Loving Israel Without Lying About It: Diaspora Jewish schools celebrate the dream of Israel. They rarely teach about the expensive slums, unpaid wages, discrimination, and daily humiliations many olim actually face.

By Bonnie K. Goodman, BA, MLIS

Today we celebrate Israel’s 78th birthday all over the world. Jewish day school children will be going to community marches and celebrations wearing the Israeli flag and singing Israeli songs. There will be ceremonies, music, blue and white everywhere, and the familiar language of miracle, pride, homeland, and peoplehood.

But do they really know what it is like in Israel to live there?

Are we teaching what Israel really is in the Jewish day school curriculum?

Before I made aliyah, I was in the middle of an MA in Jewish education and was focusing on Israel education. Yes, we discussed Ahavat Israel as the curricular viewpoint in schools and the problem with teaching Israel through idealized love alone, arguing that it did not account for political complexities. That critique is true as far as it goes. But after living in Israel, becoming a citizen there, and trying to build an actual life there, I would say politics is the least of the problems with Israel education.

Diaspora Jewish day schools do not teach the complexities of daily life. And I do not mean war, terror, sirens, military service, or the conflict that dominates headlines. Those things are documented enough. They are dramatic, visible, and easy to explain from abroad. What is not taught is the grinding reality of ordinary life. What is not taught is what happens when the Zionist dream becomes rent, work, landlords, bureaucracy, illness, wages, and survival. What is not taught is that loving Israel and living in Israel are not the same thing.

I learned that the hard way.

I did not come to Israel as a tourist, a teenager on a gap year, or someone looking for a decorative Jewish identity. I came as an adult, with a professional life behind me, with grief behind me, with serious ambitions in Jewish education, writing, and art, and with the hope that aliyah would allow me to build a real life rooted in Jewish time, Jewish space, Jewish continuity, and practical belonging. In my memoir, My Jerusalem Life, Interrupted, I wrote that what I lived “was not compartmentalized”: the apartments did not stay in the apartments, the cold entered the body, the body entered the school, and the lack of pay entered everything else.

That is the Israel Jewish day schools do not teach.

They do not teach the Israel where you can pay around $2,000 USD a month for an apartment with no hot water, or the same kind of outrageous sum for an apartment full of mold. These are not small sums. By North American standards, that kind of rent does not read as poverty. It suggests at minimum basic livability, ordinary dignity, and some degree of comfort. Instead, I was living in expensive slums.

They do not teach the Israel where landlords literally tell you how to live in those homes. You are charged like a tenant but treated like an unwelcome guest. You are paying an exorbitant amount for a place you are never really allowed to inhabit freely. You do not feel like someone with rights. You feel like someone being tolerated for a fee.

They do not teach the Israel where........

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