Columbia is not a pretty campus: still more

   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 among the cosmopolitan. 

Every day I step onto campus and 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 know how I give the impression but they're always eager to let me into 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 aristocracy he did not possess.

And that's when they hear that I grew up in Jerusalem before my family was thrown out, and I hear the  inevitable next sentence: 

'You weren't thrown out.'   

Exile takes on many, many forms. There is the forced exile of displacement, there is the internal exile of the discriminated, then there's the internal exile of the assistant professor, who bars his dignity from a series of classrooms, meetings and dinner parties to which no one there has desire to go. Other exiles are forced, this one is entirely self-generated. 

I suppose one should be grateful one is not over there. Being Protestant one is born in station over Palestinian Muslims who have suffered endlessly: before the Jews there were the Ottomans, the Syrians, the British, the French, even the Arabians. If anyone here knew the details of my biography, they would tell me I'm Egyptian and American, not Palestinian. They would call our family home in Jerusalem a mere vacation home and call it entirely typical of Palestinians to claim this land from the river to the sea as their inherent right when they're nothing but tourists. To be perfectly frank, I don't even know if I'm Palestinian. I've always felt out of place among Palestinians, Egyptians, the English and Americans. I am a nationality of one, possessing an internal passport shared not even by my sisters. One cannot deny it is an exile of extreme material comfort, but it is an exile of the self in perpetuum. 

But my reality is a world of un-reality--shared not even by other Saids, let alone by all the Awads, Al-Najars, El-Masrys and Odehs of the Gaza camps. I am merely marginalized, they are forgotten. It is far more convenient to forget them: to the world and to me; to the professional life I want, to the social life I loathe, to the life of an assistant professor people predict will be one of the great thinkers of our time, but care not at all for the person beneath the thought. 

I go to class and all the Jewish students mispronounce my name: Sed, Sayd, Sa-yed, Sa-yaad, Sah-eed, Saud, Soud, Sa-oood, in four years I think I've heard every malapropism on my name only for a student to find a new way of disfiguring it. Even the smart ones do it: especially the smart ones. I've tried to figure out whether this is a passive aggressive trait: unconscious hostility toward me lain beneath a person whose performance I have to judge. Or perhaps the students are smart enough to sense what faculty members never do: and their mispronunciation is a conscious code of reminding me that I'm not one of them. Or having their own names mispronounced so often by gentiles they unconsciously mispronounce mine as a kind of initiation ritual to make me feel at home among them. Or perhaps it's my own unconscious hostility toward them that I take it so personally. 

Nevertheless, they're generally very friendly, cooperative, good students, sometimes even solicitous of my welfare to a point that I find intrusive. Some of even shown signs of romantic interest: a number of whom display a number of features prized by the more debased among my colleagues. I, however, try not to indulge that time-honored tradition of dating my students as a matter of policy, though a few graduate students have made their interest in me quite plain. One even was male: I've been mistaken for a homosexual since Northfield Mount Hermon. One cannot simply be a dandy in the twentieth century. Instead I'm going with a business school Lebanese girl named Mariam who refers to herself as "Wall Street Friends of SDS."

Here at Columbia, they treat me as a new literary luminary, perhaps the new literary luminary. They treat me as their child, their successor, the talking head of immaculate coif who pontificates complexity on television shows America's women have on in the background while they're vaccuming to remind themselves they once were allowed to use a brain rather than a body. They treat me as a curious melange of friend and son when all I want is to send them to hell, gahennim and jahannam as it were. Maybe I truly am the child of these obnoxiously combative semites, but if I am, I'm an Oedipal child and all I ever feel toward them is murder. 

I sit there, at yet another party not even they want to go to, glass of wine in hand that's expensive but not too expensive, as they pontificate to each other and particularly to me as the young man to whom they pass their great pearls of wisdom: Boswell to a series of Johnsons whom they view as the epilogue to their golden era that will make a career of remembering them to a public that never truly cared what they had to say any more than they cared what I had to say. 

In our era of university unrest for which they were the cause, they play their parts as the cold water on the hot coffee of the new radicalism, inflaming the world after a generation of status quo that they enabled. Jews who play court historians and philosophers to WASPS who want nothing more than to solidify their position for an eternity of descendants. And in exchange for their blessing of the establishment, these Jews are solidified as the very next social class down: the bankers to their government, their academic foreign policy advisors, doctors and lawyers to the rich, with the prize of their government affixed to every unholy blessing they pronounce: a secure Israel amid a sea of Arab enemies; barbarian hordes who loathe democracy, loathe equality, and want nothing but declare holy war so as to impose sharia upon the entire world. 

