לקוראיי בעברית

I'm making an exception and posting in Hebrew today.

באופן לגמרי לא צפוי, בעודי קורא במוסף לשבת של ידיעות אחרונות, התחלתי לבכות חרישית.

בתיאורים מינימלסטיים קראתי את קורות חייהם הקצרצרים של באות ברנוער ובאיו. קראתי על ידידות אמת, שכמותה דומה שלי מעולם לא הייתה, בוודאי לא בהיותי בגילם, לפני שני עשורים ויותר. על האם שמונעת מאותם החברים לבקר את בנה. על הנער שייוותר משותק, ושהוריו אינם באים לבקרו. על המדריך שהפסקת העישון שלו, באירוניה שאין גדולה ממנה, הצילה את חייו אך גזלה את זו של ניר. אינני רוצה אפילו לחשוב על ייסורי המצפון, שלמרות התום שבמעשיו בוודאי ירדפוהו.

ובעודי מכריח את עצמי לעבור במהירות על שלישה האחרון של הכתבה - לא הרשיתי לעצמי לפסוח על אף שם, אך גם לא רציתי לנהוג כמזוכיסט - ובעודי מעלעל בהמשך המוסף לאחר שמשוכנע הייתי שהבכי מאחוריי, נתקלתי בכפל עמודים בעל מבנה מוכר. "פתחלנד" היה הכינוי שהדביק משה דיין לעמודים אלה שבראשם שמות כחיים חפר, סילבי קשת, זיוה יריב ועמוס קינן. המקאמה של חפר הייתה קצרה מאלה של פעם. כך גם החץ מסילבי קשת. ועצם הופעת שמו של עמוס קינן, שמת השבוע, כבעל טור (היה זה טור שפורסם לראשונה לפני הולדתי) היה בה כדי לפתוח את ברז הדמעות בשנית. או שמא היה זה בשלישית או ברביעית.

עצבתי.

Stonewall, Tel Aviv, August 2009

Forty years and some change after the Stonewall riots in New York's Greenwich Village, Israel's LGBT epicenter was hit. It may or may not matter that the instigator was a yet-to-be identified private person, and that the police in this case are "on our side." It may or may not matter that some of the youths who attended the blood-bathed meeting at the headquarters of Israel's LGBT Association will, in a year or two or three or four be ordered to barge into Palestinian homes in Gaza or Nablus or Ramallah or Qaliqilya and threaten and humiliate and maybe even shoot at Palestinian children, women and men just for being Palestinians.

I just heard a mother on the radio, whose 18-year old son was among those hospitalized following last night's shooting. He wasn't injured physically, she said, but for the first time she understood what a shock victim was. Her son, reportedly a sturdy young man with phenomenal memory, can barely recall the details of the events he had witnessed just a few hours ago. We know much more about post-traumatic stress disorder now than we ever did. Hopefully, that knowledge will be put to good use in the case of these distressed teenagers. So much so that they will know better than to act like their assailant when they are put in uniform.

When something horrific like this happens, we want to blame someone. Or better, some-many. The term "hate-crime" was used in the local media here in Israel. Not a common phrase here (in Hebrew pesha sin'a) and therefore perhaps linguistically clumsy. Until some reporters and anchors were reminded that Hebrew has a word – pigua – used for "terror attacks," which all of a sudden seemed fit, and very PC, for this instance.

Truth be told, there have recently been all sorts of expressions of violence in this country that made headlines: a driver who ran over a parking lot attendant rather than paying his parking fee, soccer players accused of sexual assault, another soccer player almost shot to death over an alleged organized crime dispute, a former prime minister and former president accused of all sorts of bullying – fiscal, sexual and other abuses of power, friends and family of a negligent mother burning police cars and dumpsters in Jerusalem, and even the infamous Israeli "road rage" once attributed to our hot blood combined with hot muggy weather. Of course, all cars are now legally required to have air conditioners, but let's not be confused by the facts.

Cause and effect are a tricky thing to prove. Yet it's hard not to notice how violence in Israel transcends from everyday civilian activities to harsh military operations and back again to our own streets.

People have asked me recently whether I was OK following last night's shooting of innocent queer youths in Tel Aviv. Technically I am, and I am grateful of my friends' concerns. But the large picture is, people, we're in some deep deep shit.

"Queering the otherness in the Middle East"

Some people who have known me for some time will immediately understand the subtle sarcasm in the title of this post, and hence the quotation marks in which they were enclosed. In February of 2005 I attended, along with my friends Jeff and Michael Friener, and my boyfriend at the time Keith, American University's annual conference on Lavender Language and Linguistics. Together we invented our ironic little sub-language drawing from the titles of some of the talks we had heard, in which adjectives like 'queer' and 'other' took the morphological forms and syntactic roles of verbs, gerunds, nouns and other unexpected parts of speech. I think that in addition to our astonishment at the perceived linguistic novelty of these usages, we were also somewhat confused as to the true meanings of some of what we had heard at the conference. Since I have no clear idea of my ideological goals, if any, in reporting what I am about to report, I thought this would be a good way to begin. Perhaps this linguistic vagueness will help disentangle the vagueness of the situations I will be describing below.

Between May 27 and May 31 of this year, I had the following exchange with Danielle Briscoe, a former student of mine at UT Austin, who was furthering her study of Arabic in Cairo at the time.

Danielle wrote to me with the following query:

ok, what is the best way for me to express "gay" in arabic? anything simple? stick with "a man who loves men" or "woman who loves women"? my teacher was giving us some words, but i wasn't sure if what i was repeating was anything i'd ever say the equivalent of in english, especially when she said something about "half-man, half-woman" and that hetero men were "natural men."

help!

