Intensive Arabic Semester

Last year when he was visiting Israel Professor Jonathan Golden paid a quick call to Givat Haviva and made a repeat visit recently accompanied by Yehezkel Landau from the Hartford Seminary.

“When I came to visit last year there was a group from an American synagogue participating in a seminar and I sat in on their program and was really disappointed not to have had time to join them afterwards on the tour of the region that was part of their day at Givat Haviva,” reminisced Golden, Assistant Professor, Departments of Religion and Anthropology; Associate Director, Center on Religion, Culture and Conflict and also Director of Hillel at Drew University.

Next year Professor Jonathan Golden and another faculty member will be leading a group of 20 students from Drew University on an in-depth study tour of Israel.  Professor Golden came to discuss International Department input to such a program and a seminar will be built together in the interim period.During the visit both Professor Golden and Yehezkel Landau were extremely impressed with the Intensive Arabic Semester program – a new term of which started the same day they visited campus – and expressed not only their interest in the program but also a willingness to share those impressions with others when they return to their respective campuses in the States shortly.

“This is a really exciting program and definitely could be attractive to some of our students,” said Professor Golden as he and Yehezkel Landau collected up pamphlets to take back to the States.Yahezkel Landau is also the co-director of the Open House Center for Jewish-Arab Coexistence in Ramle and a much respected commentator on interfaith and Middle East topics.

“This was an important visit for us here at the International Department,” said Intensive Arabic Semester director Hilit Ben Zvi.  “We have a great deal of faith in our program and it is very uplifting indeed to have academic guests like Jonathan Golden and Yehezkel Landau give us such encouraging feedback.”

Jonathan Golden (Ph.D. in Anthropology, University of Pennsylvania, 1998) teaches at Drew University, where he is Associate Director of the Caspersen Centers, working closely with Drew’s Center for Civic Engagement, while serving as Assoc. Director for the Center on Religion, Culture and Conflict.  Golden teaches in the Department of Religious Studies, the Caspersen School of Graduate Studies and the Theology School, specializing in the areas of Religion, Anthropology, and the Middle East - ancient and modern.  He is the author of Ancient Canaan and Israel: New Perspectives and the forthcoming Dawn of the Metal Age.  Golden offers courses and has written on such topics as religious conflict and terrorism, world archaeology, Jewish diaspora communities, ethnography of the Middle East and Latin America, and human evolution, with a special focus on the inter-face between science and religion.  Golden is also Faculty Advisor to Drew Hillel and S.T.A.N.D. and is an active member of the Drew Disaster Relief Project; he also serves on the Religious Life Council and Diversity Committee.  Golden lives in Florham Park, NJ, where he also enjoys playing soccer and performing/writing music.

For the last 2 months San Franciscan Seth Norman has been studying Arabic, Hebrew and general Middle East studies with the Givat Haviva-MASA Intensive Arabic Semester in Wadi Ara, Israel.

When asked to meet recently with a Jewish Community Federation delegation from San Francisco on a five day visit to projects the Federation supports in Israel, Seth was more than delighted to have the opportunity to meet folks from back home – but did not anticipate that among the 15 visitors would be a number of sets of parents of former peers from his high-school days!

On their way to the Kfar Kara Bridge Over the Wadi Jewish-Arab school, and having met with Israel Minister for Minority Affairs Professor Avishay Braverman in Tel Aviv before setting out for Wadi Ara, the Federation tour organizers had requested a representative of Givat Haviva meet the group en-route in order to explain about Givat Haviva and also give an explanation about the region from the Katzir observation platform on the Amir Mountain range overlooking Wadi Ara and the Dotan Valley area of the West Bank below.

Chatting with the group, Seth quickly discovered the family connections. "It was a pleasant surprise to see people that I knew from home, particularly when considering I grew up in a tiny town called Hillsborough about 20 minutes south of San Francisco.  I had not realized that I had family friends who were so involved in understanding life in Israel and working to keep the link between American and Israeli Jews strong.  I was raised with the full understanding that I was Jewish, but with none of the religious or cultural foundations.

"Coming to Israel to learn about my heritage became much more real when I saw people from home here and learned of the very close ties between Israel and the Jewish community of San Francisco," explained Seth, a 1999 graduate of San Mateo High School and who graduated the University of California at Berkeley in 2003.

"The parents of some of my school friends - Joel Abelson and twin sisters Dena and Rebecca Salamin – were with the San Francisco group and that was a real surprise, especially as although my family were not members of a synagogue nor did I attend any Jewish youth group, I did have a bar-mitzvah together with the Salamin twins," said 28 year-old Seth, who served in the United States Army from June 2004-October 2009, stationed in Germany, Kuwait and Iraq.

"My parents, Kim Norman and Kimberlie Cerrone, are very liberal thinking but I guess it wasn’t easy for them to accept my decision to serve in the Armed Forces – I just felt I wanted to serve my country in a time of need," explained Seth.

Asked why he had chosen to study Arabic and Middle East Studies with the Givat Haviva-MASA Intensive Arabic Semester program, Seth  explained that when his unit returned from Iraq to their base in Frankfurt he was given two weeks of leave and he decided "on a whim" to spend them in Tel Aviv.

"I came alone because I was looking for a little peace after spending 15 months with 80 men in a 60-man tent," he said with a laugh.  "I ended up meeting tons of people, canceling my hotel room and staying with my new friends – and had a great time. Basically my decision to learn Arabic began as a search to find a reason to spend more time in Israel.  I was always fascinated by the Arabic script I would see in the streets when I served in Iraq and many a time thought how I would love to be able to read Arabic," said Seth who was always accompanied by a translator during his service in Iraq.

During the course of the Givat Haviva-MASA Intensive Arabic Semester program, Seth and his fellow students live in the Wadi Ara kibbutz of Barkai and undertake community work in the nearby Arab Muslim village of Arara where they tutor high-school students and visit local families.