E pluribus unum

Dear chaverim v’mishpocha, the past two weeks have been eventful despite my lack of posts. The weekend before last I had a very late brunch – more lunch, really – with my friend S., her fiance T., a gay friend of hers who was celebrating his birthday, and a half dozen of his friends at a funky, laid-back Indian restaurant in Tel Aviv. Afterwards it occurred to me that the whole scene was in many ways a testament to the vibrant ethnic and cultural diversity of Israel. Shirin’s family immigrated to Israel from India, not Europe, and there is far more tolerance of homosexuality here in Israel than the rest of the Middle East, where it is severely and often violently repressed. Of course, one can find violent hostility to gays in Israel too, especially in ultra-Orthodox Jewish circles, but homosexuals are still able to live more freely, openly, and securely here than anywhere else in the region.

I have also been traveling outside of Tel Aviv since my last post. Last Thursday I made a return trip to the city of Rishon LeZion. I remember going with my friend D. to a cheap but amazingly good falafel stand there run by Iraqi Jews (Jews who had immigrated to Israel from Iraq) ten years ago. And three years ago I went with some fellow Madisonians to a nice fish restaurant near Rishon LeZion that overlooks the sea. The reason for my latest trip was to attend a lecture by my colleague H. at HaMichlalah LaMinhal (the College of Management) in Rishon LeZion.

I hoped to do a little sightseeing before the lecture. After all, Rishon LeZion has an interesting history. It was founded by Jewish chalutzim (pioneers) from Russia in 1882, fifteen years after Mark Twain's visit to Palestine. Its name (meaning “First to Zion”) comes from Isaiah 41:27. Apparently there is a history museum there and some historical sites for tourists to visit, but unfortunately I didn’t find myself anywhere near what they call the Old City (which is admittedly not so old). I suspect that I was in the newer parts of Rishon LeZion that were built in the 1980s, because the area around the central bus station and the college looked very American to me: sprawling instead of compact and walkable, criss-crossed by highways, and filled with residential apartment buildings and shopping centers. Not very appealing, if you ask me.

H.’s lecture was on pragmatist conceptions of the self, emotions, and protest movements, and it was admirably clear, well organized, and interesting. (I wish I could say that was true of all the sociology lectures I have attended, but unfortunately these qualities are not as universal as one might hope.) After the lecture, I joined H. and some Israeli colleagues for dinner and ended up by chance at the same fish restaurant I went to three years ago. There I discovered that one of the Israeli sociologists who joined us had received his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin, which gave us a chance to swap stories and compare notes about it.

There were more friends to see at the end of the week. Last Friday my friend and colleague M. arrived in Israel from Wisconsin, and I had a good time showing him around Tel Aviv and trying out some of the local restaurants with him. But the highlight of this week came already on Sunday in Jerusalem, where -- after M. found himself at the head of a Palm Sunday procession earlier in the day -- we met another of our Wisconsin colleagues and his wife for dinner. At some point it hit me how amazing and extraordinary the whole scene was. I could hardly believe it. Was I dreaming? Every year for thousands of years, Jews have concluded their Passover seders with the words “Next year in Jerusalem!” There we were, three Jews and a Muslim raising our glasses and proclaiming “THIS year in Jerusalem!” I couldn’t help but think how privileged I was to live in these times, and I couldn’t help but find some hope for peace in the laughter and camaraderie of this mixed company.

Hinei mah tov u'mah naim:
Shevet achim gam yachad.

(Rough translation: Here is what is good and what is pleasant: to sit together as brothers.)

No Ivory Towers Here

Of late the news here has been dominated by the escalating violence in and around Gaza – the daily barrages of rockets that Hamas rains down on southern Israel (which are largely ignored by the international community) and the recent Israeli military strikes (denounced by the U.N. as excessive and disproportionate) that are intended to incapacitate, deter, or punish Hamas (it’s not altogether clear which it is). The Israeli military strikes have resulted in a high death toll among the Palestinians, mainly combatants but also many civilians and even children. No reasonable and humane person could feel anything but deep sorrow for the loss of innocent life. But does it mean that the Israeli military operation involved an excessive use of force? Regrettably, civilian deaths are an unavoidable aspect of warfare, particularly when the enemy operates in densely populated areas like the Gaza Strip. To recognize Israel’s right to self-defense is to accept, however reluctantly, the inevitable loss of civilian life that comes with the use of military means. In contrast to Hamas, the Israeli army does not target the civilian population, but is it doing enough to minimize civilian casualties? It’s hard for me to tell. What could the army do differently, short of refraining from military action, to reduce civilian casualties? This is not a rhetorical question. It seems to me that when someone criticizes the Israeli army (or any other) for using excessive force, then it is incumbent on the critic to suggest answers to this question.

