

Lately, I have found myself paying closer attention to my own parents.

They are aging New York Jews, raised in Flatbush and Midwood, in neighborhoods shaped by the children of immigrants and survivors. Their conversations can move, with little warning, from Israeli politics to Impressionism, from a Yiddish expression to a Supreme Court decision, from the failures of a president to the origins of a family custom no one quite remembers correctly.

Disagreement is not an interruption to the conversation. It is the conversation.

Growing up, I assumed this was simply how families interacted. I did not understand that I was witnessing a particular kind of inheritance: a confidence that history matters, that ideas deserve scrutiny, that no subject is too settled to be reopened and no argument worth having should be abandoned merely because it has become uncomfortable.

My parents’ generation read widely and argued instinctively. They came of age in a culture that treated intellectual seriousness not as an affectation but as a responsibility. Whether they ultimately embraced or rejected the institutions that shaped them was almost beside the point. Those institutions had given them a disposition: question what you are told, learn enough to challenge it intelligently, and remain suspicious of anyone who claims that a difficult issue has an easy answer.

Their generation also witnessed Israel during one of the most extraordinary periods in Jewish history. They lived through the fear surrounding its early wars and the exhilaration that followed victories few believed possible. They watched a fragile state absorb refugees from across the world, revive an ancient language, build universities and cities and persuade a people emerging from catastrophe that Jewish sovereignty was not a temporary historical accident.

Their attachment to Israel was not constructed by a communications strategy. It was forged through history, danger, sacrifice and the sense that they were participants, however distant, in the unfolding of an improbable national story.

That generation is now in its 70s and 80s. As it fades, something deeper than nostalgia risks disappearing with it.

Long before Oct. 7, younger American Jews were becoming increasingly detached from both Israel and Jewish life. Fewer than half of Jews between the ages of 18 and 29 reported feeling emotionally attached to Israel, compared with roughly two-thirds of Jews over 65. Barely one-third said that being Jewish was very important in their lives. Even Holocaust remembrance, once the central pillar of postwar Jewish identity, has become less defining for younger Jews.

These numbers are often treated as evidence of ideological estrangement. Perhaps they point to something more basic. The greatest threat to Jewish continuity may not be disagreement, skepticism or even anger. It may be the growing conviction that the entire conversation is not worth entering.

Communities can withstand criticism. They can survive rebellion. What they struggle to survive is indifference.

Oct. 7 interrupted that indifference for many young Jews. Antisemitism forced thousands to confront an identity they had treated as incidental, private or largely inherited. Some have called this renewed engagement “the surge.” Synagogues filled. Jewish organizations saw new interest. Young people who had spent years avoiding conversations about Israel suddenly found themselves thrust into debates over its legitimacy, often before they had ever seriously grappled with the country’s history, complexities and contradictions.

But alarm is not the same as attachment, and attachment is not the same as intellectual engagement. A singular rally-around-the-flag moment produced by collective trauma cannot sustain a civilization. Identity rooted primarily in fear will eventually exhaust itself. If the only time young Jews are asked to care about Judaism is when Jews are threatened, we should not be surprised when they begin to associate Jewish life with dread, inconvenience or worse.

What, then, might endure after the urgency recedes, when the Oct. 7 Jews begin their disassociation once more?

I keep returning to my parents’ dinner table.

The inheritance I received there was not a fixed theology. It was not a political program. It was not even a particular understanding of Zionism. It was the habit of treating ideas as things to be tested rather than merely repeated.

That habit begins with reading seriously.

When I was a teenager, my parents gave me a subscription to The New York Times. I have paid for journalism ever since, not because I believe every article is correct, but because serious ideas require serious institutions: editors, fact-checkers, writers accountable for their claims and readers willing to distinguish reporting from rumor.

Today, nearly nine-in-10 Americans under 30 do not pay for their news. Information arrives constantly, but rarely with context. Expertise is treated as elitism, confidence is confused with knowledge and the algorithm rewards the opinion most likely to provoke an immediate, often hostile response. The result is not simply that young people know less. It is that many have lost the patience required to decide what is worth knowing.

Parents can begin to counter this in modest ways. They can put serious journalism in front of their children. They can discuss an article over dinner. They can model the humility of changing their minds when confronted with better evidence. Intellectual curiosity, like an accent, is often acquired simply by living among people who possess it.

Jewish philanthropy could encourage the same habit at scale. Subsidizing access to trusted journalism and serious intellectual publications for young adults is not a glamorous investment, but it may be a more durable one than endlessly lamenting that the next generation no longer reads or holding onto a phony vision of “free Day School for all.” Teaching people how to think requires giving them something worth thinking about.

