For the last issue of The Montana Professor, I wrote an essay describing my trip to Israel this past August to participate in a conference on "Twentieth Century European Narratives: Tradition & Innovation," sponsored by the International Society for the Study of European Ideas and held at Haifa University. However, rather than focus on the conference itself, I primarily explored my complex, intense reactions as an American Jew visiting Israel for the first time. In this second installment of my essay, I will concentrate on the conference itself, which provided a richly rewarding intellectual experience. Of necessity, my remarks will be somewhat impressionistic--since the ISSEI conference, like most I've attended, piqued my interest on a wide range of topics rather than offering me a sustained immersion into any one subject.
When I told friends who'd visited Israel that the conference was being held in Haifa--Israel's third largest city, in the north of the country near the Lebanese border--their responses gave me the sense that Haifa was a grungy, blue-collar town, with little culture or charm, a kind of Israeli Detroit or Akron. However, upon arriving, I was pleasantly surprised. True, as a port city on the Mediterranean, Haifa's economy is strongly based on shipping and related industries. Still, it's a lovely town, dazzling in the hot, pellucid Mediterranean sunlight, and built in tiers astride a mountain range that rises steeply from the sea .
Haifa University sits perched at the very top of the Haifan hills, while our lodging was one tier down, in the Carmel district. We stayed at the Nof Hotel; nof means "view" in Hebrew, and, indeed, our room afforded a panoramic view of the city below us. Just under our window was the World Center of the Bahai faith--with its gold dome (tomb of the religion's prophet) and gorgeous, though not yet completed, gardens. Members of the Bahai faith--an off-shoot of Islam--have been viciously persecuted in their native Iran.
Nowhere in Israel is one far from some revered holy place or religious shrine, and Haifa is no exception; along with being headquarters of the Bahai, it's the reputed birthplace of the prophet Elijah, as well as the site of two ancient Carmelite monasteries. Nonetheless, compared to Jerusalem (whose fevered, divisive religiosity my wife and I experienced as part of a three-day tour preceding the conference), Haifa is a fairly secular and peaceful place, with strong socialist and communist roots because of its labor history. Due to its proximity to Lebanon, it also has a large Arab population.
The ISSEI conference drew scholars from over fifty countries and "Twentieth Century European Narratives" was a capacious enough rubric to encompass sessions on a wide range of subjects. I do regret that the conference title (as well as the titles of many individual sessions, including my own) was saddled with that academic buzzword, "narratives," so fashionable among PC profs, for whom it's obligatory to insist that everything is a "text." Fortunately, whether or not the conference organizers themselves adhered to this extreme notion, they seemed not to have imposed any ideological litmus test when choosing chairs and presenters. On the contrary, most speakers who discussed twentieth-century European history--in particular, its legacy of genocide--tended to see it as much more than a mere "narrative."
I thought the session I took part in, "Twentieth Century Anti-Semitic Narratives: Constructing an Enemy," went very well. Part of a book I'm writing on portrayals of the Holocaust in American popular culture, my paper was titled, "The Final 'Final Solution': Anti-Semitism in The Turner Diaries." Authored by Andrew Macdonald (pseudonym of William Pierce, founder of the Neo-Nazi National Alliance), The Turner Diaries, while ostensibly a novel, is really a detailed blueprint for the violent overthrow of the American government (and ultimately the world) by White Supremacists. Called by the FBI "the bible of the racist right," the book was a major influence on Timothy MacVeigh's decision to blow up the Federal Building in Oklahoma City; obsessed with the novel, MacVeigh hatched the idea for the bombing from a nearly identical description of the detonation of FBI headquarters in Washington, DC. As its title suggests, my essay focused on the novel's virulent anti-Semitism, which in its particulars I found almost identical to Hitler's, save for those anti-Semitic calumnies which distort events that occurred after Hitler's death: e.g., a twisted explanation for Germany's defeat in World War II, denial of the Holocaust, and homicidal hatred of Israel. As its title also implies, my paper argued that the conclusion of The Turner Diaries spells out unequivocally that Pierce believes the only answer to the "problem" of the Jews is genocide, a final "Final Solution." Just before embarking on a kamikaze attack on the Pentagon that triggers the White Supremacists' ultimate victory, the novel's narrator proclaims: "If [we] survive this contest, no Jew will--anywhere. We'll go to the uttermost ends of the earth to hunt down the last of Satan's spawn" (The Turner Diaries, National Vanguard Books, p.199).
