Teaching Israel and the Pandemic
Symposium
With David Bryfman, Sara Yael Hirschhorn, Anne Lanski, Alex Sinclair, Gil Troy & Sivan Zakai
TO EMERGE FROM THE CURRENT PANDEMIC is to face an environment in which engaging with and traveling to Israel has become more complicated—and more fraught—than ever before. In what ways has the pandemic transformed the ways Israel is being taught in our schools? Which elements have gone into temporary eclipse, and which will permanently disappear? Which new resources and digital tools can educators and students turn to for succor and support? And which vulnerabilities has the pandemic usefully exposed? To mark the one-year anniversary of the outbreak of the pandemic, Sources invited six leading experts to reflect on how Israel education has changed — and on what lies ahead. Their contributions appear in alphabetical order.
David Bryfman
Why Israel Matters
In preparing for this roundtable, I asked several Jewish educators about the role Israel education has played for them over the last year. Those involved with travel to and from Israel say their work has been derailed. For almost everyone else, the answers ranged from “on the backburner,” “not really important right now,” to “are you (expletive) kidding me, do you know what I’m dealing with every day?”
Over the last twelve months, Jewish educators have demonstrated heroic abilities to pivot, adapt, and innovate, at times even putting the concerns of their learners above themselves. They deserve our profound appreciation and admiration. At the same time, for those of us tasked with thinking about the future of Jewish education, questions about Israel and Israel education remain both pressing and challenging. Pressing because Israel continues to be a perennial concern for the Jewish people. Challenging because some educators might express what many people who ponder the state of the Jewish people have known for quite some time. For the vast majority of American Jews today, we have struggled to articulate a compelling 21st century rationale and vision for a fundamental question: why does Israel actually matter, and why should it be a communal priority?
Now, as we see the signs of light at the end of the Corona tunnel, is the time to ask: what will the future of Israel education look like? Will we return to a pre-pandemic conception of Israel education? Is this a moment to reassess where we want Israel education to be in the future? To be sure, these questions are not unique to Israel education. As emphasized by The iCenter, an organization dedicated to Israel education, good Israel education is good Jewish education, which is good education.
“What will the future of Israel education look like?”
Although the question of the extent to which Israel education should be prioritized is not a new one, the pandemic has amplified it and cast a new light on related challenges. The most obvious of these challenges is the overall lack of investment in the necessary infrastructure and adequate training of educators to meet the demands of a 21st century education reliant on technology.
For Israel education specifically, however, the central problem (especially for children aged 0-18 and their families) has less to do with content delivery than with meaning. I do not suggest that Israel be the only — or even the major — factor in Jewish education. Yet Israel should form an integral aspect of any curriculum that aims to foster a well-grounded understanding of what it means to be a Jew in the world today. And it should matter, according to experts including Ezra Kopelowitz and Lisa D. Grant who pose precisely this question in their 2012 book Israel Education Matters. For a generation without personal connections to the Holocaust, the Six-Day War, or to Israel as a savior in Entebbe or for Soviet and Ethiopian Jews, why should Israel actually matter?
In addressing this question, Jewish educators must not merely teach about something called “Israel” by transmitting facts. If they are to encourage students to care about and even love this other country, educators must tap into learners’ feelings and lived experiences. Over the last year, this latter objective became exceedingly difficult.
Few would argue that Israel education warranted more focus of Jewish educators than helping learners maintain personal relationships and connections, retain a commitment to the Jewish calendar and rituals, confront issues of race and racism in America, understand a national election and civil insurrection, or sustain their mental health and wellbeing.
Jewish education occurs in a range of settings, including early childhood centers, JCCs, synagogue schools, day schools, summer camps (day and overnight), and youth groups. These distinctly different settings feature different pedagogies, curriculum, and desired outcomes, but are also unified by something not often articulated: educating about Israel in these settings serves the greater purpose of identity development.
Unlike Israel studies, or other related sub-fields that focus on the transmission of knowledge about Israel, Israel education seeks to influence the learner. Dr. Barry Chazan, founding international director of education for Taglit-Birthright Israel, has said, “the content of Israel education is not Israel — but rather the relationship with Israel.”
