the greycat blog

Jane Kramer’s New Yorker article about Nadia Abu El Haj is a piece of one-sided puffery in which Abu El Haj is depicted as a martyr to the dark forces that threaten scholarly freedom of inquiry and expression in the academy, and any notion that there might be serious criticisms of her work based on scholarship rather than politics or ideological bias is dismissed out of hand. The less than even-handed approach taken by Kramer to Abu El Haj’s work is made clear from the outset, in passages such as this, discussing the responses to Facts on the Ground:

The book was praised by colleagues who responded to the critical tropes that were Abu El-Haj’s legacy from scholars like Michel Foucault, Ian Hacking, Bruno Latour, and Edward Said, and dismissed by colleagues with a theoretical or a political or simply a turf interest in dismissing it.

So those who liked the book were scholars engaged with the intellectual movement of which it was part; those who didn’t were acting from motives of bias or vested interest.

Perhaps the most striking and questionable aspect of the article, however, is its depiction of Abu El Haj as an innocent abroad, a high-minded scholar taken aback by the very idea that anyone could see her work as controversial in any way that goes beyond ‘an exchange of letters in the kind of scholarly journals no one outside the academy reads’. Kramer quotes Abu El Haj’s description of herself as ’not a public intellectual. I’m drawn to archives, to disciplines where the evidence sits for a while. I don’t court controversy’. Perhaps she is sincere in saying that: after all the view that Israel is a repressive illegitimate colonial state is hardly controversial within the academy. On the contrary, it’s Middle East Studies Groupthink 101. It’s when people outside her own inward-looking peer group start to challenge the things she says - pointing out, perhaps, that she certainly didn’t let ‘the evidence [sit] for a while’ in her sympathetic account of the violent destruction of Joseph’s Tomb in Facts on the Ground - that she finds things uncomfortable. If you write books containing that kind of thing, and publish them, and have people buy them and read them, controversy will find you out. If you don’t like it, perhaps you are in the wrong line of work.

The account given by Kramer of how Nadia Abu El Haj came to be working on Israel is rather touching. If we are to believe what Kramer tells us, Abu El Haj was this close to devoting herself to the anthropological study of Palestine: ‘She wanted to figure out the place, the issues, the source of nationalism there’. But her dissertation adviser at Duke University changed the current of her studies by suggesting that she look at Israel instead: ‘you need to understand the institutions that have the power - the institutions of Israeli nationalism’. And that was that. This promising young scholar would henceforth devote herself to the study of Israeli national identity and Israeli institutions of power. What a radical choice to make. Picture the scene:

Dissertation Adviser: So, you want to analyze and critique the sources and nature of Palestinian nationalism and national identity?
Promising Young Scholar: Yes, that’s right. Palestine needs serious study. I want to figure out the place, the issues, the source of nationalism there.
Dissertation Adviser: Nah. Power’s the thing. Israel has the power. Study Israel.
Promising Young Scholar: Gosh, could I? That had never occurred to me. I bet hardly anyone ever critiques Israeli nationalism.
Dissertation Adviser (thinks): Booya! Another victory for intellectual diversity in the academy.

It’s hard to see what good Kramer’s article, with its patent biases, will do: it doesn’t inform, it doesn’t analyze, it doesn’t investigate, it doesn’t question. Written as it is in the dead-in-the-water prose that characterizes so much American big-title journalism, it doesn’t even entertain. It fails to engage with any of the serious criticisms of Nadia Abu El Haj’s work, and barely acknowledges their existence. It seeks to relate the Facts on the Ground controversy to the wider issue of the politicization of Middle East Studies, but does so in a way so skewed and blinkered that what it tries to say is rendered worthless; how seriously can you take someone who quotes Rashid Khalidi as an authority on academic ethics, and does so apparently with a straight face?

On the plus side, this being The New Yorker, there are some good cartoons in there.

Jane Kramer on Nadia Abu El Haj: further reading
‘The Petition’: link to the original article in PDF format
Phoebe Maltz: A balanced account
Orthodox Anarchist: The New Yorker takes aim at the Zionist thought police
Solomonia: The New Yorker dances to Nadia’s tune
The Bwog: Nadia Abu El-Haj speaks
Martin Kramer: Are Columbia’s Palestinians … Palestinian?

Further to my earlier post on Jane Kramer’s article in The New Yorker: still haven’t read it. Phoebe Maltz has, and says what she thinks here. An alternative view can be found at the Orthodox Anarchist (where there is also a link to another PDF of the full article).

There’s also an audio interview from KPFK (Los Angeles) in which Jon Wiener talks to the writer of the article, Jane Kramer. It can be accessed from this page - the direct link to the audio is here. The relevant portion of the programme starts at 21:00 and is about 15 minutes in length.

As it happens, I have just republished my own ‘Was Nadia Abu El Haj treated fairly?’, an article originally commissioned by History News Network and published by HNN on 12 November 2007, here on greycat.org. You can find the article here.

Back from hospital, back at the keyboard, and the first new post in a while is on an old topic: Nadia Abu El Haj. I’m very grateful to Richard Silverstein for alerting me to ‘The Petition: Israel, Palestine, and a Tenure Battle at Harvard’ by Jane Kramer, published in the current issue of The New Yorker. I haven’t read it yet, but when I do I may say something about it here (but only if I have something worth saying).

Here’s the link to a copy of the article (in PDF, at Scribd) which Richard Silverstein provides in the entry on his blog.