Since the answer was not obvious even to me, a gay linguist specializing in Arabic, I responded at some length as follows:

Well, first of all, it was nice of your teacher to raise the issue. Or did you just ask her about it?

Secondly, how did you know that I of all people would have the following page bookmarked: http://www.bintelnas.org/10muqadeema/transl-eng.html?

As you'll see, the table at the top of the page provides what the author calls "positive expressions," though what they really are is non-negative ones. At the bottom there's a narrative listing some of the more pejorative phrases that are in common use in the Arab World.

The basic term for 'gay' (or literally, homosexual) is مثلي الجنس, which can be shortened to just مثلي. Add a taa' marbuuTa, and it means 'lesbian.'

If you want something really really simple, what the cab driver who tried to hook up with me in Cairo a couple of months ago said was simply اولاد بيحبوا اولاد. A simplistic way of looking at things, or an idiosyncratic euphemism? Time will tell.

Help! indeed...

To which Danielle responded:

Thanks! This is great.

Basically, the conversation came up when my classmate Rob was talking about his visit to the Florida Keys, which involved going to his (gay) friend's birthday party at a drag club, and getting called on stage and taking his shirt off. So we were trying to explain that drag shows are not about having sex, that Rob does not feel like his gay friend is trying to date him, that he felt it was humorous and not scary that he got called on stage, that the US gay rights movement is considered to have started in 1969 (her comment: "Such a long time...!"), and that some reasons she might be able to understand for gays to have the right to marry in the US relate to inheritance, hospital visitation rights, and health insurance (beyond that, she was having a hard time). Naturally, I can't say we convinced her of anything, but she found it "very interesting" and she was glad to have the chance to ask us questions, since we "know many gay people." She also shared that her friend's boss is gay, and she likes going there because he is a man she doesn't have to feel uncomfortable with in that molestation/harassment way. alhamdulillah for small blessings.

Some of my more cynical readers will surely comment along the lines of, "See? That's what you get from these backward Arab countries! In Israel, gays live a life of milk & honey (oops, no sexual pun was intended)."

Now I'm not claiming that gays in Israel are in many (if not most/all) aspects better off today than they are in Egypt or Jordan, the two Arab countries I have visited in the past few years. But there were a few things I read and saw today that gave me some hope. In essence they show that some thirty years ago, lesbians and gays in Israel were as oppressed and shunned by society as they are in some of the "darker" countries today.

A dear dear man named Nitzan Aviv, whose résumé as an activist puts many other veteran activists to shame, both on the Palestinian-Israeli peace movement front and the queer rights front, to mention but two domains of political activism, recently wrote a guest column in Israel's foremost LGBTQ web portal gogay.co.il. If you read Hebrew, I recommend that you take a break from reading my blog and go here for a few minutes: http://www.gogay.co.il/content/article.asp?id=8320

Nitzan tells us of the first pride parade held in Israel in 1979 and of a group who put together what was probably the first Israeli queer theater performance. If you take a few more moments to read the comments at the bottom of the page, you'll see how some dude who hides behind the handle "the historian" accuses Nitzan and the left – in particular communists and Palestinians – of all sorts of things that Nitzan, in his online responses, demonstrates are completely false.

One online commentator (only identified as "the Tel Avivian") refers us to some footage from an Israeli TV news story from 1979 about the group mentioned in Nitzan's article: http://www.glbt.org.il/contentItems.php?sectionID=670&itemID=828. Nitzan himself, by the way, appears (in a mischievous Jewfro and open-buttoned shirt) in the second segment, which is part Hebrew, part English).

Finally, and back to present-day politics, I recommend that you watch the video in http://makore.6tzvaim.com/node/403, where we see excerpts of the June 2009 parasession if the Israeli Knesset commemorating Pride Month. The session was convened by MK Nitzan Horowitz (don't worry; not all Israeli gay men are named Nitzan), after a few years of hiatus, before which former MK Yael Dayan (featured in the video speaking following Horowitz) used to convene it annually in June, despite outcries from some of the Knesset's extreme religious members (both Orthodox Jewish and Muslim). The discussion is in Hebrew, but I think even a non-Hebrew speaker can appreciate the 4-odd minutes of parliamentary discussion on LGBT rights.

I am still unsure what my goal is here. One goal, I suppose, is exposing an audience (albeit, I admit, a minuscule one) to some facts and opinions others, not I, have expressed in the short history of LGBTQ visibility in this region. I also think that it shows how unstable things are. Not to say that homophobia is an issue of the past in Israel, but we have come a long way in a not-so-long period of time. And while it needn't be the case elsewhere, it also needn't be the opposite. At least one of my readers will surely accuse me of unjustly expecting non-Western societies in the region to adopt Western definitions of fairness and equality. I don't. Though I do believe some such values ought to be universal.

Another thing that bugs me about the Israeli case is that far too many in this country's LGBT (I hesitate to include Q here; you'll see why) community are so proud of things like "Israeli gays are allowed to serve in the military," that they forget that in fact Israeli gays are required to serve in the military (if they're Jewish and so on and so forth), where they are expected to (a) forfeit 2-3 years of their lives (and sometimes sacrifice their lives altogether), often in order to (b) engage in horrendous crimes against humanity.

I'll end here and allow you to ponder the complexity of all this.

Critique the critics

I know I promised something on friendship, and there is more and more "research" material piling up daily, but I'll start with something else.

