I'm an alien, I'm a legal alien

دراسة العربية للجميع - موشيه آرنس

2011-11-15T18:22:00.001-05:00

من جريدة «هآرتس» - ١٥ تشرين الثاني ٢٠١١
ترجم من العبرية: أوري حورش

http://www.haaretz.co.il/opinions/1.1566405

الاقتراح الذي قام به بعض أعضاء الكنيست لإلغاء موضع العربية كإحدى اللغتين الرسميتين لدولة إسرائيل عبارة عن خطوة حمقاء. بالاضافة إلى ذلك يعبر هذا الاقتراح عن عدم الاحترام نحو أكثر من مليون من مواطني إسرائيل ينطقون العربية كلغتهم الأم.

فلماذا لنا أن نعزل المواطنين العرب حينما من أهم تحديات الدولة هذه الأيام مساعدتهم بالاندماج في المجتمع الإسرائيلي وجعلهم أن يشعروا كأنهم حقاً في دارهم في إسرائيل؟

إن تبني لغة أقلية سكانية كإحدى اللغات الرسمية لدولةٍ ما شيءٌ مقبول في هذه الأحيان. تعبر هذه الخطوة عن التعاطف والمراجعة والاحترام من قبل الأغلبية نحو الأقلية. تعترف الكثير من أدول بلغات الأقليات التي تعيش فيها كلغات رسمية وإن كانت لغات لأقليات صغيرة جداً في بعض الحالات. في فنلندا تعترف لغة جارتها الكبرى وهي اللغة السويدية كلغة رسمية.

فالعرب في إسرائيل ليسوا أقلية صغيرة. لماذا نود مبادرة تغيير موضع اللغة العربية بعد ٦٣ عاما تمتعت خلالها من موقع متساو لموقع اللغة العبرية؟

يصح أن أكثرية العرب فس إسرائيل يتكلمون العبرية. للأسف معظم المواطنين اليهود في إسرائيل لا ينطقون العربية. هذا اللاتماثل هو الذي من المجبور تصليحه. من الجدير أن يدرس طلاب المدارس اللغة العربية إلى أن يتقنوا هذه اللغة. إن عدم إنجازنا ذلك حتى اليوم يعتبر فشلا لنظام التربية والتعليم فلا يقل هذه الفشل من العلامات المنخفضة نسبيا التي حصل عليها طلبة إسرائيل في الامتحانات الدولية.

نظرا للتجربة الضخمة المتراكمة في إسرائيل في تعليم اللغة العبرية لمهاجريها اليهود، ومع المعرفة أن المدارس تمضي بضعة ساعات لتدريس العربية، يمكننا أن نستنتج أن هذا الفشل ينبع من عدم إرادة وزارة التربية أن تتخذ هذه المهمة الهامة على محمل الجد.

يجب أن تحدد اللغة العربية مادةً إجباريةً في كل المدارس وأن يُفرض إتقانها شرطا للحصول على شهادة الثانوية العامة. إضافةً إلى ذلك من اللازم تشجيع الكبار أن يدرسوا العربية وشمل معرفة هذه اللغة كأحد الاعتبارات في التقدم في العمل لعمال الدولة.

بالرغم من أن جميع سكان دولة إسرائيل تقريبا – عربا ويهودا – يتقنون العبرية، على الطلاب اليهود إتقان اللغة العبية أيضاً. ليس فقط من أجل تحسبن المواصلات مع المواطنين العرب بل – وأهم من ذلك – تعبيرا لاحترام إسرائيل ومراعاتها للأقلية العربية العائشة فيها.

يمكننا التساؤل ما هو الدافع الحقيقي وراء مشروع القانون الجديد. ربما يريد بعض أعضاء الكنيست «ذكر» مواطني إسرائيل العرب أنهم أقلية وتخليد هذا الذكر عن طريق لموقع المنخفض الذي سيعطى للغتهم الأم.

ولكن خطوة من هذا النوع لا تخدم مصالح الأقلية العربية كما أنها لا تخدم مصالح الأغلبية اليهودية. فتذكرنا محاولة أخرى لـ«وضع أحد في محله» إذ تم تجليس السفير التركي في إسرائيل على كرسي منخفض في وزارة الخارجية الإسرائيلية.

كانت عملية مخجلة يأسف الجميع به الآن. وينبغي عدم تكرار الاشياء المتغطرسة والسخيفة من هذا القبيل.

The Dam Has Broken, By Uri Avnery

2011-07-26T05:35:00.002-04:00

Translated by Uri Horesh from the original:
http://www.haaretz.co.il/hasite/spages/1236017.html

It happens to me sometimes: I dream of something, both in writing and in my mind. And when the dream comes true, I'm surprised more than anyone else. For several years I have been dreaming about a new movement to fill the huge void created on the left side of the political spectrum. I have also tried to define the necessary features for such a movement: It must not be a continuation of the old left, which has gone bankrupt. It must not be affiliated with any of the existing parties. It must not use the old symbols, the old language, the old slogans. Its leaders must not be the old leaders, the old politicians, the old ideologues. Those include myself as well.

Conversely, it must be created from scratch. It should come from below, from among the younger generation. They should be the source of the leadership and the leaders. It must create a new political language, coin new slogans, adopt new symbols. It must create a new comprehensive approach, and present a model of a completely different Israel. I like to call it “the second Israeli republic."

It has to integrate all of the components of such a new Israel, and to do so naturally and gradually. It should create a new social treaty, one that will significantly minimize the gap between the richest of the rich and the poorest of the poor; it should save democracy, so that it will include equality to all citizens, regardless of gender, race, language, religion (and lack thereof), sexual orientation and political views. It should contain and unite all of the struggles for social justice, democracy and peace. "All Inclusive".

Last Saturday night it seemed that this dream was beginning to come true. A new generation has risen, the required enthusiasm has been forming, the crowds shouted "RE-VO-LU-TION!" Many of the demonstrators want to concentrate on one point: affordable housing. There is nothing wrong with that focus. It may actually be quite welcome. It will inevitably lead to a broader concept: for there will be no money for public housing, if fortunes are invested in the settlements. The gap will expand, as long as the close connection between the tycoons and the politicians remains intact. Only peace will free Israel from the need to spend astronomical sums of money on the war machine, at the expense of health, education and welfare. No need to force the young demonstrators into acceleration. They will come to this conclusion on their own. Will the revolution will be realized? It is too soon to know. But the dam has broken, and we can no longer reverse the course.

Health update

2010-09-29T00:25:00.000-04:00

I don't usually use this blog for things like this, but I rarely follow any rules anyway, so here goes.

A few months ago I began feeling aches in my left leg, which I thought I had stopped feeling. Most prominently, I've been having trouble ascending stairs, and after a long day any kind of walking became painful and extremely tiring.

When I was in Israel over the summer, I had x-rays done and a local "senior orthopaedic surgeon" said my femur looked fully healed, but perhaps I had some soft tissue damage in my knee.

When I returned to the States, I decided to seek a real specialist. When I went to Penn Surgery for a follow up on my hernia repair, I asked the surgeons there to recommend an orthopaedic surgeon. Luckily, there was an intern there who had worked with some of the ortho surgeons and he gave me a list of specialists in orthopaedic trauma.

To cut to the chase, I had a CT scan of my leg done and an MRI of my knee. They revealed that the fracture in my femur has not healed and that I have some cartilage damage in my knee. Blood work shows that I have a minor deficiency in vitamin D. Another test I did in Israel indicates that I have the bone density of a 70 year-old woman.

What is the now the likely scenario is as follows:

1. On Friday I'm seeing a doctor in the metabolic bone clinic. He'll probably have me take vitamin D and perhaps other supplements, at least for a few weeks.

2. In 2 months I'm going back to see the new ortho guy. He says that in some 10% of the cases like mine, nutritional supplements alone promote bone healing. In the rest of the cases, surgical intervention is needed. Assuming the latter:

3. There is probably a bacterial infection in the bone. I will have to undergo surgery to remove the metal rod currently implanted in my leg, as it only attracts more bacteria. In its lieu, a temporary antibiotic rod will be placed in my leg for 6 weeks.

4. Six weeks later, I'll need more surgery, this time to remove the antibiotic rod and have some other form of internal fixation.

All in all, I'll probably be unable to walk independently for about 12 weeks in December-January. I'm not sure I'll be able to work. I sent an e-mail to my supervisors at F&M today asking that we think of a contingency plan in case that happens.

I'm glad I finally have a better idea what's wrong with me. It's inconvenient that I won't know whether I'll need surgery before the end of November, but it's better than being completely in the dark or being told that I'm okay, and the pain will just go away sometime in the future.

Protecting immigrant rights

2010-07-18T05:28:00.000-04:00

American readers are no strangers to the plight of migrant workers (often referred to as "illegal immigrants" or simply "illegals"). Many workers in Israel, usually people who take care of our elders, clean our homes, build new ones and help raise our crops, are subject to persecution as well.

Unlike the United States, however, children of such workers are not immune from harsh treatment, including the threat of deportation, even if they were born in the country. Thus, thousands of children, who were born in Tel Aviv (and elsewhere in the country), who have acquired Hebrew as their native language, who have never visited any other country, are now being forced to "return" to places they have little to no attachment to.

Yesterday I attended a small demonstration in southern Tel Aviv, one of the poorest areas of the city, where many immigrants, both "legal" and "illegal" live in dire circumstances. Just a few days ago, my father and I happened to have seen Jeremiah, a documentary focusing on the "legal" (i.e., Jewish) component of that equation. I have just learned that the director of this film, Eran Paz, has one the Jerusalem Film Festival prize for best director of an Israeli documentary.

Photos from last night's demonstration are available here: http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2232275&id=1413811&l=219000c678.

"Cutie"

2010-07-08T18:33:00.003-04:00

My mother quite effortlessly perpetuates the stereotype of ... Okay, let me start over.

My mother had heard of a sale at a popular local optical store chain: buy a pair of prescription lenses for NIS 99 (ca. $25), get a frame (limited selection) for free. So naturally, we went, and I got myself a pair of readers to supplement my progressive lens pair of glasses from Philly.

