UC Berkeley will begin offering a minor in Israel studies this fall, coming at a time of acute tension on campus around the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
The minor, announced in late May and created through Cal’s Helen Diller Institute for Jewish Law and Israel Studies, is open to all undergraduates.
“It’s become clear Israel is a very important topic, and it’s also become clear people are very ignorant about it,” institute faculty co-director Ron Hassner told J. “I believe, and I think we all do at the institute, that teaching Israel studies is a source of moderation, as opposed to extremism.”
While many universities offer Jewish studies degree programs that include Israel courses, among them UC Berkeley, San Francisco State University and Stanford University, standalone Israel minors are rare. Institute leaders developed the Berkeley minor based on the few that exist, including those at the UCLA Nazarian Center for Israel Studies and University of Maryland’s Gildenhorn Institute for Israel Studies.
The minor will require students to take 20 units consisting of five upper-division classes: two core courses and three electives. Courses emphasize the multidisciplinary nature of Israel studies and incorporate social sciences and humanities as well as law, business, science and technology.
The “steady menu of courses” includes some that have been previously offered at UC Berkeley and can now be pursued as part of a minor degree, institute executive director Rebecca Golbert told J.
The minor is designed “for students who want to pursue something deeper and more robust with a formal degree attached to it,” she said.
Its four core courses are “Israel: Politics and Society,” “History of Modern Israel: From the Emergence of Zionism to our Time,” “Comparative Constitutional Law: The Case of Israel” and “War in the Middle East.”
Electives include Jerusalem architectural design, Israeli literature, anthropology, legal principles and religion and spirituality in education.
Hebrew and Arabic courses also count toward the minor. “Language is important,” Golbert said. “Hebrew and Arabic are an essential part of any Israel studies program.”
The institute hopes that both Jewish and non-Jewish students choose the new minor, she added.
Hassner, who is the Helen Diller Family Chair in Israel Studies and the Chancellor’s Professor of Political Science, teaches two courses that will count toward the minor. One is the junior seminar “Israel: Politics and Society.”
“So, unexpectedly and contrary to all assumptions, UC Berkeley is a very good place to study about Israel and study Jewish things, Jewish history, but also Israeli law, Israeli politics, Israeli history,” said Hassner, the professor who staged a two-week sit-in vigil in his campus office in March to call attention to antisemitism on campus and pressure the university to address it.
Students with the minor can “walk out of here with a real qualification to advise people about Israel, to engage in leadership around Israel and to make policy around Israel,” he added.
UC Berkeley sophomore Shaya Soleil Keyvanfar, who is part of the institute’s undergraduate fellows program, plans to pursue the new minor this fall.
Keyvanfar, 18, told J. that being Jewish on her embattled campus has — whether she wants it or not — turned her into a kind of Israel spokesperson.
“Unfortunately, as a Jew on a campus, I’ve become an ambassador for Israel, needing to know every fact to defend its existence, which is unfair but it’s the reality of the situation,” she said. “I wanted to equip myself with as many facts as possible … to be knowledgeable about Israel and to defend its existence against the haters.”
The institute, which is self-funded from outside sources, was founded as part of Berkeley’s law school in 2011. It has sponsored more than 100 courses, coordinated learning programs in Israel and brought visiting professors from Israel to teach at Cal during their sabbatical years.
Permanent faculty, including Hassner and Ethan Katz, an associate professor of history and Jewish studies and faculty director of Cal’s Center for Jewish Studies, will teach the minor’s courses, as will visiting professors from Israel.
The announcement follows ongoing unrest on campus by pro-Palestinian and anti-Israel activists following the Oct. 7 Hamas massacre in Israel that sparked the ongoing war and a spike in antisemitism worldwide.
Protesters at Cal, including the UCB Divest Coalition that organized the weekslong tent encampment, have denounced the institute and other Israel-focused academic programs. Pro-Palestinian student groups also protested when the Helen Diller Foundation donated $10 million to the institute in 2021.
“Our name has been mentioned by the Divest Coalition,” Golbert said. “In that sense, anything we do, including the minor, can be a focus of theirs. Our institute has been mentioned numerous times in rallies on the campus, specifically because we view Israel studies as essential.”