Israel Studies

Israel Studies approaches Israel as a country to be examined through the same range of disciplines applied to other modern states: history, politics, economics, geography, art, culture, sociology, anthropology, and comparative literature.[1] Its temporal scope extends into the pre-state period — taking in the Zionist movement, the Yishuv, and mandatory Palestine — while its primary emphasis remains the State of Israel itself.[2] Scholarship in the field also addresses diaspora communities insofar as their experiences bear on Israeli state formation, society, and identity.[2]

The field overlaps with Jewish Studies, which addresses Jewish religion, history, philosophy, culture, languages, and literatures, and with Middle East Studies, through which Israel may be examined in regional context.[5][1] Proponents of Israel Studies as a separate academic structure have argued that Jewish Studies and Middle East Studies each frame Israel only partially: Jewish Studies may subordinate modern Israel to religious and textual preoccupations, while Middle East Studies may marginalize Israel or view it primarily through the prism of regional conflict.[1] At the same time, Israel Studies courses and programs are often cross-listed with history, comparative literature, Middle Eastern studies, sociology, and political science, reflecting the field's cross-disciplinary character.[6]

The field encompasses the study of non-Jewish minorities in Israel, including their art, culture, and political circumstances, and it situates Israeli society within broader comparative frameworks involving Jewish, Middle Eastern, and general histories.[1][6] A recurring theme in discussions of the field is the distinction between academic inquiry — understood as critical, nonpartisan, methodologically rigorous, and open to multiple narratives — and Israel advocacy or identity-oriented Israel education, which may seek to cultivate personal affinity toward the Jewish state.[6]

Israel Studies took shape in the mid-1980s as a loose community of researchers, mostly political scientists, who were interested initially in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and related questions of Israeli foreign policy.[4] In 1985, professors formed the Association for Israel Studies, which gave the network an institutional anchor; over subsequent years, the association expanded its scholarly scope to include Israeli foreign policy, religion, Jewish and Arab literature, and the kibbutz movement.[4] The field gradually developed the characteristics of a mature academic discipline, including a peer-reviewed journal and institutional ties with Israeli universities.[4]

The creation of the State of Israel in 1948 had itself contributed to broader shifts in Jewish scholarship internationally, helping to establish recognition of the Jewish people as a living and developing nation and providing Israeli universities, scholars, and intellectual output as resources for the study of Jewish civilization worldwide.[5] Within Israel, early scholarly work on the country's history and society was promoted largely by domestic institutions and remained relatively inward-looking for several decades.[6] The opening of archives that had been closed for thirty, forty, or fifty years — combined with a younger generation of scholars who could approach Israel more critically and comparatively — eventually opened the field to researchers and students outside Israel.[6]

The Yad Yitzhak Ben-Zvi Institute, established in 1963 by decision of the Israeli government, provided one important institutional foundation for Israel-related scholarship. A 1969 Knesset law formally charged it with advancing research on the history of the Land of Israel, disseminating information about its settlements and heritage, and furthering study and education in the field; its mandate expanded in 1973 to include Jewish communities in Oriental countries and the Sephardi diaspora.[7] The historian Anita Shapira is identified as a scholar who helped lay the foundations of Israeli historiography and contributed to launching the research discipline now known as Israel Studies.[8]

The Ben-Gurion Institute for the Study of Israel and Zionism at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev represents another foundational institutional node. Established under the 1976 David Ben-Gurion Law on the basis of a 1982 agreement between the Ben-Gurion Heritage Institute and Ben-Gurion University, the institute is located at Sde Boker and encompasses an academic library, an archive, and a digital information center.[9] Its fifteen faculty members initiated and continue to lead an undergraduate Israel Studies program within Ben-Gurion University's Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, as well as the Woodman-Scheller Israel Studies International Program, and the institute hosts doctoral and postdoctoral students from Israel and abroad.[9]

The first permanent Israel Studies centers in the United States were established in 1998. Kenneth Stein initiated the Institute for the Study of Modern Israel at Emory University in Atlanta — described as the first U.S. institute or center established exclusively for the study of modern Israel — while economist Howard Wachtel created a parallel center at American University in Washington, D.C., within months of the Emory launch.[10][1] Both initiatives were motivated by the conviction that American students should be taught about modern Israel as a country in its own right rather than as a political flashpoint.[1]

Wachtel's program at American University was notably broad from its inception, drawing on twenty professors from different departments and treating Israel through history, politics, economics, geography, art, and culture.[1] American University created a minor in Israel Studies in 2006, which represented a formal recognition of the field as a distinct academic program at the sub-major level.[1] Despite these pioneering efforts, it took at least five years after 1998 before a third center was established, this one at New York University.[11]

