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In Haifa, a university serves as a base for Arab-Jewish coexistence — and a place to tackle global problems
HAIFA — On a recent chilly morning, six Israeli Druze women gathered in a room at the University of Haifa library to discuss the joys and frustrations of living in a modern, Jewish, largely secular country.
Chatting in Arabic and Hebrew, many of the women, all students at the university, spoke about the challenges of balancing their traditional Druze identity with their modern Israeli aspirations.
“I spend two hours each way to come to school. But my education is so important, I’d do it even if I spent 10 hours a day,” said Walaa Bader, 20, an Arabic literature and music major from Horfeish, a Druze village of some 6,000 souls near the Lebanese border.
Adan Bader, 22, said she became secular four years ago in part to focus on her studies.
“I was a religious girl, but our religion doesn’t encourage young women to study,” she said. “At this stage of my life, I wasn’t ready for a full commitment to my religion.”
The get-together was part of a series of weekly meetings organized by Yael Granot, director of social engagement at the University of Haifa’s student dean office. It’s part of the university’s larger social and educational mission: to serve Israel’s Arab population and build bridges between Israeli Arabs and Jews.
Aside from being a world-class center for higher learning with over 18,000 students, the university runs various coexistence programs to facilitate dialogue and mutual respect between Jewish and Arab students. One is the Jewish-Arab Community Leadership Program, which facilitates dialogue and multicultural social interaction through joint community projects.
“In addition to creating scientific knowledge, our main mission is the expansion of professional opportunities for all members of society,” University of Haifa President Ron Robin said when he began his tenure as president. “We embrace the rich tapestry of communities that make up Israeli society.”
Approximately 40% of the university’s students are Arabs, including some 300-400 Druze women. Druze constitute an Arabic-speaking faith group with some 150,000 adherents in Israel, most of whom live in highly conservative villages in northern Israel. About 70% of all Arab students at the University of Haifa are women.
“We’re very proud to be Druze, and very proud to be Israeli,” said Bader. “But we are doubly marginalized because, even within the Arab minority, we’re not Muslims. And the Basic Law puts a question mark on our sense of belonging to Israeli society,” she said, referring to a 2018 law enshrining Israel’s identity as a Jewish state that many Arab Israelis complained relegated them to second-class status.
Granot sees her role as helping the Druze students balance their personal backgrounds with their academic and professional interests. The Druze women in her group recently created mentoring groups for Druze teenagers to encourage them to pursue higher education.
This approach is part and parcel of the university’s mantra of “thinking locally and acting globally.”
Druze high school students discuss “soft skills” with University of Haifa student mentors during a weekly meeting in the northern Galilee village of Horfeish, Israel. (Amal Merey)
On the local level, the university is trying to create a new broad and inclusive middle class. Its campus, located in a part of Israel with significant Jewish and Arab populations, strives to serve as an oasis of coexistence. Among the university’s joint community projects is Hai-fa Innovation Labs, a start-up incubator whose programs focus on social innovation and impact entrepreneurship.
On the global level, this university located on the Carmel mountains with sweeping views of the Mediterranean Sea has a strong research focus on the environment. At the university’s Leon H. Charney School of Marine Sciences, scientists are studying how to improve seawater desalination — a major source of Israel’s water supply. Among the elements most critical to sustainable desalination, experts say, are ensuring the quality of drinking water while reducing byproducts of the desalination process. The school is actively monitoring these issues to protect Israel’s coastal and marine environments and provide guidance globally for how to replicate successes worldwide.
The university’s Leon Recanati Institute for Maritime Studies is partnering with the Scripps Center for Marine Archeology at the University of California San Diego to investigate the long-term impacts of climate change and rising sea levels in the eastern Mediterranean.
Students and scientists at the Charney school are exploring the viability of using ocean plants as sustainable food sources to meet the needs of the globe’s rapidly expanding human population.
As the university celebrates its 50 th year, it has aligned its academic strategic plan with the United Nations’ 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) aimed at eliminating poverty, hunger and discrimination worldwide.
On a concrete level, the university has mounted a $150 million fundraising campaign to build infrastructure, expand research areas and update its technology.
Back in Granot’s group, students are figuring out their own ways to effect change.
“We put a great emphasis on providing tools for social entrepreneurship and letting students work and find their own voice for social change,” Granot said.
In one initiative, the group asked 15 local Israeli municipalities to identify a cause or problem they’d like the students to tackle.
