Who is teaching our children to blame Israel?

Almost a year ago now, during my class about Israel, a few of my students started talking about whether it still felt safe to be openly Jewish in New York City. That conversation has stayed with me ever since, because these were kids who love being Jewish and had never once questioned whether they should show it before that year.

What worries me most is where that fear actually comes from, because almost none of what shapes a young Jew’s sense of who they are gets fostered in a formal, sustained way anymore. It gets shaped on a phone, fed by a digital system that does not care whether any of the information is true, only whether it keeps a teen watching. An algorithm can’t tell the difference between what is legitimate or an old prejudice written in today’s language, and it doesn’t need to, since outrage holds attention better than any nuanced truth ever will. For too many teens in a generation raised on social media, that feed has become the prominent teacher of who they are and, worse, who they should blame for what’s happening to them as Jews.

That second part should truly alarm us. A growing number of young Jews have come to believe the hostility aimed at them is something Israel brought on all of them personally, and that severing the connection would end it. That belief is all too common among kids raised on little more than TikTok, and we must name it for what it is. It’s the accuser’s own fabricated story about the Jews, internalized by young Jews, who then repeat it without ever asking where it came from or whether it’s true.

We have watched that type of distortion play out over and over again. A Jewish state senator in California spends years publicly criticizing his own government’s war and it earns him nothing, he still gets driven out of a public event as an enabler. A park in Ireland loses the name of a man who did nothing wrong except be born Jewish and connected to Israel. A rabbi who has spent his career arguing for Palestinian statehood still can’t get on a stage, because the room has decided no Zionist belongs there. Publishing houses quietly tell novelists to cut Jewish characters, not to change their politics, just to remove them, because the Jewishness itself has become the problem. In every case, what the person actually believed about Israel turned out not to matter. Only the fact that they were Jewish did. We are told constantly that criticizing a state isn’t the same as marginalizing or even hating a people, and then we watch that line fail in public again and again.

Ironically, these people who tie Israel and the Jews together aren’t wrong, and we should state that proudly, out loud. Jewish identity and the land of Israel never were two separate things suddenly bound together late in the nineteenth century. The Amidah, said three times daily, asks for a return to Jerusalem. The seder has closed with the same line, “next year in Jerusalem,” for two thousand years, long before there was a modern state to argue about. Nearly every major holiday points back to that same land, and a wedding still ends with a glass shattered underfoot, in mourning for a city none of us today have seen in ruins. Take Zion out of Judaism and there’s no coherent story left, because the people and the place were always inextricably bound to each other. A young person who has been taught this can’t easily be talked out of it. A teen who hasn’t been taught any of his history and customs has no tools to push back with.

So who gets to decide what it means to be a Jew, and what Israel means to the Jewish people? In today’s world it is whoever gets to our youth first. For years we worried and saw it on campuses, in newsrooms and at city halls. For today’s young people it just means an app, right at their fingertips. Whatever the source, the demand on us hasn’t changed. It’s the demand for us to get smaller and quieter and less visibly Jewish, one compromise at a time, and teens scrolling and taking in that demand over and over again have no way of recognizing that old empty bargain unless someone has already shown them what it looks like.

Most of our own Jewish children in America haven’t been shown what to watch out for, even here in Bergen County. Nationally, fewer than five percent of non-Orthodox Jewish children attend a Jewish day school, and while our own community’s enrollment numbers look strong on paper, among the best in the country, that strength comes almost entirely from Orthodox families. Outside that population, I’d guess the real number for the rest of us looks a lot closer to the national one than most people here would think.

And the climate our kids, without that grounding, are walking into isn’t improving. Nearly half of Jewish college students say they have witnessed or experienced antisemitic behavior on their own campus this past year, according to the Anti-Defamation League. In Canada, a government-commissioned study found that 95 percent of Jewish students had witnessed or been personally targeted by antisemitism. This summer, a Harvard poll found that voters 18 to 24 were the only age group in the country to favor Hamas over Israel, and they do by a wide margin. This is the world a Jewish teenager is growing up in. We cannot extinguish all the embers of hate and misinformation. They have always been there. But we can provide our children a more serious, in-depth and meaningful Jewish education, where they learn their story honestly, where they grow up proud, and understand their true relationship with Israel and the Jewish people, no matter where in the world they live.

The evidence for what actually changes when a child does get that preparation is clear. A 2025 analysis of Jewish college students, based on research out of Tufts, found day school graduates are more than twice as likely as their peers to say their Jewish identity matters deeply to them, 81 percent against 35 percent, and roughly four times as likely to describe a real connection to Israel. They show up for Jewish life on campus at close to double the rate of students who never attended a day school. Picture what that actually looks like. A 19-year-old walking into a dorm room argument already knowing who he is, next to one who has to figure it out on the spot, under pressure, for the first time.

That difference isn’t mostly about pride, though pride comes with it. It is about understanding. A student who understands why the seder ends in Jerusalem hears the demand to cut Zion out of Judaism and knows right away what it actually really is.

I don’t have a comforting prediction about where any of this is heading nationally, but as a head of school, I know we can have a powerful and positive influence along with the family. We teach our students who they are before that algorithm gets the chance to do it first, so whatever they decide, about a Jewish star or anything else, they decide with clarity instead of confusion, and never end up blaming their own people for a hatred that is not their burden.

Every generation of Jews has been offered some version of the same trade, make yourself smaller and the trouble eases, and every generation has been told this round is somehow different. It never has been. The one defense that has actually worked, every time, is the same one it always was. The children who already know exactly who they are, long before anyone or anything else gets to tell them otherwise.

Steve Freedman of Teaneck is the head of school at Schechter Bergen in New Milford.

Opinion