Ugh why does FOOD have to be problematic? Because it does.

I love this week's topic--food is just the greatest. It is unfortunate that there exists a petty rift between Palestinians and Israelis based on "whose" food hummus or pita or labneh or za'atar is. This is Arab food, not necessarily Muslim or Jewish, just Arab, and it's silly to argue about something as objective and simple as that, I think. As far as I have observed, one reason that Israelis tend to be defensive about ownership over certain foods is because of how common it is that Israel's right to exist is questioned and challenged. The Middle Eastern legitimacy that it gives someone to be from an Arab land(for generations) and to really be able to call hummus "their own" is a trait that Israelis from more recent, European roots, covet.
Food represents culture, history, birthplace, ancestry. As we have read in past weeks, the validity of the existence of the state of Israel is constantly being disputed, so it is understandable that Zionists and Israelis would cling to something as simple as food as a means of bolstering their case. Similarly, it is understandable that anti-Zionists and Palestinians and other Arabs would cling to food for the same reason. There is, admittedly, a good deal of cultural appropriation that occurs within Israeli society, but as was mentioned briefly in the July 2008 Street Food video, many Jews in Israel are just as much Arab as their Muslim or Palestinian neighbors. Something that I have witnessed that surprises and disappoints me is the lack of awareness within the Jewish population about the cultural appropriation that occurs in this context. I myself only relatively recently realized the appropriation that I had been exposed to for most of my life through Jewish education. There are countless articles about Israeli appropriation of Palestinian culture, this one being particularly thorough (and angry), and while some people view it as less of a big deal in comparison with, say, the continued construction of the settlements, it really is a huge deal and I believe that it is a very important issue that needs to be addressed before peace between civilians (not necessarily governments) can happen. Cultural appropriation threatens identities that mean a lot to a lot of people, and straightening out issues of misrepresentation and cultural belonging will enable Israelis and Palestinians to view each other in accurate ways that each group consents to.
1. How can a large-scale anti-appropriation program work?
2. How best can everyday civilians react to appropriation effectively and assertively but also kindly and in an understanding way that promotes discussion instead of angry confrontation and closed minds?
3. Does anyone think that focusing on this detracts from the larger conflict and is counterproductive(an issue I approached in a previous post)?

WOW OOPS OH MAN I forgot about this post yesterday. Whirlwind week. Here we go.

Our discussion today was a mini love-fest about the readings we've been having, and this is a good thing. Everyone is thoughtful, mindful, critical thinkers who are open to new ideas. In my group's discussion, we discussed Galit Hasan-Rokem's short but meaningful piece about the femininization of the city of Jerusalem and other lands throughout history. One group member mentioned that he had not noticed this trend before in studying history, and this surprised me considering that this is one of the first things I think about when I think about the history of a region--the controlling, possessive language used to describe a place. Once we discussed it a little bit more he said that, yes, he had definitely heard this language before in several places. This made me think even more about how feminist education is needed, not only to call attention to the mindsets that have been put in place throughout the years by male-dominated society (history writing/teaching and politics, especially), but also to offer ways of fighting it and eventually reversing it. 

These readings have also made me think more about something that has been on my mind for quite some time. As a child I thought that all Jews were more or less the same as I was, had the same values, liked the same movies, hated marzipan (just kidding, but marzipan is still super gross), etc. This might sound silly and naive, but it was only about 6 years ago that I realized that this was not at all the case. When I was in Israel to celebrate my Bat Mitzvah, I was walking around a religious area of Jerusalem and got harshly scolded for the shorts that I was wearing (it was 99 degrees out, *give me a break*). This was the first time, followed by instances of sexism, homophobia, and xenophobia that I witnessed coming from Ultra-Ultra-Orthodox people that I would have at one point considered members of my own extended family--the family of the Jewish people. Realizing this separation in values allowed me to think more critically about the fundamentalism that is present in all religions, including my own, and to say with truth and conviction that it's wrong and stupid (this is my very-very-proper and professional opinion).

I have to think, now, about how I will include anti-fundamentalist information in my curriculum. It's hard to change mindsets, but how else will peace be achieved if we don't try?

Jerusalem; Not a Woman.

What amazing readings. There are many questions that specifically Hasan-Rokem's and Sa'ar's pieces bring to light, such as 1. why land is constantly anthropomorphized (or rather feminomorphized, if you'll allow me to totally make up a word), 2. how and why that is problematic for people who live on that land and for the gender to which the land is compared, and 3. how that precedent/trend can be crushed (because really, it needs to be).

