Israel studies in the UK: the history of an idea

ABSTRACT

Through oral testimony from the major figures in the discipline, this article traces the narrative- and intellectual history, and development of the discipline of Israel Studies in the United Kingdom, using the three universities – Oxford, SOAS, and Sussex – that have dedicated Chairs in the field. It further seeks to seek to locate the discipline of Israel Studies both practically and ideologically in the minds of the scholars interviewed, and within the greater intellectual canon. It concludes that the discipline of Israel Studies in the UK has entered a new phase, in which a new generation of scholars is happy to shed any Zionist “agenda,” and meet Israel on its own terms, thereby normalizing the study of Israel.

KEYWORDS:

• Israel studies
• United Kingdom
• SOAS
• University of Oxford
• University of Sussex

Introduction

This short article seeks to trace the history and development of the teaching of Israel Studies at the three universities in the United Kingdom that have created dedicated positions in the discipline. It is thus for the most part a narrative history, although one that is – due to its relative newcomer status – based mainly on oral testimony. In this respect I was very lucky, and was able to interview many of the leading figures active in the fields of both Israel Studies proper, and related areas, such as Middle Eastern Studies: Colin Shindler, Derek Penslar, Sara Hirschhorn, Yaacov Yadgar, Yair Wallach, and David Tal – as representatives of the former group – and Avi Shlaim, Eugene Rogan, Roger Goodman, Martin Goodman, David Rechter – as representatives of the latter – all very kindly gave interviews for this article, and were generous with their time and comments.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, this article also thus attempts to trace the history of an idea. While respective of the length and scope for which I have to tie together some seemingly disparate narrative strands, I nonetheless believe it rather instructive to address the idea of Israel Studies as a discipline, and to seek to locate it both practically and ideologically in the minds of the scholars interviewed, and within the greater intellectual canon. Israel Studies as such is a relatively new discipline in UK universities, one which has the potential for controversy and political polarization, exacerbated by an ongoing, apparently irresolvable conflict. The questions of if, where, and how these realities could or should intersect with an academic discipline, and how – if even possible – Israel can be normalized in order to allow for neutral, academic study, weave throughout this article.

There is also a personal dimension to this study. I graduated from the SOAS BA (Hons) in Hebrew and Israeli Studies program in 2007, completed my DPhil at Oxford under the supervision of the first Stanley Lewis Professor of Israel Studies, Derek Penslar, now work with his successor Yaacov Yadgar here at Oxford, and sit on the Academic Committee of the European Association of Israel Studies. I am thus a product of several of the programs that blossomed in the UK in the last 15 years or so, all designed to give more focus on Israel as its own academic discipline.

The article is divided into two major parts. The first traces some of the important streams in the evolution of Israel Studies in the United Kingdom, although it is by no means comprehensive. It seeks merely to suggest one or two starting points for the discipline’s intellectual history in this country. It then focuses on the three institutions that have dedicated positions in Israel Studies: the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS, University of London), the University of Oxford, and the University of Sussex. Finally, it discusses the genesis and development of the European Association of Israel Studies.

The second part of this article undertakes a discussion of the idea of Israel Studies as its own academic discipline. As with the first part, it relies on interviews with the key players in the field in the United Kingdom. As such, it reveals a surprising degree of variety of opinion, a perhaps not uninstructive phenomenon in itself. The article concludes by speculating on the future course of development of the discipline.

Precursors

As stated above, this article makes no attempt at tracing a comprehensive history of all UK institutions that have offered the study of Israel to some degree, on their curricula. But, in the attempt to trace the history of an idea, we might isolate two important points of departure, both at the University of Oxford.

The first was embodied in the figure of the political scientist and historian, Noah Lucas, who had turned to academia after serving as head of the foreign relations department of the General Organisation of Workers in Israel – the Histadrut. In 1988, after stints at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the University of Sheffield, and in the wake of cuts to university funding under the Thatcher regime that allowed him to take early retirement, Lucas became Librarian and Fellow in Israeli Studies at the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies, at Yarnton Manor.¹ In 1991 he further became Hebrew Centre Lecturer in Politics.² Lucas came to Oxford with a rather high academic profile. He had published his one book, The Modern History of Israel, in 1975 while still in Sheffield.³ It offered a comprehensive narrative and intellectual history of Israel, from the beginning of “Practical” Zionist settlement, in 1880, through the first twenty years of the State of Israel’s existence. Although published in 1975, Lucas effectively ended his narrative with the events of the 1967 war. Despite the fact that he was located firmly in the Zionist camp, Lucas was not uncritical of both Israel’s first Prime Minister David Ben Gurion, and his “protégé,” Golda Meir. Indeed, he argued – correctly, in retrospect – that the Egyptian President Anwar Sadat sought only to regain territory lost in the Six-Day War, and had no great plans for aggression toward Israel. By the time of his Oxford engagement, the book was a standard text for the study of Israel In the UK, although it enjoyed more limited success in North America.⁴

As such, we might see in Lucas the beginning of a trend that sought to critically engage with the history of both Zionism and the State of Israel itself from within the pro-Zionist camp. Notably – like his colleague Avi Shlaim, see below – Lucas was also a member of St Antony’s College, and indeed the two men worked well together.⁵ Lucas supervised graduate students at St Antony’s, and taught for the Diploma in Jewish Studies, which was administered by the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies. He could do so only since the Centre was an independent research institute, with its own charitable status: his early retirement from Sheffield made it conditional that Lucas not enter into employment with Oxford University proper. Such a situation worked in Lucas’s favor, and he was able to teach and examine in particular instances for the university – although he did not teach for any of the university’s degrees – while continuing to fulfill the conditions of his early retirement.