As I left home today for the gym, I noticed that I had inadvertently left my BlackBerry® at home. I know, Maryam, it's a big source of shame, but I'm a relative newbie. This is only relevant because following my workout, I rode my bike to Chestnut Hill Café, Lancaster's haven of sanity (or insanity, if that's what you like best). Not having my handheld device on which to tweet, e-mail, text and play Sudoku or Word Mole, I resorted to whatever section of the New York Times happened to have been left on one of the tables.

It was the film review section. Now, a handful of my dozen followers may recall that I had dabbled in some reviewing of silver screen productions on this very blog, but today I'll do something much wilder. I will attempt to review three reviews of films I have not yet seen. I'm sure this has been done before. I've never read such a piece, but I don't care enough to google it and check.

The review of Woody Allen's new film, Whatever Works, was as entertaining as it was (expectedly) annoying. Critics love comparing any of the former Mr. Konigsberg's newest works to any number of his olden ones. They also occasionally compare him to other directors and accuse him of not being as good as the directors they argue he was trying to imitate. Now I agree that Annie Hall was fuckin' awesome. So fuckin' what? I also loved most of the Almodóvar films I've seen, with or without Penéleope Cruz. But when I watch a Woody Allen movie, I consider it a genre of its own. I guess Almodóvar is another of those genre-of-his-own directors. Robert Altman sure is (when my mother and I were watching A Prairie Home Companion, she leaned over and said, "it's just like Nashville!" to which I replied, "all of his films [e.g., Prêt-à-Porter, Gosford Park] are like Nashville – shit, don't you hate my digressions?).

So here comes A. O. Scott in the NYT with another mediocre review of a Woody flick (great title, I'll give him that: "Kvetch Your Enthusiasm"). And it's shot in Manhattan again (after a few European-shot films, in case you've been under a rock, no offense) and has Larry David as the Woody-like character. Conclusion: a must-see.

The next two I'm less passionate about, but their less-than-perfect reviews have convinced me that I will probably enjoy them.

On The Narrows, Stephen Holden writes that it "can be appreciated as the film equivalent of a reasonably palatable pasta dish concocted from a familiar recipe and served in a no-frills restaurant." Now have I ever turned down a decent fettucine carbonara? A nondescript, yet yummy lasagne? From what it seems, this is another New York movie, one of those that spans more than one borough, has a slightly more masculine than, Leo DiCaprio-looking adorable star, and promises some tension between blue-collar street smarts and ivory-tower goofiness. I'll go see it, I think.

Finally, the only movie I actually had known about before reading today's Times, and one that got probably the most decent review of all three (by Manohla Dargis), Year One. While Ms. Dargis digs up other, more "classic" pseudo-(pre-)historic films, by such geniuses as Mel Brooks, here's one thing about this movie that makes it a priori hilarious: Jack Black and Michael Cera in the leading roles.

I know a lot of people think JB is vulgar, that he overacts, and for those and/or other reasons simply hate his guts. Michael Cera, I guess some people might call him a fad, a fluke, a soon-to-be-has-been. But here's what I see. Jack Black as the anti-hero in School of Rock and as (the anti-?)Christ in Prop 8 – The Musical. And MC not only as the awkward son of the Jason Bateman character in Arrested Development, not only as the complex geek/jock/stud(???) in Juno, but also as a character in and of his own. Just go to YouTube and type his name for some gems. So there you go, a few shallow reasons to see these two in action, together.

Okay, enough of this pop-culture nonsense. I'll be back in a bit with the serious goods.

On gay activism (with or without quotes)

Several months ago, I received a "friend request" on facebook.com from Cleve Jones. The name sounded strikingly familiar, as it came a very short time after I had seen the movie Milk. Cleve Jones, as portrayed in the based-on-historical-events feature film on the life – and death – of the so-called Mayor of the Castro, was a young, sarcastic, mischievous-turned-idealist member of Harvey Milk's campaign team in San Francisco. 

Naturally, I thought it was a prank. After all, among my now-600-odd facebook "friends" are a dead author, a fictional orphaned girl from Kansas and even a teddy bear whose name resembles that of an Israeli-made semi-machine gun. I accepted this request, but questioned the requester as to the authenticity of the account from which it was sent. Within minutes a response arrived, informing me that indeed this was the Cleve Jones of Milk fame, well, really his personal assistant (who eventually became my "friend" as well), and that the real Cleve Jones is seeking to network with other gay activists.

The Hebrew verb katónti comes to mind. This is a stative verb, which essentially is a word that inflects like a verb (in this case, like a past-tense verb), but denotes a state rather than an action. It translates roughly as 'I am [too] small.' A more liberal interpretation would yield a meaning approximating 'I am humbled by this epithet, of which I am hardly worthy.'

I refrained from further questioning Mr. Jones, i.e., his personal assistant, as to the nature of my alleged activist status. I can only imagine that someone somewhere had read about my week-long (or was it week-short?) hunger strike in January of 2008, protesting the refusal of my employer at the time, the University of Texas at Austin, to abide by its own nondiscrimination policy and extend the same spousal benefits to same-sex couples as it did to other-sex couples. 

As a rule of thumb, I do not intervene in internal US politics. I am not a US citizen, and as such do not feel that it would be appropriate for me to do so. I did participate in anti-war demonstrations, as it is a global issue, and as a citizen of a Middle Eastern country what the United States does in a country which shares a border with a country with which my country shares a border is very much my business. And in the case of my own employer violating its own rules I also felt as if the relevant "citizenship" was that of me as a UT faculty member rather than the one imprinted on my passport.

So I took a stand. Needless to say, the University of Texas had bigger fish to fry, but my passive-aggressive protest caused a bit of a tropical storm in Central Texas, including a number of notable mentions in the local media and around the blogosphere.

