The Pedagogy of Israel–Palestine: University and Community Perspectives

The ACJC presents Shai Ginsburg in Residence. Shai Ginsburg is Associate Professor of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at Duke University. His research focuses on modern Hebrew literature, Israeli cinema, Jewish intellectual history, literary theory, and game studies. He is the author of Rhetoric and Nation: The Formation of Hebrew National Culture, 1880–1990 and coeditor of Jews and the Ends of Theory and Bounded Mind and Soul: Russia and Israel, 1880–2010. His current work explores the emergence of Hebrew speech at the turn of the twentieth century. Joining us from the ACJC, Dr. Daniel Kupfert Heller, the Kronhill Senior Lecturer in East European Jewish History at the Centre. His areas of research specialisation are East European Jewish history and the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. His first book, Jabotinsky’s Children: Polish Jews and the Rise of Right-Wing Zionism, appeared in 2017 with Princeton University Press. This conversation brings together university and community perspectives on the challenges of teaching Israel–Palestine in the current moment. It will consider how educators navigate questions of historical context, competing narratives, contested language, empathy, political commitment, and moral judgment, as well as the different expectations that shape university classrooms and community settings. The discussion will also explore the relationship between scholarship and advocacy, the responsibilities of educators and institutions, and the ways in which identity, place, language, and personal experience shape what can be said, heard, and taught. Rather than seeking a single model of “balance,” the conversation asks what intellectually rigorous and responsible pedagogy might look like amid polarisation, ongoing violence, and intense public debate.