A Pogrom Called Huwwara

Pogrom. That is the first word that came to mind when I heard about Huwwara. A rabid mob sowing violence, terror, fire and destruction, the terror magnified by the darkness, shops and houses and cars torched, with hundreds of injuries and – apparently by some miracle – just one death, of a man, Sameh Aqtash, who had just returned from volunteering help to victims of the earthquake in Turkey.

Horror and shame welled up close behind. This was a pogrom, but with the critical characters reversed. No longer were Jews the victims, in the classic, almost stereotypical role fixed by history and historiography for twenty-five centuries or more. Now Jews were “masters in their house”, as asserted by a minister in the new Israeli government, and determined to show it.[1]

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HUWWARA

David J. Wasserstein is professor of History and Jewish Studies at Vanderbilt University. Before coming to Vanderbilt he served as professor of Islamic history at Tel Aviv University. He’s provided the following short introduction to his poem which he’s translated from Hebrew into English.

After the pogrom in Huwwara, on 26-27 February, I was like many Jews and Israelis in shock. That shock eventually, a couple of days later, took shape in the text below. It is a cento, a work composed largely of quotations from other texts.

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