My paper was well-received, in large part because its sensational subject matter seemed to greatly interest the largely, though not exclusively, Jewish audience. At the end of my presentation, I discussed Militia activity in Montana and considered whether The Turner Diaries' post-Oklahoma City notoriety might inspire an anti-Semitic resurgence in the American heartland. While I doubt my remarks would have won me kudos from the Montana Tourist Board, I did suggest that the real problem in our state was less anti-Semitism than utter ignorance about Jews, Judaism, and Israel--circumstances which I didn't find all that comforting, since ignorance creates a vacuum into which all manner of pernicious notions can be sucked. The answer, I felt, was not censorship (though I doubt I've ever read a book that was a better candidate for censorship than The Turner Diaries) but rather education, along the lines of the Holocaust course I've instituted at Montana Tech.
The other presenters provided support for my claim that, among their other flaws, anti-Semites are notoriously unimaginative. That contemporary Neo-Nazis have added little to Hitlerian anti-Semitism was demonstrated by comparing The Turner Diaries with the examples of Nazi anti-Jewish propaganda examined in two other papers. One discussed the film, "Jud Suess," a widely propagated Nazi adaptation of a popular 19th century German novel about a lecherous Jewish merchant who seduces and then kills a virginal Aryan maiden. The second paper explored how National Socialist cinema reworked medieval martyrologies which depicted Christians (especially infants) being ritually murdered by depraved Jews. Thus, this paper made the point that even Hitler's anti-Semitism was nothing new.
The two presenters, Professors Walter Suess and Ute Stargardt, are both German émigrés now living in the U.S. A professor at Western Washington University, Suess is Jewish (indeed, as he wryly noted, his surname is the same as that of the Jewish villain in "Jud Suess"), but Stargardt is not. An English professor at Alma College in Wisconsin, Stargardt belongs to a distinct group whose existence I came to recognize after attending several Holocaust conferences: Gentile German intellectuals who've responded to their homeland's Nazi past by devoting their academic careers to the Holocaust. Shortly after we met, Ute told me how her interest in the subject had originated. Born near the end of World War II, she lost both her parents in the Allied bombing and was raised by step-parents. Even after the war, her stepfather remained an ardent Nazi. One time he caught Ute glancing at a copy of William Shirer's The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. In response, he beat her severely and ripped up the book. Afterwards, Ute laboriously reassembled the pages of Shirer's book with tape and glue, read it straight through in one sitting, and vowed then and there both to leave home at the first opportunity and to learn everything she could about the Holocaust (a taboo subject in Germany at the time). She has kept both her vows.
I focused--given my personal and scholarly interests--on those sessions dealing with the Holocaust, Judaism, and Israel. Among these, one of the best was a day-long discussion on "Western Intervention in the Middle East: The Twentieth Century." A paper I especially liked was Paulette Kershenovich's "A Case Study of Bat Shalom as a Dialogue Group and Its Impact on the Peace Process, 1987-1996." Bat Shalom is a well-known feminist political organization composed of both Israeli and Palestinian women, and for nearly a decade it has been lobbying on behalf of Palestinian statehood. Although herself a member of Bat Shalom, Professor Kershenovich (who teaches at Tel Aviv University) unfortunately gave a theoretical, jargon-ridden presentation listing the various strategies the organization has evolved to try to further its objectives. Despite its flaws, her talk amply demonstrated that (contrary to the views of many liberal academics) Israelis are hardly monolithically opposed to Palestinian self-rule. (Actually, recent polls have shown that a clear majority of Israelis support the Oslo Peace Accords and the ultimate creation of a Palestinian state--despite the risks such a state poses to the future of Israel.)
The most intriguing remarks concerning Bat Shalom, however, were voiced not by Professor Kershenovich, but, during the ensuing discussion, by another Israeli academic, Mordechai Kedar, a professor at Bar Ilan University. Professor Kedar described a recent trip to the West Bank undertaken by Bat Shalom members to meet with the head of the Palestinian Authority, Yasser Arafat. Unsurprisingly, Chairman Arafat had been happy to discuss the prospects for peace with the Bat Shalom representatives. But when the feminists turned the discussion to the treatment of Palestinian women, Arafat was much less agreeable. What did the status of Palestinian women, he demanded to know, have to do with the Middle East peace process? And what right did Israelis have to tell the Palestinians how to treat their women? Professor Kedar simply noted that this anecdote suggested problems for Bat Shalom unacknowledged in Kershenovich's presentation. In response, Professor Kershenovich only nebulously remarked that Bat Shalom was aware of the need to take into account "cultural differences" between Arabs and Israelis.
