Jane Kramer: And they call her a journalist?

I was amused to read Jane Kramer's article in the New Yorker recently. Amused because it was so incredibly inaccurate and so far from a true portrayal of our discussions on the phone. Jane Kramer played her role better than any actress. She was interested in the situation in Israel and talked of her visits here. She wanted to portray herself as such a good Jew, such a good person, such an interesting and sympathetic ear. She condemned the Barnard tenure committee's rush and agreed with so much of our discussion that after reading her piece, I realized that truth is no longer found in the halls of Columbia, or on the pages of the New Yorker. There is, apparently, little real integrity in the getting of a story.

Oh, she covered herself - she even had her assistant call me to "verify" my quotes...and when I said - "no, I didn't say that" and "no, that isn't what I meant at all," I was ignored - after all, what they were interested in was covering their...well, anyway, like Nadia Abu El Haj, they certainly weren't interested in the facts on the ground. You did say that Nadia Abu El Haj shouldn't be believed because she was a Palestinian, right? No, I said that Nadia Abu El Haj shouldn't be believed because her facts were wrong, twisted, and her research flawed.

You live in a settlement, right? No, I live in a beautiful city just outside Jerusalem. There are 35,000 people living here. But it is "occupied territory", right? Not by my definition and not even by the US government who has repeatedly said that Maale Adumim will never be "returned" should the Palestinians ever get around to peace talks rather than rockets.

Well, you did say...no, I didn't. But hey, Kramer wanted to write her story - even if it was too late (she contacted me way before the tenure decision was announced and then had to backtrack and change because Columbia surprised her and made her story really obsolete). Well, you do think...no, actually, I don't.

Forgetting the deaf assistant who couldn't understand that the quotes she was trying to verify weren't actually mine, what interested me most was Kramer's obvious ignorance in relation to Israel and Judaism...and yet, she believed herself qualified to discuss Israel's history. Well, I can only say the results (the article) bear out her lack of knowledge tremendously. She is, in my mind, the sad product of a society that has lost its focus, its priority, its essential connection and it makes me so happy that I chose to leave America and raise my children here.

I thought of giving Kramer's article the attention it deserves...none, but couldn't pass up the chance to note others also agree. Seems I'm not the only one to find Kramer's too-late commentary on Barnard's decision to be lacking and one-sided. Following is a blog piece about Kramer's article. After reading it and Larry Cohen-Esses' "masterpiece" I was left with a great feeling of sadness - forget Nadia Abu El-Haj - what is more important to me is a more basic question. Are these journalists typical of what American Jewry has become? Their incredible lack of knowledge, their left-leaning, anti-Israel slant? Their denials and back-bending apologetics?

Is this what American Jewry has come to? Is this typical? I felt the same way after reading Karen Arenson's article in the New York Times - what sorry excuses for Jews these people are...how apologetic they are for Israel daring to live and for those of us who dare to settle in our land. What sacrifices some future peace agreement may require not withstanding, Maale Adumim is very much part of Israel today, as is Ofra, Kiryat Arba, Otniel, and every other place where Jews live.

Who but Jews like these would dare to lead the battle cry against Israel's very existence - because make no mistake - that is what Nadia Abu El Haj is after. It is clear, if any of these "reporters" actually decided to READ her book (Cohen-Esses did, more power to him; Arenson and Kramer couldn't be bothered, being such "know-it-alls" themselves), they would see, they would read, they would understand. But no...they brought their agenda into play - Cohen-Esses and Arenson wanted to damn the settlers...who cares about tenure; Kramer wanted to stroke the leftist educational establishment...and all remind me of the great collaborators who would be the first to turn on their people...and then be shocked when the Nazis came for them too.

What is interesting to me, was how little of what Kramer really wrote actually came into our long discussions. She never told me that she questioned my calling Abu El-Haj a Palestinian American. But then, her goal wasn't really integrity or standing up...any more than Nadia Abu El Haj's goal was to accurately portray the facts on the ground. All in all, at the end of the day, a weasel is a weasel.