The field remained largely neglected until the academic year 2004–2005, after which it grew rapidly.[1] Several factors contributed to this acceleration: anti-Israeli activism on some U.S. campuses during the Second Intifada drew attention to the absence of substantive academic courses on Israel; American Jewish philanthropists invested in expanding the field; and surveys demonstrated starkly that most universities lacked academic courses and curricular resources on Israel.[1] A study by the Israel on Campus Coalition found that 53 percent of universities — including all of the top one hundred — had no courses on Israel at all, while another 24 percent had only one course, often focused narrowly on the Arab-Israeli conflict.[1]

The Brandeis University Summer Institute for Israel Studies, created in 2004 by the American Jewish Committee together with philanthropists, addressed the curricular gap by bringing Israeli scholars to the United States to teach American academic faculty — many of whom came from Jewish Studies backgrounds — so that they could return to their home universities and offer Israel-related courses.[1] Approximately one hundred professors had participated in the program by the time it was described in the source. In 2007, Brandeis received approximately thirty million dollars to create a full-fledged Israel Studies center headed by Ilan Troen of Ben-Gurion University.[1]

A visiting-professor program for Israeli scholars began with two professors in the 2005–2006 academic year, grew to eight the following year, and reached twenty-seven professors teaching on twenty-six campuses in 2008–2009.[1] These visiting scholars were expected not only to teach four courses per appointment but also to give lectures, participate in speaking tours, serve as campus resources, support Hillel programming, and help develop conferences and publications.[1] The American-Israeli Cooperative Enterprise supported the broader expansion of the field by sponsoring more than one hundred visiting Israeli scholars at more than fifty universities, placing postdoctoral fellows with academic mentors, and supporting graduate students through the Schusterman Scholar Award program.[12] Together with other donor investment, these efforts helped create at least twenty-nine Israel Studies centers, chairs, or programs in the United States.[11]

By the time of the earliest sources, nine Israel Studies centers existed in the United States, although most were described as essentially one-person operations.[1] Institutions hosting centers included Emory University, American University, Brandeis University, Columbia University, New York University, UCLA, the University of Maryland, Yeshiva University, and the University of Denver.[1] Later reporting identified programs or centers also at Berkeley, Ohio State, San Francisco State, Wisconsin, and Michigan State, among others.[12]

At the University of Maryland, 526 students enrolled in Israel Studies courses during the 2013–2014 academic year alone.[11] The program offered a minor and graduate M.A. and Ph.D. options developed in cooperation with other departments, with coursework covering Israeli history, politics, society, culture, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the economy, immigration, minority groups, civil rights, cinema, women, and literature.[11] The university also hosted Israel Studies Review, the Association for Israel Studies' official journal.[11]

Endowed chairs represented a significant mechanism for institutionalizing the field. An estimated cost of one million to five million dollars was associated with an endowed chair, while creating a center required approximately ten million to thirty million dollars; a visiting professorship cost roughly fifty thousand dollars, generally with university matching funds.[1] Approximately fifteen Israel Studies chairs were expected to be endowed by the end of 2008.[1]

Israel Studies is formally characterized as an interdisciplinary field that encourages multidisciplinary research on Israeli history, politics, society, culture, literature, economics, sociology, anthropology, and historical geography.[2] The field's scholarly scope extends into the pre-state period, including the Zionist movement and the Yishuv, and its practitioners are drawn from all social-science disciplines and many humanities fields.[13]

Early in its development, scholarly attention concentrated on political history, Zionism, and the Arab-Israeli conflict.[6] Over time the field moved toward a broader range of subjects and methods, encompassing cultural studies, biography, collective memory, national myths, immigration, religion, identity, language, social history, and comparative national movements.[6] The field later engaged more critically with Israel's past by challenging conventional Israeli narratives, including accounts of the 1948 War of Independence, under the influence of the so-called New Historians, including Benny Morris, and also addressed contested questions concerning nation-building and colonialism.[4]

Courses representative of the field combine history, sociology, modern Hebrew literature, Israeli cinema, and popular music.[14] A Spring 2012 introductory Israel Studies course, for example, surveyed Israeli history, nationalism, and culture in the twentieth century, extending from the emergence of political Zionism through post-capitalism in Israeli society, and required students to examine scholarly arguments, methods, intellectual lineages, historical contexts, paradigmatic differences, national scholarly traditions, and changing intellectual trends as reflected in the discipline's journals.[14][14]

Major publications include the journal Israel Studies.[2] The Association for Israel Studies identifies Israel Studies Review as its journal; the National Library of Israel catalogs it as an English-language semiannual publication that appeared as Israel Studies Forum from 2001 to 2010 and under its current name from 2011.[3][15] Course materials also identify Journal of Israeli History and adjacent journals used for field research, including Jewish Social Studies, Jewish Quarterly, AJS Review, Israel Affairs, Journal of Palestine Studies, International Journal of Middle East Studies, Middle East Journal, and Prooftexts.[14]

