Dennis Fox’s Weblog

I expected to be relatively un-busy during my four-month stay in Toronto, but I should have known better. Had I been in blogging mode I would have touched on many things: the course I taught at York University, which focused a critical psychology/anarchist lens on societal institutions; other talks I gave in Toronto on related subjects, especially whether psychology can help bring about social justice; Israel/Palestine issues, including the controversy over the Toronto International Film Festival that erupted not long after I got there and Faculty4Palestine meetings; Uri Gordon’s talk on Anarchists Against the Wall (my class read his book Anarchy Alive!); vegan potlucks, a polyamory discussion group, and a Science for Peace panel discussion; my sense of similarities and differences between Canada and the United States, including the visibility of FIrst Nations people and issues; my first-ever solo showing of my abstract photographs, at Toronto’s College Street Bar (images of tear-gassed protestors and other political topics definitely not included); and some other things as well, including visits to Ottawa, Manitoulin Island, Hamilton, and Waterloo.

But all I’ll say for now is that I had a great time in many different ways, and made enough lasting connections to give me reason to go back at some point. And now I’m back in Boston, where I expect (or at least hope) to be less busy than I was in Canada. We’ll see how that goes….

Zombie Walk at TIFF

CN Tower

Samba Elégua at Kensington Market’s Pedestrlan Sunday

Wikwemikong Unceded Reserve, Manitoulin Island, Ontario

Technorati Tags: anarchism, Anarchists Against the Wall, critical psychology, Israel, First Nations, Palestine, Wikwemikong, Manitoulin Island

As usual during long gaps between postings, I’ve been busy. Most substantively, I’ve been getting ready to spend the fall semester at York University in Toronto – drafting a tentative syllabus for the seminar I’ll be teaching, devising a list of required/optional/recommended books (and reading a few I hadn’t gotten to yet), making my way from a distance through the York University bureaucracy, finding a place to live in Toronto and subletting my apartment here in Boston, and figuring out what I’ll need to bring with me for the four months. Right now things are falling into place, and I’m looking forward to the experience.

I’m hoping that my course – “Psychology and Society in Critical Perspective” – will be like some of my more exciting teaching experiences rather than the more painful ones. It ties together a lot of my long-time interests. I’m leaving a lot of details open to sort out with the students, a process that not every student appreciates. Still, when I’ve managed to do that in the past most students have gotten a lot out of it, and so have I. For all I know this is the last course I’ll ever teach; I’d like to make it a good one!

Aside from the course, I’ve gotten a few other things done. Writing an entry on Critical and Radical Psychology for the upcoming Encyclopedia of Peace Psychology  forced me to try to give an overview of the topic in just 2000 words. The task was to write a “consensus view” of the field, which isn’t all that easy for a topic with little consensus. I’ve run the draft by a couple of the people I cited, just to be sure I’m not too far off-base; so far, so good.

Some of the books I’ve read as part of my course thinking are worth mentioning. I decided to use Fran Cherry’s 1995 book The Stubborn Particulars of Social Psychology: Essays on the Research Process. Fran highlights some of the personal aspects of psychology’s supposedly objective research efforts, and she emphasizes gender and race issues especially relevant to Canada.

Others I’m suggesting as alternatives for students to consider include two 1996 books by Tod Sloan that give some political context to personality theory and pop psychology (Damaged Life: The Crisis of the Modern Psyche and Life Choices: Understanding Dilemmas and Decisions) and Ian Parker’s 2007 Revolution in Psychology: Alienation to Emancipation, which, among other things, takes a refreshingly skeptical look at the prospect that critical psychology might actually create a useful alternative. All of these, very different from one another, are good reads for anyone interested in psychology’s inner workings.

The other books I plan to use, pending student input, are all written by nonpsychologists -  Derrick Jensen’s Walking On Water: Reading, Writing and Revolution, Uri Gordon’s Anarchy Alive! Anti-Authoritarian Politics from Practice to Theory, and James Coleman’s The Asymmetric Society about life in corporate society. All of these take on topics that psychology students should be able to relate to within the course’s multidisciplinary terrain.

I should learn a lot.

