A planned non-Zionist Jewish school in Boston hopes to ride the momentum of the left

In the middle of a conversation about her future children, it dawned on Leah Robbins that the school she imagined for them did not exist.

Robbins envisioned a Jewish school where children studied Jewish texts, history, and observance, as she did at the school run out of her Conservative synagogue in northern Florida. But having long ago rejected the allegiance to Israel that was entwined with her education, she could not fathom sending her children to a school that promoted Zionism, which ruled out all the Jewish day schools she knew.

“I was just overwhelmed with a sense of grief that my kids could be less Jewishly educated than I was,” Robbins, who has lived in Boston for 10 years, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “I would never ever consider sending my kids to any of the local day schools because of total values misalignment.”

Four years after that conversation, Robbins is building her own institution for the children she hopes to have. She plans to open Achvat Olam, a “diasporist” day school whose name translates to “global solidarity” in Hebrew, in the Boston area in fall 2029. The school aims to launch with eight to 10 families, starting with a kindergarten and adding grade levels until ultimately becoming a K-8 school.

Achvat Olam is fiscally sponsored by Beloved Builders, a Massachusetts-based nonprofit that supports progressive Jewish projects. Robbins, who has a background in fundraising for Jewish nonprofits, hopes to raise $625,000 for the launch. She said she has met about 20 local families who expressed interest and will start formal recruitment efforts, including focus groups and open houses, next year. 

Achvat Olam will teach about Jewish history, cultures, and languages outside of Israel, while engaging with Hebrew and Israel’s history from a non-Zionist perspective. The school’s website includes a page on “Israel/Palestine,” saying its community will share a belief that “the pursuit of justice, dignity, and thriving for all people is a Jewish moral imperative.” 

“This includes an age-appropriate, honest confrontation with Zionism and the ongoing Nakba against the Palestinian people,” the website says, using the Arabic word for the displacement of over 700,000 Palestinians at the time of the State of Israel’s founding. The school also says that students will consider “the complicity and support of the US government and Diaspora Jews.”

Micah-Shalom Kesselman is the parent of a 4-year-old in Medford, Massachusetts, and participates in local left-wing Jewish groups such as the Boston Workers Circle. He’s disappointed that his son Oren will age out of Achvat Olam by the time it is scheduled to open as a kindergarten. “I would super want Oren to attend something like what Achvat Olam is shaping up to be,” he said.

Kesselman, who studies Yiddish with his son, explained that he would like Oren to be steeped in Jewish traditions and culture. But as a parent who is “not a supporter of Zionism,” he said he has found few Jewish educational opportunities that match his beliefs.

Jewish day schools have historically encompassed a range of orientations toward Israel, according to Jonathan Krasner, a historian of American Jewish education at Brandeis University.

The modern day school movement was born in the 1920s and initially dominated by orthodox schools, some of which did not emphasize Zionism.

In the 1950s, secular Yiddishist schools taught varied attitudes toward Israel. Some yeshivas in the orthodox Haredi movement still today oppose Zionism on religious grounds, believing that Jewish sovereignty should only be established through the coming of the Messiah.

But Krasner could not name another day school that has Achvat Olam’s goal: education for Jewish families who disavow the current-day political realities of Israel and Zionism. In the aftermath of the Hamas attacks on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, many day schools went the opposite direction, adding curricula to strengthen solidarity between Diaspora Jews and Israel.

“The initial response of the organized Jewish community was, understandably, to circle the wagons and to reinforce their connections to Israel and to the Israeli people,” Krasner said.

Jack Wertheimer, a professor of American Jewish history at the Conservative movement’s Jewish Theological Seminary, isn’t convinced that Achvat Olam will change that trend. He said he was “highly skeptical” that Robbins could attract enough families to sustain a school. According to historical data, he said, Jews who lean more politically left tend to be less engaged in Jewish life.

“From what I know, the overwhelming majority of parents who are interested in sending their children to Jewish day schools are pro-Israel,” said Wertheimer.

Nonetheless, Robbins believes that the market for her school is growing. Survey after survey has captured a drop in Americans’ support for Israel since the Gaza war, and Jews are not an exception to the trend.

After decades of being treated as fringe in many of their communities, left-wing Jews who are anti-Zionist, or simply do not see Israel as part of their identity, say that instead of adapting to their congregations and Jewish schools, the institutions should adapt to them.

There are signs that this group makes up a substantial portion of Jews in the United States.

About 30% of Jewish adults believe that Israel has committed genocide in Gaza, according to a June poll of 1,022 Jews from the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, which had a 5% error margin. Less than 40% said that “supporting Israel” was crucial to their Jewish identity.

