A lecture on village relations between Jews and Arabs in an Israeli village turned into a heated debate yesterday as audience members offended by the content and presentation of the lecture verbally sparred with both the speaker and fellow audience members.
Susan Slyomovics, an anthropology professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and an editor of the Middle East Report, presented her research on Palestinian artistic response to the killings of 50 Palestinian Israelis in the village Kafr Kassem in 1956.
Although Slyomovics said that, "Poetry alone has never stopped any war, ever," she said she hoped that her work would be a "small increment" of a long-term goal of peace in the Middle East.
While she lectured for nearly 30 minutes to the audience of more than 50, Slyomovics used slides of artwork and photos of Kafr Kassem she had taken herself and read memorial verse written by Palestinians that she had translated from Arabic. She also presented history, personal experiences and information that she collected over a decade of research.
At the end of her short seminar, audience questions soon turned into an argument between several attendees, until at one point the moderator interrupted and asked, "Does anyone actually have a question for Professor Slyomovics?"
Some of the audience members accused Slyomovics of being too one-sided in her speech, while others simply walked out. Another told her that he did not see a point to her work.
"You used the word massacre 27 times in your lecture, and maybe you should look at your long-term goals and think about how that effects people," one audience member said.
Slyomovics quickly responded, "Healing doesn't mean forgetting -- in Arabic and Hebrew they both call Kafr Kassem a massacre -- I think I can handle the word."
As the debate heated up, a Dartmouth student asked Slyomovics if this was a typical response to her work.
"I am rarely attacked in Israel. U.S. Jews seem to have a more violent response than Israeli Jews. Again, I don't have this problem in Israel; my book was a best seller there," she responded.
Response to Slyomovics' lecture was not entirely negative, however. Several audience members congratulated Slyomovics on her work, and others criticized their fellow audience members not only for attacking the professor, but also for making broad generalizations about Arab people.
"I would hope that in an academic setting, people could look at the relationship between Jews and Arabs without broad generalizations," Slyomovics said in response to a few particularly inflammatory exchanges between audience members.
