My recent piece “An Apology from Your Jewish American Parents” in the Times of Israel attracted numerous comments and much controversy. In it, I laid out what I perceive as the failure on the part of American Jewish parents, myself included, in preparing our children for a post-diaspora, pre-Moshiach world. I was motivated to write the letter to bring attention to the problem that I see here in the US with the Zionist education in our schools and within our Zionist institutions.

I know that it isn’t enough to “apologize,” and it isn’t enough to complain. I was motivated to open a conversation, one I think we must be having about what actions we must take to improve the learning environment for our current generation of American Jewish students.

What I learned over the past few years in studying Israel’s educational system from K-12 through university, and in speaking to hundreds of students and dozens of rabbis at Modern Orthodox yeshivot and seminaries in Israel over the past five years is this: America’s Jewish day school system does an absolutely inadequate job of preparing its students for anything but liberal arts colleges in America. 

The problem revealed by these experiences is that, while Jewish day schools in America have a captive audience in their student bodies for at least 13 years (if not longer from pre-school), they fail to capitalize on educational opportunities to prepare students for transitioning to a life in Israel, attending university in Israel, or really any outcome other than American liberal arts college.

I’ve come to the conclusion that even the most supposedly Zionist day schools are more pro-Zionist than Zionist. That is, they support Israel and cheer on Zionists, but the schools themselves are not actually encouraging aliyah. If they were, they’d be more deliberate about teaching what students need to be prepared for aliyah........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)