Israel Education. Clarifying the Job to Be Done

Benji Davis and Hanan Alexander (2023) have performed a valuable service in categorizing and deconstructing the “various understandings in the literature as to what it might mean for a Jewish learner outside of Israel to receive an Israel education” (p 8). The body of literature they muster, most of it published in the last 20 years, is astonishing in its size, certainly when compared with the relative paucity of English language scholarly work in other content domains of Jewish education, such as prayer, history, Talmud, and Bible. The proliferation of those understandings and the efforts to translate them into curriculum and educational programs surely betray the extent of anxiety about how to ensure that Israel has meaning for American Jews at a time when they are assumed to be increasingly distant from Israel. Davis and Alexander are not the first to employ the tools of philosophical analysis as a means to help educators navigate this congested field, but they are probably the first to do so by grounding their analysis in so extensive a review of literature. Twenty-five years ago, Eisen and Rosenak (1997) set out to distinguish between different ways of thinking about and educating about Israel with the goal of helping to address “the challenge of bringing Israel into the lives of American Jews” (p. iv). The challenges they depicted seem benign compared to those faced by educators today; essentially, how to “nourish possibilities and opportunities for true familiarity and encounter with Israel” (p. 35). They mention “complexity” just once, and then in relation to the inner life of the Jewish people, not with reference to the situation in Israel or the tasks of Israel education. Nevertheless, the conceptual distinctions they employ foreshadow some of those employed by Davis and Alexander. Their landscape includes Israel as “the land of Judaism,” “the land where Jews live as a people,” “a political entity,” “the land of Jewish culture,” and “a thriving western country, living a natural life.” Just over 10 years ago, Isaacs (2011) engaged in a similar exercise, developing a conceptual taxonomy “that describes and critiques the dominant paradigms of Israel education in theoretical and even ideological terms” (p. 483). He identifies what he calls six models: Classical Zionist; Israel Engagement; Jewish Peoplehood; Romantic/Realist; Classical Jewish Text; and Comparative. Isaacs's categories do not readily align with those of Davis and Alexander