In effective Israel education, therefore, the learner must be prioritized — must “matter” even more than the content. The greatest transformation in thinking that Israel educators have lately experienced — accelerated by the pandemic — is that Israel education, like all education, must adapt to remain relevant to learners and their families.
During the pandemic, Israel education has succeeded in several ways:
When educators demonstrably understood that people sought connections with other people (their teachers, counselors, and friends). These connections were enhanced when educators connected students to others around the world, including Israeli peers, to forge a sense that “we’re all in this together.”
When students most needed joy and laughter in their lives, excellent educators brought dynamic Israeli culture, including recipes, into people’s homes and popular culture onto the screens.
When educators dedicated time to explain, discuss and debate how issues of race, antisemitism, and international politics impact the lives of Jews around the world, including those in Israel.
Finally, educators delivered meaningful Israel education when they connected with thousands of young people who could not travel to Israel by expressing empathy for this loss and then assuring them of the opportunity to travel there in the near future.
Still, what if I’m completely wrong? What if one great transformation in education during this pandemic has been brought about by the realization that in-person education can never be fully replicated? Alternatively, what if the pandemic ushers in a realization that technology can impart highlevel knowledge more effectively than any other educational setting? To paraphrase my colleague Rabba Yaffa Epstein, director of the Wexner Heritage Program, “what if the greatest transformation for Jewish education during the pandemic is in fact more people than ever before want to know more Jewish stuff?” How do educators develop meaningful relationships, at scale, when learners are signaling that they simply want to know “stuff?” If Epstein’s question alludes to the major transformation for post-pandemic education, including Israel education, we must ask ourselves whether we’re even remotely prepared for this knowledge revolution. For many, this dichotomy between content and experience might seem artificial, and of course the two can go hand in hand. But after the past twelve months of virtual and hybrid learning, achieving this balance will be one of the greatest challenges facing all educational institutions.
I write this article in February 2021, a month after the insurrection in Capitol and the inauguration of a new American president, and a month before another election in Israel.
This week I am meeting with nineteen youth organizations to determine the feasibility of bringing over five-thousand Jewish teens to Israel this summer. Suffice to say that the conclusion to the story of the transformation of Israel education during the pandemic (or lack thereof) has yet to be written. Debates between the primacy of the learner versus that of the transmission of knowledge will continue. One thing, however, remains constant: the need to articulate and convey a compelling vision for why Israel and Israel education still matters.
David Bryfman is CEO of The Jewish Education Project.
Sara Yael Hirschhorn
Whither Israel Education Without Israel?
With airports shuttered, lockdowns imposed, and complete disruptions to travel, education, and business both in the Diaspora and Israel, the year of COVID has been like no other in recent Jewish and Zionist history. Like Jews of medieval times, the land and people of Israel are but a distant memory, a screen (with a contemporary technological twist in 2021 of the mobile phone or tablet) upon which the anxious dreams of the Diaspora are projected. “Next Year in Jerusalem!” was shouted at the end of Zoom seders. Diaspora Jews continue to doom-scroll through minute-by-minute updates of Israeli elections and vaccination progress. Yet the two communities are separated, now more than ever, not only by geography, but by national priority. At a moment when the nation-state, citizenship, and borders have hardened and transnational ties are mostly imagined, the Diaspora-Israel relationship is at a crossroads.
“Diaspora Jews must relate to Israel as an idea, not as a Disneyland experience.”
For better or worse, experiential education has in recent years become a simulacrum for Israel education. Whether a breathless tenday trip to Israel on Birthright, a coast-to-coast coach tour with Hadassah, or the somewhat longer durée of a semester or gap-year in Israel, the pedagogical theory regarded Israel as a Diaspora playground, where knowledge and affiliation would be absorbed through the rays of sun, the grease of the falafel, or even the swapping of DNA with fellow students or the Israeli soldier at the back of the bus. Texts, classrooms, history, ideology, and narrative became passé: Israel was a place to be seen and felt — in fact, it was much like the early Zionist embrace of “Hakarat Ha-Aretz” (Knowing the Land), just without the kovah tembel and now documented on Tik-Tok. With whirlwind excursions across Eretz Yisrael now out of reach, Diaspora Jews must relate to Israel as an idea, not as a Disneyland experience.
