Why Jewish girls are missing in the discourse around Israel |
When a Jewish girl in 12th grade stands up to discuss Israeli politics, she speaks with the same confidence level as a boy in 7th grade.
What’s more, two-thirds of boys in Jewish day schools feel confident discussing Israeli politics and history, compared with only half of girls. The gap is especially pronounced for current events in Israel, the Arab-Israeli conflict, and the geography of the land of Israel. In each domain, girls are approximately 15 percentage points less confident than boys.
This is what emerged from my analysis of data from 3,703 students across 96 North American Jewish day schools, collected in 2012-13. As a sociologist who studies how gender shapes educational outcomes, this gender confidence gap reveals a systemic failure.
Let me put this in perspective: girls at the cusp of graduating high school are about as confident — and in some cases less confident — discussing Israeli politics and history as boys who recently became bar mitzvah. We’re sending young women to college with the political confidence of middle school boys.
Yet these same girls demonstrate stronger emotional connections to Israel than their male peers. They know just as much about Israeli history — recognizing leaders like Herzl, Ben-Gurion, and Golda Meir at identical rates as boys. Interestingly, when it comes to Israeli culture and daily life in Israel, both genders feel equally non-confident. It’s probably not coincidental that the areas where confidence is equal are unrelated to politics and history. The message is clear: We’ve created an environment where political and historical discourse feels like male territory.
This confidence gap appears in four out of every five Jewish schools, from Orthodox to Reform, from seventh grade through senior year. It’s not a single school’s problem, but a systemic pattern across Jewish education.
To be clear, the goal isn’t replicating boys’ overconfidence. Boys in non-Orthodox schools display the highest confidence, often bravado over knowledge. Orthodox boys show more humility. Still, even these more humble boys remain more confident than their female peers. We need to address chronic underconfidence that prevents girls from........