FORWARD>International>In India, a Historic Community Watches Its Numbers Dwindle

In India, a Historic Community Watches Its Numbers Dwindle

By Beth Schwartzapfel
August 25, 2007

Alibag, India - In most other Jewish communities, Magen Aboth would be considered an understated synagogue. But here in Alibag — a sleepy, dusty town on the west coast of India where one- and two-room huts with thatched roofs dominate the landscape — it’s a magnificent, proud building. Two stories tall and trimmed in graceful curves and carved flowers, its concrete facade is painted in shades of blue, pillars fronting a mosaic-tiled portico.

The hazan, Jacob Elijah Dandekar, leads morning prayers at 7:30 and afternoon mincha at 5:30, but there’s rarely a minyan. The group must make do with the seven or so people who come regularly. Dandekar, 72, says that he usually spends the rest of day reading the Torah. (“Or else the paper,” he says with a chuckle.) On this morning, he sits on a bench in the cool shade of the portico, shooing away the neighborhood goats that wander into the courtyard.

Alibag and the surrounding villages and towns — Ravdanda, Panvel, Pen, Nandgaon, Navgaon, about 22 miles southwest across a gray-green harbor from Mumbai — were home to what was once a thriving and vibrant Jewish community known as the Bene Israel. So many Jews once lived here, in fact, that this dirt road is called Israel Lane. The facades of many of the houses along it still bear Stars of David and Hebrew lettering. Four families now remain, totaling about 20 people. Of those, Dandekar says, it’s not a question of whether they will leave, but when.

“If they get a nice price for their property, they will go,” he said. “They are waiting for money, or waiting for their children to finish their courses, and then they will go.”

Dandekar’s English is passable, but he’s more comfortable in his native Marathi, and his translator today was Ben Siyon Ghosalker, the caretaker of Knesseth Eliyahoo Synagogue in Mumbai. Ghosalker, a cheerful man of 68 with a toothless smile and seemingly endless energy, is so effusive about the sights to be seen here in Alibag that he convinced this traveler to endure three sweaty hours on a bumpy, overcrowded bus from Mumbai. Indeed, Ghosalker is deeply connected to Alibag. Two years ago, his nephew was bar mitzvahed here. It was probably Ailbag’s final bar mitzvah: Adeyal Wakrulkar, now 14, is the youngest Jewish person left here.

The Wakrulkar family members own the S. David Soda Water Factory, housed in a worn cement building at the crossroads of two dirt lanes. Hand-drawn lettering in crumbling, colorful paint on the walls outside its entrance informs visitors in Marathi and English that ice cream and cold drinks are available inside. Ghosalker’s sister, Norin Wakrulkar, lives here with her son and daughter-in-law Levy and Sinora, and the couple’s two sons. Levy Yoseph Wakrulkar, born here in Alibag, celebrated his bar mitzvah at Magen Aboth and raised his sons here — the sixth generation of the family to live both a traditionally Indian and traditionally Jewish way of life in this town.

In 1964, when Levy was born, there were some 30 Jewish families here in Alibag; teachers from Mumbai visited regularly to teach religious school to the children, a bar mitzvah was celebrated every year or two, and come prayer times it was easy to assemble a minyan. Mirroring the larger Indian migration patterns to urban population centers from rural ones, however, many Bene Israel have moved to the city from the villages and have established lives in Mumbai and in the nearby cities of Thane and Pune. But most have moved to Israel. Of the 65,000 Bene Israel, 4,000 live in greater Mumbai and 60,000 live in Israel.

“We feel sad,” Sinora said of life in Alibag without the friends and relatives who have left in large numbers. “But we have e-mail and messages on the Internet. They come to visit every one or two years. And we go to Thane, and Bombay, and Pune.” But the Wakrulkars, for their part, are staying put. “We like Israel,” Sinora said, “but we like India more. India is our home.”

Shalva Weil, an anthropologist who researches Indian Jewry at Hebrew University’s Research Institute for Innovation in Education, noted that the emigration phenomenon is particularly intriguing, since Jews in India never suffered from discrimination. There were trickles of immigration in the 1940s after Israeli independence, Weil said, but there was never much Zionist fervor among the Bene Israel, who felt too Indian. Immigration began in earnest in the 1960s, Weil said, when economic opportunities became available in Israel on a scale on which they weren’t available in India.

“Friends and family wrote letters and said, ‘We’re happy here,’” Ghosalker recalled of the pattern by which his own family — one sister and four cousins — began to leave. “So they went, too, and wrote letters to their friends and family.” The snowball effect has left families without appropriate marriage candidates for their sons and daughters, Weil said, and so the exodus continues as young people now leave to get married.

It’s a circuitous and 2,000-year-long journey that may well have landed them back where their ancestors started. Legends abound about the origins of the Bene Israel, but the most romantic, and the one that seems to have stuck, claims that a boatload of oil pressers, fleeing persecution by King Antiochus of Palestine in second-century BCE, was shipwrecked here in the year 175. Seven couples survived, and they became the forbearers of the Bene Israel — living peaceably with their new neighbors, speaking the local language, observing the local customs and dress, and assimilating into their new homeland without losing touch with a few basic tenets of their religion. For example, they observed the laws of kashrut and circumcision and rested on the Sabbath (in fact, in Marathi they were known as Shanwar Teli, or Saturday oil pressers, in recognition of their day of rest).

But because the Bene Israel were cut off from the rest of the Jewish Diaspora for many hundreds of years (and, as the story goes, their holy books and religious articles went down with their ship), the specifics of Judaism — the Hebrew language, for instance, and the Torah and Talmud — were lost to them. That is, until they were “discovered” in the 1700s by a Cochini merchant who then brought them into contact with the wider Jewish world and its teachings. At their peak, in the 1940s, Bene Israel numbered some 20,000 in India; they built large synagogues in Mumbai and Pune, and small ones dotted these villages on the coast. An ancient cemetery in the village of Navgaon is said to contain the graves of the shipwrecked couples; newer headstones, from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, are written in English, Marathi and Hebrew.

The cemetery is in a field flanked by coconut trees, blanketed with a thick layer of grass and wild mint. Headstones cropped up from amid the brush here and there, but more common were plain stones sunken into the earth, laid in the shapes of rectangles, roughly the size of the bodies that had long ago been buried there. “Here lie buried the ancestors of the Bene Israel community of India,” read the inscription on an imposing stone obelisk that the community had come together to build some years ago. The obelisk kept watch over the graves of those “who were shipwrecked on the shores of Navgaon nearly 2,000 years ago…. With the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, they have emigrated in large numbers to the State of Israel, where they are happily settled.”

Brown Alumni Magazine>Arts & Culture>Iraqi Life Online

Iraqi Life Online

By Beth Schwartzapfel
May/June 2007

“You can join a band, or you can join a militia,” says Adel, a twenty-three-year-old engineering student at the University of Baghdad as he straps on an electric guitar. “Playing this live music and screaming, it’s like a therapy,” he says, flashing a gap-toothed grin toward a video camera.

Adel is one of three Iraqi students who are chronicling their lives on HometownBaghdad.com, a series of documentary videos produced and distributed by Michael DiBenedetto ’03. In addition to the movie-star-handsome Adel, the cast includes medical student Ausama, and Saif, who wants to become a dentist.

Hometown Baghdad made its debut on the Web on March 19, the fourth anniversary of the start of the Iraq war. New episodes are posted every few days, first to Salon.com, where they appear exclusively for twenty-four hours, then to YouTube and other sites. The “webisodes” range from forty seconds to five minutes.

Some are funny, some poignant, some banal. In one episode, Saif and his friends hang out, watching soccer and playing guitar while they prepare to say goodbye to a friend leaving for Jordan. In another, Ausama turns the camera on his young cousins as they describe a man they saw on their way home from school; he’d been shot in the head, and his brains spilled onto the road. Then the boys race around the house firing imaginary guns at each other and laughing goofily.

In an episode called “Hidden Camera,” Adel hides his video camera in a bag with a hole cut into it so he can film the wreckage and garbage in his neighborhood. “I’ll try to be careful and not say anything in English,” he says before leaving the house. If he’s caught with the camera, he says, “They’ll kill me!”

He says this in a singsong voice, but he’s dead serious. “The Iraqi producers risked their lives to do this,” says DiBenedetto. “The cast members put themselves in a ridiculous amount of danger.”

Hometown Baghdad was originally conceived for television. DiBenedetto works for NextNext Entertainment, a Manhattan-based media production company whose subsidiary Chat the Planet had produced an extraordinarily successful series of TV specials linking young people around the world. In early 2006, DiBenedetto and a colleague headed for Los Angeles to pitch a Baghdad-based reality-TV series to cable networks.

Then the urgency of life in Iraq persuaded DiBenedetto and his colleagues to use the Internet instead. They learned that their Iraqi filmmakers and cast “were receiving death threats and thinking about leaving Baghdad,” says DiBenedetto. Deciding not to wait for television’s snail’s pace, the producers went to two of their most reliable funders—the Shei’rah Foundation and Cinereach—and said, “Listen, we really want to tell these stories. We don’t really know what it’s going to look like. We don’t even know who is going to leave halfway through our production, but we need to start shooting,” says DiBenedetto.

The funders agreed, and in June the Iraqi team began filming, sending 120 hours of tape to NextNext’s New York offices for editing. The documentary will ultimately comprise forty-some episodes, upwards of two hours of programming.

