Suzanne Schneider's "Mandatory Separation"

Suzanne Schneider is the Director of Operations and a Core Faculty member at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Mandatory Separation: Religion, Education, and Mass Politics in Palestine, and reported the following:

Page 99 of my book addresses the formative role of the heder (Jewish communal school) in the imaginations of 19th century European Jewish writers who were active in what is called the Haskalah, or Enlightenment. For them, the heder was an old-fashioned institution that represented everything that was wrong with Jewish life and that seemingly prevented the complete absorption of Jews within European culture. As I write:

Within this literature, the abuses of the teacher are mirrored by the filthy conditions of the school, which is almost without exception portrayed as dark, dirty, and lacking space--both physical and psychological--for children to develop freely and flourish. If the Enlightenment marked a high point in the concern for the individual as an autonomous, self-fashioning agent, the heder represented the narrowness of the corporate Jewish community in which collective welfare was continually privileged over individual growth.

In many respects, this section of Mandatory Separation touches on some of the book's central arguments, though it only does so with regard to the Jewish side of things. The book as a whole offers a comparative study of both Jewish and Islamic education during the 19th and early 20th centuries, and tracks the ways in which modes of religious learning were mobilized in Palestine in order to further Zionist and Arab nationalist goals. Page 99 also alludes to how such a transformation could take place, that is to say, how religious texts and institutions might become thoroughly instrumentalized for the sake of modern political ends. The page continues:

...for Zionist writers, it [the heder] could serve as a vehicle for the preservation and further development of the Hebrew language and culture but only on the condition that it be drastically transformed. The clearest articulation of this latent potential appears in Hayyim Nahman Bialik's short story 'Safiah' (Aftergrowth), in which the protagonist attends two different hederim. The first is characterized by the usual darkness, yiddishkeit, and physical filth, while the second offers a manifestation of what the heder could be: still seeped in the classical Jewish texts, but now conducted in Hebrew, often outdoors, and absorbed in tales of biblical heroism rather than with the ritual laws stemming from Leviticus. This impulse to reconstitute an institution--or an entire tradition--by returning to core texts, languages, and ideas was not unique to Zionists but emblematic of a larger modernist phenomenon that stressed the primacy of one's roots.

Now, we often think about modernity as a secular project in which religion fades away and our lives become ordered by strictly rational forces. Yet, as I argue throughout this book, that narrative is deeply flawed. The old does not give way to the new, but is reanimated by it. Indeed, much of “secular” culture remains deeply indebted to religious symbols, narratives, ways of knowing, views of the self and others, and so on. And though Mandatory Separation is focused on Judaism and Islam, this is equally true of Christianity as well. For example, it’s impossible for me to think of Immanuel Kant’s notion of the rational, autonomous individual—so central to the Enlightenment and the entire cult of individualism in the West—without tracing its genealogy to Martin Luther’s concept of the accountable soul.

Finally, as the above passage indicates, these modernizing movements were oriented in many respects around a quest for roots. This is consequential, as a lot of thinking still revolves around the notion that the origin point is the most authentic expression of something (I’m looking at you, Constitutional originalists). Yet what remains so fascinating to me about religions is that they are constantly evolving, especially when they claim otherwise! While there are obviously some who deny the innovative aspects of their own faith and practice, there are mechanisms within many traditions for viewing this evolution in a positive light rather than as an aberration from a perfect past. Given all the reactionary nostalgia in our current political landscape, this is a lesson that we could all benefit from learning.

Learn more about Mandatory Separation at the Stanford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Oana Panaïté's "The Colonial Fortune in Contemporary Fiction in French"

Oana Panaïté is Associate Professor of French at Indiana University-Bloomington and the author of Des littératures-mondes en français: Écritures singulières, poétiques transfrontalières dans la prose contemporaine / On World-Literatures: Singular Writing and Transfrontier Poetics in Contemporary Literature in French (2012).

