This spring for the first time, Princeton University will offer an undergraduate course in Israeli culture and society.

Held under the auspices of the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies, the course will be taught by Rabbi James Diamond, a lecturer in Princeton’s Department of Near Eastern Studies and former executive director of the university’s Center for Jewish Life/Hillel.

Israeli Culture and Society will also be cross-listed under Princeton’s Program in Judaic Studies.

“It’s never been given before,” Diamond said during an interview at his home in Princeton. “I think it’s significant. It indicates that Princeton at least is definitely committed to making sure that Israel is in the academic mix.”

That was never in doubt, Diamond added, pointing, for example, to Ambassador Daniel Kurtzer’s graduate seminar at Princeton last semester on Jerusalem, the Contested City: Exploring Options for a Settlement. However, he said, the Israeli Culture and Society course will fill in the blanks in a different way.

“My sense is that the university is very conscious of the fact that nowadays, Israel is getting a very bad rap in academia,” he said. “It doesn’t want to be a party to that. It also doesn’t want to whitewash whatever Israel does. Israel needs to be subject to the same academic analysis as all other societies are. Israel is an admissible subject for inquiry.”

Diamond said he started thinking seriously about the course last spring, when the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies let it be known that it would entertain proposals for new courses relating to regional studies and culture.

“When I saw this proposal from PIIRS, I put two and two together and said, ‘Aha! I’m going to put in for a new course in Israeli society,’” Diamond said. He added that his colleague Miguel Centeno, PIIRS director and a professor of sociology at Princeton, was receptive to the idea. (Centeno did not return phone calls or e-mails seeking comment.)

Diamond, who lived in Israel for two years during the 1970s and again for one year in the 1980s, said he has been to Israel some 18 times. He is in the process of building on that experience with wide-ranging research into Israeli society in preparation for his new course.

“The course will be designed to examine Israel in social and cultural terms,” he said. “I hope to help students understand this small but complex country and to help them place what they see in the media in a larger human context. It’s presenting Israel in a new light.”

Some of the issues Diamond said he plans to cover in the course are nationalism, pluralism, citizenship, the cultural aspects of Zionism, religious vs. secular Israelis, the kibbutz as a social institution, the army as a socializing agency, gender politics in Israeli society, Israeli literature and films, and the tensions created by a Jewish state that is also a democratic one.

Such issues are well known to the Jewish community but are seldom presented academically, according to Diamond. He said the best example he knows of in the genre is the Rutgers University course in Israeli Culture taught by Yael Zerubavel, founding director of the Allen and Joan Bildner Center for the Study of Jewish Life, located on Rutgers’ New Brunswick campus.

“For me, it’s exciting because I’m going to be working with material I have not been working with up till now,” said Diamond, who has traditionally taught courses in Hebrew literature, Jewish studies, and the humanities at Princeton. “I’m going to be encountering new material and trying to work with a different set of issues than I’ve normally been working with.”

When he presents Israeli Culture and Society to Princeton undergraduates, Diamond said, he will be marking his ninth year as an adjunct faculty member at the university. “Now that I’ve left Hillel,” he said, “it’s my life.”