More of the burgeoning conversation among young Jews. Ali Kriegsman and Jana Kozlowski seek funding for a documentary about the Jewish Day Schools’ failure to educate young Jews about Israel. “Before coming to Penn, I never even heard the word occupation mentioned,” says one student. The students are shocked and embarrassed to enter a critical environment where others are better informed, they say. Ian Lustick, professor at Penn, is the eminence grise of the show and says that Jews have a great responsibility, by heritage and for realistic survival reasons, to learn as much as they can about the actual relations of Jews and Arabs in the Middle East.
The documentary appears to have a We-still-love-Israel theme. From the Indiegogo campaign, which has raised $385 or so so far:
On a larger scale, we hope this documentary motivates Jewish communities around the country – synagogues, camps, schools, programs – to stray from a whitewashed Israel narrative and instead engage alternative perspectives and current day complexities, criticisms, and accomplishments. We believe you can love Israel with a critical eye, and we hope this piece exemplifies that breed of love – as well as the hypothesis that Israel can be *taught* with this type of love in mind.
A simple start to ending this miseducation is to use West Jerusalem and East Jerusalem the same way East Berlin and West Berlin were used when that city, like Jerusalem today, was divided. What will it take for the New York Times to report with that acuracy?
Citizen
February 24, 2014 11:17 am
Really? “We believe you can love Germany with a critical eye, and we hope this piece exemplifies that breed of love.” How far did that get Lindbergh with Philip Roth?
Citizen
February 24, 2014 11:21 am
“American school student first learned about ‘occupation’ & Nakba when he randomly got to not college but to Mondoweiss.net. By that time he was a senior citizen worried more about how Obamacare was eating away at his medical insurance benefits.”
pabelmont
February 24, 2014 11:38 am
Just this morning as NPR and WNYC were patting themselves on the back for their diverse news coverage, blah blah, and asking for more money to support it, I fantasized about a BDS against (or toward ?) NPR and WNYC and NYT etc. asking them to cover Israel and Palestine so that Jews and of course others could have the benefit (often said to be requisite for a democracy to function) of information about reality (rather than silence or propaganda).
Here we are reminded that some young Jews have gone to Jewish Day schools where they have not learned a damn thing due to censorship. Hillels, too, enjoy/practice a similar censorship. HEY! We have a magic fantasy, don’t subject us to contrary facts!
Nothing illegal about censorship, of course, salt of the earth in a way, typical of instruction in many places BUT . . .
HERE’s this kid asked to support Israel and knows nothing about it and leaves school and all its censorship to be injected into a broad-minded (and broadly-educated) mass of university students. What a shock. what a slap at her fondness (I guess) for her parents and schools which she now learns were corrupting her, denying her, treating her like an object (to be propagandized) rather than as an ethical human being.
Imagine if NYT and NPR had been reporting on I/P as they sometimes seem to claim they do (when fund-raising) all these years (all HER life!). Just imagine. I know, contrary to fact, but we can imagine.
How do we get OPEN HILLEL to morph into an OPEN NYT and OPEN NPR movement? Has JVP an idea? Have the OPEN HILLEL’s got an idea?
CitizenC
February 24, 2014 2:47 pm
This is interesting, despite the equivocation of the filmmakers, because it challenges the Jewish establishment’s cure-all for liberalism, Jewish education. See Marianne Sanua’s Let Us Prove Strong, her history of the American Jewish Committee post-1945. The AJC went from fretting that Jewish education was inculcating nationalist and self-segregating tendencies in children, in the 1950s, to seizing Jewish day schools with both hands in the 1990s, as the ultimate weapon against the liberal scourges of intermarriage and assimilation. Peter Beinart favors Jewish education also, as a way of reproducing “Jews” who don’t intermarry and care enough to support a liberal Zionism. But not even Jewish education is fully effective, at least against Israel’s current Zionism.
We may also note the terminal bankruptcy of the US Jewish establishment (and of Beinart’s liberal Zionism) in advocating “education” not as a way of enlightening and broadening minds, but of brainwashing and constraining choice.
Actually I think Mondo had an earlier post about the indoctrination at one Jewish day school, from an alum.
A simple start to ending this miseducation is to use West Jerusalem and East Jerusalem the same way East Berlin and West Berlin were used when that city, like Jerusalem today, was divided. What will it take for the New York Times to report with that acuracy?
Really? “We believe you can love Germany with a critical eye, and we hope this piece exemplifies that breed of love.” How far did that get Lindbergh with Philip Roth?
“American school student first learned about ‘occupation’ & Nakba when he randomly got to not college but to Mondoweiss.net. By that time he was a senior citizen worried more about how Obamacare was eating away at his medical insurance benefits.”
Just this morning as NPR and WNYC were patting themselves on the back for their diverse news coverage, blah blah, and asking for more money to support it, I fantasized about a BDS against (or toward ?) NPR and WNYC and NYT etc. asking them to cover Israel and Palestine so that Jews and of course others could have the benefit (often said to be requisite for a democracy to function) of information about reality (rather than silence or propaganda).
Here we are reminded that some young Jews have gone to Jewish Day schools where they have not learned a damn thing due to censorship. Hillels, too, enjoy/practice a similar censorship. HEY! We have a magic fantasy, don’t subject us to contrary facts!
Nothing illegal about censorship, of course, salt of the earth in a way, typical of instruction in many places BUT . . .
HERE’s this kid asked to support Israel and knows nothing about it and leaves school and all its censorship to be injected into a broad-minded (and broadly-educated) mass of university students. What a shock. what a slap at her fondness (I guess) for her parents and schools which she now learns were corrupting her, denying her, treating her like an object (to be propagandized) rather than as an ethical human being.
Imagine if NYT and NPR had been reporting on I/P as they sometimes seem to claim they do (when fund-raising) all these years (all HER life!). Just imagine. I know, contrary to fact, but we can imagine.
How do we get OPEN HILLEL to morph into an OPEN NYT and OPEN NPR movement? Has JVP an idea? Have the OPEN HILLEL’s got an idea?
This is interesting, despite the equivocation of the filmmakers, because it challenges the Jewish establishment’s cure-all for liberalism, Jewish education. See Marianne Sanua’s Let Us Prove Strong, her history of the American Jewish Committee post-1945. The AJC went from fretting that Jewish education was inculcating nationalist and self-segregating tendencies in children, in the 1950s, to seizing Jewish day schools with both hands in the 1990s, as the ultimate weapon against the liberal scourges of intermarriage and assimilation. Peter Beinart favors Jewish education also, as a way of reproducing “Jews” who don’t intermarry and care enough to support a liberal Zionism. But not even Jewish education is fully effective, at least against Israel’s current Zionism.
We may also note the terminal bankruptcy of the US Jewish establishment (and of Beinart’s liberal Zionism) in advocating “education” not as a way of enlightening and broadening minds, but of brainwashing and constraining choice.
Actually I think Mondo had an earlier post about the indoctrination at one Jewish day school, from an alum.