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American Jews, particularly those who are highly engaged in Jewish communal life, learn many stories about Israel's past. They learn the story of Israel as the culmination of a heroic two thousand year struggle and about the waves of immigrants who came to the Holy Land with nothing and made the desert bloom. But when these stories are subjected to critical scrutiny, they may fail to hold up. This study analyzed 438 short narratives of the history of Israel written by Jewish American high school students attending Jewish day schools. Their responses suggested that many students are aware of the tensions between various historical accounts and adopt different strategies to negotiate between critical historical analysis and Jewish collective belonging. Although there were no differences in the content of the accounts by students' religious denomination or prior study of Israel's history, students adopted different approaches to negotiating critical analysis and collective belonging. Some students told stories of Jewish heritage without taking into account other possible perspectives. Some students engaged with challenges to their inherited stories but only to dispute them. Finally, some students managed to synthesize multiple narratives together while still using a Jewish perspective to frame their account. This last strategy suggests that students can be historically sophisticated without abandoning a commitment to their heritage.

This paper examines the independent and interactive effects of financial capacity and Jewish connections on reported constraints in purchasing two intensive forms of Jewish education, day school and overnight summer camp. The analysis is structured around three hypotheses: (1) financial capacity is inversely related to constraints on Jewish education; (2) Jewish connections increase or decrease the level at which financial capacity determines financial constraints on Jewish education; (3) the strength of the inverse relationship between financial capacity and financial constraints on Jewish education varies by the strength of Jewish connections. We merge data from 13 local Jewish community studies to test the hypotheses with bivariate crosstabulations and multivariate logistic regression models. We assess the empirical evidence as showing moderately strong, though admittedly variable, support for our three hypotheses. The most robust support for the hypotheses comes in the case of financial constraints on Jewish day school education, with less consistent support when modeling constraints on Jewish summer camp. A final section highlights and integrates the main findings and concludes with several strategic and normative considerations.

Twenty-five years after the publication of A Time to Act, by the Commission on Jewish Education of North America (CJENA), we are in a position to evaluate this initiative with historical hindsight. At the time, the commission was heralded as an unprecedented communal undertaking and a signal that after years of perfunctory treatment and neglect by the organized Jewish community, Jewish education was gaining recognition as a vital concern. While accurate, this assessment benefits from contextualization both in the American and the American-Jewish situation of the 1980s and early-1990s. The CJENA and its report mirrored American anxiety during that same period about the state of K-12 education, while initiatives to address systemic weaknesses in Jewish education were concurrent with the spate of reform efforts spawned to address the perceived decline in public education. At the same time, A Time to Act exemplified a more general malaise within the Jewish community about the effects of rapid integration on Jewish ethnic and religious survival. Communal leaders became convinced that Jewish education could stem the assimilationist tide. The CJENA, which was funded by the Mandel Associated Foundations, also presaged a sea change in the funding of Jewish education, particularly the growing impact of mega-donors on the Jewish educational landscape. Among the commissioners were a number of the funders and foundation executives who emerged in the 1990s as formidable players in such areas as summer camping, adult education, leadership training, day schools and heritage tourism. Indeed, the greatest legacy of the Commission may be that it paved the way for the initiatives that followed. If A Time to Act was not a veritable voice crying out in the wilderness, its cri de coeur shaped the leading edge of a broad-based effort of reform and revitalization facilitated by an influx of family foundation funding. And while it is an exaggeration to claim that the commission generated the celebrated and fruitful mega-donor collaborations of the late-1990s and early 2000s, including the funding of Taglit-Birthright Israel and the Partnership for Excellence in Jewish Education, it undeniably contributed to an environment that placed a premium on such partnerships.

This study presents the first longitudinal data on American Jewish children's thoughts and feelings about Israel, highlighting children's development between kindergarten and second grade. Drawing upon interviews and photo and music elicitation exercises with Jewish elementary school students, the research examines both children's conceptual understandings of Israel—what they imagine it to be—and their feelings toward Israel. The research finds that throughout the early elementary grades, children think of Israel as a place where both good and bad can happen—a duality that remains relatively stable over time. Yet their feelings about Israel change over time, as consistently happy emotions give way to a wider range of affective responses to Israel, including worry, fear, and sadness. This manuscript examines both children's static conceptions of Israel and their changing feelings about the Jewish state, addressing the implications of these findings for elementary school Israel education and Jewish communal policy toward youth engagement with Israel.

This study examines the systemic and political dynamics shaping the professional trajectories of Palestinian educators trained for boundary-crossing roles in Jewish state schools in Israel. While specialized programs successfully cultivated intercultural competence and pedagogical readiness, these gains were undermined by entrenched structural and ideological barriers. 12 in-depth semi-structured interviews with 12 Palestinian teachers were analyzed as well as findings from a telephone survey with 99 graduates. Findings reveal that institutional absorption failure, manifested through contractual precarity, geographic misalignment, and organizational inertia, prevented the conversion of individual readiness into stable tenure. Inclusion was found to be conditional, requiring sustained emotional labor, linguistic self-censorship, and political alignment, particularly during periods of heightened sociopolitical tension following 7 October 2023. These patterns reflect deeply rooted power asymmetries that marginalize Palestinian citizens and perpetuate tokenistic integration. This study argues that durable professional integration in contested spaces demands a paradigmatic shift: from viewing inclusion as a temporary concession to embedding stability and equity as structural principles. Such transformation requires dismantling institutional mechanisms that reproduce asymmetry and investing in long-term ecological supports, such as permanent contracts, culturally responsive leadership, and inclusion protocols. Without these systemic reforms, intercultural competence remains insufficient to overcome the political and structural forces.

