Standing in stocking feet on a giant, 30 x 13 foot floor map of Israel, 75 Jewish educators explored the strategic land decisions made by Zionists involved with the Jewish National Fund (JNF) in Palestine in the late 1930s. During an experiential text study recounting a meeting of Zionist leaders, teachers began to discover the valuable lessons and big ideas embedded in the history of the founding of the State of Israel. What’s more, they glimpsed the potential of bringing sophistication, nuance, critical thinking, best practices, and primary sources to the study of modern Israel. What challenges face educators in providing such opportunities for their students?

Writing for JESNA in 2004, Barry Chazan articulated three core components of the historical challenge to Israel education in the U.S.: fostering individual meaning related to Israel, making a trip to Israel standard for all Jews, and reversing the decline in Hebrew language competence.

Since the publication of Chazan’s assertions, Taglit-Birthright and Hebrew language programs such as Tal Am and early childhood immersion have begun to address the latter two challenges. But the first challenge remains: fostering an environment in which learning about Israel is meaningful and relevant.

For every organization, the first step is gathering laypeople and educators who believe the story of Israel is one worth telling. What then are the steps necessary for endowing the future of American Jewry with a compelling and germane understanding of modern Israel? The following suggestions emerge from nine years of data culled by Emory University’s Institute for the Study of Modern Israel (ISMI) during 20 teacher workshops.

Identify the message. What is the relevance of the State of Israel to American Jews? Every organization should determine enduring understandings that answer that question, but many have not considered the following: How did Jews acquire and maintain sufficient power and authority to create and sustain a state of their own? How did Jews outside of Israel use the support and defense of a Jewish state to cement their own Jewish identity and develop influence in the U.S. and elsewhere? Jewish youth who are unsure of Israel’s relevance need to understand how Israel’s existence strengthened their own existence.

Invest in a learning community. By the teachers’ own admission, one prominent factor limiting student achievement in the area of Israel studies involves the knowledge of educators. Surveys of workshop participants indicate that while nearly all teachers agree that teaching about Israel is important, the large majority perceive themselves as possessing only limited or basic knowledge of Israel and Zionism. Fewer than one-third reported having taken at least one college course on the subject. In order to educate these teachers, we should train them intensively in person and also utilize long-distance teaching tools to inform and connect interested educators.

As for the donors who are needed to invest in this field, these individuals rightly look for the measurable outcomes of their donations. Such individuals may feel more comfortable investing in a political action group than in an educational process whose results will only be evident over time. Laypeople and professionals must work together to determine satisfactory barometers for success in education.

Reconsider time allocation. When teachers are asked why they do not teach more about Israel, most answer “lack of time.” Instead of focusing years of Jewish education exclusively on prescribed bar/bat mitzvah preparation, how might communities reimagine the time and place for further study of Israel? In a school, this could mean more time devoted to Jewish values and life lessons in Israel’s history; the integration of the subject into multiple disciplines; the empowering of educators from different fields of study (not merely Judaic and Hebrew teachers); and innovative family educational opportunities.

Procure high-quality educational materials. The nature of teaching contemporary politics, international relations, or history requires regular updating of materials. Many of the best materials about Israel are unfortunately outdated, out of print, or in Hebrew. Regrettably there are few qualified individuals taking the time to produce and revise curriculur units. Moreover, while more and more Web sites collect data, few provide teachers with the context, enduring understandings, essential questions, and suggested pedagogy to teach age-appropriate, meaningful and innovative units.

Make pedagogical methods and materials age appropriate. In his recent landmark study for the Israel Project, communications expert Frank Luntz recommends that Israel educators “get real,” since young adults will reject anything that appears one-sided. If our brightest students, in our best programs, feel they are getting half the story, what will happen to them when they begin to hear a different perspective upon reaching the college campus? Getting real does not mean turning Israel studies into a dominant concern for the “other,” but it does mean answering questions with an earnest effort to tell students how the current state of affairs came to be.

Standing on the giant map, we learn that Jewish nation builders — much like Jewish leaders today — had big dreams for the future. Examining the story of the State of Israel, we can learn how to grapple with limitations, overcome adversity, and think strategically to achieve success, both for Israel and for our children. This is a story to learn from and one that is worth telling and retelling until it is as familiar as the “Four Questions.”

