Hillel Hayom

Reflections

Rabbi Danielle Stillman

I saw the new crescent moon of the Jewish month of Elul rise long and curved and yellow. It was creeping up over a field on Route 7 as I left the ceramics studio where I was taking a pottery class over the summer—throwing clay onto a wheel, off-centered and wobbly, sometimes slippery, sometimes grainy. Trying to thin the too-thick walls, only to have the whole almost-finished pot collapse as I went too far and the walls became too thin.

It is hard to go back to being a beginner in something, to try to get something right that I want to be good at, and to fail over and over. Learning to make pottery is a long game and one that requires patience and self-forgiveness. Other students whose pottery looked amazing to me told me that they still didn’t always get their clay centered on the wheel right away, even after years of practice. Apparently in Japan, ceramics apprentices spend a year or two mostly wedging—kneading the clay to remove air pockets—before they really begin to throw pots.

All these lessons from the pottery studio have felt like an embodiment of Elul, the start of the High Holiday season when we take a month prior to Rosh Hashanah to begin the process of teshuvah. This word means “return” and “repentance,” with a sense of turning around to begin again. It is our month of recentering, of trying to even out the wobbliness of our lives, to pop and smooth the air bubbles so we can make ourselves into something that works and is beautiful without the fear that we will explode under the fire of the kiln.

And perfectionists beware! Learning ceramics seems to be about finding the sweet spot between working on your piece to make it more beautiful and knowing when to call it done so you don’t go overboard and completely destroy it. It is not about making it perfect; many traditions of handmade ceramics embrace the imperfections as part of what makes a piece a work of art. 

Teshuvah is like making pottery and so is being human. We keep trying, feeling out the material under our hands, trying to guide it and mold it into a shape that rarely comes out quite as we’ve envisioned it. The material of our lives and we, the potters who shape it, are imperfect and our skill is lacking. We try again and again and again, never quite getting it right. We can let ourselves feel bad about this, beat ourselves up for not doing it well enough, for forgetting a skill we already learned, for not being perfect. Or we can accept that nothing will be perfect and try again, even in the face of enormous mistakes or failures. Even in the face of enormous loss and grief.

In this issue of Hillel Hayom, we offer some interviews and stories of professors and students on campus who keep showing up to help connect us to areas of Jewish life that can be both beautiful and fraught, seeking wholeness and connection even in strain and brokenness.  We hear from Ted Sasson, Curt and Else Silberman Professor of Jewish Studies, about teaching Jewish studies on campus these days with a focus on American Jewish life and our relationship to Israel. We also hear from the new codirector of the School of Hebrew, Adi Raz, about the work of teaching modern Hebrew. We also have a reflection on the place of structured reflective dialogue about Israel on campus.

What I wish for all of us this holiday season is to take inspiration from the pottery studio. May we have the strength to keep trying, to recognize our shortcomings so we can keep improving, to not get bogged down in what we have done wrong—rather to recognize it so we can go forward doing it more right. This feels hard right now when so much is dire. May we have the strength to help one another as we go so we don’t need to do this work alone.

An Interview with Professor Ted Sasson

Allie Cooper ’27.5 who is studying in Copenhagen this semester, got together with Ted Sasson, the Curt and Else Silberman Professor of Jewish Studies at Middlebury, over Zoom to talk about Jewish studies at Middlebury and related topics. Allie has taken a number of Jewish studies classes and worked with Professor Sasson as a teaching assistant. Professor Sasson, a sociologist, has recently returned to teaching at the College after six years as director of programs of the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Foundation.

I want to start by congratulating you on your relatively new position as the chair of the Jewish Studies Program. I’m really excited to be working in the program, and I can’t wait to see where you take it.

There are a lot of students who join different classes under the Jewish studies umbrella, but there aren’t as many students who are actually minoring in Jewish studies.

Why do so many people choose to engage with it, but not commit to the minor? And do you plan to make any changes or build interest in the program in any way?

Jewish studies at Middlebury is a framework for the interdisciplinary study of Jewish civilization, so what we really try to do is work as a faculty to offer a wide range of classes and cocurricular activities, and investigate all different elements of Jewish civilization, contemporary and past, from a humanistic standpoint and from a social scientific standpoint. Our main focus is in mounting terrific courses for students, and we’re thrilled with having good enrollments and cocurricular offerings for students, as well as for faculty, colleagues, and the whole community. We’re also happy when students choose to declare a minor in Jewish studies, and I think that we can do a better job making that opportunity visible to students.

You asked about where I want to take things. I’m beginning this fall to direct the Studies in Modern Hebrew and Israeli Society Program, as well as the Jewish Studies Program, and I agreed to direct both of those programs because I think there’s an opportunity to do a better job integrating so that students who are interested in all aspects of Jewish civilization—including Hebrew language, including Israel, including Israel and Palestine, and including Jewish studies—can form community, take common classes, and cosponsor cocurricular activities. I’m really interested in bringing those various resources that we have at Middlebury College together and making them more visible for the student body.

