Dining on Sacred Cow

Given that this is the final installment of two years of Dining on Sacred Cow, I ought to be butchering a big one this week. But all that’s genuinely worth flaying is too much to broadcast in a publication that will carry my name for the rest of my life—such is the world, and such is the reason why nobody ever takes profound risks on these pages; grant me that—and if you’d like to talk about dangerous things, we can do so more intimately.

Contrary to what I had wanted, this column has not become much of a shock generator. Despite my occasionally impish wish to upset people set in their ways, I strive painfully for nuance. I’ve talked about some quirky things, certainly—eating insects, fro-yo commerce, OKCupid/job application snafus, radical life extension—but it turns out that the real page turners are relatively boilerplate: affirmative action, the one percent, “the death of the humanities,” hook-up culture, drone strikes. On such issues, wrote Ecclesiastes, nothing is new under the sun. I would any day rather aim for unique value-add—a near impossibility when debating abortion, gun control, et al—than for outrage.

Fanatical open-mindedness to uncomfortable arguments is simply less common than I’d hoped it to be—a problem that holds as true at Harvard as anywhere else. When writers on these pages and on the public profiles of perfectly intelligent peers sincerely advocate for censorship of thought and speech, it is impossible to have a genuine conversation about anything unnerving—which is practically everything that matters.

It’s a strain against my nature to be a specialist. In light of this, general knowledge has always prevailed over talents, integration over searing focus. A hyper-fox with a pet hedgehog (actually). When I signed on to write a thesis for my Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations degree, it was only through my excitement about the topic that I was able to get past the trepidation. Would I honestly be able to allocate the balance of my mental resources to one massive project? And if yes, would I even want to?

As far as I knew for the longest time, politics was my first adult love, dominating lunch table conversations and bar mitzvah decorations, spurning my advances with the cold reality of the faraway voting age.

Since my last column on the Crimean crisis, the plot has thickened considerably: from where National Geographic stands, the dangling Black Sea peninsula has joined the likes of Taiwan, Kashmir and Cyprus as an ‘Area of Special Status’. In terms of consequence to Eurasian politics and the U.S.-Russia bilateral relationship, Crimea has far outstripped Abkhazia or Transdniestria—marking the most glaring political geographic revision the Commonwealth of Independent States has seen since the end of the Cold War.

For us Gen Y-ers, children of America’s “unipolar moment,” it is nearly impossible to relate to the Cold War zeitgeist of desk drills, space races, and Daisy Girls. Except for some brief, frenzied moments in 2001-2, the jihadists lurking between the cracks of 21st century state authority have never seemed to threaten our collective existence; from where we stand today, the threat of Chinese ascendancy is distant and mostly economic.

For about a decade, I’ve been an avid reader of the latest work on human population genetics. Following a rush of oddball (and sometimes downright irresponsible) amateurs and a few informed commentators, I’ve woven in a background in ancient history and comparative linguistics to compensate for my elementary-at-best knowledge of molecular genetics. Last year, I bucked the norms of my Arabic composition class on literature and politics, writing on the origins of the Semitic language family and the demographic nature of the Islamic conquests from a genetic perspective. Until quite recently, this was an exercise on the margins: in most cases, genetic researchers kept their speculation to the unfathomably distant past, and traditional historians steered clear altogether.

It isn’t hard to understand why social scientists of various shades have resisted the tide: comfortable in their particular methodologies and backed by decades of scholarly inertia, many cannot stand the idea of men in lab coats breaking from their traditional bailiwick and seizing the reins of academic history. It is one thing to sympathize; yet another to justify. Human population genetic science has sampled broadly enough, refined its models enough, and proven coherent enough to contribute critically to our understanding of history all the while seizing the reins of prehistory—confirming some narratives, denying others, and introducing entirely new paradigms to boot.

Every election season, Harvard’s undergraduate population bubbles over with enthusiasm for Barack Obamas and Elizabeth Warrens—standard-bearers of the well-behaved, mainstream liberalism that sets the cultural tone on campus. Students will pledge fealty to the sixties’ hallmark ideals: grassroots creativity, self-expression, lifestyle experimentation. But contrary to popular imagination, they will continue to lead overwhelmingly conservative lives.

Nothing illustrates this principle more starkly than the strange reality of marijuana at Harvard: that is to say, it’s rarer than you might expect. On the campus where Timothy Leary once conducted lab experiments with much harder drugs, only 35% of 2012’s graduating seniors claimed to have ever tried marijuana—as compared to 47% of American college students, by the Harvard School of Public Health’s account. This is not for lack of intoxication, however. By contrast, a substantial 67% admit to drinking alcohol at least once a week, with 93% admitting to have tried the liquid drug at least once.

All things being equal, I’m struck by the profundity of the gap. We might do well to experience the graces of a plant thought widely to combat stress, increase empathy, and spur creativity. And unlike alcohol, marijuana is not known to precipitate violence, hangovers, or cirrhosis. Recall, this is not a case for decriminalization—Massachusetts has already done it—nor for legalization, which most well-trained Harvard liberals support in abstract, and which Washington and Colorado have already come to do. It’s a case for experimentation.