Using the Web allowed the producers to connect viewers in ways TV could not, says DiBenedetto. “Online video has such an amazing ability to generate dialogue and real engagement,” he says. “There’s so much sharing with blogs that if it catches on, it will immediately spread.” So far, the Hometown Baghdad blog has received about 4,000 hits a day. Some episodes have been viewed as many as 10,000 times on YouTube. Online giants like BoingBoing, DailyKos, and Huffington Post have been spreading the word, and in the first week of the series the blog search engine Technorati registered more than 150 blogs linking to hometownbaghdad.com.

DiBenedetto, who says he “lives his life online,” is a passionate believer in the power of the Internet to connect everyday people and thus to humanize the war in Iraq, which is his ultimate goal. “People deserve to hear these stories,” he says. “ It may change the way that they see the whole war and the whole world.”

FORWARD>Education>Jewish Studies Take Off, North of the Border

Jewish Studies Take Off, North of the Border
Academics Take Notice of a Uniquely Canadian Subject

By Beth Schwartzapfel
January 19, 2007

‘Thirty years ago, the Jewish community of Canada was not a subject for winning tenure at a university,” said Ira Robinson, professor of Judaic studies at Montreal’s Concordia University. Now, all over Canada, scholarly journals, academic conferences, university institutes and endowed professorships are cropping up around a subject that might have seemed parochial a generation ago: Canadian Jewish Studies.

The University of Ottawa’s new Vered Program in Jewish Canadian Studies will enroll the first undergraduates in its minor this fall, and its first major publication, the bilingual “Traduire le Montreal Yiddish” (“New Readings in Yiddish Montreal”), will be put out by the university’s press next year. Toronto’s York University has an endowed chair for the study of Canadian Jewry. And the largest program of the lot, Concordia’s Institute for Canadian Jewish Studies, has an endowed chair, 10 graduate students and a visiting-scholars program, and has already published four books, including “Canadian Jewish Studies Reader” from 2004 and, most recently, an English translation of the 1948 Yiddish novel “The Rich Man,” by Montreal writer Henry Kreisel.

Scholars across North America have taken note. Editors of the English-language international journal Jewish History recently entered into an agreement with Concordia’s Robinson and Richard Menkis of the University of British Columbia to edit a special issue on Canada, Robinson told the Forward. This publication comes in addition to the journal Canadian Jewish Studies, which has a circulation of some 200 academics and is published annually by the Association for Canadian Jewish Studies.

“There is increasing interest from Canadian Jews, who have finally attained the realization that we are interesting,” said Steven Lapidus, a graduate student at Concordia who is studying the development of the Orthodox rabbinate in Montreal. “We have long underplayed our appeal.”

Canadian Jewish Studies is a wide-ranging field. Typically, programs are interdisciplinary — built of shared appointments with professors in subjects such as history, religion, Canadian studies, literature and languages — and undergraduate courses are cross-listed. Professor Norman Ravvin, for instance, Concordia’s chair of Canadian Jewish studies, will teach a religious-studies class this spring titled “The Canadian Jewish Experience: Jewish Identity and Religious Life in Canada,” while University of Ottawa professor Seymour Mayne will teach a course in the Canadian Studies department called “Jewish Canadian Writers: The Making of a Tradition.”

The unique experience of Canadian Jews is rooted in the unique history of the country itself. Where America imagines itself as a melting pot, Canada’s immigrant mythology is that of a mosaic. “There’s no uniformity, no single approach to Canada,” University of Ottawa professor of history Pierre Anctil told the Forward; compared to the United States, “it’s a much more decentralized and multiple country.” Therefore, when Jews first started to immigrate to Canada in large numbers at the start of the 20th century, there was not as much of an emphasis on assimilation as there was in the United States.

Because Canada was a British colony, “Canadian Jews adopted, at the beginning of their history, a British vision of Judaism — which meant Orthodox,” Anctil told the Forward. In concert with the “mosaic” approach to difference, these Orthodox roots have caused Canada’s Jews to “remain more Jewish, more attracted to their own tradition,” said Anctil. “There is less intermarriage, more attachment to the community and to a Jewish education for the children.” Indeed, more than one-third of Jewish school-age children in Montreal attend Jewish day schools, compared to 12% in the United States.

If newly arrived Canadians’ vision of Judaism was British, their surroundings were often French; Jewish history in Canada straddles the country’s most distinctive cultural and linguistic divide. For most of the community’s history, Montreal was the capital of Canadian Jewish life. But the passage in 1980 of the “language laws” — which established French as the sole official language of Quebec, and coincided with the rise of the nationalist secession movement — caused many Jews to feel unwelcome and prompted a mass migration westward, to Toronto. The Jewish population of Montreal fell by almost 20%. Today, some 200,000 of Canada’s 350,000 Jews live in Toronto; 100,000 remain in Montreal, and 50,000 live elsewhere.

Canada has the sixth-largest population of Jews in the world, according to the Jewish People Policy Planning Institute. Still, the absolute number of Canadian Jews is relatively small, which means that many students of Canadian Jewish Studies are not Jewish themselves. Anctil — who is not Jewish — says that this should not be surprising. Because Jewish immigrants were the first non-Christians to immigrate to Canada in large numbers, “to study Jews is to study the level of tolerance that Canadian society had toward people of different origins,” he said. “We cannot do a sound and valid history of Canada without doing the Jewish component.”

Furthermore, said Anctil, Jews have had much in common with French Canadians, particularly since Jewish life was centered in Quebec for so long. “One minority meets another minority, and there’s quite a lot to be learned,” he said. “The way that Jews have preserved their heritage is of interest to Francophones as well.”

Canadian Jewish history may date from more than a century ago, but the evolution of an academic field related to it is a more recent development. According to Concordia’s Robinson, “through the 1960s, the Canadian Jewish community was largely a community of immigrants or immigrants’ children.” It’s only recently, he said, that “it’s developed a much stronger sense of itself as its own community, and has a bit more of the perspective that allows it to examine itself.”

Many historians point to the 1983 book “None is Too Many: Canada and the Jews of Europe, 1933-1948,” by historians Irving Abella and Harold Troper, as the first example of a truly singular Jewish Canadian scholarship. “It created a real splash within the Canadian academic community,” said Robinson. “This is one of the major signposts in this process.”

Shortly thereafter, with the passage of two Multiculturalism Acts, in 1988 and 1991, the Government of Canada made multiculturalism official policy. This moment, says Concordia’s Ravvin, marked “a shift in interest and willingness of universities, and also donors, that comes from the sense of Canada as a multiethnic place.” Some of the initiatives that followed, such as federal support for “ethnic university chairs,” provided funds for programs such as Concordia’s and York’s; both were established in 1997. Ottawa’s Anctil also points to the fact that “many of the Jewish communities have a strong ability to preserve and organize themselves. That’s a strong reason why we have these programs now, because they’re being supported by Jews — financially, and also in terms of [recognizing their] importance.”

FORWARD>Arts and Culture>Rembrandt Revised

Rembrandt Revised
Was the Dutch Master Really a Philo-Semite?

By Beth Schwartzapfel
January 5, 2007

As Jewish devotees of Dutch painter Rembrandt van Rijn are fond of noting, he lived and worked in Amsterdam’s Jewish quarter during the “Golden Age” of the 17th century. He painted dozens of portraits of Jews and had a relationship with at least one prominent Jewish figure — Rabbi Menasseh Ben Israel. As conventional wisdom goes, he must have had a deep connection to his Israelite neighbors.

Not so, says a new exhibit at Amsterdam’s Jewish Historical Museum.

Called “The ‘Jewish’ Rembrandt,” the exhibit aims to differentiate “what is myth and what is fact,” according to its curator, Mirjam Alexander. “We don’t think there’s any factual evidence to support this idea that Rembrandt was a special friend to the Jews,” she told the Forward. Part of the Netherlands’ yearlong Rembrandt 400 Festival, in honor of the artist’s quadricentennial birthday, the exhibit runs through February.

“Their take is absolutely right,” said Steven Nadler, author of “Rembrandt’s Jews” (University of Chicago Press, 2003) and professor of philosophy and Jewish studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “There’s been this myth of Rembrandt as this extraordinarily sympathetic philo-Semite who lived among the Jews because he had this deep feeling of identification with them,” he told the Forward. “In fact, he moved into what was the Jewish neighborhood only because it was also the center for Amsterdam’s art world.”

Indeed, one of the first installations that visitors to the exhibition will encounter is a large, interactive map of the Jewish quarter in the 1600s that shows the proximity of Rembrandt’s home to those of not only such prominent Jewish figures as Ben Israel and Baruch Spinoza, but also such important artists as Hendrick Uylenburgh, Paulus Potter and Pieter Lastman.

The subjects of Rembrandt’s portraits have provided another clue that museum representatives say has misled aficionados to associate Rembrandt with the Jews. Abraham Bredius was a 19th- and early 20th-century art collector who compiled what is still viewed as the definitive catalogue of Rembrandt’s works. It contains no fewer than 36 paintings, with such titles as “Portrait of a Young Jew” and “Portrait of an Old Jewish Man.” Two of Rembrandt’s most famous works are a portrait of prominent Jewish physician Ephraïm Bueno and an etching of Ben Israel. However, a closer look reveals that most of these paintings were either not actually done by Rembrandt or were not paintings of Jews, after all.

