When the Syllabus Collides With War

David Beriss

In planning my classes this year, I did not count on war.

I am teaching Food and Culture this semester. This is a class in which students get to look at food and foodways as tools for thinking about the world. I assigned Nir Avieli’s Food and Power: A Culinary Ethnography of Israel (2017) as one of the texts, along with a few articles about related Palestinian and Israeli foodways and activism (Meneley 2021 and Monterescu and Handel 2019). Those readings came up this past week, roughly a month into the war between Israel and Hamas.

I have a class with several students who feel strongly about this war. I feel strongly about it too.

It is important to keep in mind that my class is not a teach-in, set up to focus on a specific issue of the day, nor is it a political rally. I included Israel and Palestine in the topics as part of a broader discussion about food, nationalism, and identity. Of course, the specifics of that conflict are important and I picked them in part because of that.

But I did not expect a war. It has been a struggle to make the readings feel adequate to the moment.

On the first day we were to discuss these readings, I tried to stay on topic. I pointed out how Avieli’s ethnographic approach to Israeli foodways sets readers up for thinking about structural and ideological fault lines among Israelis and in relation to Palestinians. He focuses on the inherent contradictions in Israeli food ideology. He touches on the famous hummus wars. He devotes a chapter to the Israeli preference for large portions of mediocre food (something Americans normally relate to). He analyzes ethnicity, gender, and the hierarchy of meat eating embedded in Israeli Independence Day celebrations and he considers the popularity of Italian food as a kind of cuisine that distances Jewish Israelis from their Arab neighbors. He describes masculinity, meat, and tensions in a unit of Israeli army reservists assigned guard duty at a prison housing Palestinian prisoners. In past semesters, Avieli’s analyses have led to discussions among my students about the many fractures that run through Israeli society. Avieli’s book, along with the other readings, can help students see that Israel and Palestine are complex places, not easily reducible to simplistic stereotypes and generalizations.

At first, none of this seemed especially relevant when the news was all about bombing, invasion, civilian deaths, and worse. Sparked by a murderous attack on October 7 that killed around 1,400 Israelis and left over 200 others as hostages in Gaza, the furious Israeli response has (as of this writing) destroyed maybe a third of the buildings in Gaza, killed over 10,000 people, and forced around 1 million others to flee. A month ago, the far-right Israeli government was the object of massive protest and dissent, but now seems to have united the country around total war. At the same time, it seems that much of the rest of the world is protesting the Israeli response.

I want my students to take away critical tools that can help them think through this conflict and to think about food and conflict in general. But how much critical thinking can there be when the news is full of unrelenting stories of death and destruction? When social media is full of outrage, misinformation, and hate? To write about the death of thousands of Palestinians is sure to bring on attacks from defenders of Israel. To assert Israel’s right to defend itself (or a Jewish right of self-determination), is to be accused of settler-colonialism or worse. As a Jew who has spent some time in Israel and who has spent much more time reading, thinking, and discussing it, my own emotions are clearly engaged. The problem is that they are engaged in a variety of different directions all at once.

In the next class, we mostly put aside food and tried to work together to develop an understanding of where each side is coming from. One of the key issues we confront in discussing this war is sorting out how to distinguish between political slogans and analytical concepts. Sometimes the same terms are used, but they mean very different things. Settler colonialism, apartheid, genocide, indigeneity, are deployed by activists in ways that flatten reality when used to condemn Israeli society and its government’s policies. Similarly, the broad deployment of concepts like terrorism, antisemitism, and Islamic fundamentalism are drawn on by advocates who want to simplify and delegitimize efforts to address Palestinian needs. Of course, the meaning of these and other concepts are often disputed. One side equates Zionism with racism, the other asserts that it stands for the right of Jewish self-determination. The slogan “from the river to the sea,” often heard at pro-Palestinian rallies, appears to have very different implications depending on who is using it.

