Last month, at the 72nd Annual Jewish Book Awards, the Jewish Book Council presented Wise School parent Sivan Zakai with a first-place award in the category of Education and Jewish Identity for her 2022 book, “My Second-Favorite Country: How American Jewish Children Think About Israel.”
Zakai, a Ph.D. and a professor at HUC-Jewish Institute of Religion, is an expert in curriculum design and teaching controversial issues. Her book sheds light on the perception of Israel in the minds of Jewish children in the United States and provides a rich case study of how children more generally develop ideas and beliefs about self, community, nation, and world.
Other finalists for the award were Corinne E. Blackmer’s “Queering Anti-Zionism Academic Freedom, LGBTQ Intellectuals, and Israel/Palestine Campus Activism,” and Samantha Vinokor-Meinrath’s “#antisemitism: Coming of Age During the Resurgence of Hate.”
In contrast to popular views of America’s youth as naïve or uninterested, Prof. Zakai’s book illuminates both the complexity of their thinking and their desire to be included in conversations about important civic and political matters. Prof. Zakai draws from compelling empirical data to prove that children spend considerable effort contemplating the very concepts that adults often assume they are not ready to discuss. Indeed, the book argues that over the course of their elementary school education, children develop and express deep interest in complex issues such as the intricacies of identity and belonging, conflicting ways of framing the past, and the demands of civic responsibility. Ultimately, Prof. Zakai argues that in order to take children’s ideas seriously and better prepare them for a world full of disagreement, a substantive shift in educational practices is necessary.
Much of this philosophy was on display last October, when Prof. Zakai—the granddaughter of Wise founder Rabbi Isaiah Zeldin—spoke to Wise School parents as part of our Parent Wise speaker series. Her presentation, “Parenting When the World is On Fire: How to Talk with Your Kids About Hard Things and Current Events,” served as a step-by-step playbook for having difficult conversations with children in light of the recent swell in antisemitic incidents locally and nationally.
Mazel tov to Prof. Zakai, and yasher koach!