In Acre, a city in northern Israeli that saw violence break out between Arabs and Jews during Israel’s 2021 conflict with Hamas in Gaza, 10 students — five Arabs and five Jews — worked together to map out challenges. They came up with a plan in which Jewish and Arab youth in Acre would create joint tours in Hebrew and Arabic for local schools. The students get about $2,850 each for their participation and are expected to volunteer 140 hours a year. The tours are expected to begin in the coming months.
The university also has enlisted two institutions, Beit HaGefen and the Boston-Haifa Partnership, for a project in which students are encouraged to utilize their creativity, activism and aspirations to design initiatives and opportunities for shared spaces in Haifa. In the program, 15 students of diverse backgrounds — native-born Israeli Jews, Arabs, Christians and Druze, as well as new immigrants from Russia, Ukraine and Ethiopia — meet on Tuesdays with local entrepreneurs while conducting tours of Haifa.
“Our main objective is to get them to know their city, with all its challenges and complexities, and make them into active citizens working toward social change,” Granot said. “Even people born here don’t really understand the richness of this city. We’d like them to experience that.”
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Anti-BDS order will test Mamdani on day one
Outgoing New York City Mayor Eric Adams is immediately testing his successor’s position on the boycott Israel movement as Zohran Mamdani takes office, at a moment when the city’s Jewish community remains divided over the next mayor’s priorities and his stance on Israel.
On Wednesday, Adams signed an executive order barring city agencies from participating in Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions efforts, which would pre-empt any moves by city officials to divest from Israel Bonds and other Israeli investments. Mamdani, a strident critic of Israel, has pledged to end the city’s decades-long practice of investing millions in Israeli government debt securities and has said he would order the arrest of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu if he visits New York.
Mamdani’s transition team had no immediate comment.
But Adams was prepared for a response. “If the incoming administration wants to reverse” the executive order, then “that is on their watch,” he said.
Why ban BDS now?
Adams announced the measure in remarks at the North American Mayors Summit Against Antisemitism, organized by the Combat Antisemitism Movement, in New Orleans, Louisiana. “You are being targeted,” Adams said. “And we have to be as intelligent and as focused, as strategic as possible. … That’s why I am signing an executive order today to deal with BDS, so we can stop the madness that we should not invest in Israel.”
Fabien Levy, the deputy mayor for communications, said the move, weeks before Adams departs, was “a flag in the ground” to state that the current administration “will not waver in the fight against antisemitism.”
New York City is home to the largest concentration of Jews in the United States. Many Jews view the bonds as a bulwark against the BDS movement, whose co-founder has stated that the goal is to apply economic pressure on Israel to end its occupation of the West Bank and to abolish Israel as a Jewish state.
The city’s investment in Israeli bonds was a flashpoint in the Democratic primary for mayor and in the general election. Mamdani, who co-founded the Students for Justice in Palestine chapter at Bowdoin College, pledged to publicly back the movement to boycott Israel. In an interview with the Forward in April, Mamdani said he would end Adams’ policies that he regarded as a violation of international law and human rights.
The city’s Jewish voters split in the competitive mayoral election last month — with former Gov. Andrew Cuomo receiving the support of most voters who identify as Jewish and dominating in Hasidic and Orthodox strongholds, while Mamdani got 31% of the vote and swept progressive Jewish neighborhoods in Brooklyn and Manhattan on his way to a citywide win. A recent poll of 745 American Jews by the Jewish People Policy Institute found that 64% of respondents view Mamdani as both anti-Israel and antisemitic, and 67% believe his election would make New York City’s Jews less safe.
Nonetheless, Mamdani’s positions on BDS and stance on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict resonated with a plurality of voters. Nearly half of Mamdani voters, 49%, said his position was a factor in their support, according to a CNN exit poll.
Levy, who is Jewish and accompanied Adams both on his four-day farewell trip to Israel and to Louisiana, said that the mayor is sending a message about what the city’s values are, “even if hating Israel has suddenly become ‘the cool thing’ by some.” In meetings and public remarks during his swing in Israel, Adams pointed out that Mamdani won with 50.4% of the vote, and that his policies were not popular. Mamdani met with Adams at Gracie Mansion earlier this week, a meeting that was kept private.
