Considering The Changing Landscape in Modern Orthodox Israel Education

Hillel David Rapp

There have been many post-October 7 articles and essays looking at how the horrific and tragic events of that day, and the subsequent year-plus of war, hostage rescues, killings, and negotiations have set new courses in Jewish life and thought. But the first page of my Google search for “Israel education after October 7” yielded few relevant results—only a couple of blog posts from Unpacked and Lookstein, and an article from Hadassah Magazine focusing broadly on non-Orthodox Jewish schools. The other links were focused on university campus life – understandable given the attention that issue has received. What I have not seen is a detailed discussion focused specifically on Modern Orthodox Jewish Day Schools which, I believe, are a unique category as it relates to Israel education. Modern Orthodox Day Schools, often unlike their Community Day School counterparts, will draw from an already committed and mostly untroubled pro-Israel constituency, to borrow Donniel Hartman’s terminology. So the purpose of this essay is to consider, from my standpoint as Principal of a Modern Orthodox, Religious Zionist high school, the changed landscape of Israel education since October 7.

Let’s begin with the educational landscape in a pre-October 7 world. When I began teaching twenty years ago, I taught a course at the Ramaz Upper School called “Survival Judaism.” It was developed by Rabbi Dr. Jeffrey Kobrin and was meant to advance student learning in specific ways that would benefit their journeys on secular college campuses—in particular the challenges to Zionism they might encounter. At the time, our conversations about Israel education were taking a particular turn toward a more nuanced posture, supported by a sense that traditional Hasbara was not a sufficient approach, with its focus too heavily-weighted on a “rainbows and sunshine” telling of Israeli history, as Ron Schleifer detailed in a 2003 paper. I distinctly remember a former student who was attending Columbia in the early 2000s sharing how he felt betrayed by his Jewish education when the first time he heard about the Deir Yassin massacre was from an anti-Israel college professor. If we were going to help educate robustly Zionist young adults, the thinking went, we would need to effectively take advantage of the bubble of Jewish day school to encourage young people to do the hard work of grappling with the historical narratives and identity that defined Palestinian history and culture, thus enabling the students to understand their Zionism in full view of its opponents.

This seemed right on every level at the time. An increasing number of students seemed less likely to take their Zionism for granted, and, in those immediately post-second-intifada and early social media years, also wanted to learn more about what was animating the other side. I was faculty advisor for a school club that attempted to invite Columbia professor Rashid Khalidi to Ramaz, an invitation that was ultimately rescinded by the Head of School. Leaving aside whether or not the Head’s decision was correct, the student interest in extending the invitation was itself a reflection of the time. In the subsequent years, the success of Unpacked in producing Israel education content that it proudly describes as “nuanced” and “complex” shows how expansive this desire had become. In my current role over the last decade, I would often enthusiastically tell parents at our schools’ open houses that our goal in Israel education was to ensure our students encounter no surprises in university, that their high school education would make them fully aware of what the pro-Palestinian side might offer when a class discussion breaks out or a professor asserts something they might find troubling. My impression is that the goal of Israel education in many Modern Orthodox day schools over the last two decades has been to engage fully with the story of the “other side” while operating from a place of firm confidence in “our side,” and to promote our students’ ability to meaningfully participate in that conversation.

After October 7, I believe, the popularity of that goal has taken a significant hit. The problem that has emerged is a challenge to the unspoken premise of the approach: that the “other side” has a narrative worth contending with. The desire to understand the Palestinian narrative of their history has given way to an emerging perception that this narrative is not really about the historiography of certain past events but more about adherence to a historical ideology built on a dogmatic judgment of the entire settlement and colonialist enterprise, of which Zionism is the most relevant case study. For example, we can explore the Palestinian experience of the Nakba and 1948 as a historical event that can be understood from the records of that experience, and that can be considered in the context of the historical records of the Zionist experience and the story they tell. But that approach is something fundamentally different from the idea that all Western colonialism is an inherent evil that must be uprooted, starting with Israel. This is not another historical narrative to be considered with nuance as much as it is an ideology that must be adhered to.

I don’t know the extent to which this ideology informs pro-Palestinian narratives as a whole, but the perception that it does has taken hold in our community, and seems to be of particular relevance for the challenges Jewish students face on campus. In his recent review of Adam Kirsch’s new book On Settler Colonialism: Ideology, Violence and Justice (2024), Michael Walzer shares what I think represents a new awareness of this ideology and its half-baked application to Canada, the United States and Israel alike:

In principle, they want all the settlers, all of us, to be gone, or to cede sovereignty to the Native American nations (and live, presumably, as their subjects). As Kirsch sums up a key text: “America is something that should not have happened”…

