'The feeling is that there's a spotlight everywhere we go'

UPenn faculty solidarity mission receives rock-star reception in Israel

A whirlwind tour of less than three days represents the first organized visit by faculty from a US university after October 7, and Israeli academia shows its appreciation

Gavriel Fiske is a reporter at The Times of Israel

  • A University of Pennsylvania faculty delegation with President Isaac Herzog, center, on December 2, 2024. (Amos Ben-Gershom/GPO)
    A University of Pennsylvania faculty delegation with President Isaac Herzog, center, on December 2, 2024. (Amos Ben-Gershom/GPO)
  • University of Pennsylvania president Liz Magill reads her opening statement during a hearing of the House Committee on Education on Capitol Hill, Dec. 5, 2023 in Washington. (AP/Mark Schiefelbein)
    University of Pennsylvania president Liz Magill reads her opening statement during a hearing of the House Committee on Education on Capitol Hill, Dec. 5, 2023 in Washington. (AP/Mark Schiefelbein)
  • Members of the University of Pennsylvania faculty delegation tour Kfar Aza, on December 3, 2023. (GPO)
    Members of the University of Pennsylvania faculty delegation tour Kfar Aza, on December 3, 2023. (GPO)
  • University of Pennsylvania Faculty delegation visits Be-Gurion University of the Negev, on December 3, 2024. (Dani Machlis/BGU)
    University of Pennsylvania Faculty delegation visits Be-Gurion University of the Negev, on December 3, 2024. (Dani Machlis/BGU)

In the ornate lobby of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, Prof. Michael Kahana, a psychologist and expert on human memory at the University of Pennsylvania, reminisced about his childhood visits to Israel when he had stayed in the famous hotel with his family. The trays of chocolates, candies and sweets the hotel served are especially lodged in his memories of visiting Israel, he said.

Kahana was back as co-organizer of a group of 29 University of Pennsylvania faculty members who conducted a whirlwind solidarity tour this week. Lasting less than three days in total, the visit was the first organized tour by US academics to the Jewish state since the Israel-Hamas war began on October 7.

The group had an extremely tight schedule and was “embraced” wherever they went, Kahana told The Times of Israel in the hotel lobby on Wednesday along with fellow tour organizer, Prof. Peter Decherney of the English and Cinema Studies department.

The group arrived on January 2 and already had met with President Isaac Herzog, toured communities in the south, met with families of hostages and visited the Hebrew University and Ben Gurion University of the Negev. The mission was to conclude on January 4 with a visit to Sheba Medical Center, a special symposium on mental health at Tel Aviv University, a University of Pennsylvania alumni dinner and then a flight back to the States.

“The feeling is [there’s] a spotlight everywhere we go,” Kahana said, speaking of both their reception by Israelis and the media attention the mission has garnered.

The solidarity trip comes at an especially charged time, as universities across the United States — particularly the elite institutions — have been publicly grappling with claims of antisemitism and a hostile campus atmosphere. Earlier in December, University of Pennsylvania president Elizabeth Magill resigned from her position just days after she gave testimony before Congress in which she would not say calling for the genocide of Jews necessarily breached the university’s code of conduct.

Former Harvard president Claudine Gay, who also testified before Congress in the same session, resigned on Wednesday amid an ongoing plagiarism scandal which drew further scrutiny in the wake of her testimony. Both Magill and Gay will remain as faculty at their respective universities.

Prof. Michael Kahana of the University of Pennsylvania. (Courtesy)

However, these issues were not the primary factor in making the trip and the professors were not so interested in discussing them.

“We didn’t come here because of antisemitism on campus,” but rather for personal reasons, Kahana stressed.

The members of the delegation were mostly Jewish with various personal ties to Israel. Kahana himself had co-authored an open letter after October 7, asserting that Israel had a right to defend itself after what he viewed as a tepid response from the university administration.

The university faculty on the solidarity mission were those who responded to an email invitation sent out to the more than 300 faculty signatories of that letter.

Embraced by Israel

This week in Israel, it was “incredibly moving and upsetting to see the communities in the south,” Kahana said but noted that “what was most moving to me about this trip was to see my friends and [everyone else]. To see how much it meant to them that we showed up. That to me was the most personally powerful part of the trip.”

University of Pennsylvania Faculty delegation visits Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, on December 3, 2024. (Dani Machlis/BGU)

In a serendipitous bit of timing, the delegation arrived during the week that Israel’s universities finally returned to learning, after the opening of the academic year was delayed multiple times from the original October 15 start date due to the war.

The reception the group received seems to have been especially powerful, as Kahana and Decherney describe meeting university presidents, rectors and other high-level officials, something that would not normally have happened if they had been just visiting for a regular academic conference.

“I hugged the Hebrew University president. I met him once at a conference 20 years ago. It’s like, ‘You came!’” Kahana said. “We just made the decision [to come] for our own reasons. Had we known how much it would mean to our academic colleagues here, would we have considered for a moment not coming?”

If more pro-Israel academics, such as the other UPenn faculty who signed his letter but did not come on the trip, could “feel what we felt, they would have come with us,” Kahana said passionately. “These are Israel supporters. If they could experience what we experienced on this trip, they would have come. That’s the message, it’s not about Liz Magill.”

