My Jerusalem Life, Interrupted and the human cost of educational instability

By Bonnie K. Goodman, BA, MLIS

In Israel, the education system does not operate in a vacuum.

Sirens interrupt daily life. Schools shift between classrooms and Zoom instruction with little warning. Teachers and students live within the rhythms of a country that can move quickly from ordinary routine to national emergency. In moments like these, schools play a stabilizing role. Teachers provide structure and continuity for children whose lives are shaped by uncertainty beyond their control. The expectation is that educators will adapt quickly, maintain calm, and keep learning moving forward.

That expectation is understandable.

But stability in education cannot depend solely on teachers.

It must also come from the institutions that employ them.

Even as Israel confronts war, national strain, and a deepening educational crisis, the public debate often remains strangely abstract. In the Winter 2026 issue of SAPIR, Moshe Behar and Avital Ben Shlomo argue that Israel’s educational decline stems from excessive centralization. Authority, they contend, rests too heavily in the Ministry of Education. Principals lack autonomy. Innovation is constrained. Dismissal procedures are cumbersome. Their proposed remedy is decentralization: grant schools more authority over hiring, budgets, and pedagogy.

Shalom Weil, writing in The Times of Israel, describes the shortage as a “palpable catastrophe” and proposes subsidized housing, school-based teacher training, and a five-year communal mission to restore the profession’s standing and embed educators inside local life. Tomer Samarkandi, writing in The Jerusalem Post, points to the scale of the breakdown: one in ten new teachers leaving in the first year, one in five within five years, thousands of teaching-program graduates never entering classrooms at all, and severe shortages especially in English and mathematics.

These are serious arguments. They reflect a country that knows it has a problem.

But from inside a classroom, particularly from the vantage point of a new immigrant teacher in her staj year, the crisis does not present primarily as centralization.

It presents as instability.

That is the argument at the center of my memoir, My Jerusalem Life, Interrupted: A Diary of a Teacher in Israel: Aliyah, Art, and the Year Everything Cracked. The book is not only about one school or one contract dispute. It is about what happens when instability ceases to be a policy term and becomes the structure of everyday life: wages delayed, authority blurred, illness aggravated, housing precarious, judgment quickened, and the larger life one came to build in Israel slowly narrowed under pressure. As I clarify in the preface what happened “spread far beyond the school itself” and damaged “money, housing, health, time, concentration, art, confidence, and the larger life” I was trying to build.

I arrived in Israel drawn by the country’s resilience and by the seriousness with which education is still supposed to matter. Within months, I was hired to teach English in an Israeli elementary school. This was not volunteer work. It was paid employment. I began teaching on September 1, working 21 hours per week. Classes were scheduled. Students were assigned. Lesson plans were prepared. The school year began.

Over nearly six months of teaching, however, I received 4,800 NIS total.

Educational policy debates often revolve around salary comparisons: whether Israeli teachers earn less than professionals in comparable OECD countries, whether unions distort incentives, whether autonomy should replace........

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