Developing Students’ Capacity to Engage in Productive Dialog about Israel
Yonatan Rosner is the Jewish Studies and Hebrew Principal at Pressman Academy. He earned his B.A. in Jewish Philosophy and Cognitive Science from Hebrew University, an M.A. in Jewish Education from Hebrew University, and MBA from California State University (Northridge). In 2013, Yonatan was awarded the Covenant Foundation’s Pomegranate Prize.
In April 2023, David Bryfman and Barry Chazan wrote: “Today the issues of identity and Jewish identity not only have lots to do with Israel, but also the connection between Israel and Jewish identity may be one of the most significant developments for Jewish identity, life, and education that we have known.” In other words, Jewish identity is intertwined with Israel in ways that have never before been true. This sentiment and understanding have shaped and guided our school’s recent thinking about Israel education.
In the Pressman Academy’s Portrait of a Pressman Graduate, the school names its commitment to, amongst other things, graduating 8th graders who are committed to living a Jewish life; in addition to their proficiency with Hebrew language, Torah, Jewish text, tefillah and holidays, a Pressman graduate is knowledgeable about, and has a personal connection to, the land, state and people of Israel. This is a strong statement that we take seriously; the following will describe the evolution of our 7th grade Israel class and how it helps us achieve this ambitious goal.
For over twenty years, our school partnered with an Israeli school in the 6th grade. When it was decided in 2019 that Israeli 6th graders were no longer permitted to fly abroad, we decided to continue taking our 6th graders to Israel, shifting from an immersive experience in Israel which was heavily based on the partnership element, to an experience focused on curriculum and learning. At the same time, after careful reflection, we adjusted our 6th grade Israel class curriculum to focus on Israeli modern history, map and borders, government, and ethnic diversity (see Themes for Social Studies by NCSS which guided us in this process).
But even with this foundational education about, and rich learning experience in, Israel, we recognized that our curriculum was not adequately preparing students to make sense of the tensions and challenges that they were facing in the news and social media. Their Israel education was lacking something substantial, and with this thought in mind, an advisory team of our Israel Educators met throughout the 2022-2023 school year, framing a three-year middle school curriculum. The first year would be the 6th grade foundational class, the second year is a 7th grade Israel course that we created and launched in the 2023-2024 school year, and the third year is an 8th grade class that is being taught for the first time now, in 2024-2025.
Seventh Grade Overview
In planning the 7th grade Israel class, our advisory team identified three core goals:
- Familiarity with Israel’s history. Our goal was to deepen students’ knowledge and understanding of Israel’s history, focusing on learning about historical figures and events in their historical context. We chose for students to learn about dilemmas that have arisen in Jewish history and Israeli society in the past 150 years.
- Analysis of primary sources. The goal was to allow our students to join the conversation based on primary sources and to develop their textual analysis skills of those sources.
- Speaking and listening with courage. Even before the events of October 7th, we recognized that there existed a lot of tensions around Israel’s political choices. We decided to focus this class on laying the foundation of perspective-taking and dialogue.
We determined that students would demonstrate knowledge and understanding by preparing debates on historical events, using primary sources as material, during which they would practice conveying and respecting the views of others. School administrators and rabbis were invited to judge these events and provide feedback. Each team shared their arguments, worked to rebut the other side, answered questions from the audience, and learned about the way in which their historical event unfolded in reality. The event concluded with cookies (how else?), decorated especially for the theme of the debate. Through the debates, students developed their ability to listen compassionately while also having the knowledge and courage to speak their minds.
In planning for the 7th grade class, there were discussions about how to focus the class and what we wanted to prioritize. As with anything we do, the goals of this course were aligned with our school mission of Developing Minds, Nurturing Hearts, and Instilling Jewish Values:
Developing Minds
The first challenging decision we had to make was around content knowledge, determining which events should be covered and addressed in the curriculum. When thinking about this for our students, we decided to focus on historical events that have already been resolved but would allow our students to explore multiple narratives and perspectives. By choosing historical events rather than current events that still require active debate, we intentionally reduced the intensity of the debates.
