Rebecca Stein: The culture of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict
By Sally Hicks
DURHAM, NC -- Rebecca Stein stands in front of her class on a rainy Thursday afternoon. She speaks, rapid-fire, punctuating her points with her hands.
"This is a complicated thing. What language does one speak? What language does one write in? And what are the politics of choosing one language?" she asked the 40 students.
Today the class is talking about hybrid cultures in Israel, particularly the "categorical problem" of Arab Jews. These Jews, from North Africa, the Middle East and the Levant, are people with a history of disenfranchisement and discrimination within a nation dominated by people of European descent.
"Right. Right. Right. Right. Right," Stein says quickly, nodding encouragement as a student struggles to articulate his thoughts.
Then, as the rest of the class sits momentarily silent, she teases: "It can't be that you didn't do the reading, could it?"
In a moment's time, the discussion is off again, and one student draws a parallel between the Black Panthers in the U.S. and the Israeli Black Panthers.
"It's a threat to the dominant narrative and the way the culture is constructed," the student says.
The class is "Palestine, Israel and the Arab-Israeli Conflict," and Stein, an assistant professor of cultural anthropology, is using all the tools of her trade to engage the class. They've seen a clip of an Israeli movie, dissected poems such as "A Night of Scuds" by Sami Shalom Chetrit and read memoirs from "Keys to the Garden."
It all fits in with Stein's endeavor to understand Israeli political culture, not only by looking at the official political history and maneuverings, but also by examining its popular culture.
"Typically Israeli-Palestinian culture has been of interest when it exemplifies the national conflict. Pop culture is virtually ignored, because it is presumed to be apolitical and unrelated to the conflict," she says. But "it's a misreading of the struggle if you only look at the diplomatic, macro-political processes."
In her research, for example, she has looked at tourism during the period of the Oslo peace accords -- perceived by some as a "golden age" of peace. During this time, middle-class, European Jews "discovered" Palestinians as tourist objects, similar to white Americans visiting Native American villages.
"The notion of peace was very abstract during the 1990s. It came home to them in tourism," she says. "This was the daily experience of the peace process."
Anne Allison, chair of cultural anthropology, says Stein's work enriches the department in several ways. She is one of two scholars of the Middle East in the department, and also studies mass media and mass culture.
"She both complements and offers new areas of study," Allison says. "She brings a very interesting perspective."
Her class has attracted 43 students -- unusual for a first-time teacher, Allison says.
"This is an issue that's very much in the present. And people are aligned very much across the political spectrum," she said.
Stein was drawn to academia by her interest in human rights. She lived in Jerusalem after graduating from Amherst College in 1991 with a degree in English and critical theory. She worked as an activist in the Israeli peace movement.
"It was very important for me to go to Jerusalem as an activist because I have a strong Jewish identity, but am committed to an end to the occupation," she said.
She worked with Israeli Jews, Palestinians with Israeli citizenship and Palestinians in the occupied territories, and wrote for a small Israeli political magazine called "Challenge."
But the work took its toll: She could hear explosions at times from her house, and the work of human-rights activists is personally difficult.
"It's hard to always be under attack. It's a very difficult lifestyle," she said.
In 1993, she went to Stanford, where she earned a Ph.D. in 1999. She continued to travel to Israel to do her fieldwork.
She's glad to find a home in a department where she can continue her interdisciplinary scholarship.
"I very much hope that my work is part of a broader conversation in the U.S. academy -- not just on the Middle East -- but also on issues of nationalism and culture," she said.