Since that was a success, she suggested I get yet another pair, this time for distance. Since I wasn't crazy about the frames offered at the first location, we went to a different one today. When we got there, the Russian-accented salesperson we first encountered asked us to wait for a moment. Then she calls, "xamudi!" – which in Hebrew means 'cutie!'

I asked my mother, "was she talking to me?" We both were puzzled. Then a smily white-cloaked optometrist with a slightly Arabic-accented Hebrew comes out and tends to us. I then realized his name tag read ħammu:di, which in Arabic is a common hypocoristic of muħammad.

I guess this story really should have a point. But whatever point I point out, it is likely to sound corny, so just draw your own conclusions. Or don't.

Liverpool, finally

2010-06-25T02:05:00.001-04:00

It's hard to explain who or what The Beatles are to me. I'm not one of those die hard Beatlemaniacs who know every bit of trivia about the Fab Four, who have every make and take and remake and remastered CD, who know all the lyrics and insist on singing Yesterday with the alleged original "scrambled eggs" line. But I like them, and I've liked them since childhood. My parents took me to see Yellow Submarine in New York when I was five or six. I would listen, mostly to the red 1962-1966 double album, and in my mind that was the order in which the songs ought to be sung. And for a long time thereafter, following our repatriation to Israel in 1977, theirs was almost the only non-Hebrew music I allowed myself to tolerate.

I've been to England many times before. More accurately, I've been to London. A few years ago I attended a conference in Newcastle upon Tyne, and I've also been to Edinburgh once (which, of course, is in Scotland, not England). You've already had the chance to read about the highlights of my Manchester experience from a couple of days ago, and when Maciej mentioned to me that Liverpool was just forty minutes away, it seemed silly not to hop on a train and check it out.

Ideally, I'd explore the city and all of its Beatles-related landmarks: Abbey Road, Penny Lane, Strawberry Fields. But I decided to begin my tour visiting The Beatles Story, a rather kitschy museum, somewhat reminiscent of Elvis's Graceland in Memphis (which I visited with my father when I was living in Austin, "because it's also in the South..."). I'm glad I went, though, because I would have regretted it had I skipped it. And it allowed me to see Liverpool on a gorgeous sunny – yet not hot – day, including a ride on a ferris wheel, something I cannot tell you when or where the last time I had done most recently was.

Rather than continuing this installment in any kind of verbose fashion, I choose to simply refer you to a photo essay of sorts, which can be viewed here. It also includes a few more tidbits from Manchester, among which was a compulsory photo op in front of Old Trafford, the home stadium of Manchester United. It is, after all, World Cup season. Which reminds me that Liverpool was probably the first English football club I've ever heard of, mostly because the first Israeli player to ever make it to the European Leagues, Avi Cohen, did it there sometime in my tweens.

The Armenian Taverna

2010-06-22T20:05:00.000-04:00

Of the many cups of coffee I had today in Manchester, the most interesting one (albeit not the tastiest one) was the one I had at the end of my first ever Armenian dinner.

When I looked at the menu earlier in the afternoon, I saw many familiar items, such as "foul bi-hummus," which, to the credit of the proprietors, was attributed to Egyptian cuisine. Many other items were known to me through various Middle Eastern and Mediterranean cuisines, yet there was something about the combination that led me to decide to wait for the restaurant to open at 5:15 and dine there.

The foul/hummus combo was not bad, but the "Armenian Goulash" was mouthwatering. But beyond the food, I was intrigued by the cultural and geopolitical context of it all. Two of my colleagues and friends at F&M are of Armenian descent. So I have had some exposure recently to both cultural issues (mostly through Sylvia, from whom I've learned a bit about the evolution of popular Armenian music in the diaspora) and political ones (through Susan, who makes sure we all remember the Armenian Genocide carried out by the Ottomans).

As I sat down, I heard in the background what sounded to me like the kind of mediocre pop music that I heard in a recent presentation by Sylvia on campus. I remembered that she had told us that since most of the Armenians in the Turkish diaspora spoke Turkish, there music, too, was sung in the language of their occupiers/hosts/future genocide executioners (uh oh, now I'll be denied entry to Turkey on Saturday...). I tried to find a sensitive way to ask the restaurant owner about it. It occurred to me that uttering the word "Turkish" might be insensitive, so instead I asked him, "what language is that song in, Armenian?" He paused for a few seconds and replied, "yes, Armenian." I immediately suspected that he wasn't telling me the truth. I even recorded some of the music on both my digital camera and my BlackBerry, so that I could later play it to Sylvia and a Turkish friend of mine for language identification purposes.

However, since I was almost the only patron in the restaurant at the time, the owner and I began talking about where we were from, and so on and so forth. It turned out that he was born and raised in Istanbul and loved the city, and moved to England when he was seventeen. One of his brothers actually lives in a suburb of Philadelphia. And his wife, my waitress, was from Poland. I reminded him of my question about the song and confessed that I had been cautious not to bring up Turkey and Turkish, but he assured me that he had no problem talking about it. In fact, the next set of songs that was playing was in the language of Armenia's next occupier – Russian.

Of course, I mentioned that I, too, lived near Philadelphia, that I was from the Middle East and recognized many of the food items on the menu, that my grandparents were from Poland, from which they departed before their people were subject to genocide, and that I had Armenian friends with whom I have recently been discussing these issues. I mentioned the Polish friend with whom I was staying, and pretty soon the wife/waitress joined in too, and we found that as different as we each are, we really had a lot in common.

The interesting thing for me personally is that ten years ago, I probably would have kept my mouth shut. I think that a combination of my training in ethnographic and sociolinguistic fieldwork and a certain selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor that I've been ingesting daily for the past six years has helped me be more inclined to engage people in such conversations and explore issues about which I am curious. I also noticed that I had probably adopted some variety of American political correctness, which was superfluous for these people, who have chosen a different home away from home.

It's bedtime for me. Tomorrow (or rather, later today) – Liverpool!

Manchester, England, England

2010-06-22T19:29:00.000-04:00

Not being a football/soccer fan, which has been apparent recently amidst the World Cup craze, it hadn't dawned on me until this morning, that I would be spending the next few days in the home of "the world's most popular football team." Rather, as a quasi-stereotypical gay man, I was thinking of the song from the musical Hair and the venue of the original, British series Queer as Folk. At any rate, here I am, in Manchester, England, England // Across the Atlantic Sea.

My mother always makes fun of me for choosing the most complex, indirect routes between the US and Tel Aviv, very much unlike the only acceptable option during most of my childhood and adolescence: JFK-TLV-JFK (or TLV-JFK-TLV, depending on where our "home base" was at the time), usually non-stop, usually on El Al.

The most natural route for me these days is PHL-TLV-PHL on US Airways, earning miles in its Star Alliance partner, United Airlines, where I am, for the second time, a Premier Executive (aka Star Alliance Gold) member. As you can see, this blog post is already taking a different direction than my usual political and social ranting and commentary. The two of you who find this interesting may read on. The rest of you, move on to my next post, which will also be here today (and which will only interest two people as well, but two different people).

Originally, I was supposed to be at the tail end of Franklin & Marshall's first ever summer travel course in Cairo. The combination of my recent accident and subsequent surgical procedures and a denial of my Egyptian visa application left me in Lancaster until a few days ago. But I had already booked my onward journey from Cairo to Tel Aviv via Istanbul, including a two-night stopover, complete with hotel reservations, so I decided to make the best of it.

Also, my friend Maciej, who teaches at the University of Manchester, keeps asking me to come visit him, either here in England or in his home in Warsaw, and my friend Roy and his wife Maya have extended a standing invitation for me to visit them in Zürich, so I embarked on a task involving what I probably do best: booking flight reservations!

Having canceled my December trip to Israel with US Airways, I had over $1,100 in credit with them that I felt compelled to use. So I booked the outgoing and incoming legs of my trip with them, namely PHL-LHR and ZRH-TLV. I planned on staying in London for the night and then flying to Manchester. So the next leg on my trip was LHR-MAN on bmi. The first two legs of my trip have been executed. my next flight, in three days, will be MAN-IST, followed by two days in the former Ottoman capital and then IST-TLV, both flights on Turkish Airlines. After a month(!) in Israel, I'll be flying TLV-ZRH on Swiss. Since booking round trips is cheaper than one-way tickets (usually), I booked a return flight (ZRH-TLV) for December. I may or may not use it.

I have the somewhat unhealthy habit of comparing new places to other places with which I am more familiar. For instance, when I visited Puerto Rico recently, I was thinking it reminded me of the West Bank, Jordan, the Bronx and Québec in equal parts, with perhaps a dash of a Brazilian rain forest (though I've never seen one in person). Manchester, and in particular the City Centre, is so far reminiscent of some mainland European city (perhaps Leipzig or parts of Warsaw or Berlin) and (I can't escape Jordan, it seems), Amman. It has a huge mall, but it's almost nothing like an American, or even Israeli mall. It's more like a patchwork of shops, the kind of which I have in fact witnessed in the capitals of both Jordan and Poland. And either a Starbucks or some British chain coffee shop on each corner. Now that I'm digging a bit deeper in my mind, I'm getting a bit of an Edinburgh sensation too, but really, this paragraph is becoming more and more irrelevant to anything.

I'm obviously obsessed with the similarities and differences between the English spoken here and the North American varieties to with I am much more accustomed. But someone else is already blogging about that, so I'll probably skip that. I did, however, find it amusing that the gentleman sitting next to me on the plane from London to Manchester couldn't help but giggling when he heard another guy speak on the phone in a pronounced Liverpool dialect (or, as he called it Scouse). That being said, I will be venturing out to the birthplace of the Fab Four shortly after I wake from this night's sleep. I already checked the train schedule and everything.

Once that happens, I'll have an excuse to write some more. I'll definitely write from Turkey. I somehow even managed to get a colleague of mine to meet me their and show me around a bit. I haven't been there since a family trip in 1992, i.e., before Al Gore invented the Internet.

Now the next post (before Liverpool) will focus on a particular interaction I had in Manchester today. Stay tuned.