This short exchange raised a host of fascinating questions. On the one hand, contrary to Bat Shalom, I don't find a self-evident connection between the Middle East peace process and the treatment of Arab women. Indeed, one might argue that given all the thorny impediments to Middle East peace, the last thing any negotiating partner should be doing is dragging in explosive, possibly tangential issues. Moreover, given the legacy of Western colonialism in the region (of which, from an Arab perspective, Israel is just the latest example), one can at least somewhat understand Arafat's indignation at Bat Shalom's attempt to impose on Palestinian culture Western ideas about proper roles for women. On the other hand, the fact remains that Bat Shalom is quite right when it claims that Palestinian women (and, to varying degrees, women throughout the Islamic world) are almost always saddled with second-class status. Whether it is germane to the peace process or not, Bat Shalom's crusade to lift the yoke oppressing Palestinian women seems a worthy cause.
The dispute between Arafat and Bat Shalom revealed some basic contradictions in feminist ideology which too few feminists have squarely faced. After all, on the one hand, much feminist thinking is based on the premise that Western culture is profoundly sexist and patriarchal. But, on the other hand, Bat Shalom's feminist criticisms of Arab subjugation of women are clearly based on premises--such as inalienable individual human rights--central to that same Western culture (particularly, its Enlightenment heritage) which, by and large, feminism decries. I think feminists need to acknowledge how many of their ideas derive from tenets of Western ideology (which doesn't mean, of course, that our culture has ever been devoid of sexism or is entirely superior to cultures of the East). Given the deplorable history of Western imperialism, and given the desperate need for a lasting rapprochement between East and West, there may be pragmatic reasons why Westerners should tread gingerly when seeking to persuade non-Western cultures to adopt our principles. But there's no reason to be either apologetic or willfully obtuse about the fact that these principles, while having universal application, originated in the West.
The superiority of a Western-style democracy such as Israel's to the dictatorial regimes predominating in the Arab world was suggested in Professor Kedar's own paper, "Assad's Partnership with the West in the Second Gulf War: Its Justification in the Syrian Press." Through close examination of the Syrian press during the Persian Gulf War--in particular, the imagery used in political cartoons--Kedar disclosed the Syrian media's often tortured attempts to justify Syria's decision to side with "The Great Satan," America, rather than with its Arab "brother," Iraq. Kedar's paper clearly showed that the Syrian media is simply a propaganda tool for Hafez Assad (as brutal a dictator as Saddam Hussein). The Syrian press' kowtowing to Assad is worlds apart from the behavior of the Israeli media, which has been especially vociferous in its attacks on the reactionary, scandal-plagued Netanyahu government. The Israeli press' feisty independence is even more notable given the permanent state of siege gripping the Jewish state--a climate which often leads to the stifling of democratic debate. Thus, to be fair, critics of Israel should level some disapproval at the autocratic regimes of the Arab world, whose repressiveness poses the major impediment to Middle East peace.
Two other sessions, "The Holocaust and the Waning of Modern Narrative" and "New Europe as Jewish Diaspora," discussed: the rebirth, half a century after the Holocaust, of the European Jewish Diaspora, especially in the ex-Soviet bloc countries, where the fall of Communism has inspired a general religious revival. Not that these Diaspora communities, even those most decimated by the Holocaust, had ever entirely vanished. This point was personalized by a lively talk given by Barbara Strassberg entitled, "Where Is My Home? A Polish Jew in America." As her title suggests, Strassberg is a Polish Jew who survived the Holocaust, returned to live after the war in her native village, and in the '90s emigrated to America. Now a professor at Aurora University, Strassberg didn't deny the horrors wreaked by the Holocaust on Polish Jewry, whose death toll was astronomical. Many of the Polish Jews who did somehow survive the Holocaust returned home only to be murdered by Polish Gentiles who'd stolen the Jews' homes and businesses while they were imprisoned in the camps. Nonetheless, a handful of Polish Jews, such as Strassberg, survived in communities that, however devastated by the Nazis and the Communists, managed to retain some tenuous Jewish identity. But in America, Strassberg said, she found that some American Jews resented her for being living proof that a remnant of Polish Jewry had survived the Holocaust, since these Jews had a deep emotional investment in the idea that the Poland's Jews had been "wiped out" in the Shoah. Spouting American colloquialisms in her thick Polish accent, Professor Strassberg said she thought every time an American Jew informed her that Polish Jewry had been "annihilated" in the Holocaust, "Hello! What about me? How can you deny my identity, my reality?"
