Culture at People's Expense: Convivencia and Anti-Semitism in Contemporary Spain

The university city of Alcalá de Henares, most closely associated with the personal confessor to Isabel I, is now a suburb of Madrid that, like many other small Castilian towns, presents itself as part of the heritage of the "tres culturas" of Spain, a place where Jews, Christians and Muslims forged a kind of coexistence, uneasy and inconsistent, but also vibrant and fruitful.

 

 

There is even a badly-proofread plaque in the "trilingual patio" of the historic site of the college commemorating a "three-faiths" encounter there.

But there is also this anti-US, anti-war mural that buys very directly into the Jewish-cabal-behind-it-all conspiracy-myth, right in the heart of the historic barrio judío. It's quite striking in its details, with a six-pointed Jewish star in the upper right-hand corner of the American flag where the 50 five-pointed stars (or even one large five-pointed star standing in for the tiny ones) should be.

 

 

It is a striking contrast as civic art in a city that is actively playing up its Jewish heritage, perhaps cynically to encourage tourism or perhaps in earnest as a real embrace of its past. But it is also a contrast that draws attention to the phenomenon of Jew-as-historical-artifact. Society at large is happy to embrace its Jewish past. After centuries of a different kind of national narrative, it has suddenly become a bit of a cool thing to do, and a path of liberation from the country's own fascist 20th century history. But it doesn't particularly seem to know what to do with actual, flesh-and-blood Jewish people.

Madrid itself is a city covered in swastika graffiti. I'd estimate that there are just about as many that are Xed out as a statement of general anti-fascism as there are that are painted on in earnest support of neo-Nazi or general fascist ideology, but that small and diffuse gesture doesn't inspire a lot of confidence against such an onslaught. It is a city that is, at a minimum, deeply ill-at-ease with its own position in relation to the whole of the twentieth century.

Genizah as Library

Atlas Obscura is an interesting site to follow for ideas for quirky places to visit and quirky places to fantasize about visiting. This week they ran a photograph of of a monument in a Jewish cemetery in Austria.

It is conceived of as a library but, I think, speaks to some of the questions about genizah practice in different communities, placing old worn out sacred books and implements in the cemetery as the proper disposal. The idea of genizah-as-archive that is sometimes bandied about is a flawed one because it misrepresents chaos as organized. Genizah-as-lending-library does something else in the space between life and death.

***

I'm ambivalent about posting this as a single, undeveloped thought because I think I want to write more about it, and I'm not sure if this is staking out the territory or scooping myself (or setting myself up to be scooped). I'm so sick of my book, and there's so much new I'd like to be working on already and I'm despairing of the fact that I won't get to do or think about anything else for at least another year still. I hate the pace of the academy. Deadly.

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.

The Humanistic Pose

"Is my 'Humanism' really a pose? Do I pretend tolerance to gain a hearing? This has never been charged against me. But what of my own consciousness? Does my own self charge me?

“Partly. Humanism is, I concede, sometimes an affectation. One restrains oneself.

“But only partly. If it be sometimes an affectation, it is always an effort. Perceiving other people’s intolerance, or rather, perceiving that intolerance is natural, one asks: What of my own intolerance? It is just as natural to me as to other people’s to them. What then? I must overlay the natural by the artificial, for the artificial is the truer, not to myself, but to a cause higher than myself. This cause is the cause of all against the one. Truth is not natural, it is artificial, artificial in the good sense. A child is not naturally truthful. He is naturally self-indulgent. Humanism is an artificial process against self-indulgence, and self-indulgence, though natural to each, is unnatural to all.

"Humanism is a pose, but a pose of grace.”

 

Quoted from Israel Abrahams, unpublished papers, Southampton Hartley Library MS 116/58 AJ 172/E.8

The Medieval Trash Heap, a Refuge from the Modern One

I'd like to share a paragraph that comes close to the end of a 1957 article I've just finished reading in the course of my research on a medieval woman poet. The article was written by the founding father of Cairo Genizah studies, S.D. Goitein:

"It is natural for woman, whose emotional life is strong and delicate, to be sensitive to religious poetry and endowed with the gift of song. In a society which does not oppress woman, especially one which does not humiliate her spirit or steal her self-worth from her, these traits find their outlet in creativity. Biblical society was such, and we have therefore found that the Hebrew woman of ancient days lifted up her voice in song. For the rule governing her was not yet 'the voice of a woman is indecent' but rather its opposite: 'let me hear your voice.' She sang in times of love and during the days of mourning, expressed the joy of victory and the agony of defeat, words of wisdom and whispers of prayer."

