Although there are a lot of different ideas constantly buzzing around in my head, I have been finding it hard to pick up a common thread that ties them all into a coherent post. I’ve also been finding it hard to focus on writing rather than endlessly reading news and opinion articles, or researching various aspects of things I want to write about in future posts. I feel constantly distracted and often catch myself just staring out the window. It’s not like me, and it’s uncomfortable. It feels like my brain has fled, deserted me, taken a vacation, as it is stubbornly refusing to be corralled into anything productive. It is possible that it is making a valiant effort to force my body/psyche/whatever to relax. But it’s having the opposite effect, making me feel more stressed because I can’t get anything done.
Yesterday my daughter and I spent the day in Tel Aviv, which was not so much a break as it was a change of pace. I had the pleasure of meeting new people and spending time in great conversations, and felt some empathy that mine is not the only brain rebelling against structure and productivity during this time. Everyone I talked to is feeling the same way. And we’re all thinking about the same things, hashing and rehashing all that has happened, and all that it potentially means, in every conversation. Trying to come to terms with it all. Trying to comprehend what next month, next year, next anything might look like. When the rug is pulled out from under all that you considered to be solid and secure – your identity, your home, your security, your livelihood – what is destabilizing is not so much being tossed up into the air, but the questions of how, where, and when you’ll land, and what that will look like. One of the interesting things that came out in talking with both Israelis and Americans, is that what is happening to Jews in both places, as different as the experiences are (war/hostages/hated government/regular random rocket fire/uprooting of regular life/threat of your country’s destruction, on the one hand, or eruption of Jew-hatred/threats of violence/vandalism/people you thought were friends or colleagues siding with a terrorist organization whose stated mission is your annihilation, on the other), we are all feeling each others’ pain and shock.
When I was in Chicago for a conference last month, I reconnected with a former professor of mine. He, his wife, and I spent a lot of time talking and commiserating about October 7th and its aftermath, both in Israel and abroad. They have dual US-Israeli citizenship and lived here for years, maintaining a lot of close connections in Israel even after they moved to the US. While we were talking, he offered to put me in touch with a very well-known scholar (like, high celebrity status if you’re in my field) when I got back to Israel. I was surprised – I knew that they knew each other, but I had no idea that they were friends. I said as much, and he laughed. “You mean because we disagree in our scholarship on pretty much everything?” I said, well yeah…. He said, “Oh no, those are just academic disagreements. We’re good buddies and he’s a wonderful man. You’ll like him.” And he set it up.
So the plan was to meet at the university in Tel Aviv. Once I was going to be in Tel Aviv anyway, I decided it was high time I got in touch with another scholar with whom I wanted to consult on one of my research projects. She is also a highly respected senior researcher in my field, so I was a bit daunted about getting in touch, but I’m so glad I did. She was lovely and gracious, and after picking me up at the train station when my daughter and I arrived yesterday morning (daughter spent most of the day reading on the beach, after a haunting visit to Hostage Square – pix in a separate post), proceeded to spend two hours discussing my work with me and sharing her insights.
There were several things that struck me about both conversations. First, not only their willingness to spend time and to talk with me, but the friendliness of each of them. Each conversation was easy, like there was a real familiarity even though I had never met either of them before (and I was a bit star-struck). We shared how difficult it has been to focus on research and our usual work and routines. The first colleague told me how completely stymied she was in even thinking about getting some work done, but that she found real salvation in the volunteer work that she has organized for herself, soliciting donations and driving them to army bases all over the country. She said meeting and speaking with the soldiers and being able to bring them things to help them during this time has been an amazing experience, and has kept her from sitting at home feeling scared, depressed, and hopeless. I heard similar things from the second colleague, who says his wife spends 9 hours every day doing volunteer work at a distribution warehouse, which keeps her busy and from spending her time worrying about relatives on the front lines. He also explained to me how best to position my body on the ground if there is an air raid siren and I’m too far from a bomb shelter to find cover. He said he learned this during the 1973 war and it definitely saved his limbs from shrapnel. I don’t think Israelis ever get much into small talk, but even if they did, any thought of it flies out the window during war time.
