Shalem College

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Shalem College

המרכז האקדמי שלם
Type	Private Liberal arts
Established	2013
President	Russ Roberts
Vice-president	Daniel Gordis
Students	Up to 200
Location	Jerusalem , Israel[1][2]
Website	www.shalem.ac.il

Shalem College (Hebrew: המרכז האקדמי שלם‎, HaMerkaz HaAkademi Shalem) is a privately funded, undergraduate-degree granting institution in Jerusalem founded with the aim of producing "broadly educated citizens for lives of influence and service."^[3] It is the only Israeli institution of higher education to offer a broad-based Core Curriculum as the basis for a first degree, as opposed to the general practice in Israeli universities and colleges of restricting a student's courses to a single department or field.^[4][1]

Shalem accepts an average of 50 students for each academic class (for a total of up to 200). Candidates are selected on the basis of exams, intellectual capabilities, and demonstrated commitment to public service.^[5] Accepted applicants receive substantial financial aid packages.^[5]

The college is accredited by the Council for Higher Education in Israel.^[6]

History[]

Shalem College was founded in January 2013 following accreditation by the Council for Higher Education in Israel.^[1] It grew out of The Shalem Center, a think tank that aimed to enrich Israel’s intellectual discourse through research, publications, and public lectures.^[7]

The Center was home to notable Israeli public figures, including former Israeli Ambassador to the United States Michael Oren, who wrote his definitive history of the Six-Day War while a fellow there, and the human-rights activist and Israel Prize winner Natan Sharansky, who currently teaches a seminar at the college on democracy and national identity.^[8]

Academics[]

Shalem College has pioneered the use of required courses for all students alongside a choice of major concentrations. Its Core Curriculum, the centerpiece of the college’s academic community, includes courses in philosophy, history, the natural and social sciences, literature, and the fine arts.^[9] It emphasizes the classic texts of both Judaism and Islam (the Hebrew Bible, the Talmud, and the Koran,^[10] among others) and courses on the history of the wider Middle East—subjects the college deems essential to meaningful citizenship in a modern Jewish state and active participation in Israel’s diverse society.^[11] The college also encourages the reading of primary sources. Most courses in the Core are taught in seminars of no more than 25 students.^[5]

The Department of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies is notable for requiring fluency in Arabic as a condition of its degree. The department pioneered the practice of bi-weekly, one-on-one sessions with native Arabic speakers and summer Arabic immersion programs to help students attain this goal.^[11]

The college currently plans to open a new department, in Grand Strategy and Diplomacy, to be chaired by Prof. , a leading scholar of military and diplomatic strategy, the founding director of the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies, and the current president of the Jerusalem Institute for Strategy and Security. Additional departments in economics and policy are slated for the coming years.

The language of instruction at Shalem is Hebrew, although students are required to demonstrate a level of English proficiency as a condition of their admittance.^[12]

Citizenship[]

The college features a comprehensive citizenship curriculum, including an experiential course on the major challenges in Israeli society,^[13] an accelerator for socially minded entrepreneurship,^[14] and the “Israel Story” event series,^[15] which brings notable Israeli authors—including David Grossman^[16] and Micah Goodman—to campus to discuss texts that have shaped the nation’s narrative. It also emphasizes Jewish peoplehood, most notably through annual delegations to the Bay Area and Washington DC.^[17] Finally, the college actively encourages student initiatives for social change, several of which have become sustainable organizations and nonprofits.^[18][19][20]

Leadership and faculty[]

Middle East scholar Dr. Martin Kramer, a student of the British-American historian Bernard Lewis, served as the college’s first president, from 2013 to 2017.^[21] He was succeeded by Prof. Isaiah Gafni, a scholar of Jewish history in the Second Temple Period and the formerly a professor emeritus and the Sol Rosenbloom Chair of Jewish history at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The current president is Prof. Russ Roberts, the American economist, public intellectual, and John and Jean De Nault Research Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. He is also the founder of the popular podcast EconTalk: Conversations for the Curious.

Among the college’s notable faculty are Daniel Gordis, the author and commentator on Israeli-American Jewish relations, who serves as the chair of the Core Curriculum Department; Leon Kass, the Addie Clark Harding Professor Emeritus in the Committee on Social Thought and in the College at the University of Chicago, who serves as the Dean of the Faculty; and author Assaf Inbari, whose history of the kibbutz movement was nominated for Israel’s highest literary honor and who teaches a specially designed course on Hebrew literature and Zionist thought.

Although the Shalem Center had a reputation for being dominated by immigrants from the United States, the college is seen as having “broke[n] out of the Anglo mold.” The college is not affiliated with any political or religious ideology.

Shalem College Press[]

Shalem College is home to Shalem College Press, established in 1995 with the goal of enriching Israel’s intellectual life by translating classic works of Western thought into Hebrew for the first time.^[22] Over the years, the Press expanded its mission to include Hebrew translations of contemporary works of political and social thought and English-language publications in the fields of Jewish thought and Zionism. Titles in its Leviathan Series, which include David Hume’s A Treatise of Human Nature, Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan, Nicolo Machiavelli’s Discourses on Livy, and Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom, among others, appear frequently in the syllabi of Israeli university courses.

See also[]

• List of universities and colleges in Israel
• Education in Israel

References[]

External links[]

• Shalem College Official Website
• Shalem College Official Website (Hebrew)

Coordinates: 31°45′7.1″N 35°13′41.01″E / 31.751972°N 35.2280583°E / 31.751972; 35.2280583