Technorati Tags: anarchism, critical psychology, social psychology, radical psychology

On an NPR talk show this morning about the usefulness of tomorrow’s Barack Obama-Mahmoud Abbas meeting, Juan Cole was skeptical about progress toward a Palestinian state. One caller went on at length calling Cole an anti-Semite for departing from what seemed to her Israel’s obviously justified position about, well, just about everything.

Then my email brought a report of today’s vote in the Knesset, which “would mandate year jail term for anyone who speaks against Israel’s status as a Jewish state.” The bill was approved by a majority but is not yet final. However, regardless of whether this particular bill passes (and regardless of whether Israel jails any of its citizens who commemorate the Nakba, the Palestinian Catastrophe of dispersal and repression beginning in 1948, as another bill would mandate), the contradictions between Israel’s Jewish and democratic self-image are becoming more apparent. As Chaim Oron, chair of the left-wing Zionist party Meretz, noted, “Have you lost your confidence in the State of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state? This crazy government – what exactly are you doing? Thought Police? Have you lost it?”

As I’ve explored elsewhere, Zionists on the left are the most pained by exposing their country’s primacy of tribalism over universalism. Unwilling to join those right-wingers who insist “democracy is not a Jewish value,” I wonder what they will do once the illusion of Israel’s democracy becomes impossible to sustain.

I’ve thought often about the process of shedding my own left Zionist identity, which framed my teenage years and early twenties. Elsewhere I’ve written a bit about absorbing the left-humanist-Zionist values that made me aware and proud of my Jewishness while also making me uncomfortable — with Israel’s close ties with South Africa, with its rationale for keeping Arab citizens in second-class status, with its 1967 occupation. Motivated by a matrix of political impulses and personal ties, I held together my own conflicting reactions, thinking with unjustified optimism that things would work out.

As I look back at those seven or eight years, its seems clear that the internal contradictions were too stark to ignore but too painful to acknowledge. Even after leaving Israel in 1973, no longer thinking myself as a Zionist, persistent emotional responses and my continuing family and other personal ties led me to focus on other causes. Some of this eventually helped me think my way through Zionism, especially anarchism’s critique of statist and religious identity and critical psychology’s challenge to ideologically convenient assumptions. My return to Israel and the West Bank during three trips since 2004 helped me explore these implications on the ground.

The difficulty of my own efforts to sort things out makes me empathize today with left Zionists who cling to the notion that Israel’s dual Jewish-democratic identity is not simply a charade. If I had stayed in Israel maybe I’d be one of them still, along with my few remaining American friends who stayed in Israel after I left 36 years ago. But I like to think I’d have moved already to Israel’s non-Zionist left, joining Israeli Jews who have been able to set aside any inner conflict to work for universal democratic principles. They’re the ones who will end up in jail if the latest Knesset bill becomes law.

Technorati Tags: anarchism, democracy, critical psychology, Israel, Jewish State

Thanks to a Fulbright award, I’ll be teaching at York University in Toronto for the fall 2009 semester, doing some other talks, and fitting in some Ontario travel. I’ve only been to Toronto a few times for conferences, so I’m looking forward to more extensive wandering.

My seminar, for graduate students and advanced undergraduates, is called Psychology and Society in Critical Perspective. It’s interdisciplinary, so I hope non-psychology students also sign up. Limited to 15 students, it should be informal and flexible, maybe even fun. If you’re in the Toronto area or know anyone who might be interested, you can read the preliminary details

The seminar expands on various courses I’ve taught in the past and combines many of my long-time interests, some of them touched on in this blog but more often in articles on my regular website. Here’s the core of the description:

This advanced interdisciplinary seminar explores interactions among individuals, the community, and the larger society. It builds especially on challenges to basic assumptions posed by critical psychology and anarchist theory. Interpreting social psychology broadly, we examine material from anthropology, sociology, politics, law, education, philosophy, and other fields. Student input is central as we try to make sense of topics such as these:

• everyday choices about the things we take for granted;
• the tension between autonomy and community within corporatized and globalized societies, especially those whose individualistic ethos conflicts with indigenous, egalitarian, environmental, and other subcultural values;
• the influence of institutions such as schools, universities, corporations, legislatures, courts, religious bodies, and the media;
• law’s assumptions about human nature, the implications of legal thinking and the rule of law, the sources of legal and political legitimacy, and the link between law and justice;
• social scientists’ ideological and methodological assumptions, especially social psychological approaches to power, hierarchy, competition, values, justice, group dynamics, aggression, conflict resolution, and similar subjects;
• mainstream psychology’s societal role; and
• prospects for achieving mutuality and liberation.