Sorting these concepts out is important. Along with readings and my own expertise as an anthropologist, I try to draw on my history with Israel to help students think about this war. I worked on an Israeli kibbutz for several months in the early 1980s, when I was fresh out of college and not yet an anthropologist. I was fairly enthusiastic about being there, but was also already concerned about Israeli politics. I recall having intense debates with people about Israel’s occupation of Lebanon and the atrocities that had occurred in that war. There was also quite a lot of discussion about Israel’s role in the West Bank, with the growth of Jewish settlements even then encroaching on a future Palestinian state. Yet a two-state solution still seemed possible. Extremist Israeli right-wing ideologues, including those establishing illegal towns in the occupied territories, seemed to be a marginal minority and hopefully would stay that way. The former seems improbable now and the right-wing fringe is now running the country.

One other thing that I took away from that experience was a sense of the choices involved in nationalism. I could have immigrated to Israel—the point of working on the kibbutz was, in fact, to encourage immigration—but I chose not to. It was at that point that I began to think about what belonging to a nation-state entails, something that I learned more about years later in reading work like Benedict Anderson’s famous Imagined Communities. American identity is based on the idea that anyone can become American. The idea is to create a community united around certain values. It is obvious that the U.S. has failed to live up to those values, but that project is nevertheless still fundamental to what many people think it means to be American. I chose that project when I chose to remain American. I think it is important for Americans—and my students—to realize that they are making a choice when they think about what it is to be part of any particular nation. Anthropology can help us see what is involved in such choices.

This is of course different from the seemingly inevitable destinies laid out in ethnonationalist dreams. Whether they are Russian, German, Japanese, or Israeli, those dreams often work to assert ties to the land, to history, and to blood. I could become Israeli simply because I am Jewish. Palestinians want a similar right. Both struggle to create narratives that legitimize those claims. In the stories people—and governments—tell, the nation is not a choice, it is destiny. This has resulted in some bloody conflicts. Yet people continue to rely on these sorts of ethno nation-states, and dreams of such, as their only framework for freedom and security. Is that the best we can do? In a recent podcast, Amjad Iraqi, a writer for +972 Magazine, calls this kind of nationalism a 19th century ideology driving a 20th century conflict in a 21st century world and he suggests we ought to be able to think of more creative approaches by now. What those are is not entirely clear. In that same podcast, host Ezra Klein points out that Palestinian freedom and Israeli security are often treated as a zero-sum game: you can have one, but not both. That is clearly a core problem. The resurgence of antisemitism in Europe and the United States certainly has raised Jewish fears. At the same time, efforts to stop every attempt by Palestinian activists to pursue their claims (even peaceful efforts, like BDS, which have been made illegal in any number of places) only reinforce this sense that there is no room for alternative views of any sort. The terms of the debates remain frozen.

Ultimately, my class cannot be a refuge from what is going on in the world, but we can find useful points of entry to the discussions that do not merely repeat the news. We can also think critically about the concepts that even academics have been tossing around lately, including settler-colonialism, indigeneity, genocide, and more. We can bring the discussion home. A recent article in the New York Times discussed a petition calling on people to boycott businesses that “promote Israel.” That could be interpreted to include any restaurant in the U.S. that claims to make Israeli food. Certainly, as I have previously argued, restaurants are not safe havens from politics, but much like calls to boycott Russian restaurants in the US after the invasion of Ukraine, this raises some key questions about who ought to be held responsible for war in another country.

The assigned readings I chose seem precisely what is needed to frame these discussions. They add complexity to the reductionism of a 24 hour news cycle and to the outrage and misinformation of social media. Our discussions can hopefully help the students—and me—make sense of what is going on. And beyond this war, I can hope that my students will bring a clarity of thought and, perhaps, action to their own engagement with future conflicts. This is, I think, why we teach about food and culture. It is also why we have to stay focused, even when there is war.

References

Anderson, Benedict. 2016. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso.

Avieli, Nir. 2017. Food and Power: A Culinary Ethnography of Israel. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Meneley, Anne. 2021. Eating Wild: Hosting the Food Heritage of Palestine. PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review. 44(2):207-222.

Monterescu, Daniel and Ariel Handel. 2019. Liquid Indigeneity: Wine, Science, and Colonial Politics in Israel/Palestine. American Ethnologist. 46(3):313-327.