1. Land is physical, it is fruitful, it is beautiful, it can be claimed. It represents the purposes that men have, throughout history, assigned for women to fulfill, and in this sense it is easy to see how land has been gendered female and how it has been controlled and bought and sold and manipulated and coveted much like women often are.

2. This is clearly a problem, but it is important that we examine exactly why this is a problem. The readings help shine a light on the numerous issues involved in gendering inanimate objects such as land. The concept that since land is where people are born, is where things grow, is beautiful, and therefore is like a woman comes from the mindset that women have an inherent duty or responsibility to produce, to be used for production, to be beautiful, to obey and succumb. This mindset is clearly damaging to women, placing them in a binder (sorry, couldn't help myself) of limited options for ways that they can live their lives or contribute to society. For the people who live on this land, this mindset is damaging because it implies that there is a correct owner of the land and does not allow for co-ownership or collective ownership or--heaven forbid--no ownership at all. This has created, as we see with Jerusalem, violence between groups that see themselves as being the rightful owners and marginalization of less powerful groups living on that land.

3. If only the soil itself could rise up and declare its independence from the fundamentalist sentimentality and arbitrary control that people place upon it. "I'm land! Just live on me and stop fighting!" Of course it's not that simple. I really am not entirely sure how this problem can be addressed. The patriarchy is alive and well everywhere we look--can standing up to injustices we experience as women (and witness or perpetuate, as men or in some cases women) help dislodge land from the area of our brains that is reserved for things that our "mine and mine alone and no one else's"?

My questions for everyone are:
1. How can the anthropomorphizing of land be stopped, especially in respect to the female gender being assigned to it and therefore justifying its control and possession by people in power?
2. Whatever the answer is to that question, can it work in Jewish and Muslim societies, both of which have different ways of marginalizing women and trying to be the sole owners of special parts of physical land?

Music

Music plays an incredibly huge role in my life. I think that a love of music, whichever kind doesn't matter, is something that all humans share. I'm sure there's someone out there who could do without, but if you're anything like me you're listening to music every chance you get. I listen to music when I wake up and shower and brush my teeth, when I'm riding my bike to class, when I'm studying, when I'm hanging out with friends (this includes playing music), when I'm eating, and often when I'm falling asleep. I think some of this has to do with the ADD that I've always suspected I have, but it also has to do with how much music makes me think and feel, and with the fact that I just love that and cannot get enough of it. 

It may be weird to cite this, but last month I tweeted, "glad I listen to music in obsessive stints; every album has a clearly defined place in my memory timeline w/ moods, places, ppl, seasons". This couldn't be more true. As a tiny kid I remember the "classics" (Spice Girls, Destiny's Child, etc) that I would jam to, but more than those I remember artists that my mother introduced me to, including Joni Mitchell, Enya(!!!!!), Melanie Safka, Carol King, The Beatles, and Shlomo Carlebach. My middle school years brought obsessions with Dispatch, Tegan & Sara, more Joni Mitchell & The Beatles, Led Zeppelin, Neutral Milk Hotel, Iron&Wine, Panic at the Disco(yup), and Modest Mouse. High school Sophie was still into that music, but was a bit more punk, a bit more experimental, a bit more influenced by the suggestions that would pop up on youtube, taking me on endless chases of that perfect new band. I worked at the local library all throughout high school, and every CD cover that caught my eye was one that I checked out and listened to. This exploded my musical horizon, and led to countless exciting discoveries that I still cherish today. Coming to college, I made friends with/started living with a lot of local musicians and poets and over the past three years have been going to loud DIY basement shows, so my taste in music has expanded even further into the realm of sometimes gritty, sometimes soft, sometimes repetitive, sometimes nuanced and complicated (but always genuine, thoughtful, and beautiful) homemade music.

Writing this post is almost bringing me to tears as I think about how music has changed me and helped me grow and learn and think and act over the course of my life. Similarly to how the internet opened up my eyes to a lot of things that other people think and feel that I thought were unique to my mind only, music (both before and after I began using the internet daily and discovering cool things there) gave me windows into the lives of other people that I would not have otherwise had. Things that I was/am unable to experience were sung about in the songs I listened to, and I gained wisdom, empathy, perspective, confidence, and curiosity by listening to the lyrics.

