In 1892, the Zionist thinker Ahad Ha’am found what he called “half consolation” in one of the most grotesque accusations ever made against Jews.

The blood libel claimed Jews murdered Christian children and used their blood in religious rituals. It was monstrous. But it had one strange advantage. Every Jew knew, with total certainty, that it was a lie. No amount of repetition or public outcry could make it true. That gave Jews a kind of shield against that libel. The whole world could agree about the Jews and still be completely wrong.

National Library of Israel/Wikimedia Commons

Portrait of Asher Zvi Hirsch Ginsberg, primarily known by his pen name Ahad Ha'am.

But Ahad Ha’am’s comfort only went halfway. He worried about something harder to defend against. As Jews became more integrated into the wider world, he feared they would start absorbing the general accusations made against them, the nondescript ones that weren’t as easy to disprove. He worried they might come to believe they really were, in his words, “the worst of the world’s nations.” He was afraid the invented, hateful “Jew of the imagination” would replace reality in Jewish minds. Jews would start seeing themselves the way their accusers saw them. Einat Wilf and others have used this essay to talk about Zionism and antisemitism. I want to use it to talk about schools. Not the arguments we make to the world, rather the sacred place where a child learns, early, not to believe the accusation at all

More than 130 years later, that fear has found its modern distribution system. It is no longer a hostile neighbor or a religious accusation shaping what young Jews believe about themselves. It is a social feed. American Jewish teenagers are absorbing who they are, and what Israel is, from an algorithm built to reward outrage, not accuracy. They are told Judaism is just a religion, when it is truly a people with a religion, a language, a culture and a homeland. They are told Zionism is nothing but a colonial project, that the Jewish connection to Israel is largely invented, and that Jewish power is uniquely dangerous. Much of it is simply false. Some of it is a distorted, manipulated kernel of truth. Almost none of it comes with the context a young person needs to tell the difference. That is the mechanism Ahad Ha’am feared, running at the speed of a smartphone.

I’ve spent more than two decades running a Jewish day school. The most urgent job of Jewish education right now is not fighting antisemitism directly. It is making sure our children are not first introduced to their own history, their own people and their own homeland by those who mean them harm. It is making sure they can explain themselves to themselves before someone else does it for them.

That is the strongest case I know for Jewish day schools right now, stronger than the continuity argument, stronger than the safety argument, though both are real. Continuity is a downstream effect. Safety is a separate and urgent project. This is the existential one. Who gets to a child’s sense of self first?

The continuity data is solid on its own terms. A 2025 study of Jewish college students found that 81 percent of day school alumni said being Jewish was very important to them, compared to 35 percent of students who didn’t attend day school. But that number describes an outcome, not the mechanism. The mechanism is actually simple and direct. A child who has already engaged with the real Jewish story, in depth, from people who love them, is much harder to indoctrinate into someone else’s version of it.

A Jewish child should be able to spot a lie about Jews the way Ahad Ha’am’s generation could spot the blood libel: with no doubt. By the time that child is a college student, or an adult among friends or colleagues, they should also be able to recognize an uncomfortable truth about Jews or about Israel, and know the difference. That takes more than pride. Pride without knowledge is fragile. Exposed to an accusation pushed by algorithms with nothing to judge it against, it melts into shame, or hardens into denial. In both cases, the “Jew of the imagination” persists, because the accuser’s version wins by default.

A well-educated Jewish adult should be able to hear an accusation and say, “That’s false.” The same person should be able to say, “That criticism has some truth, but it’s missing important history.” And when it’s warranted, that person can say, “This one is fair, and our community, or the Israeli government, needs to deal with it.”

Without a deep Jewish education, young people get boxed into a false choice, and social media enforces it. Defend everything connected to Jews no matter what, or accept whatever the loudest voice in the feed says. Neither is honest. Both are what happens when a young person never had the resources to think it through themselves.

