Survivor: Iowa State

An Iowa state senator introduced a bill to turn the public universities in his state into a horrifying, multi-campus episode of Survivor: Under Senator Chelgren's proposal, tenure would effectively be eliminated and student evaluations would be the only measure of the faculty's worth and the ultimate deciding factor in who gets to keep their jobs. Anyone who didn't meet the minimum numerial threshold on the student evaluations would be automatically fired. Then one of the lowest-performing five professors above the minimum threshold would be voted off the island by all the students at their campus, whether they had taken a class with the professors in the stockade.

The senator thinks that since we are earning "a couple hundred thousand dollars" each year, we should be more accountable.

Is Iowa paying its professors six figures? I'm certainly not earning anywhere even close to six figures and certainly not multiples of six figures. And that's part of the trade-off, as I understand it: The job security of not being put through the Hunger Games on a regular basis that allows me to take my time and do thoughtful, meaningful research and writing of the kind that can only be produced over time and with deliberate, careful thought, in exchange for a lower salary.

The senator's ignorance of the most basic details about the finances of a university system he claims to be so concerned about is the outrage-headline point. But really the rest of it is more serious.

The bill has, fortunately, died in committee, but it's one more troubling reflection of current attitudes in government towards higher education: that there is no connection between research and teaching, that students are customers, and that faculty just aren't working hard enough. It is also reflective of a conviction that college students have enough perspective to be able to write meaningful evaluations of their professors, an idea that, at least in the academy, is being increasingly recognized as flawed. Gender and race biases are rife in teaching evaluations, and despite protestation to the contrary, many students do rate more highly their professors who are less demanding.

Yet the senator thinks that "students who range in age between 18 and 30 years old, who are spending thousands of dollars to get an education, are qualified to make those decisions."

I had been vacillating about whether to write about a particular discussion that I had with my cultural history students early on in our time together this semester, and the resurgence of this discussion tipped the scales in favor because it illustrates the problem with letting college students assess their professors and giving absolute weight to those assessments.

When I took over the cultural history class and transformed it into a research seminar, I selected several topics to assign to students based upon the original syllabus that I inherited. One student complained that she didn't want to read any more work by one of my NYU colleagues, whose extensive bibliography had featured heavily in that syllabus; and then she added: "And she looks so scary, too!" I let that slide, but within a minute or so the discussion had somehow turned to all four of them having Googled a picture of my colleague, and all four of them chiming in with negative comments about her appearance — especially about the fact that she's not smiling in her photo on the department web site, and about her hair, a la the kinds of comments Mary Beard got in the wake of her Pompeii documentary. And at that point I decided that the time had come to put a stop to it.

I framed my comment by highlighting the fact that our seminar is made up entirely of women — all four students and me — and that especially because of that, and because any of us could find ourselves on the wrong side of it, I wanted to point out some of ways in which that kind of assessment of people is very gendered. I didn't say anything that would surprise anyone who is aware of the issue or has thought about it, but the idea that their slagging off a professor's looks might be unfair and shaped by deeply-rooted social expectations of women was totally new to these students. I cited studies that have shown that women are more often evaluated based on our looks or personality traits even where our male colleagues are evaluated on their teaching ability and perceived brilliance. I further framed the conversation as being a way of helping them to advocate for themselves by helping them realize that this kind of discourse is a big part of the reason why universities are starting to take student evaluations less seriously and that if they want their opinions to be heard, which they should be, they need to stick to relevant topics.  I shared with them that one of the challenges that I face when I walk into a classroom is that I often have students who expect a kind of bubbly friendliness and nurturing when they see a female professor in her early thirties that is simply not a part of my introverted personality; and because of those expectations, I have had to work doubly hard to counteract student evaluations that conflate friendliness and an outgoing personality with professorial accessibility.

They definitely didn't quite get it at first. One of the students pulled up a picture of one of her professors, a man, and said she thought it was the creepiest picture in the world. Another student wanted to make sure that I knew that that she's not sexist; but they were quickly catching on, and before I could even respond, a third jumped in to reiterate what I had already said: that this was in no way a personal accusation, but rather a looking at how we've all internalized social messages and values about women in public, in cultural life and in the marketplace of ideas.

I love this group of students. They're thoughtful, enthusiastic, and hard workers. But they're still not totally equipped to evaluate me or my colleagues in productive and professional ways. Part of my role as a professor (or as their not-professor, in this case) is to help them begin to identify and interrogate the kinds of issues that are at play in real-world interactions where human judgment is still the final arbiter. But they're just starting out, just beginning to be able to see the issues, and just beginning to develop the critical thinking skills, the compassion, and the temperance to allow them to make decisions on sound bases. And as highly as I think of these students, they'd need years practicing those skills and of hindsight perspective before I'd put my professional future in their hands.

The One Where I Get Kicked Out of Church

This church, to be precise, the one in the Convent of the Barefoot Trinitarian Sisters:

 As part of my "you're stuck with the cultural history students for the rest of the semester" plan, I'm taking the class on a few field trips to take advantage of what's unique to Madrid and also to make it a little bit simpler to prep classes on topics that are well outside my area of expertise. Yesterday I took them to the archaeological museum, which was brilliant. I think they got a lot out of it, asked good questions, all the good things that you want to have happen on a field trip. I had them read a chapter of Maryam Rosser-Owen's Islamic Arts from Spain (conveniently available in Spanish translation) and we talked about the 19th-century cabinet of curiosities as a way of looking back at the past. We'll have one more field trip, and I was thinking it would be interesting to go to the convent  where they've just discovered Cervantes' body and use that as a springboard to talk about the reception of Cervantes in the 20th century, about the role (physical and metaphorical) of the author, and about concepts of national patrimony.

Our program's admin assistant called to make a reservation for the group to visit. She was told that since the archaeologists are still working on the site they are not having regular visiting hours right now; however, she was told, we were more than welcome to come during the half hour before morning Mass and look around. I went this morning to see in advance how feasible it would be and whether it was really worth taking the students there when they might or might not be able to see much of the archaeological site.

I went this morning at 9, when the church opened, sat for a few minutes and took it all in, and then walked around the chapel a bit. It's exactly what you'd expect from a convent of that period: a lot of gold, nails, and blood.

 There was a room off to the left of the altar and through the grate you could see one of the priests putting his vestments on to prepare for the mass; and to the right of the altar, there was a door that opened onto a room with a few chairs. The door was wide open, so I went into it, thinking that perhaps I would be able to see the dig site in or from there.

