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A New Look at Israel Education: Mapping the Field and Charting the Future

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by Anne Lanski

Yesterday, in partnership with the Schusterman Family Foundation, the Jim Joseph Foundation, the Marcus Foundation and the AVI CHAI Foundation, the iCenter hosted iThink: A New Look at Israel Education. For a full day, more than 80 organizational leaders, Jewish and Israel educators, funder representatives and scholars reflected on the emergence of the field of Israel Education and envisioned what the future could look like.

The basis for this conversation was Mapping the Field, a new report commissioned by the iCenter that documents the growth of the field of pre-collegiate Israel Education over the last 10 years and offers recommendations and goals for building on our progress.

Mapping the Field follows a report commissioned by the Gilo Foundation 10 years ago, which found that Israel Education did not exist as a field. It lacked a common language, a central address, capacity-building organizations, standards and practices of professional development, funding champions and many of the other markers of a strong field.

A decade later, we have made real progress in many of these areas. The Aleph-Bet of Israel Education provides a powerful language for Israel educators. Masters degree concentrations and certification programs have been established. Foundations like the ones that sponsored iThink have committed significant resources to developing the field. And the iCenter exists as a North American agency.

Still, a great deal more work remains to be done. Mapping the Field presented four major areas of recommendations, including: promulgating standards of practice for the field; increasing the availability of and access to high-quality, developmentally appropriate resources; investing in intensifiers – strategic interventions with a multiplying effect – that can be deployed across settings; and encouraging experimentation, risk-taking and expanded offerings by practitioners and organizations in the field. (The full report is available here.)

The conversations at iThink were fueled by excitement and creativity about how the future could unfold.

  • Could we double the number of teens traveling to Israel in the next few years?
  • Could mifgash become a normative part of the lives of Israeli and North American Jewish youth?
  • Could we develop a cadre of 1,000 skilled, certified and employed Israel educators?
  • Could we significantly increase the number of North American Jewish high school students graduating with proficiency in Modern Hebrew?
  • Could we develop content-rich approaches to learner-centered education that nurture strong, resilient Jewish identities?
  • Could organizations from various sectors – camps, supplementary schools, day schools, youth groups and beyond – collaborate on new initiatives?

This was a unique moment. Rarely, if ever, has such a wide range of committed and influential people gathered to dream and plan for the future of Israel Education. And iThink marks one of the only times that a communal conversation about Israel Education emerged out of a North American organization. Partnerships will be formed, collaborations will be developed and the field will be advanced.

Now is a moment of great promise for Israel Education. The relationship between Israeli and North American Jews has evolved to one of mutuality, as we both realize how much we have to learn from and with one another. Hundreds of thousands of Jewish young adults, both Israeli and North American, have participated in mifgashim through Birthright Israel. And, as our report demonstrates, Israel Education has begun to establish itself as a field, with a language, professional training programs and capacity-building organizations.

It is also a moment of great urgency. Now is a time to act, to capitalize on the gains we have made over the last decade. It is a time to grow Israel educators and the field of Israel Education. If the energy, excitement, vision and relationships we saw at iThink are any indication, the next 10 years will be ones of even greater growth and transformation.

Anne Lanski is Executive Director of the iCenter, a national organization working to advance high-quality, meaningful and innovative Israel education by serving as the national hub and catalyst for building, shaping and supporting the field.

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  1. It is wonderful to learn how far the provision of Israel Education has gotten since the release of the “Mapping the Field” report. I do have a concern, however, since I did not see that the question of the content of Israel Education was addressed. I write this, because more and more people, young and old, after having been “educated” about Israel as children and youth, have come to realize that the narrative that they heard is terribly one-sided and, in fact, biased. Too much information has come out in the past several years that contradicts this narrative, thus provoking a good deal of skepticism and, more to the point, fall off of support for Israel.

    I have to point to the reports that Birthright Israel groups are being taken to Hebron, a major flashpoint, to encourage support for Israel’s settlement policies. If these reports are accurate, such visits can only create dissonance among the young visitors.

    Will the trips to Israel encourage a slanted, perhaps dangerous, narrative to be promulgated? How will the mifgashim between American and Israeli teens be structured? Who will participate?

