Today at the bookstore, I came across a copy of André Aciman’s memoir, Out of Egypt, which reminded me that I should write up my critique of Aciman’s much-circulated recent op-ed in the New York Times: “The Exodus Obama Forgot to Mention.” When I first read the piece, I was quite surprised that a scholar of his standing would write something so unhistorical. But before I go on to explain my reaction, let me note that I do agree with his main message. It is indeed a shame that few of us know this history, that most young Egyptians today have no idea about the vibrant Jewish community that lived among them less than a century ago.

What Aciman forgot to mention is why or how, and under what historical circumstances most of the Middle East’s Jews fled their homelands or were (unjustly) expelled from there by the governments. Aciman writes: “Mr. Obama never said anything about those Jews whose ancestors had been living in Arab lands long before the advent of Islam but were its first victims once rampant nationalism swept over the Arab world.” This is a downright dishonest and inaccurate picture, if only because of the glaring absence of the one big word you would expect to see here: “Israel.” Aciman is here playing a blame game, implicitly accusing Arabs of an inherent anti-Semitism that was ignited in the wake of nationalism. There is no mention here of the colonial powers that controlled much of the Middle East at this time and that nationalism was responding to, nor of the biggest legacy of colonialism in this region, the new Jewish state. Nor is there any realization on Aciman’s part that if Arabs were always anti-Semitic than these large Arab Jewish communities would probably not have continued to exist since “before the advent of Islam.” That Aciman is ideologically motivated is clear from his use of the word “questionable” for what Obama describes as Islam’s “proud tradition of tolerance.” A scholar like Aciman should well know that at the very least, Islam’s tradition of tolerance can be no more and no less questionable than that of other comparable religions, such as Christianity. The irony, of course, is that as a Sephardic Jew whose ancestors thrived in al-Andalus, but were thrown out of Spain after the Catholic “reconquest” and were then officially welcomed into the Ottoman Empire, Aciman should have at least some sense of comparison. But alas, perhaps he reads novels more than he reads history.

As I write this critique of Aciman’s article, it is important to note what ideological purposes are served by his narrative (why does Jeffrey Goldberg, for instance, title his blog post on it thus: “Obama forgot one Middle Eastern Injustice.”). Aciman’s op-ed has been widely circulated on the internet over the past week, not surprisingly because most people, including Jews, are embarrassingly ignorant of Arab Jewish history. But in general, the piece is being especially loved by the pro-Israeli camp, because it serves one of their favorite arguments against Palestinian right of return. They like to argue that we shouldn’t complain about Israel’s eviction of Palestinians from their homeland, because the Arabs also expelled the Jews. Moreover, they ask, why don’t the Arab regimes accept the Palestinian refugees, just as Israel welcomed the Jewish refugees who fled or were expelled from Arab countries. But this argument is fallacious. It was precisely because of Israel that the emigration/expulsion of Arab Jews happened, and Israel wanted these Jews to leave their homelands for their new state. Of course, this is not to say that the Arab states’ explusion of the Jews is justified. My point, rather, is to note the role of Israel itself in this complex history.

But let me review the relevant history to explain what it is that Aciman leaves out. Egypt is a special case, but it’s the one I am a bit more familiar with, and as it happens, that’s where Aciman is from. Unlike the other main areas in the Middle East where there were significant Jewish populations continuous since the Middle Ages (such as Morocco, Iran/Iraq and Yemen), Egypt also witnessed the emergence of what some people call the “modern” Jewish community of Egypt. This qualification is helpful because Egypt, of course, also had continuous Jewish communities that go back to medieval times. As we all know, the greatest Jewish theologian/philosopher of all times, Maimonides (or Musa ibn Maymun, the name by which his contemporaries knew him), spent most of his career in Egypt, including as a court physician to Saladin. But the “modern” Jews of Egypt are the ones that came there during the colonial period, especially during the huge commercial boost following the building of the Suez Canal, when a lot of Europeans, mostly British and French, came to Egypt. I suspect that when Aciman refers to “what was once probably the wealthiest Jewish community on the Mediterranean,” I think he’s referring mostly to these migrant Jews. In fact, what Aciman also does not mention is that his own family was not of Egyptian, but of Turkish citizenship (He just refers to Alexandria as “my birthplace and my home”)