Institutionally, Israel Studies centers engage in curriculum design, course offerings, analytical expertise, postgraduate mentoring, seminars, conferences, student trips to Israel, summer schools, publications, and the hosting of Israeli scholars, writers, and artists.[16] The field's intended infrastructure, as articulated by its proponents, includes graduate and postdoctoral training, academic appointments, sustained research agendas, and peer-reviewed scholarly output — distinguishing it from public diplomacy or advocacy programming, even where philanthropic interests overlap with the field's expansion.[1]

At the University of Haifa, Israel Studies is offered at the graduate level as an International Master's program taught in English. The program defines its mission as in-depth study of the State of Israel from the beginning of the Zionist movement to the present, situating Israel within the context of twentieth-century Jewish history and Middle Eastern politics and society while emphasizing Israeli society's multicultural character and its relations with Jewish communities abroad.[17] The curriculum is organized into three thematic strands: "History of Zionism and the State of Israel, 1881–1967"; "Jewish Diasporas in the 20th Century: A Transnational Perspective"; and "Contemporary Israel: Sociology, Minorities, Law and Culture." The program examines aliyah and migration, economics, politics, culture, religion, minorities, law, and Israel-Diaspora relations, and includes meetings with representatives from different sectors of Israeli society.[17]

Rutgers University courses examined Israeli history, society, and culture through academic and nonpartisan methods and were cross-listed with Middle Eastern studies, history, comparative literature, and other programs.[6] Tulane courses situated Israel within Jewish history, Middle Eastern history, and general history, and included subjects such as culture, identity, ideology, politics, social history, language, immigration, and the Israeli-Arab conflict.[6] These examples illustrate the field's characteristic integration of disciplinary perspectives rather than adherence to a single standardized curriculum.

Israel Studies is also recognized as contributing to multidisciplinary work in national security scholarship. The journal Strategic Assessment, launched in 1998 and published by the Institute for National Security Studies at Tel Aviv University, lists Israeli studies among the disciplines contributing to its editorial scope alongside international relations, political science, history, economics, law, communications, geography, environmental studies, Middle East and Islamic studies, sociology, anthropology, and conflict resolution.[18]

The Association for Israel Studies (AIS), founded in 1985, is the field's central professional organization.[13] It describes itself as an international, interdisciplinary scholarly society devoted to the academic and professional study of Israel, open to individuals and institutions engaged in, or interested in, scholarly inquiry about Israel, the Zionist movement, the Yishuv, and pre-state Palestine more broadly.[3] The association explicitly commits itself to academic freedom and freedom of expression and draws its membership from all social-science disciplines and many humanities fields.[3]

The journal Israel Studies, published since 1996, is a major scholarly publication in the field.[2] It is sponsored by the Ben-Gurion Research Institute for the Study of Israel and Zionism at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev and the Schusterman Center for Israel Studies at Brandeis University, in affiliation with the Association for Israel Studies.[2] The journal encourages multidisciplinary research and states that its issues present diverse points of view.[2]

The Association for Israel Studies also publishes Israel Studies Review, an English-language semiannual periodical cataloged by the National Library of Israel.[15] The publication appeared as Israel Studies Forum from 2001 to 2010 and was renamed Israel Studies Review in 2011.[15]

The Center for Israel Education (CIE), founded by Ken Stein in 2008, defines its mission as educating broadly about Israel from its Jewish historical origins through contemporary Zionism.[10] Its stated objectives include providing students, educators, and lifelong learners with trustworthy materials that explain the present in historical context, and developing Israel literacy through the study of state-seeking, state-making, and state-keeping.[10] CIE's subject areas span the origins of modern Israel, Zionism, Jewish history and peoplehood, Israeli politics and society, Palestinian history, the Arab-Israeli and Israeli-Palestinian conflicts, Israel's domestic and foreign policies, U.S.-Israel relations, Diaspora Jewish identity, the Middle East, the Ottoman Empire, Sephardi Jewry, Jews in Arab lands, Iranian Jewry, the British Mandate period, and the Oslo negotiating process.[10] The organization organizes its educational material by topic, format, language, and historical era, offering formats including bibliographies, biographies, primary sources, curricula and syllabi, historiography, maps, timelines, videos, webinars, and on-demand Israel courses.[19]

The National Library of Israel plays an important supporting role for the field. During the period when it was known as the Jewish National and University Library, it served as the central research library of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel Studies, Jewish Studies, Islamic and Middle-Eastern Studies, and the General Humanities.[20] Its Israel Collection covers Zionism; the Arab-Israeli conflict; social and historical issues; Israel's international relations; tourism; the arts; minority groups; archaeology; literature about Israel in languages other than Hebrew; Hebrew literature translated into other languages; journalism; and Israel-related official publications issued by international organizations including NATO and the United Nations.[21] The library's four core collections are Israel, Judaica, Islam and the Middle East, and Humanities.[20]