So am I a gay activist? I maintain that there are people more worthy than I of that title, but I'll give Cleve Jones and his assistant (a young, seemingly interesting bloke in his own right named Tony Cochran) the benefit of the doubt.

The next installment (originally planned to be included here, but postponed for brevity's sake) will be on friendship (also with or without quotes). I may even have something profound to say.

Summertime...

Sure, it's only mid-May and today's forecast calls for no more than 63 degrees Farenheit (that's 17 Celsius), but in our lazy world of academia this is the beginning of summer, the end of classes, end of grading (I was done 25.5 hours before the deadline!), and a catastrophe of rising tides in the blogosphere. I haven't written a word here since Cairo, and I expect to squirt out gigabytes of text in a very short time. The good news is that I'll probably get tired and/or lazy (oops: bad writing; I had already used "lazy" in this paragraph) and relieve the world of my ramblings much sooner than expected. Which probably means this whole expectation thing is nothing but a paradox.

When I first moved to the United States as an "adult," in 2000, I subscribed to the New York Times. How could I not? I think that for the first few weeks or months I also subscribed to the Philadelphia Inquirer. It was either free, or deeply discounted, and I felt the urge to get a local perspective on things. Whatever. Needless to say, my priorities quickly changed and reading the paper was no longer on the top of the list. I went through periods of full subscription, no subscription, weekend subscription, and as of late, a Sunday subscription. 

To be frank, I am still too lazy (hey, this is a new paragraph!) to read the entire paper, and in most cases, as I indicated in my first post (probably still my best one; check it out!), I typically read only certain portions of the New York Times Magazine. Though the Op-Eds are often worthy of my time too.

Now nobody wants to read my critique of the Times' writers' critique of the world. But here's something that's been bugging me for a while. I really want to like Maureen Dowd. Can't really put my finger on the reason. Maybe because she's a woman with a regular, serious column in the NY Times. Perhaps it's the brevity of her column (it's actually a column, not four or five). Or could it be her somewhat literary style of conveying the same ideas other writers express in their dry, journalistic, unengaged jargon. Or maybe it's just something about the ring of that name: Maureen Dowd. Sounds like a good name to drop at the brunch table with my more sophisticated friends and colleagues.

At any rate, Dowd writes from Washington. I may have even read that she lives in Georgetown. And if I haven't, that's where I imagine she lives. Having lived in the DC area for two years, I find it unimaginable that she would live in Silver Spring or Alexandria. She's gotta be a District gal.

Like everybody who's anybody this week, she's picking on Nancy Pelosi. Of course, she also accuses Dick Cheney of having "done many dastardly things," but that's like accusing a cow of mooing, as Simon Cowell so eloquently put it a couple of weeks ago when one of his colleagues had criticized Adam Lambert of being "too theatrical."

It's hard not to agree with virtually everything Dowd writes this week in her column. But her language, her style, really got on my nerves and reminded me of that DC-insider lingo and behavior that can take away much of the fun of living in Washington. 

Dowd cannot find it in her heart to stick to just one signifier for each signified. "Nancy Pelosi" is also "the liberal speaker from San Francisco," "[t]he stylish grandmother," "the glossily groomed speaker," "the woman who's making Joe Biden seem suave" and "one ambitious congresswoman." And all this, mind you, in a single one-columned column.

Other DC characters each get fewer signifiers, but the ones they get are nauseatingly Washingtonian: 

"The Bushies," I believe, refers to the collective of Bush administrator insiders, starting with "W." himself, and going down the chain of command to "Condi Rice," "Rummy," and my biggest pet peeve, "Vice." I admit, Had I not seen Oliver Stone's docudramedy "W," in which the title character often addresses his vice president simply as "Vice," I probably would have gone back to the beginning of Dowd's column to look for a name whose last name is Vice. 

I also dislike Dowd's chummy reference to "Osama" and "Saddam" by their first names only, although she is not the only one in public discourse to be guilty of such conduct. 

The final, and possibly most telling, insider lingo in this column is "State." That one actually bugged me last night too while listening to Dr. Shirley Anne Warshaw of Gettysburg College speaking on WITF's (the Central Pennsylvania NPR affiliate, based in Harrisburg) "Radio Smart Talk." It brought back memories of Georgetown University professors trying to sound like they're more governmental than the government itself. Oh, and "State" means "State Department," in case you were wondering.

My next post will be about "being 'a gay activist'." I think.

Propositioned in Cairo

Today was the fourth day of my third Cairo visit. Getting a visa to come here was an adventure worthy of a post in and of its own, but I'm going to begin with a story from today and fill in the gaps later on.

As I've done every morning since Monday, I went downstairs to Corniche el-Nil to hail a cab to the old campus of the American University in Cairo, from which a bus would take me to the new campus. It's about a ten-minute ride from the hotel to AUC.

Normally, there's some chit-chat. The driver either asks me whether I'm from Lebanon or just compliments me on my Arabic, and by the time it's over we've reached our destination. Every now and then, the fact that I'm from Israel comes up, but usually doesn't lead to much more than a smile and an "ahlan u-sahlan."

Today, the conversation went something like this (I'm recalling from memory and translating from Arabic):

Cabby: Where are you from?

Uri: Tel Aviv.

C: Israel?

U: Yes.

C: I hear there are boys there who like boys.

U: Sure, why not?

C: You know how many?

U: Maybe 10%, maybe 20%.

C: Do you like boys?

U: Yes. Well, maybe men, not boys (laugh).

C: Well, I like girls. And boys!

U: Nice.

C: You're handsome.

U: [being polite:] You're handsomer. 

