My Second-Favorite Country

In My Second-Favorite Country: How American Jewish Children Think About Israel, Sivan Zakai offers a novel suggestion for how to approach Israel education: let’s listen carefully to students’ sense-making. Zakai is not focused in her book on outcome goals, affective or cognitive. Her agenda is not to propose solutions and strategies for increasing students’ sense of closeness or commitment to the modern state of Israel. Rather, through rigorous, longitudinal empirical research, she explores students’ thoughts and feelings in order to understand their logic and insights.

Discovering that young students are aware and thinking about the moral, legal, and social complexities that abound in the modern state of Israel, and that young students are aware of these complexities regardless of their educational institution’s formal curricula, may be one of the most surprising findings in the book for Israel educators. But the question at the root of Zakai's study is much broader than Israel. Zakai wants to understand, through the case of Israel education, how a child develops intellectual, national, religious, and social identity in the twenty-first century. If it isn’t dictated by curricula alone, how does it happen?

One of the most powerful stories in Zakai’s book centers on a girl she calls “Gia” and her trip to the Kotel in the summer before third grade. Before her visit that summer, Gia had marveled at the greatness of the Kotel. In kindergarten, when her class took a pretend trip to Israel on a mock El Al plane, and visited a reconstructed Kotel, the mock Kotel in the school’s multipurpose room had not been divided by gender. And so Gia was caught off guard when she encountered the real Kotel. She noticed the mechitzah (partition) between male and female worshippers immediately. She was shocked. But more than shocked, she was faced with what seemed like an impossible decision. She was there with her brothers and her two fathers. So, if she wanted to touch the wall of the Kotel, she would need to brave it alone. In the end, Zakai writes, Gia’s tour guide took them to the side of the Kotel, to Robinson’s Arch, and she was able to touch the ancient stones while staying with her family. Nonetheless, the realization of what stood before her in the main Kotel plaza left Gia with real anger.

Zakai compellingly argues that simplicity is not the answer in Israel education, or any education. She reflects on the story of Gia, who continued to feel angry in subsequent years, and who Zakai argues is not at all unique in the sample of students she studied, writing that “these American Jewish children . . . were not angry at Israel at all. They were, instead, angry at the adults in their lives responsible for teaching them about Israel, and their frustration was more about their own education regarding Israeli civic and political life than about Israeli politics itself” (168). This is a profound distinction and one worth meditating on—as educators, as parents, as members of the American Jewish community.

Zakai concludes her book with the incredibly helpful idea of a “prism question,” which is presented as a best practice in education. Prism questions are questions that cannot be settled with facts alone, but rely on human judgement and discernment. It is these types of questions, Zakai argues, that sustain children’s wondering and theory building over time—a compelling argument. Zakais’ book is a must-read for educators who see it as their responsibility to help students make sense of the world in which they live, in which we all live, and in which we all may have a lasting impact.

Ziva Hassenfeld is the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Assistant Professor of Jewish Education at Brandeis University.

Ziva Hassengeld

Date Of Review:

June 26, 2023