The American Jewish Gap Year in Israel
For more than a generation, American Jewish teens have traveled to Israel for a gap year before college. These students mostly traverse an educational continuum from high school to gap year to college. But the gap year is anomalous, because it seems to be devoted to educational goals that are divergent—either slightly or dramatically—from the educational goals of high school and college.
The goal of this research is to learn about how these students understand their experience on the gap year in Israel, relative to the rest of their educational continuum. Furthermore, in conducting an initial pilot study in the winter of 2024, the research hopes to understand these students’ experience in Israel during Operation Swords of Iron, the war in Gaza that followed the massacres and hostage-taking on October 7, 2023.
As part of this project, Jon Levisohn will be hosting a Spotlight Session about the gap year with four experienced educational leaders on February 29.
Following interviews with gap year students in February, the data will be analyzed with the goal of presenting initial findings at the annual conference of the Network for Research in Jewish Education in June.
Participants in the project must be US citizens over 18 who completed high school in the US and are currently studying on a gap year in Israel.