People are able to communicate their own stories through music, and having the opportunity to just switch on the radio or whatever and hear someone's personal story is an invaluable privilege we have today. This storytelling/sharing helps me learn about types of people and ways of life that I had never myself encountered, and I myself have written down parts of my own personal story, however cryptically, for others to listen to and learn from. One school of thought in nation-building discourse is that in order to nurture peace in a country you must establish trust within the population, especially in cases where ethnic divides have driven a stake between two groups of the citizenry. One way of doing this which has proven effective in several cases is by increasing non-political interaction between members of society, like having more economic integration between ethnic groups or like placing a playground directly in between two distinctly separate communities. Another way of going about creating trust within a population is by sharing personal stories and narratives, specifically through music, which is so deeply enjoyed universally by basically everyone. I don't think that music alone can bring together an entire country that was once at war, but I think that music is a crucial, inherently human, simple way of communicating complicated and often emotionally-charged thoughts and opinions in a way that everyone (even those with differing opinions) can wrap their heads around.

The Consequence of Sound

My favorite piece this week was the excerpt from Parallels and Paradoxes. There were a few fascinating parts that really spoke to me.

The first was Said's observation that "there is a lot of sentimentality about 'homelands'" that he said he didn't care for. So many people, myself included, were/are raised with some sense of history and family ties to something--religion, geographic location, professions or other traditions passed down through generations. These are mostly arbitrary connections, and as we grow older we are more and more able to sincerely question their validity and their meaning and the place that we want them to occupy within our own lives, separate from the lives of our other family members/community members. This is obviously a common trope when discussing the I-P conflict, and it leads perfectly into the next section in the reading that I want to explore.

If one comes to the conclusion that historical connections and loyalties to places and religions and even family members is arbitrary and meaningless, one runs the very real risk of then delegitimizing the thoughts, feelings, and values of anyone who disagrees or identifies even a little bit with any of these connections. Pages 8, 9, and 10 address the concept of the "other" and how a shared experience (even one as small as citizens from two different countries playing the exact same notes at the exact same time) can break down those arbitrary walls between people who were told they should be enemies and believed that.

I usually zoom out at the end of my reading responses and try to think about how the lessons learned on the smaller, situational scales of the readings could be applied to the larger populations of Israel & Palestine (and areas elsewhere in the world, of course). This week, the questions on my mind are similar to some of the things that we've recently been discussing in class.
How can we create shared experiences on large scales, for example in a busy market street in Jerusalem or a shopping center in Tel Aviv or even--and this is a little crazy--in the settlements between Israeli settlers and Palestinians living behind the Green Line? Another question that follows, then, is about whether or not the problems between the two populations are trivialized by the attempt to create dialogue and friendship on a person-to-person level. After all, isn't that the best way to start building peace(this is not a rhetorical question)?

Priorities, hypocrisy, and critical thinking in pro-Palestinian activism

 There are a few points that I'd like to explore in this week's discussion response.
     1. The first is the criticism that Israel "pinkwashes", or flaunts and exaggerates its LGBTQ-friendly legislation and national attitude in order to garner the support and admiration of other nations and liberal citizens of the United States, especially.
     2. The second is the criticism that Israel is violating basic tenets of human rights (under international law).
     3. The third is the perplexing fact that, after the acknowledgement of the obvious fact that yes, Israel is guilty of human rights abuses, pro-Palestinian activists and others on the far left side of the political spectrum (which is where I myself stand) still fail to acknowledge or recognize the multitude of other human rights crises around the world that are exponentially worse than that of the residents of the West Bank & Gaza.

1. Yep. It does. It uses the face of its LGBT population as a diplomatic tool. It tries to make it seem as if Israel is 100% LGBT-friendly when it in fact is not. Israel, just like the United States, still denies LGBT couples the respect they deserve by barring them from marriage and the entire list of rights and privileges that come along with marriage. However, the claims made on promotional postcards or internet banners advertising Israel as an LGBT haven are that it is a beacon of hope for LGBT acceptance in the Middle East and that members of the LGBT community can live among society just as anyone else would and that there is a vibrant LGBT community thriving within Israel while just miles away in other Middle Eastern countries people do not dare to come out for fear of losing their jobs, licenses, families, friends, and even their lives. These claims are as true as they are in the United states and Israel has every right to be waving them around like oversized rainbow flags at the Jerusalem Pride Parade each year. People who fixate on Israel's pink washing are just distracting from the more urgent issues of homophobia in surrounding countries and in the Palestinian territories. Perhaps this is because they care more about the issues of Palestinians than they do about the issues of the LGBT community, and there's absolutely nothing wrong with that. Everyone has their priorities, but it's important to gain perspective and not attack those who are making strides in your issue-area while others are centuries behind the times.

