To the Editor:
I am writing in response to your article last week on the Israel Studies Center (“Profs question center,” Sept. 18 issue). Israel Studies is not a new subject at Brandeis. For the past four years we have established a record that has gained international recognition of what Israel Studies is and how it can be taught. We have been so successful that nearly 80 faculty members from nearly as many institutions have come to Brandeis for our Summer Institute for Israel Studies to acquire skills for introducing or enhancing courses on Israel on their campuses. All such faculty come with the endorsement of chairs of departments, deans or provosts. The universities sending faculty to Brandeis include the Ivy League (Brown), Wellesley, Smith, The University of Massachusetts and Boston College, and, across the country,?UCLA, San Francisco State and UC Santa Cruz in the California system. The faculty attending the Brandeis seminar have included Jews, Christians and Muslims. The institutions are public, private, liberal arts and Jewish as well as Christian (largely Catholic, but also Baptist) and U.S. military academies (West Point and Air Force). We have also had faculty on this program from Turkey, the UK (Cambridge, Manchester and Reading Universities), Ireland (Trinity University in Dublin), Brazil, Argentina, Australia and the Ukraine. Israel Studies is clearly a growing academic field that interests scholars and students well beyond Waltham. More than 1,700 universities currently subscribe to the Israel Studies Journal Brandeis co-sponsors and is published by Indiana University Press.
We are also not the only university trying to respond to this demand. New York University, Emory, UCLA, University of Maryland and American University in Washington, D.C. are in the process of establishing Israel studies centers.
It is clear that the naysayers are unfamiliar with the field, perhaps even the subject matter. It is quite extraordinary for a scholar to negate the attempt of colleagues to gather intellectual resources for the research and teaching of an issue in human affairs that so many other scholars consider interesting and significant.
-Prof. Ilan Troen (NEJS)
The writer is the director of the Israel Studies Center.