Not surprisingly, the creation of the State of Israel made things quite complicated. The Egyptian government was becoming increasingly suspicious of the Jews, and it even debated for several years whether or not to outlaw Zionism in Egypt (Indeed, there were some Egyptian Zionist organizations). Of course, those in the Zionist movement who wanted a Jewish state also wanted Jews to migrate to it, and from its very beginning Israel tried to create strong incentives for Jews from various countries to migrate to the new country. In the 1940’s and early 50’s, most of the emigration of Jews from Egypt was actually organized from outside. A lot of Israelis, for instance, came over to Egypt and set up “travel agencies” to encourage and help Jews move to Israel.

And then there were, of course, the Arab-Israeli wars, which successively made the situation worse for the Jews in Egypt. But there were also crazy incidents like the Lavon Affair (also known as “Operation Susannah”), a failed terrorist operation carried out by Egyptian Jews and Israeli spies attempting to meddle in Egyptian politics. It is one of those incredibly shady incidents in the history of Israel that few people know about but should. And soon after, there was 1956: when Britain, France and Israel together attacked Egypt in what is known as the Tripartite Aggression. Following this, Egypt expelled a lot of Jews and almost all foreign nationals — mainly British and French, but also Italians, Germans, Belgians, etc. So people were not just “summarily expelled for being Jewish,” because others were expelled too (An NYT Letter to the Editor mentions Armenians). More details on these events should be available in the histories by Gudrun Krämer and Joel Beinin.

Rabbi Michael Lerner, chief editor of Tikkun, the liberal Jewish magazine, has expressed basically the same concerns that I have in his good preface to a reproduction of Aciman’s piece on the Tikkun website. But whereas I have focused specifically on Egypt, he offers a general overview of the history. He aptly notes the role of the colonial powers:

The account given below by Andre Aciman has been challenged by some historians who point out that these Jews may have themselves been victims of Western colonialism. The colonial powers traditionally attempted to create or exacerbate exisitng ethnic divisions in each colonized country so that the colonized peoples would fight against each other, often using a domestic minority as one of their local surrogates.

In some Arab countries, France and England used the Jews in this role, and Jews willingly embraced the benefits of the privileges offered, in part because under Islamic rule they had usually been second class citizens without the same political rights as Muslims and with special tax burdens.

Unfortunately, Rabbi Lerner himself lapses into some ahistorical statements and false analogies. While it is true that the Jews as a religious minority occupied a lower social status in Muslim society, it is extremely problematic to talk about “citizenship” in pre-national state. In any case, that is a discussion for another time and place.

I write all of the above not as an apologist: I have no reason to be, since I am neither Egyptian nor Arab. Rather, I think it’s important to note these historical complexities both to realize the decisive role played by the colonial powers in creating the circumstances that we inherit today, as well as to understand some of the tragic consequences of modern nationalism throughout the world. While I’m sure NYT opinion pieces come with a word limit that doesn’t allow one to say much, it’s a shame that what Aciman does say is rather misleading. Even aside from his evident ideological sympathies, Aciman is apparently not too good when it comes to historical accuracy. His celebrated memoir, for instance, has been criticized for inconsistencies, including by other Egyptian Jews. Samir Raafat, a historian of Cairo, has done some research (detailed here and here) showing that one of the main characters in Aciman’s book is basically fictitious.

Since Mr. Aciman is so fond of analogies, as clear from the last sentence of his op-ed, let me also conclude with one: for him to try telling the story of the Jews of the Middle East without mentioning Israel, is like trying to explain the history of 20th century Europe without mentioning a “a small detail” called Germany.