My Arab-American Experience (3 of 3)

2010-06-14T22:06:00.001-04:00

3. O, Canada

As much as I know my way around the craft of making travel arrangements, things often go wrong. Anything from force majeur to technical malfunction to poor human judgment has happened to me. But what I will describe below was a first.

Since I had some free time both before the BBC event on Monday night and between the event and the reopening of the museum on Wednesday morning, I had planned two personal excursions, unrelated to the professional goals of my trip. I had intended to cross the Detroit River into Windsor, Ontario on Monday morning, and visit friends in Ann Arbor, Michigan on Tuesday.

Eventually, I spent the night between Sunday and Monday and much of Monday morning between my hotel room bed and the bathroom. I'll spare you the details, but let me just say that my body was expelling inexplicable amounts of fluids. Given my recent hernia repair surgery, I was cautious and decided to seek an urgent care center, in the hope to rule out anything like my colon being trapped in some cavity between two abdominal wall muscles. The nearest such medical center was really a small doctor's office in the heart of Arab Dearborn. The receptionist and I appeared to be the only non-Arabs on the premises. I was seen by a doctor, who ruled my ailment a viral infection and prescribed some pills to calm my digestive system and plenty of Gatorade. I picked up the prescription at the Yemeni pharmacy across the street, got two bottles of Gatorade at the nearest Sunoco gas station and went back to my hotel to rest until the BBC event. In a way, that was another component of my overall Arab-American experience. Canada was no longer on my agenda for that day.

Given the short distances and my relatively quick recovery, I thought Tuesday could accommodate both Windsor and Ann Arbor, and indeed, to some degree, it did. On Tuesday morning I made my way in my rental car to Ambassador Bridge, paid the $4 toll and quickly found myself on Canadian soil. Either poor signage or lack of attention on my part landed me erroneously in a truck lane. That, and my non-North American passport, won me an innocent-looking yellow slip. I was instructed to park my car and wait for a customs official.

As soon as I opened the car door, not one, but three uniformed Customs Canada officers surrounded my car. Disappointed not to have found anything in the trunk, they went for the passenger's seat. One officer grabbed my digital camera, and to my astonishment began flipping through the dozens of photos I had taken over the past couple of weeks. Many of them depicted the peaceful, legal, police-regulated demonstration in which I had participated on the sidewalk in front of the Consulate General of Israel in Philadelphia. We had been protesting the Israeli Navy's brutal attack on a flotilla of humanitarian aid whose destination was the Port of Gaza. The sailors ended up killing between nine and nineteen unarmed humanitarian volunteers and injured tens of others.

The officer asked me about the protest, what was it against, where it was, and whether I had participated in it. I answered truthfully, and then came a surprising question: "Do you plan to participate in and protests in Canada?" I answered in the negative and was ordered to follow the officers into the adjacent building. They already had my passports (both Israeli, but my US visa is in my expired passport, so I need to travel with both) and, still, my camera in their hands. I was ordered to sit in a waiting room until called.

The next step took me to the Immigration side of the building. While waiting there, I needed to use the bathroom a few times (recall my recent illness). The sign the locked door of the men's room instructs potential users to obtain permission from customs officials to enter. When I did just that, the customs officer told me to ask someone from immigration. "You're in their custody now," he informed me. The word custody had the connotation of something a criminal, or suspect, would be in, at which point I recalled that I have a law office in Pennsylvania representing me for the purpose of obtaining my permanent resident status in the U.S.

As I was waiting, many other people came through the same waiting room. Among them were a Turkish-American family, the women dressed in traditional Muslim garb; a Lebanese-American family who was en route to visit elderly relatives in Ontario; an African-American truck driver and his wife and a third friend. I couldn't help but suspecting that the Canadians were keeping themselves busy with some good old fashioned racial profiling. But pretty much each group had some legitimate reason to be questioned: a member of the group with no identification documents, a newborn child traveling out of the country for the first time, and so on. There were also some "regular white folk" in the room at one point or another. There were an American grandma and grandpa taking their grandson camping in Canada with no written consent from the child's parents; a Canadian woman seeking U.S. Resident status.

Interestingly, the non-white people generally said that they usually find crossing the border into Canada more difficult than returning to the States. At least one white party said the opposite. So perhaps there is indeed more racial profiling in Canada than on this side of the border. However, all of these issues the other parties had were solved within thirty minutes, often much less. My wait at the border lasted three hours at this point, during which my BlackBerry cell phone, my only connection to the outside world, was also seized.

The immigration officials mostly ignored me. They summoned me twice to their booth to ask me the same mundane questions previously asked by the customs officers. But after three hours, about an hour of which I spent without my phone, I asked to retrieve the phone and call my attorneys. I was told I was at liberty to use the pay phone in the hall. But I needed my phone to get the number, I explained. The officer wouldn't return it to me. When I asked to speak with a supervisor, another officer appeared. He was at least helpful enough to look up the phone number on his computer. I also told the officers that I no longer wish to enter Canada. I asked to be released to the United States. Their response was that they. Would only allow that once their examination was over.

That, by the way, was my status in Canada, "under examination." I was told I was not under arrest nor was I being held as a suspect for anything. Yet I was not allowed to turn around. Yet.

I did call my attorneys. They were very concerned and reassuring, but it took another hour for me to be called back to the immigration booth. The previous officer has left, I was told. The good news was that now I was permitted to sign a form in which I asked to withdraw my application to enter Canada and agreed to leave the country without delay. Ironic, I remember thinking. The only delay was imposed by Canadian officials, not myself.

I signed the document and was sent back to my car. A uniformed officer met me there with all of my belongings. I drove back to Michigan, where the U.S. Border control officer asked me, "so what's in Windsor?" "Apparently, nothing," I replied. 45 minutes later, I was reunited with my friends in Ann Arbor, where my only altercation with the law was a $10 parking ticket for a meter two minutes overdue.

This ordeal, too, was for me an Arab experience. Arab-American, Arab with Israeli citizenship, Arab Moroccan in the Netherlands or France, and of course, Arab Palestinian trying to cross anything anywhere where an Israeli official, especially one in uniform, a uniform that I once wore, has to endure. I was screwed over once, in an air-conditioned room in Ontario. Their experiences are iterative, redundant, malicious and prolonged. And I'm sitting in a coffee shop in Philadelphia's gayborhood typing my recollections on my new iPad. Many of the people I described above are lucky to have clean water to drink in their shack in an impoverished refugee camp.

My Arab-American Experience (2 of 3)

2010-06-14T21:57:00.003-04:00

2. The Museum

During my stay in Michigan, I paid two visits to the Arab American National Museum. One was on Monday, for a panel organized by Michigan Radio and BBC World Service on "Covering the Middle East," and the other, on Wednesday, was a self-guided tour of the museum. The events of Tuesday will be covered in the third part of this post.

The BBC event (can be viewed here) was very interesting. It would be difficult to assess what it is exactly that I have learned from it, but it was a heartening experience. See, in my lifetime, I have been exposed to a variety of venues for political discussion of current events, none of which resembled the Michigan/BBC discussion. In my youth, particularly in the Jewish-Israeli public school system, most of the discussions involved a great deal of polemics. Back then, I still had the energy, and perhaps naïveté, to vocally challenge my political opponents. Later in life, probably most notably after the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in November of 1995, I began limiting my political activism to fora in which we were either preaching to the converted or simply taking a stance as small groups of resistance amidst large crowds of conformists. Most satisfying in those days were joint Palestinian-Israeli rallies and discussions, before those became legally and logistically virtually impossible in the early 21st century. Then came the Penn years, with the Free Palestine Action Network and more polemics, then intermittent activism during my brief visits to Israel.

What struck me about the Dearborn discussion was that while the audience was not a monolith, the questions that people in the audience asked the BBC personnel on stage were genuinely about the media coverage of the Middle East. Typically, in my experience, any discussion about the region that is not organized by a single political entity (e.g., a party or grassroots movement) is destined to become a war of words, disputing facts and interpretations thereof. This must have the first time for me, definitely in the U.S., where I felt comfortable being around people with whom I mostly agreed. Now some of them were more pleased with the BBC (and to the extent it was discussed, NPR) coverage of recent events in the Mideast; others less so. The BBC executives were so gracefully elegant and eloquent, even when their responses were rigid and uncompromising.

In fact, Liliane Landor, Head of Middle East Region for BBC World Service, a Lebanese-born quintilingual seasoned journalist and editor, was so impressive in her defense of BBC's ethics, that it was tempting to forgive her one logical flaw. During most of the discussion, Ms. Landor insisted that her network adhered to a very rigid set of criteria for impartiality and objectivism. Yet when asked of the BBC coverage of the American- and British-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, she replied that the network had been critical of the Blair government's actions. A little "oops" moment, at least to my sensitive ears, but I give Ms. Landor credit that if engaged in a more elaborate discussion of this particular issue, she would come up with a reasonable response, such as that being objective and loyal to the facts does not preclude challenging and critiquing the subjects of the reporting. I also take issue with BBC's polling of the Uganda anti-gay legislation, of which I just learned today (and for which Landor had some editorial oversight), but this goes beyond the scope of this particular post.

My subsequent visit of the museum was the subject of a series of (very amateurish) photographs, which are posted on Facebook for public viewing. Perhaps the two greatest fortes of the museum are its very existence, especially in these times of anti-Arab and Islamophobic sentiment in the West, and its very elegant design, combining the aesthetics of the Old World — and the Arab and Arabized version thereof at that — with the amenities of a contemporary state-of-the-art facility. It is grand and humble at the same time. There is also something symbolic in its location, obviously, Dearborn bearing the largest concentration of Americans of Arab descent. As for the practicality of the location, well, Detroit is not the most sought-after tourist destination in North America. So while n the one hand, the region has a large potential visitorship from local communities, including schoolchildren who ought to be encouraged to learn about their heritage, there is something to be said about the accessibility of such an important institution to the general American populace, who, too, need much education about the cultures of the Arab peoples, beyond the sensationalist finger pointing that is constantly streaming into their television sets, personal computers and handheld devices.