But the next thing I know, the woman who had opened the church, a lay person, was standing right behind me, demanding to know what I was doing there:

Me: Nothing, just looking.
Her: No, there is no nothing. What are you doing in here?
Me: I'm not doing anything.
Her: You opened this door. You can't just open doors and go into places.
Me: I'm sorry — I didn't know that I couldn't be in here, but I did not open the door. It was already open.
Her: Yes, you did open this door. I never leave it open. It is always closed. Like this. [She closes the door to demonstrate.] The minute I wasn't looking you came over here and opened the door!
Me: I'm sorry I was in there, but the door was open and I didn't know I couldn't go in.
Her: There is no sorry! This is unforgivable! And unbelievable! You have to leave right now!

Suffice it to say, I will be taking the cultural history students on a walking tour of important sites from the filmmaker Luis Buñuel's life instead.

I think that the most absurd thing is that it's a sixteenth-century wood building. Everything creaks. If you walk across the floor, it creaks. When the woman closed the door, it creaked. If I had opened it, that woman would have heard it creak, and presumably come running rather than just finding me there. That and the fact that if they're telling people that they can come look around during the half hour before mass, they do have to expect that people who don't necessarily know the norms of that particular church will come to visit, and should post signage accordingly (or actually be careful about closing doors they don't want open).

I feel terrible because it's not like I ever want to be disrespectful in somebody else's sacred space; it's also the first time, though, that I've been somewhere where there was no clear indication, either by the floorplan corresponding to what I know to expect or through signage, that I was about to enter a space where I wasn't supposed to be.

There's more to say about sacred spaces and national patrimony and the fetishization of authors' dead bodies, but I'll leave that to another post. I'm feeling a little too rattled to be thoughtful right now. I shouldn't feel bad about it, but I still take getting shouted at kind of personally. Perhaps that's the point, though — an illustration of fostering obedience through intimidation?

Being the Professor vs. Being a Friendly, Older, Smart Person

In the spirit of sharing positive classroom experiences, as has been advocated over at Hybrid Pedagogy and other related and similar parts of the academic web (and to counterbalance what I do want to write about some missteps this semester but haven't quite fully finished thinking them through), I had a great class with my students yesterday. I'd love to be able to replicate it in the future but fear that the circumstances were so extraordinary that it just won't happen.

Some background: After a colleague had a medical emergency that required her to go on leave about a month into the semester, and because one of my classes for this term was cancelled, I was tapped to fill in. The trouble was that the class is on the cultural history of 20th-century Spain. Cultural history? Great. The 20th century on three-and-a-half days' notice? Deeply suboptimal. If I weren't under the gun to finish my book manuscript, I'm sure I could have managed to put together lectures on topics such as the role of women in civic life under Franco and just followed the syllabus. But I am, and so there was no way I could put in the kind of time it would take; so I agreed to take on the class on the condition that I lead it as a research seminar. I argued that I could teach the students methodology, theory and practice well and allow them to delve into a single topic of interest to them in a much deeper way. Initially this was supposed to last for four to six weeks, but is now looking like I will have the class for the whole semester since my colleague has not recovered as quickly as anticipated.

I created a schedule and teaching document to guide them through the research paper process. Since I was initially planning for a month and a half at the most, and since there are only four students in the class, I took the next for topics and offered them to the students as their research topics, requiring that they read the assigned primary and secondary texts dealing with their theme and then develop a bibliography of additional sources they found themselves. I told them that this was going to be a class that they'd get out of exactly as much as they put in.

At the first meeting I had with the students, it dawned on one of them that the pseudo-syllabus was my own work. Said she: "Wait, nobody at NYU handed this to you?" Said I: "No, Rob [site director] called me on Thursday and I put this together over the weekend." Said she: "This isn't half bad for a syllabus you wrote in a weekend." Another student, whom I had taught in a class last spring, added: "I was really worried when they told us you would be our professor." She realized how that sounded and added: "I mean, it's not that you're a bad professor." She realized that sounded worse, and concluded: "It's just that you gave us so much reading last year! I like this better."

And that's where the great classes and the irreplicable dynamic comes in. In reality, I'm not their professor. I walked in on the first day and was completely frank with them: I could help them with the practice of cultural history; but as for the material itself, while I'm not completely ignorant of the broad trends of the 20th century and while I've even read a decent amount from the Civil War period, this is not my wheelhouse. It's a very unusual situation, I told them, and we'll figure it out together. I'm not the professor. I'm a friendly, older, smart person with more experience and a few extra letters after her name who is helping them learn things for themselves.

It seems like it would be so artificial to try to replicate that posture in a regular class that I could teach in my sleep or underwater or standing on my head, but I think that it's what has led to such an open, fluid dynamic in the class.

Yesterday was the first day back from spring break and the students were supposed to turn in their rough drafts. When I asked if they were ready to swap with a peer for critique, they sort of... squeaked. I asked them what the squeaking meant, and they said that they had all had trouble/run out of time. It was a tight deadline (again, I was only planning to be with them for six weeks at first) and on top of spring break, I should have seen it coming. (To be fair, if I hadn't required a full draft, I suspect that they might not have gotten even as far as they did and wouldn't have had specific issues to discuss in class.) And they just started asking questions about their topic, about how to solve certain problems that they were having, and the discussion completely took off from there. They talked to each other, which I find is very rare in classes I have taught, asked each other good questions, and helped each other solve the difficulties they were having. I was there as a moderator who occasionally jumped in with an additional question or idea; they all walked out feeling much more confident about their research projects because they had much more focused ways of completing them. It was spontaneous and it was kind of perfect.

I don't know that deliberately instituting a fake schedule in the future would work. (I do that on a small scale in my regular seminars with first essays of the semester, having an unannounced peer critique and giving extra time to any student who wants to revise based on their peers' comments.) I think that it worked here because the students felt more at ease to totally blow a deadline because I'm not their professor and as much as they seem to like what we're doing, it's not what they signed up for. And obviously one can't count on spontaneity. And, finally, as I already said, I don't know how to replicate the "friendly, older, smart person" persona and the "in it together" spirit in a regular class without it seeming forced. That said, I'd very much welcome suggestions or thoughts on how to better encourage this kind of engagement in the future.

A Personal Cartography of Cordoba

Surprises aside, this was a brilliant place to teach.

We got off the bus in Córdoba a week ago today just in time for lunch. The itinerary gave students an hour and a half before we would meet in the patio of the orange trees just  outside the Great Mosque where, the itinerary said, they would be required to take audio-guides as they walked through the cathedral. And so when my colleague asked me if I had given thought to what route I would take the students on through the cathedral, I answered her that I thought I would leave them to their audio guides and just make sure that I visible at several key points on the walk through to answer any questions they might have.

