How much do Jewish kids know about Israel? According to a new report, very little.
A team of researchers from Brandeis University created a multiple-choice test for measuring Israel literacy. Like so many multiple-choice tests of literacy conducted over the last century, this one found that kids don’t know enough. While most students knew that Benjamin Netanyahu is the prime minister of Israel, few identified Etgar Keret as an Israeli novelist or located the headquarters of the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah.
The authors provide few details about how they chose the questions to include. They convened a panel of experts and solicited suggestions for “domains and concepts panelists thought were crucial for student understanding.” They don’t say how these “experts” determined what knowledge is “crucial.”
How many adults know the location of the PA headquarters? Why is it “crucial” that a student know that the headline “Ariel Sharon Touches a Nerve and Jerusalem Explodes” refers to the beginning of the second intifada? That the aliyah from the former Soviet Union was larger than the aliyah from Morocco? Is a student who gets these questions wrong illiterate when it comes to Israel?
Read the entire op-ed on the Forward website.
© Stanford University, Stanford, California 94305.
