On February 24, IIJS Visiting Professor Avi Shilon published a guest essay in the Forward titled “Students were expelled for protesting my Columbia class on Israel. Here’s what they taught me.” In this piece, Dr. Shilon reflects on how Israeli and American Jews understand this kind of incident through very different frameworks.
Following the success of his course, History of Modern Israel, in spring 2023, Dr. Shilon returned to IIJS as a visiting faculty member for the 2025 spring semester. He has been the Visiting Scholar and Israel Institute Fellow at the Taub Center for Israel Studies at New York University, as well as a postdoctoral fellow at the Ben-Gurion Research Institute for the Study of Israel and Zionism at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel, and at Tsinghua University, China. He is the author of The Decline of the Left-Wing in Israel: Yossi Beilin and the Politics of the Peace Process (2020), Ben-Gurion: His Later Years in the Political Wilderness (2016), and Menachem Begin: A Life (2012). His articles have appeared in Middle Eastern Studies, The Jewish Quarterly Review, and Middle East Journal, and he is a contributor to Yedioth Ahronoth (YNet). Dr. Shilon earned his Ph.D. from Bar-Ilan University, Israel, in 2015.
Click here to read Avi Shilon’s full essay in the Forward: https://forward.com/opinion/699100/columbia-israel-campus-protest-barnard/