We see the second important intellectual point of departure for this study in the figure of Avi Shlaim. Like Lucas, Shlaim straddles the disciplines of History and Politics – in Shlaim’s case, International Relations, which he taught at the University of Reading, from 1970–87. In the 1980s – with the opening of hitherto sealed Israeli State archives that demanded a revision of the historiography of the 1948 Arab-Israeli War – Shlaim turned his attention to the country to which his family had fled from Baghdad in 1941. With his 1987 article “Britain and the Arab-Israeli War of 1948,” and book Collusion Across the Jordan: King Abdullah, the Zionist Movement and the Partition of Palestine, the following year, Shlaim established himself as one of the leading “New Historians” of Israel.⁶ The term, coined in 1988 by fellow “New Historian” Benny Morris, defined a new trend in Israeli historiography that sharply criticized the traditional hagiographic “Zionist” approach to writing Israeli history. In 1987, Shlaim took up the Alastair Buchan Readership in International Relations at the University of Oxford, becoming at the same time a Fellow of St Antony’s College.⁷ Thus – and notably – Shlaim and Lucas were exact contemporaries at Oxford.

Shlaim’s placement in St Antony’s College was not mere coincidence. The college had established a Middle East Centre on its premises in 1957, and St Antony’s gradually became inextricably linked with Middle Eastern studies over the next several decades. In 1967 it established – first with the help of the Wolfson Foundation, and later Yad Ha-Nadiv (a Rothschild family foundation) – an “Israeli fellowship” for senior scholars. Despite the fact that the Fellowship was for Israeli nationals, it was not conditional that recipients of the fellowship be working on Jewish or Israeli studies.⁸ A Junior Fellowship followed suit in 1987, and the programs ran continuously until funding was withdrawn, in 2001 and 2006 respectively.⁹ Once the Fellowships had ended, the Middle East Centre began to collaborate with the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies in creating a Research Fellowship in Israel Studies that was funded by the Pears Foundation (see below).¹⁰ Two political scientists, first Emmanuele Ottolenghi and then Rafaella dal Sarto, held the position until the creation of a dedicated professorship in Israel Studies at Oxford mandated its dissolution. This is not to say that the Middle East Centre has not – at times, and perhaps unfairly – been accused of harboring an anti-Israel bias. But the apparent collegiality between Shlaim and Lucas would seem to go a long way in the refutation of any such claims.

The collaboration that produced the Research Fellowship – between the Middle East Centre and the Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies – highlights one of the issues involved when attempting to successfully position the discipline of Israel Studies. Does it come under the remit of Jewish studies or Middle Eastern studies? Geopolitics or Cultural studies? Secular or religious, “Jewish” or Israeli? Oxford is perhaps best suited amongst UK universities for addressing such questions, due in no small part to its decentralized infrastructure, which traditionally allowed faculties as diverse as the Oriental Institute, the Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies, the Middle East Centre, and even the Faculty of Theology to all play – often with great overlap, if not outright competition – a role in the teaching of Israel studies there.

SOAS

It is at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) at the University of London that we may begin to trace the next important strand that would lead to the study of Israel as a dedicated discipline in the United Kingdom. The School opened in 1916 and was the first UK institute dedicated solely to the study of the Near, Middle, and Far East, as well as Africa. Be that as it may – and although the school had a thriving Hebrew and Jewish studies program led by Tudor Parfitt – it was only in the 1990s that a concerted attempt to develop an Israel Studies program came into being. Indeed, the genesis and evolution of Israel Studies at SOAS can be attributed to the efforts of Colin Shindler. Shindler – a high school chemistry teacher who decided to take early retirement – had already published three books, two of them on Israel, by the time he gained his PhD in 1997.¹¹ In 1999 he began a five-year Postdoctoral Fellowship at SOAS that was funded by the Lord Ashdown Charitable Trust – which he got “more by luck than anything else,” in his opinion. Although it was originally meant to be in Hebrew studies, Shindler managed to “convince them” that Israel studies would be the more useful direction of the Fellowship.¹² During the five years of the postdoctoral fellowship, Shinder developed a course on Zionism and Israel-Palestine. In 2005, Shindler became a Reader, and then in 2008, Professor in Israel Studies, the first such position at a UK institution. He chose the title deliberately: “It was a political move on my part, and no doubt of course it had ramifications in terms of creating Israel studies.”¹³ Shindler’s efforts ushered in a “golden age” of Israel study at SOAS. During that first decade, Shindler developed a BA (Hons) and MA programs in Hebrew and Israeli Studies. Alongside courses in Hebrew, Israeli Culture, and Modern Hebrew Literature, taught by Tamar Drukker, and options such as Parfitt’s courses on Jews and Genetics, Shindler taught the history of Zionism and the Arab-Israeli Conflict. The course, along with his ground-breaking research on the Israeli Right, were epitomized in his books, The Triumph of Military Zionism and A History of Modern Israel.¹⁴ Concurrently, Shindler ran the Centre for Jewish Studies at SOAS and organized weekly lectures on themes in Jewish and Israeli studies.

SOAS, in spite of its mandate for the study of the Middle East, has a reputation of being a hotbed for anti-Israel sentiment, and my own experience there demonstrated that such sentiment was held and translated into action at every level, from the student body to the students’ and teachers’ unions, and at times the academic staff. As Shindler notes, “I realized, to put it bluntly, that Israel was not the flavor of the month.” He continues:

My approach was that given the composition of SOAS and the lecturers that were there and the Union, I could do nothing if I went to Union meetings. I could do nothing […] The only pathway which was open to me was to build an alternative which was the Centre for Jewish Studies [and] which were my lectures […] That was my approach and I tried also to separate my personal views, to strive for objectivity.¹⁵

In spite of Shindler’s success in developing an Israel Studies program at SOAS, there was, as he puts it, “no suggestion about my building a department or, if you like, an academic empire […] but I did see it as creating a basis for Israel Studies per se.”¹⁶ Be that as it may, we might well speak of a “Shindler school” when discussing Israel Studies at SOAS in the first decade of the twenty-first century. His inaugural lecture as a full Professor, on November 18, 2009 – The Road to Utopia: The Origins of Anti-Zionism on the British Left – drew in hundreds of students and colleges, both from SOAS itself and from the wider academic world. In it, he used the opportunity to once again take an alternative approach in his discussion, one that “didn’t fit into the paradigm of the Left and Israel.”¹⁷ As such, in his attempt to criticize Israel from within the pro-Zionist camp – indeed, one that is decidedly left-leaning – we may see Shindler as an ideological successor to Noah Lucas.

