Rex for some reason keeps his sideline writing op-eds for Inside Higher Ed a secret here on Savage Minds, but his latest piece has far too much anthropological content for me not to blow his cover. In it he talks about being Jewish in California, the Midwest, and now Hawaii. While the main point of the article (that being Jewish means very different things in each of these places) will not surprise our readers, Rex’s excellent writing and humor make the piece a pleasure to read.
I particularly enjoyed reading of one difference between Rex and myself which seems to go a long way towards explaining why he seems to take the whole Jewish thing a lot more seriously than I do:
As a Jewish professor from California, dealing with these stereotypes is even more difficult because I lack recourse to the solution favored by many colleagues: acting as if the complex negotiation of my identity can be accomplished simply by assuming that “Jewish” means “from New York” and leaving it at that.
Like the Hawaiian students Alex discusses, Taiwanese don’t really think of me as anything other than “American.” However, I’ve noticed that some particularly cosmopolitan Taiwanese take it as a matter of pride that they can identify my ethnicity. For them it is a sign that they’ve been to NY and know what a bagel is. Although sometimes they wrongly guess that I’m French…
I was thinking about posting about that op-ed here, but I figured that SM was not my personal vanity blog so I begged off. My “personal blog”:http://alex.golub.name/log/ keeps track of all my publications, academic and otherwise and so people can keep track of the op-ed pieces (as well as the Jedi fan fiction) there.
I thought it was a great column but I was annoyed by the response of one the posters who stated:
“What does it mean that one can receive a PhD in anthropology (from an excellent institution) and not expect to have cultural differences in the classroom in different places?” I guess the story didn’t strike me as particularly odd because the “I’ve had my assumptions challenged” story has become a sort of stock anthropological form of writing. Perhaps to an outside observer unfamiliar with anthropology, it would seem odd that anthropologists have ingrained assumptions about culture and that pure objectivity is responsible. The poster who responded seems to be implicitly saying that anthropologists need to be able to anticipate any possible cultural difference that they may encounter. Rex, you on the other hand (I think)seem to be using the piece to try to educate other academics about cultural differences that one may encounter in the class room. What annoys me is that the poster seems to be ignoring this part of the message and in essence focusing on slagging anthropology (or maybe I’m reading too much into the response).