Prior to COVID, there remained one question rarely asked in polite company about pedagogy of “shlepping around the Holyland”: does it work? Abundant data demonstrates that programs like Taglit-Birthright Israel pay Jewish communal dividends in terms of in-marriage, Jewish institutional affiliation, and some religious or ritual practice. Over the past decade, however, a somewhat less clear picture has emerged when it comes to the depth of information conveyed and whether this program does more than cultivate attachment and interest in Israel in a way that will inform historical or policy debates over the long-term. Birthright’s pedagogical emphasis on the “mifgash” (which, of late, has been limited only to Zionists, to the exclusion of many Israeli Arabs and other sectors) and the schedule of sites — Masada yes, Dizengoff Center no — suggests a kind of selection- bias of narratives provided to participants. Where Birthright does seem to intervene best in the learning experience is in the value of being on the ground in a time of crisis (like the 2014 Israel-Gaza war). At such times, access to real- time information and to Israelis (including soldiers), and even a sense of the political and emotional distance between their experience and that of the parents they were calling back home, proved to be “life-changing.” In less fraught trips, participants may have been more likely to share a news story about Israel in their social media feed or express an opinion. Yet it wasn’t clear that such Birthright trips changed students’ minds on core political issues (including ethno-nationalist ones) or gave them the tools to be able to form an opinion.
If Birthright and other forms of pilgrimage tourism aim to prevent intermarriage and disaffiliation from communal institutions, then why not lock kids into a bungalow in the Catskills for two weeks rather than send them to Israel? Similarly, does the UJA-Federation coach tour inculcate feeling or deep knowledge? And if a yeshiva or midrasha program teaches texts that could be mastered without the journeying to an Israeli beit midrash, what good does a year in Jerusalem do?
I don’t wish to downplay the real and transformational life experiences that some participants in experiential education may have, nor the kind of insider knowledge that comes from cultural immersion.
(Not to mention the entrenched industry of experiential education that has vested interests in these programs.) Yet with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict remaining at forefront of public concerns, we must use this pause during the pandemic to re-evaluate several pressing questions:
When and how is experiential education productive, and what kind of return on investment does it truly offer learners across the demographic spectrum?
Can the learning experience be enhanced by thinking about education as encounter — as an active appreciation — rather than as an adventure?
How can Diaspora-based workshops better supplement the experiential component by providing background and post-trip ongoing engagement?
What pedagogy can best prepare learners of all ages to be informed citizens in a pluralistic society who not only have profound feeling, but deep knowledge, when it comes to Zionism and Israel?
There is little doubt that when the borders reopen and it is once again safe to travel, Diaspora Jews will eagerly return after a year apart. But the experiences in our separate national bubbles over the past year have also transformed us; we will encounter each other if not as strangers then as distant relatives with somewhat nostalgic recollections of one another from a world before COVID. Such gaps offer a new opportunity to reorient Israel education toward a broader set of vocabulary, values, and vision that will allow all learners to gain deeper knowledge until Israel is more than merely a vicarious experience.
Sara Yael Hirschhorn is visiting assistant professor in Israel Studies at Northwestern University. Her book City on a Hilltop: American Jews and the Israeli Settler Movement won the 2018 Sami Rohr Prize in Jewish Literature Choice Award.
Anne Lanski
Anything but Isolated
The Hebrew term for quarantine, bidud, translates literally as “isolation.” The term reflects not only the act of separating oneself physically from one’s normal environment, experiences, and encounters, but also the social and emotional predicament of finding oneself alone. Bidud derives from the Biblical Hebrew root ב.ד.ד., meaning lonely, alone, or desolate (with regards to the relationship with the Divine). No term better describes the jarring impact of the pandemic on the field of Israel education than bidud.
