Can a Year in Israel Transform Your Teen?
Few American communities worship the university as fervently
as American Jews do. Yet no country is targeted on campus as harshly as the
Jewish State is. Jewish parents are being taken for a ride. While spending big
money to secure top credentials for their children, they are bankrolling
institutions that increasingly reject the very values that helped American
Jewry flourish: free inquiry and free speech, merit-based achievement, respect
for religion and free enterprise, and a belief in the inherent worth of the
American system. Many Jewish parents are fed up paying through the nose to get
punched in the nose.
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| Rosalyn & Stephen Flatow with Alisa Flatow Scholarship recipients, Jerusalem, 2009 |
Think
Birthright Israel — only even more ambitious. Approximately 90,000 American
Jews graduate from high school every year. The program we propose, Prep Year in
Israel, will offer these young students the intellectual and spiritual
equivalent of Pilates, strengthening the moral core of their Jewish identity
while nurturing their engagement with the central ideas of Judaism, Zionism,
the Western tradition, and American democracy.
To
achieve that, we need to answer some basic questions. Why would 18- or
19-year-olds want to attend such programs? Why would their parents pay to support
them? Why would Israel and the broader Jewish community invest in such
programs? And how can this moonshot be a true gamechanger?
History
offers some powerful models. In 1988, a few Israelis asked similar questions
when Rabbi Eli Sadan launched Israel’s first mechina, or
pre-military preparatory academy, called Bnei David. Sadan and many of his fellow
Religious Zionists felt stymied. Although Religious Zionism honored military
service and recognized it as the stepping-stone into Israeli society, dati — religious — Israelis
rarely became officers. The army seemed anti-religious, frequently turning
pious recruits into secular veterans. Meanwhile, few IDF officers considered
yeshiva boys to be officer material.
Eli
Sadan proposed something new: a preparatory year of Jewish and Zionist study,
along with pre-military psychological and physical training. Such groundwork
could help religious soldiers become officers and commandos without losing
their identities. Sadan had to sell his plan to high-school graduates, their
parents, and army brass — who had to postpone interested recruits’ obligatory
service by a year — while financing the program.
The
gamble paid off. Generations of committed, kippah-wearing, elite soldiers and
officers have now served heroically while remaining passionate Religious
Zionists — exiting the army as engaged Israeli citizens. Sadan’s success
inspired the founding of the first secular mechina in
1997, Nachshon, to foster democratic idealism,
patriotism, and tolerance among Israeli youth after Yitzhak Rabin’s
assassination.
Today,
nearly 50 mechina kdam tzvait (pre-military preparatory)
academies attract 3,300 teens annually. The programs are religious, secular, or
mixed. Many of Israel’s best officers and soldiers, along with Israel’s top
activists and educators from across the religious and political spectra,
are mechina alumni.
Both
of us have spent countless hours over many years engaging or debating Israeli
and Jewish communal leaders as to how to bolster Israeli gap-year programs.
It’s time to take the discussion public. We need to learn from some recent
successes, as well as our perennial failures. And we need to take bold action
now.
Since
the 1980s, the yeshiva gap year in Israel has become an accepted rite of
passage for Orthodox high-school graduates, as it has long been for rabbinic
students of all denominations. At the same time, the Birthright revolution
shows how even a 10-day Israel experience can launch young Jews’ Jewish
journeys. Masa Israel, which mixes learning, volunteering, and working in more
than 200 different programs of four months to a year, demonstrates how longer
experiences can provide the ideal follow-up (or alternative) to a Birthright
trip. Studies show that almost every Jewish communal leader and every oleh (immigrant
to Israel) has enjoyed a serious, transformational, Israel experience.
Nevertheless,
gap years are still widely perceived by non-Orthodox teens as a wasted year
“off,” and only a few hundred spend the year between high school and college in
Israel. Contrast this with the 700,000 young Jews who have participated in
Birthright Israel since its inception in December 1999, peaking at nearly
50,000 annually. Clearly, the challenge involves mindset, not simply money.
We need a raft of new, redrawn, and scaled-up programs that model the kind of classically liberal approach to critical thinking that universities once fostered.
It
would be foolhardy to stand between young American Jews and their rush toward
college. Many young Jews and their parents see a gap year as a needless detour
from their cultivated career paths (which in some cases began with competition
to get into the right nursery school!). Our effort will succeed only if
American Jews recognize en masse that a gap year is, in fact, a
not-to-be-missed opportunity that better prepares their children for college
emotionally, intellectually, ideologically, even socially.
A
Prep Year in Israel wouldn’t have to start from scratch. We already have many
of the needed tools at our disposal. The existing gap-year programs should be
evaluated and — insofar as they are working — expanded. We can connect to the
assets of other types of programs, such as Reichmann University’s excellent “Live in Israel Study in English”
programs, Shalem College’s efforts to bring a
liberal-arts education to Israelis, Tikvah Fund’s programs teaching
foundational Western texts to Jews (including to students on gap-year
programs), the Shalom Hartman Institute’s identity-building
and Israel-engagement initiatives, and thoughtful, extended programs such as
the Dorot Fellowship in Israel.