We talked about the domestic situation, including of course the death tolls, the internal refugee crisis, the astonishing disparity between the government’s complete ineptitude on almost every front and the civilian population’s amazing unity and volunteer assistance in housing 200,000 displaced people and supplying the army with all of its necessities. And he expressed what he thought would be the upsides and positive outcomes: Netanyahu’s political death, the integration of large numbers of Haredi Jews into the army and society, and a renewed sense of solidarity with Arab-Israelis, who seem to have been forced off the fence and out of the shadows by the October 7th terror attack. Although clearly the impact of October 7th and the ongoing hardship of the hostage situation hasn’t worn off for anyone, what he expressed the most absolute shock about, and what we spent the most time discussing, was the response from the west. He confessed several times to simply not understanding the intensity of anti-Jewish and anti-Israel sentiment on the campuses and among the general populations in America. He had spent considerable time at Harvard, in particular, and couldn’t reconcile what he was seeing on the news with what he had felt while he was there. “I never experienced antisemitism. I never felt hostility for being Israeli. I always felt welcome,” he told me. “I can’t understand where all of this is coming from, all of a sudden.”
I told him that I didn’t think it was sudden at all. That to me it was always brewing, always under the surface, though I admitted that it hadn’t been as apparent to me in the US as I had felt it in Canada. I described to him what I’ve written about a few times here in this blog, the uncritical acceptance in the academy of a nuance-lacking leftist ideology that casts Israel as white colonialist oppressors and is not interested in actual facts. I told him that most of my colleagues, who specialize in the study of religions, arts, social sciences, etc., simply don’t know much about the modern Middle East beyond what gets reported in the news, and of course the mainstream media is just as badly biased against Israel as the academy. He expressed real surprise at the former. How can they really not know anything about the history, the context, the politics, the people who live here? I thought at first that his surprise was due to the fact that for him, and everyone he knows here, this information is part of their very being, imbibed with mother’s milk and experienced in their lived daily realities. Having been educated in the Canadian school system, I told him that the answer was easy: we simply never learned it. When “history” was studied in elementary and even in high school, we learned Canadian history every single year. I can still tell him everything about the battle of the Plains of Abraham, repeated in curricula all through elementary and middle school, or about the segment of larger North American history that directly related to Canada (lots about loyalists, a bit about the Louisiana Purchase, little to nothing on the rest of American history) that we studied in the one year in high school when a history course was mandatory. But the most we ever did on the Middle East was in the 5th grade, when we studied ancient Egypt for a few weeks. And in university, if we studied the Middle East it was in the context of elective courses in political science departments, universally dominated by faculty who are at best unfriendly to Israel.
He said ok, but if Israel is in the news so often and everyone is so concerned about the “conflict” that they’re fixated on this region to the extent that they seem to be, how is it that even academics don’t have a basic sense of the region’s political, social, and cultural history? I shrugged. I guess that, as with everything else outside of our particular fields of interest, we just assume that the information we’re getting from the media is representative of reality.
“I have always deeply loved and admired America,” he told me. “I always thought it was a model of democracy, something to aspire to. But…,” he shook his head. The universities were places you could discuss and vehemently disagree and still go out for a beer afterwards. (And, I should add, this is an academic who courts conflict, seeks out and amplifies minority positions, and welcomes vigorous argument with all comers. I now understood why, despite their complete differences on academic matters, my friend who connected us considered them to be good buddies.) I told him that may have been the case 10 or 20 years ago, and maybe still is in some places in the US, but my sense of Canada at least was that people who disagreed on politics -- or academics (which to many, may or may not be the same thing) -- tended to just avoid each other socially. And certainly in Trump-era America, the extreme polarization and politicization of everything makes it difficult to engage with anyone on another side of an issue, because you’re not even speaking the same language anymore. People pick and choose which facts and “alt-facts” they like, and ignore anything to the contrary. If anyone has the gall to bring up opposing evidence, there is name-calling, yelling, and these days, the threat of violence. In Canada, we avoid all conflict inherently, so we just don’t tend to talk to people who don’t agree with us, and our Prime Minister apologizes a lot. And, I said, the presumed stance in the university and outside of it, is a leftist one. Even before October 7th, one does not champion Israel, or even advertise their Judaism, in non-Jewish circles.