C: When do you get back to your hotel?

U: Around 7:30-8 pm.

C: We should meet outside. Do you have a cell phone?

U: Yes.

And so on and so forth. Things got a little more explicit, and he gave me his number (which I had and have no intention to call). He said something about my liking my chest (not sure whether he liked the hair or the pecs or what...), asked me what I liked to do. The word "behind" came up, for example.

Later, after the conference was over, my colleague Hope and I had dinner downtown and on our way to hail cabs to our respective hotels we saw a good number of pairs of young men walking arm in arm. Hope said something about wishing some of them were straight. I commented that they probably were. She responded, "yeah, like your cab driver." 

In the cab I too back up the Corniche, the radio was playing Farid al-Atrash singing "ya Habiibi..."

Condoms!

This is going to be a short one.

Looks like the Pope's message to Africa is that condoms have nothing to do with preventing HIV/AIDS. Not only that, but they actually increase the chances of spreading the epidemic.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/7947460.stm

I don't know how Mr. Ratzinger has been using condoms lately, but someone has to tell him two important things:

1. Remove the condom from the package before putting it on your erect penis.

2. Do not, I repeat, do not reuse it.

But seriously, if anyone has an idea for an effective, grass-roots campaign, something like a million people sending the Vatican envelopes with condoms in them from around the world, please let me know ASAP.

Family Status: Partnership

One of my little obsessions has to do with parliaments. The elected bodies, not the cigarettes. When at my mother's house watching Israel's channel 99, the Knesset channel, my mother asks rhetorically what would they do without me, their lone viewer.

While I have not voted for Meretz since 1992, and while I am content that the Israeli left-wing electorate has punished the party for its support of the wars on Lebanon and Gaza, I must admit that I am happy that their #3, Nitzan Horowitz, was sworn in today as a member of the 18th Knesset. On his official bio page, his "Family Status" is listed as "Partnership." His partner, Ido Riklin, was reported to have been in attendance at the swearing in. The first bill that MK Horowitz has pledged to introduce would be one that would end the backwards monopoly of religious authorities on matrimony and divorce in Israel.

Whether the bill stands a chance in parliament is extremely doubtful. But its mere introduction is a must in light of the current bill proposed and supported by neo-Fascist MK Avigdor Lieberman, which aims to provide civil unions, mostly to immigrants from the former USSR whose Judaism is not recognized by the Chief Rabbinate. That bill, surprise surprise, would leave even this weakened civil union to heterosexual couples only. Horowitz's bill calls for full-fledged marriage, performed in secular civil proceedings, to any couple, gay or straight, Jewish of not, who chooses to do so. Plain and simple.

Catching up

For the past ten hours, my fellow countrypersons have been voting. For me, this is the first general election since I turned eighteen almost twenty-one years ago in which I have not voted. Israel doesn't have absentee voting, and I am absent.

In a meager attempt to redeem myself, I drove to New York on Saturday. The day began with a Palestinian breakfast with friends on the Upper West Side, where conversation shifted constantly among politics, linguistics, and where one can buy good labaneh in Paterson, NJ. Afterwards I took the Subway downtown and attended a small, yet vocal and creative demonstration at 700 Madison Ave., where Israeli billionaire Lev Leviev has opened shop

. He sells diamonds. He also funds settlements in the West Bank, which are considered illegal under International Law, but way too legal under Israeli law.

I recalled that in one of the January demonstrations in Tel Aviv against the Israeli war crimes in Gaza, some people had found the use of drums somewhat tasteless. As if the drummers were playing loud, upbeat music and rejoicing. I, with my nonexistent musical expertise, had tried to counter them and argue that music, and drums in particular (don't ask me why) can serve as a powerful form of protest. Come to think of it, music has been used quite often for this purpose, from Bob Dylan and Joan Baez to rappers from Watts to al-Lidd and beyond (and thanks to Ali Issa for enlightening me on the latter).

Last Saturday's protest included not only music (e.g., "Diamonds are a crime's best friend"), but also an enactment of a mock game show entitled "One Date Solution." I, frankly, thought it was a bit too long, the dialogue quite predictable, and the preachers' audience consisting of some forty-odd converted. But given the off-off-off-Broadway nature of the performance (after all, this was the East Side!), and the political convictions of the participants, I'd hesitate to grant them nothing short of a nod of approval.

True, it is difficult to smile when speaking of atrocities such as those carried out by the Israeli occupiers. But on the flip side of things, if those of us who have been fortunate enough to enjoy many of the freedoms that the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank do not fail to exercise these freedoms due to chronic fatigue and depression, we are not really doing good to anyone.

The combination of the elections in which I am not voting, the protest in which I was, to the best of my knowledge, the only Israeli, my recent visits to Jordan and the symposium I helped organize at F&M, my sense of identity is getting ever so blurry. I think I am getting much closer to understand the conflict of the Arabs of '48, i.e, Palestinians who are citizens of Israel.

To be continued.

To the women and men of St. Louis

I was just informed that Hannah Chervitz's grandmother (sorry, she didn't mention your name) and perhaps other members of the St. Louis Ethical Society an/or the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom were among my readers, so I'd like to devote this post to them.

Now my own grandparents spoke Yiddish. Sure, they also spoke Hebrew (at least the three I got to know, but I assume the fourth, who died in Jerusalem in 1941 also at least dabbled in it). They were also fluent in Russian on one side and Polish on the other. And there is some evidence that German, Romanian and English were also within their collective repertoire.

