Israeli homage to Palestinian intellectual - a tribute to Edward Said by Tanya Reinhart and Aharon S

dublin | anti-war / imperialism | event notice Friday November 03, 2006 13:37 by Hugh H - IPSC

Israeli homage to a Palestinian intellectual

A tribute to Edward Said on his third anniversary

by Tanya Reinhart and Aharon Shabtai

Irish Writers' Centre, Wednesday, November 8th, 7pm

Admission free

Aharon Shabtai

A professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University in New York, Edward Said
was a founder of the field of post-colonial theory and one of the leading public intellectuals of
the latter part of the 20th Century.

A Palestinian, born in Jerusalem in 1935, Said died in New York in Autumn 2003, sharing the exile
that has afflicted millions of Palestinians since 1948. Until the end, he was an activist in the
struggle for Palestinian human rights, a struggle which looked bleak at the time of his death and
has grown gloomier in the three years since then.

Tanya Reinhart, who was an emerita professor of Linguistics at Tel Aviv University and a public
intellectual in Israel until she left the country this summer in protest at her government's policy,
will deliver a tribute to Edward Said, on his third memorial, at the Dublin Writers' Centre.

Edward Said wrote about her previous book: "Tanya Reinhart's Israel/Palestine is the most
devastating critique now available of Israel's policy toward the Palestinian people. Written with urgency
and an unflinching clarity, it deserves to be read by every American". Reinhart will also use the
occasion to launch her latest book, "The Road Map to Nowhere", which documents how the situation
has deteriorated since Said's death.

Reinhart will be joined by her husband, the renowned Israeli poet Aharon Shabtai, whose recent
poem on the 2006 Lebanon War was so critical of Israeli aggression that no Israeli newspaper would
publish it. Shabtai will read the banned poem and will also read from "J'accuse", his collection of
poems that express some of the sharpest criticism that exists in print of Israeli policies.

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Aharon Shabtai has published some twenty books of poems and is one of Israel’s foremost poets and
translators. In 1993, he was awarded the Prime Minister’s Prize for Translation for his Hebrew
translations of Greek drama. In 1999 he won the Tchernikhovsky Prize. A number of his books have been
translated into English, and his poetry has appeared in numerous anglophone journals, including
the American Poetry Review, the London Review of Books, and Parnassus in Review. His version of
Aeschylus' Oresteia played to great acclaim at the Dublin Theatre Festival in 2003.

Born in 1939, Shabtai studied Greek and Philosophy at the Hebrew University, the Sorbonne, and
Cambridge. He currently teaches Hebrew literature at Tel Aviv University. Perhaps his best known work
internationally is the 2003 collection J’accuse, the targets of his provocative title being
Israeli government and society. Many of its poems were first published in the weekend literary pages of
Israel’s paper of record, Ha’aretz, and were met with angry letters to the editor and threats of
cancelled subscriptions. Lines such as the following have characterised Shabtai’s thirty-five year
publishing career: “You read the Haggadah/like swine... /Passover, however,/is stronger than you
are./Go outside and see:/the slaves are rising up.”

Earlier this year, Shabtai refused to participate in the state-sponsored International Poetry
Festival in Jerusalem, responding to the organisers’ invitation thus: “I object to an international
poets' festival in a city where the Arab inhabitants are systematically and brutally oppressed,
imprisoned between walls, being robbed of their rights and their livelihood, humiliated in
check-points, and international laws are trampled. I think that even poets were not allowed in the past, and
are not allowed in the present, to ignore persecution and discrimination on a racist and
nationalist background.”

Tanya Reinhart is a world-renowned Israeli linguist, author and political activist. She is
currently Professor Emeritus of linguistics and media studies at Tel Aviv University, but will soon quit
Israel, having declared she can no longer live there as it commits a “slow and steady genocide”
against Palestinians in the occupied territories. She is a guest lecturer at Utrecht University in
the Netherlands, and from January 2007, will be a Global Distinguished Professor at New York
University.

Reinhart contributes a regular critical column to Israel’s biggest daily newspaper, Yediot
Aharonot, and is also published widely in the international media. Among many titles in linguistics, she
has written the acclaimed: Israel/Palestine: How to End the War of 1948.

Reinhart studied philosophy and Hebrew literature at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem as an
undergraduate, where she later received an M.A. in comparative literature and hilosophy. In 1976 she
obtained a Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her thesis supervisor was Noam
Chomsky.

In a recent interview, Reinhart said: “As an Israeli, I believe that this struggle provides hope
also for the Israelis. Israel’s policies threaten not just the Palestinians but also the Israelis
themselves. In the long run, this war over land is suicidal. A small Jewish state of 7 million
residents (5.5 million Jews), surrounded by two hundred million Arabs, is making itself the enemy of
the whole Muslim world. There is no guarantee that such a state can survive. Saving the
Palestinians also means saving Israel."

Tanya Reinhart