Stanford University Press Blog

Remembering Refugee Children

Life for Iraqi Jews in Israel was not easy, particularly for the youngest among them.

by ORIT BASHKIN

Displaced Iraqi Jews, 1951. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

 

Between 1949 and 1951, some 123,000 Iraqi Jews who were denationalized by the Iraqi state migrated to Israel. These Jews, I suggest, were not native sons returning to their homeland, but rather immigrants arriving at a new location, where they encountered prejudice and discrimination. Most of them resided in transit camps, known as Ma‘abarot. Originally, these camps were perceived as sites in which Jewish migrants would stay for only a brief period of time, yet many Jews remained there for much longer periods (between one to seven years), living in tents, huts, and shacks where poor sanitary and hygiene conditions, poverty, and neglect ran rampant.

The transit camps where Iraqi Jewish children resided were dangerous spaces.

 

Impossible Exodus » tells the story of Iraqi Jews' first decades in Israel, who, faced with ill treatment and discrimination from state officials, engaged in various forms of resistance.

My book, Impossible Exodus, sheds light on Iraqi Jewish life in the Ma‘abarot of Israel; on the communists and activists who participated in strikes, sit-ins, and demonstrations, on the Iraqi mothers who managed to get their children out of the cycle of poverty, and on the teachers who, without state permission, organized classes and schools. The most difficult chapter for me to write concerned Iraqi Jewish children, not only because these children were the fathers and mothers of childhood friends of mine but also because of the resonance of their experiences with those of current refugee children, Syrian and Yemenite in particular, who, like the Iraqi children whose history I was reconstructing, lost a sense of home and normalcy—and also because it is always difficult to write about the sufferings of the most helpless and vulnerable.

Indeed, the transit camps where Iraqi Jewish children resided were dangerous spaces. Mothers aborted because ambulances could not reach these camps. Mice, rats, and insects threatened the children's health. In Jerusalem, land mines were found in the vicinity of one camp. In 1954, a child living in the transit camp at Holon was killed when he was playing by a dunghill, and an old shell exploded. As families were living in tents and shacks and lighting was mainly in the form of oil lanterns and candles, these temporary houses caught fire. A two-year-old baby was burned alive in one such fire; there were no water tanks to put it out and no phone with which to call the fire department. Near Haifa, three children met with the same fate when their tent caught fire. They were raised by their widowed father, who tried to commit suicide twice after the tragedy.

Experiments in Digital

Our aim is to establish a program for peer-reviewed, interactive, digital scholarship.

by ALAN HARVEY

Friederike Sundaram, Acquisitions Editor for digital humanities and computational social sciences, navigates Enchanting the Desert by Nicholas Bauch in the David Rumsey Map Center at Stanford University. Enchanting the Desert (published in 2016) was the Press's first-ever born-digital publication.

We are now two and a half years into our four-year experiment in digital publishing. Our goal, to establish a program for the formal, peer-reviewed publication of scholarly works that are truly interactive, with no print counterpart, was an ambitious one, and the learning curve has been incredibly steep. But we’re now at the point where the lessons learned can be discussed in context and shared with the broader community.

We stepped into this experiment with the expectation that the primary difficulties would be technology-driven. Little did we know that much of the infrastructure we take for granted in the print world simply doesn’t exist within the digital. From the mechanics and processes of peer review, through the mundane aspects of copyright registration and library cataloguing, and on to the incredibly thorny issue of preservation, each step has been a challenge. And the challenge has been met across the Press, not simply by the four core team members of our Mellon-funded program.

Hands Outstretched

Sociology is driven by human interaction and a desire for social good.

by MARCELA MAXFIELD

The scallop shell emblem in a street along the Camino de Santiago in Logroño, Spain. CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

Just before joining Stanford University Press this past February, I decided to take the trip of a lifetime. I booked my ticket to Bordeaux, and plotted the route by bus and train to St. Jean Pied-de-Port—a small, medieval French town at the foot of the Pyrenees and famed starting point of the traditional pilgrimage across northern Spain, the Camino de Santiago. Six weeks from that point, I arrived at the lighthouse at the end of the world, in Finisterre.

For a trip so destination-oriented, the Camino had a strange muddling effect on any notions I had about the trajectory of my life. I had been working in publishing in New York City for four years before deciding that I would prefer to join the ranks of academics whose books I was helping to publish. That was the plan, at any rate, when I started across the mountain range that first day. I would spend my time contemplating my program of study in the days to follow, trekking among the vineyards, over highways, and through austere farming villages.

