The piece shines a light on Kalaniyot’s mission to strengthen ties with Israeli researchers from diverse backgrounds and cultivate more supportive campus environments. The article emphasizes how Kalaniyot aims to “humanize” Israeli society and provide crucial academic opportunities for Israeli scholars who have faced challenges amidst rising campus tensions. With chapters already established at prestigious institutions like Harvard Medical School, the University of Pennsylvania, Dartmouth, and Columbia, Kalaniyot is a testament to the power of science in uniting humanity, transcending political divides.

We encourage you to read the full article in The Boston Globe to learn more about MIT-Kalaniyot’s impactful work and its role in promoting academic partnership and understanding: MIT-Kalaniyot featured in The Boston Globe.

By Iris WeaverBell

Published August 1, 2025

Dartmouth launched a partnership with Israeli universities in October 2024 that will bring Israeli researchers to Hanover and facilitate academic collaboration. 

Computer science professor Daniel Rockmore and Psychological and Brain Sciences professor Jeremy Manning founded the Dartmouth chapter of national group Kalaniyot, making the College one of five members of the nationwide organization founded by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology after the Oct. 7 attacks, according to its website. In addition to MIT, other member institutions include Columbia University, Harvard Medical School and the University of Pennsylvania.

The program centers Dartmouth’s “core value” of neutrality, Manning said. 

“Kalaniyot is specifically focused on furthering Dartmouth’s academic mission,” he said. “There may be other knock-on benefits. But it’s true that anytime there’s war and strife, academic difficulty comes with that.” 

The organization’s website says that it is dedicated to reversing trends of “hostility” against those with ties to Israel. 

“Many U.S. universities have seen an increase in hostility aimed at anyone with ties to Israel,” reads the national Kalaniyot website. “Kalaniyot is a faculty-driven effort to reverse these trends and return universities to their core purpose of being a welcoming place for students and scholars of all backgrounds.”

Rockmore said he was inspired to found Kalaniyot at Dartmouth by his past collaborations with Israeli universities, including the Tel Aviv University. 

“Israel has some of the best mathematicians in the world, as well as some of the best computer scientists,” Rockmore said. “So it struck us as a natural connection.”

Rockmore added that the “community of researchers” in the national Kalaniyot organization were proponents of intercollegiate research collaboration.

“We anticipate that intellectual life here will be fuller with these new connections,” Rockmore said.

Manning added that he looks forward to “engaging with this exciting community of scientists” and “building relationships with Israeli universities.”

“There are amazing scientists at Israeli universities,” Manning said. “They are at the absolute top of their fields, and they are excited to work with the amazing people at Dartmouth, too — that gives us an opportunity.”

Rockmore said the “completely apolitical” ethos of the organization “resonated” with him. 

Kalaniyot at Dartmouth is opening applications for three programs: one for postdoctoral researchers, one for visiting faculty and one for research collaborations with Israeli universities. The group will begin reviewing applications from researchers at Israeli universities in November, according to Manning. 

Religion professor and Dartmouth-Kalaniyot faculty board member Susannah Heschel said she believes programs that attract both researchers at the beginning of their careers and established faculty are valuable.

“Having someone who is young and fresh and has new ideas — that’s exciting for us,” she said. “But it’s also fantastic when we bring the most prestigious scholars in the world.”

As chair of the Jewish Studies Program, Heschel helps facilitate collaborations between Dartmouth and Israeli universities through the Brownstone program, which funds a visiting Jewish Studies professor each year. 

Heschel said she was “thrilled” about the initiative. 

“I think it’s something that gives [Dartmouth] international prominence,” she said.

Originally published on The Dartmouth.

The video features insights from co-founders Ernest Fraenkel and Or Hen, along with highlights of faculty, students, and the inaugural cohort of Kalaniyot Fellows and Scholars. Viewers will discover how MIT-Kalaniyot has transformed campus life by creating a vibrant community for Jewish and Israeli students while fostering groundbreaking research collaborations.

Watch the full video here

MIT-Kalaniyot represents the inaugural chapter of the Kalaniyot Foundation, which supports university-led initiatives that strengthen ties between American and Israeli academic institutions. Through fellowship programs, research collaborations, and community-building activities, Kalaniyot chapters create lasting partnerships that advance knowledge and foster cross-cultural understanding.

MIT-Kalaniyot launches programs for visiting Israeli scholars

Inviting recent postdocs and sabbatical-eligible faculty to pursue their research at MIT, new programs envision eventually supporting 16 Israeli scholars on campus annually.

Lisa Capone | Office of the Vice Provost for International Activities

December 20, 2024

Over the past 14 months, as the impact of the ongoing Israel-Gaza war has rippled across the globe, a faculty-led initiative has emerged to support MIT students and staff by creating a community that transcends ethnicity, religion, and political views. Named for a flower that blooms along the Israel-Gaza border, MIT-Kalaniyot began hosting weekly community lunches that typically now draw about 100 participants. These gatherings have gained the interest of other universities seeking to help students not only cope with but thrive through troubled times, with some moving to replicate MIT’s model on their own campuses.

