Stanford University Press Blog

Digital Militarism

How Israelis live intimately with the military occupation in their digital lives.

by ADI KUNTSMAN and REBECCA L. STEIN

Israeli militant selfies, Facebook, July 2014. Left: Israelis hold a sign that reads "'Hating Arab isn't racism, it's values!' #IsraelDemandsRevenge." Right: A soldier whose caption reads "Let us simply spray [them with bullets]."

In the summer of 2014 we watched the bloody Israeli incursion into the Gaza Strip unfold in real time on our social media feeds. As Israeli bombs fell, as civilian fatalities inside Gaza mounted, Palestinians live-tweeted updates from the ground, providing minute-by-minute images and accounts of the growing devastation. Many Palestinian social media users watched their international followers grow exponentially during the course of the Israeli assault. Among international anti-occupation activists and critics of the bloody operation, there was a prevailing sense of optimism, a sense that these viral jpegs of dead bodies and destroyed neighborhoods, circulating widely on social media, might make new kinds of international witnessing and accountability possible where Israel’s occupation was concerned.

A very different conversation was unfolding concurrently on Israeli social media. Here, the images of dead Palestinian bodies and destroyed neighborhoods captivating global audiences were largely missing—as they were from national television news broadcasts and popular newspapers. Indeed, the mere mention of the names of the Palestinian dead was, in the eyes of the mainstream Israeli public, tantamount to treason (a charge mounted publicly against leftists). Many Israelis used social media to support the war efforts. As bombs decimated Gazan homes, Israeli Instagram photo streams and Facebook status-updates celebrated the “righteous” victory. And many used their social media feeds to laud the mounting Palestinian death toll in very explicit terms, egging the military on.

The Feminist Entrepreneur

How women’s unique experiences are shaping their approaches to venture creation.

by BARBARA ORSER and CATHERINE ELLIOTT

Public Domain via Pixabay.

Women embrace a continuum of perspectives about how gender impacts the way they do business. For some women, being female has no influence on their business practice. For others, it’s all about being female. Many make the conscious decision not to let others’ perceptions about aspirations and behavior limit their commercial success; many seek out business relationships with other women; many prioritize relationship and see exchange as a means to collaborate rather than compete. For most women, at one level or another, being female is a significant component of their entrepreneurial identity: an asset for many, yet a liability for others.

Women are changing the way business is done and building communities of like-minded business owners.

Where once patriarchal laws and attitudes prohibited women’s rights to vote, retain property, or pursue careers, today women are embracing entrepreneurial feminism as a means to participate in the formal economy. Women are changing the way business is done and building communities of like-minded business owners, one venture at a time. Entrepreneurs are no longer the resourceful few, predominantly male, captains of industry who possess stamina and hardened constitutions. Women are breaking the mold. Today across North America, females retain ownership in half of all small businesses and in the United States alone over eight million female-owned firms generate $3 trillion a year in economic impact. For many of these women, their experiences as women inform their business practices and influence how they approach venture creation.

A Memoir of the Armenian Genocide

On the enduring legacy of Karnig Panian and his story.

words from VARTAN GREGORIAN and HOURY BOYAMIAN

At the dawn of World War I, Karnig Panian was a young Armenian boy living in an Anatolian village in what was then the Ottoman Empire. In his lifetime he witnessed and experienced firsthand the mass persecution, deportation, and extermination of the Armenians, a minority group both by dint of religion and ethnicity, at the hands of the nationalist Ottoman government. His memoir describes his experiences as a refugee in the deserts of Syria and as an orphan in an Antoura facility whose administrators sought to “Turkify” non-Turkish children. It also chronicles his personal struggle to guard against despair and erasure in the context of war and extreme loss.

In commemoration of Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day (April 24^th), we share an excerpt from his memoir, as well as a few words on Karnig's life and legacy from Armenian-American scholar, Vartan Gregorian, and Houry Boyamian, Karnig Panian’s daughter.

A Key To Our Memories

An episode from Karnig Panian’s time in a “Turkified” Antoura orphanage.

by KARNIG PANIAN

The orphans lined up in the courtyard of the Antoura orphanage, ca. 1916. Photo courtesy of: Missak Kelechian, Collège Sain Joseph—Antoura.