One of the things I noticed while taking some Jewish studies classes was the diversity of students in them who are studying other things.

I wonder what you think attracts students, who are maybe not interested in pursuing Jewish studies, specifically to Jewish studies classes, to explore Jewish history or the history of Israel.

All kinds of things. First of all, Israel and Palestine are top of mind for so many people these days. They dominate the news headlines. There’s a lot of interest in and concern about the ongoing war that’s now two years in duration. So students are drawn to the study of Palestine and Israel for those reasons, and our classes on the Israel-Palestine conflict, on Israeli politics and society, these classes fill up, and are of widespread interest.

Allie, you were a student in my class, American Jewish Life, and you were a teaching assistant the second time around in that class, and you know that that class has students who are Jewish, students who have one foot in the Jewish world and one foot outside the Jewish world, and students who have no personal, familial, or direct connection to the Jewish world. They’re interested simply in either religion or the meaning of life, and they are drawn to a class in the American Jewish experience and American Jewish life as a way of investigating issues that are of interest to them. Our Hebrew classes at Middlebury include students who are Jewish and students who are not, and again, students who have a foot in a variety of worlds arrive at these classes for a variety of reasons, and sometimes just because a friend said, “This is an interesting class,” and pulled them in. At a liberal arts college, we really want students to take classes simply because they’re interested and they’re curious and want to learn.

One of the things you mentioned was the study of Israel on campus, and of course, Israel and the Israel-Palestine conflict has been a very controversial topic on campus in the past few years.

Does that make it difficult to teach about the topic, about the countries? And what do you see as your role and the role of the Jewish Studies Program in campus debates about Israel, Palestine? Are there challenges that go along with that, and what are they?

Amazingly, I don’t find it difficult to teach about topics concerning the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the history of Israel. I find that students are actually curious, that they engage in very civil inquiry, that typically they approach these topics with humility. What draws me to academic instruction within the College—and I’ve returned to the College after many years as an executive at the Mandel Foundation—is that really only in the college setting are we able to approach complicated issues and topics like Zionism and Palestinian nationalism systematically, in historical context, and with ample consideration of a variety of perspectives.

We live in a world that’s increasingly dominated by sound bites, by social media, by polarized conflict, and only within the college setting can we say wait a minute, let’s begin at the beginning, let’s approach this topic systematically, let’s take it apart. Let’s think about it from a variety of vantage points and perspectives, and let’s take 12, 13 weeks to have a real systematic conversation that’s grounded in well-ordered collections of sources and readings that cover the field.

To me, that is exciting, and I find that students are eager for that kind of inquiry. I don’t find that these conversations are taboo or difficult to have. In fact, they’re easier to have at the College than anywhere else. Now, there are other issues concerning antisemitism that I hope we’ll get to discuss, in the student experience in college, but within the classroom, I think we have a great environment at Middlebury and can have conversations that are difficult to have anywhere else in American society today.

You mentioned antisemitism, which is something else that I wanted to talk about.

How do we see antisemitism today on college campuses, and what do you see as your role as a Jewish studies leader, someone that people look up to and look to in times of crisis, for Jewish students?

Let me address these in reverse order. Let me talk about my role first, and then let me talk about antisemitism.

My role as an instructor, and also as a member of the College community, is to try to make sure that the whole variety of perspectives, experiences, and realities are introduced into conversations within the classroom, and in cocurricular settings, in public lectures, in the cafeteria, and anywhere else where conversations are happening. 

Whenever I hear claims being advanced, I think about the claims that are backgrounded, that are obscured, that aren’t getting advanced. For example, when I hear a discourse that is, let’s say, a polemically pro-Israel discourse, I think about the Palestinian perspective, or the variety of Palestinian perspectives. And conversely, when I hear discourses that are exclusively, let’s say, pro-Palestinian that exclude the Israeli or the Jewish experience, I try to make sure that I bring into the conversation the Jewish and Israeli experience. And of course, I’ve got to qualify this by saying there’s no single Jewish and no single Israeli experience, and likewise, there’s no single Palestinian experience or perspectives. But I tend to see my role as introducing into conversations the perspectives that I think are backgrounded, silenced, or not visible. I tend to want to complicate conversations. So my role, I think, depends on the context and the setting and who I’m in conversation with.

Now let me talk a little bit about antisemitism on campus. You know, in American society, we have resurgent antisemitism in general. And a lot of it, especially coming from the political right, is classic antisemitism, conspiracy theories about malevolent Jewish power, and frighteningly, that kind of antisemitism is much more widespread today than in any living person’s memory. Those perspectives surface on campus as well, and they’re concerning.

