Since October 7, 2023, Israelis colleges have expanded or launched international programs that offer American students an escape from campus activism while training them as state cheerleaders. Maya Rosen digs into these efforts:
Over the past several years, these offices have gone on to establish programs like Ben-Gurion University’s Desert Academic Research Experience, or DARE, which brings scientists from abroad to the university for a funded summer sabbatical. Ben-Gurion’s vice president for global engagement, Michal Bar-Asher Siegal, told me that the program aimed to humanize Israelis in the eyes of visitors: “They’d meet us, they’d know who we are, and it would be much harder afterwards to imagine us as monsters who eat Palestinians for breakfast.” The name, she noted, was meant to challenge them: “We dare you to come.” She hoped that exposure to Israeli academia would cultivate a more “balanced” perspective less likely to lead to support for BDS. Other initiatives have taken a more overtly political approach to shaping international perceptions. This October, for instance, Ariel University opened an English master’s degree track in “communication, public advocacy, and combating antisemitism” aimed to help students “be ready to legally and rhetorically resist antisemitism in a campus environment.” In another case, an organization called Thrive offers international undergraduates at Hebrew University, Tel Aviv University, and Reichman University a “boot camp” experience to simulate Israeli military training. The program, explained marketing director Rena Zoldan, was designed to counteract media narratives around the Israeli military by giving students “a first-hand understanding” of life within it: “They spend 24 hours under fake fire learning how to shoot and crawl,” followed by a weekend with soldiers. “If you’re just at Tel Aviv University going to the beach every day, maybe you’ll meet soldiers,” Zoldan said, “but you’re not going to get to these conversations and these nuanced views of Israeli life.”
More picks about Zionism
A Rupture in Time
“After a year of genocide, horizons seen and unseen.”
The Road to 1948
“How the decisions that led to the founding of Israel left the region in a state of eternal conflict.”
My Great Grandfather the Bundist
Writer and artist Molly Crabapple tells the story of her late great grandfather, self-taught artist Sam Rothbort, and of the Bund, the revolutionary anti-Zionist Jewish political party he joined in Vilna in 1898.
