Last week in the New York Review of Books, Peter Beinart indicted mainstream American Jewish organizations by asserting that “for several decades, the Jewish establishment has asked American Jews to check their liberalism at Zionism’s door, and now, to their horror, they are finding that many young Jews have checked their Zionism at the door.”
Beinart’s essay is informed in part by the numerous studies over the past decade that indicate that younger non-Orthodox Jews are more alienated from and care less about Israel than their elders.
In writing about the difficult position that liberalism currently faces with regard to Israel’s policies, Beinart places the blame at the doorsteps of Jewish organizations. Among the flood of responses to Beinart’s thesis,
Steven M. Cohen argues that rather than politics, the main factor in the alienation statistics is intermarriage and the “departure from all manner of Jewish ethnic ‘groupiness,’ of which Israel attachment is a part.”
With all the discussion of who or what is to blame for the alienation that younger American Jews are feeling from Israel, liberal and modern-Orthodox Jewish day schools have been influenced by the impact of this alarming distance young Jews feel. This has led day schools to alter the thrust of their Israel education in significant ways and against their strengths as educational institutions.
In a recent study, two Hebrew University senior researchers suggest that day schools have shifted from a paradigm of instruction to one of enculturation. Today, we see day schools cultivating attitudes and commitments to Israel, rather than focusing on academic content. Traditionally, this type of informal and experiential education has resided in summer camps and informal programs, not schools.
A second trend that the researchers describe is the move by Jewish day high schools toward Israel advocacy programs. Again, this shift is away from acquiring knowledge and skills that define education in an instructional setting. What has led to this shift, according to the researchers, is a lack of confidence among educators and day school stakeholders, including parents, that children have firm commitments to Israel.
Much of the advocacy curricula appear intended to convince day school students themselves of Israel’s merits as much as they seek to convince those outside the community.
These trends are troubling. First, the educational strength of day schools is in the cumulative effect on students who have the opportunity to wrestle with great Jewish ideas, texts and concepts. Second, when Israel education becomes about advocacy and attitudes rather than a broad range of learning related to history, ideas, language and culture, students lose the valuable skills of envisioning their future relationship with Israel in ways that do not exist today.
Jewish day schools face a difficult task when it comes to Israel education. While it seems that a focus on cultivating positive attitudes may be called for given the relationship younger Jews have to Israel, such an approach creates a lowest common denominator effect; the goal becomes to make students feel good about Israel and not on what students learn and understand about it.
Positives attitudes about Israel are certainly important, but Israel education in Jewish day schools can and should be about much more. We owe it to our students.
Rabbi Mitchel Malkus is head of school at the Rabbi Jacob Pressman Academy of Temple Beth Am and will be a delegate to the upcoming World Zionist Congress.