I never really cared for the Slavic languages they spoke. Of course, this was before I became a professional linguist. But with Yiddish I had sort of a love-hate relationship. I was never taught the language. Moreover, I was socialized to believe that I shouldn't know it. It may have been my paranoia, but apart from terms of endearment, such as ingale 'boy', ziser bukher 'sweet guy' and royte bekalakh 'red cheeks' (of course they're red, grandma; you just pinched them with all your might!), I felt that Yiddish was only spoken around me as a secret language. Only grownups (and not even all grownups) could speak and understand it. Being the smartass – or uberxuxem - that I was, in hindsight I would have expected myself to force myself to learn it and be my own little intelligence agency. But I guess I was too lazy. And too pissed. You don't want me to understand? Well I don't wanna understand you anyway!

Years later, when I only had one living grandparent left, I decided to take interest in Yiddish. I audited a Yiddish class at Penn, and in a dialectology class with Bill Labov, Hannah and I did a little research project based on Weinreich et al.'s Language and Culture Atlas of Ashkenazic Jewry (there was no serious web site then; we used the actual hard copy). I then presented it and a version of it was published by the Berkeley Linguistics Society. I remember my father not quite understanding how I could write a paper about a language I didn't really speak. And my grandmother was already in her last days, so I never really got to speak any Yiddish with her. Not that I can hold conversation in it really.

Hannah's note to me about her grandmother reminded me of my "missed opportunity" to learn a language. It was also timely, because on Sunday I'll be visiting the National Museum of Language in College Park, MD, where Miriam Isaacs will be speaking about "[her] story with Yiddish." 

Nine wise people?

I am referring to the nine (or in one case eight) Israeli Supreme Court justices who overturned the decision to ban two predominantly Palestinian parties from running in the February 10 elections.

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1057497.html

In a previous post, I joined many others in commenting that "[g]iven its track record, it is likely (though there is no guarantee) that Israel's supreme court will overturn the decision of the highly politicized Central Elections Committee." I am somewhat relieved that the court had the wisdom to do so, but it is not healthy for an alleged democracy to rely on appointed officials to "do the right thing." In fact, it is one of the factors that leads a democracy to being merely an "alleged" one...

I have pretty much hashed this issue in my January 12 post, so I'll leave it at that. It was just important for me to post an update today.

Two and half films

Despite the war and the need to protest, and before traveling to Jordan, I had a few opportunities to spend some quality time with my mother. That usually means driving her to the doctor (and in one case, the ER; she’s all right now), going with her to IKEA – and other furniture stores – and an occasional trip to the movies. If memory serves me right, we saw three films. The first was a new Israeli feature called hakol matxil bayam ‘It All Begins at Sea.’ It is a tender family drama, which could have been set anywhere in the world really, except it is set in Ashkelon, one of the cities at which – a day or two after we saw the film – Hamas began aiming some of its rockets in retaliation for the criminal acts of the Israeli government. I actually remember the chills I felt when they announced these firings on the news. Ashkelon has usually been a quiet town, far from the spotlights, and here I was, within days, watching a movie set there and then hearing about it on the news.

But I really wanted to write about two other films we saw in Tel Aviv. One of them I had wanted to see as soon as I saw the previews for it at one of the Ritz theaters in Philadelphia. The original title is Entre les murs ‘Between the Walls’, though in English it’s distributed as The Class. The second is an American film called The Visitor.

I knew much more about the premise of the French film than about the American one. It’s set in an inner-city Paris school, in which immigrants and offspring of immigrants outnumber ethnic French kids. It follows their homeroom and French teacher, an attractive thirty-something single guy (of course both the students and yours truly wondered whether he was gay; I won’t spoil it for you with an answer to that question), who was not really trained or mentally prepared for such a diverse – and critical – audience. What I didn’t know about The Visitor was that it, too, revolved around a teacher, or rather a professor in a small college, and that there was some (a lot, in fact) of Middle Eastern content in it.

So both Entre les murs and The Visitor turned out to be very relevant to my own life. And while the protagonists of both films were very different from one another, I couldn’t help but finding bits and pieces of myself in both of them.

At first glance, Entre les murs promises to be yet another To Sir, with Love or Lean on Me. I, however, was relieved to see very little trace of Sidney Poitier or Morgan Freeman in the character of François (actor/co-writer François Bégaudeau). I have nothing against either of the two educational maverick precursor movies, but To Sir is a classic that was good for its time and place, and one Lean was enough. What we see in Entre is the real deal. My mother commented after the credits were over – virtually all the characters share the first names of their respective actors – that it was almost a documentary. We’ve all heard about racial and ethnic tensions in Western Europe, but few of us – in Israel or the US – have had the chance to be the flies on the walls of these tense communities. Entre allowed us a shot at that.

Entre also “keeps it real” by depicting a non-heroic teacher. Some kids like and respect him; others hate his guts; many others couldn’t give a damn. He’s intelligent, has good instincts and responds with wit and respect to his students’ mischief and skepticism, but also gets himself and others in trouble doing the clumsy things that most of us might easily find ourselves doing under pressure. Watching him, I kept waiting for the magic moment in which he’d shine in all his glory and win the proverbial Teacher-of-the-year trophy, but was delighted never to witness such a development.

The Visitor is perhaps a bit more complex. Just this week I had brief discussions about it with two colleagues. With Susan Dicklitch, who teaches a course at F&M titled Human Rights/Human Wrongs, dealing extensively with the issue of political asylum, the title of the movie came up, since it, too, has asylum at its core (or one of its cores). Alan Caniglia, who is a senior associate dean of the faculty at F&M, brought the movie up while we were riding a van from a workshop we attended last weekend at Gettysburg College. The focus of the discussion with him was the personality of the professor (played exquisitely by Richard Jenkins of Six Feet Under fame; he was the dead father).