2. Yep. It absolutely is. Just to use one example, it's tight grip of the transport of goods and people across borders in Gaza and the West Bank is damaging and unacceptable, even in the face of the radically decreased instances of Palestinian terrorism. Israel doesn't treat the Palestinians the way they should be treated--beginning and end of story.

3. Is this because of the activist's devotion to the region? Are they purely and solely concerned with what goes on in Israel and the territories and do they not really care about things that happen elsewhere in the world? If so, then fantastic. It's great that these people are dedicated to this one area and their one cause and they know what they want and how they feel and why and they're living in ways that are meaningful to them by championing this one cause. However, I do not believe that this is the case for the majority of pro-Palestinian activists today, especially not the American activists. American pro-Palestinian activists don't seem to acknowledge that there is not a single democracy in existence that is free of discrimination and mistreatment of marginalized populations, and that there are regions in the world where imperial legacies or corrupt ruling parties have created exponentially more hideous examples of human rights abuses (the Congo, North Korea, Russia, etc). Have these activists just given up on the issue of US abuses of Native Americans that continue still today? Are these activists blind to the killing of black youth and the funneling of them into prisons that is perpetuated by egregious US laws and deeply engrained prejudice? I have never received a satisfying answer to these question--does anyone have any insight?

Mm, mm, mm, mm, Feminismmmm

"alQaws strives for the social change and liberation that result from directly challenging and breaking oppressive social structures. We therefore view the adoption of 'feminism' as a means to break existing power relations and challenge hegemony in society to be a must. Hence we reaffirm our rejection of all forms of oppression in its various manifestations, whether these be patriarchal, economic, nationalistic or ethnic, in order to ensure genuine inclusivity in our community and for other marginalized groups."

This excerpt from the alQaws website totally speaks to me. Every society on Earth has repressive elements within it. Specifically in this week's readings we can see examples of behavior or traditions in the Ultra-Orthodox Jewish community that are restrictive of women and men alike. For example, women are socially prohibited from participating in politics and must wear extremely modest clothing, and men are socially pressured to spend their lives dedicated to the study of the Torah and the passing down of spirituality and religious piety/observance to later generations. I'm sure you're all aware of the heavy press that surrounds the oppressive activities and behaviors of certain sects or certain observance levels of Islam, such as the honor killings that were criticized in DAM's video and the practice of wearing Hijabs or modest clothing that many people criticize, most harshly in France with actual legislation banning certain types of religious clothing. 

This calls into question what feminism really means in terms of religious observance. I was raised in a very liberal, sex-positive, feminist environment. My family and I used to be religiously observant(of Judaism) and my mother, sister, and I would wear more modest clothing, often skirts, because it was customary. I didn't feel spiritually enlightened by the practice so it slowly became something I no longer did (the story is the same with going to synagogue and being religiously observant in many of the traditional ways). However, many of my Jewish friends feel a strong religious and spiritual connection to Judaism through the practice of modest dress, traditional prayers, and observance of "mitzvot"(commandments from the Torah) and holidays, etc. Similarly, many of my Muslim friends say that they enjoy wearing their hijabs and other sorts of traditional or modest dress because it is a way of connecting to their faith through tangible means. For some modest dress means focusing energy inwards and upwards, to the self and to the divine, not outward to appearances or attracting attention from others through superficial characteristics.

When discussing the issue of wearing makeup and still calling oneself a feminist (a question that my friends and I struggle with), a friend of mine once said that to her, "feminism means doing whatever makes you feel good". Immediately a million qualifications to that jumped out at me, like "what if that thing makes you feel good because it makes you feel more accepted by society and not necessarily by your true self?", "what if that thing somehow hurts other women or women's position in the world?", etc. 
Is feminism in a religious context doing whatever makes you feel connected to whatever god in which you believe? 
What are the limitations of this? 
Does something that makes you feel good have the potential to be oppressive or harmful to the way the world views and treats women?