The whole article is a cacophony of similarly insulting, patronizing comments on women and literature that, beyond being out-and-out sexist are also just methodologically wrong and not the way we — any of us, regardless of critical school — approach literature. I don't even think it was the way we approached literature in the antediluvian 1950s when this article was originally written. (The 1988 publication date that you'll see if you follow the link above reflects the posthumous publication of an English translation of the article, which was originally written in Hebrew.) It unquestioningly lines up the Hebrew Bible with modern poetic practices, forcing and shoehorning the the Bible into corresponding with history in a way I've only ever seen amongst the farthest-gone religious fundamentalists and Levantine archaeologists of a certain school of thought:

"During his studies the present writer sometimes heard women's poetry spoken  by men and men's by women; and yet the gender of the author was always immediately apparent" (2).

"Woman's poetry sometimes took the form of prophecy. The connection between poetry and prophecy is likewise found among many ancient peoples, and is the subject of a book by a well-known woman anthropologist and literary scholar" (3).

"Nor is the reason that 'women are chatterboxes'" (31).

The irony of it is that the vast majority of Goitein's writing on the women whose lives were recorded in and amongst the sacred trash is sensitive and nuanced and thoughtful, and for many topics in women's history and literature in the Genizah remains the authoritative work. I'm at a loss to explain what happened when he sat down to write this article. Perhaps his papers might offer some clue; perhaps I'll have a chance to look into it at some point. 

But the usual approach that we expect from Goitein when writing about women still breaks through in one line in that first offending paragraph: "The rule governing her was not yet 'the voice of a woman is indecent' but rather its opposite: 'let me hear your voice." Goitein wrote this while comparing modern Yemenite women's poetry and song to the occurrence of women poets and singers in the Hebrew Bible; the contrast that he establishes between the now and the then and the place of women in each evinces sadness over what has come to be and nostalgia for what had once been.

The voice of the woman is now indecent: We are reminded of it monthly as the Israeli police arrest women worshippers at the Western Wall for donning ritual garments that they are legally but not halakhically (according to the majority of authorities) prevented from wearing — women are exempted from wearing fringed garments and phylacteries, but that exemption evolved into a prohibition over time — and for praying out loud. Kol isha, the voice of the woman, is indecent and it is criminal.

The regular arrests and imprisonments of Jewish women in Israel for praying against the law is a powerful contrast with the occasionally tin-eared mid-century historian who would pat us on the head and exoticize us but then go ahead and treat our forebearers fairly and with great humanity as he pulled their history painstakingly from the most historic of rubbish bins and lament the loss of a time when we could speak, aloud and in writing, for ourselves. Neither model, the modern Israeli legal establishment's nor the archivist's, is perfect — far from it. But I know with whom I cast my lot.

Tiyyul in Philadelphia

The institute where I am spending this academic year as a fellow arranged for a walking tour, or in Hebrew a tiyyul (this being Jewish studies and all), of historic Jewish Philadelphia led by a Penn professor of American history; so I walked through the city today, looking at colonial, federal and revival architecture with a gaggle* of medievalists. If that kind of morning isn't high up on your list of the very best ways to spend a Sunday morning, you might as well stop reading here.

It was definitely a challenge to take even good tourist snaps while keeping up with a group, so these really are totally for illustrative, documentary purposes. (Although I hate suggesting that documentary photography = sloppy work.) I'll definitely walk back through this neighborhood and rephotograph it over the course of the year and visit some other sites (again, both of general and Jewish interest) that we didn't have time to visit today.

One of the sites that we visited today, shown above, was Carpenters' Hall, originally a trades-union hall  that became important as a meeting place. The most interesting thing that our guide talked about here was how a lot of the open green spaces in the historic center of town are the result of a 20th-century reimagining of what colonial Philadelphia would have looked like — idealized, pastoral and very much in keeping with William Penn's original vision for the city. But in fact, the reason this building was so important for the early revolutionaries is because it was surrounded by a warren of small alleys that were all packed full of buildings and so it was possible to come and go for meetings without anyone really noticing. Modernity has invisibly rewritten the history with a wrecking ball. Sounds a bit familiar, really.