In 1915 the Ottoman government marched five-year-old Karnig Panian, his family and their surrounding Armenian community, from their home village in east-central Anatolia to the Syrian Desert. Many members of Panian’s family succumbed to the harsh conditions, and he soon found himself an orphan. He was placed in an Antoura orphanage, which had been established with a broader nationalist agenda in mind; administrators of the orphanage aimed to “Turkify” their wards by erasing the cultural identities of the Armenian and Kurdish children in their care.

Goodbye, Antoura is Panian’s recollection of his time at the Antoura orphanage, a memoir described by the Financial Times as a “luminous story of witness” and a “literary gem.” Panian’s narrative offers intimate insight into the Armenian Genocide as well as the resilience of children in the face of tremendous adversity—excerpted below is a brief episode from Panian’s life in the orphanage.

Conscience and History

Justice, Martin Luther King, and the Armenian Genocide. 

by ARAM GOUDSOUZIAN 

“Conscience asks the question, is it right?" —Martin Luther King, Jr.

Sometimes it confuses people. Honestly, sometimes it confuses me. How did an Armenian guy from the suburbs of Boston become a historian of the black experience, living in the South? The short answer: partly by accident, partly by luck, and mostly out of an impulse to tell stories. What makes us who we are? African American history helps answer that question.

While helping to tell Karnig’s story,
I thought about the lessons of the civil rights movement.

Lately, I have been considering the connections between African American and Armenian history. On one level, these histories are nothing alike. They both have tragic watershed events— slavery in one case, genocide in the other—but they occurred at different historical moments, stemmed from different kinds of exploitation, and had different impacts. In such cases, historians are generally cautious to make sweeping comparisons.

And yet—what makes us who we are? I am not a historian of Armenia, but I am a historian, and I am Armenian. I jumped at the chance to serve as editor of Karnig Panian’s Goodbye, Antoura: A Memoir of the Armenian Genocide. I bore a personal burden to do so, but I also saw the great possibilities in Karnig’s evocative language, resilient spirit, and incredible journey. It speaks to us today, a full century after he was uprooted from his village, marched to the deserts of Syria, watched his family die, and somehow preserved his body and soul through a long stint in an abusive orphanage.

Genocide and the Social Death of Children

Non-lethal elements of genocide are too often dismissed.

by KEITH WATENPAUGH

Armenian orphans of the Marsovan Anatolian College in 1918. Public domain.

I teach genocide—or more correctly a course that introduces students to the theory, history, and practice of genocide. The first day’s lecture is devoted to a key insight made by the father of the genocide concept, Raphael Lemkin: Genocide is about more than just mass killing. It is also the destruction of the very social, physical, and moral fabric that binds a community of people together and defines them as a group.

Mass rape, the transfer of children, and the destruction of cultural heritage, fall short of murder, but they still constitute genocide.

Many measures, like mass rape, the transfer of children, and the destruction of cultural heritage, fall short of murder. But in the words of the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, they are still part of the crime of genocide because they are intended to cause “serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group.”

In my own research and teaching, I have struggled with how to make these “para-lethal” elements of genocide more legible, especially as they bear on the multigenerational harm of genocide. I’m not alone in this. The international human rights legal community similarly wrestles with elements of genocide that cross into the fields of sexual- and gender-based violence, like the sexual enslavement and mass rape of Yezidi women by the Islamic State, or the harm done to First Nations peoples in Canada at the hands of teachers and administrators at residential schools—experiences mirrored in the Armenian Genocide in the treatment of Karnig Panian at the hands of Halidé Edip in the orphanage at Antoura.

Armenian Feminism in Post-Genocide Turkey

On the complications of feminist speech and national belonging.

by LERNA EKMEKCIOGLU

Hayganush Mark and her husband in 1920. Public domain.

Perhaps unique in its history, feminism among Armenians reached a zenith in the immediate aftermath of genocide in the capital of the perpetrator state. The goals of Armenian national revival put extraordinary emphasis on women’s duties to the nation, not only as mothers and nurturers, but also as relief workers, financial contributors, and lobbyists. The Republic of Armenia gave suffrage to women, which in turn emboldened Armenian women throughout the world to demand representation in the governing bodies of their communities.