Finally, the exhibits themselves, while interesting and somewhat novel, do not always do justice to either Arab-Americans or Arabs in general. Asking for the latter may be unfair of a museum devoted to a particular diaspora. Yet i couldn't help thinking that the curation of the museum was dictated to a great extent by some unrepresentative sampling of artifacts, which happen to have been made available by prominent members of the Arab-American community (the name — and voice of — Casey Kasem appeared to be omnipresent throughout the museum, for instance). That is a good start for a budding museum, but as a lay user of such a facility (I am by no means an expert on museum curation), I look forward to future enhancements.

Despite my critique (it is in my nature, what can I say?) I am very glad that I took the time to visit the Arab American National Museum. I am still unsure as to how a visit to the museum can be incorporated into a liberal arts education, such as the kind that we attempt to provide at Franklin & Marshall College, but I have something to ponder, along with my colleagues and students. Like many museums, a visit to the museum store is also a must, and indeed I found some gems to purchase, some even prior to my visit, through the museum's web site.

My Arab-American Experience (1 of 3)

2010-06-14T21:35:00.002-04:00

This will be a tripartite post, mostly for ease of reading.

1. Prologue

At first glance, I would expect any reader who knows me to raise a brow or two. For I am neither Arab nor American. In fact, I am a citizen of a country that has systematically and consistently discriminated against its own Arab citizens and oppressed a much larger of Arabs living under its military occupation. And In America I am but a visitor.

Yet politically, I often identify more closely with my Palestinian brethren, and my visits in the United States have been so prolonged, that other than having the right to vote, I have become quite involved in the American political and cultural discourse. Anecdotally, when I recently spent time in Egypt and Jordan, many people assumed I was Lebanese, and in the States, too many ears are insensitive enough to accents to detect what Deborah Tannen once told me was clearly an Israeli one.

To be honest, however, what spiked my interest in the nexus of Arab and American beings was a recent visit to Dearborn, Michigan and it's environs. Since I began teaching Arabic in the U.S., I have had the pleasure to come across several American students of Arab ancestry. In many cases, they knew more about Arabs than I did. In most cases, I knew more about their parents' or grandparents' native language then they did. I am still struggling to find optimal ways in which to streamline this symbiotic learning process.

So the weekend before last I flew from Philadelphia to Detroit. I stayed at a hotel on the Detroit/Dearborn boundary, and initially with the help of a local Palestinian-American friend, and later on my own, began exploring the streets of Dearborn. In a way, it reminded me of Paterson, N.J., which in turn resembles such cities as Ramallah or Bethlehem, with its long Main Street dotted with Arab restaurants and shops. My late uncle who lived in nearby Fair Lawn once introduced me to what he referred to as "the Syrian grocery store," a medium-sized enclosed market that sold hummus, labne, diamonds and Cheerios all under one roof. Dearborn is much like Paterson, with its bilingual signs, where one Arabic name or phrase has more than one English equivalent. It is different, though, in that it is more spread out, more suburban, and instead of the discount sneaker stores I remember from its New Jersey counterpart, I seem to have seen many more doctors' offices, pharmacies and ads for legal services. And — and this was the premise of my journey to Michigan — the Arab American National Museum.

East Cocalico Township

2010-05-03T00:06:00.001-04:00

On December 13, 2009, I almost got killed. Those of you who have been in touch with me have known this for a while. For the record, I was a non-fatality in a fatal car accident on southbound US-222 in East Cocalico Township, Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. I was proclaimed “in critical condition,” having broken my left femur and left ulna, suffering a grade-1 blow to my spleen and herniating my left abdominal wall, subsequently allowing my colon to slip into a 4-5 cm gap between the muscles that form the wall, which is really the part that could have killed me. My passenger, a former student of mine, who is about to graduate from Franklin & Marshall College in just a few days, was virtually unhurt and went on to spend his winter vacation with his family and friends in Brazil. The woman responsible for the accident, younger than many of my students, who found her way northbound in the southbound lane en route to her home in nearby Denver, PA – a place I had only known of from the road sign that leads motorists from Route 222 to the Pennsylvania Turnpike – died instantly. When I was aboard the ambulance I heard someone say the word “fatality.” I recall asking, “did I hear the word ‘fatality,’” and the silence that ensued, which to me was a confirmation of what I thought I had heard.

I wanted to write all this as soon as my father brought my laptop to the hospital. Resuming my blogging “career” seemed like a good way to pass the time in my three weeks of hospitalization and the months of recovery to come. At first, however, I was only able to use my right hand, and for a devout lefty like me, that was a hindrance I could barely tolerate. I did gradually resume my updates on Twitter, which I saw at least once described as micro-blogging. And it was through that medium that earlier tonight I was urged to “blog more.”

What to write about after such a long hiatus, especially one in which my life was turned upside-down, is not an easy decision to make. In many ways, I am exactly the same sarcastic, obnoxious, cynical son-of-a-bitch (sorry, mom) that I’ve always been. For a while I was the grouchy disabled guy in a wheelchair that we all pity and forgive, but still want to punch in the face when he reacts like an asshole trying to accomplish easy tasks like crossing the street in the snow. For a short period of time, I took a break from caring much about human rights violations in my native Israel and the Palestinian territories it so arrogantly clings on to, or LGBT issues that have been dear to me at least since 1999 (though, secretly, long beforehand).

Two weeks ago, one of my orthopedic physicians has cleared me to walk, sans wheelchair, sans walker, sans cane. Just me and my own two legs, one of which will probably never fully gain the bone density it had before my injury. I still tire quite easily. I still rely on pain-relieving medications (though less on those scary, habit-forming narcotics). I am not going to Cairo with my students on a summer program that I came up with and feel like I’ve abandoned. And I have not been without at least one of my parents around for over forty-eight hours, even though I recently turned forty.

On my first morning in the rehabilitation unit at Lancaster Regional Medical Center, which was my home for two-and-a-half weeks after being released from the ICU at Lancaster General Hospital, I asked to see a psychiatrist. Earlier that morning I had cried like a baby in front of my father after enduring the embarrassing experience of having my ass wiped by a nurse’s aid whose appearance couldn’t help remind me of Kathy Bates’ character in Misery. My regular psychologist, who is based in Philadelphia, called me at least once a week to check on me, but for several weeks I felt as if my physical injuries were distracting me and preventing me from feeling my good ol’ depression.

A lot of this is over now. More and more things seem as if they are back to normal. I spent most of the spring semester teaching, most of it full-time. I have traveled independently to Washington, DC, New York and Philadelphia on several occasions. I’m in this interesting position of having the greatest excuse to refrain from doing too much work, combined with the desire not to sink into oblivion, either professionally or socially.

To be clear, I have had the utmost flow of support from colleagues, friends, acquaintances, students, the few relatives I am still on speaking terms with, you name it. And it was genuine. My biggest fears at first were that (1) I’d need Kathy Bates to keep wiping my ass for years to come, and (2) that people would get tired of caring and that I would be left alone in my misery (no pun intended). Neither happened. I learned to use my right hand for the former (don’t give me any “TMI” bitching now), and, if anything, I have people caring in doses that are a bit overwhelming at times.

I will pause here, for three almost prosaic reasons. First, this entry is already a tad longer than what I would have cared to read in one chunk had this been, say, your blog. Secondly, I want to have an incentive to keep writing. Thirdly, I want to get some sleep tonight. And this being a blog, I don’t have to adhere to any rigid beginning, middle and end rules, right? So here I am, unorthodoxically ending in the middle of nowhere.

לקוראיי בעברית

2009-08-08T02:40:00.002-04:00

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

2009-08-02T01:38:00.003-04:00

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"

2009-07-26T05:22:00.005-04:00

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

2009-06-19T15:54:00.008-04:00

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)

2009-05-25T02:47:00.006-04:00

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...

2009-05-17T10:11:00.004-04:00

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

2009-03-25T16:28:00.003-04:00

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!

2009-03-17T14:28:00.003-04:00

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

2009-02-24T17:11:00.003-05:00

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

2009-02-10T09:43:00.005-05:00

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, ethnic Palestinian who are citizens of Israel.

To be continued.

To the women and men of St. Louis

2009-01-22T12:40:00.003-05:00

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?

2009-01-22T07:13:00.002-05:00

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

2009-01-20T21:01:00.004-05:00

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:

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.
I find it curious that the Israeli distributors decided to give the French film a Hebrew title faithful to the original: ben ha-kirot.
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

2009-01-17T19:24:00.001-05:00

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

Oh, the shame

2009-01-17T16:42:00.002-05:00

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

2009-01-14T07:37:00.003-05:00

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

2009-01-12T15:14:00.003-05:00

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

2009-01-12T14:14:00.006-05:00

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

2009-01-07T14:11:00.005-05:00

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.

Deus ex machina, aka Karen Dominguez

2008-12-29T17:44:00.007-05:00

Over the past few days I have been discussing the Israeli invasion of Gaza with many people, in Israel and – thanks to the Internet – abroad. I was thinking of posting something, but I couldn't think of anything that wasn't already printed or broadcast somewhere anyway.

Karen Dominguez of Austin, TX, an activist with the International Socialist Organization, approached me and asked to interview me for Socialist Worker. I just finished typing my responses to her questions, sent to me via e-mail. I am posting this Q&A below. Once the article is out, I'll add a link to it.

First how would you like to be introduced? 
Uri Horesh- professor of Arabic? pro-Palestinian israeli? gay rights activist extraordinaire? 

I'm not a fan of titles. If you want my professional epithet, I'm Director of the Arabic Language Program at Franklin & Marshall College. Other than that, I don't know. There's a Hebrew slang term we used to use when I was younger: "ichpatnik". It translates roughly as "one who gives a damn." 

Were there rallies in Israel against the bombardment of Gaza? 

