The months since October 7, 2023, have been the most trying for Israel Studies in recent memory. Even at the best of times, one would be hard-pressed to find areas of study that provoke more heated controversies. The ricochets of October 7th and its aftermath, however, have transformed the academic environment to the extent that those seeking dispassionate knowledge about Israel are often left wanting.

The fallout has been felt well beyond academia, spreading through multiple arenas, both military and civil. The reflections in this special section, marking some eighteen months since the start of the war, examine three central areas in Israel Studies during this period. The first is academia itself, where challenges to academic freedom, politicization, and targeted attacks have been rampant. The second focuses on research reassessing the functioning of Israel's military. The third explores artistic expressions that engage with collective trauma.

In the realm of academia, Israeli institutions and individual scholars face both overt and covert boycotts, which include diverse methods of deplatforming, rejection or removal from collaborative projects, and rejection of papers from journals on grounds unrelated to merit or without standard peer review. The article by Boaz Golany, former Executive Vice President and Director General of the Technion, Israel Institute of Technology, and Rivka Carmi, former president of Ben-Gurion University, discusses the findings of the Scholar Shield Project at the Samuel Neaman Institute, which documents the manifestations and scope of the boycott phenomenon. At the same time, within Israeli academia, Palestinian Arab students and scholars have found that their freedom to express sentiments outside the bounds of what is now considered acceptable speech in Israeli society has been increasingly restricted and subjected to punitive actions by academic institutions, themselves under pressure from the central government to contain dissent. Manal Totry-Jubran's article analyzes the problem, providing examples of retaliatory sanctions on extramural expressions by students and scholars. Then there is the rise of antisemitism and anti-Israel animus on campuses in North America and beyond, which has further hindered the ability for informed and well-reasoned debates. Jeff Kopstein, Rachel Shenhav-Goldberg, and Ana Schugurensky present important findings from a survey of undergraduate students on University of California campuses, which began prior to October 7th and continued in its wake. The survey reveals a substantive rise in both forms of antipathy in the immediate aftermath of the October 7th attacks.

Survey and research conducted in Israel in recent years have regularly shown that public trust in the military is substantively higher than almost all other Israeli state institutions. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) has always been regarded as highly professional and well-functioning. The events of October 7th greatly undermined this widely held perception. The articles by Yagil Levy and Saviona Rotlevy, Ayelet Harel, and Shir Daphna-Tekoah expose fundamental flaws at the root of the military's failure to anticipate and swiftly respond to the October 7th attack. Levy argues that the IDF's overconfidence in technological solutions to challenges that extend beyond the military's core mission enabled the political status quo while also facilitating the failure to anticipate Hamas's adaptive capabilities. Complementarily, Rotlevy, Harel, and Daphna-Tekoah's research exposes how the military's institutional inertia manifested in the disregard of crucial warnings from women soldiers in frontline war rooms. These soldiers’ repeated flagging of Hamas's preparations for attack was dismissed as “just military training,” revealing a critical gap between professional field observations and the military system's ability to interpret them in a way that disrupts preconceptions.

When the cannons roar, the muses do not fall silent (contrary to the famous saying). Yael Guilat's article examines how Jewish and Arab artists use art as both testimony and healing, by focusing on the digital diaries of two artists during the “Long October 7th”—Eli Koplevitch, who was evacuated from Kibbutz Dafna, and Raida Adon, a Palestinian-Israeli artist who fled to Paris. Their daily artistic practices serve as a means of both personal processing of trauma and historical documentation, revealing how art becomes essential for both witnessing and resilience during times of crisis.