Abstract
What does it mean to be literate about Israel, and what does this have to do with you?
American academics, educators, community and religious leaders, students, laypeople, Jews, Christians, and Muslims are regularly confronted with conflicting reports on Israel in newspaper, radio, TV, or online news. Often complex situations are reduced to oversimplified sound bites, and even longer accounts focus on the immediacy of events and invite us to form opinions and take sides on issues we actually know very little about.
One important reason for this is that Israel was not a significant area of study in university curricula