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Whether it is a class on Israeli film and television at Goucher College, Israeli dance at Cornell, or on the history and literature of the Kibbutz at Indiana University, the field of Israel studies has not only grown over the past several years, it has also gone beyond the narrative of conflict, according to a recently released report.

A new study from the Cohen Center for Modern Jewish Studies at Brandeis University notes an increase in the amount of Israel-related courses at American colleges and universities from the last report in 2006.

The study, sponsored by the Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Foundation, found 548 courses focused primarily on Israel in the 2008-2009 academic year, a 69 percent increase from the 325 courses offered just four years ago.

Unlike the 2006 study, however, this one went beyond courses focused specifically on Israel and included those that deal with the Jewish state less directly, such as courses on Middle East politics or modern Jewish history.

The 316 schools surveyed offered a total of 1401 courses related to Israel, with 579 designated as "Israel-focused" and 822 as "Israel-related."

Annette Koren, the study's lead researcher, said a variety of factors explained the upswing, including programs funded by the Shusterman foundation such as the American-Israeli Cooperative Enterprise, which provides funding for Israeli academics to teach at American universities, and the Summer Institute for Israel Studies at Brandeis, a program that trains professors to teach courses that concern Israel.

Koren said that the increase is not attributable solely to a larger supply, but also to growing demand.

Birthright, the program that provides all expense-paid trips to Israel for 18-25 year olds, is another reason for this growth in demand, according to Koren.

"Students come back from Israel wanting to learn more," she said, adding that other reasons might range from the amount of news coverage devoted to Israel to the growing international popularity of Israeli cinema to the reputation of a professor.

While those schools with larger Jewish populations tend to have more offerings in Israel studies, almost a third of schools with no reported Jewish population have one or more Israel-focused course, often relating to the Arab-Israeli conflict or Middle East politics more generally.

There are, however, a number of schools such as the University of South Florida or the University of Pittsburgh that have 500 or more Jewish students and no courses focused specifically on Israel.

Michael Colson, director of Israel programs at the Shusterman foundation, credited his organization with some of the growth in Israel studies, though acknowledged that "all these efforts don't account for everything. It does not account for the breadth."

"What's exciting about the results of the study is that more students are taking more courses from more professors at more universities," he said.

The breadth of the courses offered, both in terms of their topics as well as the department in which they are offered, is another positive finding of the study, Colson said.

Based on course titles and descriptions, the study finds that approximately 28 percent of the Israel-focused courses and slightly more than 11 percent of all Israel-content courses deal primarily with the Arab-Israeli conflict.

According to the study's authors, the fact that less than a third of the courses deal with the conflict represents a "normalization" of Israel.

"From course titles and descriptions, we see a move toward viewing Israel as a culture, society, political system, and historical entity rather than solely as a locus for international conflict," the authors write.

The study shows, Colson said, that critics of Israel are loosing ground.

"[Critics of Israel] are presenting the same tired, old arguments and students and professors are voting with their feet," he said.

"If you're going to learn about Israel on campus and not have courses, it's likely you will learn about it in a highly polemicized way," Koren explained. "Wouldn't it be better to study it in a scholarly way with at least an assumption of academic honesty and rigor?"

Professor Eran Kaplan, who teaches Israel studies at Princeton University, said that he has witnessed a growing interest for Israel at American universities since he first taught at Boston University a decade ago while a graduate student at Brandeis.

Back then, Kaplan said, a majority of his students had gone to Jewish day school or had Israeli parents, whereas today, the enrollment in Israel studies courses are more "heterogeneous."

Kaplan, whose teaching and research focuses on the ideology of Zionism and Israeli culture, only incidentally dealing with the conflict, said he stays away from finding out what motivates students to enroll in his classes, though he speculated that it was due to an increased interest in the region as a whole.

"I think Americans have sensed that the region plays a more important part of their lives than perhaps it used to," he said.