Yes, there were several rallies. I actually participated in two rallies. The first was organized a day before the actual invasion. Some 200 people gathered in downtown Tel Aviv to call upon the Israeli government to show restraint and refrain from initiating an attack on Gaza, which we knew would inevitably lead to unnecessary damage, including the loss of lives, and to further animosity among Palestinians toward Israel. This was on Friday, December 26. Little did we know that the next morning the Israeli Air Force would drop over 100 tons of explosives on Gaza, killing over 200 and injuring more than 500 people. 
On Saturday night we reconvened in Tel Aviv, this time with a crowd tenfold that of the previous day's. We marched from the Tel Aviv Cinematheque, a popular venue for left-wing protests, to the sidewalk across the street from the Ministry of Defense, another site for anti-war protests.
In addition, there were rallies in Nazareth and Haifa on the day of the first attacks. And today at noon there was a vigil at the main gate of Tel Aviv University, which I was not able to attend.

Were they both Israelis and Palestinians there? 

Most of the protesters were Israeli citizens. Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza are by-and-large denied entry to Israel. But the crowds included Israelis of various ethnic backgrounds. The crowd at the rally at the Ministry of defense comprised Jews from Tel Aviv and Jerusalem (the latter were bussed there), as well as Palestinians from Jaffa, and a plethora of people from neighboring communities. I just got word of a casualty in yet another protest, of Palestinians, in the West Bank village of Ni'lin. Arafat Khawaja was reportedly murdered by Israeli soldiers there yesterday and was buried today in his village.

What were the demands of the protest? 

The demands were simple: that the Israeli government put an immediate end to the bloodshed, call a true cease fire and engage in bona fide negotiations with the Palestinian leadership, including the democratically elected government led by Hamas in the Gaza Strip.

Is the new refusenik movement in solidarity with the protests? (what are they called? not refuseniks anymore?)

I am not sure whether the refusenik movement still exists as a cohesive force, but a number of its former leaders, people who have been in Israeli military prison for refusing to serve in an army whose primary enterprise is to maintain the occupation, showing disregard to human life, are very active in the current anti-war movement. I recognized two such faces in both of the protests I attended: Haggai Matar and Matan Kaminer.

What is the state of the pro-Palestinian left in Israel today? 

I hate to say that in my view, the state of the left in Israel is grim. The leftmost Zionist party represented in the Knesset (Israel's Parliament), Meretz, was quoted as calling for a strong Israeli reaction to the sporadic launching of missiles from the Gaza strip to the south of Israel, which had preceded the Israeli invasion on Saturday. It was only after the invasion was well under way, that Meretz chairperson, Haim Oron said, "At this stage, after the IDF has operated in the Strip, Israel has an interest in reaching a renewed ceasefire as soon as possible." (ynet.co.il).
Most of the resistance to the war, from day one, and -- as evident from the pre-invasion vigil -- beforehand as well, came from Hadash/Al-Jabha, the Democratic Front for Peace and Equality, which is a formal faction in the Israeli Knesset led primarily by members of the Israeli Communist Party; and Gush Shalom, the Peace Bloc, a non-partisan group led by veteran peace activist Uri Avnery. 

The left in Israel is but a thin sliver of the Israeli political scene and by no means part of the mainstream. In fact, there seems to be a very broad consensus among the Jewish majority in Israel (some 80% of its population) that Israel must deal with as much force as possible with Palestinian militants -- and by extension, the Palestinian people at large -- to "protect Israel and its citizens."

Do you feel this movement will grow? 

You know, these demonstrations, marches and vigils often give one the sense of camaraderie. I usually feel like I'm at some kind of makeshift class reunion, except it's only the "good guys" who show up. It's very comforting and encouraging. But at the same time I fear that it is misleading. There's this notion of "the Tel Aviv 'bubble'". There is even a film named The Bubble named after this phenomenon. It pertains to people like myself, who live in (or in my case, frequently visit) the greater Tel Aviv area, hang out in our trendy cafés, read the opinion pages of Ha'aretz, the more progressive of Israel's daily newspapers, and think that everyone around us is like-minded. I dread this complacency, and I hesitate to say that the movement is growing.

I do, however, see one positive sign. As of late, there have been more and more new, young people at many of the left-wing activities in which I had the chance to participate. There is also more of an overlap among different lefty causes. You see many of the same new people active on the Palestinian front and the queer front and the affordable housing front, and so on. So perhaps the horizon isn't as gloomy as I generally think it is.

What are the issues being taken up? 

Like I said, the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is at the core of left-wing activism in Israel. There is a lot of small-scale yet vocal work done to protest the building of the apartheid wall in the West Bank. This kind of activism has brought together Anarchists and Communists and many unaffiliated people to take action together. This past summer I participated in three gay pride parades, two of which were highly political and sent broad messages of equality and solidarity. It was refreshing to see heterosexual lefties in the Haifa and Jerusalem parades and then see a queer presence in a march to commemorate the 41st anniversary of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, Gaza and the Golan Heights. Affordable housing has been a prominent issue, including among the more mainstream, Zionist left. And there has been quite some visibility and action on the matter of immigrant rights, in particular non-Jewish immigrant workers, who have been targeted by the authorities here as "illegal", very similarly to the way they are treated in the United States. 

How is the media in Israel portraying the bombardment? Here in the US it is portrayed as a self defense act by Israel, is the Israeli press saying the same thing? 

The media is nothing but sympathetic to the Israeli government, its military and the people living in the south of Israel, within a 30-mile radius of the border with Gaza, who have been calling for retaliation for quite some time. Now it is important to understand that the Israeli media is fairly independent. Even the government-funded TV and radio stations often scrutinize the government for many wrongdoings. In fact, it would not have been without the media that public figures, such as outgoing prime minister, Ehud Olmert, would be indicted for corruption felonies. But when the army is engaged in combat, all is forgotten. I'll give you two anecdotal examples from the last couple of days. On a daily televised news talk show, a Palestinian journalist working in Gaza was interviewed. He was given the opportunity to report some facts, about homes being bombed and ruined, about mosques having suffered damage, funerals and mourning families on every street. Immediately following his report, one of the hosts of the program began interrogating him on the role of the Palestinians in bringing this fate upon themselves. And on a popular call-in radio show today, the host of the show, who often rants about every possible issue, went off saying something like, "the Palestinians must know that if Israel eventually declares a truce, and they fire one missile or rocket onto one of our southern towns, we will respond in the most cruel way possible!" So you see, there is no more shame, no restraint. Being cruel is being cool.  

When you talk to your family or people in the street would you say the majority is for the bombardment? 

My immediate family thinks just like myself.  Most of my real friends are also like-minded politically. But I have encountered my share of people who support the invasion, or at least say it was justified, albeit perhaps disproportionate. And in the wider circles of Israelis, the ones one hears on the radio and television, at the bus stop and the mall and the dentist's office, there are really just two concerns: that the desperate retaliatory fire coming from within Gaza into Israel won't put more Israeli lives in jeopardy, and that if and when Israeli ground forces enter Gaza (so far there were only air strikes), no Israeli soldiers would be killed, injured or held captive.

What do you think it will take in Israel to grow a movement to stop these atrocities? 

I wish I knew. This really is the toughest question, and one that I've been pondering almost daily for at least the past eight years. Probably much longer. There is a good chance that the answer is tough too. That is, that something of immense magnitude must happen on both sides of the border for us to realize we have been playing a very dangerous game. But perhaps what we need is a leader with charisma and the guts to get us out of this quicksand. Sadly, none of the three contenders for the role of prime minister in the upcoming February elections in Israel seems promising in this regard.

Mad again

2008-12-27T07:29:00.002-05:00

Yesterday was the first full day of my current visit to Israel. At 1:30 pm I attended a small demonstration to call upon the Israeli government to refrain from attacking Gaza.

Around noon today, the Israeli air force attacked Gaza. Current reports estimate a minimum of 155 Palestinian casualties. We are now also informed of Palestinian rockets being aimed at towns in the south of Israel in retaliation. In fact, these rockets have reached towns long beyond the 20 km range, which was adhered to prior to the current Israeli attack.

Tonight I will be protesting again. I will join other angry, ashamed Israelis at 7:30 pm at the Tel Aviv Cinematheque in a protest march. Others will be attending vigils in Haifa.

One might argue that protesting amidst such a broad consensus in Israel for escalating the conflict is futile. It may not be extremely efficient, but ignoring the atrocities would be tantamount to aiding and abetting the war crimes carried out by mainstream Israel.

A film review and more

2008-12-25T05:24:00.004-05:00

So this is not the post I was previewing last time, but as Maryam said, it’s the end of the semester, the beginning of my three-week trip to the Middle East, and I’m in a packed plane with no access to the Internet, which I’d need to write about news and their depiction in the media.

These lines are written from 35 thousand feet above the Atlantic, south-southwest of Reykjavik and west of Dublin, if you believe in the accuracy of the digital map in the screen above my head. By the way, the graphic on these things finally looks like something from the 21st century, unlike the Apple IIe-like images of yesteryear. In the tagline following the title of this blog I mention that I’d like to have a talk show. Two other things on my wish list are to be a travel agent and to write an occasional film review. So what better opportunity than writing a review of a movie I’ve just watched on one of El Al’s newest Boeing 777s en route from Newark to Tel Aviv!

The film is Mamma Mia. And unlike many members of my gay cohort I did not go see it when it was out in the theaters a few months ago. This was partly due to my laziness, partly because I was in the midst of moving back to Philadelphia, and perhaps underlyingly because I had seen the musical on a London stage several years ago, and was severely unimpressed. But I’m on a ten (plus)-hour flight, and I have a video-on-demand system (VOD it’s called in my homeland and its somewhat provincial national airline) and my new Bose noise-canceling headphones, and the woman in the window seat told me Mamma Mia was one of the options, so after finishing an episode of the Israeli version of Americal Idol, I turned to Meryl Streep and Pierce Brosnan and their fellow actors-turned-singers for what ended up being a refreshing two hours.

“Refreshing” doesn’t really cut it. I dare not call it “thought-provoking”, but it was somewhere in between for me. Maybe even “emotion-stimulating”.

Let me back up. I like to say I’m from Tel Aviv, but I’m really from a fairly affluent suburb just north of the city called Herzliyya. The city itself is quite diverse, but the western portion of town, within a mile or so from the Mediterranean shore, is quite hoidy toidy. This is not to imply that my family is particularly wealthy, but more to provide some background as to the type of society I grew up among. Many of my friends came from much richer families, but we were educated, well-traveled, and despite my parents’ socialist upbringing (mostly because of the youth movements they were in, not quite from their parents), we were very much Americanized in many of our ways.

