Sitting next to Jewish children isn’t enough make yours more Jewish

This week Sir David Bell confirmed what Jewish parents have been telling each other for two years. His review found that three in five Jewish pupils in English schools have experienced antisemitism, and that fewer than half of pupils believe it would be dealt with if they reported it. The government has accepted all 27 of his recommendations. Within hours, the leader of the country’s largest teaching union called one of the central ones “the wrong approach”.

It is no surprise that more Jewish parents are now looking at Jewish schools. Some tell me plainly that they want their children somewhere safe, surrounded by other Jewish children. Others tell me the opposite: their children are fine where they are, because there are plenty of Jewish pupils in their class.

Both are missing the point. Being with Jewish children is maybe half the story.

Firstly, children at Jewish schools face antisemitism too, on the bus, in the street and on the walk home in their uniforms. A Jewish school is not a bunker. If safety were all we offered, it would not be enough.

More importantly, the goal of a Jewish school isn’t just who our children are with, but who they become.

Broadly speaking, education does two things: It gives children skills, and it gives them an identity.

Skills matter, but they are no longer for life. The industrial-age model, in which you left school with a set of skills and stepped onto a conveyor belt for the next forty years, is fading fast. With the pace of technology and AI, none of us knows which skills our children will need by the time they graduate. Whatever they leave school with, they will have to relearn, again and again. The good news is that skills can be gained later in life. Adults retrain all the time.

Identity is different. It is formed young, and it becomes second nature. A 40-year-old can learn to code. It is far harder for a 40-year-old to discover, for the first time, who they are and what they stand for. There is rarely a second chance to form an identity. That is why the school years matter so much, and why what a school gives a child beyond the timetable matters most of all.

Look at what happens to young people who lack that anchor. We have watched activists move from climate change to Gaza with barely a pause, and Greta Thunberg’s journey from school strikes to the Gaza flotilla is only the best-known example. We have watched marchers who campaign for gay rights and women’s equality turn up in support of Hamas, an organisation opposed to both. How do people arrive at such contradictions? I would suggest they were never really standing for anything. They were following the crowd, the gravitational pull.

I explain it with a simple picture: Stretch a bed sheet tight over an empty space and place a one-kilo lead ball in the middle. Around it, scatter a few dozen balloons. The balloons are bigger, brighter and far more numerous. But the sheet dips around the lead ball, and wherever it rolls, the balloons roll after it. Having no weight of their own, gravity draws them to whatever is heaviest.

From an identity standpoint, many young people today are like balloons. This is not only a Jewish problem -it’s across the West. A generation ago, a Jewish child at an ordinary British school might have grown up British first and Jewish second, but at least something solid was there. Much of that “Britishness” has since been hollowed out, for everyone. Put a classroom of balloons together with a handful of pupils who hold strong, sometimes radical convictions, and it is the few who become the centre of gravity. Their ideas – no matter how ugly – attract and spread.

We see the same pattern well beyond the classroom, in politicians who condemn an ally one week and court sworn enemies the next. When you don’t have a strong sense of who you are and what you stand for, you go wherever the weight is.

Jewish children do not need to be balloons. Our tradition has given us one of the oldest and densest identities in the world, tested across three thousand years. A child who has a genuine knowledge and personal connection to its stories, its texts, its practices and its values, carries real weight into any room. That child can sit in a lecture hall, scroll through TikTok or walk past a march without being pulled along. They may even become the centre of gravity themselves.

That is the case for Jewish education, and it is far stronger than safety and company alone. Sir David Bell’s recommendations are welcome, and schools should act on them. Training teachers, teaching about Modern Jewish life and naming antisemitism plainly will all help. But no review can give a child an identity. Only parents, schools and communities can do that, and only while the child is young.

So when parents ask me whether their children need a Jewish school because of antisemitism, my answer is simple. They need a deep Jewish education for who they will become, whatever is happening outside the school gates.

Rabbi Bentzi Sudak is founder and director of Chabad Hampstead Garden Suburb