As a painter, Rembrandt was known for his sensitive renderings of faces and expressions. He “was famous for his humanness, for his sympathy for his portrait subjects,” Netherlands-based art historian and Rembrandt expert Gary Schwartz told the Forward. Indeed, Alexander concurred, the artist’s reputation led to the self-fulfilling prophecy whereby “any [painting of a] man with a beard, looking a bit tragic, or having a certain sensitive expression, it’s considered a rabbi, by Rembrandt.”

As part of the preparation for the current exhibition, Alexander and her team tracked down 22 of the 36 portraits in storerooms, galleries and private collections around the world. Over the course of two-and-a-half years, they researched when the paintings acquired their Jewish titles and when they were attributed to Rembrandt. They subjected the paintings to X-rays and expert scrutiny. In the end, they found “only [one] certain portrait of a Jew Rembrandt ever made”: that of Dr. Bueno. The rest were either revealed to be not by Rembrandt or to have acquired their “Jewish” titles later on, after the myth about Rembrandt and the Jews had achieved wide circulation.

It is not disputed that Rembrandt had a relationship with Ben Israel; in 1655, Rembrandt provided illustrations for an early edition of the rabbi’s book, “Piedra Gloriosa.” However, there is no evidence that the men were friends. Even the etching of Menasseh Ben Israel was given its title long after Rembrandt’s death. The Jewish Historical Museum exhibition includes Rembrandt’s etching alongside another etching; that one is by Jewish artist Salom Italia and is known to be of Ben Israel. “People can compare themselves,” Alexander said. “Do these two men look like each other? Do I see the same man?” The answer, according to art historians, is a resounding no. “The face, while there is a family resemblance — and even making an allowance for Italia’s artistic shortcomings — is not close enough,” Nadler wrote in his book.

Throughout the remainder of the exhibit, each aspect of the myth of Rembrandt and the Jews is painstakingly dismantled. Rembrandt’s painting “Jews in the Synagogue,” for example, which depicts the inside of a building that some say closely resembles Amsterdam’s Portuguese synagogue, is revealed to have been painted long before the synagogue was even built. The Jewish title was not given to the painting until the 18th century; a 17th-century catalog called it “Pharisees in the Temple” — “which,” Alexander said, “it clearly is.” Some of Rembrandt’s paintings, for another example, contain well-formed Hebrew characters; however, they also contain Hebrew mistakes — enough to demonstrate that Rembrandt wasn’t particularly familiar with the aleph-bet. “Belshazzar’s Feast,” in particular, mistakenly ends an Aramaic phrase with a zayin instead of with a nun sufit. An X-ray of the painting, on display in the museum’s exhibition, demonstrates Rembrandt’s process: In an attempt to make the nun sufit look like it is in the process of being written, Rembrandt simply painted over the bottom half of it — without realizing that a truncated nun sufit is actually a different letter.

In the end, the myth about Rembrandt and the Jews has “as much to do with the image people have of Jews” as it has to do with Rembrandt, Alexander said. “What most fascinated us was the perception of Jews as suffering, and Rembrandt as suffering, and that Rembrandt’s Jews would reflect his suffering.” Plus, Nadler said, the truth “helps us understand the art. Our appreciation of the art can only benefit from a deeper understanding of the life and the thought behind it.”

Brown Alumni Magazine>Under the Elms>One Way to Stop Genocide

One Way to Stop Genocide
Brown divests from companies supporting the Sudanese government, and Providence follows suit.

By Beth Schwartzapfel
July/August 2006

This winter, Brown became the sixth university nationwide to put its money where its mouth is. Since the Corporation voted last February to divest from companies whose activities support the genocide in the Darfur region of Sudan, divestment has be-come a national trend. Following Brown’s lead have been such schools as Columbia and the University of Califor-nia, as well as a growing list of states, including New Jersey and Illinois. In April, Providence became the first U.S. city to divest from Sudan, thanks in part to the efforts of Scott Warren ’09 of the campus group Darfur Action Network (DAN). “No doubt momentum at Brown carried over to Providence,” Warren says. “And we’re trying to continue that momentum.” The group is lobbying the Rhode Island legislature to divest as well.

DAN is the Brown chapter of a national organization called Students Taking Action Now: Darfur (STAND), which claims more than 100 college and 200 high school chapters. For nearly a year, DAN has been working with the Brown Corporation’s Advisory Committee on Corporate Responsibility in Investment Policies (ACCRI) to fine-tune a coherent position on Darfur. “The University should not be making money from clearly immoral activities,” says ACCRI chair Louis Putterman, an economics professor. “It shouldn’t try to earn the maximum return on the dollar without any consideration for the ethical consequences.”

The large-scale violence in Darfur broke out in February 2003, when the government responded to local ethnic skirmishes by giving money and arms to local militias called Janjaweed, which are primarily allied with Arab tribes. Since then, the Janjaweed have been systematically targeting non-Arab civilians with a pattern of human rights abuses the Bush administration and other world leaders have termed genocide. More than 200,000 people have died and more than two million have been displaced, according to the International Crisis Group. Because the Sudanese government is funding the Janjaweed, companies that substantially aid the government are seen as complicit.

“By re­main­ing invested in these companies, we are, in effect, supporting the government of Sudan,” says Michael Williams ’08 of the Undergraduate Council of Students, which backed ACCRI’s recommendation.

In April 2005, President Ruth Simmons asked ACCRI to see whether any of Brown’s $2 billion endowment was invested in companies directly contributing to the conflict. The committee initially identified just one company, Zurich-based ABB Ltd., and called for Simmons to write the head of ABB expressing the University’s concern.

But by February, when the committee made its recommendation to the Corporation, the group was taking a harder line. Working with DAN, ACCRI had assembled a “do not invest” list of companies it wanted Brown to avoid until the conflict in Darfur is resolved.

To compile the list, the advisory committee used research by other universities that had already divested, as well as additional research by ACCRI and consultation with Institutional Shareholder Services. After the addition and subtraction of several companies, the list now totals fourteen: ABB, Petro­China, Sinopec, Tatneft, Alcatel, Siemens, Alstom, Bharat Heavy Electricals, Harbin Power Equipment Company, Lundin Petroleum, Nam Fatt Company Bhd, Oil and Natural Gas Corporation, PECD Bhd, and Schlumberger. ACCRI will continue to revise the list as companies change their practices and as the situation in Darfur evolves.

Divestment is a familiar tool for universities seeking to exact social change. In the 1980s, many U.S. institutions divested from companies doing business in South Africa to protest apartheid. After months of contentious debate, Brown agreed to divest its South African holdings over a three-year period, starting in 1986. More recently, in 2003, the University voted to divest from companies that manufacture tobacco products.

Ultimately, the Brown vote on Darfur is symbolic. By the time ACCRI’s recommendations were adopted this winter, Brown was no longer invested in ABB anyway, says Executive Vice President for Finance and Administration Elizabeth Huidekoper.

Still, as more and more schools, states, and cities divest from Sudan, the cumulative pressure is being felt. This April the Sudanese embassy released an open letter urging U.S. entities to reconsider their choice to divest. “We took that as a sign that divestment really was working,” says Warren.

Providence Journal>Books>Translating an Exile's Experience

Translating an Exile's Experience

MY FATHER'S NOTEBOOK, by Kader Abdolah. HarperCollins. 328 pages. $24.95.

By Beth Schwartzapfel
May 21, 2006

My Father's Notebook is, first and foremost, a book about translation. Ishmael, the novel's Iranian narrator, is the son of a deaf-mute carpet mender named Aga Akbar. Ishmael spends his childhood as his father's shadow and mouthpiece, deciphering the older man's rudimentary gestures and translating them into words.

Now, years later, Ishmael is a political exile living in Holland. Long after his father's death, he appoints himself Akbar's translator again. His father never learned to read or write, but he did invent a cuneiform alphabet, modeled after an ancient inscription near the village where he grew up. Ishmael has his father's tattered journal, and is attempting to translate the cuneiform scrawl into Dutch, his new tongue.

Kader Abdolah, himself an Iranian-born political exile living in Holland, has published three previous novels; this is the first to be translated into English.

From Persian to cuneiform, from cuneiform to Dutch, and now from Dutch to English, the circumstances of Akbar's life and the longings in his heart are sifted through many languages before they reach us, the readers. Abdolah does a remarkable job conveying that sense of frustrating distance, that vagueness born of too many layers of telling and re-telling, of longing for something whose outlines are sketched, but whose details are barely understood.

But sometimes vagueness is just plain vague. And even after finishing the novel, I still wondered what parts of the story were translations of the notebook, what parts were Ishmael's memory, and what were stories told to Ishmael by friends and neighbors.

Feelings were beautifully conveyed, but the events of the narrative were hard to follow and not well-knit into the backdrop of Iranian history. The result is moving, dreamlike stories interspersed with overly didactic history lessons and confusing turns.

Aga Akbar grew up in a village at the base of Saffron Mountain. At the top of this mountain are two holy sites. One is the cave into which is carved the cuneiform inscription which forms the basis of Akbar's script. The other is a naturally formed well, inside which Shi'ites believe that the Messiah sits reading, waiting patiently to emerge.