One of the opening scenes reminded me how ridiculous we can be with all our rules and regulations. A timid student enters the professor’s office with a late paper. The professor refuses to accept it. The student “reminds” the professor that he has yet to distribute the syllabus for the class. “I know,” replies the professor. Plagiarism comes up, at least covertly, when the professor reluctantly agrees to present a paper that carries his name as a co-author, even though his junior colleague had written it all by herself. Somehow we (well, not all of us) allow ourselves the luxury of this double standard. Until we realize we’re hurting ourselves as much as we’re hurting our students. Hmm, do I see an analogy to the war on Gaza? The war in Iraq?

Here, too, immigrants are part of the picture –  “illegal” immigrants, in this case. I’d like to say undocumented, but it is precisely because they chose a certain form of documenting their presence in this country that poses a problem. I’ll say no more. Go rent the DVD (Alan tells me it’s on Netflix).

So there you go, two films (three if you count the prologue). If you’re a teacher or a professor or a linguist or care about human rights, I recommend you watch them. They’re both complex in their simplicity and will leave you thinking – but also feeling (my shrink would be proud of me for making this distinction) – for a long time.

Just a couple more words on translation:

1. I would have preferred that the first film be translated ‘It All Begins at the Beach,’ though there is some merit to the current translation.
2. I find it curious that the Israeli distributors decided to give the French film a Hebrew title faithful to the original: ben ha-kirot.
3. The Visitor: who is visiting whom? The answer is up for grabs. Of the four main characters, any and all could be deemed as such. Hebrew suffers from a deficit in that it is a gendered language. Thus, the Hebrew ha-oreax (literally, ‘the visitor/guest–masc.’) inherently misses the point and precludes at least the two female characters from being candidates for the title role.

English video on Gaza doctor

Thanks to Chris Holman for the following link from AlJazeera English: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8UxJWdCwOpc

Oh, the shame

I'm back in the States. As I'm sitting in my office in Lancaster, I learn about the truce Olmert & Co. have apparently agreed to, but also about the tragedy of Ezzeldeen Abu al-Aish, MD, a regular contributor to Israel's Channel 10 News, who reported by cell phone on live TV how his home in Gaza was bombed, killing three of his eight daughters and one of his nieces.

Dr. Abu al-Aish works at Israel's Shiba Hospital in Tel Hashomer, near Tel Aviv. Just a few days ago I heard him on the radio in Israel speaking with journalist Gabi Gazit, in fluent Hebrew, about the need to stop the crazed violent attack on the people of Gaza. A character like Dr. Abu al-Aish, an educated, Hebrew-speaking gynecologist known to many families in Israel, gives even the cynics among Israel's right wing (though not all, as the online responses to the Nana article illustrate) something to shatter their blind hatred for anything Arab, anything Palestinian. 

Needless to say, the Abu al-Aish tragedy is no greater than that of many other, anonymous families in Gaza, whose lives were forever changed by the brutal Israeli attacks. Still, there is something about the story being told first-hand, with no subtitles, with a "tough" journalist like Channel 10's Shlomi Eldar nearly weeping in the studio, which makes it harder to ignore. 

How tempting would it be to think that Olmert, Livni and Barak, the three architects of the war crimes of the past three weeks, were so moved by the human tragedy that they were persuaded to declare the truce. More likely, they were thinking about Obama's looming inauguration and the upcoming elections back home.

The ultimate irony

Galgalatz, the Israeli army's music and traffic report radio station (yes, I shouldn't be listening to them in the first place) just played a song I never thought I'd hear there, especially while the organization running the station is simultaneously running a war with hundreds of innocent civilian casualties. 

How many deaths will it take till we know

That too many people have died?

Dylan's voice sounded louder and more chilling than I'd ever heard it.

Technical note

I just realized that the Al-Jazeera RSS feed was not being updated. I find Al-Jazeera to be a crucial addition to the landscape of electronic news media, both in English and in Arabic, but since this particular component of the network wasn't working properly, I changed the RSS feed on this blog to another reputable Arabic network, Al-Arabiya.

For those interested in reading Al-Jazeera, you can always navigate to http://aljazeera.net.

The most undemocratic democracy in the Middle East

In case you haven't heard, "The Central Elections Committee on Monday banned Arab political parties from running in next month's parliamentary elections [in Israel]." (Ha'aretz.com)

This is the Israel that keeps claiming that it is "the only democracy in the Middle East." The reason for the ban: these parties are allegedly guilty of "incitement, supporting terrorist groups and refusing to recognize Israel's right to exist." (ibid.).

Let's briefly explore these three accusations:

1. Incitement. This means, in this context, denouncing Zionism, opposing the Israeli occupation and oppression of Palestinian lands and persons, opposing human rights violations, such as the current war on Gaza. 

2. Supporting terrorist groups. What this really means is: calling upon Israeli authorities to negotiate with Hamas, Hizbullah and other groups in neighboring territories and countries, which are in dispute with Israel.

3. Refusing to recognize Israel's right to exist. This allegation pertains specifically to the argument that if Israel deems itself a true democracy, it must be a state of all its citizens rather than a "Jewish state." After all, if they were really not willing to recognize the state as such, would they be running for elected office in such a state?

If the views promoted in number 1 on this list are forbidden, this means that official Israel must never comply with United Nations resolutions, as Zionism, the occupation and the current war on Gaza were all denounced by the UN, some more than once.

