Yael Aronoff is the director of the Michael and Elaine Serling Institute for Jewish Studies and Modern Israel and a professor of international relations at James Madison College. She is focused on research and teaching related to Israeli politics, culture and society, as well as foreign policy.
As I reflect on Jewish American Heritage Month, there are many things to celebrate about Jewish culture, community, holidays and history. When I think of Jewish culture, the first thing that springs to mind is my favorite holiday, Passover, which we just celebrated last month. For me, it is a time for family to get together, tell stories, debate, sing songs and share great food — all while connecting us to families around the world celebrating at the same time, and families going back through generations. We remember and retell the story of slavery in Egypt and liberation to freedom in the land of Israel; the holiday also reinforces the yearning for freedom for all people in the world. It is a mixture of remembering past pain, empathizing with current suffering, and celebrating liberation, and yearning for liberation from all forms of oppression globally. It is filled with songs sung in Hebrew, including hilarious competitions over who can sing certain refrains the fastest, leaving everyone laughing.
American Jews are a diverse and varied group. Some have been in the United States for generations, some are recent immigrants. They have come to the country from all over the world, reflecting those diverse cultures and languages. We are diverse in race and socioeconomic status, as well as the ways in which we identify as Jews. While Jews have been in North America since before the founding of the United States and contributed to every aspect of national life, we have also been regarded, through waves of immigration, as outsiders. Particularly in the last several decades, we have in many ways successfully integrated into American life, yet the memory persists of historically recent immigration restrictions, of grandparents or parents excluded from some spaces — universities, professions, clubs. Representing only 2% of the U.S. population yet seeming to loom large in the public imagination, as a “model minority,” Jews are both, at turns, hypervisible and seemingly invisible.
Many layers of heartbreak
While there are so many things to celebrate about Jewish American culture and community, recent years have also brought multiple layers of heartbreak for me and for many Jews, particularly after Oct. 7, 2023, and the start of the Hamas-Israel war. There has been the anguish of the upsurge in antisemitism in the United States and around the world — an upsurge underway long before Oct. 7 — with horrific incidents every week, most recently the killings of two young people walking out of the Capital Jewish Museum in Washionton, D.C. There has been the trauma and anguish of Oct.7, with the mass killing of civilians in Israel, and the taking of 253 hostages — 58 who remain in Gaza. Many of these victims have direct connections to MSU faculty, staff and students. There is the ongoing pain as this sense of threat to family and friends in Israel continues, shaped by historical memory and intergenerational trauma. There is the daily anguish over the immense suffering of Palestinian civilians in Gaza, the thousands who have been killed and displaced, and the deep trauma that they are enduring. And there is the painful mix of very real instances of antisemitism on our campus, along with the misuse of these real issues for political purposes to promote xenophobic and authoritarian measures by some beyond our MSU community, whose broader goals are to attack higher education at large. It is a challenging time to be Jewish in America.
In the midst of all of this, I feel lucky to be at MSU. The Michael and Elaine Serling Institute for Jewish Studies and Modern Israel is an academic community well-positioned to address all these aspects of Jewish history and experience in the United States and across the world — the richness, the complexity and the challenges. While our program encompasses the historical and geographic breadth of Jewish experiences, our particular strengths are in American Jewish history, culture, religion and literature; European Jewish History and Holocaust Studies; Hebrew; and Israel Studies. Our interdisciplinary program centers on teaching, mentoring and providing community for undergraduate students, offering a rich array of co-curricular programming and a variety of scholarships, including generously funded education abroad opportunities. On average, 1,000 students — most of whom are not Jewish — take our courses each year. We have, on average, 50 students a year minoring in Jewish Studies, who represent many different identities and religions. A sample of our courses includes American Jewish history and culture, histories and cultures of Jews around the world; on Judaism and Jewish identity; on women and Judaism, on Jewish literature, and on Israeli politics, history, and culture; and modern Hebrew. We also offer faculty-led study abroad programs to Poland and to Israel.
Addressing the challenges of conflict
We have also taken on, with nuance, empathy and complexity, the challenges of antisemitism and the tragedy of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, aided by the diverse academic lenses we bring to bear. We have offered courses and programming on antisemitism, reaching out and partnering with the Muslim Studies Program’s faculty and students to provide many trainings, workshops and conversations on antisemitism and Islamophobia; faculty members including Mohammad Khalil, Morgan Shipley, Kirsten Fermaglich, Amy Simon, and I have engaged more than 2,000 students, faculty and staff over the past two years in many workshops and — with the help of Ralph Johnson and the Office for Institutional Diversity and Inclusion — have engaged additional faculty, staff and students in our “Conversations on Antisemitism and Islamophobia” that we offer ever semester. We have developed a new one-credit online course on antisemitism, and we are proud to have the Serling Institute publish the “Guide on Antisemitism for the MSU Community 2025.”