These rough men in suits bloviate complexity and nuance, liberal internationalism, peace and understanding between nations and peoples, but they are Jewish nationalists to their blood, rams clothed in the wool of lambs. And for their mortared position amid the establishment, they throw Muslims to lions and pretend the lion will lie down amid the lamb. 

Small dinner at Mary McCarthy's: Trillings, Hofstadter, Barzun, Arendt and Daniel Bell there. 

"Edward, we understand the delicate position you're in. Don't worry, we will support you, we will protect you, we will make sure you don't have to answer any awkward questions. We will make sure Palestine doesn't come up for you. 

Edward's defenses drop, he becomes comfortable as conversation turns to Arab literature and Mahfouz, which leads to Adonis and Darwish, which leads back to the Palestinian problem. Said now says what he thinks. Arendt goads him on as interlocutor, but everybody else exchanges awkward looks. 

As Mary McCarthy says goodbye, she says "I'd like to discuss ways of neutralizing hostile parties who will try to inquisition you. There's a cafe across from my apartment." She grabs his arm and moves up to his forearm. He knows what this means. 

---------------------------

A flank within SDS heard about the dinner. Wants Said to come to a meeting to take a stand to speak for Palestine. Student named Samuel Berkowitz who brings up Palestine during discussion of Conrad and sees it as part and parcel of the struggle against the Vietnam War. Said is extremely reluctant to bring it up and asks students to confine the discussion to literature "But literature is political!" the student exclaims. After class Berkowitz stays and says "Professor Sed there are more of us than people think who see what's happening to you." "It's not happening to me, I'm over here." "Somebody needs to give the Palestinian perspective. So many students think your struggle is our struggle. Jewish students too!" Said still refuses: "It's not necessarily my strugle."

-------------------------------------------------

Said honestly thinks about going through with it. But his girlfriend has an emergency at the last moment, and he has to go see her. Word doesn't get to McCarthy. 

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Literary Party at the Trillings in honor of Jean-Paul Sartre. 

McCarthy tracks him down. Accepts his apology but notes her disappointment that he didn't show up. 

Include line: "Hemingway called literary New York a bottle of tapeworms trying to feed on each other." 

Diana invites Edward to give his opinion on the Six Day War: "Lionel speaks of you every day as our brightest new light. He says Edward could be the scholar of the age and people will quote your literary criticism for generations." 

Edward gives a careful answer through the lens of Conrad and Goethe.

Wilson begins questioning him seriously as literature with a slight political bite. 

Edward says one sentence that surprises everyone.

Wilson: "I had no idea you were such a pan-Arabist. Surely nationalism is something someone with your bildung would outgrow." 

Said: "Isn't Zionism a form of nationalism?" 

It just slipped out and the room went silent immediately. 

Room goes silent. 

L. Trilling: "I think what Edward is saying is that Palestinians only want the same dignity Jews want. Even if he's misunderstood it slightly." 

D. Trilling: "Please correct me if I'm wrong Edward, but isn't that operating on the oft-disputed assumption that Palestinians are their own people." 

Said: "Well, I'm no expert on orientalism but I would think I know my own people." 

D. Trilling:* (laughs)* "Edward, please, you're among friends. You can tell us. Did anybody call themselves Palestinian twenty years ago?" 

Said: (pauses) "Not often, I'll concede, but there had to be a name for us. We weren't quite Syrian, not quite Lebanese, not quite Egyptian." 

D. Trilling: "But surely, your people could have been Israeli had they cooperated!" 

Said: *(longer pause, micro-expression of annoyance then back to smiling) *"I don't think that was possible." 

D. Trilling: "Please don't be angry with me Edward. I just mean that surely there was a moment of possible cooperation before the Mufti allied himself with Hitler." 

Said: "al-Husseini was perfectly willing to cooperate with Ben-Gurion until he realized that the Yishuv meant to resettle Jews as a majority on Palestinian land." 

McCarthy: "Surely you're not telling us that the Mufti was a perfectly reasonable man until he decided to annihilate all the Jews." 

Said: "Not at all, but I believe one has to consider the point of view of the other side however objectionable one finds it." 

Edmund Wilson: "Even when the other point of view is repugnant and murderous?" 

Said: "Especially when the other point of view is repugnant and murderous." 

D. Trilling: "Oh, Edward." 

Said: "Everyone, you must understand that it's just as important for Palestinians to consider the Israeli point of view." 

Wilson: "Why would there even be a question of the Jewish point of view after the Holocaust?" 

Said: "Please, you must understand that Palestinians view Israeli settlers on the land as thieves and sometimes even murderers." 

D. Trilling: (looks incredulous) "I'm... truly... truly shocked to hear you say that. What could Israel possibly have done to make the Palestinians think so badly of them?"

