Not the Israel of My Elementary School: An Exploration of Jewish-Canadian Secondary Students' Attempts to Process Morally Complex Israeli Narratives

ABSTRACT

The following article presents data from a mixed-methods practitioner research study that focuses on understanding how Jewish secondary students learned about controversial topics in Israel's history and how these topics impacted their connection to the country. The responses that were provided by the students showed that the material forced students to conceptualize Israel in new ways and that the material— learning from Palestinian and Israeli texts about events that happened in 1947 and 1948—was disruptive to their preconceived notions of Israel. With the passing of time, the students were able to reflect on the real difficulty they had with learning about the topics but were able to synthesize the disruption into their Israel narrative to arrive at a new understanding. The integration of this new material into existing schema is understood within the context of dangerous memories, and how learning about controversial moments in nationalist narratives can impact the way students learn and relate to a topic. A further finding was that some students expressed resentment at previous educational experiences for not being fully transparent about historical events.

KEYWORDS:

• Dangerous memories
• history pedagogy
• Israel education

Acknowledgments

The author wishes to thank his research assistant Jenna Pasternak for her help on this paper.

Notes

³ I combined Tochnit Dalet and Deir Yassin with two other examples of violence—The King David Hotel Bombing and the Sabra and Shatilla Refugee Camp massacres. I chose to link them together here because the students' explanations were equally applicable to any of the events.

1. Over the course of the year, numbers fluctuated because of increases and declines in course enrollment. In addition, toward the end of the year, student attendance declines and therefore fewer data were available in June than in September when interest and attendance was greater.

2. All names have been changed to protect the identities of the students.