Turns out that the term "audio-guide" does not mean the same thing in Cordoba as it does in Madrid. This wasn't a false-friends situation in which I assumed a definition for a Spanish word on the basis of an English counterpart; the "audio-guías" at the Prado Museum and even at the Alhambra are exactly the same as you find anywhere else; the audio guides in the Great Mosque of Cordoba are just a speaker system so that a guide can address her group through a microphone and headphones without having to shout and disrupt the quiet and the sanctity of the space. "You are," my colleague said, "the audio-guide."

 Fortunately, even though I haven't been there in fully a decade it's a space I know quite well and whose history I know quite well. It's still the first time I've taken students there, though, and so my colleague drew me a map to show me how she walks students through and what she thinks is important to tell them and what seems like an excess for intro-level students.

This map, drawn for me alone, is the very best souvenir of Cordoba. It's going up in a small frame in my office when I get back.

It speaks, I think, to the very individual ways in which any of us relates to a monument. This is a description of the Great Mosque of Cordoba by a medievalist for another medievalist that reflects the intimacy with which we both know the space. It speaks to the Mosque as a site for teaching as much as it is for anything else for anyone else who might have been there on that day or any other day in the past.

Mostly we think of maps as being for people who are lost. This one says not how much I needed to be told how to make my way through the space, but how much I didn't need to be told; not how much I needed it, but how much I did not.

Even where you might be able to read this map as a way to walk through the space, unless you are its intended reader (me) or one of the few other people in this world with her intellectual and professional profile you can't see where it says "tell them about the flying buttresses" or where it says that al-Hakam II was vain caliph with no sense of political expediency or where it explains how much more advanced engineering was in the tenth century than in the ninth, or the eighth, or in Rome. You might or might not know how many times this space has been consecrated and reconsecrated in the name of competing visions of the same God; I see it written here in ink. Personalized, this is a map through history and ideology as much as it is through space.

Titus Burkhardt described the Great Mosque of Cordoba as a forest of mathematics and history. This isn't the map that could have saved any Little Red Riding Hood walking through it, but it did save me.

The paradox of this map is its explanation of its own innecessity. And the one who can understand it will understand.

Solving the "Moor" Problem

One of the stops on last weekend's trip to Cordoba and Granada with twenty-nine NYU undergraduates was the cathedral of Granada, which was originally intended to be a late period gothic building but ended up for a variety of interconnected historical and aesthetic reasons as an exemplar of full-on, whitewash and gold leaf, more blood and nails, Renaissance-Baroque splendor. "Splendor."

One of the challenges in that space was explaining to students the two traditional Spanish representations of Saint James, he of Compostela pilgrim path fame, one as pilgrim and the other, characteristically, as Santiago Matamoros, Saint James the Moor-Slayer.

This is a representation from the cathedral of him in that second mode. It's not my photo — although I can't claim to be above taking pictures in places where it is officially prohibited, I was trying to model responsible behavior to the students this time around:

I often struggle, and mightily, to get students not to use the term moor in their work in my classes. I explain to them that it's not a historically specific-enough term to be useful and that its racialized and racist connotation makes using it a complicity with those ideologies. I have them read this essay (Paywall. Sorry. Happy to share a PDF.) And I still get reading reflections, research papers, and exams that talk about the Christians and the Moors.

It struck me, though, standing in the cathedral in Granada, right below this statue exalting Santiago in a warm golden glow at the moment his horse tramples a moro and explaining to the students that this is a part of the ideology that motivated the religious persecutions and expulsions of the period, that such a stark image, seen up close, probably drives the point home better than a thousand essays or classroom discussions could. Here is Santiago, killing a dark-skinned Muslim and receiving reward in the heretofore and plaudits in the mind of the nation; it may not be the case everywhere, but this is not an ideology, represented so starkly here, that any of my cosmopolitan, urbane, New York-based college students would choose subscribe to. It's not to say that I have never taught students with prejudices, but to a one they know what the problem is as it is represented here.

I'll wager I don't see any moros in my students' essays this term.

Head Count: Zero

Current view from the front of my classroom. Because, really. Why would anybody think about taking a class on Spanish literature while studying abroad in Spain? That would just be silly.

Spanish departments often get pegged as "service" departments. They're places for warehousing masses of students who want an easy way to complete their language requirement because they've had some Spanish in high school or, because, let's face it, for an English speaker it is simply easier to learn Spanish and to attain something closer to proficiency in a few years than languages like Chinese or Arabic. And so there's often a defensiveness amongst the faculty members who populate those departments and an insistence — correct if, perhaps, protested a little bit too much — that this is not a place to just practice your Spanish.  But it's coupled with an insistence, to varying degrees, that literature be taught only in Spanish. There's a very delicate balancing act between insisting, correctly, upon proficiency in language, and making the content accessible and interesting.

I don't know that anywhere has that balance worked out perfectly; and so we end up losing a lot of students to this notion that first you learn a language, and then you can read literature in that language, and until then, no literature for you. It's an idea that quietly, though not at all subtly, reinforces the notion that language and literature are two separate things. And so you end up with a situation like the one I have, where there are students who are studying abroad in Spain who have no interest in taking a Spanish literature course. They're here to practice their Spanish and to learn about Spain, and literature is that other thing.

Desengaño

I had a love/hate relationship with the Don Quijote class that I took as an undergraduate. Love because, well, what's not to love; and hate because as an undergraduate I was mostly put off by professors whose personalities were forces of nature. I could be as guilty of hero-worship as the next star-struck undergraduate being taught by the go-to authorities on their topics, by the laureates of the Pulitzer and the National Book Award and the Guggenheim and the MacArthur,  but my heros were often not the usual ones.

The one lecture in that class that has stuck with me for a decade was the first of the semester. I remember much of what I learned in the class (although my reading of Quijote has matured considerably since then) but that first lecture is a complete unit in my mind's eye and ear. It walked us through the title page of the first edition of Don Quijote; as a college senior, I was astonished at how much detail and information my professor could pull out of a single page that came before what I then imagined as "the book" even started.

One of the themes of the course was the idea of desengaño. The word is often translated into English as disillusionment but it doesn't carry the same kind of negative connotation; it's a word with more neutral and wider possibilities that represents not a loss of illusion but an increased awareness, a lifting of the curtain from before one's eyes. It's an idea that comes from a very classically-constructed field of Hispanic literature (that's a nice way of not coming right out and calling it a bit outdated), and Otis Green is the scholar most closely associated with developing a vision of that trope within the classically-constructed canon. (Citing Otis Green is another way of not explicitly calling the framework old-fashioned.)

