It’s hard to get Diaspora Jewish schoolchildren to love Israel when most of what they hear about the country outside the comfort of their Sunday school classes tends to spark a mix of discomfort and shame.
Indeed, what is a kid being raised in a progressive Jewish home – as many are – supposed to feel about a place that is often compared to apartheid South Africa and is now being run by a governing coalition of racist, misogynist and homophobic parties?
The dissonance between what these Jewish kids are taught about Israel in their supplementary religious school classes and what they discover when they start doing some research on their own, or simply watching the news, goes a long way toward explaining the growing disillusionment of young Diaspora Jews with Zionism.
For Rabbi Lawrence Englander, a prominent Reform educator from Canada, the conclusion is clear: If the goal is to prevent these disillusioned kids from cutting themselves off entirely from Israel, then the way Israel is taught needs to be changed radically.
“If you want kids to love Israel, then they’re going to unlove it as soon as they learn what’s going on there,” says Englander, a former chairman of the international Reform movement’s political branch, Arzenu. “So we need to stop talking about getting them to love Israel. Instead, our goal needs to be deep engagement – which means teaching them about Israel, warts-and-all.”
A brand-new program Englander helped create for teaching school-age children about Israel and encouraging “critical thinking” about the country, as he terms it, was introduced in several Jewish supplementary schools in Canada this past year on a pilot basis.
It will have its official launch in the upcoming school year in supplementary religious schools run by the Reform movement across Canada.
“To my knowledge, this is a unique effort in Jewish education,” says Englander. “We strongly feel that this curriculum will produce a sea change for younger generations on how they relate to Israel – a crucial need in Jewish life today.”
The lesson plans that were used in the pilot program will be presented at a special three-day conference scheduled for early next week in Toronto, which will be attended by some 40 teachers and educators from across Canada. Englander hopes many of them will choose to incorporate the new curriculum at their schools.
“I’ve been long concerned about what was being taught or probably not taught in our Reform religious schools,” says Englander, the founding rabbi of the Solel Reform congregation in Toronto. “It seemed to me that a lot of what our kids are being taught is very superficial, a kind of ‘Israel Disneyland’ sort of thing, and many of the teachers don’t feel competent or confident teaching about Israel because of everything going on there.”
Englander gathered together a group of educators with the goal of creating a new curriculum from scratch – one he says is based more on encouraging questions rather than providing answers, “because there’s not going to be just one answer to many of the questions these kids have.”
The team that created the lesson plan was headed by Dr. Lesley Litman, a Jewish curriculum expert from Hebrew Union College who also consults for the iCenter in Chicago – an institution dedicated to improving Israel education programs.
“What makes this curriculum unique is that it is geared toward much younger children and is inquiry-based,” she says. “In other words, we’re not coming to these children with answers, but rather, trying to open Israel to them and let them engage with it from the world they know.”
I cannot critique the curriculum because I haven't seen it, and from looking at materials at Arza Canada as well as the iCenter mentioned here, it looks like the people involved are competent educators and want to get kids to love Israel. It is possible (and even likely) that Haaretz is misrepresenting the effort.
I hope I'm wrong, but I fear that this initiative is missing the boat.
The fear is real: kids who learn a "Disneyland" version of Israel go to college and they are not equipped to respond to the hate that they see. Then they get disillusioned about how they were not taught the truth and they reject everything they thought they knew. The Israel haters are excellent at pulling the emotional strings to generate this whiplash and to turn teens who thought they knew Israel into anti-Zionists.
Certainly, there are multiple narratives about Israel, and it is important for Israel education to teach the major ones, even the anti-Israel ones. But they should not be taught as if each narrative has equal weight and value.
The curriculum must have a mature, accurate viewpoint about Israel that is meant to get kids to love Israel and its people - and then it should teach the other narratives in a critical manner.
Just like kids must be taught morality yet also taught why immoral ideas are bad, Jewish kids must be taught that Israel is a central part of their belief system, that its rebirth was miraculous, and that there are still antisemites out there who have substituted Israel for Jews as the object of their lies.
Leaving kids with questions at the end of the day or the school year is not education. It is abdicating the responsibility of educators.
The most important thing that Jewish schools, Reform or Orthodox, must do is to equip their teachers with the information they need. As the article says, "many of the teachers don’t feel competent or confident teaching about Israel" - it is obvious that those teachers must be educated before they teach children, not that they should teach children their own immature and ambiguous viewpoints.
When teachers themselves are conflicted or don't strongly believe what they are teaching, the kids are not taught anything. First teach the teachers, and have competent Zionist educators answer their questions.
I once gave a lecture on how to answer the top 20 anti-Israel arguments. (I broke it up into separate posts
here.) If Hebrew school teachers (or Jewish organization workers altogether) do not know everything in my lecture, how can they possibly teach kids enough to stand up for Israel when they confront the haters on campus (or, increasingly, high school)?
Educate the educators. If they aren't competent to confidently teach how to love Israel while countering the anti-Israel arguments, they aren't competent to teach about Israel.
Since the danger of not being able to respond to anti-Israel arguments on campus is the real fear here, then that skill is what must be taught before they arrive on campus.
Like it or not, Sunday school and afternoon Hebrew school programs are never going to be intensive enough to teach kids a comprehensive view of Israel and the Middle East. But they can teach enough on the specific topics that Israel haters use to counter their arguments.
This has far reaching effects that make the students improve in other important ways.
When teaching how to dismantle anti-Israel arguments, the kids will also be taught how to use primary research materials to find out what really happened in the first half of the 20th century. They will be be taught critical thinking skills to understand how anti-Israel propaganda works and how they could be manipulated, skills that translate to numerous real-world scenarios outside of Zionism. They can and must be taught how today's anti-Israel propaganda is a direct continuation of traditional antisemitic propaganda, and how they themselves are threatened by it today.
Teaching about Israel, "warts and all," is not the way to teach children to identify with and love Israel. What needs to be done is to teach children the beauty and importance of Israel - and then to teach the anti-Israel positions, but only in the context of refuting them.
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Monday, August 28, 2023
Elder of Ziyon
