By Jacob Kamaras
The newly minted graduate from University of Haifa International School has used his academic experience as a launching pad for building a following on Instagram, where he shares Israel-related analysis. It’s a far cry from growing up in South Africa without a Jewish community.
Growing up in Knysna, a remote town in South Africa with no Jewish community, the concept of Jewish identity was essentially a foreign concept to Josh Buchalter.
It left him with a series of questions, most prominently among them: What does it mean to be Jewish? Why is Israel important to the Jewish people? Without a local Jewish community, he had no answers.
Then, as a 12th-grader, everything changed when his parents enrolled him in a Birthright-style trip to Israel for South African Jews.
“The seed was really planted during that trip,” Buchalter said. “I wouldn’t say I was in love with Israel at the time, but I just found it fascinating.”
Twelve years later, Buchalter has gone far beyond developing that sense of love for Israel. He’s an emerging social media influencer who advocates for the Jewish homeland on Instagram, focusing his content creation on Israel-related political analysis. To date, his page has received close to 1 million views.
Buchalter’s path has been shaped in large part by his studies at University of Haifa International School, where he graduated this month with a master’s in diplomacy.
“I want to try and combine media and politics, and to help support Israel on the international stage,” said Buchalter, 29.
Several poignant and meaningful experiences at University of Haifa this past academic year helped Buchalter advance his professional goals. For instance, last November, he was one of only a handful of students invited to a discussion with survivors of the Nova music festival massacre. When he spoke with people who work in advocacy in advance of that discussion, he shared that they remarked, “Wow, that’s a crazy opportunity, can I come?”
As a result of what he described as a raw, honest, and open conversation with the Nova festival survivors, Buchalter would become involved with a social media project called The Creator Lab, hosted by the organizations Israel-is and Talk Israel. The project served as a precursor to his own activity as an influencer on Instagram.
How did Buchalter end up in Haifa, let alone Israel? To start, he never stopped thinking about the Birthright-style trip that he took when was 17. It brought him back to the questions he had growing up about the meaning of Judaism and the significance of Israel.
“Where’s the best place to find an answer to a Jewish question? For a good Jewish boy, it’s a yeshiva,” he quipped.
Indeed, Buchalter went on to study at Aish HaTorah in Jerusalem.
“I was on a mission — I had questions, and I needed answers,” he recalled.
He lived in Miami for five years, working in the cruise industry, and it was life during COVID-19 that finally convinced him to think about Israel as a more than a transient destination. The pandemic “was the message from above that inspired me to make Aliyah,” he said.
Buchalter was also motivated by reading a memoir written by his grandfather, who was a volunteer pilot during Israel’s War of Independence in 1948. At long last, it answered Buchalter’s question about why Israel is significant to the Jewish people.
“Almost everyone in Israel has really played their part in giving to the state,” he said.
After moving to Israel in the Fall of 2020, he first earned a degree at Reichman University in Herzliya. At the same time, since he didn’t enlist in the IDF, he felt that he had “lost out on integration” into Israeli society to some degree. However, his experience at University of Haifa has changed that.
“It has been amazing to experience Israel in another light, in terms of taking my integration to another level and enabling me to see Israel from a perspective that a lot of olim don’t see,” Buchalter said.
He added, “It gave me a perspective on being Israeli, living in Israel, and integrating that I could never get in the center of the country. I needed to get out of the Tel Aviv bubble.”
More specifically, the uniqueness of Buchalter’s experience at University of Haifa has centered around the diversity on the campus. University of Haifa welcomes more immigrants and first-generation college students than any other Israeli university, and its student body also has the country’s highest proportion of Arab students.
“To study and live in this environment with so many Muslims, Christians, Druze, and Jews, this diversity is not found anywhere else in the Middle East,” he said, adding that the diversity at University of Haifa debunks the trope that Israel is an “apartheid state,” which hits particularly close to home for him as a native of South Africa.
Speaking with American Society of the University of Haifa just a few days before the International School’s graduation ceremony, Buchalter admitted that he never expected to be here. He hadn’t been looking to pursue a master’s degree. And yet, University of Haifa’s support, flexibility, and understanding convinced him to enroll.
He initially moved to Haifa for ulpan (immersive Hebrew-language instruction), and then unexpectedly met a recruiter from University of Haifa. The International School worked with Buchalter to balance his class schedule with ulpan, while granting him a scholarship.
“The University was so accommodating, and if I didn’t have all of that, I don’t think I would have signed up for a master’s degree,” he said. “Now, I’m really glad I’m going to have this qualification behind my name.”