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Oct. 18, 2013
B.C. minds stretched
CFHU scholars draws hundreds to event.
PAT JOHNSON
When Richard Cohen told a professor at McGill in the 1960s that he wanted to study an aspect of Jewish history, he was dissuaded “because historians didn’t think there was a history,” he said. For a swath of conventional historians, the history of Judaism, Cohen said, ended with Jesus.
Cohen, who is now a professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, was speaking at Stretch Your Mind, a weekend of learning presented in Vancouver Oct. 5 and 6 by Canadian Friends of the Hebrew U.
When Cohen arrived in Israel and encountered the libraries of Jewish learning, he asked, “Who is hiding this from me?”
Things have changed. Conferences of the Association for Jewish Studies, which attracted maybe 20 scholars in the 1960s, now draw thousands, he said. The observation was significant in an environment where hundreds of British Columbians assembled to listen and talk to leading thinkers in the Jewish world.
The issue was also relevant as the event took place just as a major study of American Jews indicated lurking dangers to continuity. Cohen noted that contemporary doomsayers are not particularly novel. In 19th-century Germany, one leading figure called on his co-religionists to “prepare for Judaism a nice burial.”
But the ideas of Moses Mendelssohn – “the rational Jew” – signified a turning point in Jewish self-identity and provided a middle way between abandoning Jewish spirituality in favor of civil emancipation. A leading thinker of the Jewish Enlightenment, the Haskalah, Mendelssohn represented the beginning of the modern in the Jewish narrative, said Cohen.
As Jews became less socially and economically isolated in parts of Europe, a sort of fear of freedom existed, with leading Jewish figures lamenting that the integration into larger society would grant individuals personal autonomy and eliminate the constraints of Jewish community regulation. Within decades, though, Jewish history would come full circle, in a sense, as huge swaths of European Jews adopted Zionism, and Theodor Herzl was depicted as a new Moses, leading his people to a promised land.
That promised land has not been all milk and honey, noted Cohen’s colleague, Prof. Dan Avnon. Israel was founded by leaders with firm values based in social democracy and Jewish nationalism. However, those values were not shared by the ultra-Orthodox or by non-Jewish minorities, said Avnon. When four separate education systems were created (for religious Hebrew-speakers, non-religious Hebrew speakers, Arabic-speakers and an independent Charedi system), Israel lost an opportunity to forge a consensus of core values. Avnon’s academic work involves creating a civics curriculum that could be a model for creating a single, unifying national narrative. (Avnon’s work is featured in “Language and core values.”)
In a pair of lectures on contemporary developments in the Mideast, Prof. Avraham Sela warned participants against drawing any umbrella conclusions about the Arab Spring. Attempts to create a single understanding of events across the Middle East and North Africa are difficult because of the diversity of the situations, Sela said. Libya is not the same as Tunisia, which is not the same as Syria.
What is behind the uprisings? To what extent are they organized versus spontaneous? What role does social media play? Are political parties or social movements behind them? Do any or all of them have specific platforms or agendas? “The answers to all these questions are very, very vague,” he said.
A series of coups in the 1950s and ’60s brought to power a generation of tyrants in Egypt, Libya, Syria and elsewhere. While the uprisings that ousted these dictators or their successors may seem similar, each is founded on unique predicates. They share one thing in common, though, Sela said: there is no example of an open, democratic government emerging in these states.
One of the great challenges is that the deposed dictators each left a vacuum in their wake. In Egypt, for example, those who began the uprising against Hosni Mubarak included a strong contingent of secularists, but when the dictatorship was overthrown, there was only one entity – the Muslim Brotherhood – that had the organizational capacity to replace it. For decades, when political activity was suppressed, the only place safe for expression contrary to the government was the mosque. When the regime was overthrown, the only agency strong enough to have survived decades of oppression was the Muslim Brotherhood, with its base in the religious establishment. It is a familiar scenario. When the American intervention dismantled the Baath regime in Iraq, Sela said, the only organized opposition was the Islamists.
Sela warned that Westerners may be romanticizing the idea of developing world peoples taking to the streets to demand the sorts of government we think they deserve. Watching Egyptians or Syrians take to social media to express themselves helps convince us that they are very much like us. But we may be deceiving ourselves to assume that all countries are on a trajectory toward economic development and democratization.
There are also anomalous cases in which dictatorships of various levels of severity appear to have survived the Arab Spring relatively unscathed. In places like Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, money goes a long way to heel populations. The social contract in these states relies on monetary compensation to appease unrest, Sela said. Historical legitimacy can also play a significant role, which can help explain why Jordan did not experience the worst of the upheavals of recent years. The Hashemite dynasty in that country is accepted as direct descendants of Muhammad, putting the Jordanian king above criticism to a degree accepted even by Islamists.
The Syrian situation is extraordinary, Sela said, because the authoritarian power rests in the hands of a member of a minority population that represents about 10 percent of the country. The fear among the Alawites, who count among their number President Bashar al-Assad, is that any alternative to the status quo could be catastrophic. “For them to start any dialogue with other groups would seem like suicide,” he said.
And why did the Arab Spring not significantly impact places like Lebanon or Algeria? Sela contends that lingering memories of traumatic civil wars left the people in those states more reticent to initiate anything that might turn violent.
Addressing domestic Israeli reactions to regional events, Sela was succinct. Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s speech at the United Nations this month was of a pitch, Sela said, that made Israelis feel they needed to retreat to the bunker. Sela added that an Israeli prime minister lecturing other states about nuclear issues is like living in a glass house.
The overall political situation in the region puts Israel in a comfortable position vis-à-vis conventional threats, Sela said. Iran notwithstanding, Israel is in a militarily enviable position, he argued, saying that Israel’s greatest threats are internal, but those are not the matters he came to discuss.
The day of lectures also featured Prof. Moshe Tatar on issues of adolescents in crisis, and diversity in Israel’s education system. Prof. Isaiah Arkin, who lectured on new tools to combat viruses, also offered the keynote presentation on the previous night. He provided an overview of the huge range of research taking place at Hebrew U in areas as diverse as new treatments for dementia, deep brain stimulation to reduce the effects of Parkinson’s disease, soil solarization and water remediation to increase crop productivity, and software that provides synopses of video data.
The weekend event was attended by honorary co-chairs representing the University of British Columbia and Simon Fraser University. SFU president Andrew Petter told the audience about his recent trip to Israel and about educational partnerships being enhanced between Israel and British Columbia.
Pat Johnson is a Vancouver writer and principal in PRsuasiveMedia.com.
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