Settlement is the original sin, or, better, the settlers’ insatiable desire for more land, more wealth, more power is the original sin. All the evils of exploitation, racism, misogyny, and homophobia follow from the everlasting settler moment. Redemption comes only with decolonization: some secular mix of a return to Eden and the advent of the messianic age…

“Israel is much younger and smaller than the United States,” Kirsch writes, “and it is easier to imagine its disappearance.” Similarly, the number of Jews, all of them defined as “settlers,” is small enough to allow the anti-settler militants to plan their subjugation, exile, or elimination. The leading ideologues argue only for the end of Jewish sovereignty; what comes after that is, as usual, more vaguely described. But Kirsch, who has read more extensively in the literature of settler colonialism than anyone I know would willingly do, concludes that its effect is “to cultivate hatred of those designated as settlers and to inspire hope for their disappearance.” Israel is accused of genocide—and threatened with genocide.

So the radical theory of settler colonialism became “the theory of a massacre,” the ideology that justified Hamas’s atrocities of October 7 and inspired the response of too many American professors, students, and activists. The Israeli settlers were taken to be rapacious and domineering; the native Palestinians were innocent and oppressed, and October 7 was an exhilarating example of a struggle for liberation, as a Cornell historian infamously told rallying students.

In this context, it becomes much harder to see a value in engaging or grappling with the “other side” when even the secular version of the other side’s narrative seems ideologically invested in your side’s destruction. The “conversation” on campus is no longer an actual conversation—that is, a respectful but heated classroom debate on historiography where Jewish students want to feel they have a strong position rooted in understanding their opponent’s perspective. It is a zero sum loyalty test where a Jewish student either declares her allegiance or attempts to slip through the fray undetected. Whatever she decides, it no longer seems all that important to have a nuanced view of the other side. If the history that drives the Palestinian narrative insists that the Jewish nation must disappear for Palestinians to realize their national aspirations, what point is there in understanding and engaging with that story? It almost has the same feel as engaging with Holocaust deniers, where there is not a point of view that is valid enough to be understood deeply and considered empathetically.

My wife attended York University twenty years ago and there was plenty of anti-Israel sentiment then. But there were also big debates in the classroom with professors, Jewish and Palestinian students all engaged. In contrast, I recently spoke with a student attending Columbia University who suggested in a literature class having nothing to do with Israel that the story being examined should be seen through a sympathetic lens toward 19th century European values, and was summarily called a “Zio-bitch” by a classmate, and the professor had nothing to say to that. The discussion was over. When I asked her why she didn’t pursue a complaint she answered that the result would be a public record of the incident that could be seized on by Jewish activists on campus for their purposes, and that it would eventually lead to her name being outed and then her being doxed by anti-Israel activists.

Put simply, I don’t believe we are in a place where our young people are feeling challenged by their interlocutors on campus the way they were in the past. Our young people feel hated on campus and see nothing particularly nuanced about engaging with a conversation that no longer exists.

So how are we to respond to this sentiment as educators?  My colleague Rabbi Eddie Shostak recently suggested to me that this is an important opportunity to turn inward, to focus on the nuance and complexity within Jewish society in Israel, an area of learning often overlooked in Modern Orthodox day schools. While the divisions in Israel over the Judicial Reform prior to October 7 were only beginning to permeate the North American Jewish community, those divisions are emerging again, along with new ones surrounding the ongoing hostage crisis and the Haredi draft. Maybe the most important learning we can engage with is to learn about each other. That is, to understand the unique divisions within Israeli society that don’t map neatly onto North American Jewish demographics, and to discuss the difficult challenges they present. For example, what are we to make of the mainstream North American Orthodox instinct to support both Israeli soldiers and the Haredi Torah leaders who encourage refusing the draft?

Or perhaps we should keep our focus external, and consider doubling down on understanding the Palestinian narrative in all its complexity, both the concrete historiography and the half-baked ideology. On the one hand, we should keep refusing to consider the dogma of Settler Colonialism. On the other hand, we need to maintain a nuanced approach to Palestinian historiography. After all, in the diaspora we are on the front lines of that discussion. It does not seem that many university professors are bothering to challenge our alumni on Israel’s internal divisions. Perhaps we should be articulating our educational goals to parents and students in terms of a David vs. Goliath battle for the soul of higher education, and for the future of Zionism in the academy. And, at the same time, we should ask them to recognize that, at some point, Israelis and Palestinians will have to hear each other’s stories, however fanciful and distant that currently seems. Is it reasonable to expect our students to be brave warriors against some parts of the pro-Palestinian side while keeping the faith in the importance of nuance toward others?

So far, I don’t have a firm idea of what this shifting landscape will mean, or how we might consider changing how we learn in school. But, if I am correct that this shift is occurring, I want to suggest that we consider it and discuss it just as we did twenty years ago when we shifted away from traditional Hasbara. Right now this feels to me like an equally important moment.