Said: "Diana, I'm sorry, this is a very personal issue for Palestinians. My people were thrown off the land by Israeli soldiers." 

Wilson: "Edward! That was disproven a hundred times." 

Said: "I've heard so many eyewitness testimonies." 

McCarthy: "Were you there?" 

Said: (getting visibly annoyed) "I wasn't." 

McCarthy: "And you trust the testimony of a totalitarian pan-nationalist movement?" 

Said: "The people themselves are not totalitarians." 

Wilson: "Well I've seen them with my own eyes in Israel, and they subscribe to totalitarianism every bit as much as any Soviet." 

Said: "My people are not Nazis!" 

Wilson: "I said Soviet. They may not believe it, but please entertain Edward that they may be coerced by their leadership into giving false testimony." 

Said: "They're not being coerced. How could anyone coerce? No Palestinian leadership is that powerful!" 

D. Trilling: "Wasn't it the dictators of other Arab countries who told Palestinians to leave their towns and they could resettle when the war was won?" 

Jacques Barzun: "Pardon me, Diana, if I may."

D. Trilling: "Of course, Jacques." 

Barzun: "There was credible eyewitness testimony at De'er Yassin that Israeli soldiers threw Palestinians out of their town: a requisition for military necessity. But afterward there was a mass panic that caused thousands of Arabs to leave their homes and head for territory held by Jordan and Egypt." 

Said: "That is not what happened." 

Wilson: "Indeed that is not what happened. Edward, grievance is not fact. You are asking the world to make Palestinians into pure victims at the expense of Jewish suffering."

Said: "I'm just asking people to recognize Palestinian suffering with the attention they pay to Jewish suffering." 

Cynthia Ozick: "As though there is any comparison between what you've endured and what we've endured." 

McCarthy: "What grievances does Edward have? Listen to yourself, Edward. You're not Palestinian, you're pure Andover-Exeter! You're more a gentile than any of us!" 

Said: (sets wineglass down on the table) "My friends, I thank you so much for this invitation, but I do have a Conrad article to finish on deadline." 

Everyone: "NO NO NO! PLEASE STAY! PLEASE STAY!" 

Diana: This is the sort of hazing we all went through Edward. I apologize, truly. This was not meant to be an ambush. There's just so much to talk about on this subject, but I realize now this issue means a great deal to you, probably more than it does to us. We will be mindful of what you think in the future. 

Ozick: "It does mean a great deal to him. Norman told me what you said at the SDS meeting." 

Said: "Norman?" 

Ozick: "Yes, you know Norman Podhoretz I'm sure. He told me you made a speech in which you declared that the struggle of Palestine against Israel is the struggle of Vietnam against the US." 

(silence) 

Ozick: "As it happens, Norman agrees with you, even if his orientation is reciprocal, but he thought we should know." 

L. Trilling (awkwardly turns to Sartre sitting in the corner): Jean-Paul, what do you think of all this?" 

Sartre: "(pauses to gather his thoughts...) It is truly the choice of being in itself, after being becomes irrelevant." 

(everyone nods: Wilson says "Outstanding.")

Sartre: "The facticity is undeniable, but one must be careful that the look is not bad faith."

(general murmurs of approval) 

After the exchange is over and the circle breaks up Lionel whispers to Said: "Edward, please stay to the end of the party. I'd like to speak to you. Please don't mind Diana, she says terrible things when she's intoxicated. She's already gone to the back to lie down." 

-------

later

D. Trilling: "Edward, please try to understand, we're terrified. I know we don't look it but there's not a single Jew who doesn't know someone lost." 

Said: "And that is equally true of my people." 

D. Trilling: "Is it?" 

L. Trilling: "This is not getting us anywhere. Tonight was supposed to be about literature and philosophy. This is where our new breed of student gets us: a weltanschauung where not a single idea is above politics, and it permeates us all. Now one can't even talk Conrad without conversation drifting to Israel and Vietnam." 

Said: "Is it so hard to believe Conrad would provoke that?" 

L. Trilling: "Edward, we need scholars more than ever to speak up for the complexity of the written word and liberal humanism." 

Said: "I was under the impression that's what I've tried to do so far in my whole academic life."  

L. Trilling: "My boy, I thought you were that voice and speaking up as you do so well you could do your small part to lower the temperature of this country's discourse." 

Said: "But Lionel, does the temperature truly need lowering?"  

L. Trilling: "My dear Edward I still think you can be that voice. You're young, you have a lot of the world to see yet and a lot of folly in which you will be both observer and participant as we all are. But it would be a terrible disappointment if we lost you to Fanon and Gramsci." 

I know what this means. Never bring up Palestine again or I don't get tenure. 

end of story