Some of the units we created include:
- A Jewish Homeland: Israel or Uganda? (1903)
- The Costs of Statehood: The Altalena Affair (1948)
- Justice After the Holocaust: The German Reparations (1952)
- The Search for Safety and Peace: The Peace with Egypt (1979)
Nurturing Hearts
While the content of the course was important, we also emphasized the process by which students would learn. Active listening was a key component of the course goals, and we taught students the skills they needed to actively listen from the heart. We relied upon the methodology of Pedagogy of Partnership (PoP)—which we use in our Judaics classes—as well as the practice of Resetting the Table’s Courageous Communication Across Divides. These methodologies, already created and implemented successfully in our school, gave us a foundation for teaching students how to speak clearly and listen deeply. In addition, our school partnered with For the Sake of Argument, drawing from their pilot curriculum when creating our curriculum and mock debates.
Listening to and acknowledging perspectives different from their own was certainly a challenge for many of our students, but over the course of the year, we noticed considerable growth in our students’ ability to nurture their hearts and open their minds to opinions different from their own. The debates, especially, were particularly successful because of our students’ ability to listen deeply to others’ opinions. By utilizing the skills from PoP and Resetting the Table, as well as their classroom instruction, our students could listen actively and respond meaningfully in the debate format.
Instilling Jewish Values
The methodology we chose for students to learn about these events included the use of primary sources. Through the use of primary sources, we knew students would develop their minds—they would learn advanced textual analysis skills that could also be applied in Rabbinics and Tanakh—but perhaps, more importantly, they would learn about makhloket, constructive disagreement. We want students to understand our tradition’s value that engagement with multiple perspectives carries the potential for personal growth and the deepening of interpersonal connections. And primary sources were the best tool to help students engage in this constructive debate.
Early on, we partnered with the Center for Israel Education and with Unpacked which provided multiple videos, articles, and artifacts for our students to analyze. After introducing the theme to the class as a whole, students were broken into groups to research the event from a specific perspective or point of view. For example, in the case of the Uganda plan, some groups took the affirmative and were instructed to find arguments for the plan of establishing a home for the Jews in Uganda, while others took the negative and were instructed to argue against the plan. All groups were prepared to rebut arguments from the other side and answer any questions about their position (see this assignment which briefly lays out the student process).
Another example of the use of primary sources and text analysis came later in the year in a unit that focused on the 1952 question of whether or not Israel should accept reparations from West Germany for the atrocities committed during the Holocaust. After completing a short workshop by IAC-Ofek Hub about the Holocaust, our students were given the original transcripts of the Knesset members who participated in this 1952 controversy. Students were again divided into affirmative and negative teams and were tasked with annotating the speeches of selected government members, distilling the arguments, and creating their own in preparation for their debate. On the day of the debate, which was scheduled around Yom Yerushalayim, we invited the entire middle school and the 7th grade parents to attend the reenactment of this historical debate and celebrate our ability to disagree with one another while still remaining whole. The audience was given this rubric to help provide feedback to the participants for their roles.
In reflecting on the course work and the students’ engagement, we were proud to realize that the work took students beyond developing textual skills and becoming sophisticated consumers of primary and secondary sources. Ultimately this process has given our students a sense of who they are in this conversation and helped instill both a love of Israel and the ability to take a stand on complicated issues as they see them through their Jewish values—including the realization that more often than not, our Jewish values themselves clash with one another.
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The 7th grade Israel class has been a great success in terms of achieving its original goals. After October 7th, our existing Israel Education structures, allowed us to address the events with our students and offer them opportunities to process their thoughts, ask questions, and learn about the reality around them. We are proud to be able to address these difficult themes with our students.
This coming year, we are launching the 8th grade Israel class which will focus on Israeli current events. We believe that with the foundational knowledge, and intellectual and social-emotional skills provided by our 6th and 7th grade classes, our 8th graders will be ready to engage with these much more challenging topics.
But most of all, we hope we will not be an island. In our vision, we see the opportunity for students from other Jewish schools to engage one another around Israel education themes. What would it look like, for example, to take the Moot Beit Din model (see Covenant/Ravsak and Hadar/Maimonides as examples), apply it to Israel Education and create a Knesset Yisrael event in which students from different schools would debate one another around a contemporary key issue that challenges Jews and Israelis around the globe? In my mind, we already have all the ingredients in place to enable such an experience, and if not now, when?