However, I think most of what Jewish students on college campuses today, including Middlebury College, experience as antisemitism is increased hostility toward Israel, and increased opposition to Israeli policy. Now, some of the hostility toward Israel reflects a history of antisemitism, and it’s very difficult to unpack and separate the antisemitism from the anti-Zionism in contemporary discourse. They’re intertwined in various ways, not in principle, but in terms of the history of these discourses. I do not think that all criticism of Israel is antisemitic. I don’t think all anti-Zionism is antisemitic. But anti-Zionism often expresses ideas that were developed in antisemitic propaganda, and it’s difficult to disentangle the two. 

And it’s not surprising that a lot of Jewish students are deeply disturbed by political discourse that rejects Israel’s right to exist. Over the last half-century, Israel has been a key feature of Jewish identity among American Jews. So criticism of Israel is often experienced by Jewish students as criticism of their Judaism, especially when that criticism of Israel is intense and seeks to exclude or tarnish anyone who disagrees, who has, let’s say, a more sympathetic orientation toward Israel. Jewish students have been excluded and have been tarnished for either caring about or having sympathy for Israel and often feel that they can’t speak in public settings because their views are rejected. And we know from a lot of research that lots of students on American college campuses say that they wouldn’t be friends with a Zionist, and as a consequence, a lot of Jewish students feel excluded, feel that they’re paying a social penalty simply for being Jewish on campus. And I think that that’s a real problem for Jewish students and Jewish life. 

I can say that some of the debate between Zionists and anti-Zionists on college campuses today is based on disagreements about the nature of Zionism, and there is some talking past one another, which means that some of this antagonism could be diffused through dialogue.

Generally, when students identify as Zionists, what they mean by Zionism is that they believe in the Jews’ right to a state of their own, to self-determination within their own state. When people say that they’re Zionists, generally they believe that the Jews have a national character, not just a religious character, and that they have rights of self-determination, and that they should have a state. That’s all they mean by Zionism. 

Many anti-Zionists believe that Zionism is a belief that Jews should have different laws from Arabs, that they should have sovereignty and control over the West Bank and Gaza, that Palestinians should be expelled. Basically anti-Zionists believe that Zionism is a right-wing project of the contemporary Israeli government. And that’s what they reject. And so, there is some basis for thinking that better dialogue and communication could defuse at least some of the conflict between Zionists and anti-Zionists, and these are some of the things we try to do in our cocurricular activities on campus, and also in our classroom settings.

That’s definitely one thing that I really appreciate about being at Middlebury during this time, that it’s one of the easiest places to have the discourse.

I very much appreciate it now that I’ve been off campus for a while, being able to talk honestly without feeling judged. And I think other people feel that way, too, on campus [at Middlebury], which is good.

And then something that I haven’t seen on campus, luckily, but mostly on social media, is Holocaust denial and Holocaust inversion and minimization as forms of antisemitism that are mostly being applied to discussion around the Israel-Palestine conflict.

As a higher education institution, it’s possible for us to take for granted that everybody has the knowledge of the Holocaust and knows how to talk about it correctly, but of course, that’s changing now and has been trending that way.

I’m just curious about how the Jewish Studies Program and how Middlebury will address the gap in knowledge about the Holocaust, and although it’s not seen as prevalently on our campus, ensure that everybody knows how to respectfully talk about history.

Rebecca Bennette, a professor in the History Department and the Jewish Studies Program, is teaching a course on the Holocaust in the spring semester that I would encourage students to consider taking. And we also have some cocurricular activities around the Holocaust, including an event around Holocaust Memorial Day. 

I can tell you that I think you’re right, Allie, that discourse on the Holocaust is sharpening in podcasts, in social media, as a way of enabling renewed antisemitism in America by saying that, in fact, the Holocaust didn’t really happen or happened very differently. Why? Because it was coming to terms with the Holocaust in America that caused America to become a much less antisemitic society. In the 1920s and 1930s, the KKK was resurgent in America, and there was a lot of hostility toward the Jews. Following World War II, Americans in general repudiated antisemitism because they saw that it led to the Holocaust. And so when we hear today Holocaust denial, Holocaust revisionism that’s increasingly mainstreamed—I’m thinking about Tucker Carlson’s podcast, for example—what I think is that there are antisemitic forces in American society that would like to restore antisemitism to the culture, and the best way to do that is to deny or minimize the Holocaust, which was, in fact, the traumatic event that caused Americans to rather dramatically change American culture in relation to the Jews.

It’s definitely an interesting and scary topic to talk about right now, but something I think is important that everybody hears about more.

Do  you plan to collaborate with other Jewish Studies Departments in the future?

In the spring we’re collaborating with another Jewish Studies Program by inviting Professor Mara Benjamin, who is the chair of the Jewish Studies Program at Mount Holyoke College, to deliver our Quint Lecture. She is a Guggenheim Fellow who has just finished a book on the implications of the climate crisis for Jewish theology and Jewish religion, and she’s a brilliant scholar of modern Jewish thought. I think that her lecture will be of widespread interest to Middlebury students who are interested in climate and the environment, as well as in religion and theology and Judaism.