I have a colleague at the University of Toronto who teaches a course called “How to Lie With Maps.” Supporters of Israel might well suggest as required reading for this course Palestinian maps that show a unitary Palestine from the Mediterranean to the Jordan with no sign of Israel’s existence. Yet Israeli maps, and those produced by and for Diaspora Jews, rarely mark the Green Line that constitutes the country’s internationally recognized borders.

This was the case even during the height of optimism during the Oslo years. A map from 1999 by the Israeli Nature Reserves and National Parks Authority displayed Israel as reaching from the Jordan to the sea. (map 1) “Israel” includes not only the Golan Heights and greater Jerusalem, which Israel has annexed, but also the West Bank, which it has not. The territorial integrity of Greater Israel is emphasized by the empty, white space surrounding it and connoting foreign lands. A map from 2000 produced for the Israeli National Tourist Office just before the outbreak of the Second Intifada, is somewhat more sophisticated; it shades the urban areas on the West Bank that, at that time, were under full Palestinian control but the rest of the West Bank blends imperceptibly into Israel proper.

Jewish youth in North America are not well educated about the barrier between pre- and post-1967 Israel. A map currently available on the Web site of the American United Synagogue Youth* depicts a Greater Israel in which the northern West Bank is presented as part of “Tel Aviv and the Sharon Valley,” and the southern West Bank is divided between “Jerusalem and Area” and the “Coastal Plain.” This classification is topographically illogical, since the West Bank is a hilly spine, but it is ideologically satisfying for Zionists as it attaches the territory to familiar Israeli spaces.
In Israeli schools, textbooks often excise the Green Line and include the West Bank in maps of Israel. In December of 2006, Education Minister Yuli Tamir declared that future textbooks must depict the Green Line, and the Education Ministry was asked to implement a new high school curriculum on the delineation of Israel’s borders. The issue, according to Tamir, is educational, not political: as part of their training to be informed citizens, Israeli youth need to know how and when Israel assumed control of the territories in which its population currently lives. This knowledge is a necessary precondition for intelligent debate over the feasibility of border adjustments as a component of a sustainable Israeli–Palestinian peace accord. Tamir’s proposal set off a firestorm of protest from the Israeli right, which will not countenance any challenge to the legitimacy of the conquests of 1967. But underneath Tamir’s proposal is a sound pedagogical issue: the need to educate young people that borders are artifacts, not works of nature or God. The concept of “natural boundaries” (seas, mountains, and rivers) has always been more of an ideal than a reality. Borders change constantly, in both the course of war and the negotiations that lead to peace.

Modern cartography is a manifestation of the state’s assertion of sovereignty within its borders and the nationalist idea that each people should dwell within its own land. But reality rarely conforms to the ideal. The world is filled with porous borders and autonomous regions under nominal state jurisdiction. Most states, even the most zealously nationalistic, are multiethnic. The modern map is an assertion of what historian Thongchai Winichaukul calls a “geo-body”: a coherent, integral nation realized in space. It is an abstraction and a fantasy, simultaneously a legitimization for domination and a denial of hegemony’s limits.

The early Zionists imagined a Jewish national geo-body. The Yishuv was a new entity, projected onto not only the small, venerable Jewish communities of the four holy cities (Jerusalem, Hebron, Tiberias, and Safed) but also the hundreds of Arab villages that dotted the Palestinian landscape. An accurate map of Mandate Palestine would depict more than a thousand places of settlement, mostly Arab. In 1914, after two waves of Zionist immigrations, Jews made up a tenth of Palestine’s population. By 1948, they were a third. But old Zionist maps depicted only the Jewish settlements and mixed cities, with the occasional large Arab town as a point of reference, although most Palestinian Arabs lived in the countryside.