Feminism among Armenians reached a zenith in the immediate aftermath of genocide.

Hayganush Mark stood at the forefront of the battle against “women’s enslavement” and took it upon herself, along with her comrades at her journal Hay Gin (Armenian Woman), to convince the Armenian nation that women’s emancipation would not distract from, but would ultimately add to its revival.

She was born Hayganush Topuzyan in 1882 to a family of modest means. Hayganush’s mother, herself illiterate, insisted that her only child receive a well-rounded education. Mark would later note that she took “feminism’s first liberating steps” thanks to this hard-working woman who “did not know even the ‘a’ of the alphabet.” After high school, Hayganush became a teacher in the Armenian schools and started publishing literary pieces. In 1905, she got engaged to Vahan Tosigyan, a young and promising journalist, and soon thereafter the couple launched the women’s journal Dsaghig (Flower).

Transactions in Time

Enforced disappearances and the Armenian Genocide.

by KABIR TAMBAR

A photograph of a "Saturday mother," holding the picture of a victim of forced disappearance, during a sit-in vigil. Photo by Mehmetaergun available via Wikipedia.

Every week a group called the Saturday Mothers/Peoples (Cumartesi Anneleri/İnsanları) gathers in Istanbul to remember the lives of individuals who were forcibly disappeared by Turkey’s security forces in the 1980s and 1990s. Holding photographs of the disappeared, relatives, friends, and supporters come together to publicly describe how the disappearances took place and unremittingly demand accountability for the presumed deaths.

With their vigils the Saturday Mothers/Peoples ask us to think in two historical directions at once.

Many of the enforced disappearances took place in Turkey’s predominantly Kurdish southeastern provinces during the 1980s and 1990s: a time when the state and the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) were engaged in armed conflict; a state of emergency was legally authorized in that region and forced evacuations from villages were increasingly common; and media reportage of these events was heavily controlled and censored by state authorities. The vigils are politically charged because participants call out the specific individuals whom they hold responsible for the disappearances, including public prosecutors, security officials, interior ministers, prime ministers, and presidents of the republic.

The Perils of Minorityhood

The nationalist fervor that led to the Armenian Genocide still haunts us today.

by JANET KLEIN

Armenians are marched to a prison by Turkish soldiers, April 1915. Public domain.

In this centennial year of the Armenian Genocide, the matter of official recognition remains a focus of activists and for many in and beyond the global Armenian community. Recognition of a group’s tragedy is important, not only for the victims, survivors, and their descendants, but also for the perpetrator group. Any recognition must acknowledge that the genocide was not just a singular event, but rather a wider set of practices, backed by a particular worldview.

The genocide is more than an artifact of its time—though, to be sure, certain practices and ways of thinking were specific to the late-Ottoman period—and its effects remain with us today. Until we look carefully at the ongoing social construction of minorities, at the real and symbolic violence associated with this construction, mere recognition is not enough; recognition may heal the wounds of the past, but recognition alone cannot address the continuing trauma wrought on Ottoman and Turkish minorities—then Armenians and now especially Kurds.

Revolutionary Fallout

How the Young Turks went from Carnegie Hall to the collapse of the Ottoman Empire.

by BEDROSS DER MATOSSIAN

A postcard commemorating the grant of the Constitution on July 24, 1908.

On Sunday, September 6, 1908, at 7:30 pm a “Grand Mass Meeting” to celebrate the establishment of a new constitutional government in the Ottoman Empire took place in New York City’s Carnegie Hall. The occasion commemorated the Young Turk Revolution, which had succeeded just months before in pressuring Sultan Abdulhamid II to restore the Ottoman constitution of 1876, and with it the Ottoman Parliament, ushering in a new era of multi-party politics—a maneuver heralded as a triumph against absolutism.

The echoes of the 1908 Young Turk Revolution reverberated around the globe—from Istanbul to Cairo, Paris to New York.