This is the Powell House, the home of a wealthy late-colonial, early-federal family. Here we learned about the tiny details in the façade that were shows of ostentation by wealthy families like this one and those that aspired to wealth, especially the large windows and the quarried limestone bars on each floor. After the Powell family, the building was turned into a bristle factory and store by a more middle-class Jewish merchant, demonstrating the ways (economic as well as religious) that central Philadelphia was integrated. One of the major rooms of the house was removed to the Met, and so what's there now on the interior is another a reproduction; I'm looking forward to taking a lunch hour to go visit since the house is open to the public during the week.

This building represented an interesting intersection of the general national significance of the city and the sites specifically of Jewish interest: It was originally built as a fire house run by one of the private fire insurance companies that were a major innovation that was brought about in Philadelphia (and more specifically by Benjamin Franklin). Later, it was converted into a Yiddish theater; apparently the inverted onion motif on the façade of the building is characteristic of Yiddish theater spaces and other Jewish meeting places. (Incidentally, I didn't have the time to snap a photo of the former Jewish event hall that is now home to a pole dancing gym.) I didn't notice that my reflection had actually showed up in this picture of what is now the front door of a seriously swanky apartment building.

This used to be a synagogue. Now it is an antiques shop.

*This is the gaggle of medievalists in question. To the point, though, I'm open to better collectives to describe such groupings. The aforementioned gaggle (troop? congress? (no, that's reserved for Leeds) swarm? hive? drove? clutch? quiver?) is standing in front of an example of a row-house shul. These small synagogues, which served specific ethnic groups, were built to look just like the row houses that are common in the area. Apparently this is a practice that was adopted from Catholic congregations during the colonial period (and that was even more common in less tolerant colonies like Massachusetts) whereby they would make their churches fit in with the other residential buildings in the hope that  the protestant majority would, when riled up, not notice the purpose of the building and leave it and its inhabitants alone; and this simply became the architectural vernacular for religious minority groups in British North America.

In these last two photos, on the left our guide is standing on the steps of the Society Hill Synagogue, which is apparently now part of the Reconstructionist movement. Originally a Baptist church (in other words, pretty much anioconic and easy to turn into a synagogue), this became, as the legend on the lintel reads, the Great Romanian Synagogue in the mid 19th-century. Though apparently, transmitted to us on the authority of one of the greats in our field who was himself a Romanian Jew, Romanians didn't use Yiddish in the way it is used on the face of the door (die grosse romanische schul) and so that, too, is a sort of American reimagining of Eastern European Jewry.

A Chaos Muppet Looses Herself on Europe

(This fits into the general thematic concerns of the blog in that it intersects with the use of new media for popular historical inquiries and the history of European anti-Semitism. The unified theory of chaos muppets comes from here.)

Memo

To: Sweden

From: Me

Re: Your PR problem

As an academic, I travel to Europe and the Middle East sometimes to do research. More than once I’ve had the experience of taking a deep breath when someone asks where I’m from and saying: “Well… I’mAmericanbutIdidn’tvoteforGeorgeWBush.” Or, “I…amfromtheUSbutIswearIbelieveinevolution.” Or of just kind of giving my inquirer a wearied look and saying, “Listen. In spite of anything Justin Beiber says, most of us know that there’s a difference between North and South Korea. But yeah, I’m an American.”

So, listen, Sweden. What I’m saying is that I know that we wouldn’t do much better if we, as a country, tried what you are trying: Creating a national Twitter account and letting one average representative of your population take control of it each week, and narrate their experience as average Swedes and share every passing thought with the greater universe in an effort to share what life in your country is like and what typical Swedish concerns are. It must have seemed like a great idea.

Only, you’ve authorized a national spokesman and turned him loose with no plan, retaining no control. And instead of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington meets The Network, it’s turned more into Bye Bye, Birdie meets 2001: A Space Odyssey.

This week’s average Swede, the first one to take over the blue bird’s reigns since many Americans became aware of this project via a Sunday New York Times feature spent the second day of her tenure 1) musing about how childbirth is kind of like strangling your children with your vagina; and 2) using her platform to finally find out what Jews are and why people hate them.

