Calls to invest in Jewish education and pride-building are not misguided. Identity matters. Confidence matters. Knowledge matters. Bret Stephens is right to argue that a Jewish community grounded in pride will always be stronger than one defined solely by fear. But before we rush to expand Jewish schools, camps, and programs as the answer to rising antisemitism, we need to confront a more uncomfortable question: what kind of Jewish education are we actually producing—and to what end?

Education is only a defense when it is done right. Much of mainstream American Jewish education today is not.

Put plainly, the system is inadequate—putting it mildly. Not for lack of effort, but for lack of substance where it matters most. Some Jewish schools invest heavily in Mishnah and Gemara, yet graduate students with only the faintest grasp of Jewish or Israeli history. Others reduce Jewish life almost entirely to tikkun olam, tzedakah, and the occasional hamotzi. In both cases, students emerge earnest but unanchored.

They can analyze a passage of Talmud or recite values slogans, yet struggle to place the Israelites alongside the ancient Greeks in a serious historical framework. Where are the middle-school history classes that teach Jewish civilization with the same rigor, continuity, and legitimacy as Greece or Rome? They are rare—if they exist at all.

This imbalance has consequences. Jewish history becomes fragmented or sentimentalized. Zionism is hedged as “complex” rather than taught as a historical necessity born of exile, statelessness, and repeated failure of minority existence. Jewish peoplehood is softened into culture; sovereignty becomes morally suspect. Education that is uneasy about Jewish history cannot produce Jewish pride.

This detachment has surfaced repeatedly over the past year. At multiple conferences and professional gatherings of Jewish educators, a consistent sentiment has emerged: discomfort with the word Zionism itself; calls to stop “defending Israel” in favor of “holding space”; warnings that clarity is polarizing and certainty dangerous. Everything is framed as nuanced and complicated—as though avoiding moral and historical judgment will somehow lower the temperature.

At one such gathering, a prominent rabbi remarked that he would gladly give up Hebron if it meant no more Jewish soldiers would die. The significance of the statement lies not in Hebron itself, but in what it reveals. Hebron is rarely taught not because it is marginal, but because teaching it would require educators to confront Jewish historical continuity and Jewish claims to nationhood without apology. Instead, students are often offered a sanitized version of Jewish attachment, where the Kotel becomes the singular symbol of meaning, stripped of broader historical context. This is not nuance. It is avoidance.

Which brings us to a question Jewish institutions have avoided for too long: why do leaders of anti-Israel activism so often emerge from within the Jewish educational institutions those movements now challenge? Public reporting shows that this pattern is not isolated. Simone Zimmerman, a founder of IfNotNow, attended Jewish day schools and describes those experiences as formative. Rae Abileh, an early Code Pink leader, is a graduate of BBYO and the Diller Teen Fellows program. Sydney Levy, longtime advocacy director of Jewish Voice for Peace, is a graduate of Jewish school and earned both his BA and MA in Jewish history while living in Jerusalem – a background he has publicly discussed as shaping his politics. JVP has a list  These figures did not come from the margins of Jewish life; they passed through its core institutions—day schools, camps, youth movements, and leadership programs. They frequently invoke Jewish texts, values, and prayer in protests and teach-ins, deploying the tools of Jewish education to legitimize opposition to the Jewish collective itself. By any serious educational standard, this is a failing outcome. And yet it remains completely unexamined, swept under a rug and expected not to be discussed in polite company.

So when we call for “more Jewish education,” we must be honest. More of what? Expanding institutions without re-examining who staffs them and what worldview they transmit guarantees repetition of the same failures. Producing more education that is historically thin and ideologically timid will not yield stronger Jews—it will simply scale weakness.

I don’t mean to toot my own horn, but I’ve been warning about this for years: education without training doesn’t make Jews stronger – it leaves them exposed. Teaching identity without teaching how to defend it is not neutral.  It is negligent.  It is educational malpractice. What everyone is seeing for the past 2+ years didn’t come out of nowhere.  It is the result of wishing reality away for far too long.