My Father's Notebook is most moving each time the narrative returns to Saffron Mountain, as it does many times. These scenes are beautifully rendered and effective in describing the wider world through the simple lens of life in the village.

Unlike Ishmael's confusing palimpsest of city and university, political activism and new Dutch identity, Saffron Mountain -- Akbar's home, Ishmael's beloved homeland -- needs no translating. It speaks for itself.

Brown Alumni Magazine>Saving the Children

Saving the Children
Two of them are from warring ethnic groups, but these three South Asians have been united by friendship for fourteen years. Now they are putting their bond to a higher purpose: building a model of pediatric health care for the entire developing world.

By Beth Schwartzapfel
March/April 2006

Sanjay Daluvoy ’96 used to watch his mother make sandwiches. In Pasadena, California, where Daluvoy grew up, it was not uncommon for moms to make sandwiches for their young sons. But these weren’t for Sanjay. “There were millions of loaves of bread scattered all over the kitchen counter,” he recalls. “She and a friend were just making all these sandwiches in little lunch bags and dropping them off at homeless shelters. She never made it a big event, with publicity, or for recognition. It’s not like I can Google her. She just does it.”

After he earned his bachelor’s in business economics at Brown, Daluvoy worked on health-care policy in Washington, D.C., conducted research at Children’s Hospital Boston, consulted for health-care companies in San Francisco, started a dot-com called Infinity Markets, and attended medical school in Philadelphia. Through it all, his mother’s example stuck with him. So in December 2004, when the tsunami ravaged Sri Lanka, not far from the Andhra Pradesh region of southern India from which his family had emigrated to the United States, it’s not surprising that Daluvoy immediately felt a need to do something. “You wake up in the morning,” Daluvoy says, “and all the pictures you see are of people that are very similar-looking to you. It just moves you.” It’s also not surprising that, even though Daluvoy was in his fourth year at Jefferson Medical School, by February 2005 he was making plans to go to Sri Lanka with two friends, Kanishka Ratnayaka ’96 and Pratheepan “Deep” Gulasekaram ’96. The three men have been best friends since Brown, regularly talking and meeting whenever they can, even as the obligations of work and family spread them apart. Daluvoy knew that Sri Lanka would need doctors, and so he was sure that he and Ratnayaka, a pediatric cardiology fellow at Children’s National Medical Center in Washington, D.C., had skills that could prove useful in the tsunami’s aftermath. And Gulasekaram, a lawyer, had lived and worked on Sri Lanka’s remote eastern coast; his experience would also be valuable. “The three of us,” Ratnayaka says, “just wanted to go help and see what was going on.” It also helped that two of the three men were not far removed from life in Sri Lanka, one as a Sinhalese and one as an ethnic Tamil. For more than twenty years, Sri Lanka has been deadlocked in a bloody civil war between the majority ethnic Sinhalese and the minority ethnic Tamils. In 1956 the government, made up of Sinhalese, passed a decree that, from then on, Sinhala would be the only officially recognized language in the country. At the same time, it restricted Tamil access to government jobs and higher education. By the late 1960s violence targeting Tamils had broken out. Since then, the Tamil Tigers have been conducting a guerrilla war with the Sri Lankan government, resulting in the deaths of 65,000 people and the departure from the country of another 300,000. Among those fleeing were Deep Gulasekaram and his family. Gulasekaram, an ethnic Tamil, spent the first four years of his life in Jaffna, a city he describes as the “capital of Tamilian Sri Lankans.” Gulasekaram’s father, a physician, had long been mulling over the idea of taking his family to the United States, but “what hastened the departure,” Deep says, “what made it absolutely urgent, was ethnic conflict.” By the mid-1970s, he adds, “the writing was on the wall. My grandfather’s Sinhalese friends confided to him that if he had the means to get his family out, it would be a good thing.” So the family moved to Los Angeles, and Gulasekaram grew up as part of a large Sri Lankan community populated by both Tamils and Sinhalese. Unlike Gulasekaram’s family, Ratnayaka’s family arrived in the United States intending to stay only for a short while, while Ratnayaka’s father earned a PhD in religious studies at Northwestern University and completed a one-year teaching job at the University of Georgia. A Sinhalese, he intended to return to Sri Lanka at the end of his appointment. But this was the 1970s, when specialists in Hinduism, Buddhism, and other Eastern religions were in demand. When Georgia offered him a permanent faculty position, the elder Ratnayaka accepted. As a result, Kanishka grew up in the American South. “Athens, Georgia, is a very white and black community,” he says, adding with wry understatement: “There were not many Asians.” And so it was with two very different experiences that Gulasekaram and Ratnayaka arrived on College Hill as high school seniors in the spring of 1992. They’d both been admitted to Brown and were deciding where to go. Gulasekaram took the campus tour pretty much convinced he would be attending UC Berkeley in the fall. He was pleasantly surprised, however, to see another Sri Lankan in his tour group. “It was very easy for me to tell that he’s Sinhalese,” Gulasekaram recalls. “But for me, I was just more excited because he’s Sri Lankan.” Having just returned from an exciting weekend at the University of Virginia, Ratnayaka was also looking at Brown more or less as a formality. But on the tour the two young men hit it off and spent a fun weekend together. They then parted ways, assuming they wouldn’t meet again. In the end, both men did enter Brown, which they realized only after they ran into each other during their first week on campus. Soon the pair had met Daluvoy, and the three developed a friendship, Ratnayaka says, that became as much a part of their education as their classes and textbooks. Daluvoy’s family is ethnically Telegu, and though he says he doesn’t have the same connection to Sri Lanka as do Gulasekaram and Ratnayaka, he nevertheless sees many similarities between his family’s culture and theirs. The language of Telegu, for instance, sounds a lot like Tamil. When he is in Sri Lanka, Daluvoy’s south Indian features lead people to mistake him for a native of that country. Recently, he says, on a visit to Gulasekaram’s family, “Deep’s mom was just grilling him about not being married. ‘It’s important before you get too old’ ”—he raises the pitch of his voice to mimic hers—“ ‘You’ve got to be practical about it, you can’t wait till the love of your life.’ And I felt like if I just closed my eyes, it would be the exact same thing my mom would be saying.” Although they also had many other friends at Brown, the three men—and particularly Ratnayaka, who grew up around very few Asians—were drawn to the South Asian Students Association on campus. “It was very empowering,” Ratnayaka says. “It was emotional.” After Brown, Gulasekaram, who had concentrated in English and American literature, taught middle school for two years in New York City. He then earned his law degree, clerked for a judge, then practiced corporate law for two years. But the work was not satisfying, Gulasekaram says; he found himself having to “search for the goodness in what I did.” He became a teacher, first at Loyola Law School in New Orleans and more recently at NYU, where he is an acting assistant professor. Ratnayaka, meanwhile, went directly to Emory Medical School from Brown and then moved to Washington, D.C., for his residency in pediatrics. Daluvoy describes himself as the wanderer of the three, having taken time to fool around before beginning medical school. He is now in the first year of his surgery residency in D.C. Yet, even with the demands of medical school, residencies, fellowships, and law school, Ratnayaka says, “basically, all our holidays, we were trying to get together. We’d use any excuse to get together.” Observing the three men together is like watching a comedy routine among brothers: endless good-natured teasing, goofing off, inside jokes, and lots of laughter. But underlying the laughter is a restlessness and an idealism. Each man’s parents instilled in him a belief that with privilege comes the responsibility to give back, which may in part explain why each has been drawn to fields like teaching and medicine. From the time they met, recalls Gulasekaram, the three “had always talked about doing something, about creating a vision for how health care and education for children would run.” But school and careers got in the way, and they always said to themselves: maybe later. Later came in February 2005, when the men spent two weeks in Sri Lanka. They started in Hikkaduwa, the town where Ratnayaka’s mother had been raised. Two of her cousins still lived there, in a brick house Ratnayaka had often visited during his childhood and to which he had brought Gulasekaram on recent visits. The tsunami had killed one of Ratnayaka’s uncles, and the house had been destroyed. The three friends hopped from city to city, from south to east, from Sinhalese areas to Tamil ones, setting up ad hoc medical clinics in churches, schools, and tents along the way. People formed long lines, waiting for help. The men noticed that most of the ailments they saw were a direct result not of the tsunami but of the infrastructural chaos that followed in its wake. A lack of medications, for example, meant that children choked with asthma. The doctors treated burns and infections and the sickness that came from a lack of shelter, shoes, and clothes. “Really, all we did was put a Band-Aid on a gushing wound,” Gulasekaram says of their two weeks in the country. Soon, he says, they found themselves asking: “How can we have a serious long-term impact on children? We can always say we’re going to do something, but by that logic, we could literally wait forever. The time is now.” The men saw their opportunity in a statement released by the Sri Lanka College of Pediatricians about Matara General Hospital (MGH). Located in the southernmost part of the country, seven miles from the Indian Ocean, the crowded city of Matara was far enough from the brunt of the tsunami to escape the worst, but because it was one of the places to which people fled, its already stretched resources were quickly overwhelmed. Matara General Hospital is the largest of several area hospitals; patients are referred to it from all over the region. Even before the tsunami, MGH did not have enough beds for sick children; in fact, it had no separate pediatric ward for children with contagious diseases. The hospital often turned away ten to fifteen patients a day, even though the nearest hospital to MGH was two hours away by bus. The patients who were lucky enough to be admitted often had to share beds or sleep on mats on the floor. “You could go to the hospital with a cold,” Gulasekaram says, “and come back with something really bad.” As Gulasekaram remembers it, the pediatricians’ statement following the tsunami said, “had this hospital been fully equipped and functional, it could have been the point of care to save the lives of thousands of children in this area.” The men latched onto MGH as the cause they’d been searching for. But with typical zeal, they resolved not only to help this one hospital but to do it in a way that would serve as a model for treating sick children throughout the developing world. “A lot of governments and NGOs [nongovernmental organizations] look to rebuild and restore,” says Gulasekar-am. “Our thought here is, this was tragic, but out of that tragedy is a remarkable opportunity to make this hospital better, not just restore it.” And so the men founded the World Children’s Initiative, whose mission is no less ambitious than “rebuilding the medical and educational infrastructure for children in developing areas across the globe.” The MGH project, which the men have christened Project Peds, aims to raise enough money to tear down and rebuild the pediatrics wing of MGH. They quickly enlisted the help of the MGH staff and the Sri Lankan government. As a reminder of what they are working toward, Daluvoy keeps photographs of MGH on his computer. The pictures show a cluster of one-story buildings sprinkled around a sprawling courtyard just off a busy city street. Here is an old woman in a maroon skirt standing in the dusty parking lot, her hair white, a child holding her hand. Here is another child, maybe five years old, his brown eyes huge. Here is the pediatric ward, ward number 15, yellow paint peeling off its walls. Metal-framed beds, painted white, are lined up in a row along the wall. Each has a number printed onto a square of white paper and taped to the wall behind it. These are among the beds the men hope to replace over the coming months. They hope that the new MGH will have the equipment and facilities needed to offer the best medical care in Sri Lanka. In addition, plans include the building of new conference rooms, classrooms, and study spaces, as well as easy Internet access. The team has recently secured enough pediatric medical journal subscriptions to rival a state-of-the-art medical library. But, Gulasekaram emphasizes, the hospital must not lose its Sri Lankan identity. The hope, he says, is for “a nice blend of best practices from the West [while] still maintaining some of the cultural character” of the region. The Project Peds team is particularly concerned about avoiding the mistake that Western do-gooders often make: in Gulasekaram’s words, “these methods work here [in the United States], so let’s transplant them.” Rather, the team has forged close connections with the Sri Lankan ministry of health, the Sri Lanka College of Pediatricians, and the existing MGH staff, as well as with various NGOs and physicians in the area. The team has also received support from two of the United States’ most respected children’s hospitals, Children’s National Medical Center in Washington, D.C., and Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh, both of which will help guide the project and provide funds, credibility, and “expertise on problems that they [the Sri Lankan community] want us to solve,” according to Ratnayaka. In addition—and here’s where the MGH project ties in with the three friends’ larger ambition—the new wards at MGH will become a hub for learning, ideally a place where health-care providers from all over Sri Lanka can exchange ideas. And if that is successful, the men believe the model could easily be replicated all over the developing world. “Money can be raised to build anything and to bring in whatever instruments you need,” Ratnayaka says. “But in terms of knowledge, the kind of mind-share that we’re trying to promote through this project—that’s how this is going to be a model pediatric health-care institution. And that’s how it’s going to benefit other facilities throughout the country.” In addition to the Sri Lankan physicians, nurses, technicians, and social workers who will be participating in this “mind-share,” physicians from MGH will participate in ongoing scholarship exchange programs with experts from Children’s National and Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh. The Sri Lanka College of Pediatricians has an “extensive, exhaustive list of ideas,” says Ratnayaka, of what they would like to achieve with this new project. Topping it is an annual conference for health-care providers from all over the country and the world. The cost? About $2 million, according to Daluvoy. Almost all of this money will cover such onetime expenditures as bulldozing the old pediatric wards. The hospital’s day-to-day operating budget will come largely from the government, as it always has, and will be comparable to what it always has been. “It’s not true that they would have to spend more money,” on the new units, Gulasekaram says; rather, “it would have to be spent in different way.” Fearful that the Sri Lankan government will see this influx of Western money as a reason to slash allocations for MGH, the Project Peds team has already negotiated a memorandum of understanding with the Ministry of Health. “Basically what we are asking for is a non-reduction in funds,” Gulasekaram says. Of the $2 million, the team has so far raised almost half, including about $400,000 in grants from the Sri Lanka Medical Association of North America and the health-care behemoth Kaiser Permanente. In late February, the group learned that the Bush-Clinton Tsunami Relief Fund had approved a $400,000 grant for the effort. Bulldozing is scheduled to begin in July. All construction work will be by Sri Lankan firms, and all of the building materials will be local. In addition, the Project Peds team is hoping to set up a local foundation to ensure that the hospital continues to receive whatever it needs. Working in conjunction with community leaders in Matara, the team has invited local business owners, celebrities, and wealthy individuals to join Project Peds’ board of directors, with the aim of eventually turning them into an organized group that can provide both community involvement and a financial safety net. “When we leave,” Ratnayaka says, “this is their hospital. This is their gem. They need ownership.” It is a Sunday afternoon earlier this winter, and Daluvoy, Ratnayaka, and Gulasekaram have just finished watching a televised football game in Daluvoy’s apartment in Washington, D.C. Somehow during the game they managed to set off the smoke detectors while making pizza. Now it’s time for business. “I’m pretty sure the outcome of that conversation is going to be positive,” Ratnayaka says of a meeting he has planned with a potential funder. “No chickens before they’ve hatched,” Gulasekaram warns as he absentmindedly clacks a stack of quarters between his fingers. Ratnayaka points to Gulasekaram and raises his eyebrows playfully at Daluvoy. “I’ve been dealing with this for fourteen years,” he says. Each of the friends says that the range of their personalities is a big part of what makes their collaboration successful. Ratnayaka is “the perennial optimist,” says Daluvoy. “It’s like, ‘Do you really think we can do that?’ And he does. He’s not just saying it.” Gulasekaram, on the other hand, “cleans up a lot of raw ideas,” while Daluvoy brings the real-world experience of establishing and running a business. Eric Hess, an executive at Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh, admits that he was initially wary of teaming with an organization like WCI, which, he says, doesn’t have “the bandwith and the history that a big NGO has.” But he was soon won over: “They’re just energized for a cause. They’re young and energetic and wildly smart, and I know they’re going to do whatever it takes to get it done.” In addition to creating a model for health care, the friends want their partnership to be a model for mending ethnic rifts in their broken homeland. Because Matara is a largely Sinhalese area, Gulasekaram has felt some resistance from members of the Tamil community for his participation in WCI. Naturally, it hasn’t stopped him. “It’s important,” he says, “to have a lot of projects that are cross-ethnic. It gives a good model for people to follow. And I think our hope is that in the future, if we have the opportunity to do something in a largely Tamilian population, that we would do it there as well.” Their hope, the friends say, is that Project Peds will help overcome the sadness that Gulasekaram believes arises from “two people fighting on a very small island when they don’t really need to be fighting.”