TRAVEL AND ISOLATION
The single most profound effect of the pandemic on Israel education has been the widespread cancellation of almost all educational travel to Israel (for a year and counting at this point, brief lockdown reprieves excepted). Learning about Israel by experiencing Israel firsthand is the largest Jewish education initiative and investment of the 21st century. For more than a generation now, tens of thousands of young Jews annually have traveled to Israel to learn about its people, land, state, language, and culture in person, face-to-face, on the ground, on school trips, camp and youth group excursions, community delegations, service-learning missions, yeshiva and semester abroad experiences, and of course, Taglit-Birthright Israel. Suddenly in 2020, airports here and there were closed, trips were cancelled, and we found ourselves isolated, lonely, and desolate, longing for the first chance to return to Israel.
If anything, this hiatus has served as decisive proof that travel to Israel is the ultimate desire for the field of Israel education; far from waning, demand for these experiences is as robust as ever and now even pent up. One need only look at the newest major venture in Israel teen experiences, RootOne, which inauspiciously launched during the pandemic only to have its slots grabbed up by prospective participants eager to take part in the programs as early as summer 2021. Rather than asking whether Israel educational travel will have to be reconceptualized in light of the tectonic changes brought on by the pandemic, in this realm the question is only when, not what, how, or why. When the isolation finally ends, reconnection in Israel immediately begins.
Relationships are at the heart of Israel education — meaning that Israel education is the means for people to develop connections, interactions, and shared language with people, ideas, and Israel itself. It’s thus critical to recognize that isolation has posed a challenge not only to North American Jews keen to travel to Israel, but also to their Israeli counterparts seeking relationships with North American Jews. Thousands of the Jewish Agency’s Israeli shlichim could not spend their summer as they normally would at Jewish overnight and day camps in North America, interacting, teaching, learning, and enjoying time with campers and camp staff. (The same can be said of thousands more Israelis who come to North America on other programs.) When the pandemic subsides, opportunities must be available to meet the pent-up demand among Israelis for reconnecting with experiences in North America, so as to enhance the mutual and reciprocal nature of the relationship between North American and Israeli Jews.
AN ANTIDOTE TO ISOLATION
In the meantime, as an antidote to pandemic-induced isolation, Israel educators have worked tirelessly to forge and maintain connections, build new partnerships, and build capacity in the field. The iCenter, for one, quickly had to develop a philosophy, pedagogy, and framework for preparing educators for Israel education on screens rather than in face-to-face settings. While we very much missed out on the multiple opportunities in any given year that we typically offer educators to engage with each other in person, the new circumstances offered our learners virtual access to major figures and public personalities they might not have otherwise been able to encounter. They read the poems of Eliaz Cohen, a leading figure in the renaissance of religious poetry in Israel; heard the music of Karolina, Rona Kenan, and Shlomi Shaban; cooked the recipes of Israeli farmer and chef Hedai Offaim; and asked tough questions of diplomat and author Dennis Ross (among many other experiences), all live and in-person — albeit mediated by Zoom. Equally as important, our educators in North America and in Israel were now able to learn with each other simultaneously in courses, seminars, and workshops across multiple time zones. Rather than acting as a constraint, distance learning has opened the campus of The iCenter and Israel education to the entire world.
“Isolation has posed a challenge not only to North American Jews keen to travel to Israel, but also to their Israeli counterparts.”
In this context, shared learning opportunities are now happening with greater intimacy as our educators and learners connect with each other from the comfort of their own homes in North America and Israel, often with family members or friends present or not far off. The close relationships that have evolved among The iCenter’s emerging Israel education professionals have attained a personal level rarely before achieved.
The iCenter’s signature strength in the relational approach to Israel education has come to fruition in a previously unimagined and extremely powerful platform for connecting people who connect to Israel. When the world opens up again, we will be that much more motivated to meet each other IRL (in real life).
LESSONS EXCEPTIONAL AND MUNDANE
The pre-pandemic world of Israel education held a fine line between experiences that were exceptional (unique encounters with great ideas, stories, figures, sites, and culture) and experiences that were mundane (everyday encounters with people and society). A visit to Masada was clearly exceptional, for example, while a free evening on the streets of Tel Aviv was mundane. Both experiences are valuable, yet there was a clear distinction in their effects — one typically produced awe and imagination, while the other offered up authenticity and intimacy.
