Hebrew University offers credits to volunteers in right-wing lobbying group

The administration of Hebrew University in Jerusalem is facing fierce criticism these days from a group of its faculty, for allowing students to receive academic credit for volunteering with the right-wing group Im Tirtzu. This organization works on several fronts and is especially known for “identifying” professors with left-wing opinions in a campaign it calls “the politicization of the academy.”

This critique has been issued by professors who aren’t necessarily politically identified, such as Michal Frankel, head of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, who is now signing on her colleagues to a request for an urgent meeting of the university senate in order to discuss the matter. In addressing the faculty, Frankel wrote Feb. 13, “I believe that our role as academics and members of the senate of Hebrew University is to defend the freedom of expression and academic freedom from those who seek to curtail it and surveil it, especially as this is done, frequently, by violent means. I believe that the university will have no ability to supervise the activities of the volunteers and that the legitimacy it grants to the activities of Im Tirtzu, whose primary goal to limit the academic freedom of the faculty constitutes a threat to the continued existence of the Israeli academy as a stronghold of free thinking.”