Author: Martin Kramer

Lost Israelis wander onto Columbia campus

On By Martin Kramer

I can understand why the besieged chiefs at Columbia University would want a photo op with the Israeli ambassador to the United States, Danny Ayalon, and the former Israeli consul-general in New York, Alon Pinkas. President Lee Bollinger, Dean Lisa Anderson, and Middle East Institute director Rashid Khalidi want to put out the fire around Middle Eastern studies at Columbia, but it keeps getting bigger. The flames singed their gowns last week, after the New York Times joined New York magazine in making this a big story.

Bir Zeit-on-Hudson desperately needs a makeover. So they’ve concocted a conference on the Middle East peace process, to be convened on Thursday at the symbolic heart of the campus, the Low Library Rotunda, and in the presence of Bollinger. You know this is a hasty job, because the two keynote speakers haven’t been announced as of this writing. But the published program already includes Ayalon and Pinkas, and you can bet that the university photographer will be clicking away as Bollinger, Anderson, and Khalidi sidle up to them during the lunch and the reception, all smiles.

The decision by Ayalon and Pinkas to attend this event is misguided, and is more evidence of the famous ineptitude of Israeli diplomacy when it comes to campus matters. The day will come when it makes sense to engage Columbia, but it’s way down the pike, and Bollinger should have to jump through a hundred more hoops before an Israeli ambassador crosses 116th Street. He hasn’t even started. His much-touted ad hoc committee is a bitter joke (Nat Hentoff will be taking it apart shortly in the Village Voice), and Khalidi is saying truculent and offensive things to the media. Ayalon and Pinkas, by wandering onto campus, will undermine those courageous students who’ve finally put the university on the spot.

Pinkas is a free agent now, he answers only to himself, so there’s nothing to be done about him. But Ayalon represents the State of Israel. I urge him to reconsider his appearance. I and many others will support him if he skips the event because there’s too much slippery ice on College Walk.

Aryeh Shmuelevitz, too soon

On By Martin Kramer

Aryeh Shmuelevitz, a member of the Moshe Dayan Center at Tel Aviv University and a colleague, died of a heart attack on Wednesday, while attending a university event. He was only 72, and although he had retired, he came to his campus office each day, met with colleagues, and guided students. The sudden loss has been felt keenly by us.

Shmuelevitz specialized in Ottoman, contemporary Turkish and Iranian history, and the history of the Jews in the Ottoman empire. He trained at the Hebrew University under the great German-born orientalists of the old school, in particular the Turcologist Uriel Heyd, and he had a full command of Ottoman and modern Turkish. Shmuelevitz was one of the founders of the Shiloah Institute (precursor of the Dayan Center) in the years before it migrated to the university. He was instrumental in assisting Shimon Shamir in bringing the institute to the campus, and his later record of service to the university, as a teacher and administrator, was long and impressive.

His edition of the sixteenth-century history of the Ottoman empire by the Candian rabbi-historian Eliyahu Capsali (Seder Eliyahu Zuta) is his chief scholarly monument. But he also wrote widely on contemporary Turkey, and loved to travel through the length and breadth of that country. The Turkish ambassador to Israel attended his funeral this morning.

There is a saying in Turkish, that God takes those he loves early. Aryeh will be missed by all. This link is to an article he published on Ataturk’s policy toward the great powers.

Hisham Sharabi, ad patres

On By Martin Kramer

I met Hisham Sharabi only once, when I was a visiting professor at Georgetown ten years ago. It was late at night, and we shared an elevator on the way out of the building. It wasn’t at all memorable, yet I remember it—I suppose because I’d been reading him for so long. He died of cancer in Beirut on Thursday, at the age of 77, and his departure marks the end of an era. He formed one corner of that formidable Palestinian triangle, comprised of Ibrahim Abu-Lughod, Edward Said, and himself, that defined academe as war by other means. Now all three are gone.

As a Palestinian activist, Sharabi had the least impact of the three: he was a bit too academic. But he was the one most likely to surprise you by some brutally frank insight into the Arab condition. His book Neo-Patriarchy is loaded with sweeping generalizations that would be denounced as orientalist were any non-Arab to make them. Last May, when Seymour Hersh claimed that neo-conservatives had cooked up the idea that Arabs were “particularly vulnerable to sexual humiliation,” I brought this quote from Sharabi:

A principal technique of child-rearing in the middle-class Arab family is shaming…. The child’s physical functions, particularly his sexual functions, become the instruments of control. The child becomes ashamed of his body and its functions…. In the more traditional families, emphasis on ritualistic purity only strengthens the awareness of physical impurity and heightens the feeling of embarrassment associated with the body…. The child’s experience of sex is chaotic, painful, and humiliating.

Sexual frustration figured in his amusing account (in his Arabic memoir, Embers and Ashes) of his first encounter with striptease, while a young student in Chicago in the 1940s. (It’s translated here.) But there was something sadly poignant, and even ominous, about this passage:

There is not a single Arab student who does not experience feelings of disappointment after arriving in America. The first disappointment is that they discover that American girls are not all as pretty as they appear in the movies and the magazines. The girls who are very beautiful are difficult to befriend because the competition over them is strong. One must spend months before being able to befriend a reasonably attractive girl. I know young men from Arab countries who have spent years in America without having romantic relationships or sexual encounters.

The fact that America, less beautiful up close, offers no escape from sexual frustration may belong somewhere in explanations of anti-Americanism among young Arab men, and even of 9/11.

Sharabi was born and partly raised in Jaffa, but he will be buried in Beirut. He did return to Jaffa, at least twice as far as I know—once to make a documentary film with Amos Oz, and again to attend Abu-Lughod’s funeral. But Beirut is where Sharabi went to college (at the American University), and it’s where he first became politically active in the cult-like pan-Syrian movement of Antun Saadeh. Sharabi also returned to Lebanon after his retirement from Georgetown in 1998. I have a paperback copy of his 1966 book, Nationalism and Revolution in the Arab World, and the back cover describes him as “a native of Lebanon.” I invite others who knew him well to parse that, but it suggests a certain complexity that shouldn’t be completely subsumed as he’s inducted into the Palestinian pantheon.