And yet, there is an alternative model—one that has existed quietly and consistently for more than a decade. It is a single, integrated approach to Jewish education that refuses to separate identity from history, or pride from agency. In this model, advocacy is not an extracurricular activity but a core educational outcome, built into the curriculum from the start on the assumption that knowing who you are is meaningless if you are not prepared to defend it publicly, intelligently, and under pressure. What distinguishes this approach is clarity. It teaches Jewish and Israeli history without euphemism. It draws moral lines where history demands them. And it trains students to engage—to argue, to challenge falsehoods, and to withstand social and intellectual pressure. The goal is not to manufacture activists, but to produce Jews who are neither confused by antizionism nor intimidated by it.

This matters because the supposed choice between education and confronting antisemitism is a false one. Education done right is not an alternative to fighting Jew-hatred; it is what makes that fight possible.

Stephens argues that fighting antisemitism has become a mostly wasted effort. The frustration is understandable. Antisemitism is ancient, adaptive, and relentless. It will not be defeated. But the belief that it can be safely deprioritized—or wished away through inward focus—is a dangerous misreading of history.

Antizionism did not become normalized because it was persuasive. It became normalized because it went insufficiently challenged—especially by Jews who lacked historical clarity themselves. Ignorance created the opening; silence allowed the lie to harden. What followed was inevitable: an industry built on weaponizing Jewish confusion into moral indictment—against Israel, and ultimately against Jews.

Fighting antisemitism is not inspiring work. It is exhausting, repetitive, and often thankless. History doesn’t show that confronting antisemitism makes it disappear. What it does show—over and over again—is that when it’s left unanswered, it moves from being unacceptable to being tolerated, and from being tolerated to being justified, normalized and even celebrated.

Choosing not to fight Jew-hatred vigorously and consistently is not realism—it is surrender.

The choice, then, is not between identity and defense. It is identity with defense. Education must include history, moral clarity, and the skills to confront lies in real time. Pride without truth collapses. Education without conviction misleads. And defense without identity cannot endure.

If we want a different future, we must be willing to examine what already exists, what has failed, and what is quietly working.

Masha Merkulova is the Chief Zionist Officer of Club Z, an unapologetically proud Jewish Zionist space for teens to connect to each other, Jewish history, and Zionism. 

Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness was not meant to describe comfort, affirmation or emotional safety. It named a moral aspiration: the conditions under which human life can flourish. Yet, in an age increasingly organized around identity and belonging, we have lost sight of a more demanding requirement of flourishing: mattering.

In “The Mattering Instinct: How Our Deepest Longing Drives Us and Divides Us,” Harvard philosopher Rebecca Newberger Goldstein argues that human flourishing rests on two distinct “cornerstones of our humanness”: connectedness and the longing to matter. Connectedness — what we often call belonging — is “the feeling that there are particular others who are prepared to pay us special attention, whether we deserve it or not.” It is unconditional, relational and necessary. But it is not sufficient.

Mattering is different. It is the drive to justify one’s existence. “We long to demonstrate that the reason we subjectively feel that we matter is that we objectively do.” Where belonging answers the question, “Who will have me?” mattering asks, “Is my life worth living?”

“We don’t want to live if we become convinced that we don’t, can’t, will never truly matter,” Goldstein notes. “The paradigmatic words of the suicidally depressed are, ‘I don’t matter.’” It’s no accident, she says, “that the URL for the U.S. Hotline for Suicide Prevention is: youmatter.suicidepreventionlifeline.org.”

Goldstein, from a philosophical perspective, understands flourishing as bigger than happiness. Flourishing is a resistance to entropy — the psychological and moral forces that pull lives toward disorder and dissolution.

The late social psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, author of flow theory (and my mentor in graduate school), contrasted psychic entropy — the distractions, anxieties and drift toward mental disorganization and disorder — with the “optimal experience” of the “flow state,” which involves intense concentration, focus and effort.

Csikszentmihalyi found that the highest quality of life is achieved when a person stretches himself to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile over time. Belonging can support such projects, but it cannot replace them.

This distinction is even found in childhood. A recent paper from Harvard’s Center on the Developing Child emphasizes that children, too, need more than to feel like they belong. They need to feel that they matter — that their presence has value and their contributions make a difference.

Children as young as 18 months show a motivation to help others. And when adults acknowledge those efforts, children develop resilience, empathy and well-being. Connectedness tells a child, “You belong with us.” Mattering tells them, “What you do counts.”

