In the aftermath of the Hamas attack, college campuses in the US have witnessed inflammatory protests marked by the simplification of nuanced issues into slogans and a surge in violence. Public discourse now revolves around debates such as the perceived strength of the Harvard University president’s statement and the funding dilemma for a pro-Hamas student group at Brandeis University.
Jewish students report feeling threatened by a rise in antisemitism. Troubling incidents include an Instagram post at Northeastern University disclosing Jewish students’ personal information and urging campus-wide shaming. At Cooper Union, Jewish students were reportedly confined in a library while protesters chanted pro-Hamas slogans outside. Incidents also involved a Cornell University student arrested for online threats against Jewish students, a University of Massachusetts Amherst student arrested for assaulting a Jewish student and defiling an Israeli flag, and multiple arrests after clashes at Tulane University, initiated by a pro-Hamas demonstrator allegedly striking a pro-Israel student with a flagpole during an attempt to prevent the burning of an Israeli flag.
Numerous professors who teach courses on the conflict are noting a remarkable surge in demand for the spring semester, with classes reaching unprecedented enrollment levels and substantial wait lists. Although most of these courses are not newly introduced—given the time required for development—existing offerings are undergoing revisions to incorporate fresh insights into the ongoing conflict, augment historical context, and provide lessons on discerning information about the war from diverse sources.
THE TROUBLE WITH HARVARD
Derek J. Penslar, the William Lee Frost Professor of Jewish History at Harvard University, will be teaching a class on the conflict next fall. Currently, Harvard experiences heightened tensions, particularly noteworthy for pro-Hamas student protests and the inaction of the administration, resulting on January 2 in the resignation of university president Claudine Gay.
“The students who walk in my door are not necessarily the same ones as those who are in Harvard Yard screaming,” Prof. Frost told Inside Higher Ed. “More often than not, my students are curious and intelligent, and they usually do have a political view at one point or another. But they’re open-minded or else they wouldn’t bother taking my class.”
One should hope.
Michelle Murray, an associate professor of political studies at Bard College in New York, told IHE she had been preparing for the coming spring semester not knowing what to expect of her students in the aftermath of the October 7 Hamas massacre and the war that followed.
“I was observing students, on the one hand, being really hungry for knowledge and, on the other hand, kind of encountering a lot of terminology that’s circulating around in the discourse,” she said.
As a result, Murray and another professor developed a course designed to furnish students with the tools to conduct discussions about Gaza through key terminology. Her new course is titled “Keywords for Our Times: Understanding Israel and Palestine. Students will explore how words like ‘Zionism,’ ‘genocide,’ and ‘settler colonialism’ have been defined and applied by different groups of people.”
MAKE THIS SPRING THE ISRAEL-HAMAS SEMESTER
In early November 2023, Shira Schoenberg, a Boston Globe writer, contended that schools should allocate more time to educate students about the history of the conflict. Following Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel, four Dartmouth College professors, specializing in the Middle East or its predominant religions, engaged with 300 students in an auditorium, with additional attendees in an overflow room and through livestream.
During the hour-and-a-half session, they delved into topics such as why Egypt was not opening its border with Gaza, the principles of international law regarding resistance to an occupying power, and the question of whether Israel qualifies as an “apartheid” state. Notably, the professors, representing diverse ethnicities and ideologies, exemplified respectful civil discourse.
Professor Susannah Heschel (the daughter of the late Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel), head of Dartmouth’s Jewish studies program and a co-organizer of the forum, advised students against oversimplifying the events and encouraged them to delve deeper into the study of the Middle East, emphasizing the limitations of relying solely on platforms like TikTok for information (“We should not try to learn what’s going on from TikTok,” she cautioned).
Ezzedine Fishere, a former Egyptian diplomat, recommended that students consider their objectives when discussing the conflict: are they looking to advocate or to learn? He suggested that seeking to comprehend complexity and embracing diverse perspectives could prove beneficial.
ISRAELI VOICES
Smadar Ben-Natan, a former Israeli lawyer turned academic instructor, told IHE she is currently leading an undergraduate course and a graduate seminar on the “History of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict” at the University of Washington this spring. Her courses, which emphasize exploring diverse perspectives, are positioned to address the current moment and tackle challenging questions regarding colonization, self-determination, resistance, violence, and state violence. (The undergraduate course is at full capacity, with 45 students registered and additional students on the waitlist.)
While these courses were previously taught by another professor, Ben-Natan is now updating them in response to the ongoing conflict. She plans to incorporate an exercise at the conclusion of each graduate seminar class, prompting students to reflect on how the conflict influences their lives both on and off campus.
Finally, in Israel, the Rothberg International School at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem is offering a spring semester course titled, “The Israel-Hamas War: Beyond Campus Rhetoric.” The course starts on Sunday, January 7, and will be taught on Zoom by lecturers drawn from the faculty of the Hebrew University.
The course description goes:
“The Israel-Hamas war has seen an unprecedented international media, campus, and public outburst leaving many challenged to understand the conflict and its context. This course provides participants/students with the tools to understand and engage with the issues regarding this more than century-old conflict, and its more recent manifestation on campus, in visual culture, and across the media and social networks.
“To this end, the course is divided into three complementary modules: the first presents the background to the creation of the state of Israel and the unfolding of the Arab-Israel conflict. The second covers international law and the pursuit of war. It addresses the terminology used to frame the rules of engagement in armed conflict and considers how it has been used in the current round of hostilities. The third module examines representations of the war in the news and on social media. It looks at the manipulation of images and documentation and unpacks the effects of different modes of dissemination and representation.”
If I weren’t such a busy reporter, I tell you, I’d have registered.
