When the price of loving Israel is ostracism

For the last twenty years, scholars have been noting the ever-greater emotional distance between American Jews and Israel – and communal leaders have been fretting. For Israel educators, creating connection to Israel was the order of the day, and their primary educational method, the mifgash, or encounter, was designed to bridge that gap. The thinking was: by creating opportunities for young Jews to meet Israeli peers, both groups would discover how much they share. Tour organizers made sure there were Israelis on the buses, young Israelis were sent to summer camps and communities around the world, and organizers hoped that the relationships that formed would close the gap.

Since October 7 that has changed. Today, it’s hard to argue that Israel is distant. If anything, it is now too close and too personal. Israel has become an issue almost everywhere, from pop concerts to municipal politics to city streets and college quadrangles.

What this means for the field of Israel education has not been immediately apparent. In the first months after October 7, the challenges for educators seemed familiar, albeit at a new degree of intensity. If, since the start of the Second Intifada, the lived experiences and the political preferences of Israelis had become increasingly incongruous to many Jews worldwide, Israel’s war with Hamas made things even more so. As a consequence of the military action Israel was taking, the heat was higher than in the past, but the work of connecting young Jews to Israel seemed essentially unchanged.

And yet, as we know from elementary school science, when heat is raised above a certain temperature, objects eventually start to change state: ice becomes water, and at still higher temperatures, water becomes steam.

Over the last few months, with the heat having risen to such a degree, we may have entered a new educational state. As evidenced by the rash of anti-Israel college encampments, the challenge today is no longer distance from Israel, it is Israel’s widespread demonization. The task for Israel educators is no longer about creating connections to Israel: it is about demonstrating that connecting to Israel is worth the social and emotional price.

Today, expressing support for Israel, or identifying oneself as a Zionist is not just a point of disagreement with others who hold different views. It can mean being excluded and shamed, even becoming a target of hate. How, then, does one cultivate a commitment to the very thing that might result in social ostracization? This is a painfully unfamiliar challenge for educators and parents.

And yet this is not an unprecedented state of affairs. For hundreds of years, Jewish communities faced similar challenges. In European Christendom, Jews were assumed to hold heretical and unsavory views. They were occasionally required to debate their case in public disputations, ritualized debates that bear a striking resemblance to those in which Israel has had to participate in recent months at the Hague. Then, as now, some of their most outspoken opponents were those who had switched sides and who announced they had grasped a more universal set of truths. (For Pablo Christiani read Peter Beinart.)

In their magisterial study of Jewish education during those centuries, The Chosen Few, Maristella Botticini and Zvi Eckstein, argue that Jewish communities survived and even thrived during long centuries as ideological outcasts, by doubling down on a set of distinctive values, on literacy and community solidarity. Jewish education, costly as it was to sustain in such circumstances, enabled the few who were willing to invest, to maintain and sustain Jewish dignity. Remarkably, pariah Jewish communities sustained a sense of chosenness, a belief that the Jewish People have something of value to offer the world. To be clear, Jewish education was not focused on the training of disputants – those who could confront the demonizers head-on – it was concerned with the nurture of devotees, people with a love and appreciation for Jewish culture and practices. Jewish education underpinned intellectual and social resilience and, paradoxically, as Maristella and Eckstein argue, it subsequently enabled Jews to make a distinct contribution to humanity.

In truth, the situation today is not as bleak as it was during those centuries of Christian supersessionism. Israel and the Jewish people have many allies, millions of them. They may not write op-eds in the New York Times or The Guardian; they’re more likely to live next door or sit in the adjacent seat when we take a flight or train ride. This constitutes a marked difference from the Middle Ages.

At the same time, if we are to overcome this moment, it is evident that the work of Israel education can no longer just be about connecting young Jews to Israel. It must be part of a larger Jewish educational project. It should not be narrowly focused on training advocates for Israel – although such individuals make an important contribution. Drawing a lesson from the past, to resist those who demonize us, we should double down on building Jewish communities supported by Hebrew literacy, an appreciation for Jewish values, and the capacity to create Jewish culture for ourselves and for others. Resilience, at this time, will spring from an appreciation of collective Jewish self-worth.

We’ve done it before, we can do it again.