Joel Schalit

Personal Aggregation

I hadn’t heard of the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography before it ran one of the first pieces on Israel vs. Utopia. Today, I was informed that the book had made it’s 2009 best-of list. IvU is the 6th book cited, as you work your way down the page. The reviewer writes with an enormous amount of energy, and is extremely supportive.

I just did an interview with a terrific local journalist, Anna Momigliano, for Italy’s Jewish monthly, Pagine Hebraiche. We covered a lot of territory, relating to the book, as well as my family’s background in Venice. It was a nice change of conversational coordinates to navigate, though I wish I’d had more time to do my homework on my Italian ancestors.

Take Me to Your Leader

I was surprised to see the visage of a US president other than Obama. That is, a portrait of the only American head of state of equal iconographic significance. Painted on the surface of a section of the Berlin Wall, positioned outside the entrance to the European Union’s Brussels headquarters, Kennedy’s distant look particularly stood out.

Italy for Jews

The death of Claude Lévi-Strauss last month came as a shock. I thought he’d live forever. I was equally surprised by the ambivalence with which his passing was observed.

So much so, that, seeing this display of his works last night, in the brightly lit basement of our local Feltrinelli store, I felt strangely relieved to be away from America.

“There’s no ambiguity here,” I thought to myself, as I repeatedly snapped pictures of this display, hoping to get the perfect shot.

Writing’s on the Wall

I shouldn’t have been surprised by an image of Mussolini appearing out of nowhere. Appropriated for god knows what, this Shepherd Fairey-like portrait (could Il Duce be the next Andre the Giant?) on Broome Street was an awkward way of telling me that I was getting closer to the so-called old country. My teenage stomping grounds, Manhattan, and, quite literally, home. In three days I’d be on a plane, flying back to Milan.

Live anywhere long enough, and you’re bound to encounter references to it wherever you go. When I arrived in DC on Monday, my cab driver turned out to be an Eritrean from Milan. “You  ever go to the Africa Restaurant?” he asked, name-checking my favorite dining spot in town. “Milano, I have lots of family there,” said the Dominican driver of the taxi I took to JFK on Friday. “Its the one place in Europe with Latinos, like here.”

These anecdotes wouldn’t mean anything if it weren’t for the fact that much of my book is dedicated to demonstrating that the distance between “here” and “there” is never quite what it seems. Even more so now, in reference to the movement of Arabs and Jews back and forth, between the Occident and Orient, between San Francisco and Tel Aviv.  Perhaps its the war that makes my version of this seem so much more important.

Armor Piercing

All they could talk about was Obama. How naive he is. How he would be appeasing the Arabs. How, inevitably, he’d not only sell Israel short, but the Jewish people, too.

“We are the defenders of the West, the only barrier between Islam and democracy, and this young man still puts them first, as though Abdullah ever came before Netanyahu.”

The words were those of an aging general, long since retired from the IDF. “We defend this country for them, for you,” he said, looking at me, assuming that because of my American accent, I was an outsider.

I listened for as long as I could, trying to keep my cool, despite the infuriating assumptions that were being made. When I finally did speak up, I really spoke my mind. Everyone was surprised.

“You aren’t taking into account why the Americans would begin to express complex feelings towards us, towards the Middle East, and start contemplating such things as negotiations and withdrawal,” I replied.

I thought back to this conversation yesterday as I drove by this memorial, at the mouth of San Francisco Bay. There was something particularly moving about it, that caused me to stop, to think and remember.

Don’t get me wrong. I still loathe cliched displays like this. But sometimes, under certain circumstances, they’ll punch through the armor of the most jaded of skeptics.

The presence of a Veterans Administration hospital right behind it certainly helped.

America Versus Israel

Sidewalk market newsstand. San Francisco, June 2009.

Supermarket newsstand. Netanya, May 2009.

Trampled Under Foot

Bill Clinton graces the cover of The Lives of the Presidents, a special supplement to the January 15th edition of The Independent. Captured yesterday on a Circle Line train, in between the Victoria and Sloane Square tube stations.

The New Anti-Semitism

What do we make of right-wing incitement against Islam in America, and Arab Americans like Rashid Khalidi? Because it is primarily directed at Jews, despite the fact that most find themselves drawn to Obama, how are we to effectively interpret it, and work to minimize it’s potential consequences? Surely there is serious damage being done here.

Such forms of agitation are designed to erect the most vulgar of barriers between peoples, in this case, two American communities, both of whom share roots in the Middle East and bear unique personal witness to that region’s troubles. In the same way that US foreign policy has made it even more difficult to reconcile Jews and Arabs in the Levant, we must recognize that these kinds of practices also tend to inscribe similar kinds of divisions in the Diasporas we share.

Indeed, it is hard to not see in the kind of language used to classify Obama as a Muslim, and Khalidi a terrorist, a perverse desire to bring the war back to the West, and make sure that the same stresses that characterize life in the Middle East also make themselves felt in America as well. It seems that wherever we go, the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is inescapable.

-From an article in progress

Their Eyes Were Watching Gaza

Political insight is almost always far-sighted, and the Americans who invest their energy in worrying about the Israel-Palestine conflict are no exception. It is no accident that leftists in the United States started paying closer attention to that topic right when the American government, preoccupied with its own agenda, stopped doing so. The Bush Administration’s hands-off approach to the conflict, in sharp contrast to that of the administrations that preceded it, cried out for initiatives to be undertaken in civil society.

It wasn’t just the Bush Administration’s neglect of the Israel-Palestine conflict that elevated it to a central cause of the post-9/11 American Left, of course. But it sure helped. Indeed, as much anger as the Administration’s approach to the region inspired, that neglect may have been more influential in the end, for what it cleared was a pathway to intervention. Progressives were already struggling with a profoundly limited sense of agency. In the absence of government involvement, however, they found it easier to imagine their actions having a direct effect on the situation in Israel and Palestine. From this perspective, the absence of official interference actually seemed to be as much a blessing as a curse.

As the decade wore on, American political opinions about the conflict appeared to be significantly less hampered by the poorly informed provincialism that both Israelis and Europeans have long ascribed to the United States. Whether or not one agrees with the positions that Americans started adopting as a consequence of their interest in the topic is not important. What matters is that we take that investment seriously, understanding that it is the result of the Middle East’s increasing prominence in the psychological life of the United States.

-Excerpted from Israel vs. Utopia

Burning Down the House

When we first moved into the neighborhood, we rented an apartment from a former aide to House Majority Leader Nancy Pelosi. Always eager to talk politics with me, almost every time we spoke, our ex-landlord would inevitably disclose how disappointed he was to no longer be on the local Congresswoman’s staff.

Seeing this poster pasted to the ground floor of a new condo being built down the street, I couldn’t help but think of my former landlord, and wonder how he’d react to this attack on his one-time employer. Not particularly partial to this brand of agitprop myself, for once, it seemed a little more complex than usual.

It must be the superimposed Tow Away sign, and the 666 scrawled on Pelosi’s forehead. “Endless midrash“, as we were fond of saying in my biblical hermeneutics class in grad school. Everything is commentary.