Harder to reach, harder to teach: When Israel is further away

For years, communal conversations about Israel education have focused on programmes: Should we invest more in school teachers, summer tours, gap years, youth movements or campus initiatives?

Beneath these debates lies a common assumption: that attachment to Israel can be strengthened through the ‘right’ educational intervention, a single experience that will impact young Jewish lives forever. JPR’s recent What Works?  study paints a more complicated picture. It finds that no single programme has a transformative impact on Jewish identity. Rather, identity is shaped through a wider ecosystem of experiences and relationships.

For much of the post-1967 period, Israel occupied a central place within that ecosystem. Young Jews encountered it through youth movements, camps, schools, family conversations and holidays. They did not all form identical views, but many experienced Israel directly, spending time in a society where Jewish life operated as a public culture rather than a minority experience, and learning about the rich tapestry that forms the only Jewish state first-hand.

Today, those opportunities feel less certain. Covid-19 disrupted educational travel. Then came 7 October, the war in Gaza, conflict with Iran, airline cancellations and growing security concerns. For many families, schools and youth movements, taking teenagers to Israel has become more difficult, more expensive and, at times, simply impossible.

The timing of these types of experiences matters. Summer tours, school trips and gap years typically happen only once. There is just a brief window in which young Jewish people encounter Israel through shared experiences with their peers. Once that window closes, it rarely reopens. And for the past seven years, that window was mainly shut.

At the same time, many young Jews are encountering arguments about Israel before they encounter Israel itself. Social media, online activism and political debate increasingly shape first impressions that earlier generations often formed through direct experience and communal relationships.

It is therefore important to ask whether a generation of young British Jews is growing up with less direct experience of Israel than its predecessors, and what the implications of that might be.

Israel has long played a distinctive role in Jewish life because it offers something no Diaspora classroom can replicate: an encounter with Jewish majority culture. It allows young Jews to experience the Jewish People not only as an idea, but as a society.

Yet the Israel they encounter today is deeply polarised. The constitutional crisis of 2023, the trauma of 7 October, the ongoing war, and fierce debates about democracy, security and Israel’s future have transformed public discourse in Israel and across the Jewish world.

That raises difficult questions for educators. What should a summer programme teach about Israel today? Should it shield participants from political conflict, or embrace disagreement as part of the educational experience?

There is a temptation, particularly in polarised times, to believe education should provide certainty. The opposite may be true. The greatest educational value of Israel has never been that it supplies easy answers. It is that it confronts young Jews with the wonder and complexity of Jewish peoplehood. Israel, in many ways, is where the ideal of Jewish life meets the reality of it.

The challenge is not whether participants will encounter disagreement. They inevitably will. The challenge is whether they are equipped to navigate it, and that work has to begin long before they board a plane.

If fewer young Jews experience Israel directly, their understanding will increasingly be mediated by social media, news coverage and political debate – sources that rarely reward nuance or lived experience. And if those who do visit encounter only one version of Israel, they may leave with a narrower understanding of the country than it deserves. Neither outcome serves young Jews well.

The answer is not to abandon Israel-centred education, nor to pretend nothing has changed. It is to recognise that the educational task has become more demanding. Young Jews need opportunities to encounter Israel as it is: resilient yet divided, inspiring yet imperfect, profoundly Jewish yet internally diverse.

More importantly, they need the tools to understand what that means for their own Jewish identities in the Diaspora.

The Israel that shaped previous generations of Diaspora Jews is changing. So too are the conditions under which the next generation encounters it. Ensuring that encounter remains possible, and educationally meaningful, may be one of the most important challenges facing Jewish education today.

Omri Gal Glueckselig is Director of Communications at the Institute for Jewish Policy Research (JPR)