Ironically, just as Strassberg emigrated to America, a Jewish revival occurred in her homeland. This was the subject of a cover story in The New York Times Sunday Magazine on "Poland's New Jewish Question," by Dutch journalist Ian Buruma (August 3, 1997). Based on interviews with scores of Polish Jews, Buruma's article describes how, under Communism, such Jews had hidden their religious identity. Today, however, many Polish Jews or half-Jews, especially among the younger generation, are committed to uncovering their sometimes tenuous Jewish roots. Many of these young Polish Jews have not only embraced Jewish culture but have become devout. "The main sponsors of these saplings of Jewish life," Buruma writes, "is the Ronald S. Lauder Foundation, based in New York City" (36). Funded by the cosmetics tycoon, the Lauder Foundation has spent millions to establish a Hebrew school and Jewish museum in Warsaw, sponsor an annual Jewish festival in the town of Plonsk, and bring over American rabbis to teach Polish Jews about their heritage and serve as religious leaders for the fledgling community. While Buruma describes this revival in largely positive terms, at the ISSEI session on "The New Europe as Jewish Diaspora," University of Toronto professor Robin Ostow was much less enthusiastic, pointing out that Lauder, himself an Orthodox Jew, is fostering in Poland only the growth of Orthodox Judaism, rather than trying to nurture a more diverse Jewish culture by encouraging the involvement of representatives from Conservative and Reform denominations. As its title suggests, however, the session on "The New Europe as Jewish Diaspora" didn't focus only on the revival of European Jewry. Although it's seldom discussed in the American media, the imminent unification of Europe--through the instituting of a single currency and common language, as well as the removal of trade and travel restrictions between countries--greatly interested many of the conferees in Haifa, some of whom suspected that the union might ultimately inspire a dramatically "New Europe," where nationalism was supplanted by a continent-wide common culture. In his paper "The Jewish Diaspora as a Model for the New Europe?" Wellesley professor Thomas Nolden argued that the diverse, cosmopolitan culture of the Jewish Diaspora was a perfect model for the kind of Europe envisioned by the architects of the European Union. (Nolden did note the irony that a culture assumed to have been extinguished by the Holocaust offered a potential model for the future of Europe.) During the discussion period, however, one audience member noted that Nolden's admiring portrait of Diaspora Jewry as transcending exclusionary nationalist ties bore a disturbing resemblance, when recast in a more sinister light, to traditional anti-Semitic stereotypes questioning the patriotic allegiances of Jews to their respective homelands. Therefore, the speaker worried that if some Europeans held up the Jewish Diaspora as a model for a united Europe, this might inspire an anti-Semitic backlash among their more nativist countrymen.
Frankly, I found Nolden's discussion a tad theoretical--how many European political leaders, after all, are declaring the Jewish Diaspora a model for a New Europe?--though it did provide further evidence of how Jewish issues can appear in the most unlikely contexts. As for the return of European Jewry, my trip to Israel didn't shake my belief that, while the existence of a Jewish state is vital, Diaspora Jews have an equally important role to play in the worldwide Jewish community. This importance has long been evident in America, by far the nation that has treated Jews best. In any event, if the rich, ancient, and diverse culture of European Jewry devastated by the Holocaust is being reborn, that seems a thrilling development, regardless of what form this revival takes.
The insularity of American society is often lamented by cultural critics, but what has been less remarked upon is that this insularity also extends (albeit more subtly) to American academic culture--its internationalist pretenses notwithstanding. At least for this American academic, an immersion in an international conference in a foreign country provided a glimpse of a global perspective that I think has, to an extent, made me a better teacher and scholar. It's a perspective that makes many of the battles currently raging in American society and the American university seem a good deal less important, while at the same time, it makes the myriad of concerns preoccupying the rest of the world, both in and out of academe, appear far more intriguing and worthy of attention.
For these reasons, I hope for the opportunity to attend many more international conferences. At present, though, I'm not optimistic about my prospects. While I greatly appreciate that Montana Tech provided the considerable funds required to send me to Israel, I fear that the golden goose may be dead. This year, in response to the college's on-going financial crisis, all departmental travel budgets were cut by twenty percent. From talking with colleagues at the other branch campuses, my impression is that funding for conferences is even scarcer at Western, Northern, and Eastern than it is at Tech. In these hard economic times for our state in general and the MUS specifically, it may seem a tough sell to convince Montana taxpayers and public university administrators that MUS professors deserve money to attend international conferences. But if the definition of a good teacher is one who's transcended his or her own provincialism and is thus able to help students do the same, then such an argument can and should be made.