Jerusalem
There is a small experiment in liberal education flourishing on the outskirts of Jerusalem. It is called Shalem College, and there is nothing else like it in Israel. Shalem is Israel’s first pure liberal arts college—where all students undertake a course of study rooted in the great books of Western civilization.
With Shalem’s first class now in its junior year, the place is starting to feel like an institution that will endure. The campus is located among sprawling apartment complexes in a residential neighborhood. Inside, about 150 students gather in the halls or in a high-ceilinged lounge between classes, gossiping and arguing in a mix of Hebrew and English about the day’s readings, loafing in vinyl booths, or slumped over their homework, napping. The college has developed its own in-jokes, biases, and culture.
For example, Shalem students love to hate on Plato. “Ehhhhhhhhhh,” says Choresh, a sophomore, when I ask her how she likes Socrates. She holds her hand high up in the air: “He is up here. That is okay for him.” She puts her other hand on the table: “I am down here.”
Shahar, a junior, offers a sharper critique of the Republic: “You know this thing he has with the raising all the children in common? We tried that here. It’s called kibbutz. And you know what we got? A whole generation of f—ups.”
Shalem College is committed to shaping a different kind of generation. The Israeli leaders of tomorrow, they say, need the virtues that a great books education can provide, not least of which is a knowledge of the intellectual history of the world in which they live. Zionists, they contend, need the liberal arts in order to grapple with the complexities of running a Jewish and democratic state in an increasingly hostile world.
Shalem is explicit in its desire to see its students steer the future of Israel. That’s why in addition to philosophy, science, literature, and history, students must meet rigorous English-language requirements, with courses in rhetoric and public speaking. Community service is also required. One of the most common extracurricular activities, perhaps surprisingly (given the treatment of Israel at the hands of the United Nations), is Model U.N.
The students I speak to are ambitious. And I wonder if this is why Plato’s Socrates—who is so skeptical of political ambition—leaves them cold. While sitting in on one of Shalem’s English-language lectures, I got a different explanation from Professor Shira Wolosky:
“This is why you Jews are never going to get Plato!” she says. The course is on hermeneutics (methods of interpretation of texts, especially the Bible) and she is cheerfully exasperated. She has just asked them to define the phrase “to fulfill” in the context of early Christian philosophy.
“To fill up,” one student says. “To complete,” says another.
Wrong! Wolosky tells them. They are thinking too much like Aristotle, who saw actions in terms of potentiality and actuality, giving priority to tangible events with a telos, an end. In Plato, she says, the tangible is false, corrupted, “the bad version of everything,” and the only real things are the ideas—the eternal forms “beyond the world, above the world.”
Plato’s metaphysics show up again in Christian philosophy, she says. These theologians find, in Plato, “signifiers” for the story of Christ and the resurrection.
The students ask questions about eschatology, Saint Augustine, and Erich Auerbach. As the class goes on, Wolosky emphasizes the push in these texts towards universality and unity, which sometimes turns into a demand for sameness. In medieval Europe this vein of thinking helped form the rationale for antisemitism. “The Jews stand for difference,” she reminds them.
But the class soon gets distracted discussing different kinds of apocalypses, so Wolosky goes in for the kill.
“This is fundamentally important to you,” she says. “The ideas that come out of this shape the intellectual trends in Europe today. . . . It is a part of the discourse of the BDS movement, the Israel boycott. It matters for the status of Israel. You must understand this.”
This is an underlying principle of Shalem College: that studying the liberal arts is critical to the nation’s survival. Israelis need to know the Western canon—not only for its own sake, but to have the intellectual armor to fight for their existence.
The program at Shalem is modeled after great books programs at schools like St. John’s College, the University of Chicago, and Columbia—with the added dimension of Jewish studies, Zionist thought, and Islamic studies.
In the first year, students are required to take classes on classical literature and philosophy, history, writing, English, and music. They also take classes on the Talmud, Islam, and the Bible.
Dr. Orit Avnery, who teaches the Bible “as a great book,” says that while the students have the advantage of being able to read the Bible in the original Hebrew, reading it as literature presents unique challenges.
To the students who grew up studying Torah in a religious setting, “I must tell them to put off the glasses of Rashi and the Chazal [the commentary of the sages].”
Meanwhile, the students who grew up strictly secular “look like a child [at] the stories,” she says. “They remember what they read in kindergarten” and are surprised to find the material deeper than they remembered.
Avnery demands that both sides justify their interpretations in the text itself. They must “show me where they see it in the verses,” she says. Doing so, “they learn how to respect each other and listen.”
In the second year, students choose between two majors: philosophy and Jewish thought or Middle East and Islamic studies. About a third of their classes will be in their major, but all the students will still be taking the Shalem core. In the second year, this means modern philosophy (Descartes, Hume, Leibniz), Christianity, Jewish philosophy, and Hellenic philosophy.