Imagine the desengaño that I would feel ten years thence — unexpectedly and by necessity becoming something of a book historian — upon opening Roger Chartier's The Order of Books to find this spread, a discussion of the title page of the editio princeps with special attention to the relationship between the author and patron named on the title page and the author and patron identified from within the pages of the book: the ultimate source of that lecture.

My the persisting memory of my inner Yale College senior was, if briefly, devastated by this realization that the best bit of that class was cribbed from Chartier, that I had stood in awe of my professor for something that he had not done. Of course, from the other side of the table I know better. Or, "better," because we all cite the scholarship of others when we teach; and when we teach undergraduates we don't necessarily give them the full chain of transmission. Because it would be disruptive to the flow of a lecture for information that won't be meaningful to 99% of them? Because we never expect that one of those students will grow up in her professional life to accidentally open the book that was our source? Because for the most part most of us don't draw so heavily upon a single piece of scholarship as the backbone of a lecture?

Of course, the evidence before me forces me to wonder whether that was actually ever what happened.

The class seems to have changed since then. Thanks to the dubious miracle of the internet and open-online education, I can go back and read a full transcript of the first lecture of that class, a lecture that no longer makes any mention of the shape of the title page or the dedication to the duke or the name of the printer. Perhaps it is appropriate that it should be a lecture on Quijote called up shockingly suddenly from the hazy memory of an undergraduate not yet professionally trained in the study of literature, that should make me question my own judgment, perception, and memory, and wonder whether the lecture occurred as I remember it or whether I myself somehow previsaged my later reading of another scholar's work.

Guest Lectures, Omissions, and Dumb Visigoths

A really terrible account of Islamic Spain was posted to the academic blogosphere a couple of weeks ago by a modernist. (Not going to link to it.) It basically read like a parody of what critics of Ornament of the World make that book out to be. One medievalist (not me) responded and the author replied with ad hominem attacks against her and against medievalists in general and defended her post in an argument that boiled down to, well, it's a blog post and not a doctoral dissertation (And also: Not all cultures are equal so how dare you call me out for saying that the Visigoths were dumb? I really wish I were kidding, or even exaggerating.)

The blog post =/= dissertation formulation was on my mind this week because I was preparing a guest lecture to give in a colleague's class. It's a "presidential honors seminar," part of a program for the best and brightest NYU freshmen that includes extra access to advising and enrichment, and participation in a seminar that meets every other week and culminates in a trip  to the part of the world that they are learning about. My colleague is teaching the "Spain" seminar, and my guest lecture was the only thing that these students were going to hear about the Middle Ages. It's the guest teaching equivalent of writing a single blog post or teaching one single session on the Middle Ages in a big survey course.

To be sure, I couldn't do more than give a sledgehammer overview of the period. There's even a decent possibility that the group of students I met now think that the red-and-white alternating vouissoir is the single most important cultural development in the Middle Ages — because the Great Mosque of Cordoba is a really nice encapsulated way to talk about interreligious cultural relationships at that time and place; and because it's concrete, it works well under limits of time and continuity. I did a lot of that kind of shorthanding. I compared the mythology that grew up around the Cid to the mythology that grew up around George Washington because it was an analogy that allowed me to say a lot in just a minute or two, even though it's never an analogy I'd use in a semester-long class. I used the word multicultural, which I hate. And I used the world hybrid, which I spend a lot of time unpacking when I use it in seminars.

I showed these slides and did not once mention the word Almohad (an omission that should be abhorrent to me as a cultural historian of 12th and 13th century Spain), instead explaining that artistic and architectural tastes changed over time and that synagogues and palaces, just as much as mosques, kept up with the times.

But all of the shorthanding and all of the omission was done in the service of conveying the one main idea that I wanted them to take away: That religion is one factor amongst many, including economic interest, taste, desire for power, that goverened people's behavior in the Middle Ages; that they gravitate towards what is familiar to them without regard for its complex history; and in this respect, people in the Middle Ages weren't all that different to us. I thought that was a good takeway for a bunch of college freshmen I'd only ever meet once before they were loosed on the historic Toledo which survives unscathed in name only. It's not how I'd talk to my own students and certainly not how I'd talk to my colleagues (it's also not how I'd shorthand it for my own blog post or even for a general public talk to an older lay audience outside of a university setting) but there's still a certain integrity and logic to the talk that I gave.

So I've really said all of this to hopefully start a conversation.

We all make judgment calls and omissions and elisions when introducing material in introductory classes, and even moreso when we're stepping into someone else's class for one session or giving a public talk. I'm curious to hear what kinds of judgment calls other people make? What do skip when you're pressed for time? What would you unpack in a seminar that you leave at face value in a one-off talk? What kinds of principles or ideas or guiding frames help shape your thinking about what to leave in and what to take out?

Okay. Go.

Editors of the Book*

I had the chance to attend a workshop at the NYPL on the Complutense Polyglot, a multilingual bible composed in early sixteenth-century Spain. The workshop was led by a colleague I know from #medievalTwitter (and it was really nice to finally meet him in person this week) for two classes of students at Yeshiva University and Stern College. In addition to learning about the book, it was also a great opportunity to observe someone who is a very lively teacher and has developed an effective way of teaching history of the book for beginning-level students.

The really poignant thing, a completely unintended** and subtle irony of the talk was that one of the themes was the extent to which major institutional early modern library collections that are still intact even today in Spain are instrumental in being able to reconstruct the editorial process that created the Complutense Polyglot. Scholars are able to make determinations about what was read in conjunction with what else and which editors, based on what is known about their travel and living patterns, would have had access to what kinds of sources; and that says an awful lot. And here was the value of institutional library collections as collections being lauded in a library that is on the verge of dismantling its own.

***

*I briefly thought of entitling this post 'And the Word Was Made Flesh' but ultimately that seemed more kinds of inappropriate than kinds of appropriate.
**I'm reading a strange critique of the internationalist fallacy this week. More on this soonish.

This is Not a Sign of the Apocalypse.

I did something that a lot of my colleagues would consider to be unconscionable. I used that book. In a graduate seminar.

And you know what? Everybody's okay and nobody believes that anyone was nice to anybody else ever in the Middle Ages. Promise.

I'm teaching my first graduate seminar this semester, an introductory-level graduate course called Faith and Text in the Spanish Middle Ages. It is a set of case studies in cultural and literary history that is designed to give an overview of the major literary and religiocultural traditions of the Iberian Peninsula. My predecessor retired several years before I was hired and hadn't been teaching for several years before that; amongst the student population here, there is no institutional memory of the Middle Ages, however you want to define that, as a thing that happened in Spain. In other words, I knew this had to be a very introductory-level course. Even so, after the first couple of weeks it was clear that I was still pitching a little too high in terms of the background that students were missing.

