Israel education has failed us, but there is a fix.
Jews teach Israel as a historical necessity, a geopolitical argument, and an emergency shelter. We rarely teach it as a place overflowing with things that Jews of all kinds might actually enjoy.
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For decades, diaspora Jewish institutions have tried to teach young Jews why Israel matters.
They teach the Holocaust. They teach the wars. They teach the founding of the state, the ingathering of exiles, the dangers of antisemitism, and the necessity of Jewish self-defense.
They explain that Israel is the only Jewish state, that Jews have lived in the land for thousands of years and that, without Israel, the Jewish People would once again be dependent on “the goodwill of others.”
All of this is true, and much of it is failing.
The problem is not that diaspora Jews are teaching falsehoods about Israel. The problem is that they are teaching Israel in the wrong order, through the wrong emotional language, and with the wrong understanding of how people form attachments in the modern world.
We teach young Jews why Israel must survive before showing them why Israel is worth loving. We teach Israel as a historical necessity, a geopolitical argument, and an emergency shelter. We rarely teach it as a place overflowing with things they might actually enjoy.
Israel education in the diaspora has become overwhelmingly defensive. It is designed to answer accusations, prepare students for hostile campuses, explain wars, rebut propaganda, and justify Israel’s existence. Even though the lessons are historically accurate, the experience can feel like a permanent briefing:
Here is what happened to the Jews.
Here is why we needed (and still need) a state.
Here is who tried to destroy us.
Here is who is trying to destroy us now.
Here is what you should say when someone calls Israel colonialist.
Here is what you should say when someone accuses Israel of apartheid.
Here are the facts. Here are the dates. Here are the maps. Here are the talking points.
By the time many young Jews encounter Israel as adults, Israel has already been presented to them as a burden they are expected to defend. They have been recruited into an argument before they have been invited into a civilization.
That is backwards.
The old model of Israel education depends heavily on obligation: You should care about Israel because you are Jewish, you should visit Israel because your grandparents dreamed of it, you should support Israel because Jews need a safe place, you should learn about Israel because antisemitism is rising, you should defend Israel because other people are attacking it.
This language still works on some people. But it is losing its power, particularly among younger Jews who have been raised in a world of almost unlimited identity options.
They can choose their communities, causes, interests, and cultural influences. They can learn Korean words through music, develop an interest in Italian cooking through social media, follow English football clubs they have never seen play in person, and become emotionally invested in fictional worlds created by Japanese animators.
Their identities are no longer shaped exclusively by family inheritance or institutional expectation. They are shaped by fascination.
Yet diaspora Jewish organizations continue to present Israel as something closer to an assignment. The underlying message is often: You may not find this interesting, but it is important — which is a disastrous starting point. Anything taught primarily as a duty will eventually be experienced as a burden. And anything experienced as a burden will be abandoned as soon as the social pressure to carry it disappears.
Israel cannot remain central to Jewish identity if young Jews encounter it mainly as homework. The goal should not be to make Jews feel guilty for failing to care. The goal should be to give them something worth caring about.
For many diaspora Jews, the doorway into Israel is catastrophe.
Skyrocketing antisemitism across Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa leads to Jewish immigration to the Land of Israel. The Holocaust leads to the founding of the state. The founding of the state leads to war. War leads to terrorism. Terrorism leads to security. Security leads to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The conflict leads to campus activism. Campus activism leads to the need for better advocacy.
Israel becomes one long chain of threats.
Even visits to Israel are frequently organized around this framework. Students are taken to Yad Vashem (Israel’s official memorial to the victims of the Holocaust), military cemeteries, borders, and memorials. They hear from soldiers, historians, diplomats, and victims of terrorism.
These experiences can be profound. They belong in any serious encounter with Israel. But they cannot be the entire encounter.
Imagine teaching France primarily through the German occupation, terrorism, and debates over immigration. Imagine teaching the United States almost entirely through slavery, war, and political polarization. Imagine introducing someone to Japan through Hiroshima, territorial disputes, and demographic decline. Those histories matter, but no one would confuse them with the totality of those civilizations.
Israel is also treated differently from nearly every other country because it is so often taught as an argument rather than experienced as a place and a people. The result is that many young Jews know why Israel is controversial before they know why it is interesting.
They know about checkpoints before they know about Israeli cinema. They know about missile-defense systems before they know about Israeli architecture. They know about the United Nations before they know about the Israel National Trail. They know the names of terrorist organizations before they know the names of Israeli musicians.