On the following Sunday following, November 22, 2009, Shindler met with approximately 30 colleagues who had come from all over the UK to attend the lecture, and who all shared the desire to establish a European Association of Israel Studies. Buoyed by the apparent collegial interest in the proposed endeavor, Shindler approached the Pears Foundation for financial support. The Pears Foundation had been established in 1991, as “family foundation driven by a desire to demonstrate the good that philanthropy can achieve in the world.”¹⁸ Many of its programs – such as the Pears Institute for the Study of Antisemitism and the Parliamentary Committee Against Antisemitism Foundation – addressed specifically Jewish concerns. Shindler found the Foundation to be the perfect funding partner, “because they were a very open, liberal outfit,” one not associated with an agenda of Israel advocacy. The Foundation supported not only the creation of the European Association of Israel Studies, which, until the spring of 2020 was housed within SOAS, but also a new Lectureship in Israeli Studies. The establishment of the latter position was important for Shindler, as he officially retired in 2012, although he continued to teach part-time for the following two years.

In February 2011, Shindler organized a one-day inaugural conference for the EAIS at SOAS that featured papers by Shindler, Glenda Abramson, and Derek Penslar, followed by a dinner with a keynote address by Shlomo Avineri. On January 10, 2012, he oversaw the first meeting of doctoral students working in Israel studies, in which six or seven students presented their research. The following year, Shindler’s own doctoral student, Jacob Eriksson, took over responsibility for this subgroup within the Association, and the doctoral student network remains an important feature of the European Association for Israel Studies. Now with an infrastructure in place that included a part-time administrator, the EAIS came into its own. Shindler’s aim was to involve academics from European institutions who studied Israel: he notes that he felt like he was a lone wolf – certainly in the UK – until the Association helped to bring together a scholarly community that would now interact more regularly, especially during the EAIS’s annual conferences. These latter phenomena have traditionally alternated between SOAS and European cities, such as Munich, Wroclaw, Prague, and most recently Bucharest (which occurred online, due to COVID-19 restrictions). The creation and growth of the EAIS have been perhaps Shindler’s greatest legacy – outside of his books – to the study of Israel in the UK.

Shindler’s successor – originally the first Pears Lecturer in Israel Studies, now Senior Lecturer in Israel Studies – is Yair Wallach. Wallach – an Israeli-born cultural historian of Mandate Palestine – has built upon Shindler’s achievements, while also taking Israel Studies at SOAS in a different, perhaps more critical, direction. His research “deals with modernity and its transformative dimensions in Israel/Palestine, focusing on urban space and visual culture.”¹⁹ His recent book, A City in Fragments: Urban Text in Modern Jerusalem, argues that “urban texts” – “graffiti, inscriptions, official signs, and ephemera” – in Hebrew and Arabic “became a tool in the service of capitalism, nationalism, and colonialism,” and thus contributed in their own way to the ongoing Palestinian-Israeli conflict.²⁰ Wallach stands firmly outside the Zionist camp – neither “pro-” nor “anti-” – and in this respect embodies a new “type” in Israeli Studies, which will be discussed in more detail, below.

Like Shindler before him, Wallach has developed further the Israel Studies program at SOAS, adding courses such as Jerusalem: City in Conflict, and developing Shindler’s courses, so that, for example, Zionism is now studied more critically, as well as merely historically. In addition, he is the Chair of the Centre for Jewish Studies at SOAS, which has regularly offered Postdoctoral Fellowships in Israel Studies, the most recent of these being held by Moriel Ram.

Wallach was very active within the EAIS until it moved headquarters to Krakow in 2020. Nonetheless, as a member of the Academic Committee, he was not uncritical of some of its policies, notably the fact that many EAIS members now come from Israeli institutions, which provide funding for their academics to travel for academic endeavors. This phenomenon has greatly increased the number of Israelis who take part in an Association that defines itself as being European, and the fact that funding is so readily available for such participation gives them perhaps an unfair advantage, in Wallach’s opinion. To be clear, his critique is not that such scholars take part, but that the phenomenon is indicative of the EAIS’s “failure to build a base of European-based scholars. No easy solutions but without such an academic base, if EAIS does end up a holiday venue for Israeli-based scholars, that isn’t really what it was established for.”²¹

Sadly, the Coronavirus outbreak and its fallout dealt a tough blow to Israel Studies at SOAS. Due to budget cuts in its wake, the School axed the BA in Hebrew and Israeli Studies program – alongside many other language programs – and incorporated its various modules into a more general BA Languages and Cultures degree. Nonetheless, SOAS remains – alongside Oxford – one of the leading institutes for Israel Studies in the United Kingdom.

Oxford

Unlike SOAS, which saw its Israeli Studies program develop gradually, almost by accident, and due chiefly to the efforts of a single person who by his own admission “happened” into the position, the move to establish a dedicated position to the discipline involved several figures with various institutional allegiances and can be traced to a single incident.²²

On November 19, 2008, the then-President of Israel, Shimon Peres, spoke at the Sheldonian Theatre in Oxford. At one point during Peres’s speech, a Palestinian doctoral student stood up and began to approach the stage, shouting “You’re responsible for the massacre of hundreds of people in Palestine, you’re responsible for an apartheid state: shame on you!” before security guards escorted him out of the building.²³ The student’s overt aggressiveness, and, no less, the audience’s supportive applause – accompanied by shouts of “Hear, Hear!” – left an uneasy impression with several academics who were present, including Shlaim. The issue was not the fact that the student was critical of Peres and Israel, but that he expressed his criticism in a confrontational, and not at all academic, manner. Roger Goodman, who at the time was Head of the Oxford School of Interdisciplinary Area Studies and the Social Sciences Division, and who was also in the audience that day, saw the protest as a “wasted opportunity:” certainly a more effective means of critiquing Peres and Israeli policy would have been to wait until the Question and Answer period that followed Peres’s talk.²⁴ Eugene Rogan, Director of the Middle East Centre at Oxford, and who also attended Peres’s talk, concurs: “In this university, you show your intelligence not by threatening people with your presence […] but by threatening their position. You put a question that reveals the fallacy of their position.”²⁵