To remedy the situation, I made an uncontroversial choice and added in relevant chapters from Richard Fletcher's useful if imperfect political history, Moorish Spain.

But I also asked my students to read Ornament of the World.

I explained to them why I had left it off the syllabus to begin with. Principally, this was because it is not a work of scholarship and so it really isn't designed or appropriate for a graduate seminar. But I also gave them the other reason why: Having been a student of its author, I have taken unusual flack from colleagues, most often in history, for being soft on the work. For wanting to defend it because its author was my teacher. For being incapable, because of that personal connection, of seeing it for the assault on history that it is. Not my words, of course.

One of the other scholars who was with me at the Katz Center last year took it upon herself to reeducate me about why the book was such a travesty after I suggested, during the opening session of the semester when we all attempted to stake out some common intellectual ground, that a caricature of Ornament's "culture of tolerance" was not necessarily what we needed to gird ourselves against because it wasn't a scholarly work, but was rather a book intended for a general audience of interested lay people.

She understood, she told me later that day in a kindergarten-teacher voice, that she must have hurt my feelings. I didn't tell her that I'd heard it all already. That I'd heard it all from my own professors at Yale, the author's own colleagues who referred to her (to undergraduates, mind you!) as "la que ve moros por todos lados" — the one who sees Moors everywhere she looks. That I'd heard it all from people with gripes about exile and with petty jealousies about publishing. In my co-fellow's mind I obviously couldn't be objective and needed to be made to see the light. After all, she told me, in a line of reasoning I still don't quite follow, people might read the book and cite it in their scholarly works and then it will become part of the scholarly narrative. I insisted then, as I do now, that if a historian or literary critic can't distinguish between a work of scholarship and a work of popular writing, that it is hardly the fault of the popular book. I voiced this objection and was met with a promise of examples of historians and classicists citing Ornament in their scholarship and a lunch date to discuss why this was such a big problem.

What I could never make this other fellow see was that my feelings had nothing to do with any of it. All of this came about because I had the temerity to suggest that we oughtn't decimate the book in a scholarly setting not because it is unassailable but because it is not a work of scholarship. It is a question of audience, a question of venue. Feelings have nothing to do with it. I bear my soul in my scholarship and it is deeply personal but my feelings are not at stake. Even so, this particular conversation managed to burrow deep under my skin, even as I came to have increasing reason to doubt this colleague's professional judgment. The only thing this other scholar — senior to me, a stranger to me — could see was one of Maria Rosa Menocal's students refusing to bash, without qualification, her book that was never intended for a scholarly audience and was always only a literary history, never a political one. Other scholars who dislike the work are often a bit more subtle than this colleague was, and for narrative and illustrative purposes, I suppose I'm lucky that her efforts were so blunt-edged. But the criticisms of the book and of the students is nothing unusual.

Because of where my realization about needing to backtrack and backfill and back form came in the course of the semester, we focused particularly on the chapter that compares the very literarily-informed biographies of the poet Judah Halevi and the mythologized Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar, el Cid. Its major focus on the relationship between poetry and prose narrative cut straight to the heart of how I wanted to teach the relevant texts. And I asked the students to read a variety of primary sources from Halevi's life, as well as explicit and indirect critiques of Ornament's treatment of them. We talked about his reliance on Isma'ili terminology in his philosophical work even as he was rejecting the forms of Arabic poetry. We talked about the various exiles of various Arabophone Hebrew poets. I walked away feeling like I had made Halevi out to be a bad guy — but crucially, a very different kind of bad guy than the one Hillel Halkin accuses Menocal of making him to be and, equally crucially, not uniformly a bad guy. We talked in some detail about the cultural paradoxes that are the backbone and the highpoint of Ornament and the most often misread by its critics.

A culture of tolerance that means total interreligious respect and harmony is not the version of the narrative that I would want graduate students to come away from my class with; and it's not the version of the narrative that they'll come away with. (And if we're honest, it's not even the version of the narrative that's there in Ornament even if that's what people take away from it.) The kind of convivencia that obtains in my classroom is the kind where Jews, Christians and Muslims physically cohabit the same space, read the same kinds of books and interrogate their ideas in similar ways.That is also the convivencia of Menocal's more scholarly works, the graduate-level appropriate ones that I also had my students read and that are often ignored by these intellectually neo-conservative reeducators who would see us return to the grand nationalist narratives of Sánchez-Albornoz and Fanjul. But in terms of giving my students an overview of the material and orienting them towards a cultural-historical methodology deeply informed by literature, as my research methodology is and as my classes are, asking them to read Ornament worked really well. Our few class sessions since then have gone much smoother and the discussion has been more involved; and in a two-hour seminar with three non-specialist students, that's no small victory. Convivencia is not an all-or-nothing proposition.

To the naysayers: Naysay away.

My real mistake was letting them live on in my head for as long as I did and for not starting out the first week with Ornament as a useful if imperfect cornerstone.

Pass (Part III)

Part I is here and Part II is here.

I attended a public magnet high school in San Francisco that, while I was a student there, was just coming out from under federal supervision — a consent decree that had been in place since the year I was born — because the school’s population was considered to be insufficiently diverse: too many Chinese and Chinese-American students, the Northern California circuit of the United States District Court had ruled. Despite the federal supervision and an admissions scheme that required different test scores for students of different racial and ethnic groups, the plurality of the student body was still Chinese-American.

Lowell was a relatively comfortable place for me. After a miserable four years in a private middle school full of new money and a false, forced doctrine of multiculturalism that paid lip service to celebrating other cultures and made tokens out of the one black kid, the one Asian kid, the one Jewish kid in each class, I suddenly inhabited a world where I didn’t get mocked for — forget about not having — not caring about designer clothes and not going on outlandish ski vacations, and where being smart wasn’t bad or even all that exceptional. I still didn’t find myself in the default position, but it wasn’t uncomfortable. I remember that there was the occasional indignity or insult, but they were so minor that fifteen years on, I don’t even remember the details. It wasn’t always a walk in the park — it was high school, after all — but most of the fights I had were about editing the school newspaper rather than race.

Linguistically I was well on the outside, though I learned enough to at least be able to be polite. One of my classmates whose parents spoke limited English taught some of us who were her friends how to ask for her on the phone so that when we called her house we didn’t just have to shout: “Cynthia? Cynthia!” into the receiver at her mom and dad. I may not know how to do anything in Cantonese once I get Cynthia on the phone, and I wouldn’t even be able to understand if the answer were something along the lines of her not being there and might I want to leave a message, but I do at least know how to ask that the phone please be passed to her: “Mm-goi Cynthia tieng denwa?”