Today, with Israel education happening more often in our living rooms than in Israel, the line between exceptional and mundane experiences has blurred. Of course, there is no way to bring majestic experiences at the Kotel, the Galilee, and the Negev into our homes. But in this era of physical inaccessibility to Israel, what has mattered most is the accessibility of Israel educators to one another.
One image sticks in my mind: I tuned into a Zoom session of The iCenter’s Graduate Program in Israel Education at George Washington University, listening to a master Israel educator describe the great ideas, narratives, and words of great Israeli poets from the comfort of his home office as his dog barked in the background. Thirty North America- and Israel-based educators in the program, smiling in Zoom boxes across my screen, learned about the exceptional shaping narratives of the State of Israel while also connecting intimately to the professor in his mundane setting. Despite being stuck in our homes, we were anything but isolated. We were engaged in building the field of Israel education stronger and better together.
Anne Lanski is the founding CEO of The iCenter and former CEO of Shorashim, a nationally-recognized Israel experience.
Alex Sinclair
Pressing Pause
Diaspora Jewry is struggling to empower more Jews to be self-sufficient and less dependent on centralized structures, both physical and human. This pressing challenge has nothing whatsoever to do with a connection to Israel. To focus on Israel education in the face of more urgent issues is to be distracted from Diaspora Jewry’s core strategic challenge. Much as I (or presumably you, as a reader of this roundtable) care about Israel education, and about the connection between Israel and the Diaspora, at some point one has to say, “enough — this other stuff must come first.”
Across the world, the pandemic has destroyed the way people interact with their communities. We have been unable to spend time with loved ones, to congregate together in groups, or to mark significant occasions with friends. For Jews, whose core cultural and religious practices are more community-dependent than most, this has been devastating. For many Diaspora communities, moments of physical communal gathering are the gateway to and primary manifestation of Jewish life. Initial excitement over transferring communal events and prayer to Zoom quickly dissipated as it became clear that video technology is no substitute for the real thing. Without regular physical attendance at the synagogue, the JCC, or the Jewish school’s extra- curricular events, the main artery of the Diaspora Jewish heart has become blocked.
Some forward-thinking communities have tried to turn all this into a blessing in disguise by encouraging and empowering members to bring Jewish life into their homes in new ways. But this only goes so far. Without shared physical space, Jewish communities are stumbling and struggling. The sudden unavailability of physical space has exposed the painful reality that many members of Diaspora Jewish communities are not self-sufficient; they cannot enact Jewish life on their own. The most pressing need for Diaspora Jewish life is to empower Jews to do things like run shabbat tefillot in layled groups of ten or twenty people; host shabbat and festival meals at their homes where ritual enriches rather than intimidates those present; and access meaningful Jewish learning from diverse and serious online sources. Before the pandemic, many Diaspora Jews relied on centralized structures for each of these things; the past year has shown us just how problematic that reliance is.
“Today, Israeli complexities are not delightful, but debilitating.”
The pandemic has also problematized the “Israel” in Israel education like never before. The past decades have witnessed a move away from classical Zionist education and the encouragement of aliyah towards a more dialogical, nuanced Israel education that sees the complexities of Israeli society as grist for its mill. Among thoughtful educators, this complexity has spawned new curricular approaches, an increased focus in Jewish educational research, and much writing and thinking about what we mean by complexity and its accompanying commitments. This complex approach to Israel education does not shy away from addressing contentious issues — the conflict with the Palestinians, questions about Israel’s self-definition as a Jewish state, racism in Israeli society, and more — in compelling ways which encourage Diaspora Jews to be active, dialogical partners with Israel rather than merely funders or blind supporters.
But the events of the past year have also raised questions about the limitations of complex Israel education. More than any event in Israel’s history — wars, economic crises, political upheavals — the pandemic has exposed deep fault-lines in Israeli society:
The rejection by ultra-Orthodox communities of their civil contract with the rest of society, while apparent for decades, has become so painfully debilitating to Israel’s very future that it must be squarely addressed if the country is to survive and thrive.
The lack of trust in the system within Arab communities can no longer be dismissed or ignored; it requires radical solutions on both practical and symbolic levels.