Goodman, in particular, thought that the incident demonstrated a clear need for someone at Oxford who specialized in Israel Studies, but not necessarily the cultural study of Israel. Himself a social scientist, Goodman envisaged such a role being filled by a political scientist or sociologist who “happened to study Israel” and who “would bring his interdisciplinary skills” – which are transferable – to other areas, in an attempt to “normalize” and “depoliticize” the study of Israel by comparative analysis. As such, he privileged “Israel Studies” – which sees the past as determined by the present – over its opposite, “Israelology.”²⁶

Goodman notes that it was of prime importance to find the correct funding body. According to Ruth Deech, at that time the Principal of St Anne’s College, the publisher and philanthropist George Weidenfeld (Lord Weidenfeld of Chelsea GBE) was the “prime mover” in raising funds.²⁷ Weidenfeld, however, was a staunch Zionist, and there was concern that – in the words of Avi Shlaim – “His commitment to Israel study emerged from his political affiliation with Israel and Zionism rather than from a desire to create a basis for a serious and objective research and teaching on Israel: He wanted somebody who would beat the Zionist drums in Oxford.”²⁸ Goodman, by contrast, understood clearly the necessity of not making the Chair a controversial post. For him, there was a “direct correlation between the legitimacy of the Chair with the transparency of the process” for its establishment.²⁹ With the philanthropist Michael Lewis, Goodman and Oxford found the ideal donor for the Chair.

Lewis had no formal connection with Oxford. Indeed, he had attended the University of Cape Town in his native South Africa and had made his fortune there, primarily as Chairman of the Foschini Group, which his father Stanley had acquired in the 1980s.³⁰ Michael expressed interest in “doing something to support the Chair” at Oxford, and – as Stanley had been recently diagnosed with cancer – Michael donated £3 million from the Stanley and Zea Lewis Family Foundation, in honor of his father.³¹

Lewis had no involvement with the position, outside of donating the funds for its endowment. As such, says Goodman, he was the “right donor […] he ‘got’ it.”³² Apparently, so did the university, which likewise saw the need to create a post that would normalize the study of Israel, and stimulate healthy debate in a “safe space” and in the name of academic freedom.³³ The fund would be administered by a Board of Management comprising the Head of the School of International and Area Studies, the Head of the department in which the post would be jointly held (see below), and the Head of the Social Sciences Board. The Stanley Lewis Professor in Israel Studies would “research and lecture on one or more of the modern history, politics, sociology or economics of the State of Israel,” and would “hold a joint appointment in the Oxford International and Area Studies and other social science disciplinary department as appropriate.”³⁴ In addition, the Chair would be affiliated with the Middle East Centre, the Oriental Institute, and the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies, rendering it – in terms of its scope and potential for absolutely integrated interdisciplinary research of the highest quality – unique. As Goodman notes, “you couldn’t have done this anywhere else.”³⁵ By 2009 – the year that Oxford University Council ratified the post – Shlaim had retired and Lucas had passed away, which created an even greater urgency for such a position.

In May 2011, the university appointed its first Stanley Lewis Professor, Derek Penslar. In line with the post’s criteria, Penslar was jointly appointed by the School of International Area Studies and the Department of Politics and International Relations and became a Fellow at St Anne’s College. According to Penslar, it was this college appointment that was in fact the “real challenge.”³⁶ In Oxford tradition, academic posts must also have an affiliation with one of Oxford’s 39 colleges, who make a bid for the post, and who will then be represented on the search committee. Wolfson College originally expressed interest – due in part to their association with Isaiah Berlin, who was one of the founders of the college – but St Anne’s eventually secured the Chair.

Penslar noted in the university press release announcing his appointment that “he regarded himself as under an obligation to strive for political neutrality and would study Israel within a global context.”³⁷ Indeed, he sought to resolve what he saw as two contradictory problems with the way Israel was being treated at Oxford: “One was a kind of cartoonish negative image, the other, though, was in some ways even worse, and that was ignoring it altogether.”³⁸ Unlike institutes such as SOAS, however – which often demonstrate an outright aversion to Israel – Penslar experienced very little hostility, rather: “a kind of discomfort […] with Israel. I think people were afraid of saying the wrong thing. They might be hostile to Israel, they might not be, but it just made them uncomfortable, and my job, I felt, was to make conversation about Israel possible.”³⁹ As an academic, Penslar fits more easily into the intellectual legacy of Lucas: although he is critical of Israel, it is the criticism of a rigorous academic. Nonetheless, his personal politics are not easily discernible.

In addition to supervising masters and doctoral students, he modified already existing papers in Modern Israel to suit his new position and introduced lectures at the Examination Schools on the history and politics of Israel. Penslar further convened weekly seminars in Israel Studies at the School of International and Area Studies that proved to be highly popular. One of the advantages of the Oxford system is that any student enrolled at the university may attend any lecture given under its auspices. Penslar’s lectures had an audience demographic that went far beyond Israeli-, Middle Eastern-, or even Jewish Studies, and the Israel Studies seminars were open to members of the general community.

The two books that spanned Penslar’s time in Oxford give a good idea of his diversity of scholarship. Jews in the Military, released in 2013, just after Penslar took up the Stanley Lewis Chair, was a “historical re-evaluation of the relationship between Jews, military, and war from the 1600s until the creation of the State of Israel in 1948.”⁴⁰ And his new biography of the father of political Zionism, Theodor Herzl – Theodor Herzl: The Charismatic Leader – showed that “Herzl’s path to Zionism had as much to do with personal crises as it did with antisemitism,” and that it was Herzl’s energy, organizational skills, and above all, charisma that allowed him to give momentum to an idea.⁴¹ Penslar worked on the book throughout his time in Oxford, and although it was released in 2020 once Penslar was at Harvard, he held a separate launch in Oxford where his successor Yaacov Yadgar interviewed him on his new book.