When Justin Beiber says he really opposes the kind of government they have in Korea, we all have the recourse of saying, “We’re not all like that!” Even if he is, we can still try to defend ourselves by saying that Justin Beiber is not the typical American. Your government, on the other hand, declared this woman to be completely representative of Swedish people. She is officially the average Swede. And I have absolutely no interest in visiting a European country whose average citizens obviously don’t have to study European history in any way and don’t have enough command of basic logic and rhetoric to discern that resting a question on the premise that everyone hates Jews might be a flawed way to approach whatever it was that she was trying to accomplish. Sweden, if this is your average citizen, I’m sorry honey, but you seem kind of scary, especially to someone like me, a history-class-appreciating American Jew. Maybe I should be thanking you for the honest heads-up.

There’s a reason that 14-year-olds don’t get to drive cars here. It’s the very same reason we don’t just hand over the keys to the national twitter account for any old Dick or Jane to take a spin on the — well, the spin machine. There would just be really bad carnage and nobody would be able to look away. I’m sure that the average American would say dumb, uneducated stuff if we let him take over the national twitter account. So we don’t have a national twitter account. We’re at least smart enough to protect ourselves from our average citizens.

This, Sweden, is exactly why we don’t nationalize private utilities and resources. It’s a slippery slope there. Universal healthcare one minute and then suddenly you turn around and there are bloody genitals and anti-Semites all over your internet and nobody wants to visit your country anymore.

Or, with tongue not quite so firmly in cheek, seriously, Sweden? Find some above-average Swedes or scrap the project. You’re not doing yourself any favors.

***

The world helpfully informs her that Jews are things with big noses, but that you still can't tell 100% because Jewish women aren't circumcised:

Back to her merry life:

An al-Jazeera journalist calls her out on brushing off the whole kerfuffle, but not before another Swede helpfully defines Jews as "Germans of a different faith":

Not to pass up the opportunity to make it worse, she compares *herself* to a Nazi on trial:

Not really a save:

Updated at 7:55: Unconscionable question from the Tweetosphere to @sweden. Yet she still manages to one-up the bad with her reply. I'm framing it this way only because she brought Hitler into it first but, seriously, is she trying to offend every single group of people Hitler tried to eradicate?

Updated again at at 9:08, 6/14: Sonja, just drop it. Seriously. If I send you a copy of the Very Short Introduction to Judaism, would you be willing to go the whole rest of the week without tweeting the word "Jews"?

Accidental (In)Equality: Two Scenes from Transit

Scene: El Al flight 001, en route to New York, approximately 3:30am local time at destination, somewhere miles above the most northeasterly reaches of Canada. An Orthodox man walks up and down the aisle of the Boeing 747, offering to let other passengers put on his phylacteries and recite morning prayers.

Orthodox man: Tefilin?
Me: No.
Orthodox man: Are you Jewish?
Me: Yes, but this is not my custom.
Orthodox man: Oh. You are a girl.

First thought: I can't believe an Orthodox man is suggesting I put on tefilin. Second thought: My hair is short, but come on. Third thought: If only egalitarianism and religious pluralism could be solved by short haircuts for all...

***

Scene: United States Customs and Border Protection Station, John F. Kennedy International Airport, 7am

Officer O'Gara: Where are you coming from?
Me: Israel
Officer O'Gara: You just put a one on this form. One is  a number. You have to write Israel.
Me: It's an "I." I must have gotten distracted and not finished the word.
Officer O'Gara: I know you people think Israel is number one, but you have to write the name of the country.

First thought: Mustn't argue. Don't want to be detained, especially not with all the Arabic books in my suitcase and backpack. Second thought: Really? I've been awake for going on thirty hours, the last twelve of which were spent in a flying sardine tin of doom and the twelve-plus before that were spent giving a very dense paper on medieval philosophy and attempting to impress colleagues in I've lost track of how many languages, and your mind runs first to the old Jews-are-a-fifth-column-in-America canard? Next time, a "welcome home" would suffice.

A Canticle for Daniel, Part II

This is the second of three parts. The prologue to the series is here and part one is here.

Even if there were nothing else to it, I would think that a request to stop forced conversions from a people that has lived for more than two thousand years under the threat of forced conversions ought to be respected.

But there is more to it.

For people to suggest that we are just being angry, over-sensitive Jews reeks of the kind of gaslighting that would never be acceptable if it were done, for example, to women as a class of individuals. Imagine: I don' t understand what you women think is such a big deal about rape jokes; nobody's actually getting raped, and it doesn't affect anyone's body or physical safety. You're just being pissy; get a grip. Don't be so sensitive about it. Rape jokes are a big deal because they make light of an important issue, namely women's safety and autonomy.

