Matt Boxer

In My Second-Favorite Country: How American Jewish Children Think About Israel, Sivan Zakai documents her meticulous efforts to track how a group of 35 children learned and began to form their own perspectives about Israel, beginning as kindergartners in various Jewish day schools in the Los Angeles area in 2012 and continuing through their fifth-grade year. Los Angeles offers a wealth of both Israeli and Jewish religious, ethnic, cultural, and educational resources, and one may wonder if Zakai's findings would have differed had she followed different kinds of students: from other cities with large Jewish communities, from families that did not opt for a kindergarten at a Jewish day school, from communities that lack day schools, and so on. Israel education is often framed as an exercise intended to build learners' personal sense of attachment to present-day Israel as a key component of Jewish identity, but it is often a top-down enterprise, with educators making decisions about content without much or even any input from learners.