The Jewish people are one family. We carry each other’s grief and share each other’s joy. The bond is the deepest truth of who we are. And Israel is the future of the Jewish people. Whatever else is true about that future, it runs through Jerusalem.
Jewish education is vital. Two decades of Pew study data confirm what every Jewish parent already knew: Serious Jewish education is the single strongest predictor of whether a Jewish child grows up Jewishly. American day schools do consequential work, and the families who send their children there are making consequential decisions. As the father of children educated in Diaspora day schools, I want to begin with that.
On Sunday, the Israeli cabinet unanimously approved a NIS 200 million (about $67 million) plan to strengthen Diaspora Jewish education, focused on enrolling more American Jewish children in day schools. According to eJewishPhilanthropy, the Israeli state allocation is NIS 100 million (about $33 million), matched by the Jewish Federations of North America. Count me among the Israelis opposed to this idea. We should not be subsidizing Diaspora day schools.
Like much of the Jewish state, the Israeli educational system is in crisis. The country that produces world-class engineers runs schools that rank among the lowest in the developed world in reading and mathematics, with overcrowded classrooms. Teacher shortages are chronic in math, science and English.
The ultra-Orthodox system, which now educates nearly one-quarter of Israel’s first-graders, is not required to teach the core curriculum. Thus, an entire generation of Israeli children is being raised without the mathematics and English the modern economy demands. Schools in Israel’s north were closed for months during the war with Hezbollah; many have not been fully restored. The Israeli Ministry of Education has cycled through leaders and unfinished reforms.
And in this system—struggling, underfunded, serving the children of the Jewish state—Israeli taxpayers are being asked to write a check to subsidize tuition halfway across the world and after nearly three years of ongoing war?
A family in Lod, where classrooms are crowded, and infrastructure is undercapitalized. A family in Afula, in a periphery whose economic development was cut in this week’s same budget cycle. A family in Kiryat Shmona or Sderot, where the rockets fell, and the rebuilding is unfinished. A family in the southern Bedouin town of Rahat, paying taxes while minority infrastructure budgets were cut 13%. Families in Netivot and Yeruham—working class, Mizrahi, religious, secular, Arab—whose shekels are being matched into a fund that will subsidize tuition dollars in Bergen County, N.J., and California’s San Fernando Valley.
That is the real question. Not whether Jewish education matters (it does), but who subsidizes it.
The United States is home to the wealthiest Diaspora community Jewish history has ever produced by orders of magnitude. JFNA’s annual campaign raises hundreds of millions every year. Federation endowments hold tens of billions in assets. The largest Jewish foundations in the world—Pritzker, Crown, Bronfman, Steinhardt, Adelson, Tisch, Lauder, Schusterman—are American.
And it is asking the Jewish state—absorbing waves of new immigrants from Ukraine, France and Ethiopia, rebuilding its north and south, carrying a defense budget no Western country bears—to chip in for private school tuition in the suburbs.
The costs are real. Day-school tuition in New York runs $25,000 to $50,000 a year. A K-12 education for one child can cost half a million dollars before college. Multiply by the three or four children typical in these communities, and the math breaks families. It is a genuine problem—an American problem.
The affordability crisis is not new. Avi Chai, Prizmah, every Federation strategic plan, every denominational movement has named it for 40 years. Two generations of communal hand-wringing, gala dinners, blue-ribbon commissions and task forces—and the wealthiest Diaspora in Jewish history still cannot fund its own children’s Jewish education without asking Jerusalem for a co-pay.
The capacity has always been there. The will has not. But that is not Israel’s failure to fix.
Which schools will receive this money? The sharpest affordability pressure and the broadest non-Orthodox enrollment remain in Conservative and Reform community day schools—many of them uber-liberal and frequently at odds with mainstream Israeli Zionism. Will the State of Israel, where Reform clergy are openly condemned by the rabbinic establishment and the coalition’s base, channel taxpayer money into Reform education abroad?
The harder question sits underneath. Over the past two decades, large parts of non-Orthodox American Jewish institutional life have drifted—and sometimes walked—away from full-throated support of Israel. Reform leadership has publicly opposed Israeli government positions on conversion and on Western Wall access. Movement bodies have aligned with J Street positions that sit well outside the Israeli consensus. A meaningful share of younger American Jews now tell pollsters that they are uncomfortable calling themselves Zionists at all.
After Oct. 7, too many American Jewish institutional leaders treated Israel as a public-relations problem to manage, rather than a family member under attack.
And the Israeli taxpayer is now being asked to subsidize the education of children whose institutions, in some cases, actively oppose the policies—and, at times, the legitimacy—of the very government writing the check.
Diaspora Jewish education is a strategic Israeli and Jewish interest. If American Jewry believes that day-school affordability is one of the central issues facing American Judaism—and it is—then it is their problem to solve.
Israel should reverse this decision. American Jewry should stop sending Jerusalem the invoice for the choices it made.
