Three years after Oct. 7, we are still learning how to live with what changed that day. For Jewish educators, that has meant learning alongside our students—about Israel, about the Jewish people, about grief and resilience, and about how to remain in relationship with questions that do not have easy answers.
The educational landscape in which we begin this academic year is markedly different from the one we knew before the Hamas-led terrorist attacks that Simchat Torah day. The conversations are more urgent, the narratives more contested, and the need for context and thoughtful engagement more apparent.
At the same time, the work of Israel education cannot be reduced to simply responding to the latest crisis. Our task is to help learners develop relationships with Israel that can deepen, evolve and sustain them over a lifetime.
At precisely this moment, one of our most powerful educational practices is neither a new curriculum nor a new technology. It is one of Judaism’s oldest traditions: the gift of a book.
A book becomes powerful when it is part of a culture of learning that prizes curiosity, choice, sustained attention, conversation and return. Within that culture, a book can be both a tool for lifelong learning and a tangible reminder that learning is never finished.
How we think about Israel education should be no different. In fact, a new academic framework, Reimagining Israel Education, argues that effective Israel education should be cumulative, learner-centered, relational and full of meaning. It challenges Jewish educators to cultivate learners who continue engaging with Israel long after a seminar, class or trip has ended.
This requires creating a culture in which these educators see themselves as learners—with agency to choose what they want to explore, relationships in which they can test their thinking and practices that encourage them to return to questions over time. At Hillel International’s Center for Jewish and Israel Education (CJIE), we have discovered that the simple practice of gifting a book has quietly embodied these principles for years.
Every generation inherits texts, wrestles with them, interprets them and passes them on.
For Hillel professionals participating in CJIE initiatives, books are not giveaways or program mementos. They are invitations into an ongoing relationship with Israel, Jewish learning and one another. We send them to colleagues during difficult moments, bring distinguished authors into conversation and weave thoughtfully selected titles into all of our core programs.
The practice matters because books offer a particular kind of invitation, asking us to slow down and sustain attention. We can underline a passage, put the work down and return to it months later, encountering the same words differently after a new experience. A book on a desk or shelf can also spark a conversation with a student and visibly model what it means to be a lifelong learner.
And a beloved physical library can become part of an educator’s identity—a record of questions pursued, perspectives encountered and ideas that have mattered enough to keep. For example, at each in-person seminar of our year-long fellowship for campus professionals, participants encounter a collection of carefully selected books, featuring fiction and history, memoir and journalism, religious and secular voices, and authors representing the diversity of Israeli society.
The collection itself communicates something important: There is no single book that can explain Israel, and no single narrative that should stand alone. Learning from new or different voices reflects a commitment to pluralism and a multi-narrative approach to Israel education.
Before anyone opens a book, the learning has already begun.
Participants linger around the shelves, recommend favorite titles, debate ideas and discover authors they have never encountered before. They make choices based on their own interests and questions—and those choices can become openings for conversation with colleagues.
The act of choosing transforms learning from something delivered to something a learner actively pursues. That is the kind of agency that a culture of lifelong learning requires.
The bookshelf also creates a physical representation of complexity. Different perspectives sit beside one another without requiring the learner to resolve their differences. Independent evaluation of the program found that participants increased their content knowledge, pedagogical skill and confidence in engaging students in conversations about Israel and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Just as importantly, the program fostered respectful, multifaceted dialogue. These findings point to the value of sustained learning grounded in complexity and curiosity. Books are one part of that larger learning ecosystem. They provide educators with a way to deepen knowledge, encounter perspectives and continue exploring questions beyond formal professional development.
We take this approach one step further when we bring professionals to Israel to better understand Israel in the post-Oct. 7 world. We gift books as lenses for reflection and learning before, during and long after the journey.
Before departure, participants receive books that invite them into the human stories of Oct. 7. By the time they arrive, they have already encountered voices that may challenge, comfort or complicate their understanding.
The learning continues after participants return home as they receive funding to build a personal Israel library. Their choices reflect their unique learning journeys: some select histories they wished they had read years earlier; others choose novels that illuminate Israeli society through human experience; still others gravitate toward memoir, poetry or theology.
Those libraries represent a commitment to return—to difficult questions, new perspectives, and ideas that may look different after another year of experience. The library itself can become part of an educator’s identity: these are the questions I am pursuing; these are the voices I have chosen to encounter; this is learning I intend to carry with me.
We Jews have long called ourselves Am HaSefer, or the “People of the Book.” Books have not held a central place in Jewish life simply because they preserve knowledge. They matter because they invite conversation.
Every generation inherits texts, wrestles with them, interprets them and passes them on, as Israeli historian and writer Fania Oz-Salzberger wrote, “not unchanged, not unchallenged, but reinterpreted in each generation.”
Israel education can work the same way.
As we mark three years since the horrible events of Oct. 7, our responsibility today is not simply to ensure that professionals know more about Israel. It is to cultivate professionals who remain curious, historically grounded, intellectually humble, emotionally present, and willing to encounter complexity alongside their students.
That kind of learning requires a culture and agency over what we learn: colleagues with whom we can think aloud and disagree, opportunities to encounter new voices and practices that make learning part of professional identity.
A book can be one of those practices, inviting us to read one more chapter, remain visible long after a seminar or be revisited years later when an old question takes on new meaning. It’s an invitation to keep learning.
