Earlier this week, the Judaic Studies program brought together scholars from across institutions in an off-the-record workshop to discuss the future of the field of Israel studies with a specific focus on the potential of an Israel-Palestine Studies framework.
The two-day workshop, entitled “Re-Thinking Israel Studies: Power, Politics and Academic Responsibility,” consisted of five sessions that aimed to “foster open and substantive dialogue” among scholars in the Israel studies field, according to the event’s description.
“Disagreement is essential — indeed, my years of traditional rabbinic education taught me that agreement is not a Jewish value,” Associate Professor of Religious Studies and Director of Judaic Studies Paul Nahme, who organized the event, wrote in his opening remarks.
“Scholars themselves are dealing with interesting questions about how to study Israel, and how to study Israel, which is in itself, a subject that is very amorphous,” Arie Dubnov, an associate professor of history and international affairs and chair of Israel studies at George Washington University, who was one of the panelists at the event, said in an interview with the Herald.
Associate Professor of political science at Providence College Ruth Ben-Artzi, who chaired the fourth session titled “Scholarship, Advocacy and Critique,” said that scholars at her panel were “grappling with the fact that there are certain types of research on Israel that have not had an easy time to find an academic home,” even when that research is “rigorous, is relevant and should be part of the conversation.”
“That’s a really interesting academic conversation of who draws these lines and what’s part of the conversation and what is not part of the conversation,” she said.
Nahme said he has seen lots of opposition from “groups outside the University over how Israel is studied.”
That opposition is interesting to Nahme as a “scholarly question” of “why would it be controversial to study Israel, and why would it be controversial to some people to study it one way versus another?”
“Inevitably, when you talk about Israel, it does stir up questions that may lead people to bring controversy,” Nahme added, even when academics are simply aiming to have “truly scholarly, rigorous conversation.”
Anwar Mhajne, an associate professor of political science and international studies at Stonehill College and visiting scholar at the Center for Middle East Studies at Harvard, told The Herald she was invited to the event to discuss how Israel can be studied in tandem with Palestine.
“You cannot study Israel without taking the Palestinians and Palestine seriously,” Mhajne said.
“You’re not really doing the work of studying Israel in all of its various dimensions if you only look at its brightest spots,” Nahme said. “When studying any geopolitical region, any country, any culture, it’s important to look at both the bright spots and the blemishes.”
Palestinian studies must also “take Israeli culture, institutions, economics seriously and analyze it not just as an occupying power but as a more complex power,” Mhajne said.
Overall, “this workshop demonstrated that the academic field of Israel Studies is a productive arena for a vibrant, thought-provoking, self-reflecting, critical, and collegial conversation,” panelist Lihi Ben Shitrit, the director of the Taub Center for Israel Studies and associate professor of Israel Studies at New York University, wrote in an email to The Herald.
She added that there was a “wide spectrum of perspectives, spanning different intellectual as well as normative positions.”
Assistant Professor of Obstetrics and Gynecology at the Alpert Medical School May-Tal Sauerbrun-Cutler, who attended the event on Monday, said that although “there were some different viewpoints on things,” the majority of speakers seemed to lean against Zionist viewpoints.
Ellen Simon ’00 critiqued the workshop in a post on Substack. The event was closed to the public and, since Simon doesn’t have a Brown ID, she couldn’t attend.
In her Substack post and in an interview with The Herald, she expressed concerns about the panel’s alleged lack of Zionist representation.
“You can tell by looking at the agenda that (there) really appears to be a very one-sided group of academics,” Simon said. “The actual invitees did not represent the type of viewpoint diversity that I thought the University was going to strive for.”
“As an advocate for Jewish students and for fair and balanced and quality scholarship, this really concerned me,” Simon said.
In an email to The Herald, Ben-Artzi argued that “not every academic conversation has to include all perspectives or viewpoints — academia is full of specialized communities of inquiry that share a narrow academic interest.”
“Variance and academic freedom are rooted in the diversity of spaces for specialized scholarship under the umbrella of the university,” she added.
In an interview with The Herald, the workshop’s co-organizer, Katharina Galor PhD’96, who is also an associate professor of Judaic studies, emphasized that “all (were) very welcome” to attend the event.
Galor said that she is considering hosting similar events on a yearly basis.
“There was lots of disagreement on display, but we were able to engage each other with that sense of collegiality, listening, thinking about what was said,” Nahme said. “I wouldn’t want to mistake collegiality for consensus.”
Ivy Huang is a university news and science & research editor from New York City Concentrating in English, she has a passion for literature and American history. Outside of writing, she enjoys playing basketball, watching documentaries and beating her high score on Subway Surfers.
