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American Jewish Children’s Thoughts and Feelings About the Jewish State: Laying the Groundwork for a Developmental Approach to Israel Education

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Abstract

This study presents the first longitudinal data on American Jewish children’s thoughts and feelings about Israel, highlighting children’s development between kindergarten and second grade. Drawing upon interviews and photo and music elicitation exercises with Jewish elementary school students, the research examines both children’s conceptual understandings of Israel—what they imagine it to be—and their feelings toward Israel. The research finds that throughout the early elementary grades, children think of Israel as a place where both good and bad can happen—a duality that remains relatively stable over time. Yet their feelings about Israel change over time, as consistently happy emotions give way to a wider range of affective responses to Israel, including worry, fear, and sadness. This manuscript examines both children’s static conceptions of Israel and their changing feelings about the Jewish state, addressing the implications of these findings for elementary school Israel education and Jewish communal policy toward youth engagement with Israel.

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Notes

  1. The Children’s Learning About Israel Project is a project of the Jack, Joseph, and Morton Mandel Center for Studies in Jewish Education at Brandeis University and is conducted at American Jewish University. Kindergarten data were collected with funds from the Dorot Foundation.

  2. In the initial design of the study, we did not include an Orthodox day school among our partner schools because previous research about Israel education has shown that students attending Orthodox day schools understand and relate to Israel in markedly different ways from their non-Orthodox peers, and researchers have had to disaggregate data collected on Orthodox day school students (e.g., Pomson et al. 2011). However, several of the children in our study affiliate with Orthodox synagogues while attending non-Orthodox day schools, and, to date, we have found no marked differences between these children and the others in the study.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. American Jewish University, Los Angeles, CA, USA

    Sivan Zakai

  2. Children’s Learning About Israel Project, Los Angeles, CA, USA

    Hannah Tobin Cohen

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  1. Sivan Zakai
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  2. Hannah Tobin Cohen
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Correspondence to Sivan Zakai.

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Zakai, S., Cohen, H.T. American Jewish Children’s Thoughts and Feelings About the Jewish State: Laying the Groundwork for a Developmental Approach to Israel Education. Cont Jewry 36, 31–54 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12397-016-9160-y

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