Even recent books on the history of Zionism reproduce this point of view. The maps in Howard Sachar’s History of Israel, revised and republished in 2000, show just a handful of Arab communities. My first book, a 1991 study of Zionist settlement in Ottoman Palestine, features a detailed map of Jewish settlements, but Arabs are represented only by a few cities. (map 2) At the time I thought that my approach was justified because my topic was the Zionist enterprise, not Palestine’s native population, but I have come to believe that the two cannot be separated. I have been convinced by two decades of scholarship that presents the history of Jews and Arabs in Palestine holistically, with each people constantly influencing and shaping the other.

The best way to illustrate this new approach would be through maps that faithfully depict the constant presence of Jews and Arabs in the same landscape. (Overlaying film transparencies is an old-fashioned but effective technology. In PowerPoint, one can create transparency overlays using maps in .gif or .jpeg image format.) Superimposing maps would display the geographic structure and distribution of each community along with the points of intersection between them. By displaying change over time — say, at ten-year intervals between 1917 and 1948 — one could see how Palestinian settlement patterns were influenced by Zionist immigration and the British administration. Overlaying maps would display rupture and absence as well as continuity and coexistence. A map of Israel in 1953, superimposed on one of Palestine in 1947, would show new Jewish towns, suburbs, and agricultural settlements where hundreds of Palestinian villages had been. The same could be done for the post-1967 West Bank, where Jewish settlements have profoundly affected Palestinian landholding and population distribution.

Maps can also trace changing borders, both in pre-1948 Palestine and post-1948 Israel. The Green Line is but one of these borders, but it is of vast importance. It cannot be wished away. The truth, be it about intermixing of Jews and Arabs or division between Israel and its neighbors, must never be erased.

Susan Berrin: How has the content of your courses on Israel changed over the past five or ten years?

Ilan Troen: Today’s bibliography of materials is far richer than a decade ago, with a flood of resources that continues to grow because interest in the field is so very large. There’s a cacophony of diverse materials, an enormous competition to get out one’s message, one’s truth, because the subject is imbued with moral passion and moral judgment, which makes it a very intense field.

Ronald Zweig: In the last five years, as archives that were closed for 30, 40, and 50 years now become available, research and scholarly writing on Israel has increased. The huge public interest in our subject is not just a question of moral interest in what’s happening in Israel. There is an immense curiosity about Israel and courses on Israel are popular among non-Jews as well as Jews, which is a fairly new phenomenon.

Yael Zerubavel: The field — inside and outside Israel — is much richer, with a larger diversity of voices. And there is more room for the interplay with multiple disciplinary perspectives and literatures, which broadens the field. For example, when studying the development of Israeli national culture, we also look at it in relation to other national movements, and not only to its unique place in history.

Troen: The study of Israel is not only political history nor is it obviously only the study of the conflict. And Yael has led the field in exploring how roots and symbols and mythologies are applied to the Israeli case, which makes for a far more exciting historiography than politics. Twenty years ago, most Israelis writing dissertations about Israel dealt with politics. There was no biography and not much in cultural studies. That — at least in part — was a byproduct of the triumph of the Zionist movement and how it engaged with the obstacles that had been encountered. And that is a minority focus today. The range of topics is much broader. The study of Israel happens within a wide number of disciplines, which would have been anathema to an earlier generation.

Zweig: The generation who researched Israel during a period when Israel was conceived as being beleaguered and embattled has now passed and has been replaced by a generation of younger scholars for whom the continued existence of Israel is not a daily concern. I’m not saying that Israel doesn’t face any dangers, but the nature of Israel’s battle to survive in the international arena is not something that scholars obsess about within the field any more. We can allow ourselves to be more critical, more open. Israel, warts and all, is now very much on the table.

Zerubavel: While the majority of my students in courses about Israel are Jewish, there are also non-Jewish students. Interest in Israel has grown, in part, as a result of media attention to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. And out of that interest has emerged curiosity about Israeli society. At Rutgers, therefore, we offer a diversity of courses that explore different aspects of Israeli history, society, and culture. We insist that these courses are not for “insiders,” and therefore, we do not speak, or teach, in terms of “we.” And we strive to present an academic and nonpartisan approach to the study of Israel and its place in the Middle East. Sometimes that’s not so clear to some students who expect courses on Israel to be different. But it’s the academic responsibility of scholars involved in Israel Studies to ensure that there is a clear distinction between the academic field and the experiences that might interest students beyond the classroom.

