Columbia is not a pretty campus. With the gothic spires of Yale and the Georgian red brick of Harvard, it's as though two Ivy Leagues schools had a child whom they wanted to attend an Ivy League school. Another way of looking at Columbia is that it is a New Yorker's impersonation of an Ivy League: combining what it thinks to be the best parts of each school in order to create something that advertises perfectly that it doesn't belong among its colleagues: like New York intellectuals to the European kinds.
This is Columbia. Every day I step on the campus and I teach European literature to Jewish students. I then go to meetings among Jewish teachers. Occasionally I'm supervised by Jewish administrators. I publish in journals with Jewish editors. Then I go to dinners where everyone speaks of one topic and only one: Israel.
They all seem to operate under a de facto assumption I'm one of them until I inform them otherwise: I don't quite know how I give the impression but they always seem all too eager to let me in their club. I remind them my name is Said and they always protest they thought it was Sephardic. I point to my accent and they say that Professor Trilling sounds like a transatlantic Brahmin, why can't a Jew of our generation too? What they're really saying is "you speak pretentiously" because I don't round my r's and aw's.
Once they realize I'm an Arab, the racism comes later. First class resentment plays its part. They hear the boarding school in me and naturally assume they're dealing with the privilege of an Arab prince. My father was a successful merchant of the upper-middle class, much like most of their fathers. Only their fathers had all of New York to ply their wears. My father had to travel the Middle East so he gave the appearance of affluence he did not possess.
And that's when they hear that I grew up in Jerusalem before my family was thrown out, and the inevitable next sentence is 'You weren't thrown out!'
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