Brandeis Takes an Important Step For Israel Studies

April 7, 2008

by Daniel E. Levenson

Looking at the calendar of events in the Jewish community around Boston I am struck by the sheer diversity and number of happenings taking place. Although I was unable to make it to all of the great events going on around Jewish Boston this Sunday, including the ADL’s Nation of Immigrants Seder which sounded fairly intriguing, I did find my way to a conference at Brandeis on Israel.

Sponsored by the Schusterman Center for Israel Studies at Brandeis, the conference I attended was entitled “Visions and Visionaries, Imagining Israel at Sixty.” The event drew a large crowd eager to hear from a variety of Israeli and Jewish thinkers and writers, and gave me much to think about as someone who is engaged in a major project relating to Jewish culture and education.

Dr. Jehuda Reinharz, president of Brandies University noted in his opening remarks that the establishment of the center “constitutes a significant step for the study of Israel in the country and abroad,” later adding that the focus of the center will be on scholarship and not on advocacy.  I, for one, am very happy to see an American university taking an important step forward with the establishment of such a center devoted to the study of modern Israel. All too often it seems that serious scholarship on Israel and its history is excluded from discussion of issues in the Middle East.

The panel discussion which followed was moderated by Professor S. Ilan Troen, director of the Schusterman Center, who focused on the very diverse roots and modes of expression of early Zionism, from capitalists who had a vision of turning Tel Aviv into a thriving economic hub to Russian Zionists who dreamt of creating a Jewish-Socialist paradise in Eretz Yisrael. The panelists tackled a wide range of issues from the diminished primacy of the Hebrew language among Jewish scholars and intellectuals in the Diaspora, to the ongoing question of why Israel must continue to face both real and ideological attacks on its right to exist as an independent Jewish state. Professor Ruth Gavison of Hebrew university took a realistic line, I thought, admitting that there are problems in Israel but discounting the notion that there is anything inherently paradoxical about the idea of Israel existing as a state that is at once both Jewish and democratic.

Author and translator Hillel Halkin spoke passionately about the decline of knowledge of the Hebrew language among educated Diaspora Jews, noting that there was a time when regardless of whatever language they spoke day to day. Mr. Halkin said that whether it was Yiddish, ladino, Polish or some other language, in an earlier era Jews had common recourse to Hebrew when they wanted to communicate with each other, and that this is no longer the case today. I found Mr. Halkin’s comments especially moving when he described the corollary to this loss of familiarity with Hebrew, which is a loss of familiarity with a common Jewish culture. “We have become a people that needs to be translated to itself,” Mr. Halkin said.

When it came time to take questions from the audience there was the usual scramble of individuals heading for the microphone. Some had genuine questions, others seemed interested in making their own statements, but this is, of course, not unusual in an academic setting. One of the comments I found most interesting during this part of the program came from panelist David Makovsky, senior fellow and director of The Washington Institute's Project on the Middle East Peace Process, who elucidated several reasons why he thought that attempts to negotiate with Hamas as part of the peace process would be ill-advised.

Mr. Makovsky said that he had three reasons that he felt this was the case: the first being that treating Hamas as a viable negotiating partner has the potential to undermine Palestinian moderates who have no interest in living under Islamic law; the second was that doing so could put significant pressure on existing peace treaties between Israel and Egypt and Israel and Jordan, two countries in the region which are themselves actively engaged in an effort to counter the influence of Islamic extremism within their own nations; and finally that doing so would remove incentives for Hamas to change its tactics. In general I agreed with Mr. Makovsky’s analysis, but it does raise the question of what Israel should do about Hamas. If indeed, as Mr. Makosky asserts, there is little to be gained (and perhaps much to be lost) by directly engaging Hamas in peace talks, then in order for the peace process to move forward, Hamas must somehow be removed from the equation.

I left the program with a lot to think about. Many of the speakers touched on issues that related not only directly to Israel, but to Jewish community and continuity in general, issues with which we at the New Vilna Review are of course deeply concerned. Each of the speakers reflected this concern in their own way – David Makovsky in his comments on the difficulty of making peace in the Middle East with Hamas as a key obstacle to that objective, Hillel Halkin with his insights into the way that Hebrew language and Jewish common culture seem to be in decline in the diaspora, Ruth Gavison with her observations on the difficult issues Israel is facing in the world and at home as a state that is both Jewish and democratic and Ilan Troen in his comments that looked back at the early roots of Zionism echoing the still-diverse views that Jews have of themselves and their communities. Of course no one has any easy answers to these challenges and problems, but it was heartening to see such sharp minds willing to take them on. Hopefully the new Schusterman Center for Israel Studies at Brandeis will become a hub and a resource for the exploration of such questions, for they are questions that have been with us a long time in one form or another, and still challenge us in the present.