If you do live in Toronto and know a place I could rent for four months, preferably closer to downtown than York, please let me know!

The American Psychological Association’s actions since the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington have generated swift responses from psychologists objecting to APA’s role as government agent. Although I hadn’t been an APA member for some time, in October 2001 Isaac Prilleltensky and I wrote a short statement objecting to APA’s self-serving response. A month later a few psychologists affiliated with RadPsyNet organized a meeting in Boston; our letter to the APA Monitor (about halfway down this page), signed by 46 psychologists,  ended with this:

[W[e think it is important to work with others in our communities and institutions to find out what we have to offer that is useful to our collective struggle for a less violent and more just and humane world. In this way, we might find our way back from a view of psychology as a manual of techniques to a deeper understanding of it as an area of inquiry and a social practice with both an ethical and a scientific mandate.

Our early concerns about APA’s institutional direction grew as the APA became a willing partner in the expanding and never-ending deceptive and dangerous War On Terrorism. Psychologists across the country and in many of APA’s own divisions opposed APA’s support for psychologists who helped design and oversee torture techniques used against US-held detainees. I was glad to see RadPsyNet members and others I’ve known or known of through various critical psychology projects using their APA membership to take on key roles against APA policy.

And it’s been good to see several successful outcomes. Although it’s not yet online, Vicky Steinitz and Elliot Mishler describe much of this history in “Critical Psychology and the Politics of Resistance,” the concluding chapter in my co-edited book Critical Psychology: An Introduction. Steinitz and Mishler – two of the people who organized the November 2001 Boston meeting I mentioned above – place this internal APA struggle within the broader work by critical psychologists over the decades.

Despite some victories, however, the struggle is not over. Psychologists for an Ethical APA continues to lead the fight, now spurred on by new evidence that psychologists heavily involved in military interrogations helped form APA’s weak policy stance. You can read more about this on Stephen Soldz’s blog, connected to Psychoanalysts for Peace and Justice.

Psychologists for Social Responsibility (PsySR) has just issued its own call for an independent investigation to determine whether APA “knowingly cooperated with the Department of Defense and the CIA in helping to plan, facilitate, provide official justification for, or hide the use of harsh interrogation methods.” PsySR asks six questions:

• Did the APA’s 2005 Presidential Task Force on Psychological Ethics and National Security (PENS) provide an independent evaluation – without outside interference – of the ethics of psychologists’ participation in these interrogations?
• Has the APA responded appropriately and adequately to official ethics complaints registered against APA members regarding their involvement in abusive interrogations?
• Was the APA’s sponsorship of post-9/11 invitation-only workshops with security agencies such as the CIA consistent with its “do no harm” core principles?
• Why did the APA adopt unrealistic assumptions about the impact and autonomy of psychologists present in detainee settings in spite of well-known psychological research to the contrary?
• Have financial and career considerations – such as the funding of psychological research and practice by the defense-intelligence establishment – influenced APA actions and policies in regard to psychologists’ participation in abusive interrogations?
• What was the basis for the APA’s revision of Standard 1.02 of its Ethics Code in 2002 to the effect that psychologists may ignore the code where it conflicts with the regulations of an undefined “governing authority” – and why was this standard not modified after APA Council identified its potential to allow for torture?

Good questions. Answers? Not yet.

Technorati Tags: American Psychological Association, critical psychology, torture, PsySR

I just got back from a memorial for Hilda Silverman, a Boston-area activist who died a year ago at 69. I knew Hilda as a mainstay of the local Jewish peace community, relentlessly working to change inaccurate perceptions about causes and consequences, determined to challenge even those she worked with to not lose sight of justice. The last significant conversation we had was more than two years ago when we stopped for pizza on our way from a demonstration at Brandeis University, defending Jimmy Carter’s book Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, to a fund-raiser for ICAHD, the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions. I might not have made it to the fund-raiser if Hilda hadn’t asked for a ride. It was cold, and I was tired. She seemed tireless, and our conversation, along with the  pizza, warmed me up.

