Hebrew Language Program: 2025 In Review

2025 has been an eventful year for the Hebrew program! We started off in February with a bilingual poetry workshop in conjunction with the Arabic program, inviting poet Almog Behar to share his work as an artist whose heritage is both Jewish Israeli and Arab Mizrachi. Reading his poetry in both languages inspired thoughtful conversations about the role of language in shaping a person’s sense of identity.

In April we kicked off our new end-of-semester “Portfolio Showcase,” in which students from all levels of Hebrew gather to share with each other the independent projects on which they have worked over the course of the semester. In these portfolios, students use their growing Hebrew skills to explore topics of personal interest (elements of Israeli culture, the diversity of written and spoken forms of the Hebrew language, etc.) and to reflect on campus events and Duke life in Hebrew.
 

September brought five Israeli Jewish, Palestinian and Druze artists from Givat Haviva, The Center for a Shared Society in Israel, to Duke for a six-week residency sponsored by the Provost’s Initiative on the Middle East. The Hebrew classes each had a class day to explore the exhibition and have a discussion with these artists about their work and the process of creating art together in a context of social division. In one student’s words, “It was beautiful to hear how complex each piece actually was and how each artist drew from their life experiences."

In November, the Hebrew classes were visited by Dr. Ohad Cohen from the University of Haifa, a Hebrew language scholar who shared with them some of his written work inspired by his experiences growing up on a kibbutz. The students were intrigued to hear his stories and also to learn more about the language from his public lecture on how modern Arabic dialectology can shed light on the linguistic variety that existed in ancient Hebrew. 

Since feedback from our April portfolio showcase was overwhelmingly positive, we continued the new tradition by closing out the fall in December with another showcase for this semester’s students. Highlights included digging into Hebrew pop music lyrics, graffiti in Tel Aviv, women in Israeli government, Hebrew palindromes, and much more!