It also requires a more honest relationship with Israel than many young Jews have been offered.

Some grew up believing that loving Israel meant defending every decision made by its government. Others concluded that disagreement with Israeli policy required distance from the country itself. Both positions substitute loyalty tests for thought.

Zionism was never intellectually tidy. David Ben-Gurion and Ze’ev Jabotinsky argued over borders, economics, military strategy and the nature of the state they hoped to create. Labor Zionists, Revisionists, religious nationalists and secular socialists did not arrive at Israel through consensus. The country was hammered into existence through arguments that were sometimes bitter because the questions were understood to matter.

If we want younger Jews to develop a serious relationship with Israel, we should trust them with that complexity. We should invite them to debate settlements, judicial reform, minority rights, the occupation, military service, religious power and the country’s extraordinary scientific and cultural achievements. We should not ask them to choose between affection and criticism. Mature patriotism requires both.

This has implications for philanthropy as well.

American Jewish giving has helped build Israeli hospitals, universities and cultural institutions, achievements worthy of enormous pride. But the health of a society depends on more than the institutions whose names can be carved into stone. It also depends on courts, journalists, civic educators, watchdog organizations and the less visible work of building trust between communities that increasingly struggle to imagine a shared future.

Israel today is engaged in an argument over what kind of country it will become: democratic and Jewish, religious and secular, secure and humane, unified enough to function but pluralistic enough to remain free. Investing in the institutions that allow that argument to continue peacefully is not a distraction from supporting Israel. It is one of the most meaningful ways to support it.

A strong Israel and a healthy Israeli democracy are not rival causes. They are the same cause.

There is, of course, nothing new about the Jewish reverence for argument. The Talmud preserved the disagreements between Beit Hillel and Beit Shammai not because both schools could be correct in practice, but because a rejected opinion could still contain wisdom. Minority views were recorded long after the legal question had been decided. The tradition understood that remembering why someone lost an argument could be almost as valuable as remembering who won it.

This was more than intellectual courtesy. It reflected a recognition that certainty is dangerous when it becomes too comfortable. A tradition that preserves only its conclusions eventually forgets how those conclusions were reached.

The question facing Jewish parents and institutions is therefore not simply how to make Jewish identity feel more urgent. Oct. 7 has already done that, at terrible cost. The harder question is how to make Jewish life feel intellectually alive once the emergency fades.

My greatest concern is not that my children will become less religious than earlier generations. I am not particularly religious myself. It is that they will inherit a world in which curiosity has been replaced by performance, argument by denunciation and knowledge by the endless recirculation of whatever claim happens to flatter one’s existing beliefs.

A civilization can survive theological disagreement. It has a harder time surviving intellectual laziness.

When I listen to my parents argue about history, literature, politics, Judaism and Israel, I now understand that they are doing more than exchanging opinions. They are demonstrating a way of belonging. They assume that the Jewish story is important enough to interrogate, that Israel is important enough to criticize and defend, and that disagreement is not evidence of communal failure but of communal vitality.

That may also be the answer to the question Jewish philanthropy has been circling for years: how to build a meaningful identity for a generation that is drifting, and how to keep the Jews awakened by Oct. 7 engaged after the shock subsides.

Israel trips, campus programs, research studies and advocacy campaigns all have their place. But they often attempt to solve the problem from the outside in. Curiosity cannot be installed through a single experience. It must be modeled by adults, cultivated by institutions and rewarded by a community secure enough to tolerate difficult conclusions.

Young Jews who watch American philanthropy invest in the actual health of Israeli democracy, including its free press, civic institutions, human rights organizations and efforts to strengthen social cohesion, may find that commitment more compelling than another campaign telling them what to believe. They may see that the Jewish future is not a finished product they are being asked to defend, but an unfinished argument they are being invited to join.

One day, my children will forget most of what I tell them. They will remember instead what they watched: whether their father read while drinking his morning coffee, whether he listened when he disagreed, whether he treated history as a source of inquiry rather than ammunition.

What my parents passed on to me was not a catechism but a disposition. They taught me, mostly without intending to, that ideas are meant to be examined, that traditions become stronger when they are questioned honestly and that loving Judaism or Israel does not require insulating either from criticism. It requires believing they are strong enough to withstand it.

That, more than any particular answer I could give my children, is the inheritance I hope to leave them: the conviction that the questions are worth keeping.

Coby Schoffman is a Los Angeles–based serial social entrepreneur and the founder of The Nation Foundation (TNF), which operates project zones across East Africa. Schoffman holds an MSc in Transnational Security from New York University and a BA in Counterterrorism and Conflict Resolution from Reichman University. The views expressed are his own and do not reflect those of any affiliated organization