Belonging is a fundamental human need. But on its own, it does not teach judgment. It does not teach responsibility. And it does not teach the link between action and self-worth that flourishing requires. When that developmental pathway is disrupted, when people grow up receiving affirmation without standards, the longing to matter can be directed toward destructive ends.

“Subjective meaningfulness is but a feeling,” Goldstein says, one that “can accommodate the worst of which we’re capable.” Even hatred and killing can become a mattering project — a fact that helps explain the appeal of extremist groups, cults and violent protest movements. They offer feelings of belonging and promise significance without the burden of truth.

Contemporary extremist networks and even recent college encampments, function in a similar way, supplying belonging, identity and a sense of righteousness, while encouraging a belief in wild conspiracy theories. These movements don’t merely reject liberal democratic norms. They reject the idea that flourishing is constrained by reality.

Research indicates that when individual identity collapses into group identity, people become willing to engage in extreme, self-destructive and even violent behavior endorsed by the group. Studies of radicalization find that a sense of belonging draws people in and a distorted sense of mattering keeps them there.

“The quest for personal significance,” say researchers at the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism, “constitutes a major motivational force that may push individuals toward violent extremism.” And eventually, they can come to believe that engaging in violence — even terrorism — is, as psychologist and terrorism specialist John Horgan says, “not inherently immoral.”

What is lost in these movements is not just the reverence for life, but liberty in its democratic sense: the freedom to judge, to doubt, to revise one’s commitments in light of evidence, to dissent without fear. Flourishing requires that freedom.

Goldstein insists that mattering must answer to standards outside the self and outside the group. We are, she writes, “staunch realists” about mattering. In a pluralistic liberal democracy, we know, however uncomfortably, when meaning has been purchased at the expense of truth.

A society that maximizes belonging while severing it from standards produces conformity, not freedom. A society that encourages mattering divorced from truth produces fanaticism, not dignity. Life and liberty depend on holding the two together.

The hopeful implication is that individual agency still matters. You cannot choose to discard the needs to belong and to matter. But you can choose how you pursue them. A particular group might make you feel seen, but does it invite you to see more clearly? It might expect compassion toward its members, but does it extend the same toward those who don’t belong? It might provide a sense of being “on the right side of history,” but does it treat truth as a necessary constraint?

Belonging protects us from loneliness. Mattering, rightly pursued, protects us from self-deception. As I teach in the Habits of a Free Mind program, the mantra for the habit of compassion is “You belong here.” The mantra for the habit of calling is “You matter.” Communities that provide not just belonging but mattering require both compassion and a sense of calling.

They also require reality-based justification if they are to sustain a culture of civil liberties. They teach children (and remind adults) about the importance of both individual contribution and objective truth. And they underscore the understanding that democratic norms are not obstacles, but guardrails.

Flourishing, Goldstein posits, requires both belonging and mattering — grounded in truth, sustained by liberty and oriented toward constructing a life worth living.

A social psychologist with a clinical background, Dr. Paresky serves as Senior Advisor to the Open Therapy Institute, Advisor to the Mindful Education Lab at New York University, Senior Fellow at the Network Contagion Research Institute, and Associate at Harvard University. She writes the Habits of a Free Mind newsletter on Substack. Follow her on Twitter at @PamelaParesky

One doesn’t need complex econometric models or a crystal ball to foresee Israel’s economic and social future. Just look at today’s Jerusalem, and reality will hit you straight in the eye. Jerusalem is a demographic-economic portent for the State of Israel as a whole, and unless there is a dramatic change in government policy, this is what Israel will look like in three decades.

Thirty years ago, Israel’s capital was an average Israeli city, with the added charm of deep history and meaning. Certainly, it was marked by complexities and tensions then, but the demographic and socioeconomic picture was different.

Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics (CBS) uses a 1-10 socioeconomic cluster scale (10 is the highest score) to characterize the country’s population centers. Three decades ago, Jerusalem was designated a cluster 5 – a middle-class city of government civil servants, academia and commerce. Today, Jerusalem is languishing at the bottom, in clusters 1-2, alongside the poorest localities in Israel’s social periphery.

Poverty in Jerusalem is not just a statistic in dry CBS reports. Its crumbling infrastructure is painfully evident in the streets of the Haredi and East Jerusalem neighborhoods.