Obama’s Cairo speech has obviously been the most talked about thing this past week. While I have been surveying the many varied praises and critiques out there, I was drawn to a set of responses on one particular aspect of the speech: the section on women’s rights. Fatemeh Fakhraie has shared her thoughtful observations here, mainly in response to other feminists who have found more to diss than to like in the speech.

A complaint by a certain Anne Applebaum caught my attention. She writes, in an otherwise positive take on the speech: “he could have spared us the comment about the ’struggle for womens’ equality in America,’ as if we were all in this together, us and the regimes who stone women for adultery.” This is a very interesting remark, because it objects to precisely one of the reasons why many of us might actually appreciate Obama’s speech, for his intelligent acknowledgment of nuance and complexity when it comes to such an issue. As Fatemeh notes, “Obama took care not to merely point fingers.” By recognizing problems within America while discussing those of “the Muslim world,” he made a very basic ethical gesture, one that I think is often crucial to resolving problems.

Applebaum’s perspective, however, is quite different. For her, the logic of differences between us and them reigns supreme. Incidentally, sometime after I read this yesterday, I was skimming through Paul Farmer’s Pathologies of Power and came across the following notable remarks:

The abuse of the concept of cultural specificity is particularly insidious in discussions of suffering in general and of human rights abuses specifically: cultural difference, verging on a cultural determinism, is one of several forms of essentialism used to explain away assaults on dignity and suffering. Practices including torture are said to be “part of their culture” or “in their nature” — “their” designating either the victims, or the perpetrators, or both, as may be expedient. (p. 48, Paul Farmer, Pathologies of Power. Berkeley: UC Press, 2005)

Farmer is assailing those who focus myopically on cultural differences but ignore “the national and international mechanisms that create and deepen inequalities.” And this is why I think Farmer’s points are relevant to the above discussion on Abblebaum. For her, we and they are so different, that we can’t possibly have anything to do with those “regimes who stone women.” As if these regimes exist in a vacuum, totally independent of us! Not only does she seem to insist that there is nothing comparable between the circumstance of women here and that over there, she also implies that we–mighty America–basically have (had) no role to play in affecting those circumstances. But is that really so? I don’t think we can ever get to the bottom of things without also asking questions about the (geo)politics of power, the nation state, globalization and culture, and the insidious international market.

I think Paul Farmer’s insights are important because he helps show how both the “cultural relativist” and the liberal “universalist” may be at fault: while the two disagree on whether or not we should impose our values on them, they both seem to be relying on the premise of difference between us and them. But neither seriously considers the possibility that us and them may have always already shaped each other.

With regard to stoning women for adultery, a question that I have been wondering about for some time is why there appears to have been a recent spike in this practice in some places of the world, at least over the past decade or so. Naturally, given how I think, I became curious about historical precedents and patterns. Over the last few months, I have been thinking about doing a series of blog posts on the topic, particularly since I learned some very interesting things in a class this past semester. I still hope to be able to do so, alongside some more reading and research on my part. Stay tuned.

While I’m reading a bunch of dead white men debate on the nature of the historical event, thought I’d take a minute off to blog on the following interesting insight:

Television, by abolishing delay and placing the action before our eyes while its outcome is still uncertain, has at last robbed events of their historical character and projected them into the everyday life of large numbers of people. (Pierre Nora, “Le retour de l’Événement,” 1974)

The author cites the landing on the moon as the archetypal modern event. For us, of course, a more recent and striking example would be 9/11. Pierre Nora continues: “Now, moreover, events are transformed into spectacles. Is theatricality an inherent quality of so many of the conemporary events that become objects of pubic consumption, or is it live broadcasting that bestows an element of theatricality upon them?” The question is more than pertinent to the event of 9/11.

Of course, we were only waiting for the attacks on Michelle to begin. Dinesh D’Souza has taken his turn. In a typically horrible piece of writing, Mr. D’Souza–the Indian immigrant turned crazy right-wing American, and a homophobe who also blames the cultural left for causing 9/11 (!)–vilifies Michelle Obama and identifies her as the “real problem” of Senator Obama. But we all know that for sexist misogynists, the real problems somehow always have something to do with women!

