Notes from Post-9/11 Classrooms: Parsing Representation and Reality

Many of us teaching in the fall of 2001 remember a sense of inadequacy as we returned, bleary eyed and media saturated, to the classroom in the days following September 11. I was teaching at Queens College in Flushing, New York; I lived in Woodside, a working-class, multiethnic neighborhood a quick subway ride away. Though I can't remember whether the trains had started running again when campus reopened — I have no idea how I got to school that day — I distinctly remember walking into the classroom and seeing (to my surprise) a full house and immediately noticing the one thing missing: my Sikh student, a quiet young man who sat in the back, had removed the traditional, tightly fitting, top-knotted cap that he had worn every day until then.

I imagined the talk his parents might have had with him that morning. Do not call attention to yourself. Be careful. Of course, I knew that neither this eighteen-year-old nor any of the Sikhs who lived in my own neighborhood had anything to do with the attacks on the World Trade Center. But would his classmates realize this? Would the clerk at the corner deli or campus security officer regard him differently than they had on September 10? I don't remember his name or his final grade; I don't think he had anything to say that day. All I remember is his bare head and a sinking feeling in my stomach as I stepped to the front of the room.

Allen Webb relates his own 9/11 epiphany in the preface to his Teaching the Literature of Today's Middle East. His daughter was in junior high at the time, and her teacher, in the days following the attacks, showed her class Walt Disney's 1992 film Aladdin. For Webb, showing this film, often criticized as being a racist portrayal of Arabs, was a well-meaning but unfortunate use of classroom time. His collection of twelve essays (seven by him, five by colleagues) provides a corrective. For too long, he writes, the Middle East has been ignored by educators "to the loss, mis-education and even peril of our students, and the world" (x).

Today, having left New York City for rural New England and embarked on my own project of educating myself and my students about the Middle East, particularly the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, I find Webb's volume a welcome tool for curriculum building. Though I have reservations about some aspects of the text, which I will get to later in this review, I applaud Webb's mission and his effort to provide a practical classroom guide. In the decade since 9/11, Webb and his colleagues have developed an inventory of curricula, resources, and teaching approaches that teachers from middle school through college will find useful.

In 2007, at a public liberal arts college in New Hampshire, I developed a first-year writing course on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; I emphasized the Palestinian perspective, to which Americans are seldom exposed, and in 2010 I spent two weeks in the West Bank doing research and spending time with Palestinians. This experience is the lens through which I read Webb's text.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict occupies only one of Webb's chapters here, but he shares my conviction that it is the central conflict of our time: the biggest threat to world peace and a preoccupation of Arabs and Middle Easterners generally. It is also, Webb notes, one of the greatest sources of "distortions, limitations, and confused information" in American public discourse (112). In a society where, beyond those inspired by religious convictions, few citizens have traveled to the contested regions of Israel and Palestine, this is perhaps inevitable. Add to this lack of personal contact a mainstream media that often takes its cue directly from the Israeli public relations apparatus,1 and you have a...