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her latest book, The Colonial Fortune in Contemporary Fiction in French, and reported the following:

From page 99:

I would argue that a similar belated and unexamined colonial sensibility resurfaces in the novels of Laurent Gaudé, winner of the Goncourt prize in 2004 for the Mediterranean-inspired family saga Le Soleil des Scorta, which vacillate between melancholy and “presentism” (Hartog 2003) as their narratives attempt to establish a delicate balance between the empathic re-enactment of the past, in its material and affective manifestations, and the critical scrutiny of its social and political underpinnings. On his blog, Gaudé details his sources of inspiration: the journey “to faraway lands” or “remote past eras,” the shout (“le cri”) “or those who passed on without being able to voice it,” Antiquity and the Mediterranean. Combining empathy and sympathy, these categories relate to the concept of Einfühlung, or “feeling into,” described as an embodied (emotional and physical) response to an image, a space, an object or a built environment (Keen 209).

The writer’s mention of the shout (“le cri”) is strikingly reminiscent of the central idea of the Négritude movement, yet this reference remains unacknowledged by Gaudé. What might appear to be an ambiguous, if not unethical, use of an important intellectual contribution by African and Antillean French-language writers could by the same token be construed, in the light of the paradigmatic shift away from what Simon Gikandi calls “theories of difference” (Gikandi 2001, 5) to what Stuart Hall calls “the politics of articulation” (Hall 1986), as a new manner of integrating Senghor, Césaire and Damas’s thinking into the mainstream cultural vocabulary without indexing their difference and intellectual contribution. To test this hypothesis, we can turn our attention to three of Gaudé’s novels: Cris (Shouts), Eldorado and La Mort du roi Tsongor (The Death of King Tsongor). Each of them relies on the fictionalization of Africa, in an explicit or allusive manner, whether as a central theme or a secondary narrative feature, such as a character or a backdrop.

This excerpt from page 99 reflects the book’s main thesis that contemporary writing in French (fiction, autobiography or essay) by metropolitan and non-metropolitan authors who are not necessarily involved or engaged with the legacy of French colonialism is nevertheless characterized by the subtle yet persistent presence of colonial history. This latent memory is captured in idea of the “colonial fortune” which brings together issues of imperial nostalgia, neo-orientalism, fate, economics, legacy, and debt and allows us to gain a greater understanding of the current French artistic and political landscape.

Learn more about The Colonial Fortune in Contemporary Fiction in French at the publisher's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Brian E. Crim's "Our Germans"

Brian E. Crim is the John Mills Turner Distinguished Chair in the Humanities and an associate professor of history at Lynchburg College. He is the author of Antisemitism in the German Military Community and the Jewish Response, 1914–1938 and the editor of Class of ’31: A German-Jewish Émigré’s Journey across Defeated Germany.

Crim applied the “Page 99 Test” to his latest book, Our Germans: Project Paperclip and the National Security State, and reported the following:

Our Germans: Project Paperclip and the National Security State is the story of how hundreds of Nazi Germany’s leading scientists and engineers became integral members of America’s burgeoning military-industrial complex during the Cold War. Shortly after the Soviet Union shocked the world by launching Sputnik in October 1957, comedian Bob Hope urged the country to take the apparent defeat in stride. “It just proves one thing,” Hope quipped. “Their German rocket scientists were better than our German rocket scientists.” My book first investigates the diverse backgrounds of many prominent “Paperclippers” and those whose names we may not know and determines that before members of Wernher von Braun’s rocket team became “our Germans” they were, according to US Army intelligence screening reports, “unrepentant Nazis.”

The first sentence on page 99 addresses the section of the book devoted to the bureaucratic and public opposition to Project Paperclip: “Those in the State Department opposed to an unrestricted Paperclip were motivated in part by a healthy suspicion of the German scientists, but most acted primarily to shield the department from assuming the risks inherent in Paperclip while receiving none of the benefits.” I believe the most original contribution in Our Germans is delineating the motivations and fates of those who opposed this controversial intelligence program. Many officials who devoted their lives to fighting Nazism were now asked to facilitate their immigration with minimal, and often nonexistent vetting while hundreds of thousands of displaced persons languished in camps (many of them former concentration camps) in central Europe. Yet, despite their personal objections, State Department officials relented under the weight of military pressure. Still, men like Samuel Klaus, a State Department lawyer who is featured prominently in this chapter, was dragged through the mud during the McCarthy era simply because he questioned the logic of granting unvetted Nazis American citizenship. While most Americans prefer to remember Project Paperclip as a brilliant intelligence coup, Our Germans lays bare the internecine battles pitting conflicting views of national security and morality at the dawn of the Cold War.

