Fabulous reporting by the Forward’s Naomi Zeveloff on Jerusalem Online U., a website offering academic credits that good schools like George Washington are accepting, that is all about recruiting American students into Israel “advocacy.” The course offerings feature Benjamin Netanyahu and Alan Dershowitz. And notice the delicious reporting re Rashid Khalidi. Zeveloff’s revelations about the American corporate leaders’ support for this propaganda is deep in the story, but it is of course essential to an understanding of the lobby in motion:
the only reading from Columbia University historian Rashid Khalidi — a prolific critic of both Israeli policy and Palestinian leadership — is an article about the Palestinian “failure” of 1948, in which he calls the Palestinians “strikingly incapable of concerted planning and effective collective action.”
Jerusalem Online U is a product of the brave new world of online education, a world in which many educators are still feeling their way. In this world, Jerusalem Online U appears to precariously straddle the realms of academia and advocacy. Founder Raphael Shore, a Canadian rabbi living in Israel, says that, its name notwithstanding, the program is not a university but an education portal, offering classes on Israel, positive psychology, Judaism and cinema. And yet, one of Jerusalem Online U’s major selling points is that it offers courses for academic credit through Touro College, an accredited Jewish university in New York City….
[In 2009], Shore decided to change the name of the site. When Shore floated the idea of “Jerusalem Online University,” Touro officials balked, worried that the online portal would be mistaken for a real university. As a compromise, Shore settled on Jerusalem Online U….
With the name change came a surge in financial backing. Though Shore would not disclose the amount of money given by any one donor, he said that major contributors include Taglit-Birthright Israel founder Michael Steinhardt, former Goldman Sachs Group chairman Leon Cooperman and former America Online president Len Leader. This year, he said, Jerusalem Online U has a budget of $1 million and is extending its educational offerings to Jewish high schools.
According to not-for-profit tax forms filed for Jerusalem Online U’s parent organization, Imagination Productions, Inc., the goal of the program is “to create a Jewish movement on campus by exposing a critical mass of Jewish students (20%) to Jewish education within the next five years.”
A disgrace that any USA university would offer university credits for studying propaganda. The rest is ho-hum, what would you expect.
Touro should lose its accreditation.
Meh, all the other criminals are getting their fingers into the fly-by-night correspondence school secondary education pie, why not the Israel lobby too?
the article opens