The Color-Line in America: Part III

The work of the Ethnic Studies Task Force focused on the portfolio of CSU programs under the broad rubric of Ethnic Studies:

                1. African American Studies/Africana Studies/Pan African Studies/Black Studies
                2. Asian American Studies
                3. Chicano Studies/Latina/o/x Studies
                4. Native American Studies/American Indian Studies/Indigenous Peoples Studies”

     I understand the importance of CSU (California State University) to mandate that “Ethnic Studies” emphasize the history and experience of the “four racialized groups” in the United States. It is important to point out the institutional discrimination that persists in our society.

     Indeed, every Cal State student should only graduate having taken at least one course on the subject. I don’t know if I would have described such specific intervention as “the broad rubric of Ethnic Studies,” but I must logically assume the “Task Force on the Advancement of Ethnic Studies” does not define “Ethnic Studies” per se, as an academic discipline that incorporates the global human panoply of ethnicities, but has in mind primarily, if not only, “the historical development and social significance of race and ethnicity in the United States.”

     One should point out, in the statement above, “race” and “ethnicity” are distinguished for some reason, perhaps, as the goal is for our students “to develop the skills and knowledge necessary for success in an increasingly diverse environment.”

     For example, where do you put Eastern Europe and Central Asia within the history and experience of the “four racialized groups” in the United States? Almost one billion people do not fit into this “broad rubric.” They also consist of numerous ethnicities in our global economy, with emigre communities and histories of their own, in many parts of the world, including North America.

     I do not suppose the CSU would exclude from its definition of “Ethnic Studies” the hundreds of millions of people who do not fit neatly into the category (or categories) of “the four racialized groups.” It must be, therefore, a matter of emphasis rather than exclusion, which stands in stark contrast to the High School Ethnic Studies Curriculum Proposal” in California that met with immense opposition this past summer. 

Hannukah & Christmas

Last year, on Christmas, I wrote the following on the student feed (SJSU Sammy):

“hmm…. a little food for thought. Hanukkah is not Jewish Christmas. Hannukah predates Christmas by 160 years. But is Christmas a Christian Hannukah? Let’s see. “Hannukah” from Hebrew meaning “dedication” (or, in the Jewish holiday sense, the rededication of the Jerusalem Temple, a kind of ritual homecoming, after it was made impure from Syrian Greek takeover – anyway, a long story). In Christianity, Jesus came to replace the Temple – be the new Temple… hmmmm.”

This year, Hannukah in the Hebrew calendar overlaps with Christmas, so I understand the confusion. In fact, in the comments section, one student wrote: “Christmas is also nonreligious in a way. for many people at least.” Another student wrote in response, “that only really works that way when you live in a country where Christianity is the dominant religion… Christian holidays are not the default for secular life…” The main take away from this exchange, I think, is the following: secular or religious, Christmas is the dominant frame of reference in American society for Hannukah. The holiday that was relatively minor in importance on the Jewish calendar became one of the more nationally commemorated Jewish holidays in the United States.

This year, history student, Paloma Urciouli, curated the small Hannukah exhibit next to my office.

A Medieval Disputation in the 21st Century

Anyone who reads about the Jewish Middle Ages in Europe will notice that the Church, often helped by a prominent Jewish convert to Christianity, and perhaps under the aegis of some King, would make the Jews debate the fine points of the Bible. It is an odd feeling to be needed in such a way, especially after the Jewish collective survival in Christendom at times depended on this very same neediness. Once or twice a year, a random person walks up to me in some public arena, like a store, park, or street corner (as I wait for the “walk” sign), to lob some Biblical verse in my direction. This happened last night at CVS as I was returning from Synagogue after Rosh HaShanah services. The stranger, another customer at CVS, spotted my kippah and perhaps my “rabbinic” black-and-white spiffy suit and decided to impress me with his knowledge of Leviticus. (I should say, ONLY men accost me in this way; which may say something about men.) Over the years, being confronted in such a way, I learned not to ignore the person. If I say, “I do not know,” it would disappoint him. He thought I was a “Jew,” who is supposed to be naturally impressed by his knowledge of the Bible, but I was really just a pretender. My whole existence crashes down before his eyes. I certainly would not want to disappoint anyone in this way. A real “Jew” should have every verse of the Bible memorized and play along. For just this moment, – as my whole life comes down to an eventuality, – I should “witness” the Second Coming of Christ, realizing the Old Testament had prefigured his coming the first time around. At the same time, if I denied Christ, I would be a typical “Jew,” which would also bring too much pleasure to my instructor as he tells that I will burn in hell, or something along those lines. Some years ago, I did not know what was better: to be a “Jewish” pretender or the “Jewish” denier. There is no win-win. So I devised a plan to pretend to listen without saying a word while finishing my chores and walking away.            