Learn more about Our Germans at the Johns Hopkins University Press website.

My Book, The Movie: Our Germans.

--Marshal Zeringue

Martin Shuster's "New Television"

Martin Shuster is assistant professor and chair of Judaic Studies in the Center for Geographies of Justice at Goucher College.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, New Television: The Aesthetics and Politics of a Genre, and reported the following:

From page 99:

D’Angelo is not squeezed between two institutions, as if the bonds of each are equally compelling (as in Hegel’s famous reading of Antigone), but rather D’Angelo dies because he disavows allegiance to any institution.

Page 99 doesn’t quite capture the whole of New Television, but it does offer an important entryway into my reading of The Wire. The Wire, however, forms only one aspect of the book, indeed, really, only serves as the entryway into the theme of new television, which is an aesthetic and political category. With respect to the former, new television signifies that, roughly with Twin Peaks in the early 1990s, there emerge truly new aesthetic objects on the small screen. With respect to the latter, these objects locate their significance around a particular political conception—of screening a world entirely devoid of normative authority in all of its institutions, except one: the family. The Wire participates in this thematic mode, but we might say only unintentionally or unreflectively, and thereby does not reach the sort of political signification that later shows achieve … a point that New Television attempts to map.

Learn more about New Television at the University of Chicago Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Benjamin F. Alexander's "The New Deal's Forest Army"

Benjamin F. Alexander teaches American history at the New York City College of Technology. He is the author of Coxey’s Army: Popular Protest in the Gilded Age.

Alexander applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The New Deal's Forest Army: How the Civilian Conservation Corps Worked, and reported the following:

At the very top of page 99 of my new book on the Civilian Conservation Corps, this little ditty appears:

Now I lay me down to sleep,
While CCCs around me creep;
May no other CCC take
My shoes and shirt before I wake.

It's part of the chapter on social life in the CCC, it's an example of how both camp newspapers and the systemwide paper Happy Days often printed enrollees' creative outputs. More specifically, it comes in the section of that chapter about the pranks that enrollees pulled on each other and especially on newcomers. Under that verse, I write:

An initiate might be woken up late at night and told it was his turn for flagpole duty, a totally fictional assignment, or given a flashlight and a bag and told to go out into the woods to catch a snipe, an equally fictional creature. During the day, he might be sent to the supply room to ask for a nonexistent item such as a skyhook, a clipboard stretcher, a can of striped paint, some elbow grease, or a left-handed monkey wrench.

Soon after, I mention that some snakes got put in beds, both fake and real, and that any enrollee who didn't bathe adequately could get a rough and painful scrubbing with an industrial brush, or "GI Bath."

The motto of the CCC was “We can take it,” and indeed, CCC enrollees did a great deal of hard work. Enrollees planted trees, set up forest fire preventions systems, fought forest fires sometimes losing their lives, built dams and other flood control structures, landscaped public parks, and cut many of the hiking trails that outdoorspeople enjoy the use of today. They did all this under civilian supervision while living in camps of 200 that the Army ran. They were mostly young men whose families were on relief rolls, in a decade marked by the worst depression in the country's history, and indeed most of their pay went not to them but to their families, in most cases their parents.

Not all of the pranks were harmless, and not all of the men who joined the corps could “take it.” Like everything else in the Roosevelt New Deal, the CCC had its good and its bad side. On the balance sheet, what stands out the most is that many (though not all) unemployed Americans got desperately needed jobs, and permanent improvements to America's physical landscape got made. But when you put 200 male teenagers and young adults in barracks for six months, some beds are going to get short-sheeted, rigged to collapse, and outfitted with real or phony snakes for their occupants' displeasure.

