Former Harvard prof.: I had to teach while bodies littered Israeli streets

Prof. Michal Bar-Asher Siegal, Vice President for Global Engagement at Ben-Gurion University, was asked to take on her position while working as a visiting professor at Yale University and right before moving to teach at Harvard University’s Law School.

Then, October 7 happened.

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“I was at Harvard teaching, and what I experienced was shocking to me,” she told The Jerusalem Post at “Coming Home: Aliyah in Times of War,” a conference on the challenges of making aliyah while the region rages and antisemitism has spiked worldwide.

“I had to go teach on October 9 and go through hundreds of protesters yelling, ‘free Palestine,’ ‘From the river to the sea,’” she said. “There were still bodies in the streets in Israel. I had to get myself up from bed and go teach and pass such hatred of Israel, and the conversation turned to the right of Israel to exist.

“Anti-Israel sentiments were so prevalent,” she continued. “At the end of my semester, I came back to Israel with my family, but my students, my Jewish students that were on campus, I will never forget seeing them and talking to them while this was happening.”

When asked about academic boycotts, Bar-Asher Siegal said, “Honestly, even if you have criticism of Israel or Israel’s engagement in Gaza or Israel policy, boycotting academia is probably the stupidest thing or the worst thing you can do to fight Israeli policy in Gaza and Lebanon for the very simple reason that academia is the place for freedom of speech: of multi-vocality. We have Palestinian and Arab students sitting side by side Israeli students. The real conversation is taking place on academic campuses.”

Bar-Asher Siegal was disappointed to note that a majority of the hate was coming from the humanities: the discipline to which she belongs.

“There are my colleagues… and I was so sad and surprised by the simplistic approach for bad and good and evil… and how easily and how fast Hamas received support,” she said. “I have to say my biggest misconception is how they switched from criticism of the occupation, which is one thing, to talking about Israel’s right to exist… People don’t even know which river and sea.

“We, as academics, should know better,” she continued. “I am still a very firm believer in knowledge and education and teaching people what there is, and I have to tell you, we hear the loud voices, and I think they're still the minority within academia. The vast majority of people I know who know our research know that it’s good research, and want to continue working with us.”

She added, “I think the vast majority of people are with us, but we should be better at teaching and educating people about the complexity of the situation here on the ground.”

For Israelis or Diaspora Jews who want to study in English and feel ostracized, Bar-Asher Siegal said that Ben-Gurion University is an excellent alternative.

“We offer a variety of international programs for graduate students, Masters’ programs, post-docs,” she said. “We have a full BA degree in sustainability; you can come and study at Eilat’s campus and swim with dolphins. You can come and learn about solar energy, and you can study at Ben-Gurion in Beersheba, which is the best campus Israel has to offer. And Ben-Gurion’s agenda is that we don’t have separate programs for international students. Our entire international program is completely integrated with Israeli students. You come to us, you study in class next to Israeli students. You study with them, side by side. This is our policy, our ideology, and it’s a wonderful campus.”

Nevertheless, those looking to promote tolerance internationally have a very fascinating place to look for resources: history.

“I am a professor of Rabbinic Judaism,” Bar-Asher Siegal said. “I studied Jews and Christians in the first century CE, especially in a text called the Babylonian Talmud. I was teaching [at Harvard] about law between Jews and Christians in those first centuries, and what we call interreligious dialog, how those two groups suffered from massacres and persecution over the centuries, and how those two religious groups lived side by side. We have, you know, Christians in the fourth century fasting on Yom Kippur. And we have Jews looking at some theological concept in Christianity and saying, ‘Oh, that might work for us.’

“I was teaching that while my country, my family, my friends, and my community were suffering from a different interreligious conflict that was happening on the ground,” she continued. “We have to learn how history overcame it, how we manage to live through history, religious strife, and conflict, and how we made it work in previous centuries, and try to learn lessons from the horrible, horrible periods we’re living through.”

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