We’re Not Just Teaching Judaism - We’re Raising Jews
Posted on 05/29/2026 @ 06:30 AM
By Mark Kravitz, CAJE Board Chair
At a recent CAJE meeting inside Miami’s new Holocaust Education Center at the Holocaust Memorial in Miami Beach, I had one of those moments where you stop listening to the agenda for a second and just take in the room around you.
A building created to preserve the memory of the Holocaust is now also becoming a place where educators are helping students process October 7th in real time. That’s a staggering shift when you really think about it.
For years, Holocaust education mostly lived in the world of remembrance. Testimony. History. Memory.
The responsibility was to make sure future generations understood what hatred could become if nobody stopped it.
Now Jewish educators are dealing with something entirely different.
They’re helping students understand Jewish history while simultaneously living through it.
That is not what most teachers thought they were signing up for.
Young Jews today are navigating Israel, antisemitism, identity, social media insanity, political extremism, and college campuses that sometimes feel less like places of learning and more like competitive outrage festivals with meal plans.
And they’re doing it while still trying to be normal young adults.
They’re worrying about exams, relationships, internships, whether they chose the wrong major, and why every streaming service somehow costs $19.99 now.
It’s a lot.
And I think over the last two years, many of us in Jewish communal life have started realizing something important:
Jewish education is not some side department of the Jewish world. It’s the load-bearing wall.
Federation and advocacy organizations do incredibly important work.
They fight antisemitism publicly. They strengthen relationships with civic leaders. They advocate politically and communally for Jewish interests.
Especially now, that work matters tremendously.
But advocacy by itself cannot sustain Jewish identity.
Because eventually every Jewish student hits a moment where the talking points fall apart.
Life gets complicated. Conversations get personal. The issue stops being theoretical.
And in those moments, nobody is carried by a slogan they saw reposted online six hours earlier.
People are carried by depth. By understanding. By identity.
By the feeling that they belong to something older and larger than whatever chaos is trending online this week before everybody collectively forgets about it next Tuesday.
That’s where Jewish education matters.
CAJE’s role isn’t to replace advocacy. It’s to make sure there’s actually something underneath it.
Because if Jewish identity is built entirely around fear, crisis, and defense, eventually people disconnect.
Nobody can live permanently in survival mode. Jews have certainly tried over the centuries, but it’s not exactly sustainable.
People stay connected through meaning.
The Torah figured this out a very long time ago: “V’shinantam l’vanecha”- Teach these words to your children.
Not rebrand them. Not simplify them into catchphrases. Teach them.
That has always been the Jewish strategy.
And honestly, when you step back and look at Jewish history, it’s borderline ridiculous that it worked as well as it did.
Empires disappeared. Entire civilizations collapsed. World powers vanished into history books and documentaries narrated by British actors with dramatic voices.
Meanwhile, the Jewish people somehow survived all of it powered largely by learning, family, resilience, tradition, and generations of Jewish parents saying, “I hear that you’re exhausted, but you’re still going to Hebrew school.”
And somehow… here we are.
Generation after generation, Jews kept teaching other Jews who they were- that may actually be the great Jewish superpower.
Not PR. We’ve had a rough few thousand years there.
Our real superpower is transmission. Passing identity, memory, values, humor, argument, resilience, and belonging from one generation to the next no matter what history throws at us.
No group in human history has weaponized conversation at the dinner table quite like the Jews.
That feels especially important right now when it comes to Israel education.
For years, in many communities, Israel education became something occasional. A guest speaker. A special event. Maybe a trip.
October 7th exposed the flaw in that model very quickly.
Because if the first serious conversation a Jewish student has about Israel happens during a protest or an argument on campus, then we waited way too long to start the conversation.
Israel is not simply a political issue for Jews.
Israel is woven directly into the Jewish story. History, language, resilience, culture, survival, peoplehood, innovation, moral complexity — all of it exists together inside that conversation.
I saw this personally with my own son during his freshman year of college.
Like so many Jewish students after October 7th, he suddenly found himself in conversations about Israel and Jewish identity that felt far more intense than they would have even a year earlier.
And like every parent, my first instinct was to search for the perfect response.
The magical sentence that could somehow solve four thousand years of Jewish history and the Middle East conflict before his next class started.
Turns out that sentence does not exist.
Trust me. Jewish parents would already have a WhatsApp group dedicated to it if it did.
What actually mattered were the deeper conversations. Jewish history. Exile. Survival. Israel.
Complexity. The understanding that Judaism has never really offered simple answers to difficult questions.
And slowly something changed.
Israel stopped feeling like just another argument online. It became personal. Part of his own story.
Once that happens, people carry themselves differently.
Their confidence no longer comes from memorizing the “correct” response. It comes from understanding who they are.
The strongest Jewish advocates I know are rarely the people with the slickest talking points.
Usually they’re the people who learned deeply enough that Judaism stopped feeling abstract and started feeling personal.
And none of this happens by accident.
It happens because Jewish educators and professionals show up every day and do difficult work that most people never fully see.
While the rest of us are still trying to become functional before caffeine kicks in, CAJE professionals are already helping schools, supporting teachers, solving problems, building partnerships, and trying to shape the future of Jewish life in Miami.
That work matters.
And what gives me real hope right now is that this community understands the assignment.
Families here want Jewish education that is serious, joyful, connected to Israel, and deeply rooted in Jewish identity.
They want their children to feel proud being Jewish, not just prepared to defend it during an argument with some kid who took one semester of political science and suddenly thinks he should brief the State Department.
And honestly, what’s happening in Miami right now feels different.
You can see it everywhere.
New Jewish schools are opening. Others are already being planned.
Why?
Because this community has decided that if a Jewish child wants a Jewish education, there should be a seat waiting for them.
And the numbers here are honestly staggering.
The demand for Jewish day school education in Miami exceeds most Jewish communities in America by nearly four times.
Four times! That’s not normal.
That’s Miami.
Only in Miami will people complain about traffic for an hour and then voluntarily sit in even more traffic because they want stronger Jewish education for their children.
In most cities, traffic like that creates road rage. Here, apparently, it creates Jewish continuity.
This community understands that Jewish education is not enrichment. It’s survival.
Because in the end, advocacy may help defend the Jewish community publicly. But education is what makes the next generation care enough to defend it at all.
