Tag: antisemitism

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Going Walkabout in the Aftermath

This may be a very Thomas Friedman kind of thing to write, but I went out for a walk this morning in the aftermath of the second wave of arrests on campus made of students who were camped out in solidarity with Gaza and I ended up chatting with a parent who lives on the Upper East Side and whose child is a student at Gallatin. She was walking her dog and said she had come by every day this week to see what was going on.

She told me that Gallatin faculty had circulated an email disputing the official account. I said that I thought that was correct, that I had seen nothing that comported with what the communications from the president’s office have suggested about violence, danger, or outside agitators.

She told me her son had started in Tisch, that it had been his dream, I thought she said since he was one and a half but that can’t be, but that he had transferred to Gallatin because of all the “woke bullshit” in Tisch. Like this, she gestured at where the encampment had been.

Oh.

She told me she had been coming down to walk her dog and take pictures to send to her mom, to show her what is happening in New York. She told me they are Jewish.

She told me that yesterday as she walked her dog, she felt safe standing next to one of the NYU security guards who was ex-military and that when one of the students from the encampment approached to ask her to keep protesters’ faces out of any photos she might take, she moved closer to him. She felt safer that way. She made a point of telling me he was a big, Black guy.

She mocked that girl and another who was wearing an anarchist jacket and had thick chains around her boots and was taking photos like she was a fashion photographer.

She told me she felt threatened, that she could “see the anger in their eyes.”

She asked: Do I think the students are motivated genuinely by not wanting people do die or do they hate Israel. I told her I try to give my students the benefit of the doubt and that I really do think they just don’t want people dying but maybe don’t fully understand the implication of everything that they’re saying.

She asked: Do I think they care if Jews die.  

She fawned over my son. She asked does my husband also teach at NYU. She told me about a practice of bibliomancy that some of her Iranian friends — “not Jewish, real Iranian” — practice with the book of a poet whose she couldn’t remember and maybe I knew who it was.

I couldn’t possibly divine.

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My Letter to the President and Provost of NYU

On Monday, 150 of my students and colleagues were arrested on campus during a peaceful protest. This is the letter I wrote to the president and the provost in response:

Dear Linda and Gigi,

I am writing to you adjacent to the letter you will have received from a group of Jewish faculty members regarding recent events on campus. I am writing separately because I do not want to co-sign a letter that calls for BDS or the closure of the Tel Aviv study abroad site; however, in every other respect I am in agreement with the concerns outlined in the letter by those colleagues with whom I am in religious community.

As a matter of principle, I do not believe in cultural or academic boycotts. As a practical matter, I conduct research in archives and libraries in Israel and have fruitful collaborations with colleagues there, many of whom are among the fiercest critics of the Israeli government and its policies toward Palestinians and regarding other matters such as judicial transparency, religious pluralism, and gender equity. I consider myself fortunate to have spent time at NYU-Tel Aviv as part of the GRI. However, I do believe that the value of boycotts is a matter on which reasonable people can disagree and that students and faculty must not be inhibited from expressing their opinions, demanding change, and trying to persuade others of their perspective.

Like my colleagues who have already written to you, I am dismayed by the extent to which claims of antisemitism have been exaggerated and used to quash student and faculty expression. While I may not agree with the substance of much of the protest or the set of demands coming from the students who formed the encampment on Gould Plaza and while I may find some of their commentary, chanting, etc., to be disagreeable, in poor taste, incorrect, or objectionable, I have a difficult time construing those things as threats to me as an American Jew on an American university campus.

I have seen the national debate at large about US involvement in Israel and about Israeli policies use antisemitic tropes and trade at times in antisemitic ideas. However, by and large that has not been the case at NYU and I am grateful to my students and colleagues that we can disagree about a very serious political matter without our discussions taking that sinister turn. It is my own opinion that calls for the end of Israel as a Jewish state without similar calls for the end of other theocracies or countries with records of human rights violations may be questionable in their motivation and their impact. However, I can also recognize that many people, including many Jews, do not view it that way; and it is precisely because disagreement exists on this question that I could not imagine imposing my own perspective on this matter, foreclosing discussion entirely, or asking the university to do it in the name of protecting me and my peers.