In addition to his teaching and research, Penslar provided mentorship to three postdoctoral researchers – Sharon Weinblum, Johannes Becke, and Roman Vaters – all of whom worked on Israel-related projects. And of the five doctoral students he supervised during his four years in Oxford – Kathrin Bachleitner, Peter Bergamin, Hebatala Taha, Netta Cohen, and Zaha Kheir – three now hold academic positions there: Bachleitner is Fellow in International Relations at the Department for Politics and International Relations, Bergamin is Lecturer in Oriental Studies at Mansfield College and Research Fellow at the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies, and Cohen is a Junior Research Fellow in History at Christchurch College. Penslar thus achieved much in the normalization of Israel and Israel studies at Oxford, and we may even speak of a Scuola Penslar that continues to this day, despite his relatively short stint there.

Another addition to Israel Studies at Oxford came with the Sidney Brichto Fellowship in Israel and Hebrew Studies. Brichto had been a fundraiser for the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies. When David Ariel took over its presidency in 2008, he thought it might be useful to concentrate fundraising efforts on Israel Studies, as this strategy proved successful at academic institutions in Ariel’s native USA. Sadly, Brichto died less than one year after Ariel arrived. Thus, Ariel suggested to Brichto’s widow, Cathryn, that they raise funds for an Israel Studies lectureship that would bear Sidney’s name.⁴² Eighty donors in all committed funds to the project, enough for one five-year appointment.⁴³ Sara Hirschhorn was appointed to the Lectureship, and held it from 2013–18. Like Penslar, Hirschhorn tutored papers on Israel, and became co-convenor of the Israel Studies seminars upon her arrival.

Nonetheless, the two roles did not completely overlap. Their creation and administration – one a university appointment in the social sciences, the other in history and culture, run through the Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies – had both different ends and means and were complimentary rather than competitive. Indeed, the Centre delayed advertising for the Brichto Fellowship until the university had appointed the Stanley Lewis Chair, and Penslar sat on the search committee for the Brichto position.⁴⁴ Hirschhorn – whose doctoral research focused on the Israeli settler movement – was thus a fitting complement to Penslar and his research. During her time at Oxford, Hirschhorn launched her first book, City on a Hilltop: American Jewish and the Israeli Settler Movement.⁴⁵

In 2016, Penslar left Oxford to become the William Lee Frost Professor of Jewish History at Harvard University. The fact that approximately 30 academics applied for the post when it was readvertised four years after its initial posting attests to Penslar’s and indeed the university’s success at integrating and indeed normalizing the study of Israel at Oxford.

Yaacov Yadgar succeeded Penslar, taking up the Stanley Lewis Chair in Israel Studies at the beginning of the academic year 2016–17. Yadgar had previously been a tenured Senior Lecturer in the Department of Political Studies at Bar Ilan University, and the Lisa and Douglas Goldman Fund Visiting Israeli Professor in 2012–13 at the University of California, Berkeley. A sociologist, Yadgar’s research “revolves around issues of Jewish identity, religion, politics, and secularism,” and he takes a multidisciplinary approach in “placing Israel in theoretical and epistemological frameworks that bear obvious relevance beyond the specific case history.”⁴⁶ As such, Yadgar introduced a new direction to Israel Studies at Oxford: one that was firmly rooted in sociological case studies, and which – not unlike Penslar – took an interdisciplinary methodological approach.

Yadgar recognizes the potential for tension in his approach, one that “want[s] to know a case study intimately, close at hand and comprehensively, and the disciplinary need to speak to a discipline that might not be interested in the case study.”⁴⁷ He sees such tension as not necessarily particular to the study of Israel: “In the political science[s], people tend to be either dismissive of, or indifferent to, knowing the case properly; they focus on the broad strokes.”⁴⁸ Thus, for him, the “history of this word ‘studies’ … has to do with the quality, with the motivations to start [a program of study], which comes from money.”⁴⁹ And in this regard, Yadgar notes a discernible difference between the North American and British contexts. In the United Kingdom, although perhaps – and indeed, probably – the British Jewish community might lean more to the Zionist side of the spectrum, “there’s very little by way of direct intervention [in the discipline], trying to tell you what to do.”⁵⁰

Indeed, like Penslar before him, Yadgar has managed to successfully realize his own vision of what a comprehensive Israel Studies program should include. Due in no small part to the nature of his own research, he has worked together with other disciplines and departments – not only Jewish and Oriental Studies, but also Theology and Religion, alongside Politics/International Relations and Area Studies – to further expand the multidisciplinary aspect of the subject. The weekly Israel Studies seminars continue – in addition to a new seminar series on early Jewish nationalist ideologies that he co-convenes with Bergamin – and are now housed in the Middle East Centre, creating a platform for constructive dialogue on Israel between scholars from all disciplines, regardless of whether they see “Israel” in terms of geopolitics, ideology, history, or religion, or indeed any or all of these classifications. Furthermore, as an Israel-born and educated academic of Mizrachi (Iranian) origin, Yadgar – not unlike Yair Wallach – represents a new “type” in Israel Studies: one that is neither ‘pro-‘ nor ‘anti-‘, but perhaps best described as ‘post-‘ or even ‘beyond-‘ “Zionist.” Israel – shed of any “Zionist” baggage – is simply another region to be studied. Indeed, his two most recent books – Sovereign Jews: Israel, Zionism, and Judaism (2017) and Israel’s Jewish Identity Crisis: State and Politics in the Middle East (2021) – both published since he took over the Stanley Lewis Chair, attest to this categorization.⁵¹

Sussex

Perhaps a third person to add to the “beyond-Zionist” categorization suggested above, would be David Tal, who holds the third, and newest, position at a UK university that is dedicated to Israel Studies, the Yossi Harel Chair in Modern Israel Studies (History).