Prof. Peter Decherney of the University of Pennsylvania (Courtesy)

Decherney agreed, saying, “I think what we need at this moment is a human response and I think that’s what we are doing. We are coming, meeting with our colleagues… this is a very normal thing to do but in these circumstances, it’s not normal. They don’t have a lot of universities coming and connecting with them.”

Decherney, a filmmaker and photographer who creates works “highlighting the great diversity of Jews around the world,” was visiting Israel during the Sukkot holiday and engaged in research on the Ethiopian Jewish community. His flight home was on October 6, 2023.

The next day, back in the US, he was “shocked” to see the news. “I had just spent 10 days in a healthy democracy. I saw many examples of Jews and Israeli Arabs living and working together,” he recalled.

Hamas’s surprise October 7 onslaught saw some 3,000 terrorists pour out of Gaza in a long-planned assault on Israel’s southern communities early on a Shabbat/Simchat Torah holiday morning. With security forces slow to respond, the gunmen ran rampant, committing atrocities and pogroms until they were driven back to Gaza. In the end, some 1,200 Israelis lost their lives and over 240 were taken hostage in Gaza.

Israel subsequently declared war on Hamas, mobilized an unprecedented amount of reserve forces and moved to the current war footing, which shows little sign of abating.

For Decherney now, “it’s important for us to hear individual stories. I spoke with a Hebrew University student who was in full army uniform, carrying a gun. He told us unbelievable stories about fighting [in Gaza]. We asked him what he was studying. He was studying Islamic culture, and his goal was to help bring about peace through mutual understanding. That exists in the same moment that he was telling us he was going into houses in Gaza,” Decherney said.

When asked about possible fallout from students or other University of Pennsylvania community members after their solidarity mission, Decherney said, “I don’t care. Because I don’t think that will happen. Even if it were to happen it’s not a reason not to come. For a very long time, we have been connected through research and exchanges of faculty and students with Israeli universities, which are great contributors. Academic communities transcend times of trouble, war and antisemitism.”

Dramatic ties to October 7

Kahana has a deeply personal connection to October 7. Almost exactly to the day, as a young man visiting Israel 29 years before, he had been in a terrorist attack on Yoel Solomon Street in downtown Jerusalem.

“Obviously after October 7 I felt shock and disbelief,” he recalled, his voice becoming emotional. “I couldn’t sleep for two days. I heard in my head for the first time in years the screams of [the] girls, which I had forgotten…

“On October 9, 1994, I was having dinner here in Jerusalem and I met two of our friends from Hamas, they had Kalashnikovs and hand grenades. It was at night, and all I saw was the muzzle fire of their guns. I ran, the kid next to me was shot, I pulled him behind me… I ran to the back of the kitchen, up some stairs to a balcony area, with a bunch of other people waiting for the shooting to stop. While we were up there I said the Shema because I thought that I would surely die.

“The shooting seemed to last for an eternity and I heard the screams of girls [getting shot]… The nightmares lasted for a few years and then they went away, and all that was left was, I couldn’t go to the fireworks on July 4. That was it,” he said.

Noting that he has never spoken about this experience on record, Kahana explained that the event kept him away from Israel for over 20 years. He eventually came back with his older children and visited the site.

“I told them what happened to me for the first time… I looked to find the place and I thought I would remember, but they had renovated, the stores were gone,” he said.

Yoel Solomon Street in Jerusalem’s Nahalat Shiva, one of the capital’s oldest neighborhoods. (Shmuel Bar-Am)

That October 9, 1994, terror attack killed 2 and wounded 13. The attack was carried out by two terrorists from Gaza who were killed by security forces at the site, the New York Times reported at the time.

Hamas officially claimed responsibility, and just days later the terror group would abduct IDF soldier Nachshon Wachsman, who was subsequently killed during a rescue attempt, all part of Hamas’s efforts to disrupt negotiations between Israel and the PLO around the time of the Oslo Accords.

Going home

When asked about the impact their mission would have upon returning to Pennsylvania, both professors noted that most of the delegation, which was composed of faculty from diverse academic disciplines and political leanings, had never met each other previously. Even Decherney and Kahana, who organized the visit together, only became acquainted after October 7. Going forward, they said they now had a new group of colleagues with shared interests and experiences.

In the bigger picture, “I think there are faculty who wanted to come, Jewish and not Jewish, but were afraid… Maybe they thought it was not safe, maybe they were worried about what people would think about them. I hope they will see that Israeli universities really value and need connections to US institutions,” Decherney said.

Members of the University of Pennsylvania faculty delegation tour Kfar Aza, on December 3, 2023. (GPO)

There is no “big takeaway” from the visit, he added, except for the “nuance and complexity of each individual story. Holding trauma, but also still moving ahead with life. Universities are still at war but trying to have classes, Hebrew University is 20% Arab and trying to have a diverse community that learns and lives together.”

Kahana noted that he had begun receiving informal queries about visiting Israel from faculty members at other major universities. The tour agency that organized the logistics for the University of Pennsylvania delegation, Israel Destination, confirmed to The Times of Israel that they were currently in negotiations with several groups of academics from US institutions.

“I think the trip will have a big impact,” Kahana said. “I think you will now see a lot of missions from other universities because we took that first step.”

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