Troen: Brandeis’s Summer Institute trains academics from around the country to teach courses on Israel. Interestingly, we have a large number of academics who come from Catholic and Protestant institutions. We’ve had Muslims and Mormons as well. In short, it’s not Jews alone who are teaching Israel. This isn’t an insular topic; non-Jews want to understand and think about Israel and its culture and for their own reasons and out of their own curiosities.

Zweig: This year NYU is offering a course on Israel and China, and over 50 percent of the students are Asian. But the majority of courses are 60 or 70 percent Jewish as far as anyone can tell. We are not doing advocacy or reaching out specifically to the non-Jewish world with a conscious intention of propagating information on Israel. I’m sure you’re aware of this problem, but there is always the danger of adopting an advocacy role that would undermine our efforts to make Israel Studies a proper subject for the university campus.

Zerubavel: In some measure, Israel Studies is growing out of greater interest in Jewish Studies. It is also growing because of a new philanthropic interest in developing this field. We’re at a turning point, and while philanthropy offers tremendous potential for the field, it also carries a certain risk. We can benefit enormously from philanthropy, but we should also be careful to separate the donors’ intentions from our academic rigor. While we want Israel Studies to flourish as a field, as academics we must ensure that our courses are not perceived as, or don’t become, vehicles for Israel advocacy. Although there might sometimes be pressure from communal organizations or donors to move in this direction, from my experience I know that it is possible to be firm and explain that while we are creating awareness and expanding knowledge about Israel, we’re not playing an advocacy role. In fact, our credentials as dispassionate scholars are critical for the academic standing of the field.

Zweig: Though I initially came to New York concerned about the pressures we’d face from donors and the community, I’m finding that most potential donors understand that for us to be effective teachers we have to be absolutely rigid — our credibility rests on not being political or Israel advocates. The students become much more receptive to learning about all aspects of Israel and that’s ultimately what donors want.

Troen: I find a problem not with donors but with my colleagues who assume that because I’m teaching Israel I’m an advocate. And that’s where I think the real challenge is: Are you going to teach about the suffering of the occupation, about checkpoints? Are you going to invite scholars from Bir Zeit? In short, the pressure coming from inside the university is far greater than that coming from outside the university.

Zweig: We’re not considered objective unless we include the political positions of left-wing Jewish intellectuals. We should be confident in the narrative we are communicating, in the facts that we are presenting, and we should open up debate as widely as possible.

Zerubavel: As long as our work is not ideologically oriented and we present the complexity of the situation and a diversity of views, we maintain our integrity. Part of what we tackle is the view that Israel Studies, or Jewish Studies, is only relevant to people who are particularly interested in these issues. But isn’t French society or British literature relevant to a broader audience? That same principle should apply to Israel Studies. We need to establish our credentials and our credibility as an academic field and not become parochial or insulated. At Rutgers, we cross-list most of our courses with other academic programs, such as Middle Eastern studies, history, or comparative literature, and this allows us to attract more students to the study of Israel and to avoid being seen as a ghettoized field.

Troen: And we must have placements in art history, anthropology, business, and social policy — to embed the field in a variety of disciplines and not just Jewish Studies. We in larger universities can do that. However, when only one person holds an appointment in Jewish Studies, it’s much harder to offer that kind of diversity.

Zerubavel: I’m teaching now a course on the Jewish immigrant experience, and in this framework we try to explore what it means to be a society of immigrants and to compare immigrants’ experiences in Israel, the U.S., and other countries. When I lecture about national myths and collective memory, I address the tension between the desire to look at Israel as a special case (and, of course, every society has its unique characteristics) and the desire to view it with the knowledge that similar phenomena occur in every national society. As a democracy, Israel can be reduced to neither just one political viewpoint nor even two main viewpoints while the society is so diverse. Our challenge is to bridge the somewhat mythical or popular vision of Israel with its complex reality; by doing this we can effectively engage more students and faculty.

