It’s no secret that Jews and Arabs in Israel — indeed throughout the world — struggle to live side-by-side peacefully. Part of the problem may stem from each community’s failure to understand the other. Diplomats have been trying to offer up solutions for decades, and only time — a significant amount of it — will tell whether they succeed or merely fuel the flames further.

In the meantime, Israeli jouralists have come up with their own solution to bridge the gap between Jews and Arabs: Start a magazine that corrects each community’s stereotypes of the other by featuring writers of both Arab and Jewish backgrounds. Launched last spring, Duet has a circulation of 170,000 in a country with a population of 6.1 million people. Not bad for a fledgling magazine. But then again, one has to wonder who those 170,000 readers are. I suspect that most of them are individuals who weren’t resolved in their hatred of the opposing community when they first picked up a copy of Duet. But what about those Israelis — particularly influential politicians and leaders — who perhaps need to read the magazine most and yet potentially lack the open-mindednesshave necessary to do so? How will Duet’s publishers ensure that the magazine makes it into the hands that wield the most influence (and who perhaps need to embrace equality and tolerance the most)?

Perhaps the magazine’s best marketing strategy comes from its pool of writers. Given that Duet relies on volunteer journalists from across the country — instead of a staff of writers — maybe some magic can be worked. As those journalists return to work at their respective media outlets after writing for Duet, perhaps they’ll slowly influence the ways in which the Jews and Arabs are represented in the mainstream media and, in turn, alter the way that the public at-large — even politicians — understands the other community. Smart. Very smart.

Laura Nathan-Garner

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Many historians have alleged that Adolf Hitler had a Jewish grandparent. His self-hatred toward that aspect of identity might begin to explain why he masterminded the deaths of six million Jews. But what about the other six million people that died in Nazi Germany?

Tonight, Cinemax is airing The Hidden Fuhrer: Debating the Enigma of Hitler’s Sexuality, which suggests that Hitler was a closet queer and that he put sexual “misfits” to death as a response to his self-loathing homophobia.

The facts, however, seem to be sketchy at best. Whether Hitler was actually a closet queer is something we’ll probably never know. This, however, begs the question of why this documentary is being aired. Is it to raise questions and encourage people to question why Hitler masterminded the Holocaust? To figure out what drives tyrants to prevent these types of scenarios from happening again? Or so that historians have something to study and debate about?

What should we take from this? There are those who keep telling us to remember to never forget and to never forget to remember the Holocaust. Is this just another means of doing so? Perhaps. There is, after all, a tendency to privilege discussion of the Holocaust over discussions of other genocides. Some even go so far as to say that referring to mass killings such as those that befell Native Americans or Rwandans as “genocide” trivializes the Holocaust. But most of the people who say that are referring to the six million Jews who were killed in the Holocaust — not the other six million people.

But there is something unique about The Hidden Fuhrer. It begins to try to explain those other six million deaths. The suggestion that Hitler was a closet queer may not have the facts to back it up, but it raises questions about the persecution of other groups, which Holocaust studies and museums given little attention to.

Laura Nathan-Garner

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The American war to win the hearts and minds of the citizens of Iraq has surely failed, but the American government has been extending its tentacular reach into the Middle East through the preferred medium of intellectual warfare: the media.

During the summer of 2003, America launched Hi, a lifestyle magazine targeted at the 18- to 35-year-old age bracket for both men and women. The magazine, sponsored by the United States State Department, is produced by a firm based in Washington D.C. called The Magazine Group. The magazine enjoys funding from a bill, supported by the House of Representatives in the summer of 2003, for a variety of foreign projects in the Middle East. The president of the firm, Jane Ottenberg, perkily stated:

With its vibrant editorial and eye-catching format, we hope the magazine can serve as a springboard for greater dialogue and understanding between young Arab readers and young Americans.

The United States also runs the Arabic language Al-Hurra — which means “the free one,” — television network, along with Radio Sawa.  

Among the chorus of criticism from the Middle Eastern and Arabic language media that greeted the launch of Al-Hurra was a particularly well articulated voice of concern from Egypt’s Al-Akhbar:

The objective might be legitimate in normal circumstances. But seeking to achieve such objectives at a time when the US administration’s declared policy is to change ruling regimes – by force, if necessary – and to reform and discipline people through promises or threats, means we can only view this network with suspicion.