And when anyone in the media or from outside of Lowell would write or say anything negative about Chinese-Americans as a group or when parents of some of the white kids would go on about how there were just too many Asian kids who were making the environment of academic competition intolerable, I would start to feel not just angry but defensive, reflexively thinking: “Those are my people you’re talking about!” Even though, of course, they really weren’t. Maybe the most extreme example of that perspective came on a very early college-visit trip I made to the Washington University in St. Louis. I came through Kansas City, and when I stepped off the plane and into the airport, my panicked reaction was: “There are all these white people here. I bet I totally stick out.” It took me a few minutes to realize that I was the only one there who would ever think to peg me as Asian rather than white. I may have been so comfortable in my majority Chinese-American high school that I was (and still sometimes am) uncomfortable in a veritable sea of white people, but I also recognize that in most of the country, it’s a privilege that I’m the only one who knows that. At the same time, my experience in my particular, cosmopolitan corner of the world means that I don’t take the privilege of invisibility for granted on the occasions that I do have it, as I did at a distance from the crowd in the Kansas City airport. I can step out into the wider world and disappear, but I also know what it’s like to stick out, both in reality and in my own imagination.

In my professional life I have come across a startling number of people in my pretty obscure, pretty narrow academic field of study who were also products, if not of Lowell then of the San Francisco Unified School District. One of my other colleagues — senior, well-liked and respected, widely published, and a graduate of Washington High School, the school I would have attended had I not gone to Lowell — who suggested that it was something about that environment that had primed us to study religious, cultural and language contact in the medieval Mediterranean basin, something about those cosmopolitan grungy, badly-lit hallways and centralized clock systems that never worked right, those transcendent red terry gym shorts, the native hybridity sprung up in the classrooms that were too cold in the mornings and too warm all October, something from there that called us inexorably to the Med. The way she put it was this: There are lots of languages around you, some of which you understand and some of which you don’t, and that’s okay. It scales up: There are a bunch of cultural modes at play, all of which you can participate in and draw upon to lesser and greater extents without it being appropriation because the presence of different cultural paradigms is simply the mode in which everyone operates: You’re no longer responding to being in the minority or the majority, but living in a microcosm that, if never perfectly, draws upon all.

Convivencia is a term that has become a hot potato in my field. Literally it just means the state of living together and, at its core, describes readership and other cultural practices where there is significant overlap amongst Jews, Christians, and Muslims, specifically in Spain. But, largely through a deliberate collective scholarly misreading of a popular book that restricts itself to cross-cultural literary contacts, the term is viewed as an intellectual crutch, signifying a sort of happy-go-lucky kumbaya attitude in which members of the three Abrahamic faiths respected and enjoyed each other’s religious traditions and ushered in a Middle Ages in which people weren’t running around killing each other willy-nilly for God or territory. But that’s not what it is at all; I like to think of it more along the lines of people from different religious traditions reading the same kinds of things and asking the same kinds of questions, not so much in parallel but because they are living and practicing their religions within a single multivalent culture.

But to those of us who grew up like that, an honest reading of convivencia makes good, visceral sense. Even though they were East Asian rather than Mediterranean languages that surrounded us, the kind of community that one finds in San Francisco, especially in the public schools, is what made convivencia not a theoretical term, not something that needs explication or qualification, but simply what I believe it to be: a local, natively hybrid mode of cultural production. It simply is what it is; and I am lost in the textual places, be they the Twitterverse or a student research paper, where it is otherwise. 

Pass (Part II)

Part I is here. Just a heads up: This post quotes from a play that uses the f-word. I've reproduced it intact in the quotation.

***

Jews as white folk? This is where the terminology becomes problematic because it conflates religion and race, although that’s really a separate matter that deserves its own post. But this terminology also attempts to inextricably conflates race with power, implying that just because I look European-ish I am a part of the power structure. The idea that whiteness is the proxy for power reminds me of the scene in Angels in America when Roy Cohn, the fictional alter ego of the eponymous man who tried the Rosenbergs and pulled the strings at HUAC, explains that he’s not gay even though he sleeps with men because he’s also powerful:

“Your problem, Henry, is that you are hung up on words. On labels. "Gay", "homosexual", "lesbian"; you think they tell you who a person sleeps with, but they don't tell you that. Like all labels, they refer to one thing and one thing only: Where does a person so identified fit in the food chain? In the pecking order. Not ideology or sexual taste, but something much simpler — clout. Who owes me favors. Not who I fuck or who fucks me, but who will pick up the phone when I call. To someone who doesn't understand this, homosexual is what I am because I sleep with men, but this is wrong. Homosexuals are not men who sleep with other men. Homosexuals are men who, in 15 years of trying, can't get a pissant anti-discrimination bill through City Council. They are men who know nobody, and who nobody knows. Now, Henry, does that sound like me?... Roy Cohn is not a homosexual. Roy Cohn is a heterosexual man who fucks around with guys.” (Tony Kushner, Angels in America)

Heterosexual as powerful, white as powerful, those careless substitutions are harmful all around, I think. To describe "bad feminists" with the term "white feminists" racializes social evil even in spite of all the caveats that one can be white and a feminist and not be a "white feminist." It conflates an oppressed class with an eternally, existentially, definitionally powerless one. If white is a proxy for power, then nobody else can ever even aspire to have it. The converse is just as harmful: witness a recent blog post (relevant because tenure and race have become conflated in what Another Damned Medievalist has termed the “winter privilege wars”) in which the author was given the pseudonym “Adjunct Nate” in spite of his not being an adjunct because he “has solidarity.” It ends the conversation before it begins it because nobody who isn’t an adjunct (or an honorary one, as determined by whom?) can possibly be on the “right” side or have anything productive to say. The terminology becomes pernicious destiny.

What’s more, in terms of facilitating a broader conversation in which those “white folks” begin to behave and discuss in more productive ways, then railing rightly against a warped system or structure by making broad claims about white folk is going to put a lot of white folk on the back foot. And sure, an ideal reaction would be for those people to take themselves out of it and not to react by saying, well, I’m not like that! I know this probably puts me in the bad or useless ally category, but I see it simply as realistic. (And frankly, given that the standard-bearer of what constitutes a good ally has herself just been caught out making fun of interracial families, perhaps the absolute authoritativeness of her opinions in such matters and her poetics of discourse ought to be revisited.)

