Wednesday, April 16, 2008
The New Yorker has published a lengthy history [link to abstract] of the Nadia Abu El-Haj controversy by Jane Kramer. Kramer does the dirty work of savaging the critics and giving El-Haj a more fawning history of events than she could possibly have hoped for. The piece retails all the leftist viewpoints you'd expect, even reaching back to the events leading up to the film Columbia Unbecoming. Sheltered Jewish kids are simply not ready to deal with opposing viewpoints, Right Wing ideologues are leading the rube-ish peasants on pitch-fork drives against the ivory walls of the Academy, a Jewish settler is leading a campaign against a simple Palestinian-American academic...you name it. El-Haj is portrayed as a retiring academic, unassuming and completely innocent, blindsided by a political controversy that comes at her out of thin air. This is nonsense, of course (she's signature #1 on this divestment petition). The critics aren't the ones who started politicizing the campus, and the "Oh golly me, why I didn't know I'd be causing all this fuss"-act (as emphasized by the illustration accompanying the article of a tiny El-Haj caught in the middle between pro-Arab and pro-Israel mobs) isn't selling to anyone but New Yorker readers who don't know any better.
I can see why, when I've been contacted by people from the academy, it's always with the double underline admonition, "Keep my name out of it!" Academic defenders of El-Haj are portrayed here as defending academic freedom, critics as the ones pursuing a political agenda who couldn't possibly have any rational concerns. From the article's conclusion:
...In February, Abu El-Haj went to a Barnard faculty meeting and met Alan Segal for the first time. "There he was, standing up and making a big pitch for academic freedom, saying that all those terrible outside attacks had made it impossible to have a real intellectual conversation about my work," she told me. "He came up to me on his way out, he introduced himself, he actually invited me to speak to his class. I was so mad. I could have killed him."...
Segal was one of the only people on campus to come out critically on the record, and her reaction to him just goes to prove his point. It became (was anyway) almost impossible to deal with the issue in an academic manner. One thing's for sure, if Prof. Segal is harmed for his exercise of his speech, it won't be El-Haj wielding the knife, it will be her petty allies around the campus doing the slicing.
Related, considering how strongly post-Modernism and post-Colonialism figure in El-Haj's work is this piece by John Leo in The Wall Street Journal about how treacherous simply insisting on fact and evidence based scholarship can be: The Hazards of Telling the Truth
...Outraged by the nonscholarly approach of Afrocentric writers, she [Mary Lefkowitz] somewhat naïvely imagined that facts would put their extreme theories to rest. She noted, for instance, that Socrates couldn't have been black, as alleged, because his parents were Athenian citizens and blacks, in classical Athens, were not eligible for citizenship. She noted, as well, that Aristotle would have had a tough time stealing his philosophy from the library at Alexandria, since he died before the library was built. Such arguments went nowhere, Ms. Lefkowitz writes, with those who saw Greek philosophy "as yet another case of a colonialist European plundering of Africa."
While Ms. Lefkowitz was being targeted by Afrocentrists nationally, she fell into a war on her own campus with Anthony Martin, a vituperative and litigious tenured professor of "Africana studies." It was an odd battle. Ms. Lefkowitz kept trying to make it a debate about evidence and truth. Mr. Martin made it personal and added a large helping of anti-Semitism. Eventually he turned out a book titled "The Jewish Onslaught," endorsed the crackpot theory that Jews had dominated the slave trade and demanded Jewish reparations to blacks...
In the end, Wellesley College did the right thing in the Lefkowitz/Martin case. Too bad Barnard couldn't do the same.
Listed below are links to blogs that reference this entry: The New Yorker Dances to Nadia's Tune.
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Martin Kramer has been inspired to write a piece following a remarkable radio interview given by Jane Kramer following the publication of her New Yorker piece (now available in PDF here) on the Nadia Abu El-Haj controversy (see previous: The... Read More
Anthony Martin, AKA Tony Martin is the now retired professor of Wellesley College who taught a course based on the "nation of islam" book The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tony_Martin_(professor)
Thanks Sol, and Eddie for the link.
Any ideas? Why would an apparently sophisticated journal like the New Yorker not perceive the problems with the scholarship in this case?