While it is doubtful that the chirpily titled Hi magazine will be popular, or even widely read, it is certainly competing against the local media, which includes Hezbollah’s satellite television channel, al-Manar, the highly popular Qatar-based Al-Jazeera satellite TV station, and the Saudi-backed Al-Arabiyya channel which broadcasts news. This intellectual battle of the media is generally less bloody than conventional warfare, although given the cycle of violence that erupted after the Coalition Provisional Authority shut down al-Hawzah, a weekly newspaper run by Muqtada al-Sadr, a radical Shiite cleric in Iraq, the dividing line between physical and propaganda warfare is becoming increasingly blurred.

Mimi Hanaoka

Hoping to regain the dignity that has been stripped, over the centuries, from the Roma community, the Gipsy Kings, a popular French folk band, have stated that they intend to “reclaim” the term gypsy. Given that the image of the Roma, or Gypsies, that has captured the popular imagination is that of a migrant herd of vagabonds, suspicious of outsiders and mired in poverty, the move by the Gypsy Kings — who sing in the Gypsy dialect of Gitane — to transform the term gypsy into something that is positive is both welcome and heartening, and comes at a time when individuals and governments are attempting to address the issue of anti-Roma prejudice.    

The Roma, a historically marginalized group, continue, in some regions, to live in abject poverty. In some regions of Slovakia, some Slovakian Roma communities have an unemployment rate of 100 percent.  

One of the recent attempts to refigure and rectify the popular understanding of the Roma is Bury Me Standing: The Gypsies and Their Journey, a 1996 book by Isabel Fonseca, an American author who is now married to Martin Amis. The book concerns the Roma population of Eastern Europe and documents the four years Fonseca spent in Roma communities. The title of the book is taken from a Roma saying — At least when I die, bury me standing, I’ve been on my knees all of my life.  

Popular literature may help to develop a more compassionate understanding of the Roma, but Hungary is now taking a more formal approach to the issue of anti-Roma prejudice. Hungary has implemented a three-year program, targeted towards the majority of the population, to increase their respect for the Roma minority. The program encourages the general population to increase their understanding of and interaction with the Roma community.  

Hopefully, it is through this multi-faceted approach of government initiatives, public awareness, literature, and music that the old saying — At least when I die, bury me standing, I’ve been on my knees all of my life — can begin to lose its relevance to contemporary Roma life.  

Mimi Hanaoka

In the Western world, it is a truth universally acknowledged that beauty equals height, weight, and stunningly shiny hair.  When “plus-size” models are used, it’s usually an event that needs to be labeled, so as not to confuse innocent viewers.  In Russia, the same standards of beauty are also now the norm.  Accordingly, it rattled the Russian media when Alyona Pisklova, a normal looking 15-year-old, was entered in the Rambler Media Group beauty pageant by her friends and swept the contest with at least 40,000 votes.

Rambler organized the pageant as a preliminary round for the June Miss Universe contest in Ecuador, and enthusiastic Russians were able to vote via the Internet and cell phones for their favorite contestants. Rambler made a profit on the process — it cost 86 cents to submit a vote — and was no doubt shocked when the winner was a curly haired, average-sized 15-year-old girl without any makeup.  They disqualified her, requiring all contestants to show their passports and prove their single status. While Alyona is single, she is under 18.

Alyona supporters struck back with a web site called “Say No to Barbie Dolls.” The English language statement on the site says, “Alyona represents a catalyst to reveal problems of our society. People who vote for Alyona voted against not naturally looking beauties, who cannot be distinguished from each other … mass-media standards and the models it imposes; products of the same type and trademark, which are made into cult objects for specific layers of the populace …” Anti-globalization groups such as Globalynaya Alternativa also threw themselves into the protest: “In this spontaneous protest the denizens of the Russian Internet — bored office workers, secretaries fed up with work and sexual harassment, middle management with its permanent attitude problem, journalists sick to death of their own cynicism — have all come into their own.” While objecting to the anti-globalization press, Rambler media officials and pageant organizers called the contest a success based on the participation rates, and offered Alyona a booby prize “Viewer’s Choice Award.”