Tikkun>Online Exclusives>Striking Distance

Striking Distance
On Striking Back, its author Aaron Klein, and Questioning Israeli Counterterrorism Policy

By Beth Schwartzapfel
February 1, 2006

In September 1972, eleven Israeli Olympic athletes were bound, gagged, and held hostage in their own dormitories. The 1972 Munich Olympics were to be the Games of Peace and Joy – the first held on German soil since Hitler presided over the Games in 1936 – so the reporters and television cameras were already primed for action. When everything went horribly wrong, they had only to redirect their lenses at this different kind of spectacle, and suddenly, the whole world was watching. Aaron Klein, 12 at the time, watched from his family’s living room as his countrymen were marched to their death in Germany, less than thirty years after the Holocaust. Although he was only a boy, the significance of the event was not lost on Klein. “I remember scenes, pictures,” he says. “The hostages being taken from the bus to the helicopter. They are handcuffed. Their morale is shattered. It was a horrible situation.”

In the months and years following the events in Munich, Israel embarked on a systematic campaign to assassinate terrorists. Many who have written about the assassination campaign in the past have described a careful list of all of those thought to be involved in Munich. (Most notably, Steven Spielberg’s new movie, Munich, is based upon George Jonas’s 1984 book, Vengeance.) In these accounts, one by one, the guilty parties on the list are picked off. Not so, says Klein. “Like in the movie – ‘we’ll go, we’ll revenge, and come back home.’ This is a joke,” says Klein. “Nobody works like that. Nobody thinks like that.”

Klein’s new book, Striking Back: The 1972 Munich Olympics Massacre and Israel’s Deadly Response, is an inside look at the workings of the Mossad and the upper echelons of the Israeli government during this fraught time. Based on over 50 interviews with people at all levels of operation – “from the foot soldiers [to the] commanders,” Klein says – as well as Israeli archival material and a never-before-released report, the book is journalistically exacting but reads like a novel.

Klein offers harsh criticism of the Mossad and the Israeli government in the years following the terrorist attack that was to change the country’s history. He is a reporter, and he has a reporter’s eye for detail; in Striking Back, these details are used to devastating effect. One by one, Klein lines up Israel’s blunders, missteps, and less-than-kosher motivations during the birth of operations in what remains Israel’s largest military preoccupation: counter-terrorism. He seems to take particular delight in skewering Golda Meir, the prime minister who presided over most of the book’s action, and who is so beloved by Israelis that to many (Klein included) she is known simply as “Golda.” The Mossad myth – that Israel’s top intelligence organization makes no mistakes, is deadly accurate, and all-knowing – is painstakingly dismantled here. “The tone of the book is quite critical of Israel,” I observe. “Nachon,” he replies. But it’s easy to mistake criticism for disloyalty.

