My Jerusalem Life, Interrupted and the human cost of educational instability

By Bonnie K. Goodman, BA, MLIS

In Israel, the education system does not operate in a vacuum.

Sirens interrupt daily life. Schools shift between classrooms and Zoom instruction with little warning. Teachers and students live within the rhythms of a country that can move quickly from ordinary routine to national emergency. In moments like these, schools play a stabilizing role. Teachers provide structure and continuity for children whose lives are shaped by uncertainty beyond their control. The expectation is that educators will adapt quickly, maintain calm, and keep learning moving forward.

That expectation is understandable.

But stability in education cannot depend solely on teachers.

It must also come from the institutions that employ them.

Even as Israel confronts war, national strain, and a deepening educational crisis, the public debate often remains strangely abstract. In the Winter 2026 issue of SAPIR, Moshe Behar and Avital Ben Shlomo argue that Israel’s educational decline stems from excessive centralization. Authority, they contend, rests too heavily in the Ministry of Education. Principals lack autonomy. Innovation is constrained. Dismissal procedures are cumbersome. Their proposed remedy is decentralization: grant schools more authority over hiring, budgets, and pedagogy.

Shalom Weil, writing in The Times of Israel, describes the shortage as a “palpable catastrophe” and proposes subsidized housing, school-based teacher training, and a five-year communal mission to restore the profession’s standing and embed educators inside local life. Tomer Samarkandi, writing in The Jerusalem Post, points to the scale of the breakdown: one in ten new teachers leaving in the first year, one in five within five years, thousands of teaching-program graduates never entering classrooms at all, and severe shortages especially in English and mathematics.

These are serious arguments. They reflect a country that knows it has a problem.

But from inside a classroom, particularly from the vantage point of a new immigrant teacher in her staj year, the crisis does not present primarily as centralization.

It presents as instability.

That is the argument at the center of my memoir, My Jerusalem Life, Interrupted: A Diary of a Teacher in Israel: Aliyah, Art, and the Year Everything Cracked. The book is not only about one school or one contract dispute. It is about what happens when instability ceases to be a policy term and becomes the structure of everyday life: wages delayed, authority blurred, illness aggravated, housing precarious, judgment quickened, and the larger life one came to build in Israel slowly narrowed under pressure. As I clarify in the preface what happened “spread far beyond the school itself” and damaged “money, housing, health, time, concentration, art, confidence, and the larger life” I was trying to build.

I arrived in Israel drawn by the country’s resilience and by the seriousness with which education is still supposed to matter. Within months, I was hired to teach English in an Israeli elementary school. This was not volunteer work. It was paid employment. I began teaching on September 1, working 21 hours per week. Classes were scheduled. Students were assigned. Lesson plans were prepared. The school year began.

Over nearly six months of teaching, however, I received 4,800 NIS total.

Educational policy debates often revolve around salary comparisons: whether Israeli teachers earn less than professionals in comparable OECD countries, whether unions distort incentives, whether autonomy should replace bureaucracy. But those debates assume something basic: that salary is actually paid.

When pay does not appear for months, those comparisons become irrelevant.

A teacher who is not paid cannot be evaluated as though functioning under normal professional conditions.

Nonpayment is not a minor administrative delay.

It is destabilization.

That line remains true because the consequences are not theoretical. Rent does not pause for payroll systems to reconcile paperwork. Groceries do not defer to contract processing delays. Chronic illness does not remain dormant under prolonged financial stress. In my case, sustained instability triggered a flare in preexisting health conditions.

Stress is not abstract.

My memoir enlarges that point by showing how the pressures did not remain compartmentalized. “The apartments did not stay in the apartments,” I write. “The cold entered the body. The body entered the school. The lack of pay entered the mind, the schedule, the meal, the bus ride, the doctor’s visit, the ability to move, the ability to plan.” This is what teacher instability means when it lands not on a spreadsheet or in a Knesset briefing, but on one actual person trying to work, heal, teach, and remain afloat.