Initially, I was thrilled to see that people were not willing to silently accept Alyona’s disqualification. From the comments posted on the “Say No to Barbie Dolls” site, women around the world feel similarly. It’s rare that anyone challenges the beauty standard outside fringe media, and Alyona feels like a breath of fresh air. Despite this, I began to wonder where the 15-year-old girl in this story was. How would it feel to be a high school student and know that people around the world were touting you as an icon of normalcy, or to have friends submit your photo to the contest as a joke, supposedly disguising your identity with the last name of a boy you secretly crushed on?  At least in the English speaking press, Alyona’s voice has been lost while her image is everywhere. I suppose I’d rather examine images of an average-looking woman in a “Barbie No Pasaran” t-shirt over an airbrushed model, but really, I’d like to hear what both have to say.

llouison

Fierce, a magazine which I frequently write for, has been featuring a full-page advertisement that apparently has some readers in a tizzy to such an extent that many readers have cancelled their subscriptions to the magazine. But I can’t quite make sense of why some readers are up in arms. This isn’t another Details saga. This advertisement is more along the lines of art that would grace the pages of Adbusters. Not only is it a smart advertisement, but it’s one that speaks to issues that could potentially affect — and thus should concern — readers of this feminist publication.

At the top of the page, in large font of the same type used by Victoria’s Secret in their ads and catalogues, the advertisement reads, “IT’S NO SECRET.” Below that stands an attractive female model wearing fancy red lingerie. If you, like me, read the ad initially from top to bottom, you would probably think you were in fact looking at a Victoria’s Secret ad. That is, until your eyes get to the middle of the page, where you notice the model pulling down the top part of her bra to expose a scar — the result of a mastectomy.

The smaller print says it all: “Society is obsessed with breasts. But what are we doing about breast cancer? Instead of just thinking about breasts, you can help save them.” And then readers see the logo and URL for The Breast Cancer Fund at the bottom of the page.

So why are readers backlashing against this ad? Maybe they’re devout Victoria’s Secret shoppers, disappointed by the advertisement’s parody of Victoria’s Secret advertisements. Or maybe they’re not comfortable with frank discussions of the body in a public forum. Perhaps they’re in denial and just want to think about breasts in relation to sex and are turned off, even disgusted, by the sight of a young, attractive model exposing her physical imperfections (though Fierce never claims to be the female answer to Playboy by any means). Or maybe they’re in denial, preferring to play the game of “pretend the problem isn’t there, and it will disappear.” Whatever it is, it’s both disturbing and peculiar that a group of readers who are predominately female would be offended by an advertisement that spoke directly to a disease that affects women in particular.

To see a copy of the advertisement to decide for yourself, check out the inside cover of the spring issue of Fierce, now available at your local Borders or Barnes & Noble.

Laura Nathan-Garner

Dear Reader, In The Fray is a nonprofit staffed by volunteers. If you liked this piece, could you please donate $10? If you want to help, you can also:

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Sometimes I feel like I’m licking at the crumbs of American regionalism. That instead of New Orleans, I get Bourbon St. gone wild; and in place of Seattle, I’m thrown a fish at Pikes Place Market. Beads round my neck and smoked trout on my toast, I resign myself to the fact that the Eisenhower Interstate System killed the back-roads and that sitcoms have reduced dialects to parodies. Every once in a while, however, I’m shaken from this nostalgia pandemic. I realize, yes, the geography of 19th-century America isn’t quite intact, and that’s OK because new regions have emerged and it’s our job to learn how to read them.

I arrived at this realization last night after seeing the second run of the play “Proof” — an introspective drama revolving around a recently deceased mathematician and his long-time daughter/caretaker — which in 2001 won both the Pulitzer and the Tony. The play is considered a quintessentially Chicago play because it captures something of the culture of the University of Chicago, which the playwright, David Auburn, attended and in which the play is set.

I was struck by the way the audience roared with applause whenever the actors hit on little Chicagoisms and how they hissed whenever the one character in town from New York City for the funeral championed the Big Apple over the Windy City. I found myself nodding and smiling, satisfied at these collective outbursts. It felt like an assertion of some new regional identity.