Let there be no mistake. Aaron Klein is a patriot.

I meet Klein on a cold December day in New York. He is an imposing man, perhaps six feet tall with big hands and thoughtful green eyes. But he is also patient and polite, and has a professor’s careful way of explaining his ideas. Having read “Striking Back” and noted its unflinching criticism, I am quite surprised to hear Klein defend Israel at every turn. “We must understand the atmosphere at the time,” he says, explaining why Meir and the Mossad were willing to make sometimes fatal mistakes. “The Israeli state is under attack… they know at the time that they have very poor intelligence…So maybe Munich is the first in the row of 5. Or 10, or 15. They didn’t know.”

Prevention, deterrence, revenge. Klein builds his narrative around these three factors that come into play when a state chooses assassination from its wartime arsenal. Klein views prevention and deterrence as legitimate, if distasteful, reasons for assassination. Revenge, on the other hand, is dubious terrain. Certainly it is morally dubious, as he writes in the book: “Israel’s prestige would be tarnished if it became clear that the Jewish state had stooped to the level of its terrorist adversaries.” But to Klein, perhaps the more important reason that revenge is not an appropriate motivator is that it causes mistakes. The first assassination of the campaign, that of Palestinian poet and translator Wael Zu’aytir, is a prime example of the way in which revenge can cause otherwise careful people to act impulsively.

Where Jonas paints Zu’aytir as “one of the major organizers and coordinators of terrorism in Europe,” Klein writes that he was, “at best, a small fish in a pond full of sharks.” Klein continues, “looking back, his assassination was a mistake…But in the vengeance-laced atmosphere of September and October 1972…no one was in the mood to dispute it.” Being motivated by vengeance, says Klein, prevents the Mossad from doing its job correctly. And that is not acceptable. “The Mossad are representatives of the Israeli people,” he says. “I want them—as a citizen—to be cool-minded. I don’t want them to be motivated by revenge. I want them to be the best there is. When they assassinate someone, I want them to check it 200 times. Not one. Not two.”

Of the 16 people whose assassinations Klein describes, six were top-level terrorist operatives whose deaths demonstrably prevented terrorist attacks. The rest, if they were involved in terrorism at all, were low-level operatives. Perhaps they stored arms or hosted meetings at their homes. Perhaps they were simply big talkers with extremist views. One, Achmed Bouchiki, was killed by accident, mistaken for Ali Hassan Salameh, the Mossad’s top target. Bouchiki, a waiter in a sleepy Scandinavian town, was killed while walking down the street with his pregnant Norwegian wife.

This blunder, perhaps the Mossad’s biggest ever, cost an innocent man his life and sent five Mossad operatives to jail. Only one of the 16, Atef Bseiso, who wasn’t assassinated until 1992, was directly connected to the events at Munich. Top-level operatives known to have planned and facilitated the Munich attacks were largely too hard to reach; unguarded “small fish” were easier targets. Besides, Klein writes, the public was satisfied that the Mossad was doing something; the details were not important. “Sometimes decisions were made based on operational ease,” Klein quotes a senior Israeli intelligence officer as saying. “When there was information implicating someone we didn’t inspect it with a magnifying glass.”

And yet, Klein holds to account. He tells the story. But he does not blame. Even in the case of Bouchiki. “They were so, ‘oh, man, we have to do it,’” he says, describing the unacceptably trigger-happy atmosphere that led to the mistake. “No, we should check. You must raise questions. Although, I can understand, which is why I’m not judging. At the time…they thought they were going to go and assassinate the number one terrorist of the PLO…so we are not believing in a world that everything is pink and nice. No, no, there are terrorists at work.”

Spielberg’s Munich and George Jonas’s Vengeance tell the story of Avner, a Mossad secret agent. Jonas’s Avner “doesn’t exist” as far as the Mossad is concerned: he is removed from the payroll and is ordered never to return to Israel or to make contact with the Mossad (except via a Swiss safe-deposit box) until the mission is over. Before he is sent packing, Avner is handed a pre-determined list of 11 men whom he is told were involved in Munich, and whom he and his team are to kill. The team’s techniques, contacts, and whereabouts are entirely up to them and are not subject to supervision.

Jonas’s book has been widely discredited in Israel, and top Mossad agents – both on the record, in Haaretz, and off the record, to Klein – have confirmed that Avner did not, indeed, exist. Not in the top secret spy thriller sense, but in the fictional sense. He’s made up. “The whole thing with the movie,” Klein says, “we are sending you but we won’t recognize you, you are all alone in the field. It’s a joke. No organization is working in this way.”

Despite the Munich's factual inaccuracies and its larger-than-life cinematic drama, there’s something about Spielberg’s Avner that reminds me of Klein. As the story unfolds, Avner begins to question his mission. The endless bloodshed is getting to him, and what’s more, his list is starting to seem suspicious. Where is the evidence, he asks his supervisor, that these men were involved in Munich? How do we know, he asks his colleagues, that these men have blood on their hands?

Striking Back asks the same questions. Questions drive all of Klein’s work, both in Striking Back and in his work as a reporter for Time magazine. He criticizes Jonas and others because they “didn’t put question marks on anything. This isn’t my way of working. Put a question mark on everything.” Klein praises Spielberg for “raising all kinds of questions. It’s alright to raise these questions and to have a debate about that,” he says. “You don’t have to be afraid of that. Of debate.”

The act of asking questions, however, is where the similarities end. Avner’s questions serve to question Israeli counterterrorism policy, to reveal the shaky ethics behind the mission on which his country has sent him. Avner blames Israel for the bloodshed, for his own personal moral unraveling. He “refuses to return to Israel, as if decency were impossible there,” writes Leon Wieseltier in the New Republic. It is telling that Jonas’s book is called Vengeance, that throughout Munich, each time Avner finds his morale flagging he calls up images from the events at the Olympics and becomes outraged all over again. It’s as if Avner needs reminding that "They Started It" in order to maintain some semblance of moral order. But moral order is not built on revenge. Prevention and deterrence, perhaps, but not revenge.

Klein’s questions, on the other hand, seek to make Israel stronger. Vengeance, Klein concedes, was an unfortunate part of the motivation after Munich. But unlike in Jonas’ and Spielberg’s accounts, in Klein’s view of the years following the events at Munich, revenge was “not major.” If there were “one hundred pieces of the puzzle, this is one, two, five, or twenty. But it’s not the whole picture,” he says. Unlike Avner, Aaron Klein does not blame Israel for the bloodshed. Yes, the assassinations perpetuated the cycle, he says. But let’s not forget where the bloodshed began. “What the Israelis are doing, they are preventing future terrorist attacks,” he says. “The guy who’s doing the terrorist attacks…he wants to just kill Israelis, he wants to spread fear among Israelis…But they are terrorists. We are not…We are defending our citizens.”

Klein hopes that his book will help the Mossad to ask more questions next time, to think more clearly, to act for the right reasons. “I want the people who take the decision, when they are saying prevention, I want them to be sure of it,” he says. “I want that they will be able to look in the mirror and say, ‘yeah, it was prevention.’”

Rhode Island Monthly>Brave Hearts

Brave Hearts

Young Afghan women are studying at Roger Williams University, gaining political and financial skills that will help rebuild their ravaged country. What no one anticipated was that these students would change our lives as much as we’ve changed theirs.

Beth Schwartzapfel
May 2005

This piece was awarded Rhode Island for Community and Justice's 2005 Metcalf Award for Diversity in the Media.



SHE HAD HEARD OF JEAN-CLAUDE VAN DAMME. She had heard of “Ah-nold” and Times Square. But other than that, Mahbooba Babrakazai wasn’t sure what to expect when she arrived in the United States of America. She was exhausted after two days and two nights of travel, starting in Kabul, Afghanistan, continuing through Islamabad, then Karachi, Dubai, Zurich, and finally arriving in New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport on a rainy night in August 2002. So when she and her four weary fellow travelers thought they had missed their last connecting flight to Boston, they sat down on their pile of luggage and tried to decide what to do next.

It turns out that they had misunderstood about the flight to Boston. Paula Nirschel and a small entourage of supporters, expecting them in New York all along, had already piled into a van at Roger Williams University. In the van were Nirschel, her husband, University president Roy Nirschel, and the school’s dean of business, Maling Ebrahimpour. A sign that Ebrahimpour had made was on the seat beside him, its blue letters spelling out Mahbooba’s name in Dari Persian. Meem. Heh. Bey. Waw. Bey. Hey Gerdak.

On the way to the airport, Nirschel’s husband tried to prepare her, gently, for the possibility that it still might not happen. Visas, exit permits, navigating customs in five countries – not to mention cold feet – were a lot of obstacles for a handful of young women to handle on their own. “Everybody said, Paula, really, they’re not going to be on the plane,” she recalls. Logically, even after her months of dedication and work, she knew they might be right. And yet, she says, “I knew they were going to be there.”

Needless to say, the travelers were there, the inaugural class of the Initiative to Educate Afghan Women, a scholarship program that Nirschel had dreamed up less than a year earlier.

