Called by creators the largest clearinghouse of its type, Israel and the Academy site offers info to combat anti-Israel campaigns on college campuses
WASHINGTON — Founders of a new and exhaustive informational website hope that their project will provide a powerful tool to beat back the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement’s inroads on college campuses —
and it may just break some records along the way. Offering a deluge of information on Jewish identity, Israeli studies and –yes — the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the professors behind the project hope that it will provide a key to stemming the tide of BDS arguments in higher education, and even help to forward their goal of a two-state solution.
The website, Israel and the Academy, debuted Thursday as the latest initiative by a group of senior American academics, mostly affiliated with the anti-boycott MLA Members for Scholars’ Rights. The faculty members, many of whom have been on the front lines of the struggle against the academic boycott of Israel for the better part of a decade, envisioned a website that would provide all of the informational resources necessary to counterbalance — and at times challenge — BDS activity on campuses.
The idea of a clearinghouse website was first floated in May 2015, when a group of some 15 faculty members met to determine their next course of action.
“BDS over the past few years has ramped up its activities so much more aggressively, that many more associations — I think a dozen of them — have been involved in those debates. It kind of became clear that we should be talking to one another,” explained Professor Cary Nelson, one of the leading voices against BDS in US academic circles. “The group was unanimous in feeling that the thing we really most needed was a rich website that people from communities, universities, government offices and anywhere else could go to for a repository of information that they would need to engage in these struggles,” he explained.
At the same time, Nelson said, the scholars also wanted “to do something significant around pedagogy over Jewish culture, history, Israeli culture and history, so it kind of dawned on us that the BDS stuff and the pedagogy stuff could be accomplished through the same website, so we could get two of our goals done that way.”
The website’s advisory board constitutes about two dozen academics, who reached out to friends and colleagues asking for essays and especially syllabi to be shared on the new platform.
Although the initial process was slow, the results were massive. The website now will include over 450 syllabi, making it the largest resource of its type — offering free-access syllabi — in the world, according to the founders.
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