Americanized, but within a provincial setting with one TV station broadcasting in black and white (until the mid 1980s). In order to get some color on our screen we had to tune our sets to one of the two Jordanian channels, and even with our rooftop antennas our reception of those was pretty staticky.

So on the one hand, my friends and I would go to the Scouts (co-ed in Israel) and build tents out of blankets, pebbles and rope and roast our own potatoes in campfires in the woods of Mt. Carmel of in the sand dunes that once existed just east of our own beach. But on many a Friday night we’d have parties. Now I’m talking about 1979-1980, when I was in third and fourth grades. Honestly, that was the peak of my social life until much much later. Occasionally we’d have parties to which the entire class would be invited. Usually birthday parties (maybe because “the more the merrier” was interpreted “the more kids, the more gifts, the merrier the birthday child”). But the real fun parties were much more exclusive. We’d hand-pick the invitees, and different parties sometimes had different people. Yet there was a core of kids that we called “the society”, and I was always in that group. I was even in a smaller “quintet”, which included my best friend Ron, his girlfriend Fafi (who during that time became the mayor’s daughter), her best friend Ortal, my girlfriend at the time (yes, yes; my one and only ever girlfriend) Shelly and your humble servant.

How is this related to Mamma Mia, you ask? I have one word for you: ABBA. That was our music. We’d listen to it on our turntables and later Walkmans. We’d dance to it. We’d compete getting each new album as it came out. To be fair, the Village People and some instances of the Eurovision Song Contest also played significant roles in our pre-pubescent cultural lives, but ABBA just wouldn’t leave.

For many years, when I was closeted in particular, I’d try to repress my nostalgic passion for ABBA. I knew this kind of schmaltzy music had become a huge part of stereotypical gay pop culture (along, surprise surprise, with the other two components I just mentioned). And even in the 2-3 years after I came out, I still tried to shy away from being perceived as a nelly gay boy. I guess I’ve evolved since.

If you haven’t watched the movie or the London/Broadway musical on which it is based, the plot really doesn’t matter one bit. Basically it’s an excuse to sing some of the songs that our favorite Swedes (pardon me, IKEA, you’re number two, at best) have written, sung, and made a legend of. A schmaltzy story was made up, in which the schmaltzy songs make half a sense, and every moment is a blend of actors making fun of themselves, ABBA (the two guys in the band, who wrote all of the songs, are behind the production) parodying itself, and the audience making fun of everyone. But unlike the stage production, I actually had fun watching the movie.

Watching the film, I found myself naïvely drawing an analogy between ABBA and The Beatles. At the same time, I knew it was blasphemous of me to even consider that the two groups had even remotely the same kind of impact on anyone. Well, anyone except perhaps myself. I’m a bit too young to be a Beatles fan, but I am a fairly avid one. I’m too old (or am I?) to distinguish between Britney and Paris and all those. I’m supposed to be too culturally sophisticated to think anything of ABBA.

Buy fuck it, if Meryl Streep can have fun with it, I’m in! Now understand, Meryl Streep for me will always be the mother from Kramer vs. Kramer. It was the first film I’ve seen her in, around the same time I was listening to Dancing Queen and dancing to Voulez-vous. Pierce Brosnan is 007. In reality, “my” James Bond has always been Roger Moore. But let’s face it, Brosnan is Moore. Streep sings well in the film. Not as well as some critics have claimed, but movingly well. Brosnan sucks at singing. She’s the proverbial American Idol second runner-up that everyone likes but couldn’t help not vote for at the very end. He’s the guy who wouldn’t make it past the Wasilla auditions. But at the end of the day, (plot-spoiler ahead!) what could be more charming, in the schmaltziest way, than poor divorced ex-Mrs. Kramer marrying a retired Commander Bond on a Greek island full of American, British and Swedish tourists?

I have to give credit where it is due. The real artistic stars are actresses Julie Walters and Christine Baranski. They both combine their imperfect singing with exquisite comedic acting that overshadows the flaws of their singing. In fact, in the case of Walters, one wonders whether her voice naturally sounds like Janis Joplin on Vicodin or whether she’s doing it to make a point. And Baranski is just fabulous. Pereiod.

I’ll end with this. I wonder how long it’ll take for Streep to become the next Barbra. Both as a campy gay icon and as a sort of jack of all trades (but by no means master of none). Somehow we seem to love the singer who can act (Cher!) and direct (Streisand). So why not love the actress who can carry a tune and remind us of our childhood, which was innocent, yet daring? On that note, I can’t wait to see Doubt, Streep’s (and Philip Seymour Hoffman’s) “serious” movie. I think it’s due in a theater near you any day now.

Oh, and a cute provincial artifact as a PS: movies in Israel are subtitled, not dubbed. The songs in this film were translated in rhyme.

Preview of my next entry

2008-12-17T20:33:00.002-05:00

This may not seem very professional, but I've been walking around the past few days promising myself that I'd be writing on a number of issues, the common thread of which is that they relate to things recently printed in mainstream media, national and local. But since I'm a chronic procrastinator, I've been putting it off. So I'm putting this embarrassing non-post here to encourage myself to actually write. Mañana?

Noam isn't just a name for legendary linguists

2008-12-13T19:25:00.004-05:00

Not my usual post. No anger, no politics, just a little bit of nakhes derived from new photos of my 5-month old nephew Noam.

Nuff said.

Follow-up

2008-12-13T07:02:00.002-05:00

In my previous post, I mentioned - almost in passing - that Newsweek - had published a cover story in support of gay marriage. This particular article focused on debunking the religious and biblical arguments against same-sex unions. There was also another story in the same issue on the struggle of a mother to reclaim custody of her daughter after her ex-partner "found god" and moved to a different state with their daughter. The online edition has even more.

Apparently (thank you again, Joe Solmonese and HRC), the magazine was "'bombarded' with 20,000 emails in opposition to the article." HRC (and I!) calls upon people with a conscience to take a minute and write the editor of Newsweek in support of their decision to feature this viewpoint at the forefront of their recent issue. You can do so through this form.

For James, Wherever I may Find Him

2008-12-11T12:06:00.002-05:00

Can you imagine, I was actually asked to keep blogging; hence the dedication above.

I'm kinda pressed for time, so I'll do what I can in 15 minutes.

The other day, I discussed with my students in our Language & Society in the Middle East class under what circumstances do we call someone an asshole (or a bitch, in most cases where the person named is a woman; but that's for a different post). Well, luckily, I got an e-mail today from Joe Solmonese, President of the Human Rights Campaign, which gives us a perfect example of a person worthy of this epithet: one Pat Boone.

In an article written by the country singer, he writes: "Hate is hate, no matter where it erupts. And by its very nature, if it's not held in check, it will escalate into acts vile, violent and destructive." Ironic, isn't it? For he's referring to the alleged hate - and "intolerance" - of protesters of California's Proposition 8. Or as many, including myself, have come to call it, Proposition H8.

This week's Newsweek (and its website even more so) has some great pieces on the absurdity of the claims made, mostly by religious zealots, about homosexuality being prohibited, immoral, what have you. Solmonese warns us that "Boone's rhetoric – painting LGBT people as a threat to society – [...] leads to the very real hate violence directed against LGBT people every day." I don't know for a fact that there is a cause-and-effect relation between hate speech such as Boone's and actual physical hate crimes, but it is not implausible. I hope most people just see Boone as the asshole that he is, and don't take any of his bullshit seriously.

But maybe I'm being naïve.

Koran/Qur'aan

2008-12-06T12:05:00.005-05:00

This weekend's New York Times Magazine features a one-page article about a controversy among Islamic scholars regarding the divine nature of the Koran: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/07/magazine/07wwln-essay-t.html?partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

I don't really have the patience to say everything I have to say about this issue, but I can't resist the temptation to say at least a little bit.

It is as clear to me as the bottled water I just purchased for an exuberant $2.99 that a human or humans wrote the Qur'aan. Just as a human or humans wrote everything that's ever been written. It follows the simple logic that humans are the only earthly organism that has what Chomsky and other have dubbed the language faculty. As I mentioned in my previous posting, this refers primarily to speaking (a) language(s), but certainly extends to writing as well.

Of course, if you believe in god, or gods, or spirits or what have you, I don't think I can convince you that such entities do not exist. Shit, I won't even try.

I have devoted much of my adolescent and adult life to studying the language and culture of peoples who for the most part are very much concerned with matters such as the one featured in the Times article. This, naturally, poses a dilemma for me. For I have not only studied Arabic and Arabs and to some extent Islam, but I have also supported a host of political causes pertaining to these people, especially with respect to the seemingly eternal conflict between the Palestinian people and my native Israel.

Both parties to this conflict have subgroups who base their argumentation on religious scriptures and teachings. To me, these arguments are, a priori, moot. Occasionally, they may overlap with other, relevant arguments, but that is but a coincidence.

Yesterday, at yet another discussion at F&M's Women's Center, this time on Proposition 8, the issue of religion came up. A portion of the discussion revolved around the question of whether or not the Bible prohibits this or that form of same-sex love/lust/intercourse/marriage. A minister who was in the room reminded the audience that not all Christian denominations and congregations denounce same-sex unions, and took pride in having presided herself over ceremonies uniting members of the same gender for two decades.

I find it ironic that some religious establishments are more progressive than most secular jurisdictions. But like the overlap of scriptural arguments and rational ones, it is by no more than statistical chance (damn, I wish I had the numbers to prove it) that Rev. X or Rabbi Y have a better sense of human dignity than the State of A or the Republic of B. We still have Canada and the Netherlands on the good side of the secular spectrum and Pat Robertson and the Shas/Hamas coalition on the bad side of the religious one.

My biggest frustration, ideologically, politically, even academically to some extent, is that so much of our societal life is based on religious beliefs, which had evolved long before there was any true scientific research around. I wish we could cut the bullshit and stop talking about sacred walls and holy tombs and men born to virgins and people who ascended and descended and parted seas and brought frogs and locust to cover the earth.