Learn more about The New Deal's Forest Army at the Johns Hopkins University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Sam Rosenfeld's "The Polarizers"

Sam Rosenfeld is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Colgate University. He has a PhD in History from Harvard University and studies parties and American political development. His research interests include the history of political parties, the intersection of social movements and formal politics, and the politics of social and economic policymaking.

Rosenfeld applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Polarizers: Postwar Architects of Our Partisan Era, and reported the following:

Page 99 of The Polarizers comes toward the end of the introductory section on my chapter on the 1960s. As a result, it’s more big-picture and analytically explicit than the typical pages of detailed historical narrative found throughout the book. And the big-picture argument I’m making in the chapter is this: political developments in the 1960s, for all of their extraordinary social and cultural tumult, marked less a turning point than an acceleration of preexisting dynamics in party politics. They reflected debates over parties’ proper role in American politics that were not new.

The preceding 98 pages have told the story of the postwar emergence of a critique, offered by thinkers and activists on both the right and the left, of the highly unpolarized American party system at midcentury. Both parties contained conservative and liberal factions, policy was made via bipartisan coalitions, and party allegiances often still stemmed from loyalties based on either tradition or non-programmatic material incentives like patronage. A new postwar breed of activists motivated by national policy issues and ideology, buttressed by leading political science scholarship, decried the fuzzy distinctions between the two parties that such arrangements produced. In the name of democracy, they championed restructuring and sorting the parties around coherent and distinct ideological agendas.

1960s activists, though a generation younger than the postwar actors tracked in previous chapters and often motivated by more radical systemic critiques, mounted a challenge to existing party practices that sustained and amplified their predecessors’ “demands for greater moral commitment and attention to issues in party politics.” In accounts of the early work of Students for a Democratic Society, the 1964 convention challenge of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, and the antiwar nomination challenges of 1968 and their translation into a party reform project, I show how the major social movements of the era “contributed signally to the long-term project of breaking down the transactional elements of political parties and remaking them as more issue-defined and ideological institutions.”

It would take the ensuing, truly pivotal decade of the 1970s for such actors to finally achieve transformative breakthroughs in both parties that served to forge the political world we still inhabit today.

Visit Sam Rosenfeld's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Dawn Chatty's "Syria: The Making and Unmaking of a Refuge State"

Dawn Chatty is Emeritus Professor of Anthropology and Forced Migration and former Director of the Refugee Studies Centre, Department of International Development, Oxford University and the author of Displacement and Dispossession in the Modern Middle East and From Camel to Truck.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Syria: The Making and Unmaking of a Refuge State, and reported the following:

From page 99:

Three Armenian delegations from the new republic attended the January 1919 Paris Peace Conference (Hovannisian, 1987). Their public relations success can be found in one of the first acts of the conference, which declared that ‘because of the historical misgovernment of the Turks of subject peoples and the terrible massacres of Armenians and others in recent years, the Allied and Associated Powers are agreed that Armenia, Syria, Mesopotamia, Palestine and Arabia must be completely severed from the Turkish Empire’ and provisionally recognized as independent nations subject to the ‘administrative assistance’ of a Mandatory power.

What happened next is the story which this book tries to tell, the making and unmaking of the Syrian state as a place of refuge for Circassians, Kosovars, and Albanians, Armenians, Assyrians, Kurds, Palestinians, and later Lebanese and Iraqis.

I have written this book in an accessible manner to appeal to most interested readers. Each chapter who found sanctuary in Syria. The final chapter looks at the waves of people who have recently fled Syria and sought asylum in neighbouring countries. For many Syrians, there is disappointment that having provided refuge for displaced people for nearly a century, they are now faced with closed doors beyond their Mediterranean neighbours.

