“Why Israel?” Re-Viewing Israel Education Through the Lenses of Civic and Political Engagement

Abstract

This article takes up categories from literature on political and civic engagement to help make sense of data collected from interviews with 40 American Jewish day high school students about what they think and feel about Israel. Viewed through a set of lenses that distinguish between the manifestations and motivations of political and civic engagement, the article helps clarify why young Jews, even when actively and positively engaged with Israel, are uncomfortable labeling themselves as Zionists. The analysis points to an important distinction between the concepts of Israel as “home” and “homeland.” The article also raises important questions about what is presumed to be an increasing distance or alienation from Israel among young American Jews.

Acknowledgments

Funding for the research reported in this article was provided by the AVI CHAI Foundation.

Notes

¹A sample of the wide variety of initiatives that all promise Israel engagement includes: The Hartman Institute's “iengage” initiative; MAKOM—the Israel engagement network of the Jewish Agency; Hillel's Centre for Israel Engagement; Legacy Heritage Fund's Israel Engagement Innovation Project; the Steinhart Foundation for Jewish Life exploration of “Israel engagement beyond hasbarah”; Makom ba-Galil's construction of Israel engagement; PEJE's Israel Engagement Community of Practice; Jewish Federation of Dallas's “Israel @ the Center”; the iCenter's “Project InCiTE”; and initiatives in any number of schools and synagogues across North America. http://iengage.org.il/About_Us_View.asp?Cat_Id=1&Cat_Type=About; http://makomisrael.org/; http://www.hillel.org/about/news/2010/nov/16nov10_Hillelicc.htm; http://www.jewishlife.org/pdf/autumn_2011.pdf; http://www.legacyheritage.org/IsraelEngagement/?file=grantees; http://www.peje.org/programs/communities_of_practice/israel_engagement.php; http://www.jewishdallas.org/getfile.asp?id=43958; http://www.theicenter.org/project-incite

²We are aware, also, that by viewing Israel engagement in these terms, we point to a more fundamental question of whether it might be fertile to conceive Israel education in the diaspora as a form of Jewish civic education. That is a question we intend to explore in a further article.

³This assumption is a consistent thread connecting a number of the articles in a special issue on “Israel Engagement Beyond Hasbarah” in the Steinhart Foundation for Jewish Life's journal, Contact: http://www.jewishlife.org/pdf/autumn_2011.pdf

⁴While we have been collecting and processing the data for this article, two such controversies have included the debate triggered by Peter Beinart's (2010) New York Review of Books essay about the death of Zionist feeling among young liberal American Jews, and subsequent responses to it (http://blogs.jta.org/politics/article/2010/05/24/2739289/responding-to-beinart); and in a more scholarly tone, the debate collected in Contemporary Jewry surrounding Cohen and Kelman's (2007) so called “distancing hypothesis” (http://contemporaryjewry.org/24.html).

⁵School names and student names are all pseudonyms.

⁶See also, http://userpages.umbc.edu/⊃korenman/wmst/fem_label.html; http://userpages.umbc.edu/⊃korenman/wmst/fem_label2008a.html