Being an educator and not a soldier, I have been most struck by how the fighting in and around Gaza has impacted Israel's universities. It is simply not true that universities are “ivory towers,” least of all in Israel. At the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, where I am a visiting scholar, students staged a protest on Monday against the Israeli military operation in Gaza while other students held a counter-demonstration to support it. And at the Max Stern Academic College of Emek Yezreel (a regional branch of the Hebrew University until 1994), a lecturer stirred up controversy on the same day when she agreed to an Arab student’s request for a minute of silence on behalf of the Palestinians killed in Gaza. (Despite the criticism the lecturer received from the Student Union, I thought she handled the situation reasonably well: While granting the student’s request, she also reminded her that Israelis in Sderot and Ashkelon are also suffering, and she encouraged a discussion of the Israeli military operation afterwards. Had I been in her shoes, I might have handled the situation the same way.) But the violence has affected higher education in Israel most directly and most poignantly at Sapir College in Sderot: Last Wednesday, a rocket fired from Gaza hit Sapir College and killed a student. (Sderot is a town just 40 minutes from Tel Aviv inside Israel proper – not in the occupied territories – which has borne the brunt of the rocket attacks from Gaza.) The day after the attack, Yedioth Ahronoth published this moving statement by another student at Sapir College:

What you will find if you come to Sapir is reinforced police presence, red signs that include instructions for cases of emergency, and loudspeakers that on occasion sound a hair-raising alarm that gives us less than 10 seconds to seek cover in the face of incoming rockets.

At Sapir College you will not find students sitting on the grass. They are scared to be left without shelter should rockets land. But you will find great fear here.

It happens almost every day: A “Color Red” alert, Qassam rockets landing, and all this followed by tears, mass panic, and concerned phone calls from home. It happens to us during classes, it happens during breaks, and it happens during difficult exams.

We have already sustained property damage to the college before, but this time we are dealing with the worst possible scenario – the death of a student. To my regret, despite our army and the reinforced security deployment at school, I do not have the confidence to say that tomorrow’s Qassam rocket will not hit me or any one of my friends at the college.

Can you comprehend that this is how students in Israel go about their studies?

Haifa and Jerusalem

This week was unusually busy for me. On Tuesday I took the train from Tel Aviv to Haifa to present a paper (in English, of course) at Haifa University’s Department of Sociology and Anthropology. This was lots of fun. My friend U. teaches there, and he and a few of his colleagues took me to lunch, showed me around campus a little, and introduced me to some of the graduate students there. There is a very interesting archaeology museum on campus with the remains of an ancient Phoenician boat, and since the university is high up in the hills, the social science building provides some beautiful views. On a clear day, you can see the border with Lebanon.

The next day (Wednesday) I took the bus from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem to present another paper at a history seminar at the Hebrew University. This was a trip not only across Israel (less than an hour by bus) but also across disciplinary boundaries. Most of my work is historical sociology, so I think of history as a kindred discipline. Still, I didn’t feel quite as at home here among the historians as I did in Haifa among the sociologists. For that reason it was an especially nice surprise to see my friend T. at the seminar. She’s an HU graduate student who was the G. M. Student Fellow last year at the University of Wisconsin. It’s always comforting to see a familiar face in a new place.

I wanted to make a good impression on my Israeli colleagues, especially in Jerusalem, where I will be teaching during the second term, but I was dissatisfied with my weak replies to some of the questions in Haifa and especially in Jerusalem. Maybe I’m a little rusty; I haven’t presented a paper since last fall. Still, the experiences were good overall, and the questions and criticism were useful and valuable, especially for the paper I presented in Jerusalem, which I’m now revising for publication. In any case, they certainly made a good impression on me – their questions were all extremely smart and incisive.

I’m pleased that I’m starting to learn my around Israel (the bus and train system), seeing more of the country outside Tel Aviv, and making contacts with colleagues here. Though I’m enjoying the flexibility that comes from having no teaching obligations at the moment, I have also felt a little isolated and detached from academic life – suffering, to use the jargon of my profession, from insufficient social integration. These trips to Haifa and Jerusalem helped to re-integrate me a little.

Three Photos

Here are a few photos I’ve taken recently. The first one is a funny poster hanging on the door of a café on Dizengoff Street where I often go. It’s obviously a parody of the American military recruiting posters from the First World War where a pointing Uncle Sam says “I Want You!” But this version says drushim ovdim, literally “hiring workers” (help wanted). Here it’s workers that Uncle Sam wants, not soldiers. Perhaps he’s assembling an Industrial Reserve Army. I’m probably reading way too much into this poster, but I found the implied analogy between workers and soldiers sociologically interesting.

Here’s some more Americana in Israel: graffiti of Elvis near my apartment building. Elvis haMelech, even here.

And finally here are my friends U. and A.K. and their colleague S., all Israeli sociologists, during a night out on the town. U. is beckoning A. to come to Israel with the promise of a nice cold beer. Let’s hope it works.