    I am a person who has committed his entire adult life to Israel and the future of the Jewish People. I have pushed for more and more mifgashim to be initiated. In order for these mifgashim to have the positive, long-term effect that we hope for, they must be open, without artifice.

  2. Congratulations on a great initiative and a gathering which will hopefully make strides towards the further professionalization of the field and its place on the agenda of the American Jewish community. I’d also like to point to the important role that study abroad in Israel can and does play in this issue. To truly deepen content knowledge, significant time in Israel is critical in the training of the next generation of educational leaders. With all due respect to the accomplishments of short-term, summer and Birthright programs, only a concentrated, long-term experience, including an academic component, can provide the content knowledge necessary to lead this field. Recognizing this need, Ben Gurion Univeristy intiated an MA in Israel Studies, taught in English and based at the Ben Gurion Archive. These and other initiatives can be valuable partners in shaping the future of the field in the U.S.

  3. Go iCenter! I can’t wait to hear more about what came out of this “think tank.” I am especially interested in the challenge of Israel education as it relates to supplementary Jewish education. At Jewish Kids Groups we embed Israel into everything we do. For example, we use technology to bring Israel into the classroom in the form of trigger videos from: Israel21c, Leadel.net .. but still, time is so limited! I can’t wait to hear more about the gathering and what Israel education standards will emerge from it.

  4. It is wonderful to see all the different initiatives being launched in the Israel Education arena. As Anne Lanski points out, the field has developed significantly over the last 10 years. In addition to the thanking the iCenter, for hosting this gathering to think about future directions in Israel Education, we should extend a thank you to the AVI CHAI Foundation and the Jim Joseph Foundation for their commitment to this field within Jewish Education.

    These two Foundations, together with the Stanford School of Education have recently also launched the Consortium for Applied Studies in Jewish Education (CASJE). The Consortium is connecting leading individuals in the fields of Jewish education, research and philanthropy to shape a collective vision for the future of applied research in Jewish Education.

    Among CASJE’s (www.casje.com) first initiatives is an Israel Education Panel that brings together leading researchers and practioners in the field to develop a series of high impact research questions which will give direction to the emerging research that will be used by groups like the iCenter, individual educators, schools, and camps as they engage in the work of Israel Education.

  5. This is daft. Creating “educational” programs for American Jewish kids in Jewish day and congregational schools is like bringing ice to eskimos. Not one of these foundations–Avi Chai, Schusterman or Jim Joseph, actually does a thing to support secular education in Israel itself. They are obsessed with getting Jewish kids in America to–what? “Love” Israel more? Speak on its behalf? To whom and how? By being propagandized via fantasy programs about a country that doesn’t actually exist in the ways that people like Lynn Schusterman insists on it being taught? So many Israeli teachers cry out for help with curriculum, lesson plans and very, very basic support. But JJF, Schusterman and the others have no intention of helping.
    I love the shopping list, among them: how to develop 1,000 “certified” Israeli educators in America. With US Jewish day schools, BJEs and congregational schools failing, just who is talking to who? No congregational school in American requires a “certified” teacher of any sort, and their “Israeli” programs are “taught” by Israeli expats.
    It’s all very sad and very silly and comments by Ana Fuchs above are simply painful to read, while it seems Gordon Silverman should have sat in on the meetings.

  6. The field of Israel education is indeed interdisciplinary and ever-changing and in dire need of revamping. What remains at the top of the list of priorities is Israel experiential education. There can be no substitute for the kind of Israel education one receives – and the impact it will have – by actually participating on a quality Israel experience program, where the land, the history, the culture and people of Israel come to life.
    To answer Anne’s 1st and last bullet points: “YES” – we can double the number of teens travelling to Israel in the next few years; and “YES” – organizations from various sectors can collaborate on new initiatives. Lapid, established 3 years ago as a collective body with the goal of raising awareness of and significantly increasing participation in quality high school age programs to Israel, is proof of the willingness of organizations from across the religious/political spectrum to collaborate on such important initiatives.
    The report says that by 2020, “20,000 Jewish teens will travel to Israel each year (approximately double the current number”). This is not only very achievable, if not earlier than 2020, it has been done before and it can be done again with the right community focus. It’s time for action.