This collapse is the direct result of demography and unsound government policy. The trends shaping the city over recent decades are a frightening looking glass for what is happening in Israel today. In the 1980s, the ultra-Orthodox (Haredim) constituted 16% of Jerusalem’s population, similar to the Haredi share in Israel’s population today. In the 1990s, they represented 20% of all Jerusalemites and 28% of the city’s Jews; by 2011, they were 27% of all Jerusalemites and 30% of its Jews. And today, roughly 30% of Jerusalem residents are Haredi, making up more than 50% of the city’s Jewish population, a result of the sector’s high fertility rates and migration into the city.

When we examine the education system – the most accurate predictor of the future – the figures are even starker. An overwhelming majority (67%) of Jerusalem’s Jewish first-graders study in Haredi schools; just 17% are enrolled in secular institutions.

Jerusalem has suffered from decades of “negative migration,” primarily of the Zionist, productive and liberal population. According to CBS data, thousands of young people and secular families leave the city every year for the Tel Aviv metropolitan area or the coastal plain, leaving behind a city whose engines of economic growth sputter and groan. Today, the share of secular residents in Jerusalem is only 20%. The share of the Arab population, incidentally, rose only very moderately over these years (by about 4%), so that is not what has changed the city’s circumstances.

The economic equation is simple and brutal: labor productivity in the Haredi sector is far below the national average, and the employment rate of Haredi men is still dramatically low (around 52%) compared with the general public (over 85%). The result is a shrinking tax base alongside expanding welfare needs.

The poverty rate in Jerusalem is alarming: 39% of families and 51% of children live below the poverty line. That is why a significant share of Jerusalem households are eligible for substantial municipal property tax (arnona) discounts with an annual value amounting to more than a quarter of the city’s potential revenue. This means that the residents who generate income and pay full taxes carry the city’s burden on their backs and pay the highest arnona rates in Israel.

So how is it that Jerusalem does not go bankrupt? The answer is “artificial respiration.” Jerusalem survives thanks to an annual infusion of billions of shekels from the state budget – through capital grants, balancing grants and earmarked budgets. Some of this is intended to fund the complexities of being the capital city. But a considerable portion finances the deficit created by Jerusalem’s demography. Put simply: high-tech workers in Tel Aviv, industrial workers in Haifa and service workers in Rishon LeZion are financing the entrenched deficit of Israel’s capital.

Jerusalem’s data profile from 1980s is eerily similar that of Israel in 2026 with respect to Haredi demography, the departure of an established and educated population, poverty, tax burden, the education system and more. Looking at Jerusalem today is looking at Israel in a few more decades. And herein lies the existential danger. According to demographic forecasts by the National Economic Council and the Central Bureau of Statistics, if current trends continue, in about three decades the share of Haredim in the general population will jump to around 30% – similar to the situation in Jerusalem today. Israel as a whole will become “Greater Jerusalem.”

By then the difference will be critical and irreversible: from whom will the “State of Jerusalem” receive its balancing grant? When the entire State of Israel presents a Third World socio-economic profile, there will be no “external purse” to rescue us. Tel Aviv, no matter how thriving, will simply be unable to subsidize an entire country of dependents.

And the implications go far beyond living standards. This is a matter of national security. You cannot maintain a modern army, procure squadrons of F-35 fighter jets, develop laser defense systems and sustain intelligence, cyber and technological superiority with a per-capita GDP that resembles Angola’s. The IDF – the people’s army – will not be able to maintain its qualitative military edge when half the eligible draft cohort evades service, and those who do enlist lack basic skills in mathematics and English. Economic collapse is an existential threat to Israeli sovereignty no less severe and no less immediate than the Iranian threat.

We are sailing, eyes wide open, into an iceberg. The Israeli public may look at Jerusalem with nostalgic longing, but it misses the glaring warning sign the city is raising. The current Jerusalem model is not sustainable at the national level. If there is no drastic policy change – full military service, full mandatory core curriculum studies, full integration into the labor market and active participation in Israeli life – Jerusalem’s fate will be the fate of us all.

Dr. Shuki Friedman is Director-General of JPPI – the Jewish People Policy Institute – and a senior lecturer in law at the Peres Academic Center.