The summer at NTY Tel Aviv started with a lot of promise. I was very excited to take over the directorship of NTY Tel Aviv. I am coming from Emory University where I spent many years as a Professor of Hebrew, Arabic and Linguistics and I also served as the Director of the Linguistics Program there. My academic specialties are Judeo-Arabic, the Arabic of the Jews in the Islamic world; Hebrew linguistics; sociolinguistics and dialectology. I also led Emory students in many study abroad academic tours.
In the summer we had 15 wonderful students from NYU-Shanghai taking courses at Tel Aviv University and hosted by us. When hostilities started, we needed to evacuate them and we created a great course for them, which we ran in Istanbul, Turkey for a week: The Ottoman Empire and the Holy Land.
After the decision to postpone coursework for the Fall, we began working on long-overdue infrastructure projects at the site. We made our offices look more professional; created a beautiful Faculty Lounge (which we did not have before); ordered new signs for NYU Tel Aviv and completed many other necessary minor projects. We are also teaching three courses from here on line (via Real Presence and Google Hangouts) to students in London and Berlin who could not come to Tel Aviv because of the situation.
We are also in the process of scheduling special events for the academic year. On October 21 we will host Professor of Physics and Mathematics, Dr. Daniel Stein, who will speak to NYU alumni in Israel on Order, Disorder, Symmetry, and Complexity, followed by a reception. Later in the semester we will host A Night of Comedy and Reflection, parodying the Middle-East peace process through farce, mockumentary and autobiographical monologue and presented by Jeremie Bracka. In January we will host Orly Ramihiyan who will discuss the image of the Jew in Iranian culture. Later in the Spring semester our noted Israeli film director and faculty member of NYU Tel Aviv, Eytan Fox (Yossi and Jagger; Walk on Water) will lead an evening of Film and the Arts in Israel where he will host an Israeli actress and following her career. We are planning more events for the Spring.
Things are much quieter in Tel Aviv these days and you can see people enjoying themselves at cafés in the city and along the Mediterranean. We are planning to start as usual the J-term with courses from the Silver School of Social Work and of course we are all excited to see students again in the Spring in a vibrant intellectual environment.