Students Play Guest at Weekly Shalem Forum – at the Mayor’s Office
Most Tuesday nights, Shalem’s student lounge plays host to Shalem Forum, a weekly series featuring influential personalities from Israel’s cultural, political, business, and academic sectors. This past week, however, students headed off-site for their event—specifically, to City Hall, where they joined Jerusalem mayor Nir Barkat for an informal, free-flowing conversation about the city, its challenges, and its future.
Second-year student Omri Segev, the evening’s moderator, had jokingly warned Mayor Barkat that students would take a no-holds-barred approach to their questions, which ranged from the status quo at the Western Wall and Temple Mount to the treatment of Arab citizens of East Jerusalem and the maintenance of a delicate balance between secular and religious interests.
Yet more than any other subject, students were interested in Mayor Barkat’s plans for making the city an attractive place for young professionals to live and work after graduation. “Mayor Barkat stressed that revamping Jerusalem’s image from a place ambitious young people leave after finishing college is one of his top priorities,” Segev stated. “He detailed the steps he’s taken so far to make the city a place that draws young talent from all over the country, both for the professional opportunities it provides as well as for the quality of life and culture it offers. And while he conceded that there’s still a long way to go in this regard, he was able to point to encouraging statistics that show that the movement of young people out of Jerusalem has actually reversed. The city is becoming a capital in the real sense of the term.” Finally, Segev added, “Both we and Mayor Barkat felt that Shalem—and other top-notch educational institutions in the city—have a serious role to play in making Jerusalem a mecca for the state’s best and brightest.”
Dr. Stephen Hazan Arnoff, Director of Shalem’s Department of Campus, Community, and Society and organizer of the event, described it as a “kind of meeting of the minds.” Barkat, he explained, “is a leader whose understanding of Jerusalem as a capital of youthful innovation and education meshes with our vision.” As for the decision to hold the event at City Hall, “We always tell our students, ‘this city is your classroom.’ And we mean it.”