He told me about an eye-opening experience he had in Cambridge, MA, where he was honored in an academic ceremony with a very prestigious award. The presider began their remarks with an apologetic statement that they were convening on the unceded territories of indigenous peoples. I waited for him to continue, and then I realized that that was the eye-opening experience. “I was shocked!” he said. “What was that about? What is the purpose?” he asked. “Oh, you mean they started with a land acknowledgement,” I said. “We begin all of our meetings that way.” He looked at me in disbelief. “What absolute hypocrisy!” he exclaimed. “How can they be so hypocritical?” What good does that do, he asked. We came, we pillaged and stole and settled here hundreds of years ago; just letting you know that we remember that? We said it, so now we’re all ok? And they then have the nerve to tell us that we are colonizers, we who were kicked out of this land by almost every other people who walked the earth over thousands of years?
He continued. “It’s like making someone president of the most prestigious university in America because she is black, gay, and female. I know no one wants to say this. But did you see her CV? She has published 11 articles. That’s all. And she is accused of plagiarism in some of them. No one in Israel gets even an adjunct job if they’ve only published 11 articles! Does hiring her as president somehow make up for what America has done to blacks, to women, to gay people?”
After I left the university I took a long walk through Tel Aviv to my next meeting. I reflected on how easily what he had said would have been enough to allocate – and angrily or scornfully dismiss – him in their minds to the category marked "right-wing" (which he is not at all; and I’ll add that like most Israelis these days, he’s become a huge fan of President Biden, not just for his stance on Israel, but for what they perceive as a deep sense of morality, and real, as opposed to performative, ethic of social justice). I wondered how many of my North American friends and colleagues, who might so easily dismiss statements like these as horrible, as hate-speech, racist or fringe craziness, would secretly think the same thing if they allowed themselves to. And, I wondered, if they didn’t; what did they think about her qualifications, or her testimony in Congress? Do people think that such hires really address America’s horrific treatment of BIPOC and other minorities in the past, or systemic discrimination against them in the present? Do people really think that land acknowledgements in any way compensate for, let alone seriously come to terms with, Canada’s terrible abuse and attempts at ethnic cleansing of Indigenous peoples in the past, or their continued disenfranchisement in the present? Does paying lip service to these atrocious stains on our collective consciousness only serve to make us feel better, thereby not only avoiding having to deal with the ongoing and endemic problems facing these people, but somehow absolving ourselves of further responsibility for them?
Along my walk, there were all the usual flags and signs, with “together we will win” and “Netanyahu = traitor,” as well as posters of the hostages absolutely everywhere. I saw a new image and slogan too, on bus shelters and lamp posts: “There is no right or left. They will not separate us anymore!” It was an interesting sentiment; clearly heartfelt, and surely the lived reality during the war. But I can’t see any Israeli seriously desiring such a dystopic reality, in which everyone is on the same side about everything. That sounds too much like the Canadian leftist circles that I’ve grown accustomed to, in which everyone is presumed to hold the same opinions, and disagreement is shunned and effectively silenced. Israelis are united now, because of the common enemy and because of the pervasive sense and constant reminder that when the kharah hits the proverbial fan, they only have each other to count on. As my senior colleague pointed out in our conversation, once the war is over, the unity will not last. And that, he opined, is a good thing; as long as we don’t go back to the fierce intensity of the pre-war divide between those who supported Netanyahu and his reforms, and those who didn’t. We agreed that one positive thing to come out of all of this was that *hopefully* Israel would end up with a more moderate, less divisive, centrist government.
I was looking forward to meeting a couple from New York at a café. They were living in Tel Aviv for the year; the woman, a novelist, had reached out to me when my “Dear Students” letter went viral. Her husband was on sabbatical, and like me, his work plans had been completely derailed. I liked them instantly (and not just because they were so forgiving of my complete directional ineptitude – never underestimate how easy it is for me to get lost – and the fact that my navigational challenges had kept them waiting almost an hour), and felt a real affinity with them. Our conversation over tea churned through all the usual topics, but kept coming back to our shared concern about eventually having to return to the places where we had made lives for ourselves and which we called home. How welcome would we be when we go back? How welcome would we feel?