Posthumous baptism in the Mormon church makes light of my beliefs and denies me and my ancestors the autonomy to make our own spiritual decisions. It treats us like children who chose not to become saved in our lives, so it's going to be done for us whether we want it or not. Rather than letting us go, according to their own belief system, and letting our eternal souls live with whatever the consequences might be — even if they are very negative in terms of Mormon beliefs — they hunt us down and force us into their vision of salvation. To baptize me as a Mormon doesn't actually make me a Mormon as far as I'm concerned, as far as my family would be concerned or as far as God is concerned. It doesn't mean, though, that I don't want my choice to remain not-a-Mormon to be respected. Your right to throw punches ends at the edge of my cheek; your right to religious actions ends at the edge of my religion.

I'm writing as if there is a monolith. There isn't, of course. For dissenting views, see this Slate roundtable discussion amongst its Jewish staff writers about whether they'd object or not to being baptized posthumously. I don't agree with him, but I do like Matthew Yglesias' formulation of his position as: "I feel that the Mormon view that they should posthumously baptize me so I go to heaven is better than the orthodox [sic?] Christian view that I should just burn in hell forever." But as for me, I prefer the flip side. There is a material distinction between a Catholic praying for my soul or for my conversion and Mormon acting to effect it, and the distinction lies in the respect for autonomy.

It has been argued in the blogosphere that since only our names are implicated, we shouldn't be so worked up about it. But the sanctity of our names is everything. People can and do desecrate our graves and our bodies — even today and even in the United States — and so our names are the only thing that we ever truly and fully possess. Man is not remembered by his corpse but rather by his name; names are central to mourning rituals and to remembrance. A typical honorific that is said of a dead person is "may his memory be a blessing." It is frequently also given as, "may his name be a blessing." We honor our dead not by mourning them, but by remembering them and by sanctifying God and studying in their names. We read out the names in synagogue of those whose death anniversary fell during the previous week in order to honor their memories. We observe Holocaust Remembrance Day by reading out the names, for twenty-four hours straight, of Hitler's victims. To curse someone in the strongest terms, we say: "Let his name be erased!" The sacred name of a dead Jew is anything but a triviality.

By the by, doesn't everyone want control of his or her name? Witness the trademarking, for example, of variations on Jeremy Lin's name, to cite only the most recent of celebrity examples. Take a look at the famed British libel laws. And as Juliet learned as she implored Romeo to "doff thy name" and begged to understand "what's in a name," for however trivial a name may seem, its power is inescapable. We may have specific cultural and religious reasons to object to the co-opting of our names, but it's not as if the rest of the world can't understand it.

Writing about this issue has forced me to better articulate the reconciliation between the day-to-day secularism of my lived life and the belief system that is at the core of my identity. I live assimilated, but still believe. I think that a lot of secular writers dismiss religion as a lot of hokum. Even as I used to, as well. One of the things that really changed my mind was reading Madeleine Albright's memoirs, and specifically the section in which she wrote about realizing that taking people's religious claims seriously had to be part of the Middle East peace negotiations. You couldn't just tell Christians that their claim to the Holy Sepulchre was a silly attachment to a building or Muslims that they should swap out the Temple Mount for more land in the West Bank because what's a rock, anyway? You might think it's silly. I might think it's silly. Madeleine Albright might think it's silly. But it is still real in that it is going to govern how people behave, and that must be accounted for. This kind of dismissal is practiced, then, by people who will never be able to understand why it is upsetting and who will never be able to be compassionate to the suffering that this kind of practice causes. Religion is something to be accounted for even if you don't believe it fully or at all.

Even though I have come around, perhaps it is still hubris and secularism that allows me to say that I'd rather be damned, thanks. But even if I were deeply religious, I would come to the same conclusion even though the reasoning is different: You believe that you are right and I let you; I believe that I am right, so let me. And let God sort it out in the end.

It's real even though it's not real. It doesn't change things. As Daniel Pearl's parents said when the news broke, with more grace than I would ever be able to muster, he died as a Jew and his eternal fate is as a Jew. But that also doesn't mean that it's not important or that we're wrong to be disgusted by the practice. It's one of those sensitive, cracked-up paradoxes to be held only by a first-rate mind: This thing that doesn't matter at all is everything.