Often Chicago is given the honor of hosting a test run for future Broadway plays. They do a dry run in the Loop, tweak the production, and head East for the main event. The same thing happens with comedians, who learn their craft on the Second City stages and then head west, to the L.A. Studios. I don’t think that was the case with “Proof,” but even so, the play reminds me of the practice and brings to mind what I think of as one of the defining qualities of Chicago. There’s a certain advantage to being in the place where things are test-run. There’s a freedom in it, denied to those on the center stage. When I think of the so-called Chicagoland region, this is what comes to mind.                        

Benjamin Helphand

During his first 100 days in office, San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom made national headlines with his decision to allow gay marriages in the city (since halted by court order). But he now has to get down to the minutiae of running a city facing a huge budget deficit.

Newsom ran as a centrist liberal against Green Party progressive candidate Matt Gonzalez in the race for mayor. With his move on gay marriages and the attention he has paid to the city’s Bayview-Hunter’s Point district, Newsom has surprised many progressives and others.

Just after taking office, Newsom made unannounced visits to crime scenes in the Bayview, historically a low-income and predominately African American area of the city that has recently been hit by a wave of killings, including the shooting death of a police officer over the weekend.

The mayor also escorted a group of city department heads to the Bayview and pointed out problems with parks and other infrastructure. After the tour, repairs around the neighborhood began with earnest.

Other moves meeting with approval by many in the city include naming Heather Fong the new police chief, making her the first woman to head the department and one of the few women chiefs in the country. She’s also one of a handful of Asian Americans to be the top cop in a big city.

It’ll be interesting to see if Newsom can keep the left happy as he grapples with the budget and other everyday issues.

chinoloco

In a story I wrote recently, I revised the phrase “as American as apple pie and baseball.” To better reflect Americans’ lackluster sentiment about baseball and the most fashionable tenet of our contemporary political culture, I coined the phrase, “as American as apple pie and the war on terrorism.” But the MoveOn political action committee, which is supporting war on terrorism opponent John Kerry’s run for the White House, is attempting to change the face of America, and in the process, restore the old similes used to characterize American identity in this election year.

That is, MoveOn.org is sponsoring bake sales across the country this Saturday in an effort to distinguish the fundraising tactics of the Democrats (little money raised the old-fashioned way) and those of Republicans (big money). Sure, there is something a bit humorous about this fundraising strategy. I’ll admit that it reminds me a bit of the kids in student council holding bake sales to raise money for various projects in middle school. But why did we quit holding bake sales once we came of a certain age and develop more “sophisticated” fundraising strategies? Many, whose parents would no longer do the baking for them, didn’t have the time or interest to learn how to become Betty Crocker. But I suspect that much of the reason we outgrow bake sales as a fundraising strategy is the minimal amount of profit compared to the amount of time it takes to bake and stand around selling our products. That being said, you’re probably thinking, “and that’s exactly why this is a waste of time for raising funds to help Kerry defeat an extremely well-funded Bush campaign …”

But I’m not sure that that is the case. When I received the email about the MoveOn Bake Sale yesterday afternoon, I skeptically checked to see if there were any bake sales in my area. There were none. I then checked again a few minutes later and 10 bake sales within 10 miles of my zip code had been organized. Some of them already had close to 40 volunteers for baking and selling. Some are scheduled for individuals’ homes; one is scheduled to be held at a local grocery store; another is scheduled to be held at one of the largest and most popular book stores in the city; and one is scheduled to be held at a popular restaurant. And there will likely be hundreds more like these held across the country. At the end of the day when the profits are totaled, I suspect that these bake sales will raise more than those we held in middle school. But even if they don’t, I don’t think fundraising itself is actually the point.

Rather the purpose seems to be to restore a spirit of innovation and entrepreneurship to Americans regardless of whether they’re CEOs or people who are just barely getting by in today’s economy. And in the process, the bake sales serve to forge a sense of local community among bake sale volunteers and like-minded customers at any given bake sale. And by scheduling these bake sales to occur on the same day across the country, this project unifies Americans committed to unseating Bush and alters the sense of hopelessness that many have in the face of the corporate stronghold on the political process. Is this a winning strategy? Only time will tell with regard to the presidential election. But as a strategy to bring communities together and change the face of America one apple pie at a time, it seems like a promising project.