I found this on the Internet - how very appropriate:

A weasel is wild. Who knows what he thinks? He sleeps in his underground den, his tail draped over his nose. Sometimes he lives in his den for two days without leaving. Outside, he stalks rabbits, mice, muskrats, and birds, killing more bodies than he can eat warm, and often dragging the carcasses home. Obedient to instinct, he bites his prey at the neck, either splitting the jugular vein at the throat or crunching the brain at the base of the skull, and he does not let go . One naturalist refused to kill a weasel who was socketed into his hand deeply as a rattlesnake. The man could in no way pry the tiny weasel off and he had to walk half a mile to water, the weasel dangling from his palm, and soak him off like a stubborn label.

http://www.sheftman.com/ewrt1a/dillard/weasel.html

Anyway - here's a blog entry about Kramer's article.

http://sandbox.blog-city.com/are_columbias_palestinians_palestinian.htm

Are Columbia's Palestinians... Palestinian?

Tuesday, 22 April 2008

You will remember the case of Nadia Abu El-Haj, the anthropologist who last year received tenure at Barnard after a furious controversy over her book, Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society. Jane Kramer has written a panegyric to her for The New Yorker, simply brushing off serious-minded criticisms of Abu El-Haj's book.

Kramer (no relation to me) also has given the back story to her piece in a radio interview (from minute 21:00), where she makes a telltale confession: "I felt a deep commitment to write this piece, part of it having to do with being Jewish myself, and I thought to myself, Jewish people also have to stand up for her integrity." Ah, another Jew working through an identity complex on a Palestinian canvas. "Guilt-saddled New Yorker, Jewish, seeks stylish, well-bred Palestinian-American academic to love, admire, share Darwish and opera. Make me feel chosen again."

The odd thing is that Kramer goes to great lengths to deny that Nadia Abu El-Haj is a Palestinian at all. "Is Nadia Abu El-Haj a Palestinian?" asks the interviewer. Answer: "No, she's actually an Episcopalian from the United States, born in Long Island. Her father was Palestinian." Kramer again: "She [Abu El-Haj] came to this project [of Israeli archaeology] as an American with no particular axe to grind." (Amazing quote, that.) Kramer even scolds Paula Stern, Barnard alumna and author of the petition against tenure for Abu El-Haj, because Stern "didn't know Abu El-Haj wasn't Palestinian."

Well, by these criteria, (New York-born) Rashid Khalidi and (Champaign, Illinois-born) Lila Abu-Lughod and (Washington-born) Ali Abunimah aren't Palestinians either. They were born here, not there, and they're U.S. citizens. (As for being an Episcopalian, so was Edward Said.) Jane Kramer is so clueless that she seems not to have figured out that "Palestinian" can be an identity. To judge from Nadia Abu El-Haj's choices—from keeping her father's Arabic name to working exclusively on undermining Israel's claims—it's obvious that her Palestinian identity is profoundly meaningful (and useful) to her.

And in fact, Abu El-Haj doesn't have to chose between being American and Palestinian, any more than Jane Kramer has to choose between being American and Jewish. Kramer's insistence that Abu El-Haj can't be Palestinian because she's American or Episcopalian or from Long Island distorts the context of the controversy. That context was identity politics—not just of Jewish-Americans, but of Palestinian-Americans. Abu El-Haj is deep into her own identity politics, pursued tirelessly through her academic work. She's engaged full-time in the intellectual fortification of the Palestinian nationalist narrative. If you conceal that, you've botched the whole thing.

There's also a telling contradiction here. In her article, Jane Kramer calls Columbia's Rashid Khalidi a "Palestinian-American." It would be interesting to know what, in her mind, makes Khalidi a Palestinian-American, while Abu El-Haj is an American, period. Khalidi, like Abu El-Haj, was born in New York; like her, he had a Palestinian Muslim father and a mother who was neither. As a child, Khalidi sometimes attended Sunday school at the First Unitarian Church in Brooklyn, where his parents had been married. Khalidi also grew up in the United States, whereas Abu El-Haj spent much of her childhood abroad. So why does Jane Kramer make Khalidi into a hyphenated American, and not Abu El-Haj?

After all, Jewish people have to stand up for Khalidi's integrity, too.

Appendix: Here are a few sources, some of them supportive of Abu El-Haj, that identify her as a "Palestinian-American":

• Chronicle of Higher Education: "Ms. Abu El-Haj is a Palestinian-American assistant professor of anthropology at Barnard College..."
• Columbia Spectator: "Abu El-Haj, a Fulbright Scholar and Palestinian-American..."
• Ahram Weekly: "...another hate campaign is being waged to deny tenure to Palestinian-American anthropologist Nadia Abu El-Haj."
• International Socialist Review: "...the Palestinian-American anthropologist Nadia Abu El-Haj is fighting a well-orchestrated campaign by Zionist groups..."