If you were walking down Jerusalem’s Rechov Emek Refaim or Ben Yehuda Street this Thanksgiving week, you would have heard an unexpected chorus: American English. The speakers weren’t tourists. They were parents and their teenage sons and daughters visiting yeshivot, midrashot (seminaries), mechinot, and other gap-year programs, hoping to choose where these teens will spend the year after high school.

This annual parade of families says something essential about the future of Jewish identity. The “gap” these programs fill is not the year between high school and college. It is the widening gap between Jewish ancestry and Jewish literacy; between saying “I’m Jewish” and living as a Jew with confidence, purpose and knowledge.

For decades, we assumed that Jewish identity could be maintained by minimal affiliation — a few holidays, a Hebrew school education, a bar or bat mitzvah, a youth group trip. But the last few decades have challenged that assumption. Rising assimilation, antisemitism on campus,........

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