The Jerusalem Post, Thursday, July 7, 2005
Giving US academics the good bad and ugly view of Israel
By Talya Halkin
Standing at the side of a Negev road winding its way past the unrecognized Beduin village of Abu Al-Quayan on Tuesday afternoon 21 American academics listened as a resident and District Attorney's Office representative debated the land dispute between the unrecognized villages and the state.
Olga Gershenson who teaches at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst remained nonplussed by the criticism she heard of the unlawful construction of the village across the road.
"Where was the same outrage when we visited the illegal extension of Ofra yesterday?" she asked.
During their seven-day visit to Israel which ends this Friday the participants of the Brandeis University Summer Institute for Israel Studies met several dozen experts on areas as diverse as religious Zionism Hebrew literature the separation barrier the Israeli media and contemporary Israeli art.
The members of this innovative academic program - which was launched last year - teach at universities across the US and specialize in subjects as diverse as Karaite Jews and gender studies. What brought them together was their interest in participating in an in-depth study of contemporary Israeli society culture and politics which would endow them with a new degree of expertise in teaching about Israel.
"I think the program makes an important contribution to Israel studies in universities abroad Elie Rekhess, a professor at Tel Aviv University who has taught the group both at Brandeis and during their stay in Israel. What is unique about this program is that it is not a public relations campaign about what a beautiful place Israel is. It is a combination of serious theoretical study and field experience during which participants learn about both the bright and dark sides of Israeli society."
Ilan Troen a long-time faculty member of Ben-Gurion University and the director of the Brandeis University Institute for Israeli Studies told The Jerusalem Post that one of the main goals of the program was "to show that Israel could be approached from more than a conflict point of view." "During the 1990s Israel passed from being criticized to becoming illegitimate" in academic circles Troen said. Consequently he explained there arose a need to create academic programs that were neither extremely politicized against Israel nor exercises in pro-Israel public relations.
Currently Troen added new academic departments dedicated to Israel Studies are being founded in the US to address these issues. The members of the Brandies program Troen said have different academic backgrounds and different political views.
During the past year they have been exposed to different sides of what Troen called "the explosive issues such as Israeli Arabs and Jewish settlers in order to let them listen to a variety of voices rather than to a series of abstractions."
Although many of the participants in this program have ended up teaching in Jewish Studies or Near Eastern Studies departments they come from diverse disciplines - including history sociology anthropology and cultural studies to name a few.
"Whether they like it or not when these people return home they will become authorities on Israel on their campuses and we want people who can fill that role Troen said.
Fred Astren, who teachers at San Francisco State University, said that recent tensions between Jewish and Arabs students on his campus led him to conclude that Israel Studies would be a good idea. Astren said that while he was initially worried that the program would end up becoming another hasbara trip, he feels its directors have done a good job of offering a more detached approach to examining Israel.
"I'm going to bring back more complexity to my campus in contrast with the one-dimensional messages of both pro- Palestinian and pro-Israeli activists on campus," he said. "I don't think Jewish students should be warriors for Israel. Rather everyone should gain critical knowledge about the issues at hand."
Karen Aviv a sociologist in her mid-thirties said that for a new generation of younger scholars Israel studies is in part about the inversion of the Zionist argument according to which Israel is the focus of Jewish life in the Diaspora.
"It means understanding Israel in a comparative perspective not as a unique historical anomaly - and this opens up the study of Israel to previously suppressed questions she said.
Danny Ben-Moshe, who teaches the first Israeli Studies program in Australia, where he is a scholar at Melbourne's Victoria University, said that unlike his earlier visits in Israel, his encounters this time were not shaped by feel- good flag-waving."
"When we visited the mayor of Sderot this morning Ben-Moshe said, we got to have a lively debate which is very different than what we would have gotten if we had been a group arriving to show solidarity with rockets falling there. And the same goes for meeting settlers in Yesha - it's about grappling with complexities by hearing people speaking candidly about their positions."