Learn more about Syria: The Making and Unmaking of a Refuge State at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Mark Newman's "Black Nationalism in American History"

Mark Newman is a Reader in History at the University of Edinburgh and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. He is the author of the award-winning Getting Right with God: Southern Baptists and Desegregation, 1945-1995 (2001) and Divine Agitators: The Delta Ministry and Civil Rights in Mississippi (2004).

Newman applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Black Nationalism in American History: From the Nineteenth Century to the Million Man March, and reported the following:

Black Nationalism in American History provides an overview of its development, expression and organization from early manifestations through the Million Man March in Washington D.C. in 1995, when black nationalism’s popularity was greater than it had been in the 1960s. The book avoids either advocacy or condemnation found in many studies and assesses leading scholars’ interpretations against historical evidence. Scholars disagree about defining black nationalism, when it began, what forms it has taken, how popular it has been, and how much it has been independent of or shaped by developments in white society. Outlining black nationalism across two centuries, the book addresses these issues and the often neglected contributions of women. Black Nationalism argues for a broad definition that incorporates demands for self-determination focused on controlling institutions within black communities, and it contends that black nationalism’s shape, appeal, and meaning have reflected the particular circumstances of its time.

Page 99 occurs in the second half of chapter three about the Nation of Islam and Malcolm X, and just over halfway through the book, reflecting the fact that the Nation and Malcolm X, its most famous convert and leading minister, were important contributors to, but not originators, of black nationalism. Page 99 concludes a discussion about why Malcolm X left the Nation in 1964 and disputes biographer Manning Marable’s claim that his departure resulted from ‘politics; not personalities.’ Elijah Muhammad, the Nation’s leader, and most of his family had become jealous of Malcolm X’s growing popularity and feared his knowledge of Muhammad’s adulterous affairs and illegitimate children. Suspended ostensibly for welcoming President John F. Kennedy’s assassination, Malcolm X tried repeatedly to be reinstated and left only after concluding that Muhammad would never lift a suspension intended to contain and silence him. Page 99 is reflective of the book’s style but not of its overarching themes.

Learn more about Black Nationalism in American History at the Edinburgh University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Sunaina Maira's "Boycott! The Academy and Justice for Palestine"

Sunaina Maira is the author of Boycott! The Academy and Justice for Palestine and a founding organizer of the US Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (USACBI).

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to Boycott! and reported the following:

Page 99 is a great page to open to in my book! It addresses one of my key arguments about the movement to boycott Israeli academic institutions and for Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) more generally. Documenting the history of the expanding academic boycott campaign as a progressive social movement, the book discusses how it is grounded in antiracist and decolonial principles. BDS campaigns have linked Palestine to struggles against militarization, police brutality, incarceration, and violent borders. The book draws on interviews with scholar-activists involved in academic boycott organizing and with the US Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (USACBI). On this page, I quote Cynthia Franklin, from the University of Hawai’i a, Manoa:

To draw on Darnell Moore and Sa’ed Atshan’s formulation, the “reciprocal solidarities” that have been emerging as those in BDS and other social justice movements come together is resulting not only in emotionally sustaining shared stories and forms of community, but also in concrete forms of mobilization and calls to action for struggles that are at once articulated and place based. The historic M4BL Platform, and its support for BDS, is one example of this; another is Palestinian support for Native Peoples in North America organizing against the Dakota Pipeline. This is the result of organizers in different movements learning from and supporting each other in struggles that are at once articulated and sometimes distinct.

In this chapter, I discuss the endorsement of BDS by the Movement for Black Lives (M4BL), which grew out of the Black Lives Matter movement, building on the transnational Black-Palestinian solidarity of campaigns such as Ferguson 2 Gaza.

The chapter offers an analysis of the backlash against the boycott movement as a window into the cultural and racial wars in which the Palestine question is embedded. It theorizes the backlash as an archive of repression, going beyond documenting the systematic censorship, defamation, blacklisting, and disciplining of academics, students, and activists who advocate for BDS and Palestinian rights. The backlash illuminates the racial, gender, and class politics of the “backlash network” of Zionist organizations, based on anti-Arab racism and Islamophobia. Israel lobby groups view the cross-racial solidarity and coalitions forged by BDS activists with other progressive movements, including queer and feminist campaigns, as a threat to uncritical support of Israel. They regularly combat the current recasting of solidarity with Palestine as a progressive-left cause by accusing boycott advocates of anti-Semitism.