On the broader issue of "post-modern history" - why is ok for "diversity" to include - to reward - surreality or even untruth? It's one thing in the arts, another in the sciences - is history an artform now? Maybe it is and should be read as a novel, a la Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria Quartet.
Also: why is it necessary to build up the esteem of nations or peoples at the expense of others?
Most striking: the case of the Jewish people, clearly not powerful conquerors but in fact frequent victims: why are we all too often the target of OTHER oppressed nations and peoples, even in their revisions of history and/or national narratives?
This doesn't make sense to me at all.
Ultimately, it leads only to more confusion, victimization and untruth.
Does anybody have any ideas? I'm baffled, especially when liberals and progressive writers and institutions apparently endorse what often overlap with or link up to reactionary, bigoted "storylines" (like Holocaust denial or conspiracy theories involving Jews or the denial/distortion of our history, ancient OR modern).
I think this piece echoes some of the problems:
http://www.spme.net/cgi-bin/articles.cgi?ID=3904
Martin Kramer linked it. It is by Efraim Karsh, entitled, The 60 Year War for Israel's History.
The New Yorker bought in to the storyline of this being a left/right issue and knew what side they were on in that fight. The piece in question is an object lesson in subtle bias while getting most of your facts right.
The trouble comes when you get into post-modernism and the freedom it grants to go back and start redefining things everyone thinks they already have the definitions for. You can start at the top and reinterpret everything for your politics' sake.
I stayed out of the nuts and bolts of this matter early on and stuck to "a tabloid interest" (to quote the article) because I felt that even if I read the book, I wouldn't have the intellectual grounding in post-modernism, post-colonialism and archaeology to be able to address the issues from a serious standpoint. Few people do, so I stuck to repeating what the scholars were saying and fitting it into the framework we all understand -- that of bias and devolution in the academy. (It's what a careful reader of this blog will note that I do much of the time.)
I can see now I need not have been so careful. Most people labor not from a position of right knowledge, but from a position of coincidentally right (or more often wrong, or right for the wrong reasons) opinion -- including authors in major publications. I should have gotten in with both feet.
El-Haj's take is sophistry. It sounds pretty good, and there are quite interesting aspects, but when you get down to what she's really doing there's something quite insidious there.
Let's take one of the more controversial aspects of the book. One of the issues in question is as to whether El-Haj believes that there is no evidence for ancient Israel, or whether it's all just a "pure political fabrication." Some of El-Haj's critics have said she doesn't buy into the evidence of an ancient Jewish presence in the Holy Land. That's not quite true. That's not careful.
She is certainly aware of the archaeological evidence, but she also, in keeping with post-modernism, believes that that Jewish presence should be no more significant than the many other political presences that have occupied that geographic area. The idea that somehow the Jewish presence is more significant than any other (any other tribal, religious or political entity that has lived there) is somehow an ideological construct -- it has no independent existence other than what we decide to privilege it with. Further, she clearly believes that the idea that you, Sophia, a Jew living today in the 21st Century, have any connection whatsoever in any way with those ancient Jews is absolutely nothing but a "pure political fabrication."
Jewish identity and connection to the Middle East of today (particularly for non Middle Eastern Jews) is nothing but a political construct. And since it has been imagined into existence, it can just as easily be imagined out of existence if the proper pressures toward reconceptualization are applied.
Everything is because we imagine it so. If we just stop imagining so, the existence of this connection will cease to be. This is the kind of thing you get when you take the classical Western Enlightenment tradition of fact and evidence out of the equation. Everything goes. And, since I hold that your beliefs are based on nothing but so much as preference (in some cases to "privilege" actual evidence as well as cultural practices kept up over millenia), I can come at you with new ways of reconceptualizing what we thought we all knew and demand that you hold it to be just as valid.
This book is part of that effort at reconceptualizing the Jewish connection to Israel out of existence, and it looks like she is now moving on to the next part of the program by using genetics to pile on to it.
It comes down to playing with ideas and, regardless of the validity or usefulness of them, demanding tenure and a salaried position to keep at it -- as if your "new thought" had already proven out as being as useful as the old. No wonder so many real scholars have decided to move on from academia.