Third-year students take Hebrew literature and Zionist thought with an added requirement in physics or biology. In the fourth year (which hasn’t actually happened yet), students will tackle economics, modern social science, and Western literature from Dante to Woolf. In addition to the core, the students have asked for, and received, elective classes on feminism, Eastern thought, and critical theory
The majority of Shalem students come in their mid-twenties, after military or national service. They are full of zeal, but they also know they are taking a risk. Shalem is new. And their families—and future employers—might look at their education with confusion or even scorn.
Aryeh is a 23-year-old freshman from Beit Shemesh. Growing up, his father told him and his three siblings, “You have free choice in your career. You can be any kind of engineer you like.” One of his older siblings is a civil engineer, the other a computer engineer. His little brother is in the army. Aryeh got out a month ago. He got hooked on philosophy while he was stationed in Hebron in the summer of 2014, during the Israel-Gaza conflict. “There was a lot of guarding and stone throwing,” he says. “It gets very boring.”
At night, he started reading a translation of Bryan Magee’s The Great Philosophers. His copy is falling apart, but “I never finished it,” he says. “I got stuck on the pragmatists.” The one who really got under his skin was David Hume, the Scottish skeptic, famous for making philosophy students doubt that there’s any empirical evidence suggesting the sun will rise in the morning.
“Hume was not fun,” he says, but “the boldness” he liked. “It was shocking.”
Aryeh skipped the gap year many Israelis take after their service (perhaps to go backpacking through India or South America) and went straight to Shalem.
Tovi, 23, is also a freshman. She asks to be interviewed so she can practice her English. Tovi grew up in a small settlement attending an all-girls religious school. She found Shalem when it hosted her for Shabbat during a cross-country hiking trip she took.
“My father would like to see me married with two kids by now,” she says. “Most of my friends are married. But I choose a different path.” She is reading Heraclitus. She likes how “everything moves all the time, and the world is built by contrast.”
“In other places I won’t read all this,” she says. “It makes me wonder.”
The classes are small (about 50 students per year) and Shalem is selective. To apply, students must have a weighted average above 100 on the standardized test Israelis take to graduate from high school. Each attends on full scholarship, and students who live within a kilometer of campus receive a stipend as well. This is to encourage students to dispense with outside jobs and be able to devote themselves as fully as possible to the program’s grueling requirements.
It also acknowledges the leap of faith they are taking in attending a college about which Israeli society hasn’t yet made up its mind.
There are hundreds of liberal arts colleges in the United States, even as one hears frequent laments about their decline. And most American college students, even if they aren’t at a liberal arts school, still have to take some liberal arts classes intended to give them a well-rounded education. But in Israel, where higher education is geared to research, technology, and preparation for professional life, such a program is radically new.
Although Shalem’s founders tell me that other academics have been supportive, they’ve also faced steep skepticism and even some hostility. In response to a detailed description of the aims of Shalem College, a leading Israeli academic figure wrote back that “education” wasn’t the proper role of an academic institution.
The higher education system here follows the model of the German research university, where programs are tightly focused and career-driven. Even the humanities (which make up about a quarter of Israeli undergraduate education) are highly specialized. A student could get a degree in English literature without ever reading Homer—or a degree in Arabic literature without ever having to read the Hebrew Bible.
When it comes to the STEM fields (science, technology, engineering, and math), the Israeli education system has been wildly successful. Israeli advances in science, medicine, and defense have helped the country survive and grow into a major world and economic power.
However, the founders of Shalem believe that the problems Israel faces cannot be confronted with technical know-how alone.
Shalem College may be just three years old, but its students have already been through a war together. During Operation Protective Edge in 2014, about 20 percent of Shalem’s students were called up to reserve service.
And the first day I visited Shalem last fall proved to be a momentous one. I turned on my phone after Shabbat to see that Paris had been attacked by ISIS. Meanwhile, stabbing attacks were taking place in Israel nearly every day, many of them in Jerusalem. Some of the attackers, I was told, came from the neighborhood around Shalem’s campus.
Two Israelis had been killed in the Old City, the walls of which are visible from Shalem’s roof. The night of the Paris attacks, I was walking alone near Jaffa Gate and asked for directions to a vigil for the victims. A group of young men told me that ISIS was the work of the FBI and Mossad. They chased me out of their store, one of them shouting, “F—ing Jews, Jewish ISIS, ISIS is Israel.”
At Shalem, life went on as usual, except a field trip to a nearby Arab-Israeli town was canceled for security reasons. Instead, Shalem took its freshmen to the Israeli Supreme Court, where they grilled a justice on the intricacies of Jewish divorce laws and debated gay marriage. One of the freshmen is a former agunah, a “chained woman,” whose husband for many years refused to give her a divorce.