However, the BDS movement has challenged the taboo on criticism of Israel in the U.S. academy and reframed the oppression of Palestinians through the frameworks of settler colonialism and apartheid, in addition to challenging the military occupation. The academic boycott resolutions endorsed by various academic associations, such as the American Studies Association, have helped transform the Palestine question, situating it in antiracist, internationalist, and indigenous rights frameworks. These campaigns have ruptured the sanctioned narrative about Palestine-Israel and reveal fugitive knowledges hitherto repressed by a powerful status quo. The boycott has thus enlarged academic freedom in the U.S. university and challenged the assaults on academic (and human) freedom for Palestinian scholars and students.

Learn more about Boycott!: The Academy and Justice for Palestine at the University of California Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Daniel R. DeNicola's "Understanding Ignorance"

Daniel R. DeNicola is Chair and Professor of Philosophy at Gettysburg College and the author of Learning to Flourish: A Philosophical Exploration of Liberal Education.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his latest book, Understanding Ignorance: The Surprising Impact of What We Don't Know, and reported the following:

From page 99:

…[I]t is not always the coming-to-hold-this-belief that is the problem; it is the reflective maintaining of such beliefs along with the refusal to disbelieve or discard them that may be voluntary and ethically wrong.

If the content of a belief is judged morally wrong, it is also thought to be false. The belief that one race is clearly inferior or not fully human is not only a morally repugnant, racist tenet; it is also thought to be a false claim—though not by the believer. The falsity of a belief is a necessary but not sufficient condition for a belief to be morally wrong. Neither is the ugliness of the content sufficient for a belief to be morally wrong. There are morally repugnant truths, sadly, but believing them does not make them so. Their moral ugliness is embedded in the world, not in one’s belief about the world.

One of the virulent forms of ignorance is willful ignorance. Its flat rejection of challenging evidence and ideas is often bolstered by false knowledge. In nearly all cases, the willfully ignorant are engaged in the protection of some prior belief or value commitment, an ideology or doctrine. It masks ignorance with false knowledge.

Those who refuse to know, when cornered, sometimes assert a right to believe whatever they want. It is a hollow claim. My page 99 quotation, which is drawn from a section on the ethics of belief, asserts our responsibilities regarding our beliefs. Perhaps we seldom “choose to believe,” but we do have epistemic responsibility for what we believe. Some beliefs are morally repugnant; some are ridiculous and demonstrably false or unjustified; and some are merely stubborn refusals to assent to uncomfortable truths. Some believers think they are wisely skeptical of mainstream “truths”; that they have special access to the “real truth”—usually a conspiracy theory of some sort. Ironically, these misguided attempts to honor the “real truth” are little more than ignorance in elaborate disguise.

Today, we have unprecedented access to vast human knowledge and real-time information. There has never been a better time to learn. Unfortunately, our society is also being engulfed by a culture of ignorance that is characterized by widespread, reprehensible ignorance of matters that affect our ability to live together; by the rejection of expertise in favor of ideology and populist opinion; by the willful ignorance of partisanship, religious intolerance, and privilege. As a result, our society spends far too much time, energy, and capital coping with the willfully ignorant and their impact on policy and practice.

At the heart of this problem is the urgent need to respect the truth. I do not mean that we need to act as though we possess the Truth. That is, in fact, the problem with those who refuse to recognize their own ignorance, the possibility of error, or the potential justification for altering their beliefs. Rather, I mean the ideal of truth, the search for the truth, must guide us; only that permits genuine deliberation, genuine inquiry. Beliefs are factive; they aspire to the truth. It is wrong to use them as epistemic pillows to comfort us in our prejudices.

Learn more about Understanding Ignorance at The MIT Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue