By Jacob Kamaras
When Alyssa Eisenstein decided to pursue a Master of Arts in Peace & Conflict Management at University of Haifa’s International School, she had a clear idea of what was to come. Having previously studied journalism at Northwestern University, volunteered for the Peace Corps in Nicaragua, and worked for six years as a Press Officer for the humanitarian organizations Refugees International and Oxfam America in Washington, D.C., she was intent to apply her experience to the quest for peace in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
University of Haifa — home to Israel’s most diverse student body and situated in the country’s most culturally diverse city — was already the natural living laboratory for her career interests.
“I had a one-way flight and was already planning on working on the task at hand,” Eisenstein said, calling her master’s program “the perfect, logical, most aligned next step to train me as a peace and conflict specialist and to work in Israel.” The program trains students in tangible peace-making skills, mediation, listening, understanding their own biases, and more.
And yet, nobody could have predicted how the October 7 attacks would take the significance of her peacebuilding pursuits to a whole new level.
“Going through a war is a devastating experience. There is an immense amount of grief and suffering that is felt on a daily basis,” she said. “It’s the backdrop to the whole program, what’s happening right now in Israel. The program has provided such a deep, profound satisfaction that I am being trained in something very needed, useful, and practical, and to be just one part of the conversation on moving towards peace.”
Now, the Chicago-area native — who is entering the third semester of her program— has also officially made Aliyah to Israel.
“It was very clear to me that once I arrived, this is home,” Eisenstein said.
Eisenstein has always been passionate about service, humanitarian work, and global affairs. Prior to living and studying in Israel, her career focused on working with the media and policymakers to advance humanitarian advocacy objectives — and she believed that would continue to be her path. But then, she felt burnt out during the COVID-19 pandemic, got in touch with her Jewish roots, and studied at seminary in Israel. She said that the University of Haifa program will help her transition her work from “emergency humanitarian mode” to identifying the root causes of conflict and finding peacebuilding solutions.
She arrived in Israel in September 2023, and her master’s program was slated to begin that October. Due to the war, classes ended up starting in mid-November over Zoom.
“Studying in the middle of a war poses lots of unique challenges. It was very challenging but very rewarding,” Eisenstein said. She noted experiences such as interacting with evacuees from the North and South who were housed in University of Haifa dormitories, uplifting student activities like Shabbat meals and challah bakes and, more broadly, he sense of community and inspiring mobilization efforts on campus after October 7.
Eisenstein believes that because she was not born Israeli nor Palestinian, she can approach peacebuilding with “a different level of hope and aspiration,” she says. “Not having grown up in conflict, not having to live through it and having friends die, I arrive new to the situation and can bring fresh perspectives, which I think is needed at this time.”
As part of the program, she interned at Together Beyond Words, an organization that works to stop cycles of violence, rebuild trust, and establish dialogue between Jews and Arabs, Israelis and Palestinians. At the same time, University of Haifa itself has functioned as a living laboratory for her ambitions due to the diversity at the school — which welcomes more immigrants and first-generation college students than any other Israeli university, and whose student body has the country’s highest proportion of Arab students.
“It’s a very inspiring feeling to walk around the campus. It’s an inclusive model of coexistence and shared society, and that’s one of the main reasons I came to University of Haifa,” she said.
Moving forward, as a new Israeli citizen, Eisenstein plans to remain in Haifa after graduation for ulpan (immersive Hebrew-language instruction) and to begin her professional career as a peacemaker. Additionally, sometime in the future, she hopes to learn the Arabic language.
“I really trust the next steps,” she said. “I’m excited to see where it goes.”