New Jewish Day School Promises Not To Celebrate Israel Independence Day

Plus: a reassuring read from PCE inflation

Free Palestine graffiti mars a park in Boston’s Jamaica Plain neighborhood. Photo: The Editors.

A new Jewish day school is targeting parents who want their children to know what Israel Independence Day is but don’t want them to celebrate it.

The school is promising to “de-center the modern nation-state of Israel from Jewish identity-building” while avoiding “ethnonationalism.”

The school also says it will teach about antisemitism in a way that situates it “within the context of white supremacy, capitalism, and all forms of systemic injustice.”

It also commits to “creating a learning environment that inspires our students to become informed and invested change-makers for collective liberation.”

A promotional website for the school says students “will learn about” Israel Independence Day and “other Zionist Israeli holidays, including how they are understood by Israelis and Palestinians, how we understand them as a justice-driven community that stands against colonialism and nationalism, why our school will not celebrate them.”

The school appears to be the first of its kind. It is almost certain to attract widespread attention—both condemnation from those who see it as a betrayal of Israel in the midst of a war of self-defense against radical Islamist terrorists, and praise from those eager to seize upon any sign that American Jews are abandoning Israel.

Here are the full details about where and when the school is opening, who is involved in funding it, and what I think about it:

The website of what calls itself Achvat Olam Diasporic Community Day School says the school’s “goal is to open in the 2029-2030 school year with 8 Kindergarten families” and to “grow by adding 1-2 grade levels per year after that.” The school will be based in the Boston area, with the precise neighborhood to be disclosed in the coming months. (Jamaica Plain or Somerville might be likely candidates.) Boston already has several centers (maybe cells is a more appropriate term) of non-Zionist or “diasporic” Jewish life, with beachheads at Harvard in Cambridge, Hebrew College in Newton, and the Boston Workers Circle in Brookline.

The individuals behind the school, “a small-but-fierce group of Boston-based educators, activists, and former day-school kids,” are not making their identities public, citing “digital security purposes.” But the school does have a website, www.achvatolam.org, and a fiscal sponsor, a nonprofit called Beloved Builders.

Beloved Builders, based in Florence, Massachusetts, has a three-person board that consists of Rabbi Sara Luria, David Trietsch, and Rabbi Elan Babchuck. Babchuck was the one rabbi that the New York Times chose to have a Rosh Hashana question and answer interview with, in which the New York Times interviewer, former Smartertimes.com contributor Ruth Graham, contended, “in the American context, the divisions are emerging around what had felt like a core consensus around the centrality of the state of Israel.” (I am a fan of Ruth’s but I think her framing is off there.) Beloved says its backers include the Lippman Kanfer Foundation for Living Torah (the family that owns Purell hand sanitizer), the Fetzer Institute, the Kalliopeia Foundation, the Dobkin Family Foundation (former Goldman Sachs partner Eric Dobkin), the E Rhodes and Leona B Carpenter Foundation.

In the vast landscape of American education, a school with eight kindergarten families is microscopic. It is trivial by comparison to larger developments such as Eva Moskowitz’s Success Academies charter school network expanding into Florida with backing from Governor DeSantis and with $50 million from Ken Griffin (who almost certainly will get a better return from Success than he did from Harvard), or to the boom in Jewish school enrollment in Florida, fueled by the state’s scholarships of $8,000 a student (student enrollment between 2007-08 and 2022-23 rose 58 percent, to 13,379 from 8,492, while the number of Jewish day schools and yeshivas grew to 74 from 40), or even by comparison to conservative Tikvah launching Emet Classical Academy in Manhattan.

So what to make of it, and why pay any attention at all?

It’s newsworthy mainly as one more data point to support the narrative that backing for Israel among young Jews, or young Americans, is eroding. There are some survey data that indicate that is so, especially on the progressive left. Though the more one digs into it, the more overstated it is—wishful thinking by a few wealthy donors—George and Alexander Soros, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund—aiming to portray a fringe phenomenon as gaining momentum. Even this school—designed to cater to the anti-Israel crowd—is avoiding the terms “nonzionist” or “antizionist” in its public-facing communications, preferring the “diasporism” dodge. If the mainstream Jewish community weren’t so solidly pro-Israel—even among Conservative and Reform Jews in a Democrat-leaning area like Boston—the Israel-haters wouldn’t need to start their own school.

One reaction—my gut reaction initially—is to view the “diasporism” as disingenuous, a smokescreen for the real agenda of wiping Israel off the map as a Jewish state, or wishing for that to happen. It takes a certain moral obtuseness to, or at least dangerous naivete about, the fate of the Jews currently living there. Without the protection of a state those Jews would doubtless be subject in far greater numbers to the same fate—rape, murder, kidnapping, being burned alive—as the October 7, 2023 victims. Previous attempts to divorce Judaism from the land and from power—bundism, communism, German Reform—did not end well. The organizers of the school did not respond to my email seeking more information about their plans.

Another reaction, perhaps an excessively charitable one, is that if the choice is between this education and a secular public school, maybe some Jewish students would be better off here. At least here they’d perhaps wind up with some language skills and context that offer them a path to explore the Jewish tradition, eventually, on their own, with a feeling that it belongs to them, rather than having lost it entirely. Maybe the “diasporists” will even come around to joining with Orthodox Jews and Catholics to create political pressure so that Massachusetts takes advantage of the state tuition tax-credit program in the One Big Beautiful Bill.

If the school indeed opens, the rest of the Boston Jewish community will have some concrete choices about whether to treat it as inside or outside the boundaries for things such as information-sharing about security threats.

And if the Boston “diasporists” think they’ll be any safer from violent vandalism on account of their distancing themselves from Israel, just wait for the first “free Palestine” brick to shatter a school window—hopefully when no students or faculty are on the site. When it’s only Israeli or Jewish or American nationalism, not Palestinian nationalism, that a school opposes, reality can get complicated quickly. Sometimes even an ideological conversion is insufficient to satisfy enemies. If the Achvat Olam Diasporic Community Day School lasts long enough to become a high school, perhaps students will read Benzion Netanyahu’s history of The Origins of the Inquisition in Fifteenth-Century Spain and learn about how there, even the genuine converts were burned at the stake.

Reassuring read from PCE inflation: On a cheerier note, here’s the inflation news from this morning:

The market-based PCE number is one to watch because it strips out some of the noise such as imputed rents of owner-occupied housing or increases in asset-based money-management fees resulting from stock market increases. It’s not negative or zero but it’s not the return of runaway Bidenflation, either. And while the dollar sagging against gold is not exactly confidence-inspiring, the combination of this inflation report (or the series of them) and revised upward 3.8 percent second-quarter GDP growth adds up to a fairly encouraging overall story that leaves reasonable room for further rate cutting by the Fed. We’ll see how long it all lasts, but so far, so good.

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