Number 2: The PLO was once considered a terrorist organization. Some people still can't forgive assassinated  prime minister Yitzhak Rabin and President Shimon Peres for having negotiated with the late Yasser Arafat, but at some point in time their bold position won them extreme popularity – locally and worldwide – and a Nobel Peace Prize.

As for number 3, All i have to say is, gimme a fuckin' break!

Given its track record, it is likely (though there is no guarantee) that Israel's supreme court will overturn the decision of the highly politicized Central Elections Committee. But the mere fact that even Labor Party representatives voted in favor of the measure is alarming, angering, saddening and for me, yet another source of deep deep shame.

And let us not forget the 900+ murdered in Gaza in just over a fortnight by the strong army of this democratic state, of whom some 40% are women and children, who no one – even on the rightmost edge of the Israeli political spectrum – claims were ever guilty of anything. Except, perhaps, being part of a society that voted – in free, internationally overseen elections – for a party Israel loves to hate. 

Ironic? Or just evil?

River Jordan is deep and wide

I'm in Amman.

When I was growing up, a sentence like that coming out of my mouth would have been science fiction. When we said yarden, we were merely referring to one of two TV stations broadcasting from the nondescript kingdom to our east. When Israel only had one TV channel, all black and white, Jordan had two channels in color. And static. And a daily newscast in Hebrew that sounded like the anchors were reading the text phonetically in Arabic orthography without understanding a word.

And now I'm in Jordan for the third time. The first time was in 2000, when I was piggybacking on an "educational" excursion with my friend Benny Hary and his Emory University students. 

My second time was just seven months ago, and it was much more independent. My friend Dan and I crossed the border up north, took buses and cabs all the way south, crossed the border back to Israel in Aqaba/Eilat, and drove a rental car back to Tel Aviv.

(I'm not counting the two layovers I had at Queen Alya International Airport on my way to and from Cairo last January, though even that was exciting).

This time I'm here solo. I volunteered to conduct some site visits at three centers that teach Arabic to speakers of foreign languages (mostly from the US), to assess their usefulness for my students in Lancaster. 

I was going to cross the border by land again, but given the lack of popularity of Israel and Israelis these days, I caved in to my mother's pleas and booked a last-minute flight.

My hotel, it turns out, is the next-door neighbor of the Egyptian Embassy, and across the street is the Palestinian Embassy. I myself purchased a kaffiyye, not so much to "protect" myself (people see I'm a whitey no matter what I wear), but more to show solidarity and to be involved in my own little way while I'm here.

Jordan is not the most glorious country in the Middle East. It doesn't have the political power that Egypt has, nor is it as culturally significant as Egypt or Lebanon. It's not part of any kind of "axis of evil", like Syria is supposed to be. It's not rich and ultra-modernized like the Gulf states, or vast and mysterious as its eastern neighbor Saudi Arabia.

Say "Amman", and most American school children would have no idea what you're talking about. Mention its historical name, Philadelphia, and you'll be talking about its much younger counterpart across the river from Camden, NJ.

Amman doesn't make much sense to me. Or at least it doesn't for now. It's mostly gray/beige with flowing traffic and friendly people. Modern street signs with house numbers

 are prominent, but even cab drivers often fail to find your destination if all you have is so-and-so street, house number X. Tell them whose pharmacy it's next to, or what's the name of the nearest mosque, and you're slightly more likely to get there, and not be too late.

Amman is not a place even I would just come to as a tourist per se. We stop here on our way from the archaeological site in Jarash to the impressive findings in Petra. We fly Royal Jordanian from Ben-Gurion Airport to destinations east, or sometimes southwest. But I'm glad I'm having the chance to be here for four days. 

It's hard for me not to romanticize my very being here. The place I could formerly only see on television. The capital of a country that had been so near and so unapproachable. The place where people like the ones I see in Jerusalem and Jaffa and Nazareth and the Negev and (until recently) in Bethlehem and Ramallah live. 

I had lunch today at a place called Books@Café. Everyone spoke English there, including the waitress, who I guess was Thai or Filipina. Two Arab-looking young men sat at the table in front of me. The one facing me had a Palestinian kaffiyye on, the same kind I had bought yesterday, and spoke English in what to me sounded like a slight German accent. The gentleman at the other side of the table spoke English as well, with a more pronounced Arabic accent. They both interjected words, phrases, even full sentences in Arabic, but their conversation was primarily in English. The first guy (80% gay, my gaydar says) is conducting research on identity. He wants to learn whether Pales

tinians living in Jordan feel more Jordanian or more Palestinian, or equally both, and why. I feel like I've heard this discussion a million times, but maybe it's just because I've read a handful of sociolinguistic studies on Jordanian youth by Enam Al-Wer at the University of Essex. He has questionnaires. The other guy fills one out. I wanted to go to their table and ask them why they were speaking English. I felt as if I could do it and be accepted with the friendliness I had been experiencing since I got here.

Eventually I chickened out. My excuse was an excruciating headache. I had no pain relievers on me and just wanted to eat and get back to my hotel room, where I'd self-medicate. But I was satisfied that I was even considering interacting with these two people. In a way, I envy Jordan. I'm sort of an Arab wannabe. And frankly, I wouldn't wanna be a Palestinian refugee in a camp in Nablus or Gaza. I have the utmost sympathy for them (and shitloads of guilt), but if I could choose, why not be a Jordanian? I'd enjoy the same climate, have similar cultural experiences, but unlike the Palestinians in the Occupied Territories – or even in Israel – I'd be a full-fledged citizen, with pride and a sense of belonging.

Okay, I don't want to go overboard with the longing and the romanticizing. There are still quite a few cons that may in fact outweigh the pros, but I'll save those to myself for the time being.