About
“Sha’ar Ruach” is a special program in the faculty of humanities intended for students of the Faculties of Engineering, Exact Sciences & Life Sciences.
The program allows the students of these faculties to experience a variety of basic issues in the world of humanities and humans.
What is the purpose of the program?
- To expand the view of science students on the world from historical and philosophical directions
- To impart tools for critical thinking, writing and oral expression skills
- To expand humanistic horizons
How will the courses be conducted?
Every student in the faculties of engineering, exact sciences and life sciences is obliged take courses of 6 credits in the program (each course’s is valued as 2 credits).
The courses are conducted in different ways: Online, hybrid, face-to-face, workshops, and action-oriented courses.
What do you study in the Humanities?
Who wrote the Bible, how did the invention of printing in the 15th century affect culture? When did the Middle East become Muslim? When did women in England begin to write novels? How did the discovery of the New World affect the European imagination? How did Plato envision the ideal state and what was the place of women in it? Why do conservative religious values still have such a strong hold on our lives? What allows science fiction to imagine future technological inventions such as the submarine and the spacecraft? What are the differences in the concept of Zen in China and Japan? When was the concept of childhood invented? How did concepts of race and gender affect medicine? Do all humans have a common and innate syntactic system?
Join the world’s leading universities
In American universities, and especially in the leading ones, all students study the Humanities Core / Core Curriculum in the first two years of their studies. At universities in Israel, female students of engineering, exact sciences and life sciences have almost never been exposed to humanistic studies until now, and to the extent that they took courses in the Faculty of Humanities (for example, as part of the “integrated Tools” program), and these were not included in the number of credit hours.
Thanks to dialogues and interdiscipline
One of the goals of the program is to create new connections between the parts of the Tel Aviv University campus and to promote collaborations between researchers working in different research fields. For this reason, some of the courses in the program will be taught by two lecturers who will provide different perspectives on the course topics. For example, a course on the climate crisis will explore global warming not only from the perspective of earth sciences but from the perspectives of history, literature and cinema, philosophy and more.
