Daniel Gordis Appointed Chair of Shalem Core Curriculum

Daniel Gordis, Shalem Senior Vice President and Koret Distinguished Fellow, has been appointed Head of the Core Curriculum Department at Shalem College. Himself a graduate of Columbia College, home to one of America’s oldest and most renowned core programs, Gordis will be responsible for defining the Shalem College experience through a unique course of study that combines the great texts of the Western and Jewish traditions.

Author of numerous books on nationalism, Jewish identity, and contemporary Zionism, as well as the former director of Jerusalem’s Mandel Leadership Institute and founding dean of the Ziegler School of Rabbinic Studies in Los Angeles, Gordis believes that a shared curriculum grounded in classic texts and profound thinkers is an absolute, even existential, necessity for the Jewish state. Young Israelis, he insists, need to be familiar with the writing of John Locke and John Stuart Mill, the giants of Western political philosophy. But they also need to study the debates internal to Zionism, to encounter the thought of Islam, and to “know what Jewish civilization has had to say about government and society, about fairness and justice, and about the good life and the good death.” Bringing all these subjects into conversation with each other is a challenge, Gordis concedes, but one that, if it succeeds, “holds the potential to turn our graduates into  “the kind of individuals willing and able to commit their lives to addressing, successfully, the challenges facing their country and people.”

Gordis, whose new biography of Israel’s former Prime Minister Menachem Begin is about to be published, emphasized that the purpose of the Shalem Core will be about far more than conveying knowledge, however. “As is the case at the leading liberal arts colleges in America and Europe, our students will be inducted into a certain type of learning culture.” By teaching the classic texts in small, participatory seminars, he maintains, the Shalem Core will “balance debate with civility, and turn passionate conversations about big ideas into blueprints for national discourse.”