But instead of thinking about what academic track would make the most sense for me, I was distracted by the people around me—walking archives of tragedy, humor, nostalgia, and empathy—some of whom became like family to me for that relatively short span of time, and others with whom I interacted only once, maybe with just a passing smile. But even in those cases, their stories often wound back to me in the words of others. Over soup in a hostel one night I was asked, “Did you hear about the 87-year-old woman from New Zealand who is walking the Camino alone?” A face surfaced in my memory, smiling at me from underneath her pink knit hat as we waited in line for coffee, weeks ago. “She told me that her family is moving her into a nursing home next year and won’t let her travel on her own any more after this. She plans to throw her boots into the ocean at the end.”

Sociology’s terrain is vast and varied—possibly personified by the pilgrim stopping into a hostel and finding kinship among strangers.

Making a Home for the Disappeared

As the Peruvian state uncovers mass graves, relatives find ways to honor their missing loved ones.

by ISAIAS ROJAS-PEREZ

Photo taken by the author at the Museo de la Memoria, Para que no se Repita, established in Ayacucho by ANFASEP (Asociación Nacional de Familiares de Secuestrados, Detenidos, y Desaparecidos del Perú).

An enlarged identity card photo of a boy wearing his school uniform alongside one of his class notebooks are among some of the most moving artifacts displayed at the Museo de la Memoria—the small museum that the Quechua-speaking mothers of the disappeared built in memory of their missing relatives in Ayacucho, Peru. The notebook displays what could be the work of any Quechua-speaking boy in a Spanish-speaking state institution such as the school: the unsteady lettering, the misspellings and grammatical errors, the playful drawings. It is the work of a joyful boy preparing to enter into adult society and the political community by mastering the state’s writing and reading practices. But at midnight on June 24, 1984, a military squad burst into his house and kidnapped him. He was never seen again. Only his class notebook and the enlarged identity card photo remain.

Pablo Gerardo Albites Pariona is one of the thousands of people “disappeared” by the Peruvian state during the 1980s and 1990s counterinsurgency campaign in Peru’s central southern Andes. In August 2003, at the end of its mandate, the Peruvian Truth and Reconciliation Commission (Comisión de Verdad y Reconciliación, or CVR) compiled a preliminary list of four thousand “disappeared” people. In 2011, another state-sponsored institution, the Central Register of Victims, registered 8,661 cases. Yet, as the UN Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances observed as recently as July 2016, the real figure may be much higher. Citing such institutions as the Public Prosecutor’s Office, the International Committee of the Red Cross, and the Peruvian Forensic Anthropology Team, the UN Working Group considers that figure “to lie between thirteen thousand and sixteen thousand victims of enforced disappearance.” According to Peruvian human rights organizations, the actual figure may be as high as eighteen thousand disappeared.

Abstract figures tallying the number of lives lost cannot convey the visceral quality of the horror that families like Pablo Gerardo’s experienced.

Transcending Without Transcendence

A tribute to extraordinary scholar and Meridian series editor, Werner Hamacher.

Select titles from the Meridian series. Photo by Kalie Caetano.

 

It was with the heaviest of hearts that Stanford University Press learned of the death of Meridian series editor Werner Hamacher this past month. Professor at the University of Frankfurt, and founder of its Institute of General and Comparative Literary Studies, which he also directed, Hamacher was also the Emmanuel Levinas Chair and Professor of Philosophy and Comparative Literature at The European Graduate School.

SUP’s collaboration with Werner Hamacher dates back to 1991, when he and series co-founder David Wellbery (who served as co-editor until 2000) reached out to former Stanford editor Helen Tartar with the idea of forming a book series that would be a forum for work in literary and aesthetic theory, particularly that being done in France, Germany, and the United States. The series name was meant to pay homage to Paul Celan and his influential poetological statement of the same name, which was eventually published in a prizewinning translation in the series itself; but it equally referenced the editors’ desire to cross geographical meridians, to privilege internationality, and to foster work that remapped connections between disciplines, institutions, and national traditions.

Werner’s acumen as a series editors was unparalleled.

Tracking Changes in Digital Publishing

Copy editors of digital scholarship must take into account the medium of the project.

by JASMINE MULLIKEN

Photo by Rodger Evans. CC BY-ND 2.0 via Flickr.