The creation of the chair overlapped the creation of the Stanley Lewis Chair and Brichto Lectureship at Oxford, and the Pears Lectureship at SOAS. Thus, the years 2011–13 were a hotbed of action for the establishment of Israel Studies as its own academic discipline in the UK. Perhaps not surprisingly, Weidenfeld also had a hand in fundraising for the Sussex position, and the money he raised – approximately £1 million – was put together with funding from the Pears Foundation and donated to the university to begin the process of selecting the Chair.⁵² Tal, a specialist in the military and diplomatic history of Israel, had been the Kahanoff Chair in Israel Studies at the University of Calgary when he interviewed and accepted the position at Sussex.⁵³

Tal, like his colleagues discussed above, placed prime importance on the academic process of his selection, and – again, not unlike his colleagues at SOAS and Oxford – he notes that “The process was separated from the politics behind [the funding]. It’s obvious that there is politics, but I don’t know if people know my political thinking […] I was never asked about that, and I don’t think that my research can apply to th[is] or that aspect of politics […] For me, the whole selection process was completely academic, and I wouldn’t [have] agree[d] otherwise.”⁵⁴ There was perhaps one important further reason for taking the job at Sussex: “Calgary is very cold!”

He sees his Chair in very much the same way as his colleagues in SOAS and Oxford:

‘I’m a historian and I’m doing Israeli history. Someone decided to donate money to create a chair in Israel Studies, which is done in many universities, so there’s nothing unique about the Chair […] Essentially I am the Chair of Israel Studies, but Israeli Studies as such does not exist in the sense that I’m teaching courses on Israel, but these modules are among many other modules [in the History department at Sussex].”⁵⁵ His courses – “Zionism to post-Zionism,” and the “Arab-Israeli conflict” – all occur under the umbrella of the BA History program at Sussex.

Be that as it may, and like SOAS and Oxford, Tal’s position – as one of only three Lecture- or Professorships in Israel Studies at UK universities – is important both in terms of the historical “moment” that led to its creation, and indeed the need for dedicated scholarship on the region that keeps it going. It would appear that, as noted above, the years 2011–13 were seminal years in codifying – through the proactive creation of durable positions in Israel Studies at three of the UK’s leading universities – much of what had existed, only peripherally, in the cases of Lucas and Shlaim at Oxford, or through personal engagement, as with Shindler at SOAS. Indeed, no matter where it is situated in each institution, nor how it is carried out in practice, Israel Studies as a dedicated discipline is now firmly situated on the academic programs in all three of the institutions discussed, above.

Israel studies as a discipline in British universities

At his inaugural lecture for the Stanley Lewis Chair in Israel Studies, on June 3, 2014, Penslar noted:

Israel is a small country, but it commands vast attention, and it is an essential object of study. […]. The existence of a standalone post in Israel Studies thus makes good sense, and yet given Israel’s location in the heart of the Middle East and the visibility of the Israel-Palestine conflict, it is often housed within Middle Eastern Studies. At Oxford as at many other universities, Israel Studies is placed as well within a disciplinary department such as Political Science or International Relations, and it usually has some connection with Jewish Studies.⁵⁶

Penslar then went on to examine the “relationship between critique and apologetics in the field of Israel Studies.”⁵⁷ When interviewing for this article, I undertook with each academic a discussion on the idea of Israel Studies as a dedicated discipline, in the hopes of gleaning some idea of their own feelings in this respect. And although, in the final analysis, most of their views might only be very cynically relegated to that of either “critique” or “apologetic,” the two categories are not completely useless when trying to discern the perceived utility (or indeed lack thereof) of dedicated study to such a small geographic – but welt-politically volatile – region.

Shindler, whom we might fairly see as the first academic in the UK to consciously try to develop an Israel Studies program, not surprisingly maintains that “it’s certainly a discipline,” but sadly “one which gets lost in the megaphone war between pro-Israel and pro-Palestine,” and thus “was always regarded suspiciously.”⁵⁸ As such, Shindler “never set out to be a hasbara [propaganda] outfit,” and has constantly striven for neutrality in both his teaching and writing. Indeed, the fact that he succeeded in this effort – in spite of the fact that his research focuses largely on the Israeli Right – speaks volumes for his initiative.

Penslar further elaborated on his view of the validity of Israel Studies as its own discipline in an interview for this article:

Israel Studies can bestow upon a scholar the same advantages that you have in Jewish Studies if done right, which is that you work in a small and peripheral discipline. And in order to do it well, you have to know something about, and be able to talk to, people in a great many other fields […] As, in order to study Jewish history, you’ve got to know a little bit about everything, so can Israel Studies actually be more illuminating that if you work on something big, like American history.⁵⁹

Penslar’s colleague during his Oxford stint, Sara Hirschhorn, is of a similar opinion:

Israel Studies today defines itself as an interdisciplinary discipline – primarily of scholars and practitioners in the humanities and social sciences whose work pertains to some aspect of modern Israel, either alone or in a comparative perspective. This interdisciplinarity allows opportunities to gather experts in many fields who can have a rich conversation across methodologies, while also posing challenges in finding core themes and “languages” with which to communicate.⁶⁰

Shlaim disagrees:

It is not a discipline, it’s a multidisciplinary study of one country. And a multidisciplinary approach is very fashionable and it has some things going for it. But there’s also a downside, which is that it becomes a hodgepodge of different approaches to the subject, without any principle, main discipline. So I think the way around this problem is to do Israel Studies in a multidisciplinary approach [in which] the writer [is] grounded in that discipline, whatever it is, and then everything else is an add-on […] So, I’m a historian, and I approach everything to do with Israel Studies as a historian.⁶¹

