WITH FIRST iCON IN 5 YEARS, iCENTER TO NAVIGATE EDUCATING ABOUT AN ISRAEL AT A CROSSROADS

Hundreds of Jewish educators of all types, ages and denominations will gather in Chicago beginning today for iCenter’s three-day iCON, where they will discuss and learn how to teach the complicated and now thornier-than-usual topic of Israel.

Meant to be a biennial gathering, this will be the first iCON in nearly five years because of the coronavirus pandemic.

“For us, this is a real opportunity to be back, to be back in person, to gather the field, to see how much it has grown despite COVID,” Aliza Goodman, one of iCON’s organizers, told eJewishPhilanthropy.

The conference, which runs through Wednesday at the Marriott Marquis Chicago, comes at a particularly fraught period for Israel, as regular mass demonstrations rock the country in protest of the government’s proposed judicial overhaul.

For The iCenter, one of the first organizations to focus on Israel education not as a discrete area of focus but as something to be infused in all aspects of Jewish education, the situation in Israel presents a particular challenge. On the one hand, the current moment is undoubtedly out of the ordinary, perhaps unparalleled in Israeli history, and therefore has to be addressed in some way at the upcoming conference, but at the same time, it is not the sum total of all that is Israel so it shouldn’t completely dominate the discussions either, iCON organizers said.

For opponents of the proposed legislation, the overhaul represents an assault on the strength and independence of the country’s court system and Israeli democracy in general, while to supporters, it is a necessary corrective for an overly powerful, activist judiciary. This issue is particularly acute among the more than 100 Israelis who are participating in iCON this year. (Roughly a quarter of the more than 500 participants in this year’s gathering are coming from Israel, the rest from North America.)

“We are all affected by what’s going on to different degrees,” said Anne Lanski, the founding CEO of iCenter. “Obviously, for those coming from Israel, it is different than for those who are here. But it’s deeply personal to all of us. And so it’s going to be part [of iCON]. It will be addressed directly in some places, but indirectly it will be a thread through every single conversation that happens, every single experience that happens because we are what we are and we’re all very tied to what’s going on right now.”

And yet, to Lanski, this current struggle should not substantially change the basics of Israel education.

“Educational frameworks that have to be changed every single time something happens are not fundamentally solid foundations,” she said. “The approach, the educational approach and framework, the language, the commitment, those things don’t change. The content of some of the presentations gets adjusted, but that is true anytime.”

Lanski, who founded iCenter in 2008, reflected on how dramatically both her organization and the field of Israel education have expanded over the past 15 years. When the group held its first iCON in 2009, just 50 people attended, all of them teachers in American Jewish day schools or Hebrew schools.

View full article on eJewish Philanthropy.