Good Jewish day schools supply those resources before the feed gets there first. They teach history, Hebrew, law, text, ethics and the dynamic relationship between the Jewish people and the land of Israel. Students learn that Zionism was never one single idea but a loud, arguing collection of movements. They learn what drove Jews to seek a modern state of their own while also learning what that history has cost Palestinians. They learn to hold two ideas at once. Israel has a right to exist, and any particular Israeli government’s actions are fair game for honest criticism. None of this is available in a fifteen-second video, and that is exactly the point. No feed can convince a child who already knows the story.

Parents rarely walk into my office talking about “continuity” or “communal survival.” They talk about belonging, values, a strong school, and a real community. Underneath that is the question most never say out loud. When my child is older and alone with a phone at midnight, will they have internalized enough of their own story to recognize when someone is trying to write it for them? That question matters even more for families whose Jewish life is less engaged, since a thinner foundation is easier for an outside narrative to overwrite. What every family shares is the right to inherit enough of our culture and traditions that no algorithm gets to define it for their children first.

Two people, arguing from very different places, are each getting half of this right. Neither is describing the piece that’s missing. We have to teach children who they are before someone else does.

Dara Horn has argued that the wider culture prefers Jews as history’s victims to Jews as a living people. She’s right, and the imbalance lives inside our own walls too. We’ve spent far more energy teaching the Holocaust than teaching the Jewish calendar, the law and the memory that make up a Jewish life, which means a hostile stranger online often knows more Jewish history than the Jewish teenager they’re arguing with.

Simon Amiel, who just took over Birthright’s North America operation, said this week that Israel travel is the strongest anchor for Jewish identity, and that his mission is building connection through immersive experience. He’s not wrong either and Israel trips matter. A trip to Israel can change how a young person feels about being Jewish, sometimes permanently. But I love Italy. I’ve been to Italy. And yet, I still couldn’t tell you why its regions distrust each other, or what actually happened there in 1943, let alone 1443. Loving a place isn’t the same as knowing it. Experience can make someone feel connected to Israel. It can’t hand them the calendar, the law, the history of Zionist movements, or the specifics they’ll need at 1 a.m. when a stranger online tells them a different story. That has to be taught intentionally, over years, in a classroom, not just visited.

None of this guarantees one kind of outcome. Some graduates grow more religious. Some don’t. Some support whatever Israeli government is in power. Some criticize it, sometimes sharply. Those are different questions, and people can answer them in any combination. What matters isn’t which answers they arrive at. It’s whether they built that understanding themselves, or inherited it from whoever got to them first.

A community that doesn’t educate its own children first eventually lets someone else, an algorithm, a stranger, a viral post, decide which parts of its identity survive. That failure isn’t theirs. It’s ours.

Ahad Ha’am’s half consolation was knowing the whole world could be wrong about the Jews. His fuller worry was that Jews would come to believe it anyway, once the accusation grew too diffuse to disprove outright. He was describing 1892. He could have been describing a comments section in 2026. Our job isn’t to teach children that the world is always wrong; that would be its own kind of lie. Our job is to make sure they meet their own story before the internet tries to write it for them, and to give them the tools to know, when the two versions conflict, which one to trust.

Send them to Jewish day schools because culture, traditions and story are worth knowing on their own terms, before anyone else gets to explain them first. Not because the world might hate them, or because a stranger online might lie to them. An identity built only in opposition to what others say ends up limited and reactive, still defined by the accuser, just in the negative. They deserve the texts, the arguments and the memory that shaped our people, not as a defense to be deployed but as a self already formed. When they run into someone who gets Jews or Israel wrong, that inheritance gives them something no viral rebuttal ever will. The ability to stand in their own story while judging what other people say about it.

Who gets to explain the Jews? If we don’t take our children’s Jewish education seriously, the answer will keep being: everyone but the Jews.

And increasingly, a machine that doesn’t even know their names.

Steve Freedman is the head of school at Solomon Schechter Day School of Bergen County (N.J.). Freedman has served as a head of school for over 23 years and has also served as a congregational education director.