In the 2024-25 academic year, the Serling Institute partnered with several institutions to spotlight the subject of Americans and the Holocaust, encouraging MSU students and faculty and the Lansing community to consider how Americans responded to the onslaught of Nazism in the 1930s and 1940s, and to consider the experiences of Holocaust survivors in the United States.
From Jan. 11 to Feb. 22, the Serling Institute helped bring the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum exhibit, “Americans and the Holocaust,” to the Library of Michigan in Lansing. More than 1,000 people visited the exhibit and attended the programs organized to spotlight the subject of Americans and the Holocaust at the Library, including a lecture by the exhibit curator, Daniel Greene: Americans and the Holocaust, including a scholarly panel, Rethinking the History of Antisemitism in Michigan.
During the spring 2025 semester, Kirsten Fermaglich, associate director of the Serling Institute and professor of history and Jewish Studies, organized her HST 480 capstone seminar to develop a companion exhibit, “Americans and the Holocaust: A Michigan Perspective,” at the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum at MSU, in collaboration with the Zekelman Holocaust Center, MSU’s Lab for the Education and Advancement in Digital Research (LEADR), and MSU Libraries. The students’ physical exhibit will be at the Broad Art Museum until Nov. 16, and the students’ digital exhibit is available indefinitely through LEADR. At a time when extremism, antisemitism, and anti-immigrant sentiment are rising, the exhibits and programming are more relevant than ever.
Bringing together diverse viewpoints
In the context of the anguish in the escalation of violence in Israel, Gaza and the West Bank, we work to promote understanding, empathy and dialogue by bringing together diverse groups and viewpoints for difficult conversations. Reaching peace between Israelis and Palestinians has been a lifelong passion and dream of mine. This work is especially important in this traumatic and devastating time, where the self-determination, legitimacy, dignity, security and freedom of each nation and people is ever more important. We promote understanding through expanding the knowledge of progress made in previous efforts at negotiating peace, as well as the past and ongoing efforts by Israeli and Palestinian peacebuilders and peacemakers that work together to provide a better future.
In my own courses, I bring Israelis and Palestinians who participated in serious and innovative peace negotiations to campus to meet with students. We have organized events in which Israelis and Palestinians meet to talk about the spaces they share — for example, over the meaning of Jerusalem for Judaism, Christianity and Islam, and dreams for that city’s future — as well as their shared grief. One such event included the Israeli documentary, “The Narrow Bridge,” centering the Parents Circle Families Forum, a group made up of bereaved Israeli and Palestinian parents dedicated to promoting coexistence. Rami Elhanan and Bassam Aramin, former Co-Directors of the group, joined virtually after the film.
In one memorable event, for example, we screened the Israeli documentary, “Children of Peace,” about Neve Shalom, an intentional community dedicated to fostering coexistence, and had Mohammad Darawshe, director of the Center for Equality and Shared Society at Givat Haviva in Israel, lead a discussion after the film. In other events, we brought representatives of Standing Together and PeaceWorks. These representatives modelled respectful, empathetic and difficult dialogue between Israeli and Palestinian peacebuilding organizations and offered glimmers of hope during a devastating war. The Peaceworks representatives remarked that MSU was the first university they had visited in the Midwest in which they witnessed Palestinian American and Jewish American students engaging in such constructive dialogue with each other.
This practice of “empathetic complexity” — of breaking down the simplistic binaries of “pro-Palestinian” or “pro-Israel,” of replacing “or” with “and” — has been central to my approach, in collaboration with Palestinian colleague Saliba Sarsar. I am grateful to partnership with my colleagues Vered Weiss, Yore Kedem, Steven Fraiberg and Ariana Mentzel in several of the endeavors listed above.
This negotiating with complexity, “and” rather than “or” could be said to be integral to Jewish, and indeed Jewish American heritage and culture.
MSU community members are welcome to visit the Serling Institute or email Aronoff at aronoffy@msu.edu to be added to the email listserv. Students are welcome to contact Aronoff if they have questions about courses or minoring in Jewish Studies, and all are welcome to attend events.