Even the administrative structure of my employment reflected the same instability. I began teaching at the start of the school year, but my formal contract with the external payroll body was dated December 1. The teaching had already begun. Yet when payment questions arose, the system recognized only the later date. Months of real work effectively disappeared from the administrative record.

For a teacher in a probationary staj year, this kind of discrepancy is not a technical inconvenience.

It is financial instability.

It is also moral instability, because labor was real while it was needed and suddenly debatable once it had to be honored.

That pattern did not stop at the missing wages. It extended into the gaslighting that followed: whether I was really a staj, who was actually responsible for paying me, what counted as formal employment, and how far each institution could retreat into ambiguity once accountability became inconvenient. What had seemed sufficiently clear while I was standing in the classroom became strangely evasive after the fact. Status blurred. Responsibility scattered. The worker remained visible enough to be judged, but not protected enough to be paid.

That is one reason the current conversation about teacher shortages cannot remain at the level of recruitment slogans and structural proposals alone.

Samarkandi warns that the shortage is already harming the quality of instruction and pushing Israel toward a reality in which schools recruit “anyone with a pulse” just to fill vacancies. That warning is real enough, but it does not fully describe what happened in my case. In my situation, the system did not behave as though it were willing to take just anyone. It behaved as though it wanted something far more impossible: a miracle worker without pay or stability. It wanted someone who would absorb institutional confusion without protest, remediate multi-year gaps without continuity or proper support, adapt constantly without having those adaptations recognized as real teaching, and somehow continue performing at a high level while standing on increasingly unstable ground.

That is the deeper myth at work. The problem is not only that schools may become desperate enough to take “anyone with a pulse.” It is also that they may demand more than anyone should be expected to give while withholding the minimum conditions that make the work possible. They do not want merely a body in the classroom. They want the impossible combination of total flexibility, total emotional resilience, total pedagogical success, and total compliance — even when the system itself is failing to provide pay, clarity, continuity, or protection.

And when the bill comes due, the dynamic becomes painfully familiar. In a 1990s episode of Friends, Phoebe Buffay remarks, “There are some people who just always try to get out of paying.” The line is a joke about an everyday transaction, but its structural logic is recognizable. Once payment becomes unavoidable, suddenly the service was not quite good enough, the role becomes open to reinterpretation, the expectations start to shift, and responsibility belongs to someone else. Education is not a sitcom dispute over a restaurant tab. But the instinct is recognizable all the same.

Take the classroom itself. I was the third English teacher in three years assigned to a group of English-speaking boys. That pattern alone should have raised structural questions. Literacy development requires continuity. Vocabulary builds cumulatively. Reading fluency improves through stable instruction. Instead, what I encountered was fragmentation. There was no coherent curriculum sequence. Some workbooks had been reused from older siblings. A fourth-grade student once opened his workbook and recognized his older sister’s handwriting inside. Some students in fourth and fifth grade struggled with basic letter recognition. Spelling was inconsistent. Reading fluency varied widely. These were not minor gaps. These were multi-year structural deficits.

Yet remediation was framed as my responsibility.

So too with method. Classroom management required constant adaptation. Many of the students were bright, warm, and fully capable of engagement. Relationships formed. Trust developed. But when literacy foundations are fragile, frustration rises quickly, and multimodal instruction becomes essential. Visual reinforcement helps vocabulary retention. Audio modeling supports pronunciation. Interactive exercises help sustain attention when frontal teaching alone falters.

It was labeled “not teaching.”

That phrase belongs in this discussion because it reveals how quickly adaptation can be recast as deviation when institutions are already under strain and looking for somewhere to place blame. In the memoir, I describe the larger mechanism this way: “What disturbed me most, finally, was not only the harm itself, but the way the meaning of the harm began to shrink under official language.” Real work became “administrative ambiguity.” Real expectations became “misunderstanding.” Real obligations dissolved into “silence, delay, evasion, or denial.”

