Why Some Jews Don’t Speak Arabic

Ben Cohen
The Cutting Edge
10 January '11
(h/t Bataween)

I always interpreted the term “rootless cosmopolitan,” a Soviet euphemism for “Jew” with a distinctly pejorative ring, as a compliment. The Jewish stevedores who hauled their loads along Salonika’s docks, the Jewish writers who populated the cafes of Vienna and Paris, the Jewish newshounds who bashed out copy for shoestring budget newspapers in London and New York—all conjured up hugely appealing images of a worldly people equally at home with the labor of the hand and the labor of the mind. Jews were building transnational networks, both rabbinical and revolutionary, before we even knew what to call such things.

Not for us the bunkum of “blut,” “boden” and “volk,” I liked to think. To paraphrase the historian Isaac Deutscher, we Jews were in but not of the societies in which we lived, enabling us to see past the parochial complaints and primitive hatreds of our neighbors.

A recent tussle I had with an Arab writer forced me, however, to consider that admittedly romantic notion from another standpoint. The trigger for the dispute was a piece I’d written about Al Akhbar, a pro-Hezbollah Lebanese newspaper that had been the subject of a flattering New York Times profile. My antagonist, a blogger rejoicing in the nom de plume “Angry Arab,” was irritated for a number of reasons: my discussion of Al Akhbar’s anti-Semitism, my reprise of the bloody end which typically meets Middle Eastern leftists when they align with nationalists and Islamists, my questioning of the paper’s “independent” credentials—but most of all by the fact that I don’t read Arabic.

(Read full "Why Some Jews Don’t Speak Arabic")

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