Politics of Hospitality: African Students at the Hebrew University Medical School in the 1960s

Abstract

From 1961‐1965, the Medical School of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem taught four cohorts of medical students from developing countries, mostly African. This article explores the program through the theory of hospitality. First, we find that hospitality is constructed and enabled by international interests. Second, those interests build a status which has unexpected consequences that reveal sorts of hosts, welcoming and xenophobic. Third, as an outcome of the international structure of student exchange, the guests' response to the terms of hospitality was mitigated by their privileged status as international medical students. On the one hand, they appreciated Israel as a model of post‐colonial state‐building; on the other, they criticized the racist reactions to their presence.

How to be a good guest: American ethnographers in Turkey in the long 1968

“…Like Fallers, Afghan traders are embarrassed by bad guests from their home country and try to highlight, by contrast, their good guest status. In their historical study of African students at Hebrew University in the 1960s, Nuriely and Kozma (2021) show that although these students suffered discrimination and harassment at the hands of Israeli students, the Africans students nevertheless bit their tongue to avoid reinforcing the stereotype of African incomers as a nuisance. In fact, their perception of Israel as a modern, advanced country caused them to reproduce the judgemental discourse of the host public; they, like Fallers, voluntarily strove to be good guests.…”

“…The desire to be a good guest is an under‐theorized theme in the anthropological literature on hospitality. As Benny Nuriely and Liat Kozma point out, ‘scholarship on hospitality usually focuses on the characteristics of the host rather than those of the guest’ (2021: 575). Although most accounts define hospitality as a relationship , it usually comes to mean the host's attitude towards the guest; hence, it is treated principally as a property of the host (Agier 2021: 13ff.).…”