Since the beginning of time, it is fair to say, the overarching hopes and aspirations of parents have been to keep their children safe from harm. However, since the beginning of time, it is equally fair to say, parents have understood that such hopes and aspirations are impossible to fulfil. Dangers always lurk. Parents cannot keep all dangers away from those whom they love. Nor do children lead the fullness of their lives under their parents’ protective wings. But since the beginning of time, when it came to their children, parents have always tried to carve possible out of impossible.
October 7 birthed a relatively new danger for Jews in North America, especially for young Jews. We are inundated without cease, in every virtual, digital and physical space of communication, by vile, hateful, false accusations about who we are. Only this week, for example, viral conspirators accused Israel of causing the forest fires burning in Europe. Others (or perhaps the same) conspiracy champions accused Israel of engineering the migrant crisis at the Moroccan-Spanish border in Ceuta.
Living under such constant condemnation and denunciation can create risks to our children’s sense of Jewish self, let alone, God forbid, to their physical selves.
In a brilliant, inspiring essay, Who gets to explain the Jews?, Steve Freedman, head of school at Solomon Schechter Day School of Bergen County (N.J.), reflects upon these worrisome challenges for Jews in North America. He acknowledges that we cannot eradicate the accusations, we cannot keep our children from colliding with the obsessively driving, resurrected ancient/modern harm. But he does suggest how parents can help their children cope.
We reproduce only select portions of Freedman’s essay. We recommend it to our readers.
It may be read at: https://ejewishphilanthropy.com/who-gets-to-explain-the-jews/
Freedman begins his essay by referring to societal similarities at the turn of the last century to our own time, when hateful lies about Jews – much as today – were the intellectual currency throughout much of Europe. Freedman writes that scholars and chroniclers of Jewish life, Ahad Ha’am, for one, worried that “Jews would start seeing themselves the way their accusers saw them.”
The purpose of Freedman’s essay is to try to prevent such an outcome. He argues that it is the “sacred space” of the Jewish day school “where a child learns, early, not to believe the accusation at all.”
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“The most urgent job of Jewish education right now is not fighting antisemitism directly. It is making sure our children are not first introduced to their own history, their own people and their own homeland by those who mean them harm. It is making sure they can explain themselves to themselves before someone else does it for them.
“That is the strongest case I know for Jewish day schools right now….the existential one. Who gets to a child’s sense of self first?
“A child who has already engaged with the real Jewish story, in depth, from people who love them, is much harder to indoctrinate into someone else’s version of it.
“A Jewish child should be able to spot a lie about Jews the way Ahad Ha’am’s generation could spot the blood libel: with no doubt. By the time that child is a college student, or an adult among friends or colleagues, they should also be able to recognize an uncomfortable truth about Jews or about Israel, and know the difference.
“A community that doesn’t educate its own children first, eventually lets someone else, an algorithm, a stranger, a viral post, decide which parts of its identity survive. That failure isn’t theirs. It’s ours.
“Ahad Ha’am’s half consolation was knowing the whole world could be wrong about the Jews. His fuller worry was that Jews would come to believe it anyway, once the accusation grew too diffuse to disprove outright. He was describing 1892. He could have been describing a comments section in 2026. Our job isn’t to teach children that the world is always wrong; that would be its own kind of lie. Our job is to make sure they meet their own story before the internet tries to write it for them, and to give them the tools to know, when the two versions conflict, which one to trust.
“Send them to Jewish day schools because culture, traditions and story are worth knowing on their own terms, before anyone else gets to explain them first. Not because the world might hate them, or because a stranger online might lie to them. An identity built only in opposition to what others say ends up limited and reactive, still defined by the accuser, just in the negative. They deserve the texts, the arguments and the memory that shaped our people, not as a defense to be deployed but as a self already formed. When they run into someone who gets Jews or Israel wrong, that inheritance gives them something no viral rebuttal ever will. The ability to stand in their own story while judging what other people say about it.
“Who gets to explain the Jews? If we don’t take our children’s Jewish education seriously, the answer will keep being: everyone but the Jews. And increasingly, a machine that doesn’t even know their names.”
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We must equip our children with the knowledge – the ability – to fend off the harm intended by today’s anti-Jewish accusers. Through Jewish education, our children must learn who they are. Only in this way will they know how to deflect and discard as utter rubbish and intellectual ordure, the calumnies shouted everywhere about Jews. And for this, they will be individualy much stronger and the collective Jewish future, more assured.
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If you wish to contribute to GAJE’s lawsuit to achieve fairness in educational funding, please click here. Charitable receipts for donations for income tax purposes will be issued by Mizrachi Canada. Your donations will be used for the sole purpose of helping to underwrite the costs of the lawsuit. For further information, please contact Israel Mida at: imida1818@gmail.com Thank you, in advance, for considering doing so.
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Shabbat shalom
Grassroots for Affordable Jewish Education
August 7, 2026
Grassroots for Affordable Jewish Education 