It was a historic moment. For the first time since the Israel-Egypt Peace Treaty was signed, an Egyptian professor has joined the Israeli academy.
On 27 October 2022, Professor Kamal Abdel Malek from Alexandria addressed the Association of Egyptian Jews in Israel, whose President is Levana Zamir. After being given a warm welcome, Professor Abdel Malek lectured on the subject “The Pyramids and The Star of David – by an Egyptian in Israel.”
The lecture took place before a packed house at the Heritage Center of Egyptian Jewry in Tel Aviv.”I feel at home with all of you here !” Professor Abdel Malek exclaimed after chatting briefly with the audience. “I feel like I am meeting family relatives I have not seen for a long time…”
Professor Abdel Malek is teaching at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem for one semester. Eminent Israeli professors, experts on the history Jews of Egypt, attended the lecture. They included the 2022 Israel Prize Laureate and Tel Aviv University Professor Shimon Shamir, Professor Elie Podeh of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Professor Itzhak Reiter, President of The Middle East and Islamic Studies Association of Israel, Dr Eyal Sagi and Dr Eran Goldenberg of Haifa University.
The Ambassador of Israel to Egypt, Amira Oron, whose mother was born in Egypt, was also present. In less than two years she has managed to drive forward many important Israel-Egypt projects, including this academic one.
Professor Kamal Abdel Malek is an expert in Arabic literature. His speciality is “Encounters between Israelis and Egyptians, in Literature and Cinema.” This is a special course he is teaching with Professor Elie Podeh, Head of Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies at the Hebrew University, whose main fields of interest are modern Egypt, inter-Arab relations, the Arab-Israeli conflict and education and culture in the Middle East.
Professor Elie Podeh stressed what a historic event this occasion was – the first time an Egyptian professor has joined the Israeli Academy since the peace treaty was signed. Professor Shimon Shamir remembered the first time he met Professor Kamal Abdel Malek 43 years ago, when he came to Israel just after the treaty was signed in 1979, to join the Hebrew University as an undergraduate for a one-year program. He studied Hebrew, history, politics, Judaism and Jewish art. He had never returned since, and completed his graduate studies at McGill University in Canada where he received his PhD in Arabic and Islamic Studies in 1992.
As well as being a researcher and a professor of Arabic literature, Kamal Abdel Malek is a supporter of Israel and of peace. Before coming to Israel last month he was a visiting scholar at Harvard University. Today he lectures at universities around the world, including in Dubai on the topic of Arab-Jewish encounters in literature and the arts. He has authored many books and articles, among them “Arab-Jewish Encounters in Contemporary Palestinian Literature and Film (2005)”. He has won prestigious excellence awards for education and research.
To close this moving event, Levana Zamir said: “we have to remember what happened during the mid-twentieth century to the Jewish community in Egypt, but now our time to love has come”. She concluded by reading a beautiful poem, titled “Ya Masr el-Habiba’. It was written in Arabic by her mother Esther Vidal-Mosser on the day that President Anwar Sadat came to Jerusalem on 19 November 1977.