Bar-Ilan University is always changing, developing, and growing. At the International School, we are constantly finding ways to increase the options for international students and immigrants to provide them with exciting opportunities to study in Israel, including new graduate degrees that are taught in English.
Offering a new degree for English-speakers that has traditionally been taught only in Hebrew is not just a process of ‘translating’ it from Hebrew to English. We need to build something that is innovative, interesting, and original, something that other universities do not have, drawing on our unique talents and knowledge.
Our latest degree is a new English Master of Arts in Jewish Philosophy, which will have its inaugural class in the 2021-2022 academic year. The new MA, the first of its kind at BIU, focuses on all fields of Jewish thought from the classical period until modern times and has well-known scholars like Prof. Hanoch Ben Pazi, who runs the Department of Jewish Thought, Prof. Yehuda Halper, Prof. Ephraim Meir, and Prof. Steven Shmuel Harvey.
We are happy to finally be able to open it up to English-speaking students from all over the world. In this issue, you will find an article that provides further information about our new graduate degree.
This program will now be added to our many successful Master’s degree options, which include Biblical Studies, Land of Israel Studies and Archaeology, Creative Writing, Physics, Brain Sciences, Life Sciences, and many more.
These diverse programs, which span both the sciences, humanities, and Jewish/Israel-related topics, emphasize the uniqueness and richness of Bar-Ilan University, one of the largest and fastest-growing universities in Israel.
But this is not the only new development that has taken place since our last newsletter in December 2020.
Two very exciting collaborations have been implemented – the first between Bar-Ilan University’s Azrieli Faculty of Medicine in the Galilee and the Gulf Medical University (GMU) in the UAE, and the second between Regent University (RU), a private Christian institution in the United States.
The BIU-GMU collaboration is the first of its kind and its aim is to promote medical research and improve public health in Israel and throughout the Middle East. You can read more about it below.
The BIU-RU collaboration started with an interesting lecture between RU’s Robertson School of Government and BIU’s Department of Political Science, but other sessions in the future will probably include the Bible Department, Land of Israel Studies and Archaeology (LISA), and others.
In addition to creating new degrees and developing new collaborations, our aim is to attract more doctoral and postdoctoral students from all over the world, and we have various funding opportunities to encourage them. The Zuckerman Scholarship is one example and is open for high-achieving postdoctoral scholars from the USA and Canada to do their research at Bar-Ilan. Please email me for further information.
Last, but not least, I’d like to mention another first for us. On February 17, 2021, we will be hosting a special “Escape Zoom” for our graduate and postgraduate studies in Brain Sciences. Find out more below.
Enjoy this month’s newsletter.
Prof. Rachel Dekel
Academic Head
Bar-Ilan University’s International School
Email: [email protected]