That being said, am I guilty for not being critical enough when I teach about Arabs and Arabic and Islam? On the flip side, had I been more critical, would I be deemed "culturally insensitive"? I know in my mind that I think that all theistic religions are equally ridiculous. But in this era of utter disregard for context, even I tend to walk on eggshells.

Languages have no "letters"

2008-12-05T14:42:00.007-05:00

Okay, this is mostly for those of you who are students of mine, who have found this blog while stalking me.

I am elaborating here on an issue that has come up in both my classes this semester, and was exacerbated (eh, that may be too harsh a word, but I like it) by a question I was asked today, namely, "what's the difference between Yiddish and Hebrew?"

So this is the blog-level answer, i.e., don't cite this in any sort of formal writing assignment (even if I assign it).

Yiddish is a language very similar to German. In fact, some might argue it is a dialect of German. Others might argue it's actually closer to Dutch, but then an argue can be made that Dutch is, too, a dialect of German, or that Dutch and Deutsch (=German) are both dialects of something... West Germanic perhaps. At any rate, they are both Germanic languages (or dialects; linguists don't really care about that distinction all that much). Other examples of Germanic languages are Swedish, English, Icelandic.

Hebrew, OTOH, is a Semitic language. Some other Semitic languages spoken today are Arabic, Amharic, Tigrinya and neo-Aramaic.

One of the sources of confusion is that Hebrew and Yiddish are both conventionally written using what we typically refer to as the Hebrew alphabet. Actually, if you look at the history of writing, the so-called Hebrew alphabet (e.g., אבגדה) was really used for Aramaic before it was used for Hebrew. But the Christian dialects of Aramaic (aka Syriac) were written in three different scripts (different from one another and from the Hebrew/Aramaic script).

But here's the shocking part: Languages don't have letters. Yes, yes, call me a radical (thanks for that btw). But for real, language is first and foremost an oral/spoken entity. Writing is secondary to speaking. We can fill an entire semester talking about that, so for now just trust me (or better, do some research).

So the fact that two languages use the same alphabet says very little, if anything, about the languages being related or similar to one another. Consider English and Swahili. Both use the Roman alphabet, but have VERY little in common.

The Hebrew/Yiddish connection is slightly less arbitrary than that. Both languages are/were spoken primarily by Jews, and the Yiddish vocabulary is sprinkled with word of Hebrew origin that have been borrowed due to the cultural and religious overlap. Similar cases are those of Ladino (or more precisely, Judeo-Spanish), which is written in Hebrew characters and has some Hebrew loanwords, and even some varieties of Judeo-Arabic, i.e., Arabic spoken and documented by Jews from the Middle Ages onward, written with the same Hebrew alphabet.

Similarly, the Arabic alphabet is used nowadays to write two major non-Semitic languages: Persian (aka Farsi) and Urdu. Both are Indo-European languages, and are really more closely related to English and German than to Arabic. But the fact that they're written in Arabic characters, and the presence of many Arabic loanwords in them create the illusion that they are close relatives of Arabic. But listen to Arabic and Hebrew vs. Farsi and Yiddish, or better, analyze their grammars, and you'll discover that the former two are related to one another, and the latter two are related to one another. So that the languages are classified by criteria other than the alphabets people have decided to adopt for graphically representing them centuries (if not millennia) after they began speaking them.

Okay, I can go on and on, but y'all are already yawnin'.

salaam - shalom - peace

V-Day / Vagina Monologues

2008-12-04T11:57:00.002-05:00

Last night (okay, it was 6 pm) I went to the Women's Center on campus to attend an information session on V-Day, which will be in February, and include, inter alia, three performances ov Eve Ensler's The Vagina Monologues. I was one of two men in the room, amongst, I'd say, twenty-something women.

I wasn't sure at first in what capacity I would like to join the effort, but I did know that I wanted to somehow be involved. After all, how could I not partake in an enterprise that stands for empowerment of a grossly underrepresented group? All the things I've ever done in the name of LGBT rights, Palestinian rights, workers' rights, and so forth, have been intertwined in my mind. I even recall one time when I marched in Philadelphia with a group of Palestinians who were protesting the Israeli occupation. A few minutes into the march, I realized I was in the posterior half of the crowd, surrounded by women; all the men had been marching in the front. I didn't like the idea, but I stuck with it and kept marching with the women, despite repeated pleas from one of the (male) ushers that I march with the men instead.

For these and other reasons - perhaps a guy feeling above all - I was taken aback when the organizers of V-Day at F&M announced last night that the Vagina Monologues auditions were open to women only. I wouldn't have been able to participate anyway, because it was also restricted to students, which I totally respect. I also understand where the insistence on having women only in the show ("after all, it's the Vagina monologues," one organizer said), but I generally dislike enterprises that limit participation to certain groups and exclude others. Oh, by the way, men are allowed to have all sorts of "behind the scenes" roles, such as sit on committees, do the lights and sounds on the show - just not be on stage talking about their non-existent vagina.

I would not like to be part of events or groups for gays only, or for Israelis only, or for that matter, for men only. I decided to keep my mouth shut. But I really wanted to ask them whether transgenders and transsexuals - both MTF and FTM - could participate. These are people who either have vaginas but want to replace them with penises (and some have actually done so) or want badly to have a vagina, but may not be able to afford the expensive gender reassignment surgery to obtain one. And besides, is this really about the physical vagina? Or are we talking about the vagina as a symbol.

The more I think of it, the more I think I should have spoken up. But I also value my own restraint. Because after all, I'd be seen as another man who wants to take control over women. So I erred on the side of caution. But I also wrote this entry for the sake of venting. And seeking y'all's input.

Peace.

2008-12-04T09:50:00.002-05:00

I'm posting this article by Graham Crookes on "Radical language teaching". It was sent to me by Ali Issa. It seems to be relevant to what we're doing.

One person's rationale for learning a foreign language: Why and how to teach & learn Arabic

2008-12-04T07:59:00.007-05:00

The following article was originally submitted to a student-edited publication titled The Liberal Arts Review at Franklin & Marshall College, where I teach. The editors told me my format and style were "too informal" for their publication and decided not to print it. Here it is for your perusal.

What could be more boring than a professor writing about her or his field of study, research and teaching, in a publication catering primarily to an audience in that professor’s own institution? Hell, you’re probably yawning already, moistening your right index finger, contemplating to flip several pages ahead to the next article. Oh, and I teach Arabic. I admit; much has been said in the media over the past few years about how the events of September 11, 2001 have ignited a rise in the demand for Arabic courses in North America. The press, which rarely troubles itself with mundane issues such as education – let alone higher education – has given this “shocking” phenomenon quite some attention. Even a local Lancaster newspaper featured Franklin & Marshall College (and to a lesser extent, a few other area schools) in a recent article about the emerging interest in Arabic, Chinese and other presumably exotic languages. I read these articles, because I sort of have to. Sometimes (as is the case in the recent Intelligencer article), I’m even quoted in them (See http://edisk.fandm.edu/uri.horesh/Intel.pdf for an article by Madelyn Pennino in the October 6, 2008 Lancaster Intelligencer Journal and http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2008/10/01/arabic for an article by Elizabeth Redden in Inside Higher Ed.). Yet for this and other reasons I wish to deviate from this routine course of writing, and offer you something different.

Hopefully, the phrase “something different” caught your eye and you’ve continued reading.

That the attack on the World Trade Center, on the Pentagon and on a plane in Western Pennsylvania by Saudi nationals, as well as the United States-led occupation of Iraq has reminded people in this region of the world that Arabs speak Arabic is of no surprise. One of my concerns, however, is that the United States might exploit recent violent events and the subsequent scholarly interest in the Middle East, in the same cynical way as my native Israel has been doing practically since its establishment as an independent state in 1948, and given the history of Zionism dating back to 1882, probably even earlier than that. This concern of mine has led me to write this essay, in which I attempt to explain why I believe it is important to learn languages of other peoples, as well as how I believe languages ought to be taught and learned. Some of my remarks will be of a broader, cosmopolitan nature, while others will reflect directly on the study of Arabic.

I began writing this essay a few weeks prior to the 2008 presidential elections in the United States. I wholeheartedly hope that by the time you pick up this issue, Sarah Palin will have become “Sarah who?” for most of you. Or perhaps not. Perhaps it is important to etch into memory that a potential second-in-line to lead the so-called free world responded, when asked whether her refraining from obtaining a passport until after she was elected to be the governor of Alaska was an indication of her “lack of interest and curiosity in the world” with the following words:

“I'm not one of those who maybe came from a background of, you know, kids who perhaps graduate college and their parents give them a passport and give them a backpack and say, ‘go off and travel the world.’ No, I've worked all my life. In fact, I usually had two jobs all my life until I had kids. I was not a part of, I guess, that culture. The way that I have understood the world is through education, through books, through mediums that have provided me a lot of perspective on the world.”

(See http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/09/25/eveningnews/main4479062.shtml for a transcript of Katie Couric’s interview with Gov. Palin on the CBS Evening News.)

Reluctantly, I must give the governor some credit. Learning through books and other educational media is definitely a goal worth pursuing, and probably no one in this institution would ever advocate against it. One may find Ms. Palin’s comment somewhat inconsistent with her attempt to ban books from a public library, in her capacity as mayor of Wasilla, but much has been written about that matter as well. What is troubling about the governor’s reaction to CBS’s Katie Couric’s question, was that she dismissed the very notion that a leader of a country that has prided itself on having some of the best and well-funded institutes of higher learning in the world may benefit from some degree of curiosity as to how other peoples lead their lives. She in essence tried to delegitimize Couric’s very legitimate concern.

Traveling abroad does not have to be a sole criterion for worldly curiosity. New sources report that as recently as 2006 fewer than thirty percent of Americans had a valid passport (See, e.g., http://www.ezilon.com/information/article_17024.shtml for a report by KVOA in Tucson). This number may be on the rise since then, as travel to Canada, Mexico and some Caribbean nations that did not require passports for travel now do. In an ideal situation, we would all have both the intellectual curiosity and the financial means to travel around the globe and experience the cultures, foods, climates and of course languages of our fellow humans worldwide.