D’Souza, characterizes Michelle as an “above-average but far-from-stellar performer” who never deserved to have gone to Princeton. And then, you knew it, he quotes from her already much-quoted college senior thesis! For a man who doesn’t have a real job other than getting paid for spewing forth bullshit like this, D’Souza comes across as exactly the kind of person who would bother spending hours going through a 21 year old’s paper until he finds a “typical” sentence with a couple of grammar mistakes. And voila! Mr. D’Souza declares his triumphalism as he proves once and for all the lack of intelligence of an inherently inferior being. Of course, what were we thinking? Did we forget, black people are not supposed to know good English! And we have Mr. BA-in-English to remind us of that.

But D’Souza’s main contention is that Obama should be married to a strong woman like her, “a woman who clearly influences him and who stands to have public influence in her own right.” The assertion, it seems, is that Obama can’t control his wife. And a man who can’t control his wife is the real horror in the eyes of misogynists.

The release this weekend of Sex and the City, the movie, has been the buzz across country, and anyone who has recently opened the news (on-line or off-) could not have avoided hearing about it. And so partly out of curiosity, when a couple of friends asked about going to the theater last night, I agreed to accompany without reservations.

Now, I’m not inherently averse to that less-than-serious genre of romantic comedy, not to say anything of the stuff known as “chick flix.” But Sex and the City was an awful film. If it weren’t based on a wildly popular TV show that ran for six seasons (I’ve only seen a few episodes occasionally), the movie would’ve certainly been a poor-quality no-name romantic comedy and not the box office hit that it has become–grossing over $55m this opening weekend. As you may have heard, for the premiere in NYC last week, there were last-minute posts on craigslist seeking tickets and willing to pay as much as $6,000. And of course there’s the woman who spent $19,000 on eBay for what turned out to be a fraud. That kind of spending is perhaps condoned by the culture that produced, and is depicted in, Sex and the City–even as many women claim that SATC is merely fantasy, and not a reflection of their real desires to spend all the money they could on designer items. But more on that later.
The movie itself was less than mediocre: the plot was remarkably flimsy, the drama was sloppy, the acting lacked the power to convince, and there was barely any character development. Throughout much of it, I had to struggle to ignore the feeling that I was watching TV, and in this I couldn’t agree more with New Yorker’s Anthony Lane, who says that the film “was more like a TV show on steroids.” Indeed, the movie felt like another episode of the show, except this time it was stretched to the big screen and to a painful length of 2 hours and 20 minutes (that’s nearly 5 times the 30-minute TV allotment!).

I also particularly relate to a concluding remark in Lane’s good and funny review: “I walked into the theatre hoping for a nice evening and came out as a hard-line Marxist.” Which brings us back to the question of money and cuture, or the money-culture, in Sex and the City. Regarding Carrie’s $525 Manolo Blahnik shoe, I can only say that even my suits don’t cost half as much! A fashion critic on the NYT addresses precisely the questions I have asked myself and others:

It’s easy to bash the show’s over-the-top materialism, but “Sex and the City” has never bothered to rationalize it, no matter how absurd or overpriced an item may be. (Nor has the show explained how a freelance writer could afford all those clothes.) It simply accepts that fashion is good and assumes the audience, just like Carrie, so badly wants to be a part of Vogue.

Not sure if that counts as artistic self-confidence or consumerist ideology masquerading as entertainment. The show has often struck me as ostensibly the business of three W’s: wealthy white women. You don’t have to go to the Third World to find women who barely relate to those in SATC, there are countless thousands in The City itself. In capitalist societies coded by hierarchies of class and culture, ridiculous questions like “who are you wearing” merely deconstruct. And then Carrie hires an assistant who happens to be African American (who shares a living-situation with 3 roommates but rents designer handbags!). Sometimes white normativity is so pervasive, that any effort to multiculturalise something makes it look rather silly. Incidentally, I was reminded of my critique of one of the Harry Potter films from several years ago.

