Reimagining Israel Education for This Moment
By Rabbi Dena Klein and Beth Cousens
October 7 fundamentally changed the context in which Jewish educators teach.
For years, Jewish educators wrestled with how to help learners build authentic relationships with Israel amid increasing complexity. After October 7, those questions became even more urgent. Learners today ask harder questions and parents often bring different expectations. In this context, educators are called upon to teach content and to facilitate difficult conversations with wisdom, empathy, and confidence.
Reform Jewish educators, thankfully, are not starting from scratch. The Reform Movement’s Israel Education Outcomes articulate a compelling vision for helping learners develop enduring relationships with Israel, engage thoughtfully with multiple perspectives, deepen their understanding of Jewish peoplehood and Zionism, and participate meaningfully in Jewish life.
The new Reimagining Israel Education Framework from The Jewish Education Project builds on many of those same aspirations. Developed through conversations with hundreds of educators, researchers, thought leaders, and community stakeholders, including many ARJE members, the Framework offers a shared educational philosophy for what Israel education can and should become in this new era across the Jewish educational landscape.
In the coming months, we will be releasing a series of materials to help you adapt the Framework to your organization. As much as we are building roadmaps to action, we have also only begun to reimagine Israel education. We are excited to work and learn together and develop real instances of the Israel education that we need today and in our future.
We invite you now to get to know the Framework. Start by reviewing these ten commitments, the heart of the Framework, that offer a practical roadmap for educators.
- Israel education should be cumulative.
Israel learning is more than a single unit, a semester, or even a single Israel trip. It should be woven throughout Jewish education, connecting Tanakh, Hebrew, prayer, history, culture, and lived Jewish experience over many years. - Israel education should embrace complexity.
Learners deserve an honest encounter with Israel's diversity. They should experience multiple voices, narratives, and perspectives while developing the capacity for respectful disagreement and thoughtful engagement. - Israel education should be constructivist.
The goal is not to produce identical opinions but to help learners build their own meaningful relationships with Israel. Inquiry, reflection, and personal meaning-making belong at the center of the educational process. - Israel education should be collaborative.
Diaspora learning should be shaped by real relationships with Israelis. Israeli educators, peers, and communities should become partners in learning rather than simply subjects being studied. - Israel education should be courageous.
Educators need the support and confidence to facilitate difficult conversations, acknowledge both grief and joy, and create classrooms where learners can wrestle honestly with today's realities. - Israel education should be continuous.
Relationships with Israel develop over a lifetime. Learners should revisit Israel at different developmental stages, allowing their understanding to deepen and mature over time. - Israel education should embrace contrasting perspectives.
Learners should encounter Israel's religious, political, cultural, and ethnic diversity while cultivating the Jewish ability to hold multiple truths—eilu v'eilu—in productive tension. - Israel education should be covenantal.
Grounded in Jewish texts, Hebrew, and shared responsibility, Israel education should help learners see themselves as contributors to the ongoing story of the Jewish people rather than passive observers. - Israel education should build connection.
Authentic relationships with Israelis, Jews around the world, and, where appropriate, Palestinian and Arab voices transform Israel from an abstract topic into a lived human experience. - Israel education should cultivate curiosity and care.
The Framework imagines learners who ask questions, think critically, disagree respectfully, and remain deeply committed to both Israel and the Jewish people. Growth—not certainty—is the goal.
The Framework is designed to shift our focus from what we want learners to know to the enduring relationships we hope they will build—with Israel, with Israelis, with the Jewish people, and with Judaism itself.
That vision feels especially resonant today. As the Framework puts it, our goal is to help create a future in which "we are actively, together, building the Israel and the Jewish people of our dreams." Israel education is about more than transmitting information or preparing learners to answer difficult questions. It is about enabling them to become contributors to the ongoing Jewish story. We hope our young learners begin to feel responsible for one another and feel a desire to shape the future of Jewish life.
For Reform Jewish educators, that has always been our calling. Reform classrooms are places where Jewish identity, moral imagination, and sacred community take shape. The Reimagining Israel Education Framework builds this commitment, providing a shared vocabulary for strengthening the work we are already doing. Grounded in the Reform Movement Education Outcomes and informed by the realities of this new era, it invites us to continue building Israel education that is courageous, nuanced, deeply relational, and ultimately hopeful.