{"id":1680,"date":"2005-01-04T23:59:00","date_gmt":"2005-01-05T04:59:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sandbox.blog-city.com\/orientalism_and_the_jews.htm"},"modified":"2005-01-04T23:59:00","modified_gmt":"2005-01-05T04:59:00","slug":"orientalism-and-the-jews","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sandbox\/2005\/01\/orientalism-and-the-jews\/","title":{"rendered":"Orientalism and the Jews"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Back in 1996, to honor Bernard Lewis on his 80th birthday, I organized a conference. The proceedings appeared as a book<\/a>, The Jewish Discovery of Islam<\/span>. Now there appears a new book<\/a>, Orientalism and the Jews<\/span>, edited by Ivan Kalmar and Derek Penslar, who develop other aspects of the subject. (Jacket blurb here<\/a>.) It’s got some interesting pieces, but a few of the contributors are firmly in the orbit of Edward Said. I’ll grant them this: just as an Arab can be an anti-Semite (even though he’s a putative Semite), a Jew can be an (anti-Arab) orientalist (even though he’s a putative oriental). But the notion that Zionism in toto<\/span> is just a variety of orientalism is riddled with contradictions, because Zionism is contradictory, simultaneously embracing (and repelling) East and West. There isn’t any room for such ambivalence in Said’s us-and-them framework, which is just one of its many flaws. Why anyone would still want to operate in such an intellectual straightjacket should be a mystery. But fashion slavery in academe has its rewards, and some of these authors are sure to collect them. (You can read the intro to the book here<\/a>.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Back in 1996, to honor Bernard Lewis on his 80th birthday, I organized a conference. The proceedings appeared as a book, The Jewish Discovery of Islam. Now there appears a new book, Orientalism and the Jews, edited by Ivan Kalmar … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1167,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1680","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sandbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1680","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sandbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sandbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sandbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1167"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sandbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1680"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sandbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1680\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sandbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1680"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sandbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1680"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sandbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1680"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}