Defensiveness is going to be a suboptimal but natural and not uncommon reaction; and it seems that it would be better all around to have both a more precise discussion and one that allows more people to participate. I know that critical race theory has moved beyond this, that conversations about being a good ally are done and dusted, but I’m not sure they should be. There’s something deeply twisted about ADM feeling that she has to write, in the post linked above: “I don’t want anybody to think I think like that.” I don’t want anybody to think I think like that either; in other words, don’t assume that I’m one thing intellectually or in my approach to the world because I'm in your category of white people.

The idea that being allied or supportive or just a basic not-bad person requires simply taking everything that’s dished out, and that there’s only one correct way to have these conversations, and that white people should be shouted down and should be shut out for even asking questions; to my mind, activism and education go hand in hand. It’s not a question of understanding or approving but simply of being practical and realistic. I’ll put the nail in my own coffin and quote Claire Potter, who has been demonized as an arch-conservative (which, I think, says something more about the academy at large than it does about her): “Allies don’t let allies make excuses; they push for better analysis.”

Anything short of that is a Catch-22 in that it forces people to say, oh, I’m not that kind of white person, I don’t think like that, which is also an unacceptable thing to say:

The Twitterverse is sweeping a spokesman and her movement on its shoulders as its current hero-darling. It’s a popular message that it’s easy for people to get on board with unquestioningly. It makes me want to exercise my prerogative as a medievalist and disconnect from the web. I know exactly what criticisms I’m going to receive for saying what I’ve said here, and I realize it may be stupid for me to post this now, when I don’t have time to play along or argue back because I’m trying to finish a book project. But I think it’s worth being a little critical before adopting and heralding and celebrating a subtly-but-deeply flawed message of justice.*

The twin rhetorical techniques of piling on and shouting down is just a long winded, cathartic way of saying: Get out. (And I know that saying this opens me to charges of “tone policing.” Go ahead. I’ll wait.) But two cases where other academics were trying to think through structural issues this winter are perfect counterpoints that illustrate the problem. Claire Potter, quoted above, is a prominent academic blogger who wrote about the extent to which internet rage is or isn’t a productive response to the sorry state of the academy; and the raging internet didn’t hesitate in proving her point by piling on, heavy-handedly shouting down, ad hominem attacks, and frivolously declaring victory. Karen Kelsky, who blogs job market and professional advice, tried to tie that broader discussion of the horrifying state of the academic hiring to the ongoing discussion on Twitter amongst activists and academics about racism, structural and otherwise. She wrote an exceptionally offensive post in which she completely appropriated and minimized the conversation on race by comparing white people to tenured professors in the way that they take advantage of a system that is rigged in their favor. And oddly, despite how so clearly offensive it was, the web response, at least where I was looking, wasn’t so much unbridled rage but rather explanations about why different people found every aspect of the post problematic; and the blogger listened and apologized in a genuine and unqualified way.  It was obviously really big of her to apologize straight-up with no rhetorical curlicues or contortions. But I suspect that the fact that there hadn’t been a great piling on, that people explained what they found problematic or offensive about her argument, and encouraged her to read specific things to educate herself more, that all of that made it easier to apologize than it might have been from a beaten-down position.

Am I making this about me? Yeah, I am. And that’s because I’m thinking about this from my own perspective as someone who wishes she had done a better job in handling an issue of structural racism that came up in her classroom, as someone who is still trying to work out how to balance her pastoral role against her pedagogical one. I’m thinking through it in the way I know how to think through things — by writing about them, by reading, by talking to other people. I don’t really want to participate in the discourse that I have found, though; but I suspect that’s ideal because I’m smart enough to know that in so many ways I’m not welcome there.

For the most part, this just makes me want to stay farther away from the corner of the Twitterverse I have begun to inhabit; it has stopped being useful and interesting and has become more like distracting, hurtful background noise. There are more examples and problems I’d like to draw in, but this has already gotten quite long, so I’ll stop here with this: I went online, I found a relevant discussion that wasn’t going to be productive. I couldn’t join in and I couldn’t even just plain quietly walk away without being rendered some other kind of caricature:

There was never a way in; but even for a bystander looking in from the outside there is also no way out.

***

Pass (Part I)

I’ve been futzing around with versions of this post since the very beginning of December, since I read the first draft of a student research paper that spoke more to modern day race and class privilege than to anything about the Middle Ages and did so in a way that, at least as far as teaching goes, was new and challenging for me to know how to approach. What you’re reading now has been up and down and up and down on and off the blog in two major forms with some tweaks since then. I’m calling this the final version although, as I tell my students, there’s no such thing as a final draft. This probably isn’t the totality of what I want to say or the best way I could articulate it. It’s certainly not extensively researched since all of my research energy is pointed firmly at those same Middle Ages that my student so skillfully managed to ignore. Writing that sentence feels funny, too, since I don’t normally encourage a firm division between modern and medieval, having been the student of medievalists of the sort who firmly consider Salman Rushdie to be part of their purview and who wouldn’t do but keep close tabs on the modern goings-on in the regions whose histories they write. I guess I’m struggling with time management in all sorts of ways.

“Give it to me in narrative form,” one of those medievalists used to say, when I would get ahead of myself. So here goes:

This all began while reading, as I said, a first draft of a student research paper. I had to start out by explaining that Benzion Netanyahu was definitely not the same person as Benjamin Netanyahu, and while yes, his conservative politics may have influenced his historian’s judgment, it had very little to do with the premiership of Israel. And in any case, you ought to know what you’re in for when Netanyahu is the most reliable source on a bibliography. Ultimately, using the argument from the web site of a Holocaust-denying Catholic priest as its backbone — you’d be forgiven for thinking that I hadn’t spent parts of several class sessions or given handouts and detailed instructions on how to critically analyze secondary source material — the paper argued that the lesson of the Spanish Inquisition was that racial and religious minorities, including African-Americans whose voting rights had been curtailed and Muslims who had become the targets of everything from surveillance to violence in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, should understand that these restrictions and worse came into being because the people in power just feel really threatened by them, and that the onus of that fear lies on those minorities to understand that.

I honestly don’t think that my student is a racist in the conventional sense of the word. I think that it was in some kind of earnest, unexamined sympathy that she was trying to argue that everything from the Inquisition that nobody ever expects to civil rights violations in New York City in the 21^st century aren’t actually justified but are based on irrational fear; but it doesn't really make much of a difference. I tell my students to avoid the intentional fallacy in reading texts, and I'm not going to make it in reading theirs.