I can imagine that that would be a very Middlebury talk!

I also really want to know a little bit more about what you’ve been up to outside of Middlebury. I know that you’ve been spending a lot of time in Tel Aviv, where you are right now. What have you been doing, and what have you learned from Israel that you plan to take back home with you?

I am on associate status at Middlebury, which means that I have some flexibility during the fall semesters, and I have a position as a research fellow at a research outfit at Tel Aviv University, and my work here focuses on the relationship between the United States and Israel, and Israel’s relationship to the American Jewish community. These are topics I teach about at Middlebury College, so there’s a strong connection.

What specific research are you focused on right now?

I just published a couple of pieces in both Hebrew and English. One is on the growing criticism in the United States—in public opinion, among political elites, and also in the Jewish community—over the continuation of the war in Gaza. The changes may be enduring and have real consequences for the future of what had been a very important alliance for both the United States and Israel.

Then I also published a piece, not long ago, oriented toward an Israeli audience, about how the Trump administration has been approaching the issue of antisemitism, particularly within higher education. Israeli audiences often are very supportive of any kind of a crackdown on antisemitism, and so the presumption in Israel is that if Trump is going after antisemitism, that must be a good thing. In fact, the American Jewish community is very divided in its attitude toward how Trump is approaching antisemitism, in particular in university settings. And I tried to show Israeli audiences some of the complexity in how American Jews are thinking about that issue.

I have one other question for you as someone who’s involved in Jewish life and the U.S., and who teaches about American Jewish life. Something that I’ve observed has been a lot of instances where Jewish life and practice have been segmented between Jewish people who have different opinions on Israel, and I’ve heard a lot of the reasoning behind that is that we want everybody to have a safe space and to feel safe in talking about whatever they want and just feel supported in their community, especially in their Jewish community, where they’re practicing something vulnerable.

But I’ve also heard that that same practice separates Jews and continues the polarization issue that we’re seeing today. So I’m wondering what your opinion is on that, especially because it’s something that’ll be interesting to Hillel going forward.

I’ve got a roundabout way of answering this question, and then a straightforward way.

So, first, the roundabout way. In the Kol Nidre prayer at the beginning of Yom Kippur, the congregation asks for permission to pray with the sinners. And I think about that line whenever I attend worship services in a congregation that is politically quite distant from me. I think that they might think of me as the sinner, and I might think of them as a sinner. But we’re all in congregation praying together, and I think that that is a value.

Now, having said that, let me also say that I think of Judaism as a civilization, after Mordecai Kaplan. And when you think of Judaism as a civilization, it should no longer be surprising that Jews disagree with each other. They disagree with each other about politics; they disagree with each other about religion. They share in common language or languages, texts, customs and practices, elements of civilization, but they don’t agree about the meaning of those things. They argue intensely about their meaning, within themselves and in the community, and so it’s not surprising that there should be Jews who congregate politically and congregate religiously. And I think that’s healthy.

Jews have a mythology about unity, and sometimes, politically, they’ve acted in a unified fashion, and sometimes that mythology has produced real consequences in the world. I’m just thinking about the American Jewish movement on behalf of Soviet Jewry that drew on support from the right and the left, from the religious and the secular—it really helped produce this sense of the Jewish people as a unified political actor. We continue to think about the Jewish people as unified. And sometimes they can be, but there’s also the reality that we’re a civilization, and within a civilization, there are going to be factions, and they’ll struggle with each other, sometimes bitterly.

And that’s all very rich material for reflection and also can be enriching for practice, because the Jewish scene is so diverse and variegated. That variation is something that we try and encounter in the American Jewish Life class, when we go to New York City and spend time with the Hasidic community of the Satmar in Brooklyn, and also an anti-Zionist Jewish left-wing community in Brooklyn, and the Reform and the Conservative Jewish community scenes in Manhattan. It’s all very rich and interesting. But absolutely, there’s a lot of polarization, a lot of disagreement, and to my mind, there are occasions where it’s good to suspend that disagreement and be together. That’s my own sort of value position, my own normative position. I think that breaking bread on Shabbat evening and praying in the worship service are moments when we can recognize our shared civilization. And that’s a value that I personally embrace.

Is there anything else you want to tell the readers about yourself, about the Jewish Studies Program, or about your goals for the program?

I’ve got just one more thing to share, which is the great news that Middlebury College has approved a position in the Religion Department for a scholar of Judaism, and we’re recruiting for that person this fall. In a sense, the new faculty colleague will succeed Robert Schine, who retired from the faculty last year, as a professor of Judaism within the Religion Department.

I’m very pleased that Middlebury, in a period of tight budgets, has seen the importance of preserving the College’s capacity to teach about Jewish sacred literature, about the Bible, about rabbinic literature, and is recruiting a scholar in those fields to enrich the Religion Department and the Jewish Studies Program. It’s a very exciting development for us.

