Courses

The program offers a variety of courses pertaining to modern Israel. The courses cover the following main topics:

Israeli politics and government

Past and present antisemitism

History and Theory of Zionism

Israel and Jewish Diasporas

Emerging trends and issues in Israeli society

Israeli culture

State and religion in Israel

Israel in the Middle East: between conflict and resolution 

Israeli politics and Government

The course will clarify the intricacies of present-day Israeli politics, along with a rundown of the country’s political history. Studies will range from the Zionist movement’s earliest trends up to the debates convulsing Israel’s democracy at present. Students will be familiarized with the political and government institutions and practices as they evolved under successive Israeli governments from 1948 until today. This factual and historic knowledge will give the student the theoretical tools needed for advanced study and original research into the subject.

 Antisemitism – Past and Present

Students will be acquainted with the academic study of past and present-day antisemitism. During the year they will engage with scholarly materials tracing the origins, processes, and manifestations of antisemitism as a social and political phenomenon. Students will also learn about innovative strategies used by governmental and non-governmental agents to deal with anti-Semitic prejudice. The program is geared toward enhancing students’ ability to address different forms of anti-Semitism in the local, regional and global levels – both on the conceptual and the practical levels.

History and Theory of Zionism
Students will be acquainted with the main trends in Zionist ideology and its key thinkers, the evolution of the Zionist ideas over time and the criticism and internal debates that have accompanied Zionism from its inception. Students will learn the ways in which the Yishuv (the Jewish community in Palestine) and later, Israeli society, has been consolidated through succeeding widespread waves of immigration, starting with the period of the first Aliyah until the first two decades of the State of Israel.

Media and public diplomacy in the Middle East

The course will focus on analyzing the complex relationship between the Arab-Israeli conflict and the international media over the years. We will reveal how the mass media in the US and Europe covered the Arab–Israeli conflict and what types of images were created for both sides. Special attention will be given to the public diplomacy and media strategies employed by both sides in order to affect their media image and to influence the international public opinion. The course's subjects are introduction to the Israeli-Arab conflict media battle, introduction to media news theory and public diplomacy, the coverage of wars and conflicts, the Middle East coverage in American and European media over the years, propaganda and public relations in the ME conflict, and peace coverage.

Israel and Jewish Diasporas

One of the distinctive qualities of the program is that it encourages its students to examine Israeli history within the context of twentieth-century Jewish history and to think more seriously about the mutual – complex and ambivalent – interrelations between the State of Israel and the Jewish Diaspora. Courses included in this category will examine the histories of the major Jewish communities in the English-speaking world, Central and Eastern Europe, North Africa and the Arab world. Students will learn about the far-reaching transformations which shaped the Jewish world during one of its most turbulent centuries, and the dynamic processes which continue shifting old balances and reshaping the landscape of the Jewish world.