The thing is that I took the coward’s way out. When I was a college student, I detested professors who injected modern politics into unrelated class discussions. I didn’t want everything to boil down to George W. Bush or the Israeli-Palestinian conflict or — no, those were the two main things — even if I agreed with them on at least one and a half of those issues. I don’t want to be one of those professors who goes off on tangents because she’s sure she’s right. When I talk about the modern world in my classroom or in my office, it’s because we are talking about Adonis’ appropriation of the petty kingdoms of al-Andalus as a metaphor in his poetry or because Salman Rushdie is firmly a part of my brief. I mostly don’t want to go near anything that isn’t firmly grounded in text, and all the moreso with students. And so I didn’t try to explain to my student that no, it’s not the responsibility of African-American voters to understand that the power structure feels threatened that they might effect change and it’s not up to any Muslim in America to suborn the fear that his religion might inspire in the mind of the bigot. I told the student to take all the references to the modern world out of her paper on the Spanish Middle Ages, and in doing so, I failed as a teacher and as a human being. I don’t believe that the modern should be pulled out of the medieval. And I think that this kind of pernicious, unlearned, pervasive attitude about the relationship between the majority culture and minorities is so clearly wrong that there’s no debate in whether or not I should address it or whether I am right; but I am equally certain that someone bashing George W. Bush in the classroom believed the issue to be as clear-cut and obvious and with only one right answer and I didn’t want to risk becoming that professor.

I did write a blog post about the whole issue though, and went into a little bit more detail because it happened to be during the brief interstice when this space was password-protected and restricted to people I know in real life and have gotten to know reasonably well online; it was always FERPA-compliant but it went into greater specificity than I was comfortable doing for a general audience. Even this is probably too much; the student could recognize her paper if she were ever to come across this, even though nobody else can.

By coincidence, a tweeter I had started following a few weeks earlier because of some very on-the-nose observations she made on anxiety in graduate school and the academy, weighed in on what is more her main topic of writing an activism in a way that was very relevant to what I was thinking about:

That was exactly what I had been wondering, and more specifically, wondering about how to address it in the classroom. I almost retweeted the remark before realizing that it was the opening salvo in a jeremiad against white folks that I just wasn’t comfortable participating in, including these two:

I was trying to figure out how to attend to this particular problem, but I definitionally needed to figure it out first. Obviously these comments weren't personal, but they also marked thinking about this issue (and thinking about it in the way that I usually think through things, by writing) as something that I oughtn’t do because I’d never do it right.  And there’s a lot wrong with that: Even if this sort of discourse pigeonholes me as white folk, I don’t fit in as neatly as the theorists and the activists who rely on their work might like; the terminology perpetuates the problem; and this line of rhetoric disregards both human nature and the fact of cosmopolitan enclaves that treat the whole issue of race and culture in a completely different and incompatible mode. There’s a lot there. This is going to end up being a three-parter.

Critical race theory says that I’m a white person. And if you don’t look too carefully or talk to me, I can be pretty invisible in lots of parts of the United States, though as a friend who grew up partly in the American South pointed out to me, I’d never pass, even visually, there. I know that the extent to which I can pass is a privilege, whatever its limitations. But I’m also Jewish, and in spite of several scholarly arguments to the contrary, my lived experience as an American Jew makes me pretty definitively not a white person in the way the term is used as a critical category.

The fact that this part of the Twitter conversation could include a remark in which someone, mocking Jewish people who try to insert themselves into the right side of the debate, could do so with a caricature whine that would be unthinkable to pour into the mouth of any other minority group: “What about the JEEEEWWWWS?!” suggests to me an othering that negates the “whiteness” it tries to impart. (I unfortunately don’t have a screenshot of this one because at that point I was so disgusted that I figured I’d never write about this; if I remembered the exact number of Es and Ws, I might have a better time locating it through Google or the Way Back Machine, but alas.)

I’m white-looking enough that I can mostly pass, except to the little old Russian ladies on the bus or in the copy shop or at the airport who register that we have something phenotypically in common and start jabbering away to me in Russian, refusing to believe my protestations that I simply can’t understand them. Because even though I consider myself fully American, even though I’ve never been to Russia and (clearly) don’t speak the language, there is something — my cheekbones? my hairline? — that marks me to coteries of little babushkas as being as foreign as they are.

I’m white-looking enough but a college roommate still told me that I didn’t “look American.” That I looked more exotic, like a “European beauty” — I know that must sound like I’m satirizing, cartoonish as it is, but I’m quoting what I suppose was meant as a compliment.

I may look white at first glance and may have much privilege that results, but I still have to negotiate how to respond to a “you people” speech from a U.S. Customs official when I (a U.S. citizen, by the way, only and always) returned from giving an academic talk in Israel and, having been awake at that point for close to 36 hours, made a mistake in filling out my customs and immigration form. I have to figure out how to tell someone I consider a close friend (and apparently I have defaulted to the inadvertently passive-aggressive mention in a blog post method) that describing someone as “Jewish” isn’t at all offensive, actually, but then backpedaling (that even believing that she needed to backpedal) by saying “no offense, but I could tell by his nose” is super offensive and tied in with all kinds of murderous historical stereotypes. I don't want to have to trot out a litany of insults, but even though I may look white at first glance, and even though critical theory may declare that I am white, it’s 2014 and I still have to talk about the extent to which I can or can’t pass in mainstream American society.

And then there is the Gestalt, the famed immigrant mentality that has never really died out. I am a fourth-generation American. I had the luxury of knowing that my parents were mostly kidding when I brought home tests with high scores and they would ask: “So, nu? A 97? What happened to the last 3 points?” But they still asked. And I also knew just as readily that when my grandparents were asking that question, they were mostly not kidding; and I know this because I grew up hearing, over and over again, the story about how my grandfather’s older brother participated in a prestigious medical training program in the Air Force, the top ten graduates of which were guaranteed a spot in an equally prestigious civilian medical school, with the promise that they would continue to serve once they finished their education; and the year that my great-uncle Arthur graduated tops from that program, the medical school slots went to graduates #2-#11, Christians all of them. We still had to be the very best because even that would never, ever be a guarantee. I know that I attended Yale within a generation of the Jewish men who had managed to gain admission despite the explicit quotas that imposed upon them higher expectations and lower possibilities of success; and to a one, at least among the ones I know, they were permanently warped by that environment. Every time some pundit comments on how the Jews control Hollywood or the economy or the news media, I am reminded of how tenuous whatever gains we have made remain. I have spent my life not belonging anywhere I have found myself. That’s partly a different story, but it’s also partly because however much I might see myself as a Jewish American, the world sees me as an American Jew. Jews may have some "access to whiteness" — sometimes good access, even — but we’re definitely not white folks.