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Equipping the Negev's Next Generation with Digital Broadcasting Skills. Radio and broadcasting? Tel Aviv, Neve Ilan, and Herzliya are the places that come to mind. Israel’s communications industry is based largely in the center of the country, with Negev communities relegated to the periphery, where the promise of economic mobility is woefully out of reach. At Sapir, our mission is to change that. For six years running, we’ve been taking our academic knowhow to the southern town of Ofakim, opening new educational horizons for young people.

Schools should be crucibles of tomorrow’s society, safe spaces where children learn the social skills and empathy that make democratic life possible. COVID-19, unfortunately, has wreaked havoc on the behavioral codes of classroom interaction. A recent Washington Post article calls this “toxic stress”. After months of remote learning, children need to “relearn how to be in school.” Can technology help undo what technology has wrought? Researchers at Sapir College think it can, and they’ve built an app to make it happen. SeeMe, is a simple but powerful idea, developed by Dr.

Sapir lecturer's research recently published in the New England Journal of Medicine Back in August 2021, Israel took a calculated risk to stem the fourth wave of COVID-19 infections. With no substantiating data to go by, the country rapidly deployed a third, booster shot of Pfizer’s Corona vaccine, a campaign that has since reached over 4 million people. Did it work? Now the results are in – and they’re striking. Dr. Ronen Arbel of Sapir Academic College, has just published convincing scientific evidence in the New England Journal of Medicine that the booster really saves lives.

Finally, art comes to life once again at the College's Art School. As public gatherings following COVID-19 protocols are now approved, Sapir’s art gallery is open to visitors with a striking new exhibition called On the Seam, featuring the works of Mai Daas, an aspiring artist from the City of Tira. Mai’s photomontage brings home the perpetual sense of living on the threshold between multiple aspects of her identity – as an Arab woman and a mother, a spouse and a feminist, a Moslem and a Palestinian, and an individual with a powerful sense of self and the will to assert it.

Smart Specialization – The Process that is Transforming the Negev Israel’s Negev is thousands of kilometers away from North London, but Dr. Dan Kaufman of Sapir Academic College exemplifies the historic epigram on one of England’s most controversial statues. To paraphrase a quote beneath Karl Marx’s imposing bust, “Change the world, don’t describe it.”  Admittedly, reading Marx is not on the top of Kaufman’s ambitious “to do” list. But he is making academia a tool for real world social transformation.

Nir Kedar of Sapir Academic College made Full Professor Nir Kedar was promoted to Full Professor by Israel’s Council for Higher Education.

It was a team that could only have met at Sapir Academic College: four women – one a secular Jew, another strictly Orthodox, and two Arab sisters of Arab Bedouin background. Meital Bergman, Yovel Cohen, and Sondos and Dalal Sraiaa come from entirely different worlds.