The Color-Line in America: Part II

Imagine, there was a prominent Jewish clan in the town of Medina, in the Arabian Peninsula. At the time, the people of Arabia (the Arabs) were pagan. Came the Messenger of Allah, Muhammed, seeking shelter from his enemies in Mecca, where he first revealed the new religion of Islam, and brought his teachings to Medina. At first, it was difficult for Muhammed to gain a following in Medina, as well. Yet, he was a great and charismatic leader. Sooner or later, Muhammed attracted the Arabs of Medina to his side. The Jews of Medina, however, continued to reject Muhammed’s teachings. Muhammed then raised a militia and defeated his opponents of Mecca, as well as, of Medina, and forever silenced all doubters, including the Jews of Arabia. Muhammed, thereby, showed everyone he was a strategic mastermind who knew when to make peace and when to war with those who reject him as the Messenger of Allah.   

In short, this is what one of my SJSU students wrote on his short essay response (which I briefly paraphrased above) for my summer (2019) course on Western Civilization (until 1648). It had almost nothing to do with the assignment, which was to write at least five-hundred words on any aspect of the history in chapters 8-14 in the assigned textbook, The Making of the West, that had to do with either gender or economy. It was a way to assess how well the students gobbled up large chunks of information presented to them in the one-month long summer session that ought to take three months to cover.  

I am not sure why someone would write the response I paraphrased above. Is it because I am unmistakably Jewish? I could just ignore the matter, make no mention of it publicly, not bring unsavory attention to the issue and to myself.   

 Now, imagine, in an American history course, a white student wrote an essay response to a black professor that retold the history of American slavery from the perspective of Confederate slave-owners, even though it had nothing to do with the assignment. The professor in question would be confronted by a Booker T. Washington or W.E.B. Dubois choice: Should she/he not call any attention to the matter because he has more important things to focus on or worry about, such as, his personal career? Or, should she/he call attention to the matter and risk making someone in the administration uncomfortable, especially since the university blogosphere is almost entirely for promotional purposes?  

From my personal point of view, as someone who is unmistakably Jewish, the primary difference between the case in my course and the hypothetical case in the American history course is that American slavery is something that happened less than two centuries ago, the effects of which are still very much present in American society, while the enslavement and eradication of the Jews of Medina happened about fifteen centuries ago.  

Of course, the response was written in 2019 and should the administration investigate, there was absolutely nothing on my part that would prompt such a response. Not even close.  

Today the 9th of Av

     Traditionally, the 9th of the Hebrew month of Av is the day of mourning and supplication and fasting and commemoration of all the suffering that the Jewish people went through over the centuries. This includes the Holocaust, of course.

     There are two other nontraditional memorial days of Holocaust. The International Holocaust Remembrance Day is January 27th, when the Red Army liberated the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camps in 1945. The other is the 27th of the Hebrew month of Nissan, called Yom HaShoah, and is commemorated in Israel and by Jewish communities around the world in solidarity with Israel. The 27th of of the Hebrew month of Nissan (which falls either in April or May in the Solar calendar) marks the irruption of the Warsaw ghetto uprising (in April 19, 1943), which makes sense for Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish survivors of the Holocaust. (The Warsaw Ghetto uprising that remarkably fended off the German wehrmacht, undoubtedly at the time the most powerful army in the world, for over one month, irrupted after the last ghetto residents found out [through the help of the Polish underground resistance movement] that over three million of their brethren had been systematically gassed in the German-occupied Poland between the springs of 1942 and 1943.)   