We also talked a lot about the ideology that we had all seen take over the academy in the last couple of decades and that was now spilling out onto the street and taking hold of the marching masses. She, in her literary circles, had seen it coming for a long time. He, a specialist in educational technologies, was aware of it in the academy but had mostly managed to escape and ignore it in his particular field. We traced the change in North American youth from what used to be a robust sense of resilience and recognition that anxiety and discomfort are part of life to the new demand, largely in the younger population but also really endemic, that any hardship was unbearable, that if anyone was upset about anything, someone in power needed to be held accountable. I told them about a film I used to show in a particular class, year after year, that I used in order to incite my students to think about gender inequities in particular religious contexts and how they affected social and cultural perceptions. The students used to really get into it, often thanking me afterwards and praising me in my teaching evaluations for pushing them to think critically and deeply about their own biases and assumptions. The film sparked debate and great discussions, and students wrote really thoughtful papers about it. And then, one year, I showed the same film in the same class, and instead of excited discussion: uncomfortable silence. They shifted in their chairs and stared at their desks. Some eventually ventured simplistic observations that had nothing to do with the topic. I thought maybe it was just a dud class, which happens; but then after class I started getting emails from students, angry that I hadn’t issued a trigger warning before they watched the film. For the first time, my teaching evaluations dropped from their usual scores. After one more attempt the following year with similar results, I stopped showing the film. I realize now that I had caved to cancel culture. This student – and general public -- preference for shutting down anything that is too hard to think about, too painful to confront, too challenging to discuss, is the underside of accepting simplistic narratives and mistaking ideology for fact. They would rather complain about gender inequalities (real and imagined) that they were suffering from and demand reparations, than face some unpleasant images on a screen, look hard at where those roots of inequality might have developed, and critically evaluate the larger contexts.
The couple and I commiserated over the simplicity and ignorance of the oppressor/oppressed narrative, and the ways in which we had watched it take hold in both the public sphere and in student culture over the past decade. They told me about a book that they had just read, in which the authors point out the ways in which people who feel disempowered use this oppressor/oppressed narrative to turn the tables, to be able to manipulate those in power who are effectively silenced by any accusations by those who claim to be oppressed. We shared our frustration of not being able to distinguish between students who actually need support or accommodations, and those who simply used the system to their own advantage by identifying as ‘oppressed.’ “That would never fly here,” she pointed out. “Not only are Israelis not afraid to call ‘bullshit,’ but here, no one wants to say they’re oppressed. That would be admitting a kind of weakness.” I realized she was right. We talked about how many stories we had been seeing and hearing of the heroism of the kidnapped, the slain, and those whose homes had been overrun on October 7th. I wondered for a moment if it was an Israeli/Middle Eastern thing – a denial of being oppressed or suffering as part of a cultural landscape in which honor and shame were so prominently part of the worldview, and in which identifying as a victim would be considered shameful. But then I thought about the trope we’ve all heard in Jewish circles everywhere, far away from the Middle East, about how “my grandfather came here with nothing and built x,y,z….” We talked about how Jews in North America simply built their own organizations when – right through into the 1970s – private clubs everywhere posted signs saying “No Jews or dogs allowed.” Because, if we had cried and complained, no one would have cared. “Maybe it’s also because we’re so used to not being helped,” I offered. “Like what we’re seeing right now from the UN, the Red Cross, and all of those international ‘aid’ organizations is nothing new to us. We don’t expect anyone to come to our rescue; rather we know they’re just going to blame us and heap more accusations on us. We’re never the victims in the world’s eyes, always the villains, so taking on the role of ‘oppressed’ doesn’t do us any good.” [Watch for an upcoming post on the Red Cross and other aid organizations’ history of ignoring and gaslighting the Jews.]