A short video at the memorial showed clips of an interview with Hilda talking about trying to reconcile her lifelong identification with the Jewish people’s millennia of suffering and victimhood with her clear understanding that “the price was too high” for displaced Palestinians. The Boston Globe’s obituary included this:

“I am a Jew with a profound consciousness of Jewish victimization through history,” she wrote in a 2002 opinion article for the Philadelphia Inquirer. “But, for me, victim and victimizer, oppressor and oppressed are not mutually exclusive categories.” She denounced some of Israel’s actions toward Palestinians, then stood firm as many Jews labeled such criticism as a betrayal.

Sandy Tolan, the memorial event’s featured speaker, pointed out that Hilda’s empathy for those on both sides and her deep understanding of the conflict’s complexities did not stop her. He related Hilda’s political understanding and efforts to his book, The Lemon Tree, and went on to talk about the dim prospects for a two-state solution, acknowledging that Hilda herself had tired of that particular topic. Tolan ended by advocating a search for something other than a one-state/two-state choice, whether dual state or binational or confederation or something as yet unthought of. He knows, as Hilda knew, that Israeli settlement policy had rendered impossible a viable Palestinian state on what’s left of Palestinian territory. And that Hilda would keep looking for peace with justice.

Technorati Tags: Israel, Jewish State, Palestine, Reconciliation, two-state solution, Sandy Tolan

I neglected to post anything two weeks ago when Shachaf Polakow of Israel’s Anarchists Against the Wall came through Boston on a fund-raising tour. (Since Israel has started arresting rather than simply tear-gassing and shooting Israelis and Palestinians engaged in non-violent anti-Occupation efforts, legal costs have escalated beyond $100,000. If you can, help; the money will first pay for Palestinian legal defense and then for Israeli costs.)

In addition to Shachaf’s largest Boston event – a panel discussion with Noam Chomsky and Leila Farsakh – I went with him to a smaller discussion at Kavod House, a local progressive Jewish organization for twenty- and thirty-somethings. During the discussion after Shachaf’s slide-and-video presentation, I made a point I’ve made before when talking about his group: Unlike many of the more numerous Israeli liberals and left-Zionists I’ve met who know something is rotten in Israeli democracy and Israeli society but are unwilling to reach conclusions that should be obvious, anarchists engaged in direct action against the Wall seem refreshingly unconflicted. It’s been useful to meet Israelis who seem able to put aside Israel’s nationalist and religious mythology and focus on what justice demands.

I’ve just finished reading Uri Gordon’s new book Anarchy Alive! Anti-Authoritarian Politics from Practice to Theory. Uri’s an Israeli anarchist who teaches Environmental Ethics, Social Analysis of the Environment, and Environmental Politics at the Arava Institute for Environmental Studies, which I’ve noted here before. We were scheduled to meet back in November during my most recent West Bank/Israel trip but I had to come home early instead. I had hoped to get his take on several topics, so am glad now to at least have the book. It’s a good clear read.

Anarchy Alive! highlights and dissects issues that divide anarchists, focusing on power and influence, violence, technology, and – most relevant here – the incongruous anarchist relationship to national struggles, as seen most directly right now in the work of Anarchists Against the Wall. Uri doesn’t try to resolve every issue, no doubt an impossible task; it’s useful enough that he addresses them head on and draws out many of the difficulties anarchists face in making their way through a long and varied terrain.

Uri has a related piece on the history of anarchism in Israel, including influences on the early kibbutz movement, a movement that served as my own teenage introduction to the notion that we don’t have to accept things as they are.

Despite the touring and writing, Israel’s anarchists continue their direct action campaign in support of Palestinian resistance. Their website has much information, including video clips. And a way to send them some money.

Technorati Tags: Anarchists Against the Wall, Anarchy Alive, Shachaf Polakow, Uri Gordon

Last night I went to hear a panel discussion featuring Noam Chomsky, Stephen Walt, Irene Gendzier, and Duncan Kennedy at Boston University’s Law School. The central topic was the US role in the Israel-Palestinian conflict. All four panelists are critical of US support for Israel; the moderator told us that academics on the other side who had been invited to attend had all refused.

