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ABSTRACT
This study examines how 3- and 4-year-old Jewish children think and feel about Israel. The research, conducted as a collaboration between scholars and practitioner-researchers who work in Jewish early childhood centers, draws upon group interviews, elicitation/provocation exercises, a drawing task, and teacher documentation to investigate how some of the youngest learners in Jewish educational settings conceive of Israel. We found that 3- and 4-year-old Jewish children think about Israel as a foreign country with its own customs, landmarks, and language. They also think about Israel as a distinctly Jewish place, with a special role in Jewish traditions and stories. We found no evidence that 3- and 4-year-old children reflect on Israel as a place of personal meaning for their own Jewish lives. This absence challenges both the theory and practice of Israel education in the early childhood setting.
Acknowledgments
The authors would like to thank the educators and early childhood institutions who collaborated on this project, the children who participated in it, and the parents who agreed to let their children take part. We also thank CASJE for the generous grant that enabled us to conduct this research. Finally, we wish to thank Dr. Dana Rofey’s lab—Pittsburgh Obesity, Weight, and Emotion Research—Gender Diverse Youth (POWER-G), University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine for assistance with figures in this article.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1 We are not the first to offer tweaks to the way that this heuristic device is used in Israel education. See, for example, Hassenfeld’s suggestion that there may, in fact, be a third axis to this matrix that focuses on a learner’s stance toward important questions about Israeli policies (Citationin press).