A digital publishing program like ours, which prides itself on being platform agnostic, offers exciting potential for variety in the look and feel of final publication formats but also ensures that some of the production processes typical within a press can never be completely standardized.

As I mentioned last week and will write more about in the future, we have a responsibility to host the projects we publish, and while that hosting environment might be centralized, the process of migrating a project there from its development environment is very much determined by its underlying structure. There isn’t a set of steps we can apply to all the projects in the production pipeline because each project requires a different approach.

The process of copyediting a project must take into account the format and structure of the project.

Likewise, the process of copyediting a project must take into account the format and structure of the project. SUP, like any other established press, has a pretty streamlined process for this stage of production when it comes to books. Page counts normally indicate a ballpark timeframe for how long copyediting will take, and most professional copy editors are already familiar with the file types they’ll be working with. They are presumed to know how to leverage the affordances of basic software like Microsoft Word to manage and track their work. In other words, in most cases, a trained copy editor with a knowledge or specialization in the subject area knows exactly how to handle a manuscript and get the job done.

Is He a Sociopath?

Why the principal question we ask about Bernie Madoff is wrong.

by COLLEEN EREN

Bernard Madoff, painted portrait by Thierry Ehrmann. CC BY 2.0 via Flickr.

In May, HBO’s The Wizard of Lies brought in the largest premiere audience that the network has seen in four years. The film, an adaptation of Diana Henriques’ journalistic account of Bernie Madoff’s multi-billion-dollar Ponzi scheme, saw, 2.4 million viewers, the weekend of its release—a sizable audience, especially considering that actors Richard Dreyfuss and Blythe Danner headlined Madoff, a four-hour ABC miniseries on the same subject, only a year prior. Perhaps as a way to seize upon the renewed interest generated by the film, which cast Robert De Niro in the lead role as Bernie and Michelle Pfeiffer as Ruth Madoff, the New York Post ran a lengthy article, “The sad new life of exiled Ruth Madoff,” with paparazzi-style photos of Ruth, her preferred bagel shop, dry cleaners, local clothing shop, and other quotidian details about a no-longer-privileged existence. The UK’s Daily Mail published a similar story with photos of the “recluse” Ruth emerging from a local CVS. With a distinct note of schadenfreude, the piece indicated just how far down the social ladder she had fallen. With the ten-year anniversary of Bernie’s arrest approaching, public appetite for this story and curiosity about its principal characters remains robust.

Whether or not Madoff fits the criteria of a sociopath (or a psychopath) has produced numerous conjectures.

Being a Good Host

Producing and reliably delivering digital scholarship requires a robust hosting platform.

by JASMINE MULLIKEN

Server room. CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

The delivery of a book, from author to press and then press to reader, despite its complexity, is pretty well established. Stanford University Press, for example, has been doing it for 125 years. University presses outside the United States have been doing it for as long as 430 years or better. Much can be streamlined in book production when you have over a century to perfect your processes.

Digital publications, on the other hand, are still in their infancy. And the kinds of digital projects SUP is publishing, which move beyond the basic text-centric ebook, are even newer. Although scholars have been creating these kinds of projects for years, only now has any press taken on the challenge and responsibility of advocating this kind of scholarship by publishing it. And part of that process is implementing a plan for delivering the final product to readers.

As many authors of interactive scholarly works know, a project needs a secure and well-maintained hosting environment. For most authors, this environment is one managed by their university, whether by a department or college technology initiative, or a library’s or university’s IT department. These operations are usually fairly well staffed (though rampant nationwide budget cuts to higher education may imperil these assets). But university presses don’t usually have the resources or the need for such dedicated, highly staffed departments. Just as modern presses outsource the physical making and moving (printing, binding, shipping, etc.) of their books, our digital publishing initiative has required that we choose an appropriate hosting provider to manage our growing library of diverse digital publications.

As many authors of interactive scholarly works know, a project needs a secure and well-maintained hosting environment.

Experimenting with Slave Cures

How was new knowledge tested in the Atlantic World?

by LONDA SCHIEBINGER

This beautiful plant featured in the “Negro Dr’s” cure for yaws.