At the same time, among adults who identified as religiously Jewish, younger people said they emphasized Jewish traditions more than their older counterparts. Younger Jews were more likely than older ones to say that “celebrating Jewish holidays” and “celebrating or marking Shabbat” were important to them, while Jews over 45 placed more emphasis on “remembering the Holocaust” and “supporting Israel” than younger ones.

This finding could reflect the growing share of younger Jews who are Orthodox. It also comes amid a boom in Jewish leftist organizations that explicitly ground their activism in religious tradition.

IfNotNow, an anti-occupation group that has grown from 1,000 dues-paying members in 2023 to 7,000 this year, says it is “growing a community rooted in Jewish values and ritual.”

The anti-Zionist Jewish Voice for Peace, which has amassed 32,000 dues-paying members, often frames its protests through Jewish holidays, texts and prayer.

Robbins is betting that a significant pool of younger Jews, many of them now parents to young children, are seeking avenues to both protect their Jewish traditions and reset their community’s relationship with Israel for the next generation.

Instead of supporting Israel, Achvat Olam says that its students will learn a curriculum of “collective liberation at home, globally, and in Israel/Palestine.”

“This is a very experimental moment in Jewish history. The Jewish left is growing by leaps and bounds,” said Robbins, referencing estimates of dozens of anti-Zionist congregations and prayer groups sprouting across the country. “There is hunger for this.”

Boston is a hub for such new organizations. Since 2024, the city has hosted the Conference on the Jewish Left at Boston University, a gathering of left-wing Jewish scholars, students, activists and faith leaders.

The first annual meeting drew 300 people, the second 700, and the third in February saw more than 900 participants. A poll of Greater Boston by Combined Jewish Philanthropies, the central fundraising arm of Boston’s Jewish community, found earlier this year that 38% of Jews aged 18 to 29 identified as “anti-Zionist,” and another 30% said they were “uncommitted” to Zionism or anti-Zionism.

Rabbi Greg Hersh left his congregation at Temple Emmanuel in Wakefield, north of Boston, in 2024. He said he became increasingly alienated from his congregants after Oct. 7. Hersh felt that the congregation, focused on supporting Israel and fighting antisemitism locally, did not share his anguish about the deaths of Palestinians.

Last year, Hersh founded V’ahavtah, a mostly Cambridge-based congregation devoted to “practicing Judaism beyond Zionism.” V’ahavtah joined Jews, like him, who felt uncomfortable with the norm of Israeli flags flying inside synagogues.

Their Shabbat services regularly draw 30 to 40 people, numbers he said he never saw in Wakefield. He believes that is proof of growing demand for non-Zionist Jewish institutions.

“You take Israel out of the equation and the Jews will show up, and that’s what happened with V’ahavtah,” said Hersh. “My expectation is Achvat Olam is going to be very well poised to fill that void.”

On the ground, Robbins faces formidable obstacles to funding Achvat Olam. Jewish day schools struggle across the country to attract enrollment in the face of tuition that many families can’t afford, along with budgets strained by economic uncertainty and heightened spending to ward off security threats.

Earlier this year, MetroWest Jewish Day School in Framingham, a suburb of Boston, shuttered and said that its “model of highly individualized Jewish day school education is no longer sustainable.”

Heavy investments from local philanthropies have helped day schools offset high costs. Prizmah, a national network of 305 day schools, recently reported that it saw enrollment rise across denominations for the first time last year, thanks in large part to philanthropy.

But many groups that fund Jewish education hold values that are antithetical to Robbins, including CJP, which calls itself a “pro-Israel, Zionist organization.” Prizmah and CJP declined requests for comment from JTA.

The individual donors who fund Jewish schools also tend to be older, more conservative than Robbins and more motivated by support for Israel, according to Krasner.

“The people who are most likely to be in a financial position to support day schools with generous philanthropic gifts are demographically very different from the population that Leah is trying to attract,” he said.

Robbins admitted that funding challenges meant the success of Achvat Olam was not “any sort of inevitability.” But she believes there is inevitability to the political momentum that could drive families toward such a school. “Something I want to convey to people is that the train has already left the station,” she said. “There is no stemming the tide of the growth of the Jewish left.”

Robbins has turned to funding from left-wing organizations, which already siphon much of their resources to grassroots activism, legal defense and awareness campaigns.

“It can be hard to get in the face of people to make the case for something that requires long-game thinking,” she said. “I’m trying to make the case, when the last fire has been put out, what’s going to be left if we’re not building it right now?”