Tal seems to agree with Shlaim, to some degree: “It’s not a discipline; there is nothing from the methodological contribution that that is unique […] The one thing that is quite obvious is that Israel Studies as such was created for political [reasons]. There’s no academic reason for the existence of Israel Studies […] I’m a historian and I’m doing Israeli history.”⁶²

The question of geography is also not to be discarded. Rogan, not surprisingly, sees Israel Studies as “having been a very firm subsection [of Middle Eastern Studies] in its own right, but [one] that’s taken a little longer to develop institutionally outside the United States.”⁶³ He suggests that a reason for this delay may have been because “it might have been more difficult for Israel Studies to separate itself from the broader field of Jewish Studies.”⁶⁴ Shlaim agrees, and elaborates: “Israel geographically is located in the Middle East. It doesn’t like being in the Middle East, doesn’t like its neighborhood, but that’s where it is.”⁶⁵ For Wallach however, the problem is even more substantial: the fact that Israel’s borders are undefined makes the very definition of “Israel” problematic.⁶⁶

Yadgar is clear that Israel Studies fits within the larger framework of Middle Eastern Studies.⁶⁷ Nonetheless, he doesn’t discount the idea of Israel Studies as its own academic discipline: “It depends on the way we execute [it]. I don’t think in principle it’s illegitimate.”⁶⁸ But, for him, there is a danger of “saying that Israel is an idiosyncratic story that cannot be compared to anything.”⁶⁹ Yet Yadgar highlights another phenomenon that is perhaps idiosyncratic to Israel Studies: “There are two groups interested in Israel. Those who were taught in conservative Jewish schools [where] Israel is part of the Jewish identity. But they’re not our students [who constitute the second group, ed.] because they don’t study Israel.” Nonetheless, he notes the potential for tension between the two groups.⁷⁰ And Penslar spots another potential problem:

Although the field [of Israel Studies] is growing, I don’t see particularly within the State of Israel a significant move among Israeli graduate students to embrace Israel Studies as part of Middle Eastern Studies, or as part of the history of decolonization or the history of the Cold War, etc. Students with such interests tend to be in International Relations or anthropology –social sciences, where they can think broadly and comparatively (and be on the left of the political spectrum).⁷¹

As such, in his opinion, these students tend to stand outside of the “traditional” world represented by the Association for Israel Studies.⁷² Nonetheless, sociologists such as Roger Goodman and Yadgar would doubtless see such development in a positive light. Shlaim, commenting on the rather specific phenomenon of the SOAS BA in Hebrew and Israel Studies is more cynical:

I don’t think it’s a good idea to have a degree in Israel Studies, because you emerge out of university with an extremely narrow and limited knowledge and the purpose of university is to give you a liberal education […] And to have someone who does nothing but Israel, which is one small country with a population of nine million people and ignore the rest of the Middle East and the world is just not good enough.⁷³

He would certainly welcome the fact that the SOAS course has now been rebranded into a more general language BA, or a Middle Eastern Studies BA, although the reason for this change – budget cuts across all small language programs at the institute – had more to do with financial reality than ideology.

Conclusion

This article has focused on the three UK institutions that hold dedicated chairs in Israel studies. Nonetheless, there are many more lecturers who engage with the study of Israel in their curricula. Oxford’s historic competitor, the University of Cambridge, while having no dedicated program to the study of Israel, does – in the figures of the Kennedy-Leigh Professor of Modern Hebrew Studies, Yaron Peleg, and Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellow, Roman Vaters, who researches Israeli nationalist anti-Zionism – offers some degree of academic focus on the subject. Moshe Behar, Senior Lecturer in Israel/Palestine Studies at the University of Manchester approximates Shindler’s and Wallach’s position at SOAS, insofar as he teaches within the discipline of Modern Languages and Cultures. Alan Craig, who had previously held a Pears Lectureship in Israel and Middle Eastern Studies at Leeds, is now a Visiting Research Fellow there, having also served as Chair of the European Association of Israel Studies from 2016–19. Another former Leeds Lecturer and EAIS Chair (2013–16), Clive Jones, now holds a Professorship of Regional Security at Durham University.

It would be remiss not to mention University College London (UCL), which has one of the largest Jewish studies programs outside of Israeli or American universities and boasts the largest Jewish student and staff population of any British university. Nonetheless, it is perhaps notable that an institution that has engaged with the subjects of Israel and Zionism for decades has no dedicated Chair in Israel Studies.

Kings College London is also worthy of mention. The Israeli historian Efraim Karsh, and political scientists Ahron Bregman and Menachem Klein all bring their various expertise in the study of Israel to more general security and regional programs of study. In a similar vein, Queen Mary University is notable for the Israel/Palestine-focused research and teaching that Neve Gordon, James Eastwood, and Sharri Plonsky carry out. Regrettably, this article can do no more than pay mere lip service to their contribution to the field.

It would appear then, that the discipline of Israel Studies seems to be undergoing a significant fundamental overhaul, one which sees Israel both come into its own as a focus of academic study and at the same time take its place within the greater geographical and ideological context of the Middle East. While we still see traces of the “first” generation of Israel Studies scholars, what Hirschhorn describes as those being “concerned with research about pre-State Israel and the 1948 war, through the lens of empirical and often archival-based study,” and which often felt the need to describe their work in relation (either pro- or anti-) to Zionism, this new generation, which – perhaps not coincidentally – includes Wallach, Penslar, Yadgar, and Tal, is happy to shed any Zionist “agenda,” and meet Israel on its own terms.⁷⁴ As such, the expectations of Roger Goodman and the Oxford team who implemented the Stanley Lewis Chair have been met: the three UK institutions that established dedicated chairs in Israel Studies between 2011–12 – Oxford, SOAS, and Sussex – have successfully managed to normalize the study of Israel. Israel Studies as its own academic discipline is not only thriving but integrated in a way that was perhaps unimaginable only 20 years ago.

