The day was Oct. 6, 2023. Hanan Alexander had just arrived from Haifa for another term at UC Berkeley as a visiting professor. An East Bay native who made aliyah in 1999, he loved Cal and was looking forward to his stay.
The next day, that all changed. Many visiting Israeli faculty, impacted by the war back home and intense protests locally, faced unprecedented challenges. What should have been a peaceful, productive academic year at Cal became one of pro-Palestinian and anti-Israel demonstrations, tent encampments and even violence.
“Being in a place that considers you the assailant is very, very difficult,” said Masua Sagiv, a visiting professor in legal studies.
Even with the turmoil and anxiety, though, Alexander said he believes the university was able to navigate through some rocky shoals.
“Berkeley did pretty well in the last year,” he said. “A lot better than some other campuses.”
UC Berkeley regularly hosts academics from Israel through the Helen Diller Institute for Jewish Law and Israel Studies, a program housed within Berkeley Law, including some as Koret visiting professors.
Although Alexander is a visiting professor, he is no stranger to the Bay Area. Raised in Berkeley and neighboring Kensington, he earned a Ph.D. at Stanford. Now a University of Haifa professor emeritus in the philosophy of education, he taught at UC Berkeley from 2008 to 2010 and has been back again since 2021. He is currently in Israel but will return to Cal for the spring semester.
Alexander, who is also a Conservative rabbi, said his Bay Area ties and history gave him a perspective about Cal’s students and administration. He both praised the way the administration handled the past year — and called out what he considered errors of judgment.
He noted that Carol Christ, the longtime chancellor who retired in June, seemed to learn from mistakes, such as allowing pro-Palestinian students to block Sather Gate. He also praised Jewish faculty members for building a solid relationship with Cal’s administration over the years, which helped with communication during difficult moments.
Alexander said he feels fine about colleagues and students in classrooms challenging his views on the Israel-Palestinian conflict, as long as it’s done with intellectual rigor and honesty. He took last school year’s heated campus climate as an opportunity to engage his students — Jewish and otherwise — in critical thinking about subjects such as free speech on campus.
“I felt terrible that I was away from Israel. But at least I was doing something that was useful,” Alexander said.
Still, he said, students must feel safe in order to engage in difficult conversations. That must be the first priority of the administration, he emphasized. “Jewish students, Palestinian protesters — everybody needs to be safe.”
Sagiv researches social change in Israel. She has been teaching at UC Berkeley since 2021 as a visiting assistant professor in Jewish and Israel studies and as a scholar in residence for the Bay Area through the Jerusalem-based Shalom Hartman Institute.
She was in Berkeley when Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7.
“I think that being an Israeli outside of Israel, when there is such deep crisis and fear and pain, was something that was really, really difficult,” she said.
It was a tough year in particular at Cal.
“Last year, when you walked outside on campus, it was a feeling of constantly being attacked,” she said. Sagiv wasn’t afraid of being physically assaulted, she said, but she felt emotionally unsafe.
“The public space of the university constantly tells you that you’re an attacker, that you’re committing genocide, that you’re killing babies. And no one sees your pain,” she said.
She found solace among Jews.
“The Jewish community in Berkeley and the Jewish community in the East Bay in general have been so embracing in a way that really feels like home away from home,” she said.
Sagiv teaches about gender, religion and law in Israel, as well as comparative constitutional law. Her students were mostly non-Jews last academic year, she said, and she was able to bring a debate into the classroom about free speech on campus — carefully, without taking a strong position of her own.
“Only … where it was appropriate, and always, always with multiple viewpoints,” she said.
While last school year was challenging, the current year has been better so far. Sagiv is cautiously optimistic.
“I’ve been present on campus twice a week this year, and I haven’t seen something even remotely like what happened last year,” she said.
Noah Hysler Rubin, a senior lecturer in architecture at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem, applied to become a visiting professor at UC Berkeley before the Israel-Hamas war began.
She thought Cal’s campus protests meant that “nobody will be interested in hiring an Israeli academic.” But she was accepted and arrived in Berkeley in August.
She teaches a course on the urban design of Jerusalem, delving into the multiple identities of that complex city. Most of her students are not Jewish.
“I don’t feel any hostility whatsoever, not on the establishment, the institutional level and definitely not on the personal level,” she said. “None whatsoever.”
Only a few weeks after she arrived in Berkeley, though, the war intruded in a different way. Rubin is close with the family of East Bay native Hersh Goldberg-Polin, who was executed by Hamas in a Gaza tunnel after almost a year in captivity. When the news broke that he had been shot to death in late August, Rubin said, it was “devastating.”
“I had to get up in the morning and go and teach, and it was almost impossible for me,” she said.
Finding herself unable to stick to her lesson plan that day, she told her students instead about Goldberg-Polin.
“I showed this picture of Hershy’s room,” she said, using Goldberg-Polin’s nickname. “I just told them this short story about a sweet guy who was born and raised here in Berkeley.”
She pointed out a sign that he kept on his desk at home that says “Jerusalem is Everyone’s.”
“This is what I want to tell my students: Jerusalem is for all,” she said. “It was created by different people. It is made for different people, and we all have to share it.”
While the visiting faculty program at UC Berkeley is well established, it represents the type of bridge-building that is under threat due to calls for an academic boycott against Israel from groups such as Students for Justice in Palestine.
Until this summer, the American Association of University Professors, a national union with a chapter at UC Berkeley, had opposed academic boycotts. In August, however, the association pivoted, announcing that “academic boycotts are not in themselves violations of academic freedom and can instead be legitimate tactical responses to conditions that are fundamentally incompatible with the mission of higher education.”
But it is exactly such cross-cultural, interdisciplinary connections that made Rubin glad she’d come to UC Berkeley.
“It’s a wonderful opportunity for me to know the world better, to become a better academic,” she said. “And it’s a wonderful opportunity for my students to get to know an Israeli academic who speaks to them in their own language and who wants to teach them and to learn from them.”