Alexandria, Babylon, Spain. Is America next?

We are losing our children. At best, to indifference. At worst, to the ranks of movements that actively seek to delegitimize and dismantle the Jewish State. “As a Jew” Jews, tokenized Jews, deployed as fig leaves in service of anti-Zionist ideologies; what feels like a bitter and particularly loathsome betrayal.  

But it’s not entirely their fault.

In his state of world Jewry address last May Dan Senor said: "It is remarkable to see the lengths to which some Jews will go to keep their children Jewish, short of practicing Judaism." Jewish continuity. This has been the central question driving Jewish education and Israel programing for the past 3 decades at least. I should know, I spent almost 20 years of my career in the thick of it. Yet, the majority of Jewish kids in the United States and Canada receive a minimal Jewish education if any at all. According to the Pew Research Center: Jewish Identity and Belief 95% of Orthodox children, 22% of Conservative children, but only 7-8% of Reform children are enrolled in Jewish Day Schools. The vast majority of American Jews, 74%, are Reform or unaffiliated.  

Jewish days schools can cost between $25,000 to $40,000 a year per child, a luxury only the wealthy can afford. This is a prohibitive cost that restricts comprehensive Jewish education to the very wealthy or those requiring significant welfare. Most families, even those who are otherwise financially comfortable, are effectively squeezed out.

The alternative? Sunday school, a brief sprint towards Bar/Bat Mitzva, reading a section of Torah in a language they do not understand. An emphasis on Holocaust memorial (76% of US Jews cite Holocaust Memorial as essential to their Jewish identity), possibly join the March of the Living, cry and hug at Auschwitz, and swear that Never Again. They might go to Jewish summer camps (character building, lifetime friendships, Israel rah rah rah), if they’re lucky, a family or birthright trip to Israel. They learn that Israel is awesome, the beaches are amazing, the soldiers are young, beautiful and brave. The food is absolutely fantastic. Everyone is Jewish and smart with a start-up nation vibe. It’s Jewish Disneyland.

And that’s it.

Then they go to college and meet, for the first time in their lives, the word: Nakba. They learn an entirely new historical narrative and sophisticated vocabulary from professors with authority and gravitas. In this narrative Israel is not a bastion of liberal values but a “settler-colonial-ethnostate”, Zionism is not a liberation ideology but a “racist-white-supremacist-genocidal ideology”. Everything they thought they knew about Israel is challenged and they do not have the tools to process, let alone the confidence to object to these false claims. They are confronted with the neo-Marxist "oppressor-oppressed" paradigm, in which Jews are cast as part of the white power structure. In this twisted world view, Israel serves as both the evidence and the indictment, and Jews are guilty by association. Intellectually unarmed, is it any wonder young Jewish students will want to disassociate from Israel and Zionism? This ignorance is the vacuum where anti-Zionism grows.

This is now a civilizational battle, not a Jewish one. We cannot outspend Qatar, China and Russia, who have been for decades systematically rewriting the narrative on North American campuses by creating faculties, “cultural centers”, developing curricula, appointing professors and awarding scholarships. So, what can we do? I say this as an old-school Zionist. To be clear, I believe in Aliyah. I believe that the only place where the full range of Jewish identity, religious and secular, national and political, can be lived and argued honestly is in a Jewish state in our ancestral homeland. But I am also a realist. Not everyone can make that choice and there is a strong argument for a stable thriving Jewish Diaspora. But, If the Diaspora is to survive, it must take responsibility for forming Jews who know who they are.

This requires a radical rethinking of Jewish philanthropic priorities.

Jewish day school must become affordable and accessible. This is not a fantasy; functioning models already exist. Catholic schools in North America operate on a parish-subsidy model that keeps tuition 50%-70% lower than Jewish equivalents. In Argentina, Jewish schools function as a communal welfare system. Families pay roughly $6,000 per child annually, a fraction of the cost for an American family, because, in addition to JAFI and JDC, private and public resources, the community collectively underwrites education as a public good, not a private luxury.

There is enough Jewish wealth in North America to give every single Jewish child a comprehensive Jewish education. The Diaspora is hemorrhaging its children while we debate priorities that would be irrelevant without a next generation to inherit them. Jewish education isn't a priority - it must be the priority, and it must result in building a strong foundation that will create Jewish pride, Jewish literacy and moral clarity for every Jewish boy and girl growing up in an environment increasingly hostile to Jews. My Jewish North American mishpocha: Welcome back to Jewish history. 

How then are we to deal with the darkness that is surrounding us? We are living through a moment of reckoning, a crossroads, that will determine whether North American Jewry survives as a coherent community or becomes another glorious but closed chapter of Jewish history as Alexandria, Babylon and Spain had before it. This is our generation’s crossroads to choose:  

To be Jewish.

To be the light.

Happy Hanukkah.