On Tuesday, Washington Square Park near New York University, served as the site of a birthday party for Israel. Capping the Bronfman Center for Jewish Student Life’s Israel Week, the event featured balloons and streamers alongside banners that ready, “Happy Birthday Israel!” Everything from face painting to backgammon tournaments took place. Sponsors included “the Bronfman Center, Gesher: Israel at NYU, Hillel, Stand with U.S. and Masa.”

One of the more creative aspects of Israel’s birthday bash at NYU was entitled “Get to Know Israel Twister.” With five Twister boards reconfigured to resemble a map of Israel, each color was synonymous with a city - so participants in the game had to put their right foot on Haifa instead of the traditional primary colors. Thanks to the beautiful weather, a winner of one round of the Israeli Twister game, Tisch sophomore Erica Frankel, joked, “I feel like I’m back in the Holy Land!”

Stern freshman David Sharon, a student organizer, said their ultimate goal was “to portray the true Israel that is not portrayed in the media.”

“And to have fun,” said CAS freshman Angelica Murdukhayeva, also a student organizer.

The festivities did not go off completely without a hitch. Opponents of the celebration demonstrated near the end of the event, and featured support for the Palestinian cause and criticism of Israeli policies.

As the party wound down, a group of students began shouting, “Long live Palestine! Free, free Palestine! Long live the Intifada!” along the outskirts of the area in the park where the Israeli Independence Day Party was taking place.

CAS junior Eihab Abdelfatah was strongly opposed to the celebration.

“My grandparents … my parents were born in a refugee camp,” he said. “This is a slap in the face to me.”

Although many students who were in attendance at the Israeli Independence Day celebration seemed upset by the actions of the protesters, events did not become heated beyond a few minutes of shouting, and the small group of dissenters disbanded.

Rejewvenation, a new program from Hillel International which seeks “to provide an alternative, social Sabbath celebration to bring Jewish and non-Jewish students together on college campuses,” launched its pilot event at Emory University last Friday. Emory and Indiana University are the two pilot schools for the program, which Hillel hopes will bring Jewish students into an environent their non-Jewish friends will find welcoming. The Steinhardt Foundation is funding the program, which will launch on a larger scale in the fall.

Rejewvenation’s national director, Jacob Schreiber, said Emory was chosen as one of the two pilot sites because of the “ecumenical feel” on campus, promoted by a strong Jewish life staff. The first pilot event was held at Indiana University three weeks ago.

Schreiber said that Emory was a challenge because the school has a large contingent of students who have a strong sense of their Jewish identities but do not view themselves as religious.

“Part of me believes that if we can make this work at Emory, then we can make this work at other campuses,” Schreiber said.

Schreiber said Rejewvenation is not a religious event, although some Jewish rituals take place, like blessing the wine and bread. Jewish cultural music also played.

“There’s something universal about it, but there’s also something that’s particularly Jewish,” Director of Emory Hillel Michael Rabkin said. “I think that’s the challenge of this event, and also what’s special about it - bringing the universal and the particular together.”

A political science professor at the University of New Mexico, Gregory Gleason, has been chosen as one of 45 academic fellows by the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies. The group will be taken on a 10-day trip to Israel, courtesy of the FDD, to “discuss the threat terrorism poses to democratic countries.” The itinerary will include field trips to military and police institutions as well as lectures by “diplomats, academics and military officials” from Israel, the U.S., Jordan, Turkey, and India.

The Foundation for the Defense of Democracies was created after the September 11 terror attacks as a non-partisan non-profit to, according to their website, “engage in the worldwide war of ideas and to support the defense of democratic societies under assault by terrorism and Militant Islamism.” The group has been criticized by groups including the Council on American-Islamic Relations as leaning to the right and promoting a hawkish neo-conservative agenda.

The trip will not focus on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, said David Silverstein, vice president of campus education and grassroots programs for the foundation.

“It’s actually very little about that,” he said. “We use Israel as a case study about a democratic nation defending itself against the threat of terrorism.”

Gleason said he is not concerned about his safety on the trip.

“It’s risky, but I’m not worried about it,” he said. “There are risks in going to New York.”

“We speak a lot these days about terrorism,” he said. “But it’s not really an -ism. It’s not like Marxism or capitalism. Terrorism is when you have a bunch of people trying to hurt other people to get what they want. The name is kind of misleading, because it doesn’t say anything about their ideology.”

Democracies need to understand terrorists in order to combat them, Gleason said.

“If we really want to protect ourselves, we need to understand why they do what they do,” he said. “There’s the adage about following the money. For a lot of people - small arms dealers, that sort of thing - there’s financial incentive. On top of that, of course, there’s the pure, xenophobic hate that some people feel toward the United States and Europe.”