This matters because the damage did not stop at money. Lack of pay was only one part of the rupture. The instability spread into health, housing, concentration, art, professional reputation, and future career. A year that should have helped establish me instead endangered far more than my finances. It threatened credibility. It damaged professional standing. It complicated the future path I had come to Israel trying to build. That is one reason My Jerusalem Life, Interrupted is not just a memoir about underpayment or one difficult school year. It is a record of how a system can take much more than money from a person while still trying to minimize what it has done.

The memoir contributes something different to the national conversation. It provides the interior record of what untenability feels like. It shows how one form of instability activates another until the whole life begins to contract. The school did not remain merely a workplace. The apartment did not remain merely an apartment. Illness did not remain merely illness. The lack of pay entered concentration, movement, art, and confidence. It altered not only practical survival, but the larger Jerusalem life I had come to build: a life that was supposed to hold teaching, writing, Jewish belonging, and art.

That is why My Jerusalem Life, Interrupted is also about belonging and the conditions under which belonging becomes conditional. I came to Israel trying to build something serious, not a fantasy, not a sentimental reinvention, but a real life. What followed damaged that effort more deeply than I first allowed myself to admit. The book argues that the deepest wound was not only chaos, but what it calls “conditional belonging”: being real enough to work, to be judged, to be observed, and to be disciplined, but not fully protected by the very structures claiming authority over you.

At one point, the memoir makes the contradiction especially plain: in times of national crisis, teachers are praised as stabilizers, as essential people doing essential work. But if teachers are essential in rhetoric and disposable in payroll, the praise curdles. That sentence belongs not only to my story. It belongs to the current Israeli discussion of education.

Because accountability must be reciprocal.

You cannot demand excellence while withholding stability.

You cannot demand innovation while restricting professional methods.

You cannot demand remediation of multi-year literacy gaps without coherent curriculum and structured support.

And you cannot expect teachers to stabilize classrooms in a country facing war and uncertainty while the system fails to provide the most basic stability in return.

Israel calls itself the People of the Book.

That identity carries moral weight.

It demands structural dignity for those tasked with teaching.

I was hired to teach.

I was hired to be paid.

I was not hired to be an unpaid miracle worker, a scapegoat, or a disappearing category once responsibility became inconvenient.

That is not ideology.

But it is also more than contract. It is a test of whether a country that says it desperately needs teachers is willing to confront the material, administrative, and moral conditions that make teachers stay or drive them out. If the debate initiated by Behar and Ben Shlomo in SAPIR, expanded by Weil in The Times of Israel, and sharpened by Samarkandi in The Jerusalem Post is to mean anything, it must confront not only where authority sits but how responsibility is lived.

Teachers cannot stabilize classrooms — during war or peace — while standing on unstable ground themselves.

Excellence requires stability.

And My Jerusalem Life, Interrupted shows what happens when that stability never comes.

Bonnie K. Goodman, BA, MLIS, is a historian, journalist, educator, and artist whose work focuses on Jewish life, history, education, and contemporary issues. She is the author of My Jerusalem Life, Interrupted: A Diary of a Teacher in Israel: Aliyah, Art, and the Year Everything Cracked, available in ebook and paperback on Amazon.

Behar, Moshe, and Avital Ben Shlomo. “An Education System Worthy of the Jewish State Decentralization is the answer.” SAPIR, Winter 2026.

Goodman, Bonnie K. My Jerusalem Life, Interrupted: A Diary of a Teacher in Israel: Aliyah, Art, and the Year Everything Cracked. History Musings Books, 2026.

Samarkandi, Tomer. “Teacher Shortage: The Statistic Shaking Israel’s Education System — Opinion.” The Jerusalem Post, 22 Feb. 2026.

Weil, Shalom. “A Bold National Plan to Fix Israel’s Teacher Crisis.” The Times of Israel, 23 Feb. 2026.

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