The auditorium was pretty full, and at the end lots of people lined up to ask questions. Most were supporters of Israel incensed at what they tried to portray as one-sided inaccuracies. Several made points that would have been worth pursuing, but there was too much pro-Israel shouting and ranting to enable much actual discussion. The way this went added to my thinking that these sorts of panels with longish presentations and little time for actual back-and-forth discussion bring little clarity. I’ve been to enough similar talks to know that  the structure makes actual communication secondary regardless of which side the speakers are on.

Of the speakers, the one I had never met was Duncan Kennedy, a Harvard Law School professor and critical legal studies scholar. When I was teaching legal studies I used a classic piece of his on how law schools are essentially training in hierarchy. I had only learned recently that Kennedy has become outspoken on Israel/Palestine, and is now teaching a course on related legal issues. A quick web search found a lot of his work. Here, he begins a short piece last month about Gaza in the Harvard Crimson by referring to a point he made in somewhat different fashion last night, that too many otherwise progressive academics would rather avoid the subject:

When I told a friend, a former section leader in a large Harvard College course, that I had been offered a chance to do an op-ed for The Harvard Crimson on Gaza, she identified two fairly common, understandable undergraduate attitudes: “The situation is too complicated and I can’t make up my mind about it;” and “This is controversial and there are differences of opinion. No side is ‘right.’’”

I hope that the recent war, occurring at the beginning of the Obama presidency, will lead to enough discussion of Israel and Palestine in the Harvard community so that more of us feel able to take positions. With that in mind, I will use my space to present a factual picture one would think controversial, but which surprisingly is a matter of consensus of “informed observers.”

The bulk of the column presents an account that will probably strike some as less consensual than Kennedy suggests, though I think disputes would mostly be a matter of emphasis and tone. I especially appreciate his penultimate context:

Numerous observers have charged Israel with committing war crimes during the war. Without downplaying that aspect, I think it is important to understand the 1,300 Palestinian casualties, including 400 children as well as many, many women, versus 13 Israeli casualties, as typical of a particular kind of “police action” that Western colonial powers and Western “ethno-cratic settler regimes” like ours in the U.S., Canada, Australia, Serbia and particularly apartheid South Africa, have historically undertaken to convince resisting native populations that unless they stop resisting they will suffer unbearable death and deprivation. Not just in 1947 and 1948, but also in Lebanon in 1982 and 2006, Israel used similar tactics.

Causing horrific civilian deaths is often perfectly defensible under the laws of war, which favor conventional over unconventional forces in asymmetric warfare. The outright “crimes,” like the My Lai massacre, Abu Ghraib, or Russian massacres in Afghanistan and then in Chechnya, are less important for the civilian victims than the daily tactics of air assault, bombardment, and brutal door-to-door sweeps, meant to draw fire from the resisters that will justify leveling houses and the people in them.

Kennedy’s final paragraph makes sense to me, too:

Can this picture be right? If so, what is to be done? If not, what is to be done? If you are not already clear about what you think, it is crucial to try to find out for yourself. If the situation is as bad as I have painted, you might consider some small step, perhaps just a contribution to humanitarian relief for Gaza, or e-mailing the White House, or something more, like advocating for Harvard to divest.

Technorati Tags: Gaza, Israel, Palestine, Duncan Kennedy, war crime

In other areas of my life, the second edition of my co-edited book Critical Psychology: An Introduction has finally arrived in the mail. The first edition, which I put together with my longtime critpsy collaborator Isaac Prilleltensky, was published in 1997. It’s still in print, but Sage, the publisher, finally persuaded us a couple of years ago to expand to a second edition, which we agreed to do once we found a third collaborator, Stephanie Austin. You can see the Table of Contents on my website, with links to the publisher’s UK and US pages and Amazon (though the book may not be in stock in the US for another couple of weeks).

You can read the new edition’s introductory chapter online at the publisher. The book has 23 chapters with 35 authors. In addition to looking at various subdisciplines of psychology from a critical perspective – the core of the first book – this time we have new sections with chapters on social issues (race, gender, class, disability, colonialism, human rights, and the mental health system) as well as on critical practice (theory, research, therapy, organizational change, and the politics of resistance). It’s really mostly a new book, but the publisher wanted to keep the same title.

