Tuesday, December 27, 2022, I taught my last of 8 classes in Problems in American Criminal Law. My location? Bar-Ilan University in Ramat Gan, Israel, a suburb of Tel Aviv. This culminated a two-year journey, one interrupted by COVID and fraught with concerns about the world I would be entering, the tolerance I was hoping for, and a goal of supporting the bridge between our two law schools.
The beginning of this story is simple. Bar-Ilan and Temple Law are collaborating, and as part of that process I was asked to create a course for an intersession program Bar-Ilan offers, 1- and 2-credit English-language courses for students nearing the end of the formal law school education (followed, unlike in the U.S., by a required internship before sitting for the Bar). Problems in criminal law were the focus, using the successes, failures, and dilemmas of the U.S. system as a tool to offer a comparative perspective and engender discussions about topics that know no boundaries – guns, capital punishment, race and class, the allocation of power between judge and jury, and the strengths and weaknesses of expert proof. Taught last year online, this year was to be in person.
The trepidations? Would Bar-Ilan be an isolated outpost of religious conservatism? Would Israel be a place of tolerance? Will the course engage the students? And how will I manage traveling in a land where I don’t speak the language – one of many mundane but important concerns?
Let me start at the top. Bar-Ilan is a school committed to diversity – diversity of ideas, values, religion, and gender. I learned that from the new Dean, Michal Alberstein, whose commitment to student diversity ad conflict resolution is strong. I saw it in my class, where there were young and old, women and men, secular and religious, Jew and non-Jew. I found it in vibrant class discussions, be they debates about the right of a battered spouse to act in self-defense against the sleeping abuser or whether the death penalty served any purpose and could be applied rationally and fairly. And stereotypes were quickly repudiated – a Palestinian student held extremely conservative views when it came to punishment, and an Israeli Jew from the military argued strongly for rehabilitative-focused sentencing.
Teaching about problems in criminal law brought that arena into greater focus. Every day a report or news article from the United States gave new, usually distressing, teaching material: guns became the leading cause of death for children in the United States; police departments can no longer get enough recruits; a death sentence was likely to be overturned because the trial judge made antisemitic statements; the cost of imprisonment continues to skyrocket, but a Penn Medicine study showed that making modest repairs to homes reduced the rate of gun crime arrests in those restored neighborhoods. I had to make sense of these facts to students and come to grips again with the dysfunctions of the criminal law systems of the United States.
What else? The kaleidoscope of wonderful food; kindness from every person who could see that I lacked the ability to converse in Hebrew; the beauty of Masada, the oasis Ein Gedi; the collections at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art; crossing into Jordan to experience the archeological and geological marvel of Petra, visited at dawn after a night of music around a Bedouin campfire; and the quotidian neighborhood life seen from my bus excursions to and from the University, a place, like all Israeli schools, that can be entered only through a security checkpoint.
As I finish this article, the latest Netanyahu coalition government of Israel has been sworn in, kindling a new and greater set of fears. What path Israel will take can only be guessed. But perhaps that concern makes engagement between Temple and Bar-Ilan even more important. It was important to me and I hope to those I taught, spoke with, and went to bear witness for.