As for the (undoubtedly complex) feminist interpretation of Sex and the City, I leave that to my feminist colleagues.

This week’s Nation is carrying an interesting review of the new book by Samantha Power (who is perhaps now best known for her Hilary-Clinton-is-a-monster-gaffe). Chasing the Flame is a portrait of Sérgio Vieira de Mello, the UN diplomat who was killed by the 2003 car bomb at Baghdad’s UN headquarters. Michael Massing’s book review tries to understand Power’s fascination with this man, whose life can best be described as sketchy. Incidentally, I learned, Vieira de Mello’s UN field career began in Bangladesh!

Even as my familiarity with Power is limited to talks at conferences in DC and Cambridge, I think Massing’s effort to locate the book in the context of her intellectual development makes sense–or, at least, make for interesting food for thought, especially for those of us angry youth who sneer at cooptation by power (Which makes me wonder, what will happen of Obama the Prophet? *shudder*):

Just as Vieira de Mello made the journey from student revolutionary to senior diplomat, so has Samantha Power gone from being an independent critic working outside the system to being a high-profile figure operating within it. Her book’s odd shifts in tone and frustrating gaps in analysis reflect, I think, the ambivalence she feels about making that transition. In grappling with the many compromises Vieira de Mello made in the course of his career, Power may be unconsciously wrestling with the accommodations she’s been forced to make as she’s traveled the perilous path from obscurity to celebrity, from being an outside analyst assessing those in power to being one of the powerful herself.

Read the full article here.

I have often complained, along with my friends in college who were engaged in critical activism, about the pervasive tendency in our culture to treat racism as if it’s merely an issue of attitudes and personal prejudices. It was therefore refreshing to read a great article by Thomas Sugrue in The Nation, in which he presents a nuanced review of this and related issues. A pertinent excerpt:

The story of inequality is one of the maldistribution of power and resources. Racial inequality has persisted in American life not just because whites harbor bad thoughts about blacks but because the advantages that redound to whites through racial segregation, especially in housing and education, have yet to be dismantled. But structural explanations of racial inequality have never fared well in a culture that attributes success to individual merit and pluck. White Americans who live in privileged suburbs pride themselves on their colorblindness but resist efforts to construct affordable housing lest it interfere with property values. They rebel against the misuse of their tax dollars to support the indolent and efforts to shore up failing urban schools. Structural explanations are taboo because they puncture our treasured myths of upward mobility and self-reinvention. Anyone can make it if they try hard enough, if they break free from the chains of dependency, if they get up in the morning and say, “Yes, I can!”

If that last phrase sounds familiar, that’s probably because it’s deliberately so. The four books reviewed by Sugrue include one that was co-authored by Bill Cosby, and he also raises some interesting questions about notions like “sellout” or “race traitor.” Read the full piece here.

I really like reading Patricia Williams’s column, Diary of a Mad Law Professor. She writes with amazing vibrance and clarity, and a critical perspective that I share with great conviction. Last week, she had some interesting remarks on the performative aspect of law in the following paragraph, which I’m obviously taking out of context:

Both science and law have their meta-worlds–the lab, the courtroom–and each sets up controls against the influence of extraneous matter, as in the sterilization of equipment or rules that exclude hearsay. If science is rooted in empiricism, the trial is to some extent a theatrical enterprise. Philosopher Susan Haack has likened proof in the courtroom to a quasi-religious proceeding, historically traceable to the dunking of suspected witches to see if God would save them before they drowned; law professor Jessie Allen has analogized it to the kind of sequential rituals of mask and incantation that give certain traditions of magic their social power. We dress judges in robes, we raise our hands, we swear on a Bible. Then comes the peculiar process of evaluating “demeanor”: studying the bodies of parties and participants–their faces, their fidgety fingers–for outward signs of lying, for any shiftiness that will reveal the certain discomfort God and conscience will manifest in them if they are knowingly breaking an oath taken in the name of the divinity. ["Divining Demeanor," The Nation]

Christopher Hayes had an interesting article on economics entitled “Hip Heterodoxy” in last week’s Nation, reviewing the state of the disclipline and the situation of those who depart from the ‘orthodoxy’ of neoclassical economic theory. It made for good reading, particularly as I myself am quite the non-economist. On a broader, thematic level, the basic issue is really the dialectic between establishment and dissidence.