That is exciting. Those are some big shoes to fill, though. Professor Schine was an amazing professor!

Yes. And Professor Schine is not leaving the College community. He is continuing as a professor emeritus. He’s advising students this fall, and I am hoping he’ll offer more classes in the future. 

My gratitude to you, Allie, for conducting this interview and for your interest in the Jewish Studies Program as a student, as a teaching assistant, and now, as a journalist.

The Feel of Jewish Life on Campus

By Evie Happel ’26

As we approach both the two-year anniversary of October 7 and of Yom Kippur 5786, I am placed in a familiar position of remembrance and prayer. This year, as I pray for the hostages and their families, and all people experiencing loss and trauma from the ongoing war, I am also looking back on the community that we were just before, just after, and in the months following the watershed of Hamas’s attack in October 2023. 

In the fall and the winter of 2023–2024, I recall college campuses across the country as hubs of political and religious mayhem. Students became polarized by values, beliefs, and identities, each side suspicious of the other, and all taking great care when speaking so as to maintain control over our own reputations. Members of our community lost friends and family members—to violence in the Israel-Palestine territories and to heated disagreements that led to resentment, disconnect, and exclusion. Jews gathered to pray, hope, and heal, but tensions within the community were escalating as the actions of the Israeli government and defense forces escalated in the East. 

But today, I am proud to say that the atmosphere of the Jewish community here on campus has shifted. Though war still rages in the Israel-Palestine territories and Jews and Palestinians within our community and across the world continue to lose family and friends to the unspeakable violence of war, Jewish students at Middlebury are beginning to step across the bridges we have been slowly building since the day they first fell. It is true that listening and speaking from the heart do not fix everything; but dialogue has played a pivotal role in cultivating a community of care and openness—a bigger role than many of us realize. 

As Tzedek chair in the spring of 2024, and as president of Middlebury Hillel for the 2024–2025 school year, my intentions to reshape our community began with speaking and listening. Together with Rabbi Danielle, the Kathryn Wasserman Davis Collaborative in Conflict Transformation, and friends from all across the campus, Hillel partnered with the Muslim Student Association on March 7, 2024, to bring together the voices of people on campus who had personal connections to the war. This dialogue came at a time when everything was still raw. Hugs and private tears came after, but for me, the overwhelming emotions were not of fear but rather of hope, relief, and a renewed energy to share. 

Following the success of our interfaith circle, I and other members of Hillel requested a space for an intra-Jewish circle. Just one week after the creation and one day after the diffusion of the Middlebury SJP encampment, a number of Jewish students gathered in the Hillel space to support each other, listen to each other, and understand each other. The space included students who had been involved in organizing the encampment itself, students who had attended programming out of curiosity, and students who felt targeted and fearful of the encampment’s presence on campus. In the time together, Rabbi Danielle facilitated a conversation not about politics or definitions; the central question of the gathering was “What about being Jewish motivates your opinions about the war and your actions in response to it?” Members of the circle connected on levels that were inaccessible in environments of fast-paced, high-stakes conversation. Dialogue itself is conducive only to a specific environment that is cultivated through each member’s commitment to the space. 

With more opportunities for dialogue in the following year, I learned that continued space-making for meaningful connection results in a cycle of growth, change, and ease. The more we practice creating space for dialogue, the more dialogue we are able to have; the more dialogue we have, the more connected we become, and the easier it is to create space for more. From the spring of 2024 to the spring of 2025, small groups of Jewish students gathered, connected, and brought energy back into the larger Hillel and campus spaces. Each meeting had a different assortment of people; but the effects of each small group spread to far more people and spaces than expected.  

With our budding strength and commitment to community, many Jewish students are no longer holding so much weight of unbelonging or the stress of a divided community. This opens up more room for us to collectively hold space for the anniversary of October 7, the continuing tragedies in Gaza today, and hope for a peaceful future. 

There was a time when entering the Hillel space felt heavy and exhausting; this year, I walked into the first Shabbat on campus feeling lighter, more open, and hopeful. I can’t wait to continue to make progress crossing the bridges we’ve built through careful understanding. May the New Year be sweet and filled with communal strength—for us and for all Jewish communities across the world.

School of Hebrew Welcomes New Codirector

Adi Raz, who recently finished her first full year as codirector of the summer School of Hebrew at the Middlebury Language Schools, may have been new to the school, but the school was not new to her. As director of the Modern Hebrew Language Program at the University of Michigan since 2016, Raz says, “I’ve been sending students to Middlebury for a long time. It’s a great place.”

At the School of Hebrew, Raz’s role focuses on the academic side of the program, complementing the work of the other codirector, Elizabeth Gerner, MA Hebrew ’16, who handles more of the administrative aspects. She also works closely with assistant director Ori Zuriel. Language Schools director Molly Baker calls the trio “a really strong leadership team.” And Gerner says it has been a great first year with Raz. “She has great pedagogical experience to share with our faculty.We really enjoy working together and have similar goals for the program.”

