TEACHING ABOUT ISRAEL’S MANY COMPLEXITIES WITH CONFIDENCE, COMPETENCE, AND COURAGE

By Aliza Goodman, Ari Feinstein, and Dvora Goodman

Jewish educators have long been successful at instilling a love of Israel in their learners by providing opportunities to engage with the sights, sounds, tastes, smells, and vibrancy of the country and its people in an ongoing way. Many settings culminate their Israel educational programs by visiting Israel, an experience designed to further deepen learners’ relationships with the people, land, and State of Israel. These varied modalities and content areas all are critical tools for achieving our collective goal of fostering a deep connection and commitment to Israel and the Jewish people.

There is another element, however, that educators have been grappling with for many years: finding the balance between instilling that love of Israel with acknowledging and exploring Israel’s many complexities. We’ve all had these thoughts: to what extent do we want to introduce our learners to topics related to Israel’s internal religious, political, and national divides? And how might we address the many facets of the Arab-Israeli / Israeli-Palestinian conflict (shorthand: the conflict) specifically? Will exposing learners to multiple perspectives on these challenging topics turn them away from Israel altogether? And how could we possibly do this work when, for many of us, our own understandings are limited?

Striking this balance in our teaching is even more important now, in the post-October 7th world, to help learners unpack and understand what is going on around them while also continuing to develop and deepen their ongoing relationships with Israel.

To tackle this challenge, educators need to develop the confidence and courage to integrate teaching about Israel’s many complexities—including the conflict—into their Israel education offerings. This holistic approach to Israel education, one that invites learners to appreciate Israel in all its richness and nuance, can help young people build the enduring, evolving relationships that we hope they will carry with them forever.

We believe that in order to be successful in Israel education, we need to start with ourselves. As a frame for this work, we offer the mindset and value of being a talmid hakham—a learned learner. Educators have the tremendous ability to embrace these two roles at the same time—being the learned (the teacher) and being the learner (the student). The very essence of the talmid hakham is the ability to approach learning opportunities with both wisdom and humility.

As such, we offer some tips from our own experiences that can help us do this work with impact. These timeless principles have long guided our work at The iCenter and are even more essential today.

Life is full of complexities and gray areas. Embrace them and get comfortable living in the expanse.

Parker Palmer, a renowned educator from whom we often draw inspiration, wrote about the need to live with the gray: “We can hold [multiple truths] as paradoxes, not ‘either/ors,’ allowing [the truths] to open our minds and hearts to new ways of seeing and being.” We live in a time where it is easy to find ourselves in black-and-white echo chambers, often influenced by the loudest voices around us, making it difficult to focus on the gray areas. Our role as educators is to help add color, nuance, and complexity to the black-and-white extremes.

In the aftermath of October 7th, many of us are ourselves grappling to hold multiple truths at the same time. As adults, we may be better able to understand that our love and commitment to Israel can live in tension with some of the darker realities on the ground, be it the current war, the anti-government protests, religious-secular controversies, and other long-standing internal divides. In order to form mature relationships with Israel, our learners need to develop the skills to navigate through and live with life’s paradoxes. They will grow to see that Israel’s many complexities deserve our exploration as they invite our love, support, and critique. Indeed, rather than threaten our commitment to Israel, they have the potential to strengthen it. Our goal in Israel education, therefore, is to help learners develop a multilayered understanding of Israel and how it fits into their lives.

Any learning experience about the conflict can begin by highlighting the grays and inviting learners to get comfortable exploring them:

• Asking “When did the conflict start?” breaks down the very assumption that there is a clear, agreed-upon beginning, allowing space and appreciation for multiple narratives.
• Asking “Who is in conflict?” challenges us to expand our view of the conflict as simply being between Israelis and Palestinians. It also reminds us that the words we use—and the words others use—matter and carry with them a tremendous amount of complexity and gray areas ripe for exploration.
• Asking “What is the conflict about?” forces us to look deeper into the points of contention that are at play and have been at play at different times during the conflict. It also highlights that different people focus on different aspects of the conflict at different times.
  Discussing these seemingly simple questions moves what might be considered a black-and-white conversation into the expansive gray area. Living in the gray enables us to raise questions, explore ideas, develop critical thinking skills, challenge assumptions, and expand learners’ fields of vision as we inspire their ongoing growth and transformation.