An extraordinary experiment pitted purported slave cures against European treatments in Grenada, a small island south of Barbados, in 1773. Plantation owner A. J. Alexander experimented with his “Negro D^r’s” medical techniques in an effort to cure yaws, a horrid tropical disease infecting the skin, bone, and joints bred of poverty and poor sanitation. When Alexander tested his slave’s cure, what was he actually testing? African cures transported to the Americas? Remedies developed by Amerindians and transmitted to African slaves, who, unlike Europeans, were familiar with what we today call tropical medicine? Cures developed by plantation slaves in the Americas? Or, by some great twist of irony, cures communicated by Europeans to the slaves via the plantation complex?

Alexander considered his slave’s cure for yaws to be part of a body of medical knowledge derived from Africa, referring to the slave’s cures as “Negro Materia Medica.” And, indeed, historians writing about “slave medicine” often assume an African origin of a cure. Did Africans bring medicines and medical techniques with them from their homelands or did they experiment with new plants and cures found in the West Indies? More generally, how did knowledge circulate in the Atlantic World?

Right to Repair is Right to Interpret

As text technologies evolve, so too does the province of literary analysis.

by DENNIS TENEN

Public domain via Pixabay.

How is a tractor like a writing desk?

Some metaphorical insight is to be gained in the comparison between reading and writing, and reaping and sowing. Changes in technology that facilitate physical contact between laborers and their element, be it a blank page or a fallow field, bring farmers and literary scholars into a more direct, non-figurative conversation, concerning the nature of electronic goods.

In the digital world, neither plow nor pen is subject purely to their mechanics.

In the digital world, neither plow nor pen is subject purely to their mechanics. Modern tractors like modern typewriters are also computers, which means that these tools now contain an inward facing surface, marked by inscription. Solid-state memory arrays are machined out of silicon, ceramic, palladium, platinum, silver and other precious metals. They are tiny storehouses for information—programming instructions—which ultimately govern the behavior of the mechanism. The presence of such a surface and the capability to respond to its commands is what differentiates "smart" devices from their lackwit counterparts. The smart device, to paraphrase Marx, is one that evolves, out of its silicon brain, grotesque ideas. It is a thing imbued with potential for symbolic manipulation.

It should not surprise us then that protections usually reserved for intellectual property have been expanded to cover such tangible goods as harvesters and combines. In her essay "Freedom to Tinker," Pamela Samuelson, of Berkeley Law, described the now infamous attempt by John Deere, a major international maker of agricultural machinery, to restrict access to the innards of its machines, thus severely limiting its customers' ability to repair their own equipment. Organizations such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation and repair.org have mobilized politically, resulting in "right to repair" bills adopted into law in at least eleven states, including New York and Massachusetts.

Preserving Born-Digital Scholarship

Keeping up with innovation is an added challenge for authors in the digital medium.

by JASMINE MULLIKEN

Public domain via Max Pixel.

One of my first projects as digital production associate for the works being published under SUP’s Mellon-funded digital publishing initiative was to create a set of technical guidelines. It has proven to be a complex undertaking and one that is unearthing many philosophical questions and considerations. Over three months of work on these documents, which will be featured here in the coming weeks, has shown that just as a recommendation seems to be complete, something in the technological world changes, and the guidelines need to be updated. It’s the nature of the digital, and it’s something many of us know all too well.

Many authors that compose their work in and for digital environments feel the sting of loss when what they’ve created succumbs to the ruthless speed of technological innovation.

The life of a technophile seems to constantly oscillate between elation and grief. The excitement at the birth of a the latest mind-blowing API, elegant publishing platform, lifesaving open source plug-in, or game-changing JavaScript library is inevitably closely followed by the death of another favorite app, well-used software program, or familiar media interface. While the swing keeps us curious and creative, it can also become exhausting and frustrating.

The Form of Digital Projects

Unlike print, the form of digital projects has a direct bearing on the ideas they convey.

by NICOLE COLEMAN

A word processor from the 1970s-1980s. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

Not too long ago we used word processors to write documents on computers. The act of writing itself was called “word processing.” The excitement around the revolutionary new technology (first electric typewriters, then computer applications) inspired a new name for writing, defined by the instrument with which we produced it. Now the technology has become common place and we just write documents, whether electronic or on paper. The term “word processing” has fallen out of use. 

So, in another decade, will the long-form, peer-reviewed digital humanities projects, or interactive scholarly works, produced today be known as just books? Is it our excitement about the new technological instruments of production that has us searching for a new name? Time will tell. What we know for certain is that this new form of scholarly publication has significant implications for the practices and processes of authoring, publishing, archiving and preservation.