     There is an eerie difference between the traditional day of commemoration and the nontraditional memorial days. For one, both memorial days commemorate the human motive for liberation from collective suffering. The traditional day of commemorating collective suffering had been designated over time as the day of disaster, the cruel suffering itself. In other words, the most cruel suffering in Jewish history is collapsed into the one traditional day: the 9th of Av.

     The 9th of Av is especially when the sacking of the 1st and the 2nd Jerusalem Temples had been commemorated in Jewish communities for over two millennia. In fact, the 9th of Av is not the day when both Temples fell. The 1st Jerusalem Temple fell in 586 BCE on the 7th of Av and the 2nd Jerusalem Temple fell in 70 CE on the 10th of Av. But both dates were collapsed into one, the 9th of Av. In the course of the last two thousand years, the most dramatic events of Jewish suffering were added to the same day of commemoration, fasting, and supplication, according to the traditional Jewish calendar, even if those events really happened on completely different days. One of the primary reasons for this conflation is rather simple: to synchronize the mourning period of the various Jewish communities scattered about the world.   

     The second main difference between the traditional and nontraditional days of remembering the Holocaust is the major conflict between the traditional and the non-traditional reckoning. While the International Holocaust Remembrance Day on January 27th does not seem to conflict with the accepted Jewish calendar of the last two millennia, Yom HaShoah does conflict with the month of Nissan, which is the first month of the traditional Jewish calendar, a month of joy and celebration in the birth of the Jewish people as highlighted by the prevalent communal celebration of Passover (Pesach) to this very day. Life is full of contradictions.

The Color-Line in America: Part 1

Here’s an interesting episode from the life of an Orthodox Jew at SJSU.

Today, a stranger tapped on my shoulder as I boarded the elevator at the MLK library. “Hey, do you believe the original Jews were really black?” Usually, the question is “Do you know the real Jews are really black?” About 18 years ago I once spent 18 hours on the same Greyhound bus (from New York to Cleveland via Buffalo) with a fellow passenger sitting next to me who tried to prove to me that he was really Jewish, while I was a fake, according to the Bible. It was my first real encounter with age-old Christian super-sessionism that was less about “Veritas Israel” than racial supremacism (like in Hitler’s Table Talk), only it was not the ultimate, inborn supremacy of the White Man but of the Black Man, in this case. Back then, in response, I tried to prove to him that I was really a black man. This time in the elevator at the MLK library, my fellow passenger phrased the same belief rather differently and I was appreciative of it. I probed, “Do I believe [the original Jews were really black]?” He nodded. I responded, “Probably.” He gave me a fist bump (which is like a “high five”) and walked out of the elevator at the designated floor.

Were original Jews black? Sure. Where they white? Sure, why not. Why stop there? They were probably also brown, yellow, pink, or olive-green. And, what is the business with the “original” Jews? Where “original”? Is this “original” like “vintage,” like the “original” Babe Ruth rookie card when he was still the fabled south-paw of the Boston Red Sox? Of course, the Bible (even the Christian Bible) does not really shed much light on the “original” pigment, and for good reason.

Indeed, why stop at white or black? Why the fixation with only white and black? Someone else’s skin color is subjective anyway. If I may be permitted to use Michael Jackson to teach us an important lesson (“Michael Jackson” as symbolic of the Age, not of the person):

 

 

The Canaanite god, Baal-Peor, in Downtown San Jose. Ha!?

Would you imagine my bewilderment [predicament]!? I was taking a leisurely stroll around the block from my office this morning to “get a piece of fresh air,” as they say. The cars zooming by, the birds chirping, the soft breeze on my prickly face, the glowing rotunda of the post-modern San Jose City Hall that lost its ’90s luster, rising before me on the horizon. As I approached the back entrance of City Hall, I looked up and  BEHOLD!:

You can imagine my confusion. I was staring at the backside of the statue with the dome of the rotunda of the City Hall before me like in procession.

I slowly pivoted around to witness the great, mighty, and colorful cow.

 

“Wow,” I thought, “the Canaanite god, Baal-Peor! Here, in San Jose!?”

How funny it is to stumble on the backside of the statue of a cow to let you know, “BEHOLD, you are about to enter the sacred  of the City Hall FROM THE BEHIND.”

Zionism @ SJSU?