See also this reasoned rebuttal in the Columbia Spectator by respected biblical scholar Alan F. Segal, whom Kramer's New Yorker piece portrays as a hypocrite and bully.
Let's take this another step and see where it leads (just got home from my commute). Let's pick one of those ancient Peoples, the Jebusites. Now, you and I know that the Jebusites had their run and now they're done. History has closed the book on them and no one has thought of themselves as a Jebusite in a long, long time.
Now it's perfectly uncontroversial that, had the Jews been erased from history, we wouldn't consider the ancient Jewish Kingdoms as all that significant in our consciousness. It's almost tautological. BUT, we know that the people called Jews have had an uninterrupted, continuous existence as a People with an attachment to a particular piece of Land. There's evidence and verifiable history in favor of that idea. The Zionist movement was about modern Nation-State building, not People (with an attachment to a Land) building out of whole cloth.
Some Palestinian Arabs and their apologists might try to make the argument that they are descended of the ancient Jebusites, but WE would be able to trace that particular idea down and find out both when it started and, arguably more importantly, why, and we would find that it was of recent vintage and didn't have much validity (for any number of reasons) at all. It has more to do with the reasons that Arafat and the politicians in Imams' clothing that control the Temple Mount deny the historical fact of an ancient Jewish Temple there -- politics, which we could privilege or not depending on, again, a number of factors. It truly would be a "pure political fabrication," and a rather recent and lame one at that.
What El-Haj (and Khalidi and many others) tries to do is smooth this all out and make all the claims equal -- equally fabricated, equally poltical, equally erasable.
Sol, this is brilliant, thank you:
"Everything is because we imagine it so. If we just stop imagining so, the existence of this connection will cease to be. This is the kind of thing you get when you take the classical Western Enlightenment tradition of fact and evidence out of the equation. Everything goes. And, since I hold that your beliefs are based on nothing but so much as preference (in some cases to "privilege" actual evidence as well as cultural practices kept up over millenia), I can come at you with new ways of reconceptualizing what we thought we all knew and demand that you hold it to be just as valid."
So - the endgame will be????
Does the university have any idea what is being created under its auspices?
There's a real huge problem with this kind of sophistry - it isn't just a mind game and it isn't art either. It's likely to lead to a real tragedy.
There are millions of real human beings involved, and imagining that they are invalid constructs is simply unimaginable to me.
It's appalling that supposedly intelligent people can't see the very real motive of revenge lurking just below the surface of so much "post-modern" or "post-colonial" "history".
Why would the university support such deadly poetry? This is somewhat similar to the art gallery where the artist starved the dog to death.
Well we "get it". The animal was a "metaphor". The artist got an award.
Unfortunately a beautiful, trusting animal died, who could have been saved.
This is barbarous. The casual cruelty and simple want that afflict so many human (and animal) lives is bad enough and there is no question in my mind that we must, simply must try to do better. But this deliberate cruelty is so much worse.
And, the vengeful dreams driving the "history" of Israel toward disaster are similarly cruel - far more cruel than the desperate search for survival that drove people to seek sanctuary in faraway lands - including Israel - in the first place.
This is something else I just don't understand: people judging that migration and colonization is per se wrong and evil, when in fact it's an ongoing and constant part of human history and human development, and has hardly been a factor merely of "white people" or "Westerners" or "imperialists".
Would it have been better for people in Ireland simply to have died en masse, rather than to have let them and other "huddled masses" emigrate to America? And aren't needy people, people seeking better lives, freedom, sanctuary, continuing to move to Europe and US? Didn't people from Siberia move to America thousands of years ago, and create great civilizations there?
Didn't people from Mongolia move all the way to Asia Minor, establish great Empires - indeed to the gates of Vienna?
If so why is Israel such a great evil, with or without Jewish history, that she must be dismantled and her people destroyed?
I looked at the Columbia divestment signatories. One name that stood out is #33 Nicholas De Genova who attracted attention for his "wish for "a million Mogadishus," a reference to the 1993 battle in Somalia in which 18 U.S. soldiers were killed".
De Genova's defence? "quoted me out of context."
http://chronicle.com/free/v49/i32/32a05601.htm
So they found their token Jew to write in El Haj's defense. Does this really surprise anyone?