Upstart Activist’s Michael Eglash and ISRAEL21c’s David Brinn display the campus technological exhibit. (Photo: Ariel Jerozolimski)Exhibit of Israeli technology to be showcased on U.S. campuses

HA’ARETZ
By Daphna Berman
January 22, 2005

A traveling exhibit featuring Israeli technological achievements will be shipped Monday for a tour of American college campuses, in an effort to show U.S. students how technology developed here positively affects their daily lives.

The exhibit will be showcased next month at a number of prestigious Boston-area universities, including Harvard, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Tufts, and Brandeis. Following a tour of the area, the exhibit will be shipped to major campuses across the U.S.

“College students today have only seen Israel as a place of conflict and war,” said Amir Gissin, director of public affairs at the Foreign Ministry, which together with the Boston Jewish community and two pro-Israel organizations, ISRAEL21C and Upstart Activist, is sponsoring the showcase. “This exhibit shows them that there’s another Israel that exists – one of medical advancements, technological breakthroughs, and scientific discoveries that are helping each one of us.”

The exhibit, which was on display at Foreign Ministry headquarters in Jerusalem this week, boasts accomplishments for a number of major Israeli companies, including Teva, Intel, and GuruNet. Lotions that combat jellyfish stings, a treatment that promises to burn fat and a pill with an embedded miniature camera are among the achievements on display, which also reminds students that Israeli technology was behind the creation of the cellular phone, as well as voice mail.

ISRAEL21C, a nonprofit public relations company aiming to improve Israel’s image abroad, created much of the content for the dozen companies on display.

“This allows us to expose American college students – both Jewish and non-Jewish – to an Israel that they didn’t know before,” the organization’s editorial director David Brinn said. “The audience is between 18 to 21 years old and all they know about Israel is what they’ve seen on television or read in a newspaper over the past four years.”