I spent the train ride back to Haifa sorting through the various conversations from the day, pulling the strands apart and putting them back together in my mind. I looked at the photos my daughter had taken at Hostages Square. I thought about how even the families of those still held hostage in Gaza are not sitting around feeling sorry for themselves. They are all out attending rallies, speaking to the media, addressing the UN, flying to the US, talking to governments and celebrities and anyone who will listen, asking them to find a way to get Hamas to release their loved ones. They don’t represent themselves as ‘the oppressed,’ and the world doesn’t see them that way either – chicken or egg? – so no one is interested in helping them. I think of the situation of the people of Gaza, and all of the efforts by NGOs, the media, and governments to get them aid – and all the while these same groups are blaming Israel for this massive civilian suffering, rather than blaming Hamas. Why is there no pressure on Hamas to give up the hostages, to surrender, so that the people they are supposed to represent and for whom they are responsible can live? Because the narrative is that the Gazans are oppressed, Hamas members are freedom fighters against that oppression, and Israelis are the villainous oppressors. So why should anyone help the hostages?
And, as happens too often, my thoughts turned to my students; former students who I’m told are posting all kinds of pro-Palestinian/anti-Israel material on their facebook accounts (I purposely don’t check), and the students who I would have been teaching this year if I were home, and those I will have to teach in the future. I thought about the “Dear Humanities Students” letter that I wrote last month, intended for the students that make up my core teaching load, with whom I share the joy of their discovery of the beauty and truths that humans have experienced across the millennia, and with whom I emphasize the importance of understanding cultural and historical contexts. I know there are colleagues who are fully supporting these students' pro-Palestinian activism this year, reinforcing the popular lines that Israel is a white colonialist oppressor state, and I'm both glad I'm not there and also wishing that I could have some influence at the same time. I know that there are also well-meaning colleagues who are trying to mitigate the media narrative by explaining the history of Jewish suffering and the need for a state of Israel particularly in the aftermath of the Holocaust. But this is not the story that I would tell them. This isn't what I wrote to them in my letters. Thinking about it on the train last night, I realized that the reason that this narrative isn't the one I would choose is that it falls into the trap of playing the oppressor/oppressed game. The story I would tell the students is not a play for sympathy and understanding from those who would cast Jews as oppressors, showing instead how we were in fact also the oppressed. To me, what is important to convey to the students is not a hierarchy of suffering, or a matter of who gets to claim the most oppression. At best the students come away from that with a shrug and a begrudging “oh ok, then I guess there is a reason why Jews have become the oppressors,” in a reflection of their similar casting of Hamas as freedom or resistance fighters against colonialist racists. As a Jew and a Zionist, it isn’t sympathy for our suffering that I want the world to have. That isn’t the narrative that I wrote. Mine was about context, nuance, care for how one uses words like “genocide” and “colonialism.” Mine was about how to make a proper argument using evidence. Mine was a stand against uninformed opinions and dangerous hatred-inciting misinformation. Mine was about the need to question simplistic narratives and critically evaluate catchy slogans, as well as their sources. Mine was about not reducing available data to what can best fit a trendy neo-marxist ideology about oppression, but rather carefully examining all data on its own terms in order to understand the present, so as to be able to construct and tell the story as accurately as possible.
On a lighter note, the next few days will likely be taken up with preparing -- once again, and at last – to take my daughter to Be’er Sheva to move into her dorm this coming Sunday. Classes start December 31st, and we are once more feeling the anxiety, trepidation, and excitement of new and unknown horizons for both of us. I don’t know if I will have time to post more in the coming week or not, but after reading this lengthy diatribe perhaps that is a point of relief for many of you. Thanks, as always, to those of you who are still reading. I deeply appreciate the outlet that writing all of these thoughts here provides for me, and am grateful to those of you who are entertaining and engaging with these thoughts. Or who maybe are still reading because you just want to know that I’m still alive and still ... functioning. I’ve written “still alive and still angry” before and almost wrote that again just now, but I’m not sure about the anger so much anymore. I think I have settled into more of a bewildered and spaced-out kind of grief, and a lot of questioning of if and how I come back to what I had previously thought of as ‘myself’ on the other side of it all.
[OK, so that wasn't "a lighter note" after all... Here's something I received today that is more positive to end on.]