Our healthcare system has been exposed as fragile and brittle: despite its success at rolling out vaccines, we now see that it subsists on the narrowest of margins. We have paid the steep price of draconian lockdowns designed to protect those margins.
Perhaps most devastating, the sins of decades of under-investment in our education system have now come home to roost. Israel has had neither the physical infrastructures nor the quality of human resources to enable the flexibility and creativity needed for education to continue during the pandemic.
These fault-lines cast a shadow over the typical themes and approaches of complex Israel education, which has relied on the intricate complexities of Israeli issues to engage and fascinate Diaspora Jews. Yet today, Israeli complexities are not delightful, but debilitating; not inspiring, but insane; not fascinating, but f---ed up. You can’t build education around a train wreck.
Israel must sort out its own deepseated problems. Its need for progress on issues of shared society and social infrastructures is no longer a liberal luxury but an existential necessity. Diaspora Jewish communities need to focus renewed energy on educating their members to be self-sufficient Jews who can create meaningful and rich Jewish lives for themselves without centralized scaffolding. Israel education simply will not meet either of these needs; in fact, it will likely only distract us from these tasks and possibly even impede our ability to succeed at them.
This is the time to press pause. If Israel and the Diaspora succeed in overcoming their respective challenges, the connection between them will be strengthened as a by-product; or at least, the ground will again be fertile enough for us to cultivate it. Then — and only then — can we celebrate pulling back from the brink and once again talk about the complexities of Israel education.
Alex Sinclair is chief academic officer of Educating for Impact and the author of Loving the Real Israel: An Educational Agenda for Liberal Zionism.
Gil Troy
An Ark and a Covenant
I teach Israeli and American 18-yearold participants in a gap-year program called Hevruta. I recently asked the Americans how central Israel was to their Jewish identities before they arrived in Israel. One answered, “not much.” Most of what he learned about Israel, he complained, was very “indoctriny” — coining a vivid term. A second student said that for her, Israel barely made up “ten or fifteen percent” of her Jewish identity. Still, she added, “we did get a range of views on Israel back home, from very right-wing pro-Israel to BDS.”
Both answers dismayed me — and highlighted the central challenges to Israel education, before, during, and after this Corona-crisis. Our virtual teaching experiences might make us more techno-savvy. Our shared plague-related traumas might invite some comparisons that resonate. But Israel Education’s two overlapping crises remain in full force. Too many educators teach Israel defensively and romantically; they offer a one-dimensional, Hava Nagila, blue-and-white flowers Israel which you must love and defend, right or wrong. Too many others — in reaction — teach Israel politically; they peddle an equally- superficial headline-driven Israel as the Jews’ central headache — or biggest heartache. That approach is all about picking a side, right or left. We must escape this overly politicized Zionism, which usually is distorted by guilt trips that demand that we either support Israel or apologize for the occupation. Instead, let’s embrace Identity Zionism, which invites Jews to use Zionism, Jewish peoplehood, and the Israel connection as frameworks to chart their own personal pathways toward finding meaning through community and history.
Identity Zionism is about befriending Israel rather than defending it. It’s about joining an old-new, 3,900-year-old conversation about how to build a meaningful life and valuable communal structures — from synagogues to states — that can boost us as individuals while bettering the world. It starts with the great Jewish anomaly: Jews automatically inherit both a religion and a membership card in the Jewish people. That dance between belief and belonging helps us become better people — especially when we can be free in our own Land of Israel — or be free to engage with that Land.
The Zionist movement’s success in leveraging Jewish peoplehood into Jewish statehood allows us to use Israel in various ways. It’s a refuge if necessary, but more likely something else. From up close, Israel offers a platform for living a 24/7 3-D Judaism. From afar, this grand experiment in Jewish-democratic statehood opens doors to learning about our own identities. In short, engaging the Zionist trinity of Am Yisrael — Eretz Yisrael — Medinat Yisrael (the Jewish people, the Jewish homeland, and the Jewish-democratic state) offers a richer and more affirmative lens through which to view Israel education.
“A dance between belief and belonging.”