Yonatan Rosner is the Jewish Studies and Hebrew Principal at Pressman Academy. He earned his BA in Jewish Philosophy and Cognitive Science from Hebrew University, an MA in Jewish Education from Hebrew University, and MBA from California State University (Northridge). In 2013, Yonatan was awarded the Covenant Foundation’s Pomegranate Prize.
FROM THE EDITOR: Fall 2024
It feels pretentious and premature to be talking about retooling education about Israel. The war is not over, the wounds are still fresh, barely a year has passed since that awful day, there are thousands of children-parents-loved ones still in active combat and separated from their families for months at a time, many of the hostages are still in captivity, the campuses are reeling, the internal divisions in Israel are deepening rather than abating, and the landscape of the Jewish world is muddled at best as the aftershocks of the earthquake still rattle us. And yet, we dare to think that we have something meaningful to contribute as to how to teach about Israel. It is fair to say that everything written in this journal is written with the awareness that when the dust settles, we may need to re-examine everything all over again.
The Story of the Ever-Living People
As a preface, I believe that we are all experiencing a revolutionary moment in the evolution of the Jewish people. By that, I mean that while the evolution of the Jewish people remains a constant, we are nonetheless at the forefront of a moment of awareness—of what in Judaism is known as she’at ratzon—a moment of willingness among Jews that is unprecedented in modern Jewish history. That, in and of itself, should raise for us a great call for action as educators and as people who work on behalf of the Jewish community in charting a path for our envisioned trajectory.
Knowledge and Identity: An Interview with Natan Kapustin
I would identify two very different kinds of Israel education that we do. The one that I will not speak about much is what I might call the reactive component. When things happen in or related to Israel, we need to address them. And we do that in a variety of ways. We have speakers come in, debriefing sessions with our students, Town Halls dedicated to open discussions about Israel, special tefillot, etc. This past year, post-October 7th, we were particularly intense in the reactive programming, and it is hard to know what this next year will bring. But none of this has affected what we have been doing in our core Israel education programming.
The Times They Are A’changin…
When I began my work in Jewish education at the Park Avenue Synagogue High School in September of 1967 it was, as some will remember, a tumultuous time. In the Jewish world, the Six-Day War gave a sense of elation (albeit very temporary as we have seen for many decades) and America was filled with social and political crises. Our afterschool and weekend program quickly became a magnet for Jewish and even non-Jewish teenagers from across the Upper East and West sides of Manhattan. Feeling the absence of the “international” (Jewish and beyond) in my own education and seeking to emphasize and expand it in that of my students, we quickly added international travel during summer and mid-year vacations as a key part of our curriculum, and within a decade we were traveling into the Arab world.
Israel Front and Center: Developing a Curriculum on Am and Medinat Yisrael
Sitting in my 12th grade Modern Israel class, one of my students raised her hand and asked “why haven’t we learned anything about Israel in History classes since 10th grade?” While I began to explain the sequence of the History curriculum, where students learn Zionism and the history of Israel in 10th and 12th grade, I realized that students learn about Israel in multiple subjects and in co-curricular activities throughout their four years of high school. I pointed out that the 11th grade Hebrew curriculum offers a range of readings and discussions on early Zionist thinkers and Israeli literary figures, many of whom students engaged with, albeit from a historical perspective, in their 10th grade History classes.
Learning from Children’s Ideas about October 7th and the Israel-Hamas War
Day school teacher Mr. Berkman is a proud long-time Jewish educator, but only recently has he also come to see himself as an Israel educator. “In October,” he explains, “I joined every other Jewish educator in the world in realizing, wait, I have to teach Israel now. But how?” Ms. Baghai, a general studies teacher at a different Jewish day school, has also had to rethink her teaching in the wake of October 7th. “How much do we talk about it and learn about it? How deep do we go? How much do I share?” she wonders.
Finding the Balance: The Synergy of Nuance, Critical Thinking, and Ahavat Yisrael
We get off the bus for a quick stop on our first day of Derech l’Lev, our 8th-grade Israel experience. There is an electric energy as our two busloads of students and chaperones embark on this much-anticipated, two-week journey to Israel. I turn to one of my students: “So Sarah, what do you think? What are your first impressions of Israel?” Her face lights up. “I can’t explain it,” she says. “It’s all so familiar even though it’s my first time here. I just feel like I belong, like I’m home. I love this country!”