With 20 faculty members, the School of Hebrew offers a seven-week Modern Hebrew program for doctoral and master’s students as well as a track for biblical Hebrew students. During those seven weeks, the school also offers two three-week programs designed for both students and lifelong learners. In 2025, 120 students attended the School of Hebrew. “There are about six programs running at the same time,” Raz says, “and that involves a lot of coordination, a lot of back and forth going into the classroom, supporting teachers.”

In her first summer, Raz focused less on making changes and more on assessing the school as it currently runs. She aims to identify and preserve those aspects of the program that faculty and students find valuable. But pedagogy and curriculum are constantly evolving, and she wants Middlebury to be at the forefront.

Early in the term, she made a point of visiting the other Language Schools for ideas. “We don’t live in a bubble, so, a lot of times people say, ‘Oh, Hebrew is different than all the other languages.’ It’s not. The same stuff that’s done in Spanish and German and French is very applicable to teaching Hebrew. … There’s a lot to learn from the other schools. They’re doing a great job.”

The daughter of Israeli diplomats, Raz grew up in Tel Aviv but lived in New York City during elementary school. She earned a BA in English literature and linguistics from Bar Ilan University and holds a Master of Education in applied linguistics from Teacher’s College, Columbia University, and an MA in TESOL from Hunter College. She also earned a Doctor of Education in Jewish education from the Jewish Theological Seminary and is one of only a handful of educators with a specialization in teaching Hebrew to students with language learning disabilities.

She praises the immersion approach of the Language Schools. “What is done here in seven weeks takes a whole year at another setting. I tell my students in Michigan that every day at Middlebury is equivalent to a week at any other university. Here, students are focused on one thing for the entire day, 24/7. The amount of work that gets done, the amount of language acquisition that happens, is just astounding.”

Raz says even students studying in Israel don’t get this degree of Hebrew immersion, because outside the classroom Israelis will tend to speak English as soon as they hear a foreign accent. “Middlebury is amazing. This is truly a language laboratory. This doesn’t happen anywhere else.”

While she refrained from making any big changes at the school this year, she did introduce a tool that has proven successful at the University of Michigan: graphic novels. “We’ve added graphic novels to almost all our classes. I’ve learned that students find novels very intimidating; there’s a lot of text. Graphic novels are a great way to study a foreign language. The text is limited, and there are pictures. Even if a student doesn’t understand everything, they understand from the picture. It makes it a lot easier for them to learn.”

Raz has another idea from the University of Michigan she would like to try at Middlebury: “I have this amazing course called Seeds of Peace. We take Hebrew, Armenian, Persian, Turkish, and Modern Greek students and we meet twice a week in our languages. Then once a week we meet all together in English. We focus on what we have in common rather than what we don’t have in common.” At Middlebury, she envisions this course bringing together students from the School of Hebrew and the Arabic School. “I think it’s important, because we need to see each other as human beings.”

She stresses that if she is able to start a Seeds of Peace class at Middlebury, she will be bringing the idea only. “I want the two groups to work together to decide what they want to focus on. … I think our students will be excited.”

Raz says that in the Seeds of Peace class in Michigan, topics can get serious as the year goes on. But that has to wait until the participants have had a chance to build trust and a sense of community. “We start with food, which is easy. Everybody loves food,” she says. “It takes time, but by the end of the semester, students actually hang out together; they’re friends. I hope to see that here, too.”

Raz has returned to Michigan for the school year, but she is looking forward to being back at Middlebury next summer.

“This place is magical,” she says. “I love it.”

Reflections on a Semester in Israel from Noah Miller ’25.5

Following a phenomenal spring semester in Cameroon (read about it in the fall 2024 issue of Hillel Hayom), I had the opportunity to spend fall 2024 in Israel.

My stay in Israel materialized almost by happenstance; I had been in conversation about a potential summer internship in Israel at the time, with a contact who wanted a four-month commitment that I wasn’t able to make. This seemed to present the perfect opportunity; I had been hoping to study abroad in Israel but encountered too many complications finding a Middlebury-certified program. I got approval to change the internship dates to the fall, declared a leave of absence from Middlebury, and enrolled myself in the Middlebury School of Hebrew over the summer to get my Hebrew up to speed and make up for the lost credits. 

Fast-forward a few months, and after multiple canceled flights and airport closure scares, I was walking out of Ben Gurion Airport into my new life in Israel.

I arrived in Israel in September 2024 and stayed there until New Year’s of 2025. Ultimately I spent two and a half months of that time living in Tel Aviv—working remotely and exploring the city—and the remaining month and a half in the southern part of the Negev Desert, living on Kibbutz Ketura and working at Kibbutz Yotvata, both tranquil, palm-lined, desert oases in the middle of the otherwise barren, hyper-arid Arava Valley, which runs along the Israel-Jordan border from the Dead Sea in the north to Eilat in the south.