From that perspective, four Corona- related takeaways emerge. First, Zoom should enhance Israel trips, not replace them. The virtual revolution may have triumphed over spatial limits but teaching and building community through Zoom is like kissing through a handkerchief (to borrow from Hayim Nahman Bialik’s description of reading poetry in translation). There’s nothing like the real thing. When Israel trips resume, our Zoom-fluency will transform identity pilgrimages from sprints to marathons. Orientations for Israel trips can facilitate encounters between Diaspora Jews and Israeli Jews well before arrival at Ben-Gurion airport — and continue long after the tearful goodbyes. Beyond that, all the Jewish community’s groundwork creating partnership opportunities from P2K to twinning schools can now flourish, welcoming many more people who have become far more comfortable interacting online.
Second, we’ve witnessed a Corona-imposed mass global teach-in on our need for community, human contact, and group experiences. That deep existential need is doubly met by a Jewish tradition addicted to communal life. Even Israel’s extraordinary success in distributing vaccines illustrates its rich communal life, collectivist Zionist values, and abundant social capital — especially compared to America and Europe. This foundational block of Judaism and Zionism will be much easier to teach post-Covid.
Third, the crisis proves yet again that if the malign forces of anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism cannot be ignored neither should they define us. Jew-haters have demonstrated anew how Jew-hatred and Israel-hatred overlap, from the “Covid-48” hashtag, to the attempt to blame the IDF for American police brutality, to the ugly new phrase that Israel reflects “Jewish supremacy,” to the libel that Israel’s efficient vaccine delivery to all its citizens, Jews and Arabs alike, was somehow an assault on Palestinians. The Jewish State still serves as the Jew of the world — the target of an obsessive assault wherein Jew-haters connect the dots between Israel and the great concern of the moment: in the 1980s, it was fighting apartheid, today it’s anti-racism. Israel is always in the docket, and always found guilty.
Finally, during a time of a growing repudiation of nationalism, the Coronavirus crisis has reinforced two essential overlapping lessons that Zionism taught and Israel epitomizes.
On the one hand, we all need homes, borders, nations, even fences, both to shelter and to nest — to protect our bodies and soothe our souls, especially when threatened. On the other hand, we’ve learned that we are one global mass of humanity, sometimes facing common threats that require international cooperation to overcome. That duality lies at the heart of all healthy expressions of liberal-nationalism, and that inherent juggling act between universalism and particularism is characteristically Zionist.
David Ben-Gurion called Israel an ark for refuge, and a covenant for hope. A sophisticated, multi-layered conversation about how Israel embodies both an ark and a covenant can advance the reclamation project so urgently needed to recover from the Trump era’s false choices.
Gil Troy is a Distinguished Scholar of North American history at McGill University. He is the author of nine books on American history and three books on Zionism, including The Zionist Ideas. His latest book, co-authored with Natan Sharansky, is Never Alone: Prison, Politics and My People.
Sivan Zakai
The Local, the Digital, and the Political
“It’s just shocking,” 13-year-old Asher says. “I never ever thought that something like this could happen. I spend a lot of time just staring at a screen and thinking, ‘what has the world become?’” Asher is an 8th grader at a Los Angeles charter school that has been shuttered since the start of the pandemic. “The world is changing,” he adds. “It’s kind of scary. But you just got to adjust.”
Asher recognizes that the pandemic has radically shifted his educational experiences. At the same time, he insists, “I’ve kind of gotten used to it.” Many of Asher’s peers — the cohort that pioneered the “Zoomitzvah” and online Jewish schooling — see the pandemic both as a shift and as a preservation of what preceded it. In the words of Asher’s twin brother Caleb, “it can be hard, but we’re doing what we always do, just over computers.”
Like many teens, the twins recognize the pandemic as both an “adjustment” and a “continuation” of Jewish life and Jewish education. I have been following Asher, Caleb, and a group of their peers since they were in kindergarten, attempting to understand how they make sense of Israel and their education about it. From these articulate teens, I’ve learned the “3 Rs” of Israel education in light of the pandemic: the resurgence of local context, the reign of the digital, and the recognition that all education is political.