While many in America turned inwards after 9/11, Nirschel was glued to the television. The images of Afghan women haunted her. “It was like an out-of-body experience. Days and days would go by…I actually could not sleep.”

She got on the phone – to Washington, to Kabul, to “anybody who would talk to me at the state department.” She was making up a scholarship program as she went along until eventually the details took shape. Her husband offered the first one at Roger Williams University. Nirschel used that scholarship as leverage and sent out letters to 3,500 college presidents around the country, asking for additional help. Robert Finn, the U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan, offered roundtrip airfare for the first group of students, and assembled a group of U.S. Foreign Service officers, Afghani academics, and government ministers to interview applicants.

Nirschel then hand-picked women who planned to return home after graduation to serve their countries. She designed the program knowing that there were two potential stumbling blocks. She realized that many recent graduates get lured at graduation time with American salaries and jobs. She also knew that students who’ve spent too much time in the U.S. can find returning home very alien. So each June, the students go back to Afghanistan. Nirschel helps them secure internships with nongovernmental organizations, government agencies, and other groups. The summers spent working at home allow them to help support their families, build their resumes, and stay grounded in their country.

As a result, “these women…will end up in key positions,” says Nirschel. “President Karzai and ministers I have spoken with…are waiting for educated women to help to run the country…They’re very eager to get them back.”

So when Nirschel pulled up to the terminal at JFK Airport, she knew she was looking at more than her dream coming to fruition. She was looking at a handful of trailblazing women who will help rebuild Afghanistan from its shattered ground up.

Mahbooba, for her part, was flooded with joy and relief when she finally laid eyes on the people whom she still calls “Mrs. Nirschel and Mr. President.” Any concerns about whether the Americans would be friendly evaporated when she saw Ebrahimpour’s sign. “My name? In my language? I was like, Wow! We have somebody waiting for us!”

The group piled in the van and headed towards Bristol. After a short orientation, the women would spread out to Universities all over the country: the University of Montana in Missoula, Notre Dame College in South Euclid, Ohio, the University of Hartford in Connecticut, and Bristol’s Roger Williams University.

AS ONE MIGHT EXPECT, there have been some growing pains and reshuffling as the program evolved. A couple of the women transferred to different schools. Another made the difficult decision to leave the program and return home. Overall, however, the arc of the Initiative has been an upward-swinging one. Three years after the program’s inception, thirteen Afghan women are studying at universities throughout the United States. Several of the women from the first group to arrive are now preparing for graduate school and threeAfghan women now attend Roger Williams.

Mahbooba Babrakzai, twenty, and Nadima Sahar, nineteen, are juniors, and Arezo Kohistani, twenty-three, is a sophomore. All three women grew up in Kabul, but as teenagers all three moved from Afghanistan to Pakistan.

Mahbooba explains that when the Taliban came to power, her parents knew that she couldn’t go to school anymore. “They didn’t want a future for me that was dark and I’d have no ideas,” she said. “That’s why my parents moved to Pakistan, to get my education. And then whenever the Taliban went, they would move back to Afghanistan.”

That is roughly what happened. The Taliban fell just as Mahbooba finished high school. “I was joking with my mom,” Mahbooba says, “that the Taliban were there until I was finished with my school. When I was finished, I could go back.”

In fact, just after she graduated from high school, her father heard on the radio that there was still time to take the Kabul University entrance exam. “He was so happy,” Mahbooba recalls, “and he was telling me, there is a chance, so me and you are going back to Afghanistan.”

They left the rest of their family behind in Peshawar and returned to Kabul so Mahbooba could take the test. Mahbooba says the house felt cold and empty without her family. She passed the exam and enrolled in medical school at Kabul University and was a few weeks into her first semester when she got a scholarship from the Initiative.

Mahbooba’s major is financial services – she plans to get a masters in finance when she graduates – but she changed majors a number of times before making up her mind. In Kabul it was medicine, but when she arrived in the U.S., she switched to computer science, then engineering.

Now that she has settled on business, Mahbooba sees the possibilities of women’s empowerment in finance. One summer Mahbooba’s job was in Afghanistan’s new Ministry of Commerce; she helped a woman secure a small grant to open a women’s clothing shop. The shop sells business suits, casual clothing, and party dresses for women. It is the first female-owned business in all of Kabul. Under the Taliban, Mahbooba wrote in an email, women often made and sold clothing. But since they weren’t allowed to own a business, “they would sell their hand made products to shops and those guys would keep the most profit.” Now women get to keep the profits.

Arezo Kohistani arrived in 2003 as part of the Initiative’s second generation of students. When Arezo finished high school in Peshawar, she got a job as an Operations Assistant with the United Nations International Organization for Migration in Islamabad. Her father, a lawyer, also worked for the U.N., so the family moved to Pakistan and lived there until the Taliban fell and they were able to return home. While in Islamabad, Arezo started a chapter of the youth-run NGO Youth and Children Development Program, which offered weekend classes in English, math, and Islam to Afghan refugees. The Youth and Children Development Program originated as a series of secret basement-schools for children in Afghanistan who were unable to attend school under the Taliban. However, even in Pakistan, where children were able to attend school, Arezo was not surprised to find that their desire to learn was fierce. Even before the Taliban, Arezo explains, Afghan schools were only open intermittently. The years of civil war that ravaged the country meant that it was not always possible, or safe, to keep them open.

When the family returned home after nine years in Pakistan, their house was in ruins. The seven members of Arezo’s family – her mother, her father, Arezo and her two sisters and two brothers – now live with Arezo’s uncle and his family while they slowly rebuild.

Nadima Sahar moved to Peshawar with her father and 3 sisters when she was nine or ten. Her mother was a lawyer with the World Food Program, and stayed behind in Kabul to secretly continue her work. Each morning she would put on her burka and take a cab to her office. What gave her away, though, were her trips to Pakistan to see her family. Though she only visited two or three times a year, the Taliban kept catching her as she crossed the Khyber pass. They gave her many warnings until one day they put her in jail. She was released with another, more scary warning this time: she had better not get caught again, or else. She was in the midst of despairing about how she might see her family again when the Taliban fell.

Nadima is a political science major with aspirations to become Afghanistan’s first female president. She plans to attend law school after graduation. Dr. Jennifer Campbell, Assistant Professor of Writing Studies, taught her for two semesters and says her student is a force to be reckoned with. “Nadima Sahar says she’s going to be president of Afghanistan?” Campbell says. “Then Nadima Sahar is going to be president of Afghanistan.”

Encouragement from her mentors at Roger Williams, not to mention her mother’s striking example, helped Nadima to develop the confidence to voice such lofty ambitions. Though there are now women governors of several Afghan provinces, and there was a woman candidate in the recent presidential elections, there’s a segment of society that doesn’t view these as acceptable jobs for women, Nadima says. She initially thought she might study business, or medicine but changed her mind. “The only way I could really make a difference is to get involved in government,” Nadima says.

Campbelladds, “She’s got this completely quiet demeanor, but you don’t want to mess with Nadima.”

IN SOME WAYS, THESE THREE ARE serious young women. They’re determined to succeed and devoted to their country and their religion. They spend far more hours studying than most of their peers. Their professors are unanimously impressed with their dedication and their focus. The women pray five times a day. They will have their marriages arranged when the time comes. They do not date. They do not drink or go to parties. Nirschel says this single-mindedness is because they are on a mission to become role models for the women of Afghanistan. “They take that responsibility very seriously,” she says

The women are also hilarious and fun to hang out with. They are relaxed, laugh easily and often, and tease each other constantly, though they are too polite to tease most anyone else. (Arezo laughs as she tells Nadima the word in Dari that she uses to describe Mahbooba. All I can get out of her is that it is a small bird. Suffice it to say, she says, that “most of the time I just tease her. I call her small and cute, and she says, ‘don’t call me that!’)

They love shopping, and it took them some time before they learned how to manage their work-study paychecks wisely. “My first paycheck,” Arezo laughs, “all gone to Target.” Now they have a code--don’t look at things you can’t buy.

“Sometimes she’ll say, ‘Nadima, look at those shoes!’” Nadima teases Arezo. “And I’ll say, ‘Arezo, you are blind’,” which is their code for ‘don’t look at things you can’t buy.’ “And Arezo will say, ‘right, I have no eyes.’”

But even as she describes the self-restraint she has mastered, Arezo shakes her head in mock sympathy for all the things she does not buy. “We feel really bad for the clothes. They will really miss us if we leave them there.”

The women love the ocean. Nadima calls it their soulmate. Arezo said that she had seen the ocean in Pakistan, but it was not until they were homesick that they realized how comforting the ocean can be. “Whenever we feel sad,” Arezo says, “we just go and sit.”

While all three women are friendly and warm, Arezo and Nadima agree that Mahbooba is the most outgoing, social, and talkative of the three. Lindsay Toto, a Roger Williams University senior who is one of Mahbooba’s closest American friends, says that the most important thing she has learned from Mahbooba is how important laughter is. Before she met her, Toto explains, it was easy to get overwhelmed by school and lose perspective. But Mahbooba “told me her dad is someone who makes everyone laugh when times get bad…so I can tell that’s from her family.”

IT’S CLEAR THAT THE AFGHAN STUDENTS’ lives have been changed by the Initiative. What’s less predictable is how American students have been altered by it, as well.