Flyers announcing the festivities had been distributed among the different ethnic groups in Manhattan inviting them to attend. With the trilogy of the French Revolution—“Liberty! Fraternity! Equality!”—across the top, the flyer indicated that the event was organized by the Young Turks, the Armenian Revolutionary Federation, and the Hunchakist Party with “the participation of all the Ottoman Elements in New York, Turks, Syrians, Greeks, Hebrews, Albanians, etc.” The honorary presiders at the event were to be His Grace Archbishop Yeznig Abahouni, the Armenian Primate of the Eastern Diocese; the Honorable Dr. Tiryakyan Khan, once the personal physician of the Shah in Persia; and the Honorable Munji Bey, Ottoman Charge d’Affaires in Washington.

Remembering the Armenian Genocide

A blog series in commemoration of the centennial.

Armenians are marched to a prison by Turkish soldiers, April 1915. Public domain.

On April 24^th, 1915—one hundred years ago this Friday—the Ottoman government arrested hundreds of Armenian intellectuals and community leaders living in Constantinople and, save a few exceptions, gradually deported and assassinated them. This blow to the Armenian community came after years of social strife and nationalist propaganda presenting the Armenians as a threat to the empire’s security. Driven by nationalist impulses, the Ottoman government persecuted the Armenian minority within its borders by way of conscription, deportation, massacres, and death marches—events that coalesced into what is widely regarded today as the first genocide of the 20^th century.

April 24^th, the date that the Armenian notables were arrested, serves as the formal start date of the Armenian Genocide and is commemorated today as Genocide Remembrance Day by Armenians the world over. This week the Stanford Press blog presents reflections on this harrowing chapter of history, and introduces Goodbye, Antoura—the memoir of one young Armenian boy who lived through it all.

Tuesday

Revolutionary Fallout ⇨

How the Young Turks went from Carnegie Hall to the collapse of the Ottoman Empire.

by BEDROSS DER MATOSSIAN

 

Tuesday

The Perils of Minorityhood ⇨

The nationalist fervor that led to the Armenian Genocide still haunts us today.

by JANET KLEIN

 

Wednesday

Transactions in Time ⇨

Enforced disappearances and the Armenian Genocide.

by KABIR TAMBAR

 

 

Wednesday

Armenian Feminism in Post-Genocide Turkey ⇨

On the complications of feminist speech and national belonging.

by LERNA EKMEKCIOGLU

 

Thursday

Genocide and the Social Death of Children ⇨

Why do we downplay the non-lethal elements of genocide?

by KEITH WATENPAUGH

 

Thursday

Conscience and History ⇨

Justice, Martin Luther King, and the Armenian Genocide.

by ARAM GOUDSOUZIAN

 

 

Friday

A Memoir of the Armenian Genocide ⇨

On the enduring legacy of Karnig Panian and his story.

words from VARTAN GREGORIAN and HOURY BOYAMIAN

 

Friday

A Key To Our Memories ⇨

One man’s recollection of his childhood spent in a “Turkified” Antoura orphanage.

by KARNIG PANIAN

 

 

The Brooklyn Project

Capital of twenty-first century?

by DAVID KISHIK

Williamsburg Bridge. Photo by Thomas Hawk. CC-BY-NC 2.01 via Flickr.

The Manhattan Project is dedicated to the capital of the twentieth century. It doesn’t pretend to have a position on life in contemporary New York. But I can only imagine that if, a hundred years from now, someone were to take up the task of writing a similar book about New York in the twenty-first century, it would probably be titled The Brooklyn Project.

Brooklyn was designed as the first American suburb and it cannot escape its original telos.

For the past 15 years I’ve been living on the wrong side of the East River. Increasingly, Manhattan felt like a deserted island, at least as much as my milieu was concerned. I often joke that riding my bike over the bridge on the way to meet someone in Brooklyn feels like Whitman’s ferry ride in the opposite direction. As if both are trips to the truly pumping heart of the metropolitan matter.

But I never considered actually moving there. Here’s why: Brooklyn was designed as the first American suburb. Though it operates very differently from the iconic iterations of suburbia built after World War II, Brooklyn cannot escape its original telos. It has no way to become a genuine urban center. No matter how much it will be revitalized, how much capital will be pumped into its tree-lined streets, this borough can only offer its inhabitants a sub-urban experience.