Practice seeking and being receptive to viewpoints that differ from your own even—or especially—if doing so causes you discomfort.

In an effort to help learners develop strong, positive relationships with Israel, Jewish educators have often focused on teaching a singular Jewish narrative. We now know, however, that this approach can lead young people to turn away from Israel. Significant numbers of young adults claim they’ve been “lied to” throughout their Jewish education; rather than working to navigate through a multifaceted reality, they then opt out altogether.

Bringing in multiple perspectives and exploring different narratives—Israeli, Palestinian, Arab, and more—is key to developing a deep understanding of past historical events, present realities, and possible futures. To grapple with the complexities of the conflict, multiple narratives should be considered, even if some of them are difficult to teach or to hear. In fact, engaging with the most challenging perspectives opens the door to tremendous learning and growth for ourselves and our learners.

History can be taught by including different narratives on the same events. As we develop learning experiences on the conflict, we ask ourselves:

• How can we engage with a timeline of the modern State of Israel that reflects more than a singular Israeli narrative? How might we incorporate a range of Jewish perspectives, as well as those of Palestinians and the broader Arab world?
• How do we begin to understand the same time periods and events from these very different perspectives?
• And what if, in trying to understand multiple perspectives, we feel discomfort because they seemingly change the significance of the event itself?

Receptiveness—being truly open to hearing other points of view—is key to grappling with these questions. Since October 7th, exploring concepts, ideas, and perspectives related to the conflict has been even more difficult than usual. We have found that practicing receptiveness ourselves, both through listening and being thoughtful in the words we use, allows us to engage respectfully with varied and even opposing opinions.

When it comes to our learners, we give them opportunities to practice their own receptiveness by engaging with resources that offer multiple perspectives. For example, we can invite learners to engage with a recent historical event through a curated multimedia experience that includes articles, images, audio clips, and videos that examine the event from different vantage points. This enables learners to broaden their understanding of the event’s significance and better explore issues in their full range. When studying primary source documents, we can challenge learners to consider how the documents might have been received by different players in the region at the time, both Jewish and non-Jewish, and their implications for the future. When studying milestone events in Israel’s history, we can encourage learners to research the historical events through multiple lenses, considering the historical significance for all parties involved, and then presenting these perspectives to their peers. These practices help ground the learning in the varied perspectives of those involved in the conflict. Allowing learners to see things from different points of view and appreciate the complexity of this enduring conflict further highlights the grays and strengthens our growing understanding of today’s realities.

You don’t have to be a content expert to address and contextualize the conflict.

Not all Jewish educators have PhDs in Middle Eastern History and Politics, and many may have learned a minimal amount of Israeli history in their own Jewish education. So when it comes to teaching about the conflict, our limited knowledge can become an obstacle to teaching—and even an excuse to avoid the topic altogether. At the same time, learners increasingly approach us with big, complex questions as they navigate through today’s realities.

Even as we continue to learn more about the conflict for ourselves, we must remember that, as master Jewish educators, we have always relied on good educational practice as a grounding force in our work. Teaching the conflict can and should be done by drawing on the pedagogic approaches and methodologies we regularly use with other subject matter.

For example, we can create a “meeting” of Jewish and Arab leaders from the British Mandate period who represent different movements and competing interests; learners study primary documents to understand a perspective and then act out that perspective at a “meeting” with the British High Commissioner. We can listen to songs written after a particular historical event and discuss the significance of the music and word choices as a reflection of different perspectives. And when learners come to us with those large and complex questions, we can respond with more questions, connect them to additional resources, and do some of the learning together.

Ultimately, learning should be a shared process between educators and learners. By being transparent about our own attempts to explore diverse perspectives and deepen our understanding of Israel’s complexities, we invite learners to join us in this lifelong journey of discovery and learning.

Conclusion

October 7th was a wake-up call for many of us in the Jewish educational world. As Jewish educators, we came face to face with the implications of having focused our teaching more on developing a love for Israel and less on examining its nuances. We found ourselves standing in front of learners wanting to explain what was going on in Israel, while at the same time navigating our own feelings and relationships with the events and continuing aftermath.

The time is ripe for us to embrace these approaches in our educational work, to boost our confidence, competence, and courage to teach about Israel’s many complexities—including the conflict. In doing so, we can strengthen learners’ relationships with Israel and deepen their commitment to Jewish life and community.