On the evening of February 1st, over a hundred Barnard and Columbia students, many of whom had never set foot in the Kraft Center Hillel building, celebrated the opening of Café Nana, a student-run, Middle Eastern/Israeli-themed café. Partygoers were regaled by belly dancers while sipping fair trade coffee, and reclining on pillows in “Moroccan-style” tents.
Consistent with its intention of drawing attention to the diversity of global Jewish culture, Café Nana wants to make the Jewish student center an open place for everyone, and it appeals to customers of any or no religious affiliation. The Café also serves coffee that supports an interfaith Ugandan coffee farmers’ collective, with the motto, “Not just a cup, but a just cup.”
Café Nana sets out to serve coffee with justice. But does it live up to its ideals?
The café highlights both the admirable intentions and the glaring deficiencies of a multicultural, tolerant approach that tries to promote diversity as if it exists in a vacuum, apart from history and dynamics of power. This point is best illustrated not through post-colonial, subaltern jargon (of which Columbia knows no shortage), but simply by imagining the tents of Café Nana through the eyes of a truly diverse clientele:
Imagine an older Moroccan Israeli Jew for whom the romanticized tents of the café might recall the shoddy conditions and tents of the “transit camps” where hundreds of thousands of Mizrakhi (Middle Eastern) Jews were housed upon immigrating to Israel—camps that marked the beginning of the ongoing marginalization of Mizrakhim in Israel.
Imagine an American Columbia or Barnard student reading the school’s unofficial core book, Edward Said’s Orientalism, seated in Nana’s “authentic,” ambiguously Oriental décor, luxuriating in the invented exoticism of the “Moroccan”/Palestinian atmosphere.
Imagine Jewish American students reclining on cushions brought from the Muslim Quarter of reunited/occupied Jerusalem, discussing plans to move to an Israeli settlement, recalling time they spent studying in a religious school in the Occupied Territories, or remembering the ever popular “Bedouin Tent night,” a mainstay of organized American youth trips to Israel.
Imagine a Palestinian refugee, having walked past the American and Israeli flags in Hillel’s lobby, past the Café Nana sign inviting her to “A Taste of Home,” ordering one of the café’s Israel-themed sandwiches—perhaps the Khayal (Hebrew for “soldier”).
For none of these potential patrons is Café Nana an apolitical scene. Some are more conscious of this context than others, but every patron of the café is operating within a physical manifestation—a celebration—of the political relationships between a Manhattan Jewish community and various (Jewish and non-Jewish) Arab cultures.
The café’s Moroccan tents and Israeli themes implicitly call to mind the ongoing discrimination against Mizrakhi Jews in Israel, the Western colonial and neo-colonial exoticization of the “Orient,” and the Jewish state’s 39-year-and-counting occupation of the West Bank and its refusal to allow Palestinian refugees to return to their homes.
Despite these allusions, many people from a variety of backgrounds (including Mizrakhi Jews) are very excited about the café. Many appreciate the founders’ vision of a neutral, tolerant project, and their impulse is especially understandable at this particular campus. After its Middle Eastern and Asian Languages and Cultures department was hurled into the international spotlight last year, many members of the Columbia community are reluctant to analyze their roles in – and the ramifications of – the Israeli/Palestinian conflict.
But no pro-Israel American space that so self-consciously creates a bastion of Eastern romanticization can avoid confronting the context of international politics. The attempt to depoliticize and obscure the power relations of intercultural and interfaith initiatives is itself a political move that silences critique. Café Nana, with its bold fabrics, brocade pillows, and blithely military-themed sandwiches, acts as a tacit affirmation of the status quo.
In their efforts to raise awareness of Jewish diversity and build community, the founders of the new café have invited us to think critically about power and exclusion. This Pandora’s Box cannot be forced shut. One cannot remove a cup of coffee from its source any more than one can extract Café Nana from the political agendas that it both serves and represents.