On a related note, I encourage you to check out the National Women’s Law Center report on the setbacks to women’s rights in the U.S. during the past three-and-a-half years. You may be aware of some of the setbacks, but due to a dearth of media coverage on the subject, some of the findings just might blow your mind (as they did mine).

Laura Nathan-Garner

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A facile understanding of the meaning of diversity is troubling, as is the oversimplification of the issue of equality into a stark dichotomy of race and wealth.  

Walter Benn Michaels, professor of English at the University of Illinois-Chicago, declares in The New York Times that in their quest to increase the wealth of “cultural identities” in their student bodies, colleges and universities obscure the question of socio-economic diversity. Michaels claims:

Diversity, like gout, is a rich people’s problem. And it is also a rich people’s solution. For as long as we’re committed to thinking of difference as something that should be respected, we don’t have to worry about it as something that should be eliminated.

Michaels does make a valid point that socio-economic diversity is vital to creating a vibrant, fair, and stimulating educational environment. However, framing the issue of diversity in such stark and, if we were to believe Michaels, mutually exclusive terms — race or wealth — is abysmally unproductive. We — and certainly Michaels — must expand our understanding of what constitutes diversity without compromising our commitment to furthering, in concrete terms, the wealth of diversity in institutions of higher education. Absent of diversity — in its physical manifestations, its socio-economic context, and in diversity of opinion – even the best-intentioned education can only create a myopic world view that leaves students ill-equipped to respond to the needs of an increasingly multicultural society. Whittling down the concept of diversity to one of either race or socio-economic status is at best an anemic understanding of diversity.  

Mimi Hanaoka

The United States is now embroiled in an escalating hell of its own making; hundreds of Iraqi civilians are reported dead in Fallujah, the US-appointed Iraqi Governing Council is apparently livid that it was not consulted by the United States prior to the U.S. program to “pacify” Fallujah, and President Bush and the Coalition Provisional Authority have created a united front of resistance against the US-led occupation.  
  
While it is unclear whether the current cease-fire will produce a peaceful agreement, it is evident that Paul Bremer and the CPA instigated a disastrously violent chain of events when the CPA temporarily shut down al-Hawzah, a weekly newspaper run by Muqtada al-Sadr, a radical Shiite cleric in Iraq. In choking off a legitimate forum for political discourse by shutting down al-Hawzah, the CPA further angered, frustrated, and insulted a large number of Iraqis; frustration led to protests which, in turn, led to the current orgy of violence.  

Abdel Hady Abu Taleb, a journalist, demanded in Egypt’s state-owned Al-Akhbar newspaper, “How will the Americans explain to the world the joint Shiite-Sunni intifada?” How indeed will President Bush and the Coalition Provisional Authority explain to the world and to the families of the dead how the alleged victory in Iraq has disintegrated into an angry bloodbath? And what is to become of Iraq, given that President Bush is adamantly insisting on June 30 as the date on which the CPA will hand over power to a local Iraqi government?  

Juan Cole, Professor of History at the University of Michigan and author of Sacred Space and Holy War, which examines the history of Shiite Islam in Iraq, Iran, and the Persian Gulf, stated on April 10, 2004:

This looks to me like an incipient collapse of the US government of Iraq. Beyond the IGC, the bureaucracy is protesting. Many government workers in the ministries are on strike and refusing to show up for work, according to ash-Sharq al-Awsat. Without Iraqis willing to serve in the Iraqi government, the US would be forced to rule the country militarily and by main force. Its legitimacy appears to be dwindling fast.

Muqtada al-Sadr’s Friday prayers sermon, read by one of his aids at the Great Mosque of Kufa, sounds both increasingly prescient and like a clearly articulated battle-cry:

“I direct my words at my enemy, Bush … If your justification for the war on Iraq was Saddam and his weapons of mass destruction, then these issues are past, and you are now making war on the entire Iraqi people. I advise you to withdraw immediately from Iraq, otherwise you will lose the elections for which you are now campaigning, and you will lose your own people, and other peoples, as well … America is not confronting a popular resistance, but rather a genuine revolution.”

President Bush and the CPA, though lethally allergic to the idea of an Islamic society, need to reconsider what the new Iraq will look like, and they must reconcile themselves to the fact that it may be clerics — unlike the secular Baathist regime — who become the leading voices in a new Iraq.  

Mimi Hanaoka