Mamdani will also have to decide whether to disband the recently-created mayor’s office to combat antisemitism, which has pursued a measure adopting the controversial International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism, which considers most forms of anti-Zionism as antisemitic. He’ll also need to decide whether to take action on Adams’ new New York City–Israel Economic Council, an initiative to strengthen economic ties with the Jewish state.
What the executive order says
Adams’ anti-BDS order bars agency heads, chief contracting officers and other mayoral appointees with contracting authority from adopting practices that discriminate against Israel or Israeli citizens. It also directs the city’s chief pension administrator and pension trustees appointed by the mayor not to support divestment from Israel Bonds or other assets.
Brad Lander, the outgoing city comptroller overseeing pension fund investments and a Mamdani ally, ended the city’s half-century practice of investing millions in Israeli government debt securities in 2023 when the holdings matured.
At the time, the city’s pension funds held $39 million in Israel Bonds, with a roughly 5% return. Lander, who is Jewish, maintained that he was following the city’s policy of avoiding foreign sovereign debt, treating Israel the same as other countries rather than giving it special treatment in the pension portfolio.
City pension funds also held more than $315 million in Israel-based assets, including nearly $300 million in common stock and over $1 million in Israeli real estate investment trusts.
Mark Levine, the comptroller-elect who is also Jewish, pledged to repurchase the bonds as part of the city’s portfolio. “This has been a rock-solid investment for decades,” he said. “Israel has never missed a bond payment, and a good, balanced portfolio should have global diversity.”
The post Anti-BDS order will test Mamdani on day one appeared first on The Forward.
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Senate Foreign Relations Committee advances Yehuda Kaploun as antisemitism envoy, with some dissent
(JTA) — Rabbi Yehuda Kaploun moved a step closer to becoming the next U.S. antisemitism envoy on Wednesday, as the Senate Foreign Relations Committee voted to advance his nomination in a divided 14-8 tally that reflected the partisan tensions surrounding his bid.
All 12 committee Republicans supported Kaploun, while only two Democrats — Sen. Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire and Sen. Jacky Rosen of Nevada — joined them.
Kaploun, a Chabad rabbi, businessman and 2024 Trump campaign surrogate, used his November confirmation hearing to highlight his personal encounters with antisemitism and to emphasize education, particularly about the Holocaust, as the central tool for combating hatred.
But Democrats focused instead on the administration’s approach to right-wing antisemitism, pressing Kaploun on Trump’s failure to denounce the extremist influencer Nick Fuentes after a recent interview conducted by Tucker Carlson. Kaploun avoided direct criticism of Trump, stressing free speech principles while asserting that the administration “is clear in condemning antisemitism.”
The vote came two weeks after 18 House Democrats urged the Senate to reject Kaploun’s nomination, citing his past partisan comments and legal controversies previously reported by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. Shaheen said Wednesday she remained concerned about those remarks but hoped Kaploun would “be above partisanship” if confirmed, according to Jewish Insider.
Speaking soon after the vote at the Combat Antisemitism Movement’s North American Mayors Summit in New Orleans, Kaploun framed the challenge in civic terms.
“Antisemitism is anti-American. Racism is anti-American,” he said. “Myself, the president, the secretary of state, and the entire administration are going to work tirelessly to make sure religious liberty, justice, and restoring respect for humanity for everybody is the goal.”
The post Senate Foreign Relations Committee advances Yehuda Kaploun as antisemitism envoy, with some dissent appeared first on The Forward.
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Campus Frontlines: Professors and Students Continue to Fuel Antisemitism
A pro-Hamas group splattered red paint, symbolizing spilled blood, on an administrative building at Princeton University. Photo: Screenshot
There may be a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, but on university campuses globally, antisemitism has yet to end. The encampments that took up space both on the lawns of universities and on the front pages of newspapers may be gone, but the new form of antisemitism, one that student leaders and professors are driving, is not.
The top global universities are expected to train students to become the next leaders in society. That requires complex courses to be taught with accuracy and objectivity.
This is not the case at Princeton, however. One course, entitled Gender, Reproduction, and Genocide, is scheduled for the spring 2025-2026 semester.
Taught by Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, the course is said to explore “genocide through the analytic of gender” and specifically will focus on the “ongoing genocide in Gaza.”
In the course, students will “engage reproductive justice frameworks,” suggesting that Israel is committing genocide by deliberately targeting institutions that would prevent women from becoming pregnant. However, this claim, spread by the UN, has no factual basis.