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Additional information

Notes on contributors

Peter Bergamin

Peter Bergamin is Lecturer in Oriental Studies at Mansfield College, University of Oxford, and Research Fellow of the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies. Peter specializes on the British Mandate for Palestine, with a particular interest in Maximalist-Revisionist Zionism.His first monograph, The Making of the Israeli Far-Right: Abba Ahimeir and Zionist Ideology (I.B. Tauris, 2020), focused on the ideological and political genesis of one of the major leaders of pro-Fascist, Far-Right Zionism, in the 1920s and 30s. He is preparing a manuscript that focuses on the role of Jewish anti-British resistance in Britain’s withdrawal from the Palestine Mandate. His current research looks at Anglo-Jewry in the first half of the Twentieth Century, using the British Zionists Paul and Romana Goodman as a case study.

Notes

1. George Mandel, “Obituary: Noah Lucas,” The Guardian, March 6, 2009. Interview with Martin Goodman, 29 Oct 2021.

2. Report of the Oxford Centre for Postgraduate Hebrew Studies 1990–1991, pp. 45–6. https://www.ochjs.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/AR-1990-91.pdf, accessed April 22, 2014.

3. Lucas, The Modern History of Israel.

4. Interview with Martin Goodman, Oct 29, 2021, and Derek Penslar, Dec 16, 2021.

5. Ibid.

6. See, inter alia, Shlaim, “Britain and the Arab-Israeli War of 1948,” and Collusion Across the Jordan.

7. Rogan, “The Middle East Centre, 1987–2007,” 14. I am grateful to Eugene Rogan for kindly providing me with a copy of the book.

8. Nicholls, The History of St Antony’s College, quoted in ibid., 112.

9. Ibid. Aron Shai – at that time Rector of Tel Aviv University – resurrected the program in 2014.

10. See Rogan, “The Middle East Centre,” 17.

11. Interview with author, August 2, 2021. See: Shindler, Ploughshares Into Swords? and Israel, Likud and the Zionist Dream.

12. Interview with author, August 2, 2021.

13. Interview, August 2, 2021.

14. Shindler, The Triumph of Military Zionism and A History of Modern Israel.

15. See note 13 above.

16. Ibid.

17. Ibid.

18. Pears Foundation website, https://pearsfoundation.org.uk/, accessed April 22, 2024.

19. Yair Wallach, https://soas.academia.edu/YairWallach, accessed April 22, 2024.

20. Wallach, A City in Fragments, back cover.

21. Yair Wallach, e-mail to author, November 3, 2021.

22. Interviews with Roger Goodman August 17, 2021, Eugene Rogan, September 14, 2021, and Avi Shlaim, September 23, 2021.

23. See “Shimon Peres at Oxford University,” https://youtu.be/MbT2Z4dh-KA, accessed April 22, 2024.

24. Interview with Roger Goodman, August 17, 2001.

25. Interview with Eugene Rogan, September 14, 2021.

26. Interview with Roger Goodman, August 17, 2021.

27. Ruth Deech, e-mail to author October 13, 2021.

28. Interview with Avi Shlaim, September 23, 2021.

29. See note 26 above.

30. Sandisiewe Mbhele, “Meet Michael Lewis, SA-born Billionaire Who Married Princess Diana’s Niece,” The Citizen, July 27, 2021, https://www.citizen.co.za/entertainment/celebrity-news/2581225/michael-lewis-married-princess-dianas-niece/, accessed April 23, 2024.

31. Interview with Roger Goodman, August 17, 2021, and “Stanley Lewis Professor of Israel Studies,” Oxford University Gazette, Vol. 148, p. 491, May 24, 2018, https://governance.admin.ox.ac.uk/legislation/stanley-lewis-professor-of-israel-studies, accessed April 23, 2024.

32. See note 26 above.

33. Ibid.

34. “Stanley Lewis Professor of Israel Studies,” 491.

35. See note 26 above.

36. Interview with Derek Penslar, July 20, 2021.

37. “Professor Derek Penslar to join department at the first Stanley Lewis Professor of Israel Studies”

38. See note 36 above.

39. Ibid.

40. Penslar, Jews and the Military, quoted at https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691138879/jews-and-the-military, accessed April 23, 2024.

41. Penslar, Theodor Herzl, inside front jacket.

42. Interview with Martin Goodman, October 29, 2021.

43. Ibid.

44. Ibid.

45. Hirschhorn, City on a Hilltop.

46. “Yaacov Yadgar,” https://oxford.academia.edu/YaacovYadgar, accessed November 9, 2021.

47. Interview with Yaacov Yadgar, August 11, 2021.

48. Ibid.

49. Ibid.

50. Ibid.

51. Yadgar, Sovereign Jews and Israel’s Jewish Identity Crisis.

52. Interview with David Tal, September 23, 2021.

53. Ibid., and “Yossi Harel Chair of Israel Studies,” https://www.sussex.ac.uk/research/centres/jewish-studies/israel-studies, accessed April 23, 2024. See, for example, Tal, War in Palestine and The American Nuclear Disarmament Dilemma, 1945–1963.

54. Ibid.

55. Ibid.

56. Derek Penslar, “What is Israel Studies,” Inaugural Lecture, June 3, 2014. I am indebted to Derek Penslar for providing me with a copy of his lecture.

57. Ibid.

58. Interview with Colin Shindler, August 2 2021.

59. Interview with Derek Penslar, July 20, 2021.

60. Sara Hirschhorn, e-mail to author, November 10, 2021.

61. Interview with Avi Shlaim, September 23, 2021.

62. Interview with David Tal, September 23, 2021.

63. Interview with Eugene Rogan, September 14, 2021.

64. Ibid.

65. See note 61 above.

66. Interview with Yair Wallach, August 10, 2021.

67. Interview with Yaacov Yadgar, August 10, 2021.

68. Ibid.

69. Ibid.

70. Ibid.

71. See note 59 above.

72. Ibid.

73. See note 61 above.

74. Sara Hirschhorn, e-mail to author, November 10, 2021. I would also categorize myself, and colleagues such as Sara Hirschhorn and Johannes Becke, similarly.