Two recurring institutional debates define the field's positioning within the university. The first concerns whether Israel Studies should be housed within Jewish Studies, on the grounds that Israel cannot be understood without Hebrew, Hebrew literature, Judaism, and Jewish history, or treated instead as the study of a modern state that includes non-Jewish citizens and cultural communities.[1] The second concerns the field's relationship to Middle East Studies: proponents of an independent Israel Studies structure have warned against Israel being marginalized within departments they regard as hostile or insufficiently attentive to Israeli perspectives.[1]

A further debate concerns the relationship between academic Israel Studies and Israel advocacy or identity-oriented Israel education. Scholars have argued that the field should be academically rigorous, critical, comparative, nonpartisan, and open to multiple narratives, rather than functioning as a vehicle for Israel advocacy.[6] At the same time, much of the philanthropic and communal investment that expanded the field was explicitly motivated by concern about anti-Israeli activism on campuses during the Second Intifada and by a desire to ensure that Israel could be studied at major American universities.[1] The distinction between expanding Israel's scholarly visibility and countering perceived bias is therefore not always clear in practice.[5]

The concern about donor influence is a recognized issue within the field. Communal funding of Israel Studies positions has been identified as contentious when scholars supported by endowments express views that conflict with some local opinions about Israeli history, society, and politics, placing the question within a broader debate about academic objectivity and possible tension between university programs and communal agendas.[5] Scholars in the field have maintained that academic credibility depends on separating scholarly work from donors' or communal organizations' political intentions, and that visiting Israeli professors involved in campus programs present Israel's facts and flaws rather than acting as spokespeople for the Israeli government.[6][1]

The distinction between academic Israel Studies and Israel education involves a difference of purpose as well as method. Academic Israel Studies focuses on developing knowledge about Israeli society, history, culture, and politics without making the learner's personal affinity toward Israel the central objective. Israel education, by contrast, may seek to cultivate a personal connection to contemporary Israel and Jewish identity. A proposed "commitment and critique" approach has been discussed as a way of combining attachment with critical examination rather than defaulting to automatic endorsement.[6]

Israel Studies reached a peak of institutional presence in the late 2000s. During the 2007–2008 academic year, seventy Israel Studies courses enrolled 1,700 students at twenty-seven universities.[4] The visiting-professor program grew from two Israeli professors in 2005–2006 to twenty-seven professors teaching on twenty-six campuses in 2008–2009, with approximately forty Israelis teaching as visiting professors at U.S. universities at that time.[1][4]

A 2012 American-Israeli Cooperative Enterprise report documented the pace of change quantitatively. A 2006 study had found that 53 percent of major universities offered no courses on Israel and 77 percent offered zero or one course.[6] A later Brandeis study of the same 246 institutions found a 69 percent increase in courses focused specifically on Israel, while AICE visiting professors were credited with generating nearly 150 new courses.[11] The Brandeis Summer Institute faculty-training program contributed additional instructors capable of offering Israel-related coursework.[6]

These figures reflect a significant transformation in the field's curricular footprint in a relatively short period — from near-invisibility at major American universities at the start of the 2000s to a substantial, if still unevenly distributed, presence by the early 2010s.

Despite its growth, Israel Studies has faced persistent challenges concerning its identity as an academic field and its sustainability on American campuses. A 73-page Jewish People Policy Institute report characterized the field as being "at the brink of extinction," at a crossroads, and apparently unsustainable in the contemporary campus climate. The report attributed difficulties to factors both inside and outside the field, including funding uncertainties, strategic incoherence, institutional placement disputes, and a hostile or tense campus environment exacerbated by events following October 7, 2023.[4]

The same report criticized Israel Studies for lacking agreed aims, methodologies, priorities, qualification criteria, and a centralized curriculum, and described the field as suffering from a "profound identity crisis."[4] Its recommendations included that organizations unify and define their goals, establish scholar-qualification criteria, create a centralized curriculum and guidance documents for fraught topics, set realistic expectations with donors, and expand instruction beyond universities.[4]

This crisis interpretation is disputed within the field. Csaba Nikolenyi, a Concordia University scholar and vice president of the Association for Israel Studies, argued that Israel Studies remained healthy because of its pluralism, robust member engagement, and student interest, and that its interdisciplinary and methodologically diverse character should be treated as a strength rather than evidence that it lacks the coherence of a conventional discipline.[4] Avi Shilon of Columbia University similarly rejected the characterization of the field as being in crisis.[4]

The Association for Israel Studies has described an earlier internal dispute over its ideological character, in which some members were outspoken critics of Israel and post-Zionist revisionist historians. The association later became more mainstream as less-politicized scholars became active within it.[1] This history illustrates the broader tension — present since the field's founding — between scholarly independence and the political and communal stakes attached to the study of Israel.