Polis Institute Launches Consulting Services in North America

The Polis Institute of Jerusalem is glad to announce the launch of its new consulting services for educational institutions across North America. These services are designed to help colleges, universities, and schools integrate the Polis Method, a language-learning approach grounded in full-immersion and dynamic language development. This marks a significant step forward in our mission to expand the reach of the Polis Method.

By partnering with colleges, universities, and schools in the U.S.A., Mexico, and Canada, we aim to offer educators and administrators personalized consulting packages that will transform how languages such as Latin and Spanish are taught. The consulting services include on-site evaluations, immersive teacher training, and curriculum development to enhance student engagement and fluency in classical and modern languages.

"We're excited to bring our method to North American colleges, universities, and schools, where there's a growing demand for innovative and effective language instruction," said Guillermo Dillon, Senior Consultant for the Polis Institute. "Our team is committed to helping these institutions adopt this proven method, tailored to meet the specific needs of their classrooms."

Universities and schools interested in learning more about this initiative can go to our consulting services page or contact Guillermo Dillon directly at [email protected].

Join us for the 2024 Dies Academicus on October 8th

Jews and Arabic: Judeo-Arabic, Its Literature, and Why It Matters

In this lecture, we will immerse ourselves in the revolutionary innovations in Jewish literature that occurred during the critical era of Rabbinic Judaism between the sixth and eleventh centuries. During this period, Arabic was the native language of the vast majority of the Jewish population, and Arabic was without a doubt the language of choice for Jewish authors. We will emerge with an understanding of the sweeping linguistic and cultural transformations in Judeo-Arabic religious scholarship that shaped Judaism as we know it today.

Miriam Goldstein was trained at Harvard, Cambridge and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and is professor in the Department of Arabic Language and Literature at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. A specialist in medieval Judeo-Arabic texts, Goldstein focuses on interreligious relations in the medieval Arabic-speaking world as well as Judeo-Arabic Bible exegesis.

She is author of A Judeo-Arabic Parody of the Life of Jesus: The Toledot Yeshu Helene Narrative (2023) and Karaite Exegesis in Medieval Jerusalem (2011), as well as numerous articles on Arabic and Judeo-Arabic literature, and is co-editor of Beyond Religious Borders: Interaction and Intellectual Exchange in the Medieval Islamic World (2011) and Authorship in Mediaeval Arabic and Persian Literatures (2019). Her work has been supported by the Israel Science Foundation, the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, the Minerva Stiftung, and the German-Israeli Foundation for Scientific Research and Development. She is currently completing a critical edition and translation of the Judeo-Arabic Genesis commentary of the tenth-century Karaite scholar Ya‘qub al-Qirqisani, and leads the project “Parodies on the Life of Jesus in Yemen: Towards the Origins and Development of the Toledot Yeshu Literature” (Israel Science Foundation 2063/22).

In collaboration with the Polis Insitute, Northridge Preparatory School is organizing a five day in-person conference in the Chicago area for current and aspiring teachers interested in learning how to teach Latin and Spanish using the full-immersion approach best exemplified in the Polis Method. 

This training will equip current and aspiring teachers of Latin and Spanish on how to teach a language via a natural, engaging, and spoken method. Additionally, the conference will provide a greater appreciation of why languages are worth teaching using this approach. Educators who value the liberal arts and the tradition of Western education are invited to participate.

The conference will take place during the week of 17-21 June 2024 in the school Northridge which is located in the suburb of Niles, IL, and it's just 15min away from O'Hare International Aiport. Registration costs $700 USD and it includes lunch and dinner from Monday through Friday, along with printed materials for the conference. Want to find out more? Click on this link to visit the conference's webpage or contact Guillermo Dillon at [email protected] in case you have any questions.

Click here to hear a podcast about the Polis Method.

Considering the current situation in Jerusalem and the country, it was decided to postpone the start date of the Fall semester 2023-2024 to Monday, October 16. This applies to both, In-person and Online courses. 

In-person courses will remain in-person at Polis, and online courses will remain online. 

Please note that courses that are to be held on Mondays and Wednesdays will start on Monday, October 16 and courses that are to be held on Tuesdays and Thursdays will start on Tuesday, October 17.  

Registration will remain open until a week after the start of the courses. 

You can Pay online via PayPal to this account: [email protected] or by Bank Transfer or Credit Card over the phone.

To pay by Credit Card over the phone. You can call us on (972)0747011048 or on our WhatsApp number +972 50-793-8663

You can place cash and Credit Card payments at the office, only note that we will not necessarily be open during all the regular office times, and our presence at the office depends on the situation, so please call before visiting us at the office. 

FYI: Our courses depend on the number of registrations we get, if the number is enough the course will surely take place. If not, students will be notified 5 days before and will be issued a refund. The unconfirmed and uncancelled courses are still not decided yet, and we will update you all the time. 

Instructor Iosif Fridman

In this course the students will learn to read and write using the traditional Ethiopic
syllabic writing system, as well as with the help of the transcription system used by
scholars.

A lecture by Prof. Ophir Münz-Manor

The Polis Interdisciplinary Colloquium: Souls and Sounds of the City

The Polis Interdisciplinary Colloquium: Souls and Sounds of the City

Congratulations to Polis graduate and Biblical Hebrew instructor Oobie Weinberg, who was recently accepted for a position as an exegete and researcher with Cambridge Digital Biblical Research https://www.cdbr.org/ .  Oobie will be joining a team of scholars to work on the Psalms Layer-by-Layer project  https://www.cdbr.org/psalms.  He will begin with three months of linguistic exegetical training and then move onto detailed methodological analysis of the Hebrew psalms, creating sophisticated visual resources for biblical translators all around the world. This will include, for example, grammatical diagramming, participant analysis, discourse analysis, semantic analysis, speech act analysis, poetics, word plays and phonological repetitions, and more. “I also believe that this opportunity will enhance my abilities as an instructor at Polis,” explains Oobie. “I am excited at the chance to go deep into Biblical Hebrew research and then bring that richness into my teaching.” 

Dr. Tania Notarius draws on her research to create this new course

Ugaritic is an ancient Northwest Semitic language and an early cognate of Hebrew, Phoenician, and Aramaic.  Dr. Tania Notarius, our Head of Near Eastern Languages, leads research on the historical syntax of Ugaritic, which concentrates on diverse syntactic topics.  Her interest in the topic grows out of her study of archaic Biblical Hebrew poetry.  From 2020-22, she represented the Polis Institute at several international conferences and published articles in leading scholarly venues about voice, tense, and impersonal constructions in Ugaritic and Hebrew.  Several examples include “Impersonal Verbal Constructions in Biblical Hebrew,” Journal for Semitics, and “From Phrase to Clause: Active Participle in Ugaritic,” Acta Orientalia 74 (4):  565–581.  Her research opens a new page in the historical linguistics of the Northwest Semitic languages, examining the diachronic connections between the 13th century and the 8th-10th centuries linguistic data.