They know how Israel responds to accusations of apartheid, but they may know almost nothing about its food, humor, neighborhoods, television, scientific culture, sports rivalries, design, beaches, poetry, or environmental projects.
This is not serious Israel education. It is crisis management disguised as education.
The central question of modern Israel education should be simple: What is already alive inside this person, and how can Israel deepen it?
A teenager who loves basketball should not first encounter Israel through a lecture about the 1948 war. Show him Maccabi Tel Aviv. Teach him about Israeli basketball legends like Tal Brody, Miki Berkovich, and Pini Gershon; local basketball clubs; international competition; and the way sports reflect Israeli society.
A student who loves music should be introduced to Israel through Israeli hip-hop, Mizrahi music, indie rock, classical composition, electronic music, and the revival of Hebrew as a language of popular culture.
Someone interested in art should discover Israeli painters, photographers, sculptors, street artists, and museum curators. Let her explore how Jewish memory, Middle Eastern geography, immigration, and international influences have shaped Israeli visual culture.
Someone who loves nature should encounter Israel through the Negev, the Galilee, the Mediterranean coast, the Dead Sea, desert agriculture, bird migration, hiking trails, and the extraordinary ecological diversity concentrated within one small country.
Someone interested in food should learn Israel through markets, family recipes, and the culinary traditions brought by Jews from Morocco, Yemen, Iraq, Poland, Ethiopia, Iran, Tunisia, Russia, and dozens of other places.
Someone interested in business should examine Israeli entrepreneurship — not merely through the tired slogan of the “Startup Nation,” but through the cultural habits that make Israeli innovation possible: informality, argument, improvisation, impatience with hierarchy, and a high tolerance for failure.
Someone who loves television should watch Israeli series. Someone who loves fashion should study Israeli designers. Someone who loves languages should learn Hebrew slang. Someone fascinated by urban life should compare Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Haifa, Beersheba, and Jaffa.
This does not trivialize Israel. It humanizes it. Music, art, sports, and food are not decorative additions to a national story. They are how most people enter one.
People rarely fall in love with a country because they memorized its diplomatic history. They fall in love with a country because a song moved them, a city surprised them, a landscape stayed in their imagination, or a conversation made them feel unexpectedly at home.
History explains why Israel exists. Culture helps explain why anyone would want to be part of it.
Many Jewish institutions are uncomfortable asking what Israel can offer the individual — at least in part because the question sounds selfish. Israel, they believe, should not need to market itself. Jews should care because Israel is theirs.
But telling people what is “theirs” does not guarantee they will feel any connection to it. Inheritance without intimacy becomes abstraction. “What’s in it for you?” does not mean reducing Israel to a consumer product. It means recognizing that relationships require reciprocity.
What can Israel awaken in you? What can it teach you? What can it add to your life?
Can Israel make you a better artist? A more adventurous traveler? A more interesting thinker? Can Hebrew give you a new way of understanding Jewish texts, Israeli humor, or your own family? Can Israeli music give language to emotions you did not know how to express? Can Israel’s landscapes connect you to nature? Can its arguments teach you how to live with disagreement? Can its mix of cultures complicate your understanding of what Jewishness looks like?
Young Jews should not encounter Israel only as something that needs their support, advocacy, and loyalty. They should encounter it as something capable of giving. Israel offers community, creativity, language, memory, beauty, intensity, and belonging. It can make Jewish identity more expansive rather than more defensive.
But first, diaspora Jewish educators must stop acting as though relevance is beneath them. Relevance is not pandering. It is the beginning of education.
Diaspora Jewish education frequently jumps between two versions of the country.
There is biblical Israel: Abraham, Moses, King David, Jerusalem, and the ancient Jewish kingdoms. Then there is political Israel: Zionism, 1948, the resulting wars, the Arabs (including the Palestinians), terrorism, and the peace process. The Israel that exists between sacred history and geopolitical conflict often disappears.
But most Israelis do not spend their days living inside a history lesson or a political panel. They go to work. They sit in traffic. They complain about housing costs. They argue with relatives. They follow sports teams. They take their children to the beach. They watch television, open restaurants, build companies, protest, write songs, hike trails, and plan weekends.
Modern Israel is a living society, not merely the answer to an ancient prayer. To teach modernity is to teach Israel as it is being created now.