The term “heterodox”–like, say, “infidel”–is necessarily imprecise; it categorizes people by what they don’t believe rather than what they do. In the case of heterodox economists, what they don’t believe is the neoclassical model that anchors the economics profession…

The problem, then, that heterodox economists face is that they are economists who don’t “think like economists.” Many point out that humans aren’t rational, or not nearly as rational as the theory would have them be (and, further, that in the aggregate this creates market failures). Others point out that humans are social creatures, not individual agents, and their preferences and behaviors are forged by social structures: institutions, habits, social mores and culture all mediate and drive economic behavior. Others say that price and value aren’t interchangeable and that prices don’t arise from the simple intersection of supply and demand curves, while some argue that unequal power between different sectors of society affects how markets operate. Dissent from the mainstream of economics is not new; indeed, it’s nearly as old as the profession itself.

Real the whole piece here.

Katha Pollit’s column in The Nation this past week considers the state of women’s rigths in Iraq, in the context of the US invasion. She opens with a reference to Du’a Khalil Aswad, the 17 year old Kurdish girl who was stoned to death in a public spectacle for falling in love with a Muslim boy. I don’t know how I missed the story, but it is utterly horrendous:

The video, originally posted on jebar.info, a Kurdish website, is now plastered all over the Internet: a young girl in a red track-suit jacket and black underpants, beaten, kicked and stoned to death by a mob of excited, shouting men. It’s a gruesome marriage of twenty-first-century technology and medieval barbarity. At one point, bloody and dazed, the girl tries to protect herself, whereupon a man drops a big rock or lump of concrete on her face, killing her. Her crime? As an Agence France-Presse story explains, Doaa Khalil Aswad, a 17-year-old member of the Kurdish Yazidi religious minority, a non-Muslim sect, had fallen in love with a Sunni boy and possibly converted to Islam. For this “crime” against family and community, Doaa was murdered in the small village of Beshika, near Mosul, in a collective act of woman hatred, led by her brothers and uncles. In the video you can see local policemen watching and one man recording the killing on his cellphone.

Unfortunately, the superficial tendencies of our perspectives detract us from recognizing key structural problems beyond and underneath the cultural specificities of such social behavior (Which would explain, for instance, why the incident is being cited on most anti-Islamic blogs and websites, even while they recognize that this was not carried out by Muslim — but as if there is something intrinsically ‘Islamic’ about stoning a woman to death.) I am not critically mature enough to really understand some of the deeper issues that I refer to, but I sort of feel where these issues lie. The fact of Du’a being female, of course, is fundamental to this whole case – precisely why Pollit brings this up in her column. But there are other important aspects of the case to be examined: the theater of the punishment, i.e. the stoning as public spectacle; the identit(y/ies) of the individual versus the communal; the question of the body as the site of social conflict, as well as retribution; the question of shame; and, the meaning(s) of crime.

As a human being, however, the first question that necessarily springs to my mind is this: what about compassion? And emotion? What is it about the behavior of those men, shouting and cheering over a bloodied body, that I simply cannot fathom?

It’s a shame, really. The soul of humanity was crushed that day with the body of that girl. I am at the prospect of becoming physically ill on re-enacting that scene in my mind — which, honestly, may be worse than watching the video, as unbelievably horrible as that is. In face of helplessness, I invoke an invocation in memory of Du’a – whose name, in Arabic, means invocation. Alas, God’s Invocation herself was not safe from human cruelty.