By Janis Siegel, Jewish Sound Correspondent
Kenneth Stein has learned a few things about his students. The professor and history scholar from Atlanta’s Emory University, who spoke to a crowd of over 50 Seattleites at Hillel at the University of Washington, said that during his 37 years of teaching Israel studies, political science and Middle Eastern history, students today don’t have the context they need to understand the Middle East. And he’s asking pre-college Jewish educators to raise the bar in the classroom.
Blame it on the ease of a thumbs-driven database like Google or a general academic malaise from decades of under-teaching of Jewish history, but students today, he told The Jewish Sound in a pre-lecture interview on March 10, don’t have enough background to meet the verbal challenges of a narrative as nuanced as the one in the Middle East.
“Anyone can spin a story,” said Stein, “but are you sophisticated enough to know what the spin is and are you smart enough to know what’s left out?”
Stein, the director of the Emory Institute for the Study of Modern Israel and president of the Center for Israel Education, has spent much of his out-of-class time during the last 13 years conducting workshops and seminars teaching the teachers in 2,100 supplementary and congregational schools, summer camps, and JCCs across the U.S.
He said that these schools are missing an opportunity.
“They spend most of their time learning about traditions, lifecycle events, and holidays,” Stein said, “and they know very little about American Jewish history and European Jewish history.”
Stein, who was honored with an endowed professorship established in his name at the Emory College of Arts and Sciences in 2011 for the study of modern Israel, wishes that the nearly 800,000 Jewish students attending colleges in the U.S. can at least be able to refute false claims about Israel with confidence.
“Students in general are coming to college today with a lack of knowledge of foreign affairs international relations, and geography,” said Stein. “It’s particularly harmful if you’re a minority and don’t know your history. Of course, that can be turned around if the kids knew about a Jewish connection to peoplehood and a Jewish identity that included the land of Israel.
“I would expect a kid or an adult to know that when someone asked a defensive question, they could say, ‘Wait a minute, that’s not the whole story.’”
In addition to writing an extensive collection of books and histories on the Middle East, Stein was the expert chosen to contribute to the Microsoft Encarta Encyclopedia entries for “PLO,” “1948 Israeli Independence War,” “June 1967 War,” “1973 October War,” “Hamas,” and “Intifadah” for its 1999 and 2002 editions. He spoke at Hillel UW on March 10 about the “Assault on Israel: on Campus and Beyond.” On March 11, he spoke at Temple De Hirsch Sinai on the implications of the changing Middle East.
According to Stein, one of the most contentious and pervasive political movements against Israel on American college campuses are the boycott, divestment and sanctions efforts that have become a significant and rallying issue for those who consider themselves to be against Israeli policies.
Designed to target Israel’s economy, he said the movement instead affects the emotional lives of Jewish students. But it doesn’t have to.
“The BDS movement is a real negative for kids on campus because they feel like they’re being singled out because they’re Jewish,” said Stein. “In terms of actual imports and exports, the impact is probably minimal, but the hurt is a psychological hurt…. They want to go, like their computers, into silent mode.”
Students, he said, must learn the facts and understand that history is complex, often without clearly identifiable villains and heroes.
In the case of Israel’s founding, the growth of the Jewish State was a two-way street, he said, with Arabs who participated in its expansion by selling land to the Jews, often without the knowledge or consent of their Arab populations.
“Had there not been Arab collusion, Jews could not have purchased the nucleus for a state to build buildings, kibbutzim, and cities, and villages that gave them the toehold from the 1880s right through 1948,” Stein said. “The documentation is everywhere.”
“Did the Zionists know what they were doing? Of course. Did they know that Arabs were being displaced because of land purchases? Yes. Did they compensate some of them for their displacement? Yes. Did they want them not to settle near Jewish settlements? Yes, because they wanted to create contiguous areas.
“But if you don’t have someone who’s willing to line their pockets and say publicly, ‘I didn’t do it’ and then privately go ahead and do it, if you’re a Zionist you say ‘We’ll just keep on buying land as best we can, even when we’re not allowed to.’”