Linda, we have only met a few times in the context of your previous role in Global and my involvement with programming at NYU-Madrid, but if I may address you directly as I close my letter: It meant a tremendous amount to me to see a Jewish woman appointed president of the university. There’s no real reason for it except that affinity is funny like that. Now, however, I am embarrassed and angry to see a coreligionist quashing debate, which is so central to the Jewish tradition, and, what’s more, turning state power on other religious minorities — I am truly at a loss for words to describe my reaction to seeing photos and video of arrests being carried out while Muslim students were praying maghrib. First and most importantly, it is simply wrong. And second, I am acutely aware that anything that the state can do to a Muslim minority it can ultimately do to a Jewish minority as well. The actions of the NYPD on campus this week sanctioned by your office have not made us safer and have instead enacted a permission structure for repressing not only political but religious speech.

I know through my own area of academic expertise, namely the intertwined intellectual history of Jews, Christians, and Muslims in medieval Spain, that members of the same and different religions can disagree fiercely, pray differently, and sometimes even insult each other polemically while most of the time still managing to walk the fine line of coexistence, resolving tensions through thoughtful engagement and agreement to disagree; based on what I know of your work as a filmmaker, I suspect you know this, too.

I urge you in the strongest possible terms to reconsider your position. Please: do not impose punishments on the students who have exercised their freedom of expression this year and especially this week and do not sanction my colleagues who were arrested while trying to protect them. Treat their demands as demands to be addressed on their face and not as trespass against the university or any of its constituent communities. And barring real violence, please do not breach the trust of our university community by inviting the police to arrest students and faculty on campus. In short, please uphold the university’s own existing commitments to student and faculty freedom of expression and the right to protest.

I appreciate your consideration of my concerns.

Sarah Pearce

Associate Professor, Department of Spanish and Portuguese

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Pozo Amargo, 2020

I used to have this friend. For a lot of reasons we grew apart. Ultimately, it was one of those grad school friendships that didn’t survive one and then both of us no longer being in graduate school. I might have tried to hang on longer if I hadn’t felt like I had taken on the role of being the friendly local Jewess whose very being could debunk the kinds of myths believed by people who grow up in parts of the world and the country where they might not have ever met any Jews, and if I hadn’t felt like I was failing at it. She’s the sort of person who thinks she can identify Jews — strangers, classmates, faculty —  by the size of our noses or who will start out an anecdote by mentioning that one of the people involved “is Jewish — no offense” as if it were an insult. 

There are other reasons for it, too, but we’re not in touch anymore; and that’s entirely on me. I don’t wish her ill. I hope she’s doing well, whatever well means to her; and I do occasionally look at her social media to see if that’s the case. In the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, a Jewish journalist posting a photo of a line of men in coats and streimels and black hats waiting to buy suits for Passover; the journalist commented that he found this phenomenon infuriating.

My former friend replied to him:

(Guys, look, I know this is searchable, but I’ve anonymized it because as much as this hurt is personal, this is a much wider problem. Don’t go be an arse to someone I used to care about on social media, please.)

I’m teaching an introductory lecture course on medieval Spain this semester as part of NYU’s core curriculum, and we are nearing the lecture in which I will discuss the fourteenth-century legends and the rhetoric that grew up around Jews as unique and malicious vectors of the plague, legends and rhetoric that have persisted until today. It’s less flashy than the neo-Nazis who march with tiki torches, afraid that Jews will “replace” them, but it’s still an anti-Jewish myth that has persisted — in forms that change over time, of course — since the Middle Ages.

Let’s start with some statistics. The measles outbreak in Marin County, CA, was the result of a huge percentage of parents refusing to vaccinate their children for non-religious philosophical reasons. The United States was within days of no longer being considered a country where measles is eradicated; we’re not a big enough or spread out enough part of the population at large for that to have happened if measles were a Jewish problem. The bottom line is that yes, there are people in Jewish communities who are wrong on public health issues in ways that perpetuate harm. But there are also people in non-Jewish communities who are wrong on public health issues in ways that perpetuate harm. Thinking that you know better than physicians and epidemiologists or that you don’t have to pay attention to the wider world, whatever the foundation of those beliefs, is not an inherently Jewish trait. People are people in both the wonderful and the deeply stupid ways they engage with the world; but people tend to highlight it and act on it when it’s Jews in the wrong.