Recent trends suggest that liberal democracy in Israel experiences tensions. Although such a crisis calls for the involvement of political scientists in this public debate, the bulk of political scientists has refrained from visible activity. The exception to this rule is the civic studies arena in which a small group of political scientists is deeply and visibly engaged. Civic education, which Israel integrates into the civic studies subject, is a central political socialization tool. As a deep controversy rages in Israel regarding the meaning of the “democratic” and the “Jewish” components of the state’s identity, civic studies arouse strong emotions. This arena enables political scientists, who are divided into the liberal and the conservative camps, to remain out of the limelight of the general public debate about the illiberal turn, while at the same time engaging heavily in its shaping. The civic studies issue constitutes an example of how collective engagement of political scientists on specific policy issues, may constitute an opportunity for these scholars, their visibility and enhance to therefore, their social relevance. A qualitative analysis of the case study of civic studies in Israel demonstrates the various ways of involvement employed by political scientists in the illiberal turn debate.

The waning of direct political engagement around the world began in the wake of the Second World War, not only as reaction to what can be called an excess of politics, exemplified by that war, but also because of the relative spread of prosperity in the second half of the twentieth century, the rise and then decline of the welfare state and the gradual domination of the market, which shaped these developments. The gravamen of this critique was leveled at the Israeli labor movement and the political and administrative apparatus it created before and after the establishment of the state, whose involvement in so many aspects of life, from housing policies, to land regulation, to the development of the public educational sector, to the control of cultural institutions, has been described as the root cause of many of the political, social and cultural ills that continue to plague Israel to this very day. At a time when most political parties all along the ideological spectrum in Israel all but accept the current general ideological consensus—there is no Palestinian partner to negotiate with; there is no alternative to the free market—all that is left to debate in the public sphere are old grievances and limited sectoral interests. In the 1980s and early 1990s Israeli cinema seemed to reengage with politics and to offer a new look at, among other things, Arab-Jewish relations and the impact of militarism on Israeli life. Since the end of the 1990s, however, many Israeli films seem to have shifted their focus to bourgeois ennui, to adopt Hollywood generic formulae or to celebrate a new sense of identity politics, where one’s cultural heritage becomes the key to happiness and contentment in an anchorless, ever-changing world of consumerism.

Racial/ethnic aspects of urban neighborhoods have been a major concern of social scientists post-World War II. As we move into the twenty-first century, however, the object of study is changing dramatically in that the majority US population will soon be minorities; this is already the case in many locales, and other countries are experiencing similar shifts. To recount this dynamic and provide context, the paper begins by considering the US city pre-World War II, ethnic enclaves, and their transition to the present day—giving rise to an immigrant ethos that remains prevalent. Attention then turns to general frameworks related to the immigrant experience, and their future applicability. Considered next is the current state of majoritizing the minority. As one outcome, urban neighborhoods will become demographically diverse and reflect socioeconomic differences rather than racial/ethnic ones; that is, in the jargon of past research, neighborhood composition will be determined by Class more than Culture. This should be largely driven by market forces as mediated by elements such as social networks (formal and informal) and personal preferences. Inertia effects also would operate to slow, but not eliminate, shifts in the urban landscape. Conceptually, these forces are represented by Market-Led Pluralism and Resurgent Ethnicity. Regarding other likely futures, as acculturation occurs a substantial increase in intermarriage is expected, leading to A Blended America. Economic shifts also play into the future as nations of the Global South strengthen, while production in the Global North becomes more automated. Hence, immigration will continue, but from different origins; and the overall level will be lower, leading to A Shrinking Nation.

Although the Regency of Algiers was little known in Europe before 1830, a number of studies on this territory had been published since the sixteenth century by diplomats, travelers, captives, and clergy dedicated to the redemption of captives and militaries. Their writings described a territory inhabited by people of various cultures and religions, Jews, Moors, Arabs, and Kabyles, each of these having its specific place and role in the country's society and economy. Inside the Regency, dhimma, an inferior status, was granted to all non-Muslim followers of the revealed religions (Jews and Christians) accepting Islam domination. However, the Christians mostly enjoyed the benefits of an alleviated dhimmitude (The researcher Bat Ye'or, in his works on Egyptian Jews, first used this term as a synonym for \"dhimmi legal status\". Some researches in English, French or German commonly use the word: See for references: http://www.dhimmitude.org/d_bycv.html), under agreements with European countries. Directly under the protection of the French Consul, the Franc Jews were exempted from it. The other Jews were scorned, subjected to dhimma, and sentenced to discriminatory and humiliating punishments. These accounts help map out the origins of the various ethnic groups of the Regency, their number and range of activities, the level of confidence placed in them, and the ways to modernize their conditions and possibly turn them into allies. Some of the foci of these early writings would be validated and developed during the first stages of French colonization: for example, the future importance of the Jews coming from France for Algerian Jews' \"education\", or the difference perceived by Europeans between Arabs and Kabyles, which led the latter to enjoy more consideration, and ultimately gave birth to the \"Kabylian myth.\" The positive reception by Algerian Jews, supposed to be favorable to the French, as well as their important role as intermediaries, was confirmed by the facts. Yet, the very low opinion of Jews harbored by the conquerors was so persistent that it soon fostered among the European settlers a prevailing \"anti-Judaic\" sentiment throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.