When they first arrived on campus, for instance, the Afghan women encountered many misunderstandings about Afghanistan and Islam. Countering these misconceptions was part of the women’s mission when they put aside their fears and got on that plane in Kabul. “If I I think the people would not be friendly to me and therefore I am not going,’” Nadima asks, then “how could we change the negative perspective that people have about Afghans and about Afghanistan?”

Mahbooba’s friend Lindsay, for her part, says that Mahbooba’s presence at Roger Williams has changed her mind. “Having been a freshman during 9/11,” she says, “I think a lot of students had reservations about having students from Afghanistan come over here.”

But Lindsay says that “having met Mahbooba really changed my life. When you start to view people as individuals…to be able to see that people have homes, and families, and love, and go on and live their lives every day, despite the difficulties,” then one really starts to gain understanding.

When she first arrived, Arezo was taken aback by some of the questions that her fellow students asked. “They were asking me, ‘ooh, you’re from Afghanistan? Have you ever had TV in your country? Do you know what apple is? How can you wear such clothes?’ On media, they just show Taliban, and mujahedeen, fighting on the mountain, and women wearing burka. So they think that we are living in the caves.”

Mahbooba was asked how many camels she owns. She was also asked the apple question. “The apple one was really funny,” she says, “because they were like, A-H-H-pull.” Mahbooba laughs when describing her sarcastic response to this question: “OK, no, I don’t know what apple is.”

The women answer each misconception with a careful explanation. And maybe a giggle. For example, Kabul is a big city, a bustling metropolis of honking cars, shoppers, kids playing in the street. For holidays and special occasions, the women wear elaborate and colorful costumes, threaded with gold and hung with beads. But even in Kabul, most days, they wear jeans, or a long skirt, with pants underneath, and a headscarf. Many women in Aghanistan’s more remote providence wore burkas long before the Taliban came to power, but the women explain that Islam requires only that a woman cover her hair. They feel somewhat sad about it, but they’ve decided not to cover their hair while they are here. Since the purpose of the headscarf is to discourage men from staring, the women know that wearing them would defeat the purpose. “Here if you wear the veil,” Arezo says, “everyone stares.”

All of the women’s parents, mothers and fathers alike, went to Kabul University. Their parents have always been proud and encouraging, and pushed the women to live up to their potential. “If you want to be someone,” Arezo recalls her father saying, “be the best one.” She laughs as she repeats her father’s motto to Nadima. “If you want to be teeth, be the top teeth.”

So when their classmates’ questions revealed certain assumptions – that the Afghan women were not street-wise or savvy, for instance, or that they were not valued by their families – the American students, in fact, revealed themselves to have a limited understanding of Afghan culture. “They were feeling very sorry for us,” Arezo recalls, “and I was thinking, ‘What do you mean by this?!’”

The women admit they had their own preconceived notions of the US before arriving, which has helped them to understand where the American students are coming from. To combat ignorance on both sides, Nadima says, “usually when we give any presentations in our classes, we focus a little bit on Afghans.”

Arezo did just that with her final project for Computer Science 101. It’s hard to imagine how an Introduction to Spreadsheets project could relate to Afghanistan, but Arezo constructed a multilayered spreadsheet about opium production and the Afghan economy. The women also give speeches about their country and their culture, both on and off campus. Recently they gave a lecture about Afghan culture and Islam to a lecture hall packed with 200 of their classmates and professors. When the University launched a journal called Reason and Respect: A Journal of Civil Discourse, Nadima wrote a thoughtful piece called, “Ramadan, the Month of Fasting,” in the inaugural issue.

Nadima has also engaged other students, even those who were initially hostile. The Roger Williams University College Republicans, for instance, are a rather outspoken bunch. College campuses tend to be bastions of liberal thinking, but this group has pulled some pretty head-turning right-wing stunts. In February of last year, for instance, they offered a “whites only” scholarship in protest of affirmative action. Shortly after the Afghan students arrived, the group’s chairman, Jason Mattera, wrote an article attacking Islam in the conservative campus paper.

Nadima wrote her final paper for her Expository Writing class in response. It’s an essay Nadima’s professor, Jennifer Campbell describes as a twenty-page dialogue about why Mattera should understand what Islam really is, instead of the misrepresentations he’d made. (Nadima politely describes their conversations as her attempt to clear up a little misunderstanding about Islam.) Even two years later, Campbell remembers this paper for how compelling it was, how earnest, and patient. “She’s…unfailingly sweet and unfailingly polite,” Campbell says. “But at the same time, she is like girl of steel. She will go up to anyone, and in a very loving way, she will engage them.”

IT IS 10:30 ON A THURSDAY NIGHT, and Arezo pads to the door of her dorm to let me in. She is wearing slippers and blue flannel pajamas with clouds on them. On the way to the room that she and Nadima share, we step over empty beer cans in various states of crushed-ness. Arezo jokes that she had a few drinks. I joke that I won’t mention as much in the article so her parents won’t get the wrong idea.

It is an Afghan custom to offer food to guests, so Arezo has prepared classic dorm room fare: a Tupperware full of microwave popcorn. She also offers me sugared almonds, an Afghan delicacy which she brought back from a recent trip to California. They are delicious.

Arezo and Nadima have set up pillows on the floor of the room they share, which reminds them of home. Arezo is sitting on these pillows, rewriting notes from one of the day’s lectures, when Nadima breezes in.

Nadima is a mentor in the Bridge to Success Program, which pairs Roger Williams students with minority students at Newport’s Rogers High School. That night the Bridge to Success crew has gone to the Providence Black Repertory Company’s production of Cheryl J. West’s Jar the Floor. Nadima and her mentees all enjoyed the show, and Nadima fairly glows as she sits cross-legged on the floor of her room and recounts the story of the play, in which four generations of African-American women gather for the family matriarch’s birthday. Nadima is also on the mock trial team, so we chat a bit about the case her team recently won at a regional championship. She loves these sessions, partly because they help her look forward to law school, and partly because they’re good training in seeing every story from many different angles. “Most of my friends in mock trial are Republican,” she says, “but they accept other people’s opinions, whether they agree with them or not.”

I tell the young women about an email conversation I’ve been having with the President of the College Republicans, Mike Martelli. I’ve brought a transcript of some of the emails Martelli and I have exchanged to get the women’s thoughts. “Personally I am not a fan for the Initiative to Educate Afghan Women,” Martelli wrote. “Last I checked, [the Afghan students] would be returning to a culture where women are second class citizens and are not valued…Seems to me that we wasted something there, considering their religious leaders love to oppress them.”

Nadima recalls her conversations with Mattera and is not particularly surprised. “To me, it seems like a really ignorant opinion,” she responds. “It’s the twenty-first century.”

“He was only talking about Taliban,” Arezo says. “Before then, women were doctors, governors, judges, pilots….they should learn about religion and culture and country and then talk.”

“He is expecting a country that has been in constant war for 24 years to have women presidents?” Nadima asks. “Countries with peace have no women presidents!”

Echoing her friend’s sentiment, Arezo asks, “Why does the US have no woman president?”

The women stress that this young man’s sentiment is in the minority on campus. For the most part, they say, their reception here has been warm and welcoming. “Everyone welcomed us with a smile on their face, and was really helpful in helping us to get used to the environment,” says Nadima. But as much as the women dismiss Mattera’s criticisms with a wave of their hands, his sentiment nevertheless strengthens their resolve. “This makes us stronger,” Nadima says. “It makes us more ambitious to prove ourselves…When I become the first female president, I can prove to him that women are truly not slaves.”

“I used to say I want to become the first female president,” Nadima adds. “When I hear things like this, now I say, I must become the first female president.”

I remember what Professor Campbell said about Nadima. Get out of the way, Mattera. Here comes the girl of steel.

NADIMA, AREZO, AND MAHBOOBA might have liked very much to go to Kabul University. Twenty-five years ago, professors came from all over the middle east – indeed, all over the word – to teach there. The University hosted a busy exchange program. But a quarter century of civil war, then a repressive regime that valued obedience over knowledge, followed by air strikes and ground wars to unseat that regime, have left the university in ruins. Mahbooba was a student there for part of one semester, so she speaks from experience when she says that students there are suffering a lot. “A lot of things are torn up,” she says. In the winter, the dorms have no heat, and “the food is not, like, good.” At first, this sounds like the kind of comment any college student might make about cafeteria food. But then she continues. “The government is not rich enough to feed everyone there…Even if there is something to eat, it is not sufficient to give you energy.”

Arezo recalls walking at night with her father. After 9 pm in Kabul, the streets tend to empty out, so it was quiet. It was also winter and very cold. Arezo noticed a group of young people huddled under a streetlight, and she asked her father what they were doing. There was no electricity in the dorms, he explained, so the students had brought their books outside to study by the streetlight.

The Initiative to Educate Afghan Women will be most powerful when it succeeds into obsolescence, when women come to the U.S. to study in order to participate in a rich cross-cultural exchange, not because they have no other options.

The thirteen women will return to their country with U.S. educations. Then they must roll up their sleeves and crouch under that streetlight with the students from Kabul University. Together they will rebuild Afghanistan’s universities, its hospitals, its infrastructure.

“We know that…one or two people cannot do a lot for the country,” Arezo says.

“But we can do our part,” says Mahbooba. “I can’t wait to go and do my part.”