Continue reading “Pozo Amargo, 2020”

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Yo, judío

Eventually, I would like to write something about this very short essay by Jorge Luis Borges. I had tried to work an excursus on it into a review essay I’m writing, but it just wasn’t working and read very forced. It’s now sitting in a file called “cut bits from review essay.docx.” (I will just note that with Borges being the writer he is, I did actually track down his reference to Ramos Mejía, and it exists as it is reflected in this essay.) So for now, I’m just sharing the text, because it’s one of those things I think everyone should read. This is allegedly an image of the original manuscript copy, currently for sale in a Buenos Aires bookshop (anyone have a spare $24k they don’t know what to do with?); I’m not enough of a Borgista to know if this is really his hand or not. In any case, it’s very clear. Read on.

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Spain, I love you so much. And then you go and do stupid sh¡!t like this.

One of the more challenging aspects of Spain is its ongoing, collective ambivalence about Jews and Muslims. It’s a place that, in the last 20 (or maybe even closer to 30) years has come to embrace its Judaeo-Islamic past — uneasily and and sometimes haltingly — if for nothing else than because it makes for a very attractive draw for tourists and foreign investment; but at the same time, it is still very much a place that hasn’t figured out how to deal with the Jews and Muslims in its midst. (A brief disclaimer here: I’m talking strictly about the public sphere and not the academic one for the purposes of this blog post.)

It’s something that struck me most strongly when I was here in 2015 for a semester and visited Alcalá de Henares, a city that very much plays up the presence of its Jewish and Islamic quarters but also sports a mural that trades in stereotypes about Jews being the shadowy, driving force behind corporate and military America. And, here again for what I have come to call The Great NYU Global-Conference-Conference-Research Trip of 2017, I walked past a shop that was trying to sell highish-end women’s accessories by using the image of a frightening, unindividuated Jew conducting bad business under the table. (And now with added homophobia!)

But the casual, corporate, Jews=money=flashy accessories antisemitism of this marketing campaign pales in comparison to the postcards that are available on sale at the Museum of Jewish History in Girona, such as this one:

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Girona is easily the best-preserved medieval city I have ever visited and was an important center of Jewish life in the late Middle Ages. Yet even here, even in a medieval city that very much markets itself for Jewish tourism, the old medieval stereotypes are never far below the surface. The “joke” of this postcard is that Isaac “the Blind” of Posquieres, a thirteenth-century kabbalist, is shown selling the lotto tickets that, in Spain, are a concession held by blind and visually impaired people. The not-really-a-joke is that the postcard shows a Jew with a big nose (for anyone who needs a refresher about the medieval origins of this stereotype, see Sara Lipton’s Dark Mirror) enriching himself.

I took a photo of the postcard and showed it on my phone to the women sitting at the entrance desk and explained what I thought the issue was with it; they looked at me very sheepishly, explained that they knew about it but because the bookshop is actually a concession that isn’t operated by the museum, there was nothing they could do about it. They promised to pass my complaint on to the director of the museum, and suggested that it would be helpful if I mentioned it to the owner of the bookshop. Perhaps, they suggested it without really believing it, he just didn’t know.

Of course, the bookshop owner knew. I suspect that this is not the first time that this conversation has proceeded along the edges of this particular triangle: a surprised tourist, the women at the desk, and the owner of the book shop. The shop owner first told me that he doesn’t make the postcards but just orders them; and since the shop orders them in multi-packs and these come in the multi-pack and they are all paid for, he has to sell them. (Nevermind that if it were me and those postcards came in my multi-pack, I’d throw them out even at a loss before I’d sell them  — who’s the greedy Jew now?) He also tried to tell me that Isaac the Blind — the thirteenth-century kabbalist, in case you’d forgotten from a few paragraphs up — wasn’t a Jew, but rather was the owner of a tavern at the edge of the Call, the Jewish quarter, so it wasn’t actually a stereotype of Jews.

The tourist industry here that pours so much energy into remembering long-dead Jews and enticing the living ones to tour their old haunts will never be more than a silly little parody of itself and a pathetic disservice not just to Jewish history but to its own — which are, of course, inextricable from each other — until it actually looks its own history, both medieval and modern, squarely in the face and appreciates it rather than just casting a casual glance in its direction.

My pithy closing sentence was going to be this: I love this country deeply, but I also have to hate it because it still very much hates me. But the use of that word, country, is what opens up the broader question. How much does a modern country owe to what used to be there? To the descendants of the people who used to be there? What is the nature of what is owed? Is there only a choice between forgetting fully and remembering fully, or is there some middle ground? I had planned to end with a barrage of unanswered questions that I’d really like to answer, but I think that would make this a much longer and different post. So for now, I’ll just get on with loving and hating Spain and trying to let that seething tumult wind itself into words.