Teachers explore Israel’s democracy at St. Elizabeth seminar on social studies

by Robert Wiener
NJJN Staff Writer

Participants at a three-day conference in Convent Station submitted a plan for revamping Israel’s government this week, supporting direct balloting to elect the country’s prime minister and urging a codified constitution to augment the country’s 11 basic laws.

While no one expected Israel to move quickly to adopt the plan, organizers of the conference — the New Jersey Social Studies Teachers’ Summer Institute at the College of St. Elizabeth — felt the exercise was a success in exposing the 26 participating teachers to the reality and challenges of Israeli democracy.

The conference, which began on June 27, was titled Maintaining Democracy & Civil Liberties in an Age of Terrorism: Israel as a Case Study. Its sponsors were the College of St. Elizabeth, the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, the NJ-Israel Commission, and the North American Coalition for Israel Engagement.

“Part of the goal is to expose social studies [teachers] to Israel because they know very little about it and to hopefully have them have a more positive attitude towards Israel and also to transmit that to their students,” said Rebecca Glass, Israel education director at United Jewish Communities of MetroWest NJ and a representative of NACIE, a project of the Jewish Agency for Israel.

Participants heard presentations from Harriet Sepinwall, codirector St. Elizabeth’s Holocaust Education Resource Center; Guy Benshachar, executive shaliah, or emissary, of UJC MetroWest; and Jonathan Adelman, professor in the Graduate School of International Studies at the University of Denver.

It was Adelman in his Monday lecture who laid out the challenges of maintaining democracy in the tinderbox of the Middle East, including the fundamental question of whether Israel is a “state of the Israelis or … a state of the Jews.” Adding to Israel’s challenges is the increasingly potent voice of Israel’s Jewish Orthodoxy, who would like to see Israeli law hew more closely to the Torah.

Benshachar, the only Israeli citizen at the seminar, suggested other challenges in an interview with NJ Jewish News. Benshachar, who will be returning to his home in Tel Aviv at the end of July after serving a three-year terms as an emissary to MetroWest, said he was troubled by a disparity between the way Israeli law treats those living within the Green Line and in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

“I think it is a big problem in the territories in terms of the lack of enforcement of Israeli law on settlers and I think the Israelis now are maybe starting to understand that it is problematic for Israelis as well,” Benshachar said.

Adelman disagreed, suggesting that such a two-tiered system of justice in the occupied territories does not compromise Israel’s democratic nature because “those are areas that are under military control, any more than what the United States does abroad, and the United States doesn’t face massive waves of terrorism.”

On the first day of the conference, teachers divided into three workshops and drafted recommendations on how best to enhance democratic forms in Jordan, Egypt, and Israel.

Organizers said they were untroubled by lack of Palestinian participation in the seminars on Israel and democracy.

“The majority of post-13-year-old Jewish students have no connection to formal Judaism at all or Jewish education. The majority of our kids go to public schools and this is the only venue we have to reach out to the students indirectly,” Glass said. “This is not propaganda. It is not advocacy. It is to give the teachers tools to utilize in their classrooms.”

Colleen Tambuscio, a master teacher at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Regional Education Corps, said the absence of Palestinians did not suggest a lack of balance on the part of the programmers.

“It’s like when we started out with Holocaust education and people weren’t happy that all the other genocides weren’t included at first,” she told NJJN. “That was because we were building a case study for the Holocaust, and then later those components were included. That might happen with this as well.”

Tambuscio said she wanted “to make sure the Israeli viewpoint is represented fairly and accurately, because the media doesn’t fairly represent anything.”

Rhonda Seyam, a Muslim who teaches Middle Eastern studies as part of her world history courses at Chatham High School, told NJJN most of the students who take her courses are supporters of Israel “who get most of their information from the media.”

Rather than state her own political opinions, Seyam said she scrupulously presented all viewpoints in her classes. “I attended the sessions so I can make sure my students get all sides,” she said.

Robert Wiener can be reached at rwiener@njjewishnews.com.