Jewish Parents Forum

Mission

What is the Jewish Parents Forum?

American Jewry today finds itself at an extraordinary inflection point in our nation’s cultural and political history. As a result, many Jewish parents feel the heightened responsibility and pressing need to prepare their children to flourish in the face of the unique challenges of the moment. The Jewish Parents Forum (JPF) creates a home in which parents can learn from leading thinkers and educators about the practical challenges facing Jewish mothers and fathers today; strengthen their own Jewish and Zionist identities; and work together as they navigate the web of modern American life. At its core, JPF is a community of likeminded parents committed to raising morally courageous and proud Jewish, Zionist, and American citizens.

In the fall of 2021, Tikvah launched the Jewish Parents Forum to create a center of gravity for parents grappling with a variety of challenges as they raise their children in the current cultural minefield. As parents, how do we:

• Raise the next generation of Jewish and Zionist leaders with moral confidence and civic courage
• Educate our children to appreciate the heroic history of modern Israel when anti-Jewish, anti-Zionist, and anti-Semitic ideas have made new inroads in the institutions to which we entrust our children
• Help Jewish children—and all American children—navigate the moral hazards of the new social media universe
• Inculcate in our children a sense of patriotism and civic purpose when our schools have reinterpreted our nation’s story and formed negative civic attachments in our children
• Respond when values and beliefs we want to instill in our homes conflict with values currently taught in our kids’ classrooms

Why Now?

The hard truth is that we are living through a genuine crisis in American culture and education that has left Jewish parents concerned and hungry for answers to exceedingly difficult questions: in this polarized cultural climate, how do we raise the next generation of Jewish and Zionist leaders with moral confidence and civic courage? How do we educate our children to appreciate the heroic history of modern Israel when anti-Jewish, anti-Zionist, and anti-Semitic ideas have made new inroads in the institutions to which we entrust our children? How do we respond when values we wish to instill in our homes conflict with values taught in our children’s institutios? The cultural and intellectual hour in which we find ourselves–fraught and with a fledgling moral center–opens up a space that the Jewish Parents Forum is ready to fill.