What does Israel look like beyond the headlines?
At UC San Diego, San Diego State University and the University of San Diego this year, students will have a chance to consider that question with Israeli scholars whose specialties range from terrorism and warfare to climate justice and women’s health.
“People do not understand the size of Israel, and they definitely don’t understand the complexity of the population,” said Professor Keren Agay-Shay, an environmental epidemiologist at Bar-Ilan University in Ramat Gan who will teach at UCSD during the winter 2027 semester. “I live in the Galilee, where we are 50 percent Jewish and 50 percent Arab. The diversity within Israel is huge.”
Agay-Shay is part of the largest-ever cohort of Israeli-visiting faculty coming to San Diego universities through the Murray Galinson San Diego-Israel Initiative. Ten professors will teach at local campuses during the 2026-27 academic year.
At UCSD, the two professors will approach Israel from very different academic disciplines.
Case studies
Professor Eitan Shamir will teach “Insurgency and Terrorism” and “Politics and Warfare” this fall in the Department of Political Science. Shamir is the managing director of Bar-Ilan University’s Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies and heads the university’s master’s program in security and strategy.
His courses will pair broad theories with Israeli case studies, including the theory of deterrence and its application in Israel’s national security doctrine.
“The last three years have been history in the making,” Shamir said.
The Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas attacks and the prolonged conflict that followed will be part of the context for discussions of warfare, terrorism and national security. But Shamir said the point of bringing Israeli scholars into San Diego classrooms is not simply to discuss current events. It is to give students sustained access to researchers who study these subjects.
“Israeli researchers bring a very high level of scholarship,” Shamir said. “Even when we talk about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict or war, we bring scholarly rigor.”
Shamir had planned to spend his sabbatical in the United States when San Diego became his preferred destination through previous visits, friendships and academic connections. He will also hold office hours and make himself available to students outside the classroom, including for informal conversations about events in Israel.
“I’m happy to sit with a group of students for coffee and talk to them about the elections,” he said. “I’ll do my best to give them a clear picture of what’s going on.”
Agay-Shay will approach the subject from a very different academic lens.
Climate justice
An environmental epidemiologist at Bar-Ilan’s Azrieli Faculty of Medicine and head of its Health and Environment Research Lab, she studies the relationship between environmental exposures and pregnancy outcomes, child health, stress and cancer incidence across diverse ethnic groups.
At UCSD, she will teach “Climate Justice” and “Climate Change Seminar: Women’s and Girls’ Health” in the Department of Anthropology.
Agay-Shay lives and works in Israel’s Galilee, where Jewish and Arab communities live side by side. She hopes connecting UCSD students with her own students in Israel will create opportunities for questions and discussion. She also expects to learn from the exchange herself.
In her climate courses, Agay-Shay will examine how climate-related harms can fall disproportionately on people with fewer resources, including those who cannot afford air conditioning or whose jobs require them to work outdoors. Students will also consider environmental interventions such as adding greenery and improving the built environment as ways to reduce health disparities without relying solely on individual behavior changes.
The other eight visiting faculty members will teach subjects including peacebuilding, Israeli LGBTQ films, photography, public health, history, geography, economics and management at San Diego universities.
“This is our largest cohort to date, bringing unprecedented expertise about modern Israel to our San Diego campuses,” said Susan Lapidus, the Galinson initiative’s founding director.
Since its inception, the initiative has placed tenured and tenure-track professors from Israeli colleges and universities as visiting faculty in 22 academic areas across five local university campuses. The initiative facilitates the placements, supports the professors and funds their participation.
Agay-Shay sees the exchange as a two-way experience.
“I become a much better researcher and a much better person when I go to a different country,” she said. “It makes us better people when we are exposed to diversity.”
