Edward Said

But what are we adding with this term Hebrew Orientalism? How is it distinct from Orientalism and how is it related to what our audience knows as Orientalism?

When we talk about Orientalism, the shadow of Edward Said usually looms very, very large.

Rather than opening up and objectively explaining the Orient for European audience, Edward Said teaches us that Orientalism is a projection and a reflection of the West itself.

And therefore, during the colonial era, Orientalism reflects the history of colonialism and imperialism rather than representing or talking about the East itself.

As the object of Western imagination, the East is seen as the uncivilized, the savage, the underdeveloped, the weak, the feminized, while the West emerges as the superior, the powerful, the civilized.

But what are we adding with this term Hebrew Orientalism? How is it distinct from Orientalism and how is it related to what our audience knows as Orientalism?

When we talk about Orientalism, the shadow of Edward Said usually looms very, very large.

Rather than opening up and objectively explaining the Orient for European audience, Edward Said teaches us that Orientalism is a projection and a reflection of the West itself.

And therefore, during the colonial era, Orientalism reflects the history of colonialism and imperialism rather than representing or talking about the East itself.

As the object of Western imagination, the East is seen as the uncivilized, the savage, the underdeveloped, the weak, the feminized, while the West emerges as the superior, the powerful, the civilized.

And I find that Sartre story kind of interesting that way.

The other one is Edward Said.

Because Edward Said not only sits in the pulpit of Columbia and writes his big books and his very intellectual post-colonial, post-structuralist things.

He also got directly involved in Palestinian politics and the Palestinian National Committee.

He met with Yasser Arafat.

Meaningless, right.

He had to start basically from the beginning with these people and, like, earn their trust and respect and admiration or whatever.

And there's this beautiful scene, one of my favorite scenes of cinema, with Edward Said sitting with a group of, like, five Palestinian women, refugees in the south of Lebanon.

Yeah

... and I've read everything, and I've never heard of Edward Said and then they made me read him in college.

I was like-

Yes, yes.

Sor- sorry, I'm ranting.

No. Yeah.

This guy named Edward Said, who I had never heard of before.

This is very strange because in high school I had read basically every single great writer that you could possibly think of, or at least I'd heard of every single great writer that you could possibly think of, and I didn't know who Edward Said was and I didn't know, you know, what poem or what novel we were reading of his.

Okay, I think the issue with this point is this that young people have basically been indoctrinated with the idea that western civilization is evil okay and they have been indoctrinated with the idea that israel was evil and that it was essentially a singularly evil country and then the same methods used to demonize israel as it turned out had actually been applied against the western democracies as well And, you know, you've got people like Foucault, Marcuse, and a whole bunch of other people that have been dominating the intellectual environment on college campuses for a long time.

And Edward Said, people basically embrace the idea that Western civilization was evil.

And as a white guy, I'm going to, and white guys were the worst.

Okay.

And, you know, that's what made me want to study the region further, eventually getting a PhD in history in the modern Middle East.

And the part where media plays into it is when you study the Middle East, I mean, one of the most important texts that all of us will read is Edward Said's Orientalism.

and this idea of the entire way that the region has been depicted through the academy, through popular culture, through art.

And that made me very interested in understanding narratives, how stories are told, in our modern society the to my mind at least the most important storyteller is the news media because most people you know that if you're looking at mass consumption of the public most people are not going to be reading a lot of books on these topics they're not you know everybody has their own jobs and specialties and things that they're working on and so everyone's not going to become a historian of the middle east that's not the extent that their education is going to go on this particular topic.