         The issue of the Israel-Palestine conflict on US university campuses has had a way lately of attracting extremists who prey on the common courtesy of common ignorance, smug self-righteousness, or pasty-faced cowardice to appear justifiably irate and just and humane. 

         “Zionism” is fodder for extremists who cannot (nor do they want or care to) distinguish Zionism from Jewish culture, which, perhaps in some random superficial sense, does not seem all that disconcerting, but especially on campuses where social activism is a large part of student life, it is difficult for students to identify with Jewish culture.

          The obvious implication here is that Jews and Zionism have something in common. Would you agree? If not, then it must be stated unambiguously:

          The SJSU Program of Jewish Studies does not discriminate on the subject of Zionism, non-Zionism, neo-Zionism, post-Zionism, or anti-Zionism. Any ideological strain may be supported, considered, debated, repudiated. Any member of the academic institution in question is not only entitled to an opinion but should have the freedom to express it accordingly and appropriately. The key point here is free, open conversation about Zionism.

            Anyone affiliated with the public university should be allowed to choose, endorse, prefer, emphasize, decline, criticize, assail, or be entirely indifferent toward any public issue, including Zionism. No opinion, ideology, or religious belief, is foolproof to the human mind. Everyone is accorded the same freedom of speech, assembly, and press, – the hallmark of the free, open, multicultural, pluralistic, liberal, democratic society.

             The only time when this freedom does not apply to everyone is in the case of public safety.  It would then fall on the particular institution in the particular case to make this underlying intention clear.

          Not making the intention clear, when the free expression of opinion is curtailed, targets any number of people on campus who may suppose virtually any point on the subject of Zionism and may be shunned, harassed, or verbally abused for no reason other than existing. All in all, in the name of social justice, of course!

            Just as scandalous is when the administrative faculty is too busy, too uncertain, too lazy, too ignorant, too unwilling, or, all combined, to care an iota for the issue. “Jews cry wolf, again,” he/she would say with smug self-righteousness and chin raised up high. Somehow, to think an university professor drank the cool-aid or is all in on it, is too simple. It is quite another to show an institution of the university had been taken over by extremists – yes, “taken over,” as in, strategically, to further the extremist point of view, – for how else is power thereby exercised by repeatedly ignoring and then consistently blocking (when ignoring is not possible) the same dissenting point of view from making a debut within the same institution?

           What one may find is that administrative carelessness as such when it is too easily manipulated is simple, even banal, carelessness. Not quite the “banality” in Eichmann in Jerusalem, but one that is still intriguing: The (“too easily manipulated”) professor in charge, or the institution at large, is not willing to educate precisely when it is pivotal, when uneducated social activism is extremism!

             The field of Jewish Studies exists precisely on account of public education in multicultural society. As an academic program, Jewish Studies depends on open, unprejudiced, relentless conversation on Zionism or Israel or “everything done under the sun” (Ecclesiastes 1:14).

The Armenian Genocide Smoking Gun

     The SJSU Program of Jewish Studies co-hosted a presentation today by Dr. Taner Akcam of Clark University about the Krikor Guergeurian Archive. Dr. Akcam discovered the private archive and, in recent years, has cataloged and digitized the many documents that present the smoking gun for the widely held position the Turkish government committed a genocide against its Armenian subjects in 1915-1916. The Turkish government denies the genocide ever took place (and United States, Israel, and Great Britain refuse to join historians and many governments in officially recognizing the Armenian genocide, for geopolitical reasons).

    It is all the more significant and necessary (in the world of Jewish Studies, at least), that Dr. Akcam presented today. Coincidently, today is the Jewish holiday of Purim (from the Book of Esther, about how Judean exiles of ancient Persia were saved from genocide).

     Some may deem it odd for Jewish Studies to co-host a presentation about one of the darkest and saddest episodes in modern history on the day of revelry, carnivals, costumes, and games. Let’s say, in the history of mass murder in the twentieth century, if the Holocaust in 1941-1945 is the grand finale and the 1919 pogroms in the Ukraine is setting up the stage, the Armenian genocide in 1915-1916 is the first draft of the script. In fact, what Dr. Akcam has done, in discovering and publicizing the archive recently, is a real cause for celebration. He has uncovered the original script of the horror for the world to witness.