I recently asked a subset of my Elementary Arabic class at F&M to discuss why they chose to study Arabic. Some of the answers were typical and expected. One student wants to work for the FBI, another envisions a career in diplomacy, some see the financial opportunities in the oil market. Finally, one student had a different answer. “I don’t want to sound like some kind of hippie,” she said, “but I just want to know how other people live.” I was on the verge of ecstasy (the emotion, not the street-drug). I am in no position to dictate to my students what their motivation to study what they do should be, but I am entitled to some satisfaction when their rationales are consistent with mine.

A colleague of mine, Ali Issa, who happens to be fluent in the Arabic dialect of Baghdad, was asked not too long ago to assist a student. The student was studying Arabic at the University of Texas at Austin, and Ali was a teaching assistant in one of her classes. The curriculum at UT, as well as here at F&M, includes Modern Standard Arabic, a largely artificial variety of Arabic used mostly in formal situations, as well as a good deal of more naturally-occurring dialectal features of Arabic, mostly based on the dialects of Cairo and the Syrian/Lebanese/Palestinian region (also known as the Levant). However, the student in question was a member of the US Armed Forces and was about to be deployed to Iraq. Given her TA’s command of Iraqi Arabic, the student found him to be a perfect candidate to tutor her in the dialect. Given his strong opposition to the student’s prospective role in Iraq as part of a foreign army invading an Arab country, he refused to tutor her.

I subscribe to the Sunday edition of The New Tork Times. I rarely find myself reading most sections of the paper, but I try never to skip two sections of The New York Times Magazine: “On Language” by William Safire (with whose conservative notions about linguistic norms I rarely concur) and “The Ethicist” by Randy Cohen. The latter entertains, week after week, readers’ questions about, well, ethics. Is it okay for a teacher to lower a student’s grade because she lost the student’s assignment (or did she?)? May a physician reveal confidential medical information about a patient who lied to her school about having a terminal disease she doesn’t have? Must a language instructor teach a soldier how to speak a foreign language in order to assist the soldiers in committing war crimes? Of course, I made the last one up (the former two were paraphrased from recent columns).

I believe my colleague was right to act according to his conscious. The chance that his actions would lead to the loss of life of an innocent Iraqi civilian was – at least in his mind – greater than the chance of the student-soldier being deprived of the benefits of knowledge. The student can seek other tutors, or conversely obtain the knowledge she seeks while pledging not to use it in a way that would harm anyone (e.g., by assisting a group like Doctors Without Borders rather than going to fight a futile war).

Here at F&M we are in the process of establishing an Arabic language program. It is your humble servant, in particular, who bears the lion’s share of the responsibility for this emerging program. In our case, we do not have the luxury of choosing our students based on their ideologies, career goals or other non-academic standards. Nor do we want to. If I were Randy Cohen, and a student were to write to me asking whether the College or a professor were acting within their purview in denying her participation in an Arabic class because she had “the wrong motivation” for studying the language, I would resoundingly send her to hire a civil rights lawyer to represent her.

The ethics of disseminating knowledge are therefore not as neatly definable as one would like them to be. I am fairly positive that my attempt to illustrate some aspect of them will not fair well with many of this publication’s readership. Good. That’s what the educational experience is – or should be – all about: dialogue. And I don’t mean provocative, ill-spirited, presidential debate-like “dialogue”. I mean thought-provoking, respectful exchange of ideas, while expanding one’s horizons.

Now that we’ve toyed around with being pseudo-intellectual and throwing in the fashionably obligatory Sarah Palin mockery (under the guise of poignant academopolitical constructive criticism, of course), it is probably time to bring ourselves down to earth. And like on Google Earth, we are gradually descending onto the planet, zooming in on Lancaster, the F&M campus, my office in Keiper Hall and the classrooms that surround it.

My philosophy about teaching Arabic is simple. Implementing is can be trickier. Justifying it to others is part of that complexity. By “simple”, I mean something like this (this will look a bit like a handout for a linguistics class; that’s how I was trained):
(1) All persons are equal to one another.
(2) All persons speak a language or languages.
a. Speaking can be oral (e.g., English, Arabic).
b. Speaking can be manual (e.g., American Sign Language, Mozambican Sign Language).

From (1) and (2) we can draw the following conclusions:

(3) All languages (including dialects and other linguistic varieties) are equally legitimate.
(4) By learning a language or languages other than oneself’s one learns about the speakers of the other language or languages.
If we add to that a couple of axioms about learning, e.g.:
(5) Learning about other peoples renders the learner a better person.
(6) Learning expands one’s horizons.
we can draw a conclusion as follows:
(7) Learning languages leads to better people with expanded horizons.

But since I promised you simplicity, here’s the philosophy in a nutshell:

(7') Learning languages is a good thing.

The conclusion I presented above in (7') is both good and bad for my efforts to establish and expand the Arabic Language Program at F&M. Needless to say, Arabic is a language. So from (7') we may conclude the following:

(8) Learning Arabic is a good thing.

However, the following conclusions also must be true:

(9) Learning German is a good thing.
(10) Learning Spanish is a good thing.
(11) Learning French is a good thing.
(12) Learning Hebrew is a good thing.
(13) Learning Russian is a good thing.
(14) Learning Italian is a good thing.
(15) Learning Greek is a good thing.
(16) Learning Latin is a good thing.
(17) Learning Chinese is a good thing.
(18) Learning Japanese is a good thing.

These conclusions only include the languages currently taught at Franklin & Marshall College but the reader is free to insert the name of any language she or he pleases between the words “Learning” and “is” in (8) through (18). In fact, I am not just paying lip service to my colleagues who teach other languages. It is my true belief that as a general rule, there is no one language whose mastery is preferred. Furthermore, it is far from the purpose of this paper to serve as propaganda for the program under my direction. What I do want to do is to clarify why I think students who are considering to study Arabic ought to bear in mind when making their decision, and what I believe current students of Arabic should consider and look forward to in their studies.

The egalitarian view – of people as well as languages – as stated above, lends itself to an understanding that learning Arabic in my mind is a means to open a window into the Arabic-speaking world, spanning from Northwest Africa to the Persian Gulf. Very much like everything else we learn, I would urge students of Arabic to bring to the table (or in this case, desk) three crucial ingredients:

1. Curiosity
2. Appreciation of the subject matter
3. Critical thinking

Curiosity goes without saying. Appreciation of the subject matter, in this case, can be multifaceted. One can appreciate the beauty of the sounds of Arabic, the elaborate nature of the Arabic script, the glory of Arabic literature and poetry, and – most importantly – the complexity of the people whose native language Arabic is. Yet appreciating the language and its people does not preclude thinking of them critically. Nor does critical thinking preclude appreciation. As a matter of fact, it is part of the democratic tradition in which we take so much pride, to combine the two. We respect one another despite our differences, and we do not shy away from criticizing even our closest allies.

While I believe these guidelines for learning Arabic are universal, both for language learners and for learners in general, they seem to warrant some degree of justification in our post-9/11 world. I must admit I am somewhat reluctant to justify what I believe must be obvious to any enlightened, educated person, and I will therefore constrain my comments to a certain degree of brevity.

Most of us rely on mainstream media outlets for information on foreign lands. You may watch CNN, or read The New York Times or The Washington Post, or listen to NPR. For some of you the international pages of a local newspaper will suffice. But unless you familiarize yourself with independent media sources (usually on the World Wide Web) or read foreign newspapers – be it in the original language or in translation – you are typically deprived from obtaining information and learning of points of view, which can only become available through this kind of diversification of sources.

In the modern-day classroom, we go beyond the old-fashioned vocabulary–grammar–translation paradigm, which was the essence of language pedagogy for generations. While you may not be able to learn to read an editorial in Al-Ahram, Egypt’s largest and most significant daily newspaper, until you reach your third or fourth year of Arabic classes, you will have acquired familiarity with some of the basic notions in such an article by the end of your first semester. Your ability to watch a story from the popular Qatar-based Arabic-language satellite channel Aljazeera will be limited for a year or two, yet very early on you will be able to distinguish between a formal narrative in Modern Standard Arabic and a “person on the street” segment spoken in one of the many and diverse Arabic dialects.
Language and culture are intrinsically related. If you learn Arabic, you must learn about the foods, holidays, movies, music, art and hobbies of people who speak Arabic. It is also imperative that you learn something about the politics of the Middle East and its connections to the West, and the United States in particular. You may think you already know much about the latter, but how much do you know about the Arab perspective on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict or about the war on Iraq or about the economic policies that govern the trade in crude oil and ultimately affect the prices at the local Turkey Hill gas station?

I am eager to reach the bottom line of this paper, and – admit it – so are you. Of course, each student and each teacher of Arabic will have their own bottom line or series of bottom lines. And that is the beauty of it all. We are not confined to one conclusion for all of us. If you choose to learn Arabic in order to “know thy enemy”, that saddens me, but also gives me hope that the enemy would eventually turn into a human, who may or may not remain an enemy after you learn about her or his customs, religion, songs and ideologies. Those of you who are more inclined to see the good in everybody may end up applying some of the critique you have for your own society to the societies whose languages you are studying.
Initially, I was going to devote several long paragraphs on emphasizing why Arabic should be taught as a complex linguistic entity, which includes a standard variety (sometimes known as Classical Arabic, or, as noted above, Modern Standard Arabic) and a multitude of regional dialects. I then would have explained how we teach the standard variety alongside “squirts” of dialectal forms, which eventually grow and form an inherent part of our discourse in the language. I’d tell you that we try to emulate how Arabic is used in the Arab World, where speakers intuitively know when to use the more formal manifestation of the language and when their native dialect is more suitable. Finally, I would have mentioned that several colleagues of mine (from various colleges and universities) and I have been discussing lately how to enhance our teaching resources to accomplish all of the above.

I think I ended up illuminating some of the more interesting, important underlying considerations in Arabic pedagogy. It also seems that dialect diversity in teaching follows from the philosophy I have presented in this paper. And since I am reaching my limit of 3,000 words, your curiosity will just have to wait.