But
new Prep Year programs must also appeal to American Jewry’s most ambitious and
academically sophisticated 12th-graders. We need a raft of new, redrawn, and
scaled-up programs that model the kind of classically liberal approach to
critical thinking that universities once fostered. The programs will build
students’ skills in these essential areas, while also strengthening their
connections to Jewish civilization and to other young Jews and Israelis. They
ought to offer college credit as well, making them seem even less like a year
off and more like a way of preparing for and easing into the college
experience.
These
programs will cost money, because families have to recognize them as
investments in their futures. Ultimately, these educational adventures should
become résumé boosters, like the 10-week Birthright Israel Excel program and
Masa’s Israel Tech Challenge,
which place superstar students in top Israeli companies for internships and,
potentially, careers. American Jewish families will have to decide whether,
along with the test prep and college prep so many families spend thousands of
dollars on, they will also invest a bit in Moses, Miriam, Maimonides, Herzl,
and other models of life prep.
We still see in the Zionist idea and the Israel conversation the balance that healthy democracies need and that good educators should nurture between being stouthearted and staying open-minded, between identity and freedom, between having patriotic pride and being self-critical, between being the oldest of nations and the Start-Up Nation.
As
American Jews reimagine Israel’s role in their children’s lives, Israel will
have to do some reimagining of its own. Israel’s leaders initially hesitated to
finance Birthright. Many wondered: Why should Israeli taxpayers bring “rich”
Americans to Israel? Ultimately, subsidizing Birthright became the first phase
of a massive paradigm shift in the relationship between Israel and the
Diaspora. As American Jews continued contributing to Israel, Israel gave them
something back: a material shift in
the ways that young people understood their relationship to Israel and to their
Jewish identity.
Because
our proposal is less directly linked to Jewish identity-building, it marks a
bigger step. Israel would be tackling a broader American educational problem
while burnishing mostly American-oriented credentials. Still, there would be
some clear benefits, particularly for Israeli universities that would stand to
gain in money, reach, and prestige by becoming universities for the Jewish
people as a whole, not just for Israeli citizens.
To
do so, those universities will need to offer more courses in English and also
in “American” — meaning using teachers who are skilled in the delivery of
liberal-arts teaching to foster critical thinking. While improving their
current course options, Israel’s universities must also develop stimulating new
courses that major American universities can accredit. And the government must
prioritize this initiative, incentivizing universities to make the necessary
adaptations.
Beyond
the new programs, young Jews and their parents need a mass
consciousness-raising initiative. Boosted by a popular educational advertising
campaign, this expanded infrastructure can change the conversation in the
Jewish world. The excitement should sweep up those who go to Israel and even
those who choose not to go. That’s their right, but at the very least the
existence of a compelling, ever-more-popular Prep Year might get them to start
thinking differently about Israel, Zionism, and Jewish identity, to say nothing
of the crisis on so many American college campuses.
Many
may wonder: Why Israel? And how can programs celebrating Israel, Zionism, and
Judaism also foster the liberal values and critical skills colleges should
cultivate?
Our
bias here is clear. We still see in the Zionist idea and the Israel
conversation the balance that healthy democracies need and that good educators
should nurture between being stouthearted and staying open-minded, between
identity and freedom, between having patriotic pride and being self-critical,
between being the oldest of nations and the Start-Up Nation. Israel today has
many educators who juggle these values effectively.
If
done right, these programs just might awaken students to the exciting
opportunities of Jewish identity, peoplehood, and statehood. By getting a
grounded perspective on Israel and its dilemmas, in an environment encouraging
analytical skills and vigorous debate, many students could emerge as involved
insiders rather than dismissive outsiders. They might be less willing to
abandon their Jewish state even if it occasionally disappoints or embarrasses
them among their peers. A newfound aptitude for understanding and living with
complexity, built in one of the most complex places on earth, will be
profoundly useful when students get back home: in conversations about Israel
and about America, in debates about the past and the present, in the ability to
criticize without denigrating or delegitimizing.
So
let the brainstorming begin! Let’s talk about a month-long Hebrew intensive
course and a year-long seminar on Jewish citizenship 101; about a flagship
Rhodes Scholar–type program with everyone living in one renovated mansion;
about regular tiyulim (trips), holiday celebrations, and
weekend happenings. Let’s also change the conversation on the American side
about what we expect from young people, how we educate them, how liberal arts
and liberal-democratic values are essential to American Jewish survival, how we
want them to think about the Jewish future and the role that Israel can play in
their lives.
We
would love to see America’s first-class universities return to their initial
mission of fostering critical thinking and open debate or see new colleges and
universities emerge to fill the void. It’s an essential national mission for
America. But we can’t wait. If this moonshot takes off, our young Jewish
students can get the prestige payoff and professional launch that many seek
from higher education, without paying the high ideological price. They will
have a head start by arriving prepared morally as well as academically.
Ultimately,
in proposing this Prep Year in Israel moonshot, our goal is simple: From now
on, rather than having every significant adult in their lives ask Jewish
high-school students, “Where are you going to college?” we want young Jews to
be asked, “Where are you spending your year in Israel?” And we hope our
students will be able to answer thoughtfully, choosing from an extraordinary
array of life-changing programs, preparing them not only for college but also
for life.
* * *
The Alisa Fund for Jewish Education accepts contributions.
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