I know that I said my last post on Nadia Abu El Haj would be precisely that, my last post on the matter, at least for a while. However, as the following is of considerable interest for anyone who has been following the Abu El Haj controversy (and consists not of my views but of an exchange of views by others), I think I can be allowed to stretch a point. 

Larry Cohler-Esses, editor-at-large of The Jewish Week, is a journalist who has reported the Nadia Abu El Haj controversy in some detail. Following the publication of an article in which he was critical of the campaign against Abu El Haj, he was contacted by a Columbia University faculty member who took issue with his position. A very interesting and enlightening exchange of views took place, so interesting that Larry has - with the permission of his correspondent, on condition of anonymity - asked for it to be published in full here. What follows consists entirely of the text of the exchange between Larry and his anonymous correspondent (’XXX’), as Larry has forwarded it to me. As the whole thing makes for a long post, I have put the transcript itself under the cut. (more…)

The current (Fall 2007) edition of The Current (’A journal of contemporary politics, culture, and Jewish affairs’ published at Columbia University) has a special focus on ‘Studying Middle East Studies’, sparked by the Nadia Abu El Haj controversy. Three essays relate Abu El Haj’s work to wider currents in contemporary anthropology and Middle East studies. They are all well worth reading, but I would particularly recommend David Rosen’s discussion of Facts on the Ground.

• David Rosen, ‘Searching for Facts on the Ground‘
• James R. Russell, ‘Ideology over integrity in academe’
• Jonathan Rosenbaum, ‘Is truth attainable?’

This will probably be my last posting on Nadia Abu El Haj for a while. I think it’s time to let her get on with her work and see what she comes up with - not, I suspect, that it will contain many surprises.

‘Was Nadia Abu El Haj Treated Fairly?’ is the title of an article of mine published by History News Network today. Here’s the direct link.

A selection of further responses to Nadia Abu El Haj’s gaining of tenure, in no particular order.

Inside Higher Ed has a report that strives for balance, although citing this hostile review, now discredited, does no-one any favours. Some positive comments from two former students of Nadia Abu El Haj can be found at Interprete. Some tired old anti-tenure canards are given the chance to flutter their wings by Marty Peretz, who proves how well-informed he is about Nadia Abu El Haj’s work by getting her subject wrong (anthropology, not archaeology). A site called The Islamic Workplace has decided that Nadia Abu El Haj is a Muslim.

Over at Israel Matzav Paula Stern is quoted approvingly and at great length, which should tell you all you need to know. Elder of Ziyon favours an approach based on personal abuse, describing Nadia Abu El Haj as a ‘bigot’ pursuing ‘a purely Jew-hating agenda’, both of which claims are surely actionable. From another perspective (and under the category ‘Palestein’, sic), avari rejoices that Nadia Abu El Haj winning tenure means ‘that we are free to pursue knowledge against agendas of imperialism, oppression and hegemony’. Oh thank goodness, there are so few academics interested in doing that these days. Ethel Fenig at American Thinker condemns the tenure decision and reminds us that Jordan did a lousy job as custodian of eastern Jerusalem between 1948 and 1967, and that the Islamic authorities responsible for the Temple Mount today are little more than a gang of vandals. Both these statements are undeniably true; quite what they have to do with whether Nadia Abu El Haj should have been awarded tenure, however, is far from clear.

MuzzleWatch (’comments are closed’) welcomes the tenure decision, and cites Larry Cohler-Esses as a counter to Paula Stern; both pieces are, in my opinion, rather too partisan to form the basis of a balanced view of the issue. Israpundit offers a semi-literate but concise blend of misrepresentation, unfounded accusation and insulting insinuation: ‘Abu El-Haj, is an artful deconstructionist, fiction writer and Christian dhimmi doing the bidding for her beleagured Palestinian Islamists benefactors as a Social Anthropologist in the academy’.

Finally, The Bwog, which is compiled by staff from Columbia University’s undergraduate magazine The Blue and White, puts things in perspective with its description of the whole tenure controversy as ‘a drawn-out squabble on the margins of academia’.

[UPDATE 6 November 2007: I’ve slightly amended the wording of the penultimate paragraph to be fairer to Larry Cohler-Esses, in response to Richard Silverstein’s comment below.]

It’s been confirmed that Nadia Abu El Haj has been awarded tenure: ‘Controversial Barnard prof. gets tenure’ (Jewish Telegraph Agency), ‘Embattled Barnard anthropologist is awarded tenure’ (New York Times), ‘A new fact on the ground: Nadia Abu El Haj wins tenure at Barnard College’ (Chronicle of Higher Education), ‘Nadia Abu El-Haj gets tenure at Barnard despite smear campaign’ (MuzzleWatch), ‘Tenured!’ (Dr Jim West), ‘Columbia grants Abu El-Haj tenure’ (Richard Silverstein).

The campaign to deny Abu El Haj tenure was illegitimate in its conception and, in many ways, disreputable in its tactics. I am heartily glad that it failed. Tenure is a matter internal to the academic institutions concerned and internet campaigns, petitions and anonymous smear sites cannot be allowed to play any role. As with any other scholar, Nadia Abu El Haj’s tenure process was a matter for her, her colleagues and her university, and never was anybody else’s business.

There’s been no official announcement from Columbia or Barnard as yet, but what appears to be confirmation of the tenure decision from someone within the university administration is reported by the Columbia Spectator (an earlier version of the story here).

More coverage: The New York Sun, Solomonia, and (for anyone who has forgotten just what the campaign against Nadia Abu El Haj has been like) Paula Stern.

From Solomonia: ‘Sources: Nadia Abu El Haj receives tenure’. No confirmation elsewhere yet, as far as I am aware.