UN’s fake “genocide report” accuses Israel of intentionally striking Gaza Al-Basma IVF clinic to destroy embryos to “prevent births” and “destroy future of Palestinians.” This claimed attack is a key aspect of the claim. But there is ZERO evidence for any of it. Analysis: 1/ pic.twitter.com/t6n855r5an
— Aizenberg (@Aizenberg55) September 17, 2025
The UN report relies on a 2024 ABC News story that claimed an IDF shell was deliberately fired at an IVF clinic in December 2023, allegedly destroying more than 4,000 embryos with the intention to “prevent births.”
But even ABC News and its sole source, who was not present at the time, could not verify that an IDF shell caused the damage. In fact, a wide-angle photo of the scene shows a nearby high-rise building visibly damaged, while the IVF clinic itself appears fully intact.
If the course’s entire framework being held up by falsified information wasn’t enough, it also seeks to compare the history of the “genocide” in Gaza to other genocides, including the Holocaust. There is no lack of moral clarity more evident than flattening the Holocaust into a political talking point. No comparison can be made between a war of defense and the industrialization of murder that the Nazis waged against the Jewish people.
Yet, this vile comparison does not come as much of a surprise, considering the professor herself has, in the past, denied the murder and assault of Jews.
Antisemitism from faculty is not limited to academic courses. A Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) chapter at University College London hosted Samar Maqusi as part of a series titled “Palestine: From Existence to Resistance.” Although the lecture was advertised as a discussion on the origins of Zionism, Maqusi instead promoted classic antisemitic tropes, including that Jews require the blood of gentiles for making their “special pancakes,” referring to a medieval blood libel in which Jews use the blood of gentiles for making matzah.
Antisemitism at UCL Event With University Research Fellow
A StandWithUs UK student shared this recording with us, exposing awful comments made by a UCL academic during a lecture at University College London.
During a lecture titled “The Birth of Zionism”, delivered by Dr… pic.twitter.com/0RF9Ooz3d6
— StandWithUsUK (@StandWithUsUK) November 13, 2025
Unfortunately, many discussions of Zionism on university campuses come from those with hostile and thus inaccurate beliefs on what it truly means to be a Zionist.
Even in an interfaith discussion at the City College of New York, a Hillel director was told he was “responsible for the murder” of Gazans and caused “disgust” in other participants because he was a Zionist. Activist and student groups further condemned the interfaith discussion. Not in favor of defending the Hillel director whose sole wrongdoing was being a Jew, but because interfaith efforts were causing the “normalization of Zionism.”
In warping the definitions to fit the narrative of the speaker or lecturer, lectures and campus spaces have become breeding grounds for bias and thinly veiled antisemitism.
Antisemitic Student Voices
Student leaders and activists have also frequently isolated their Jewish peers.
At The Harvard Crimson, one column suggests that there are some “visions of Zionism more morally objectionable” and therefore one might “feel wary of staying friends with Zionists.” It should then be no wonder to the author why Jewish students feel isolated on campuses.
This becomes all the more problematic when the students elected to represent the entire student union are not neutral nor representative on complex issues, particularly regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict at large.
At the University of Oxford, the Oxford Student Union elected Arwa Elrayess as the incoming president. She has been part of a no-budget documentary on the pro-Palestine protests that erupted after October 7. In one post promoting the film, Elrayess makes the moral equivalence between the Holocaust and the war against Hamas in Gaza by comparing the deaths of Anne Frank and Hind Rajab, a Gazan civilian.
Elrayess is meant to represent all students equally. Still, her posts suggest otherwise and are part of a worrying trend of using Jewish trauma to uncritically discuss Israel’s war.
As the current academic year continues, it remains clear that the issue of antisemitism on campus has not gone away, nor can it be afforded to be swept aside and ignored. When courses are built on debunked claims and student leaders use Holocaust inversion to further their anti-Israel narratives, it becomes evident that this issue is not isolated but rather is systemic, requiring urgent and sustained action.
Jewish students on campuses worldwide deserve the same safety and respect as any other student, and all students deserve an education grounded in truth and accuracy. The moral and intellectual integrity of higher education depends on confronting antisemitism directly, rather than allowing it to fester under the guise of activism or academic freedom.
The author is a contributor to HonestReporting, a Jerusalem-based media watchdog with a focus on antisemitism and anti-Israel bias — where a version of this article first appeared.