Zweig: I often wonder to what degree our generation’s experiences color our understanding or beliefs about the situation in Israel. How different are our donors’ experiences from ours, and what part do those differences play in determining their understandings of today’s Israel? Our experiences are different from those of our students. I wonder what our students really think and know about Israel before they come to our classes.

I’ve been surprised to find some Israelis in my classes who are not registered as students but come and listen with great interest to their own history.

Troen: This is important because the field will change. Many children of German Jewish or East European Jewish immigrants to the U.S. wound up as scholars of the communities from which their parents and grandparents came. They come to class without much knowledge. Israeli students often know very little about Israel’s history or culture beyond a superficial symbolism learned in their school assemblies or from their inadequate textbooks. We have opportunities to take these students (even those Israelis who think they know their parents’ experiences) and teach them the wonderfully, humanly complex study of Israel on all levels — not just the conflict, but also the integration, assimilation, identity, religion, faith, and how one expresses oneself through a variety of cultural forms.

Zerubavel: The study of Israel was promoted to a great extent within Israel itself and became ingrown. But the field has opened up to students and scholars outside of Israel. If Israelis can become experts on Chinese, American, or French society, then, along the same lines, French or American scholars may study Israel, and one cannot dismiss them just because they are not Israelis.

Troen: The people who are helping export Israel Studies are Israelis themselves. There are about 40 Israelis teaching as visiting professors in U.S. universities like Tulane and Tulsa, as well as Harvard and Stanford. This effort is subsidized by donors but grows out of the natural interest of universities. There aren’t enough people in the U.S. who can do Israel Studies. So where’s the next generation coming from? Some will be the children or grandchildren of Israelis, or students who’ve gone on birthright israel, or the non-Jews who are attracted to the topic even as Jews might be interested in Chinese Studies. That’s part of the cultivation of curiosity that is taking place in American institutions.

After much soul-searching and polling among my friends, I came up with a title for my book on wife beating: Silence is Deadly. The victim has no place to turn if the topic is not discussed. A woman is truly victimized if she thinks she is the only one in the world who is being beaten by her husband.

Every now and then there are headlines, a period of time or event dedicated to eradicating violence against women. But what is not mentioned is how dangerous the message is, that women’s voices should not be heard, and that women can be silenced with violence.

The evidence that Jewish wife beating exists is strong. The estimated minimum figure is 100,000 battered women in Israel (with 40,000 hospitalized); the maximum number is 200,000 (which includes the Arab population). There are between 150 to thousands of agunot — it depends on whom you ask, the rabbinical court or the activists.

Where does the attitude come from that physical and mental abuse against women is acceptable? Does it start at home, in school? Is it supported by the rabbinate? What gives some men the right to think that silencing women is permissible? Is it because, as our sages say, a woman would prefer any marriage to not being married at all?

Some religious leaders choose to ignore the distress of battered women; family stability and obedience to rabbinic law trumps the suffering of the individual. These sages are silencing women’s voices. In Israel, jurisdiction in matters of personal status is given to the Orthodox rabbinical courts, which means that all matters of marriage and divorce are adjudicated according to the interpretations of Jewish law. Although ample precedents exist for interpreting halakhah in a way that might favor women, rabbis who sit in today’s rabbinical courts have no such incentives.

The Quebec Court recently upheld the right of an agunah to attain a get. The judge wrote that the husband’s refusal “represented an unjustified…impairment on [her] ability to live her life in accordance with this country’s values and her Jewish beliefs.” A judgment like this can serve as a countermodel to society’s apathy. The Israeli judicial system could learn from their Canadian counterparts.

Recently, there have been some changes in Israel — safe houses and shelters for Orthodox and Haredi women in Jerusalem, and some rabbis who don’t automatically side with the husband. I hope this change is a result of a new weltanschauung, new coalitions against the rampant abuse by the Israeli rabbinate, and less acceptance of the silence of those who sweep abuse under the carpet. What ethical questions are raised by this silence?

We still have much to do: demand prenuptial agreements; learn our rights; ask hard questions; and demand legislation to dismantle the rabbinate’s monopoly on divorce. Outside Israel, the Jewish community should support human rights organizations that are part of the international coalition for agunot and trafficked women. This might change the face of Israeli society and return to us our voices.