We invited two researchers involved in political activity inside and outside of the university for a talk: Zvi Ben-Dor Benite, from the Department of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at New York University, and Lin Chalozin-Dovrat from the Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Ideas at Tel Aviv University. We asked them to consider together, from their different geographical and disciplinary positions, the place of Israeli academe between North and South. Ben-Dor Benite looks at the Israeli university in its Asian context and sees it, from the establishment of Hebrew University in 1925 to this day, as an alienated university – as opposed to Asian universities (especially in India and China), which over the last hundred years became less alienated, host traditional bodies of knowledge, open their doors to wider publics and see them as legitimate subjects of knowledge. Ben-Dor Benite turns to the poet Rabindranath Tagore and the Oriental University he established in India, and describes it as a model of a hospitable local university. Chalozin-Dovrat examines academe in Israel through the question of language: an academe that is in fact peripheral and Hebrew-speaking, but strongly denies its peripherality and imagines itself as part of an English-speaking hegemonic center. She questions the meanings of the gap created between the language of research and science and the daily language of social intercourse, and discusses the recent debate over the commitment of Israeli academe to Hebrew. This debate ranges between a patriotic national position that prefers Hebrew as the language of Jewish renaissance in the Jewish homeland, and the universal globalist stance that prefers English for research collaboration. She sees it as a fake debate between two poles that are nothing but different emphases within a single national neoliberal hegemony, which behooves the proposal of a different stance of academe in the periphery. The conversation between the two ranges between criticism of the placeless and languageless academe of Israel, and the possibility of imagining a different kind of university here.

https://doi.org/10.70959/tac.54.2021.241264