The questions that a great books education raises—about the nature of justice, of freedom and equality—are not abstract here. Daniel Polisar, the college’s provost and executive vice president, points to the “disintegration of the Arab states at Israel’s borders,” which is not just a security issue but an existential, philosophical problem for the future of democracy. It’s an issue with which the entire world is grappling but one that Israel, due to proximity, has to face first.
Polisar says the next generation of Israeli leaders will need to be able “to think, to analyze, to write well, to speak well, to listen well.” There is no better training for this than the liberal arts.
These students, he says, are “facing all the questions” of a nation “whose founding generation has died out.” Shalem’s emphasis on the great books of Zionism “might not have been necessary 40 or 50 years ago,” when those who saw the birth of the modern Jewish state were still around and active in public life.
But as Zionism transitions from a founding project to a project of perpetuation, the education Shalem offers its students becomes increasingly necessary. What’s the future of the Jewish state? How—and why—will it endure?
These tensions exist within the college as well. Students majoring in Middle East and Islamic studies also take intensive classes in Arabic. Throughout their week, they meet with their instructors one-on-one or in small groups.
Shalem puts an emphasis on hiring native Arabic speakers to teach these classes, like Eman, a 25-year-old Palestinian from East Jerusalem. Eman is getting her master’s in Arabic literature from Hebrew University. She wears a black hijab with white and pink polka dots and a matching hot pink sweater.
Initially, she brings children’s textbooks and listens to her favorite songs with the students. They talk about their families. “I will tell them about our weddings, and they will tell me about theirs. We talk about cooking, and I find the recipes that are the same as mine; I find that their mother was from Libya, their uncle from Algeria.”
They also read newspapers, but they try not to talk about local news. Occasionally, her more advanced students will ask her what she thinks about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. I ask her if she feels comfortable working at a place that is unapologetically Zionist.
“I love working here,” she says. “They are so sweet. I feel very comfortable, very warm. We live together.” But, she says, “It’s hard. It’s hard to talk about. They believe in things, and I believe in things.”
She pauses. “The both of us want to bring good things,” she says.
But they do not agree “on where to put people. On which party should control Jerusalem. On whether it will be Israel or Palestine.”
These discussions do not end in neat resolutions or singing “Kumbaya.” Eman says she’s never spoken about this with Israelis before. Although she had Israeli friends at Hebrew U., they never spoke about politics. They knew she didn’t want to. “At Shalem they put me in a situation where, yalla, we have to talk,” she says.
Yalla means “Let’s go.”
“I think now—I want to talk more and know,” she says. Her students say the same thing.
This semester, Eman is reading the Bible for the first time. She reads it in Arabic with her students, who are fascinated by the way it’s been translated from the Hebrew.
“I want to be a professor,” she says. “I want to continue my studies. I have big dreams. My family encouraged me to work here, but other people who learn that I am teaching the Israelis Arabic, they think it is . . . strange. They say ‘You are teaching the enemies your language. They may use it against us.’ ” She tells them that her teaching is for “academic research . . . not for the army.”
In his essay “Progress or Return?” Leo Strauss wrote that “the core, the nerve, of Western intellectual history, Western spiritual history . . . is the conflict between the biblical and the philosophic notions of the good life.” He called this conflict “the fundamental tension” between Jerusalem and Athens.
To Strauss, the “recognition of [the West’s] two conflicting roots . . . is, at first, a very disconcerting observation,” but it is also “the secret of the vitality of Western civilization.” In a way, each side—reason and revelation—can check the excesses of the other.
Nowhere is that tension more keenly felt than in Israel, a state that strives to be both Jewish and democratic, secular and religious, modern and eternal.
At its core, Shalem College seeks to equip its students to live these tensions. In some cases, they’re already doing it.
Shmuel, 25, is one of Shalem’s American-born students. Riding his scooter to class sporting wild hair, flannels, and a To Kill a Mockingbird T-shirt, you could picture him at home at Hampshire College or Sarah Lawrence. You’d be wrong.
Shmuel grew up in an orthodox community on the East Coast and moved to Israel when he was 18. He is, like Odysseus, a man of twists and turns. He spent five years in yeshiva and then two years in the army driving tanks.
What he likes about Shalem, he says, is their idea that education is for “building a person.”
Students who don’t have Hebrew as their first language are sometimes allowed to read works in translation. Shmuel grew up speaking English, but now he’s reading Homer in Hebrew. He’s pushing himself to become fluent. When he gets excited, his English and his Hebrew run together. You can tell he likes it when he forgets English phrases.
But Homer in Hebrew is creating problems for him. The translation uses archaic Hebrew words that are out of fashion. But he doesn’t always know what’s modern and what’s not. So he’ll start using Iliad words in everyday conversation. And people look at him funny. He keeps using them. His favorite Hebrew word in the Iliad, he says, is l’hitkatesh.
“It means ‘to spar,’ ” he says. “I use it to say, to spar with ideas.”
Kate Havard, a graduate of St. John’s College in Annapolis, is a research analyst at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.