In another decade, will the long-form, peer-reviewed digital humanities projects, or interactive scholarly works, produced today be known as just books?

Global Media in the Holy Land

From satellite TV to contraband texts, media has played a critical role for Palestinians in Israel.

by MAHA NASSAR

Control room of Arabic-language satellite TV channel. Photo by Deirdre Kline, 2008. Public domain (via Wikimedia Commons).

Flip through some of the eight hundred or so Arabic satellite television stations available today, and you’ll find many programs that would look quite familiar to American audiences. On the popular MBC 1 station, you can watch Good Morning Arabs and Arab Idol, both of which are produced and hosted in Arabic, but have formats nearly identical to those of their American counterparts. Programming on MBC 4 would look even more familiar, with popular American shows like Project Runway and CBS’s The Talk broadcast in English with Arabic subtitles. The programs’ sidestepping of political sensitivities and frequent product placement exemplify the commercialized, corporatized global media that has come to the Arab world in recent decades.

But there is another type of global media, one with a longer and more interesting history. Long before satellite television and the internet became the primary modes of communication and entertainment in the region, written texts, especially books, newspapers, and journals, were being hand-copied, printed, sold, mailed, and smuggled across geographic and political divides. Far from being commercialized entertainment, this written media was utilized by political organizers and intellectuals to subvert official state narratives, challenge government policies, and connect otherwise isolated peoples to one another.

Beyond the ebook

As scholarship and technology evolve, the question of how to define born-digital work arises.

by JASMINE MULLIKEN

Public domain via Pixabay.

Part of any publisher’s production workflow is registering published items with identifiers of various kinds. For traditional books these identifiers includes things like ISBNs and other cataloging descriptors like OCLC numbers and Library of Congress call numbers. With the advent of digitized texts came the addition of Digital Object Identifiers, or DOIs. Assigning all these identifiers involves metadata, which inevitably means defining the publication’s format type. Definition is easy when a format has been widely understood, accepted, produced, and circulated for centuries. The process of cataloging and registering books is pretty streamlined for most publishers. Even assigning identifying information to ebooks, a much newer format, has become pretty routine. But digital projects like the ones we’re publishing, which are inherently multimodal and web-based, offer an entirely new and somewhat perplexing set of challenges.

A recent discussion I had with a DOI registering agency was a reminder that the organizations and entities that publishers work with on a regular basis don’t yet understand that what we at SUP are publishing, and what other publishers will inevitably be adding to their programs, is very different from what’s already out there. So it’s worth taking a moment to establish what distinguishes our digital publications from other kinds of digital publications, like ebooks, that seemingly have none of these challenges of definition surrounding them.

Digital projects like the ones we’re publishing, which are inherently multimodal and web-based, offer an entirely new and somewhat perplexing set of challenges.

Hard Luck and a Dose of Pluck

A newly translated Judeo-Tunisian novella opens a window onto life under colonial rule.

a Q&A with LIA BROZGAL and SARAH ABREVAYA STEIN

A young Jewish woman in Sfax. Source: Géographie pittoresque et monumentale des colonies françaises: Tunisie. Paris: Flammarion, 1906.

Published in Tunis in 1938, Ninette of Sin Street is one of the first works of Tunisian fiction in French and is now available in English for the first time. The story peers up at colonial society from the gutter, rather than down from the balcony of high politics. It is about ordinary, everyday life and, as such, is a study in power relations as they took shape on the ground and in the street, amidst the intricacies of French colonial rule, religious difference, and class discrepancy. This volume offers the first English translation of Vitalis Danon’s best-known work. Professors Lia Brozgal and Sarah Abrevaya Stein, editors to the English edition, answer some of our questions about the novella below.

 

Q:

Who and what is the story of Ninette of Sin Street about?

 

A:

LIA BROZGAL: Ninette tells the story of its titular protagonist, Ninette, a young Jewish woman living in the town of Sfax in the 1930s—a period during which Tunisia was under French rule. Ninette, as we learn, has grown up in poverty; she is an orphan making her way in a complicated, harsh world; she is destitute and has sometimes resorted to prostitution for a few coins. She is also the single mother of a little boy named Israel. Her primary concern, when the novella opens, is getting her son enrolled in the local Jewish school so that he can learn a trade and become, as Ninette says “honorable.” As she recounts her travails—always with a dose of pluck—we travel with her from the poor district of Sfax to Tunis, the capital, and back again as Ninette makes her way in the world.