Now, scholars at Israel’s nine state-recognized universities will be able to compete for MIT-Kalaniyot fellowships designed to allow Israel’s top researchers to come to MIT for collaboration and training, advancing research while contributing to a better understanding of their country.

The MIT-Kalaniyot Postdoctoral Fellows Program will support scholars who have recently graduated from Israeli PhD programs to continue their postdoctoral training at MIT. Meanwhile, the new MIT-Kalaniyot Sabbatical Scholars Program will provide faculty and researchers holding sabbatical-eligible appointments at Israeli research institutions with fellowships for two academic terms at MIT.

Announcement of the fellowships through the association of Israeli university presidents spawned an enthusiastic response. 

“We’ve received many emails, from questions about the program to messages of gratitude. People have told us that, during a time of so much negativity, seeing such a top-tier academic program emerge feels like a breath of fresh air,” says Or Hen, the Class of 1956 Associate Professor of Physics and associate director of the Laboratory for Nuclear Science, who co-founded MIT-Kalaniyot with Ernest Fraenkel, the Grover M. Hermann Professor in Health Sciences and Technology.

Hen adds that the response from potential program donors has been positive, as well.

“People have been genuinely excited to learn about forward-thinking efforts and how they can simultaneously support both MIT and Israeli science,” he says. “We feel truly privileged to be part of this meaningful work.”

MIT-Kalaniyot is “a faculty-led initiative that emerged organically as we came to terms with some of the challenges that MIT was facing trying to keep focusing on its mission during a very difficult period for the U.S., and obviously for Israelis and Palestinians,” Fraenkel says.

As the MIT-Kalaniyot Program gained momentum, he adds, “we started talking about positive things faculty can do to help MIT fulfill its mission and then help the world, and we recognized many of the challenges could actually be helped by bringing more brilliant scholars from Israel to MIT to do great research and to humanize the face of Israelis so that people who interact with them can see them, not as some foreign entity, but as the talented person working down the hallway.”

“MIT has a long tradition of connecting scholarly communities around the world,” says MIT President Sally Kornbluth. “Programs like this demonstrate the value of bringing people and cultures together, in pursuit of new ideas and understanding.”    

Open to applicants in the humanities, architecture, management, engineering, and science, both fellowship programs aim to embrace Israel’s diverse demographics by encouraging applications from all communities and minority groups throughout Israel.

Fraenkel notes that because Israeli universities reflect the diversity of the country, he expects scholars who identify as Israeli Arabs, Palestinian citizens of Israel, and others could be among the top candidates applying and ultimately selected for MIT-Kalaniyot fellowships. 

MIT is also expanding its Global MIT At-Risk Fellows Program (GMAF), which began last year with recruitment of scholars from Ukraine, to bring Palestinian scholars to campus next fall. Fraenkel and Hen noted their close relationship with GMAF-Palestine director Kamal Youcef-Toumi, a professor in MIT’s Department of Mechanical Engineering.  

“While the programs are independent of each other, we value collaboration at MIT and are hoping to find positive ways that we can interact with each other,” Fraenkel says.

Also growing up alongside MIT-Kalaniyot’s fellowship programs will be new Kalaniyot chapters at universities such as the University of Pennsylvania and Dartmouth College, where programs have already begun, and others where activity is starting up. MIT’s inspiration for these efforts, Hen and Fraenkel say, is a key aspect of the Kalaniyot story.

“We formed a new model of faculty-led communities,” Hen says. “As faculty, our roles typically center on teaching, mentoring, and research. After October 7 happened, we saw what was happening around campus and across the nation and realized that our roles had to expand. We had to go beyond the classroom and the lab to build deeper connections within the community that transcends traditional academic structures. This faculty-led approach has become the essence of MIT-Kalaniyot, and is now inspiring similar efforts across the nation.”

Once the programs are at scale, MIT plans to bring four MIT-Kalaniyot Postdoctoral Fellows to campus annually (for three years each), as well as four MIT-Kalaniyot Sabbatical Scholars, for a total of 16 visiting Israeli scholars at any one time.

“We also hope that when they go back, they will be able to maintain their research ties with MIT, so we plan to give seed grants to encourage collaboration after someone leaves,” Fraenkel says. “I know for a lot of our postdocs, their time at MIT is really critical for making networks, regardless of where they come from or where they go. Obviously, it’s harder when you’re across the ocean in a very challenging region, and so I think for both programs it would be great to be able to maintain those intellectual ties and collaborate beyond the term of their fellowships.”

A common thread between the new Kalaniyot programs and GMAF-Palestine, Hen says, is to rise beyond differences that have been voiced post-Oct. 7 and refocus on the Institute’s core research mission.

“We’re bringing in the best scholars from the region — Jews, Israelis, Arabs, Palestinians — and normalizing interactions with them and among them through collaborative research,” Hen says. “Our mission is clear: to focus on academic excellence by bringing outstanding talent to MIT and reinforcing that we are here to advance research in service of humanity.”