Sunday November 26

On my way back to Florida from Chicago, I spoke briefly with a good friend of mine who is teaching the first-year Humanities class that I would have been teaching this year if I weren't on sabbatical. Teaching this class in the "Great Books" program very frequently over the past 13 years has been the highlight of my teaching career. The students are all high-achievers, they are eager, they love to hear new ideas and to discuss them together and with me. The course has a unique structure, in that it is team-taught by me and another colleague who specializes in ancient east and southeast Asian texts. We take turns, teaching 2 or so weeks at a time and then yielding the floor to the other, as we sample texts from the ancient world with the students and talk about the nature of myth, history, and the ways that cultures tell their stories, as well as the ancient worldviews that we can learn about by reading them. As we explore the stories together, students encounter very strange and foreign ideas about how to live even as they are touched by familiar human themes like love, death, and the mysteries of life. They learn, in other words, how to approach and understand the Other on that Other's own terms and within her own contexts. We have a full year together, with three hours of lecture per week in addition to smaller groups of student-led discussions for another 1.5 hours per week for each group.

My friend told me that after teaching about Genesis 12 and the covenant promise to Abraham that the Hebrew Bible relates as part of the self-understanding of the ancient authors, she has been having a lot of conversations with the students, especially in the seminar groups, about the war. She has been trying to give them perspectives that they are not encountering in the news they all get from social media. She said that they argue with her, they all make points that come straight out of the pro-Palestinian propaganda they are hearing, and that every time she says something to contextualize or contradict the points they're making, they accuse her of simply being pro-Israeli. She actually thinks that if anything, she is pro-Palestinian, but it seems that if one doesn't like what someone says these days, the appropriate response is simply to accuse them of ignorance or bias. My friend says that ultimately -- even though she has lived for periods in Israel (she is not Jewish) and knows a lot about the situation, she is at a loss as to what to say to them anymore.

Hearing all of this from her was depressing and heart-breaking all over again, in a way that is hard to describe. My dream job is now a casualty of the war as well. I have been mulling this over in my mind, along with everything else I write about here, and wondering if there is anything I can or even should bother trying to do. 

At the same time, I've been hearing from a lot of my new friends who saw my Dear Students letter on social media, that they too are at a loss as to how to talk to people about the war, how to point out the gaps in their knowledge or the flaws in their reasoning without simply sounding like they are defending Israel. I'm hoping that my blog is helpful to many of you in this way, but I realize also that not everyone has the time or the inclination to read every word I write! (And I don't necessarily want all those students reading this, so that's not a solution.)

So I tried to distill some basics for her to pass along to her students. I thought maybe a 2-3 page "fact sheet" of sorts would be appropriate. But of course when I sat down to write it, it just kept growing. So it's about 10.5 pages. I don't know if any of them will read it, but I've sent it to her and told her she is welcome to pass it along. I'm also redacting it a bit and will post it here as a separate entry in case it's helpful to any of you out there as well (though there is really nothing new there if you've been reading everything in this blog).

I don't know if they'll bother reading any of it, but I had to try.