Cinema, Comedy, and the City

Woody Allen and Walter Benjamin walk into Elain's Restaurant…

.@NeinQuarterly We like to think he’s in New York having tête-à-têtes w/ Woody Allen—luckily there’s book for that → http://t.co/iY4DUg6Fzb

— Stanford Press (@stanfordpress) April 3, 2015

The following is an excerpt from David Kishik’s The Manhattan Project: Theory of A City. 

We publish here a transcript of an interview with Allan Stewart Konigsberg (aka Woody Allen), conducted by Walter Bendix Schönflies Benjamin (aka Carl Roseman), which took place in 1985. Sandor Needleman, a retired Columbia University professor who arranged the meeting and took these notes, stipulated that they should be “published posthumously or after his death, whichever comes first.”

WALTER: Most people think about Manhattan the film as your love letter to Manhattan the place. I disagree. For me it is a declaration of war. What was on your mind when you made it?

WOODY: You’re right. I said before that I wrote the script while thinking about what is happening to American culture, where relationships between human beings are becoming harder and harder to have, and it is becom­ing harder and harder to be honest and not to sell out. New York has to fight every day for its survival against the encroachment of all this terrible ugliness that is gradually overcoming all the big cities in America. This ugliness comes from a culture that has no spiritual center, a culture that has money and education but no sense of being at peace with the world, no sense of purpose in life.

The Roseman Hypothesis

Reviving Walter Benjamin, rethinking New York.

David Kishik's new book, The Manhattan Project, engages in deep conversation with Walter Benjamin's The Arcades Project, revealing a world of secret affinities between Paris and New York. 

Crack the spine on David Kishik’s The Manhattan Project and one of the first things you will discover is the timeline at the book’s beginning recounting the life of German philosopher and cultural critic, Walter Benjamin. The chronology plods predictably enough beginning with Benjamin’s birth in 1892 and skimming through the first half of the twentieth century, during which time we see Benjamin study, marry, flounder as an academic, and begin work on his magnum opus, The Arcades Project, also known as Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century. 

The philosopher fakes his death and departs for New York under a pseudonym borrowed from a Kafka novel.

Around 1940, however—an ill-fated year for Benjamin—Kishik’s history veers off course, teetering into what the author describes as a counterfactual trajectory of the philosopher’s life. Benjamin’s death by suicide at the French border is reimagined as a clever ruse, in which the philosopher fakes his death and departs for New York under a pseudonym borrowed from a Kafka novel. Walter Benjamin-cum-Carl Roseman (à la Karl Rossman of Amerika) finds himself stateside, where he retreats into anonymity and begins composing a sequel to his Arcades Project. This manuscript—lost in the annals of the New York Public Library until 2008—applies the same sweeping analytical lens Benjamin applied to Paris to New York, heralding the city as the successor to Paris—capital of the twentieth century. It is this hypothetical manuscript that is Kishik’s chief object of analysis in The Manhattan Project.

The Taboos of History

Executive editor, Eric Brandt, on his aims for the Press’s list in American history.

by ERIC BRANDT

The Gateway Arch of St. Louis. In April the city will host the annual meeting for the Organization of American Historians. CC-BY-SA 4.0 via Wikipedia.

Who wouldn’t want to attend a conference on taboos? Freud said they were forbidden and dangerous. Sade croons that they can be sweet. Henry Miller claimed that, “Whenever a taboo is broken, something good happens, something vitalizing.” Sign me up! I’ve got my ticket, I’ve booked a hotel room, and I’m packing my bags, bound for the OAH.

“Challenging Taboos” is the theme of this year’s annual conference of the Organization of American Historians in St. Louis. And historians of the U.S. are pretty conversant when it comes to taboos—the spiritual taboos of the Native Americans and the religious taboos of the Puritans who first settled here, the political taboos our founding mothers and fathers fought against, the battle over the taboo of slavery, activists challenging cultural taboos in the sixties, and the social taboos so sharply brought into focus by recent events in the host city’s backyard of Ferguson, Missouri. It promises to be a lively conference and I’m pleased to be attending on behalf of Stanford University Press.