None of this was exactly as planned, as tends to be the case in Israel. Yet building the plan on the fly and enjoying the tumultuous journey are hallmarks of the Israeli culture I found myself surrounded by, and attitudes I came to immensely appreciate. 

A year later, I want to share some reflections of things I learned, elements that surprised me, and memories that stuck with me.

Israel during Wartime

Living in Israel during wartime was an experience of constant whiplash: it was filled with grief, fear, and terror as seen on the news, but also full of love, humor, and celebration.

The war had a way of bending time and making worlds collide, which I felt very acutely during my stay, most notably over the High Holidays during the month of October. 

During the height of the conflict in October, we often spent entire days in Tel Aviv in and out of bunkers, constantly put on edge by huge booms that shook buildings and set off car alarms, followed by festive meals and celebrations in the streets as soon as it was safe to go outside again. 

The day before Erev Rosh Hashanah was the scariest of these days, when Iran sent 181 ballistic missiles into Israel, which coincided with a mass shooting in Yafo, less than a mile from where I was living at the time. 

As the emergency warnings blared and the radios tried to parse together what was happening, the entire city felt as if it were in a state of panic and holding its breath. I don’t think I’ve ever felt as genuinely terrified for my life as I did that evening, feeling the explosions echoing through the walls and the windows and doors rattling from their drafts, with no way of knowing how or when things would end. 

Eventually the shelter-in-place was lifted, and I went to spend the night on a family friend’s couch so I wouldn’t have to sleep alone after the attack. 

I remember waking up the next morning and watching Erev Rosh Hashanah transform the energy of the entire city. By midafternoon, the markets and streets were full again, and I was walking into a huge Rosh Hashanah dinner with Professor Michal Strier’s entire family, everyone I passed on the street dressed in white and headed to festive dinners of their own. 

Just a few days later was October 7, the first anniversary of the start of the war, which was a day of numerous air raids once again. We spent the evening at a screening of the beautiful and heartbreaking memorial ceremony (which was supposed to host hundreds of thousands of people but was ultimately closed to everyone except the hostage families), in a reinforced bunker turned into an auditorium three stories below a shopping mall. The experience felt jarringly dystopian. At the end of the ceremony, the hosts invited everyone watching to stand up and sing Hatikva (the Israeli national anthem) together, to wish for new hope, a better future, and an end to the war. Hundreds of us in the amphitheater sang together, people sobbing in a collective ensemble of weak, trembling voices. The feeling in the air was as if the whole room was beaten down and holding its breath. My hands were trembling, and I could barely get out the words. 

One week later was Erev Yom Kippur, which was one of the most beautiful moments I experienced during my time in Israel. All roads in Tel Aviv are closed for the holiday, so the entire city was out dressed in white, strolling and biking through the middle of the closed-down streets and picnicking on its beaches and in its parks.  

The next day, I walked down the middle of Ayalon Highway and came across all kinds of Yom Kippur services throughout the city—most notably, an egalitarian Yom Kippur service some friends and I stumbled across at Hostages Square with hundreds of people in attendance.

A week and a half after that was Simchat Torah, the day after a particularly heavy barrage of rockets that set the whole city once again on edge. 

A friend from Middlebury School of Hebrew and I were wandering through the streets of Tel Aviv on Erev Simchat Torah, less than 24 hours after the last attacks, when we came across a huge outdoor concert in a park. We got sucked into the dancing, and suddenly someone placed a kippah on my head and a Torah in my arms. Next thing I knew, 30 people were dancing in circles around me, singing, laughing, and cheering. 

After spending some time at the concert, we left to keep wandering and walked through streets packed with hundreds of people, huge parties taking over entire intersections, and floats with massive speakers parading Torahs, with men and women dancing behind them and chanting, “Am Yisrael chai” (“May the people of Israel live”).

The whiplash was extreme yet awe-inspiring to someone living in Israel for the first time. I felt it to varying degrees throughout my stay. War is known to bring out the worst in society and people, but I also watched it bring out so much beauty, love, and closeness. It made me feel like I was part of something bigger than myself, and I was welcomed like family by everyone I crossed paths with.

Finding New Family

One of my most cherished memories during my stay took place just days after I arrived in September. 

I had been put in contact with my grandparents’ former realtor, who was in Tel Aviv and invited me to meet him for coffee on a Friday afternoon. I met the guy at a café, and we started chatting. He asked me at some point where I was going for Shabbat dinner that evening; I told him I didn’t have plans and was planning to cook at home. He looked majorly offended, stopped me mid-sentence, and declared, “You’re coming with me.” 

That first Friday, I ended up going with this man, whom I had only met hours before, to his wife’s sister’s apartment for a boisterous, 25-person, three-generation family Shabbat that continued until well after midnight. I was the only one not part of the biological family, yet they treated me as if I were. I came to learn that this kind of experience was not a fluke—I was welcomed like family by complete strangers over and over during my stay. 

