Educators are hungry for tools that center Israeli voices while holding space for students’ real questions about Israel, even — especially — the hard ones. That impulse reflects two key ideas shaping Israel education today.

The first, articulated by David Bryfman, CEO of The Jewish Education Project, is that learners’ connections to Israel cannot be limited to the affective and the behavioral — they must be built on a foundation of content knowledge, of the “canon for Israel education.” The second, championed by scholar Sivan Zakai, is that children will seek answers elsewhere if they don’t find trusted adults who will honor their questions. In her 2022 book My Second-Favorite Country, Zakai implores us not to sacrifice complexity on the altar of naivety: “The magic of childhood comes not from an innocent lack of awareness about the ills of the world; it comes instead, from children’s unfettered belief that the world can be remade.” 

Courtesy/The Jewish Education Project

Musa and Geula, characters from the curriculum HaTikvah: Our Hope for Israel from The Jewish Education Project.

For decades, we’ve spoken about the importance of teaching Israel with nuance, but rarely have we trusted our youngest learners to join that conversation. Yet over the last year, educators across the field of part-time Jewish education have told us: We understand that these learners are ready to explore Israel with nuance, but we don’t have the resources or tools to make it possible. In a field skewed toward materials for teens and adults, they sought an age-appropriate entry point for younger learners: a set of materials that invited curiosity and held complexity and could empower supplementary school teachers — with limited hours, limited prep time and unlimited responsibility — to teach with confidence. They needed a curriculum rich in content yet flexible enough to meet teachers and learners where they are.

That’s the need that gave rise to HaTikvah: Our Hope for Israel, a new six-session curricular unit from The Jewish Education Project designed for fourth- and fifth-grade students. HaTikvah sits at the intersection of two imperatives: helping children to know Israel and Israelis more intimately, and helping them to imagine what a better, more hopeful future for Israel might look like. 

Presenting a spectrum of perspectives

At its core, this curricular unit uses the Israeli national anthem as a window into belonging, identity and moral imagination. Across six sessions, learners explore “HaTikvah” through music, story and discussion, encountering a set of realistic characters whose diverse experiences and values shape their relationships to Israel and its anthem.

One lesson introduces four Jewish Israeli perspectives: a secular boy who finds hope in freedom; a child who connects to her Mizrahi ancestors; a religious nationalist (dati leumi) girl who sees divine purpose in the state; and an ultra-Orthodox learner who struggles with the anthem’s secular associations. 

Other lessons introduce Arab citizens of Israel and American Jews. In one session, learners encounter fictional children whose lives have been touched indirectly by the (now thankfully resolved) hostage crisis, and who model ways to maintain hope in difficult times. Each time, learners consider where and why these characters might agree or disagree; they locate their own voices in the conversation, too. 

Through these narratives, learners practice what we might call empathic literacy: expanding their circle of understanding while clarifying their own commitments. The activities encourage creativity — composing art, poetry or performance pieces — but also moral reasoning. The goal isn’t to arrive at one “correct” interpretation of “HaTikvah”; it’s to discover what it might mean, personally, to hold hope for Israel.

One of the most important aspects of the unit is what it asks of educators: not mastery, but presence. In our free online trainings for educators preparing to teach the unit, we emphasize that teachers need not be historians, theologians or therapists. Their role is to be an attentive guide on the side, to model compassionate listening, authentic questioning and respectful exploration.

This approach reflects current research at the intersection of Israel education and developmental psychology, which shows that upper-elementary learners are capable of wrestling with questions about fairness, identity and justice when adults trust them to do so. Avoiding these topics doesn’t protect children; it leaves them to form opinions without Jewish context or guidance. By positioning educators as facilitators of values exploration, the unit helps reclaim Israel education as a deeply Jewish practice — one grounded in dialogue, empathy and the courage to hold complexity.

It is easy in this moment to feel that hope itself is fragile. Yet effective Jewish education is a long game, shaping not only what children know today but how they will make meaning tomorrow. Twenty-five years from now, the learners encountering HaTikvah: Our Hope for Israel will be adults: community members, parents, even educators. The ways they learned to talk about Israel — as a place shaped by real people, real disagreements and enduring hopes — will shape how they carry those conversations forward and how they invite their own children into them.

When young learners are trusted with complexity, they develop habits that endure: curiosity, empathy and the confidence to ask hard questions from a deep stance of belonging.

This initiative is one effort to plant those seeds early. Because hope learned in childhood, like any anthem, is carried for a lifetime.

Mikhael Kesher is the director of Israel education at The Jewish Education Project.