I’m happy with the way it turned out, though I’m sorry the first edition will soon be unavailable, or so I assume. We had to leave out material I really liked. You can still read introductions to the first book’s 19 chapters, and there should be plenty of used copies around.

What I like best about the new cover is that it uses a photo I took, part of my current fascination with abstract reflections (in this case, clouds and blue sky reflected in a lake at the University of Miami, where Isaac works). No photos inside, unfortunately.

I did a quick Google search and discovered the book already turns up in several places, including Wikipedia’s main article on Psychology. That article now lists Critical Psychology as one of psychology’s many subdisciplines; I’m not sure that’s what I’d call it, but more on that another time. Wikipedia’s separate article on Critical Psychology doesn’t yet list the new edition.

During my ego surfing I also stumbled across a UK website that sells essays to college students. Their sample essay on social psychological research answers this question:

“What are the strengths and weaknesses of a ‘critical’ compared to a ‘traditional’ approach to social psychological research. Limit your answer to one (or possibly two) areas of relevant research.”

A good traditional question. Fortunately, the site assures students that buying an essay is not cheating. I guess that’s thinking critically.

Technorati Tags: Stephanie Austin, critical psychology, Isaac Prilleltensky, social psychology

1. An article about today’s election on the Jerusalem Post website:

In Meretz, veteran politicians hoped [to...] re-energize the party. With a predicted four seats in the Knesset according to the exit polls, [Haim] Oron … pledged that Meretz would “return to be a central factor in the establishment of a Zionist, social-democratic left-wing, dovish and humanistic State of Israel. This space was left vacant in these elections.”

2. From the blog South Jerusalem run by Gershom Gorenberg (an American-born Israeli journalist who I heard speak in Boston the other night) and Haim Watzman:

South Jerusalem is…. The only place in the world where you can be a left-wing, skeptical Orthodox Zionist Jew and feel like you are part of a mass movement.

3. From the controversial Israeli historian Benny Morris’s book Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881-1999, which I recently started chipping away at, here writing about the early 1920s:

Zionist spokesmen argued, as after previous rounds of violence, that the May rioting had been the work of a few agitators, not a true reflection of majority Arab opinion. The reason: If the violence was widely supported, there was no hope for Zionism. It had to be explained as the work of a small group of criminals, with the Jews — whose “interests were identical” with those of the Arabs — striving for “peace with the Arab nation.” This of course ran contrary to the truth, and contrary to the findings of the British commission of inquiry…. The violence, it concluded, was rooted in political and economic reasons arising from Jewish immigration and Zionist aims and was not caused by envious effendis, as the Jews claimed….

Zionist officials, though they maintained the fiction in public, were well aware of the truth. As Thon put it…. “This may be fine as a tactic, but, between ourselves, we should realize that we have to reckon with an Arab national movement….”

Comment: After Gorenberg’s talk the other night, I asked him the question I hadn’t been able to give after his talk. He had hinted that Israeli democracy needed improvement, even calling on Diaspora Jews to remind Israel that democracy requires equal rights for minorities rather than simply imposing majority rule. I wanted to know if he thought the second-class status of Israel’s Palestinian citizens was really a fixable problem, akin to that of racial minorities in the US where the law in theory even when not in fact holds all citizens to be equal, or whether in Israel the refusal to become “a state of all its citizens” demonstrated a structural distinction that meant second-class status for non-Jews must be eternal. He said it was a good question, but unfortunately the crowd at the literature table left room only for small talk.

Benny Morris, despite his meandering from army refusenik to right-wing apologist, and despite his reliance on Israeli sources and perspectives, at least provides useful evidence that from its very inception in the late 1890s Zionist organizers made public comments far removed from their actual goals and expectations. It’s sobering reading for those who still cling to popular pro-Israel defenses, and especially useful I think because it comes from a now-right-wing Israeli academic. For me, it’s one more reminder that Meretz’s Haim Oron and South Jerusalem’s Gershom Gorenberg remain mired in a past that never had a chance of moving forward.

Technorati Tags: Israel, Benny Morris, Gershom Gorenberg