In a similar vein, another family friend, who I hadn’t ever met prior to arriving in Israel, invited me to come sleep on her couch the night after the Iranian missile attack, so I would have someone to take care of me if anything happened overnight. Little did I know that night that I would end up staying in that apartment for two more months after she convinced me to move into her apartment. I ended up with a new adopted family; it was among the most meaningful aspects of my time abroad. 

This new family—she and her two kids—took me on adventures all over Tel Aviv and the rest of the country, going to a stargazing retreat at a kibbutz deep in the Negev, finding phenomenal restaurants in the shuk (market) and in the middle of the forest, trekking to monasteries in the desert, and exploring the fortified Ottoman walls of Akko on the far northern coast of the country. 

Time and time again I would talk with locals who told me, “You’re an American. You don’t have family here. We’re your family.” By the end of my stay, I was receiving more invitations to Shabbat dinners than I knew what to do with. Even during the war, when people were really struggling, I felt truly welcomed and taken care of. 

Considering My Jewish Identity

And last, although my time in Israel was notably secular, I felt my Judaism profoundly grow in richness over the course of my stay. 

I fell in love with the incredible diversity of Judaism and Jewish culture I encountered across Israel, which struck me as rich and layered compared to the relative homogeneity of the American Ashkenazi community I’m accustomed to. 

Living with Israelis and exclusively speaking Hebrew during my stay gave me the opportunity to break out of the Anglophone bubble and meet all kinds of Israelis from different backgrounds. Mundane day-to-day interactions often led to deep conversations about personal Jewish heritage and elements of shared culture.

I think about the young produce vendors across the street from my adopted family’s apartment in Tel Aviv who came from a Haredi Yemeni family and told me about their family’s Saturday meals of jachnun and kubaneh. I think about the Persian woman who welcomed the entire team at the organization I was interning for into her house for a dinner of her family’s food and stories. I think about the Ukrainian Jews I sat across from at a pottery class that I joined, a New Year’s Eve dinner party with retired French Jews in a soaring penthouse in Yafo, and groups of Americans, Australians, and South Africans that I met through mutual friends. I think about fabulous Moroccan food I ate in Beer Sheva, and the phenomenal Argentinian grill overlooking a date plantation in the middle of the desert by the Dead Sea, and the famous bourekas that people line up around the block for every weekend morning in Florentin in Tel Aviv. The list goes on and on. 

Yet what astonished me beyond the individual traditions is that I encountered such a collective spirit of sharing them. I constantly had moments where I’d stop and comment to myself about the profound richness of the culture of this place. These were all part of my people, the Jewish people. 

Religious observance aside, just by virtue of being Jewish, living in Israel meant constantly discovering new parts of my own Jewish culture and what it means to be part of a larger collective Jewish identity.

I sensed that the Israelis I was meeting believed that our shared Judaism was stronger the more diverse and interconnected it was. They wanted to learn more about my American Jewish culture, and that environment made me feel proud to be Jewish. And learning about other Jewish traditions encouraged me to become more connected to my own. 

As I reflect on four transformative months in Israel, I’m left with an incredible sense of gratitude. 

I loved the food, the people, the sense of family and community, the culture of truly looking out for one another, and the Israeli spirit of living beautifully, carefree, and fully present in the moment. I even came to love and miss the Israeli chaos, pushiness, and boundless disorganization. 

Many moments of my experience in Israel were raw, emotional, and scary, but being there to bear witness and be a part of this exceedingly complicated time, I felt like I was truly alive, truly learning, and truly human. 

I’ve brought back with me the tradition of weekly Shabbat dinners, one of my favorite parts of the Israeli experience. No matter what’s happened in the world or in people’s lives, everybody—religious or secular—makes a point to come together, fully present in the moment, to be surrounded by family, love, and joy at the end of the week, often extending into the wee hours of Saturday morning. 

I’ve made it a point to go to Shabbat dinner every week since then and even to host some of my own. 

The experience of living with Israelis, speaking Hebrew exclusively, and getting to spend extended time in parts of the country outside of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem helped me integrate on a deep level and get to know many people I wouldn’t have otherwise met.

That experience of integration and the deep conversations that followed, along with the experience of going to protests and conferences, running down apartment stairs to the bunker in a bath towel when the air raid sirens went off mid-shower, and living the news as it happened, gave me a newfound grounding, awareness, and confidence to return to campus and participate in Israel-related dialogue much more tactfully and discerningly than I was able to before. 

And finally, building on my time spent with the Jewish community in Cameroon, my stay in Israel helped cement within me a deep appreciation for the diversity of our global Jewish community, as well as for my individual Jewish roots. It’s a privilege I cherish: to come across so much Jewish tradition, diversity, and joy out in the world and people eager to break down barriers for a more integrated global Jewish community.