RESURGENCE OF THE LOCAL
Israel education rests on an assumption that Jews around the globe are connected to and responsible for one another. It relies on transnational ties — a bedrock that appeared solid as globalization took root. In light of the pandemic, those ties now appear to be on shaky ground as local context resurges.
Jewish youth in Toronto, Chicago, and Los Angeles — cities with markedly different Covid rates and divergent ordinances about gathering for religious and educational purposes — have had uneven access to in-person Jewish communal and educational life. Teens like Asher and Caleb, long curious about life in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, are now turning their attention to their own neighborhoods in new ways. Prior to the pandemic, they worried about the collective safety of the Jewish people, especially in Israel; now they track local case numbers and fear for the safety of their own teachers and friends.
If Israel education is to remain relevant, it must address a shift in mindset: from “think globally, act locally” to “think locally, act responsibly.” This may involve fostering connections between cities, like the deep and longstanding Boston-Haifa connection. More likely it will need to involve situating vital questions like “what ought individuals sacrifice in the service of the greater good?” or “what constitutes a just society?” at the heart of Jewish education. Jewish youth, having long gazed far into the distance, are turning their attention closer to home. Whatever form it takes, Israel education will need to respond to that fact.
REIGN OF THE DIGITAL
Today’s youth are digitally savvy. Ever since they learned to read fluently in second or third grade, Asher, Caleb, and their peers have been seeking information about Israel online. While the pandemic may have drastically disrupted their mathematics or Bible classes, it has also reinforced what has long been true about their Israel education: much of it happens online and without adult guidance.
Contemporary North American Jewish youth, many of whom have easy and unmediated access to the Internet, turn online with questions about issues that adults often feel uncomfortable discussing with them: anti-Semitism, rising Covid-related deaths, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and more. When they wonder about issues related to current events that directly impact the United States — questions about vaccine safety and efficacy, for example, or about the impeachment of President Trump — they know where to search in the vast expanses of the Internet. They turn, for example, to sites like Newsela, designed to provide reliable and accessible information to children and teens with varying reading levels. Yet no such digital content translates Israeli news and current events — both linguistically and culturally — for English-speaking Jewish youth. In absence of such resources, Jewish children and teens conduct untargeted Google searches and attempt to make sense of whatever they happen to stumble upon.
Jewish educators have had to reimagine and reconstruct teaching and learning for online schooling. Their herculean efforts have been both necessary and laudable. At the same time, moving experiences online is ultimately insufficient for students who tend to seek out digital content precisely when their educators sign off. Children and teens often give online sources more credence than their teachers, parents, and clergy. Thus the creation of curated content geared to helping young people understand the complex political and social realities of life in Israel is a necessary next step.
RECOGNITION THAT EDUCATION IS POLITICAL
Education is inherently political. This truism has been elevated in the current partisan and polarized political climate. Scholars of education, most notably Diana Hess and Paula McAvoy, have demonstrated one dramatic consequence of increased polarization: at the very moment that young people most need help learning to deliberate about their differences, their educators are increasingly hesitant to help them do so. “When democracy is reduced to warring political camps,” Hess and McAvoy write in their book The Political Classroom, “one reaction can be to keep politics out of schools.”
Young Jews like Asher and Caleb have long critiqued their own schools — especially their Jewish schools — for glossing over important political issues. Since second grade, they and their peers have been pleading to learn more about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Since fourth grade, they have expressed anger that they were never taught to understand contested political issues within Israeli society. In middle school, they expressed frustration that they have not been given sufficient context for grasping why Israel itself has become a wedge issue in American politics. They understand that the pandemic has made clear just how high the political stakes are. They need — and deserve — an education that treats politically contested issues as worthy of careful consideration.
Today more than ever, those of us committed to robust Israel education for Jewish youth must elevate local context, design new digital content, and situate political questions at the heart of education. As 13-year-old Asher explains, “it’s not easy to adjust, but a lot of things are changing so there’s no alternative.”
Sivan Zakai is the Sara S. Lee associate professor of Jewish education at the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion. She directs the Children’s Learning about Israel Project and co-directs Project ORLIE: Research and Leadership in Israel Education.
This article appears in Sources, Spring 2021
