From the Mouths of Children Widening the Scope and Shifting the Focus of Understanding the Relationships Between American Jews and Israel

Key Findings:

This report makes two distinct yet interrelated arguments about the role of children in research on contemporary American Jews. The first is that children ought to be included in research about American Judaism. Second, the inclusion of children in research both widens the scope and shifts the focus of understanding American Jewish relationships to Israel. Children’s participation in research demonstrates how American Jews develop relationships with Israel over the course of a lifetime.

The Children’s Learning About Israel Project, a longitudinal study tracking American Jewish children’s thoughts and feelings about Israel, is one example of research that attempts to address the absence of children’s voices in the research literature. 

In the case of American Jews’ relationships to Israel, children simultaneously situate themselves as part of the American Jewish community and express notions of Israel that are distinct from those of American Jewish teens and adults. 

Jewish children in the United States, like the American Jewish community writ large, look to Israel from afar. American Jewish children readily express both feelings of pride or joy and feelings of anxiety or frustration with contemporary Israel and its role in American Jewish life. 

American Jewish children, no less than their adult counterparts, are also acutely aware of the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. Even as five-year-olds, they understand that Israel is embroiled in ongoing, often violent conflict, and by the age of eight most children are able to offer multiple explanations for the root causes of that conflict. 

Finally, the author emphasizes the research methods that allow for the inclusion of children operate on an inventory approach that attempts to uncover what children do understand and believe about Israel. This a departure from a more normative deficit approach that catalogues the insufficiencies in what Jews know and feel about Israel.

New research suggests that young Jews’ attitudes towards Israel may in fact shift very little between the teenage years and young adulthood (Pomson 2018). If this is widely true, then understanding the beliefs and attitudes of Jewish children becomes even more important, as childhood may be the time of greatest growth and transformation in a young Jew’s life.