Nowhere in Particular

It isn’t the first place that comes to mind when you think about getting a good plate of hummus. However, as far as San Francisco’s Arab restaurants go, its one of the city’s longest-running Mideastern establishments, and the kibbe, if I remember correctly, is absolutely first class. The only other local place that served kibbe of that calibre was the late, great Cleopatra’s, in the outer Sunset, several blocks west of the old San Francisco Conservatory of Music campus.

One of the things that Jennifer wrote to me about during the last month we were separated was her determination to find an equally good spot for hummus here in Milan. She finally found one near her firm’s new office, a few blocks from Garibaldi station. I’ve yet to try it, but frankly, I confess to having fallen in love with a Turkish-run doner spread a stone’s throw away from our apartment. If you ask them to hold the mayo (yes, mayo), their panino kebab is totally killer.

Schnauzers Against Fascism

We are all anti-Fascists. Including Pixel, whose posterior appears in the foreground. Milan, 9/23.

Travel Literature

One of the things I love to do at airport bookstores is take stock of the books they carry. Inevitably, there are surprises, standout titles one would be hard pressed to immediately locate in regular bookshops, and always a good war history or two. While I am no expert on French stores, changing planes at de Gaulle last week, this send-up of Islamic fundamentalism, a collaboration between a comic artist and a journalist, stood out.

The reason? The familiarity of the title. It reminded me of a joke my brother used to make satirizing 9/11 conspiracy theorists, speculating that Bin Laden was secretly Jewish. “Ben Ladin,” (as in Ladino), he would pun, transforming “Bin” (son) into its Hebrew sibling, “Ben”. Seeing this title, stocked on a shelf near auto mags, I couldn’t help but recall David’s sardonic translation, as though others were clued into his same wavelength.

Chock Full of Signifiers

Who said advertising was bad for you. Milan, 9/18.

Otherwise Known as Emo

On Friday morning, every paper ran the same cover story: Six Italian soldiers had been killed by a suicide bomber in Kabul. Corriere Della Serra, La Repubblica, even the local edition of The Metro, all seemed to be working with the same set of photos of the event’s aftermath. For the first time since we arrived here in March, it was like we were overhearing the entire country sighing, simultaneously. From left to right, the reaction was the same. Everyone was in a state of shock.

Taking the dogs out for their afternoon stroll today, I decided to walk them down a side street, two blocks from here, where I knew the traffic would be light, and the pedestrians at a minimum. Hemmed in by a vacant elementary school on one side, another undergoing renovation, and a college campus, Beroldo street also boasts some of the best political posters in the neighborhood. Lo and behold this unambiguous response to Thursday’s death toll in Afghanistan.

“Enough Italian blood for American petroleum,” it reads.

The New Italian Pop

‘Eurabia’. Local gig flyer, Corso Buenos Aires. Milan, May 2009.

Remixing anti-Semitism

To the post-1967 progressive mind, we had become Europeans, when, until Israel’s independence, were considered neither fully white nor adequately oriental, even though it was not uncommon for Jews to be derided as ‘Muslim’.

The problem is that the contemporary judgment of the left, committed as it is to the colonial critique of Zionism, oversimplifies this history, forgetting it, impeding the Arab connection. It also fails to acknowledge any other Jewish ethnicity than Ashkenazi, further severing any ties between Jews and the Levant.

To read the rest of this article, click here.

Complex Carbohydrates

That’s one ideologically charged burrito. Notice it’s colonially-designated Indian neighbor. Cal Mart supermarket, SF. 9/4/09.

Branding anti-Racism

Criticism of European anti-Semitism always neglects its context. That is, it mistakes it’s object, frequently construed as being Israel, for being more important than what it has in common with other continental racisms. It is a criticism of the Jewish right to statehood, to political freedom, never an expression of a larger prejudicial impulse towards towards persons of Mideast descent, which attaches itself to different European Semitic communities at different times.

Reading the mountain of op-eds this week about the Aftonbladet affair, I could not help but wonder why, if we were really dealing with a case of anti-Semitism, not a single charge ever sought to place itself within the context of larger trends in contemporary European xenophobia. Was it because of the political persuasions of the persons making the claims, who, even if they are not sympathetic to Arabs, cannot see the similar ideological mechanism that substitutes Muslim for Jew, and vice versa?

Or was it because the critique of anti-Semitism took form before the advent of large scale Muslim immigration to Europe, and never redefined itself to include both peoples? I’m inclined to believe the latter, especially considering the degree to which the critique of anti-Jewish racism became problematized in left circles following the Six Day War. ‘Anti-anti-Semitism’ came to be considered an ideology masking Israeli transgressions against Palestinians.

Anti-Arab racism had to unnecessarily get segregated, independent of European Muslims’ experience of the same basic prejudices as the continent’s former Jewish population. There would be no concentration camps, but there would be facsimiles of everything else: specifically a combination of ghettoization and integration. They would be outsiders within the bourgeoisie, as Max Horkheimer once described Europe’s Jews, as well as perennially itinerant migrant laborers.