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Recently, and this is why we’re sharing these reflections, in work with Moishe House we saw the promising intimation of a different strategy. The task in this context was for Makom, the Israel Education Lab of the Jewish Agency, to help Moishe House residents become better informed about and better equipped to facilitate conversations and programming for young adults about contemporary Israel, in all its (yes) complexity.

Jewish day schools are in the news. Some of the attention comes in the form of negative publicity about health risks that schools in the more insular sectors of Orthodoxy have taken to keep classes in session during the COVID-19 pandemic. On a more positive note, day schools with a more modern orientation have received praise for doing an unusually good job of helping their students get through the spring lockdowns—and, where possible, for how rigorously they planned and executed reopening the current school year. Their efforts seem more successful than those of many public and nonsectarian private schools. These achievements have not been lost on parents, including some who had not enrolled their children in the past but over the summer showed new interest. Why day schools have done well and what parents are seeing when they give them a second look is a story that can be understood only in the context of their significant, yet largely unremarked, educational transformation over the past two decades.

The articles in this issue confirm that today’s Jewish teenagers are a generation of creative thinkers; they will not be the passive recipients of an ancient tradition. Instead, they are broadly categorized as a generation from whom Jewish wisdom, values, and tradition are most readily adapted when presented in a nondogmatic, inquiry-based approach, where their role is to internalize, make sense of, and produce their own meaning. There is a tremendous opportunity for educators and for places of Jewish learning if they adapt to these practices: a generation of Jewish teenagers is open and willing to actively participate in those journeys.

These reflections are prompted, I admit, by the release of another report, in this case one for which I’m partly responsible, along with my colleagues at Rosov Consulting. This report — Devoted, Disillusioned and Disengaged: The Forces that Shape a Relationship with Israel — does not make any new claims about whether American Jews are more or less distant from Israel. It does however offer some new lenses on this relationship and what shapes it. Most significantly, this report has profound implications for how Jewish day schools and other educational institutions should teach about Israel.