It means teaching new Hebrew words, not only biblical ones. It means examining what Israelis are building, watching, reading, wearing, and debating. It means introducing young Jews to contemporary Israeli voices rather than presenting a polished institutional version of the country. It also means allowing Israel to be imperfect without making imperfection the entire point.
Real attachment does not require pretending that everything is beautiful. In fact, people often become more attached to a place once they understand its tensions, contradictions, and frustrations. Israel can be inspiring and infuriating, ancient and startlingly modern, deeply tribal and fiercely Western, warm and abrasive, communal and individualistic, innovative and bureaucratic, beautiful and poorly planned.
That complexity is not an obstacle to connection. It is what makes connection possible.
Propaganda produces fragile loyalty because one uncomfortable fact can destroy it. Intimacy produces resilient loyalty because it can survive disappointment.
Many diaspora organizations have spent enormous resources preparing Jews to defend Israel, but people do not defend what they have merely been instructed to defend. They defend what has become personally meaningful to them.
Advocacy without attachment creates exhaustion. A student may memorize the correct answers about Zionism, borders, refugees, and international law — but when that student enters a hostile social environment, facts alone may not be enough. If Israel exists only as a political position, abandoning that position can become the easiest way to gain acceptance. It is much harder to abandon a place that has become part of your emotional world.
A young Jew who loves Israeli music will continue listening even when Israel is unpopular. A young Jew who has close Israeli friends will understand that the country cannot be reduced to slogans. A young Jew who has hiked through the Galilee, learned Hebrew, cooked a family recipe, or spent a summer working in Tel Aviv possesses something deeper than talking points.
Knowledge may win an argument. Attachment survives one.
This is why culture must come before combat. Experience must come before advocacy. Curiosity must come before obligation. First, show them the country. Then teach them how to defend it.
The future of Israel education will not be one standardized curriculum delivered to every Jewish child. It will be personalized.
A Jewish institution should know what its students already care about and build pathways into Israel from there. An Israel program for athletes should not look like an Israel program for filmmakers. A program for environmentalists should not look like one for entrepreneurs. A teenager interested in archaeology should be given a different doorway from one interested in nightlife, dance or medicine.
The destination may be the same, but the entrances should be different.
This requires Jewish educators to abandon the idea that there is only one serious way to teach Israel. A song can be serious. A football rivalry can be serious. A television drama can be serious. A hiking trip can be serious. A cooking class can be serious. These experiences become educational when they open larger questions about language, history, migration, identity, and society.
Because Israel should also be taught as a possibility: a place you might visit, study, create, invest, volunteer, work, live. Or a language you might speak. Or a culture you might help shape. Or a society in which you are not merely an observer.
Young diaspora Jews should not be told only that Israel needs them. They should be shown that there may be a version of themselves waiting for them there. Perhaps it is a more confident Jewish self, a more creative self, a less apologetic self, a self who experiences Judaism not only in synagogues and institutions but in streets, music, friendships, landscapes, and ordinary life.
That is the promise that much of diaspora education has neglected. Israel is not merely where Jews go when the world becomes dangerous. It is one of the places where Jewish life becomes larger.
It should go without saying that students should know Jewish and Israeli history as more than the litany of its travails. But it seems that Hoffman's antidote is a variation on "Look who's Jewish in show business/ sports/ politics, etc." Somewhere between the real need to know how to defend Israel and experience its natural charms and cultural vibrancy lies the vast treasure of Jewish values, ideas, and achievements, that are absent from the lessons our children are taught about every other culture except their own.
Let's face it - we are doing a terrible job of educating our children. A trip to Israel - assuming that happens - is insufficient. A "religious" education that looks mainly to preparing a student to learn the trope for a bar or bat mitzvah ceremony followed by an unrelated secular celebration is unlikely to clothe that child in the knowledge and pride that will be needed to face an indifferent or hostile world. Or to be able to raise another generation with substantive Jewish values .
We need imaginative ways to make alternative education available to almost every Jewish child. In this age of limitless internet options and educational alternatives, it shouldn't cost a fortune to provide broad education to every Jewish child. We don't need a single brick in another structure. Every penny should be invested in the only structures that will assure a strong Jewish future - children.
We have failed spectacularly. We need to massively reallocate our priorities and our resources. We need bold new ways of thinking instead of wringing our hands about what not's working and seek what will
This is true. Someone once tried to convince me to visit Germany; I responded, “Who wants to go there!?”