Obama, Israel, and the Paranoid Style in American Politics

Dear chaverim v’mishpocha, sorry for the long hiatus since my last post. As Mark Twain warns in The Innocents Abroad, it’s easier to begin a travelogue than to keep it going: "At certain periods it becomes the dearest ambition of a man to keep a faithful record of his performances in a book; and he dashes at this work with an enthusiasm that imposes on him the notion that keeping a journal is the veriest pastime in the world, and the pleasantest. But if he only lives twenty-one days, he will find out that only those rare natures that are made up of pluck, endurance, devotion to duty for duty’s sake, and invincible determination may hope to venture upon so tremendous an enterprise as the keeping of a journal and not sustain a shameful defeat." "If you wish to inflict a heartless and malignant punishment upon a young person," he adds, "pledge him to keep a journal a year." Rest assured, I'm not so young anymore, and my hiatus was only that and not a defeat.

Let me pick up where I left off: with the Wisconsin primary. While I voted for Clinton, I was not terribly upset to see Obama win big in the Badger State. What does upset me – what increasingly angers and disgusts me, in fact -- is the smear campaign being waged against Obama, based on innuendo, insinuation, and outright lies, that he is anti-Israel, un-American, and some kind of crypto-Muslim fifth columnist (as if Muslim Americans cannot be loyal Americans). What offends me even more is that the campaign appears to be aimed especially at Jewish voters in an effort to manipulate Jewish votes. (This just in: I’m not so easily stampeded.) Now, lest this smear campaign be seen not as an attempt to manipulate Jewish voters, but rather as an attempt by the shadowy and supposedly omnipotent “Israel Lobby” to manipulate the American public, I want to point out that the Israeli press (where I have been learning about this campaign) has done a nice job of exposing and debunking it. Here are a few examples:

Obama and the Jewish question

Yedioth Ahronoth interview with Obama

Obama: Not only Likudniks can be pro-Israeli

Obama tells Jewish leaders: I have never been a Muslim

On the other side of the Atlantic, the leaders of nine national Jewish American organizations and seven Jewish members of the United States Senate forcefully condemned the smear campaign against Obama in January. (“If ever there was a concentrated deployment of American Jewish power for a single cause,” quipped The Forward, “this was it.”)

My friend and colleague Jeff Weintraub has also shed valuable light on the smear campaign:

Obama and Israel

Jewish organizations denounce an ugly e-mail slander campaign against Obama

Why Obama is good for the Jews

And so too has The Forward:

Nader, Obama and Israel

Both the smear campaign against Obama and the invocation of the “Israel Lobby” by the far left and the far right to account for wars and policies they don’t like suggest a distressing revival of what Richard Hoftstadter called the paranoid style in American politics. Like former Wisconsin Senator Joe McCarthy, its adherents today ask, “How can we account for our present situation unless we believe that men high in this government are concerting to deliver us to disaster?” As Hofstadter showed, this paranoid style has a long history. In the nineteenth century it was Catholics who were accused of delivering America to disaster. In the twentieth century it was Communists. Today, it’s Muslims (or, more accurately, a Presidential candidate who is mistakenly believed to be a Muslim) and Jews.

P.P.S. to Election Day

I am indeed being “foreignized rapidly and with facility”: only a few weeks of living here and I'm nearly as pushy as the sabras (native-born Israelis). While standing in line at my neighborhood supermarket, I became increasingly annoyed at the guy in front of me who wasn’t moving forward, so in typical Israeli fashion I pushed my way past him. That brought him back to Earth. “Slichah!” (excuse me) he protested. I shrugged and gestured to him to go ahead. If I’d been a little quicker with my Hebrew, I would have said “Atah tzarich hazmanah?” (you need an invitation?). Or, as my father likes to say, he who snoozes loses. I can only imagine what a holy terror I will seem to polite Midwesterners when I return to the Galut with my newly acquired minhagim (customs).

On the other hand, I don’t want to give the impression that life in Israel is all pushiness. People here are at the same time very warm and friendly. Just today a high school teacher sitting on the bus next to me struck up a very pleasant conversation with me. As I noted in an earlier post, there seems to be less “civil inattention” here, which can manifest itself in different ways. It means that people are less inhibited about offering their opinions and advice (even when it’s unsolicited), but they are also more open to engaging in dialogue with strangers. Perhaps these habits and customs reflect the fact, as George Mosse was once jokingly informed, that Israel is not so much a polis as a shtetl.

Speaking of the polis, Wisconsin's primary is today. I'm waiting eagerly for the results.

Sociology on Israeli TV

Tonight I tuned into the channel 10 evening news program to watch an interview with my friend and colleague A.K. A.K. teaches in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Tel Aviv University, and she has written an important new book about citizenship, migrant workers, and the Israeli labor market. (Sorry, fellow Anglophones, the book has not been translated from Hebrew into English.) Even though I could only understand a few words of the interview, I still watched intently and enthusiastically. Aside from the admittedly silly thrill of seeing a friend on TV, I was impressed that Israeli TV provides a forum (however brief) for sociologists to share their research findings with the broader public, and I think A.K. was engaged in a valuable public service. As Emile Durkheim noted more than a century ago, “writers and scholars are citizens; it is thus evident that they have the strict duty to participate in public life…. We must be above all … educators.” “It is our function,” he added, not to “govern” our contemporaries but to “help our contemporaries to know themselves.” Yasher koach, A.K.!