Teaching about Israel’s Many Complexities with Confidence, Competence, and Courage
Jewish educators have long been successful at instilling a love of Israel in their learners by providing opportunities to engage with the sights, sounds, tastes, smells, and vibrancy of the country and its people in an ongoing way. Many settings culminate their Israel educational programs by visiting Israel, an experience designed to further deepen learners’ relationships with the people, land, and State of Israel. These varied modalities and content areas all are critical tools for achieving our collective goal of fostering a deep connection and commitment to Israel and the Jewish people.
“History of Israel” as History
As the years continue, Israel education now necessarily includes the history of Medinat Yisrael as a larger component than it has in the past. Young students have no memories of the major events in the history of the state, and as time passes, more information, stories, and significant events must be learned in order for students to be able to understand deeply what Israel represents and how its past informs its present. Language, culture, and geography are no longer sufficient for a well-crafted Israel education program.
Israel Education in a Post October 7th World
Is being pro-Israel the same as being Zionist? Is the call of the hour advocacy training or education? As Israel educators with decades of experience between us, October 7th forced us to take a hard look at what we teach, and how we teach it. We’ve taught American high school students, Masa gap year and Yeshiva/Seminary students, and visiting college students. We certainly weren’t prepared for this traumatic war, but we will argue that an authentic, classic Zionist approach to Israel education makes more sense now than ever.
Cultivating Respect in Teaching the Arab-Israeli Conflict
Being a Jewish History teacher in a pluralistic Jewish day school, I often find myself up against the question of how we apply the principles of pluralism to the teaching of Israel, and especially the teaching of the “Conflict.” Given that Jewish identity and religious expression are tied to Israel, it is important to help guide students through the fraught path of figuring out the relationship between their emotional connections and the political and social responses to the academic study of Israel. But, just as we set out guideposts for the limits of pluralism, it is important to craft boundaries of what is acceptable within our classroom environment. Key to this challenge is helping students understand their identities and how this sense of self shapes the way that student views the historical realities behind these conflicts.
Israel Education For Today’s Generation
For many educators, teaching about Israel has never been so challenging. The emotionally charged nature of the discussion, attitudes on Israel dovetailing with political affiliations, and educators’ fears of facing backlash from parents and the community, are all reasons for why teachers are reluctant to address Israel in the classroom. This is further complicated when considering the generational gap surrounding Israel in our communities. While previous generations saw Israel as the country of miracles and the underdog in the Arab-Israeli conflict, many in the younger generation see Israel as the aggressor in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and feel conflicted over support for Israel.
Middle School Israel Advocacy
Yavneh Academy, in Paramus, New Jersey, is a Modern Orthodox, staunchly Zionist, preK-8 Jewish day school. Its mission statement includes: “Establishing the centrality of the State of Israel in the life of our school and in the lives of our children and imbuing each child with a connection to the State of Israel as an essential part of his/her identity.” Yavneh has always held true to its mission statement. It has seamlessly woven the study of Israel into much of its curriculum. Students learn Hebrew in every grade, including pre-K. They are exposed to Judaic texts and maps to connect history to the present-day land.
A Shared Student and Teacher Approach at Learning About Israel
The first aspect of helping my students this year was to create a safe, open, and accepting environment in the classroom to allow students to share their fears, questions, and thoughts. I have learned over many years of teaching that students desire to be heard and validated. They are seeking to be heard, much more than they are seeking actual answers to their thoughts and (philosophical) questions. I have learned over the years to listen and understand them.
Preparing Students For Their Encounter With Broader Society
Long before October 7th, as a teacher with a Social Studies background, I have been working with my administration team and the Center for Israel Education to revamp our Israel curriculum. My instinct was to bring Israel education from a place of chronological progression of events to finding touch points with other historical events outside of our people and land, helping to anchor historical periods in students’ minds. This approach mixed with modern culture and current events, should give students a broad and basic foundation of understanding that culminates in our annual 8th grade trip to Israel.
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