In the theater of the absurd that often becomes of Birthright’s trips for Diaspora Jewish youths to Israel, few moments are stranger than the detour into the Negev desert to the now-canonical “Bedouin tent.” Pitched by businessmen for tourists, stocked with modern comforts, and designed with intra-Jewish coupling in mind, the airy tent becomes a romantic stand-in for the experience of the Negev Bedouin, one of two varieties of “Good Arab” in the official Israeli imagination. “You see, hevre,” I imagine a guide explaining to a bunch of clueless American Joshes and Jeremies, “the clannish Bedouins don’t want trouble like other Arabs—they’re loyal to the State of Israel, and serve as excellent scouts in the army!”

Much has been made of the coming once-in-a-lifetime “Thanksgivukkah” convergence, an apotheosis of Jewish assimilation complete with vile turkey-and-latke creations for all. Last time it happened—1888, I’m told—Hanukkah wasn’t even much of a thing, and it won’t happen again until the year 79,811. This of course means that it won’t ever happen again, because for however much I love America and love Jews, I don’t expect either to exist on such a timescale (and if you do, I suggest that you get over it). So if it’s your sort of thing, enjoy it: it’s the only Thanksgivukkah there will ever be.

I will not deny that the convergence of Thanksgiving and Hanukkah serves my interests, narrowly speaking: That is to say, my mother will have no choice but to prepare a flavorful brisket instead of the ever-unpopular, but culturally perfunctory turkey. But beyond the alimentary upside, Thanksgivukkah does absolutely nothing for me. To put a finer point on it, this chimera of a holiday epitomizes much of what has always alienated me, a proud Jew and proud American, from the culture that is Jewish America. This season, I would rather celebrate the two concurrently than be dragged into the morass of cranberry sauce latkes, Hallmark bastardizations, and what I can’t help but imagine of Adam Sandler in pilgrim garb.

Thanksgiving, for whatever the Pilgrims and their Wampanoag neighbors actually did in 1621, has managed to grow from its colonial New England germ into one of America’s most splendid cultural institutions. It is ecumenical, ethically redeeming, civically healthy, and patently unconcerned with history. And if Christopher Hitchens and Jerry Falwell alike could celebrate it with gusto, it’s hard to imagine for whom this day of feel-good family feasting is beyond the pale. For me, the celebration of Thanksgiving is a sublime celebration of America-the-ideal, binding together all who eat turkey and give thanks as part of the openly fictive, essentially ethical kinship group that we call America. I very much like being part of this group, and Thanksgiving is a better expression of it than wearing yellow pants.

“He’s making this country into the best machine he can,” goes the upbeat, silvery refrain sounded thousands of times a day on trains, trams, and television sets across the country. And speaking of trains (and speaking of across the country!), a network of maglev tracks, vaguely late Victorian in appearance, crisscrosses the landscape, its trains running perfectly on time as they barrel from city to city.

“Craft!” whispers another, smaller voice from your corner lamppost, giving testimony to a national ethos whose name, shared with the currency, derives from the suffix of the president’s surname. Not quite president, but “director,” he reminds foreign correspondents. That was his title when the family business acquired the hard-hit national government on December 31, 1996, and as far as he’s concerned, nothing has changed.

This is Friedland, an industrial North Atlantic island nation of about 20,000,000—Anglo-American enough to be keenly familiar but German enough to have excellent railways and a trade surplus. Its technocratic director, Rosencraft, 49, is a vigorous, black-haired devil of a manager—known for his unique synthesis of machine efficiency and ubiquitous personality. He is neither liberal nor conservative, neither parochial nor universalistic. If he has a given name, it is neither here nor there. He just works.

For quite some time, I’ve been dabbler in what is broadly called “the bioanthropology blogosphere.” It’s one of the Internet’s strangest most provocative corners—abounding with intellectual polymaths, ideological singletons, and, very disconcertingly, more than a few unreconstructed racists. Its cast of characters, endowed with a flair for the interdisciplinary, have supplied me with both an obsession with historical population genetics and a thesis topic in intellectual history.

What binds together a good majority of bioanthro writers, from the sloppiest to the most precise, is a cultural-political identification with the secular Right. Their atheism and belief in evolution sets them apart from their fellow conservatives (only 37 percent of whom admitted in 2005 to believing in evolution); their wariness of universalistic humanism and persistent consideration of evolution as an explanatory variable in human behavior sets them apart from secular liberals.

Despite certain sympathies, I don’t identify as a member of this camp. Nonetheless, I very much value many of its critiques of baseless liberal globalist conventional wisdom—such as the claim, advanced decade after decade, that the world is becoming overpopulated. By now, mainstream outlets yielded to complicating the myth: if you read, you now know that Italy, Russia, and the Ukraine are on the verge of shrinking. In Japan, well-heeled “herbivorous” men and women are dragging the population growth rate into negative territory. But breathe easy, they write: by first-world standards, America is as fecund as you’d want it to be.

“When I was 17, I had wrists like steel / And I felt complete,” croons Ezra Koenig in “Giving Up the Gun,” a song to which I was particularly given when I was seventeen myself. To this day, I think it a good mantra for intellectualized seventeen-year-old maleness in all its invincibility and unbridled individualism.

My initiation into pure, triumphalist classical liberalism did to some degree have its roots into the spirit of my age: “You can’t tell me what to do.” But more than anything, it was a rebellion against longstanding, self-imposed order.

By casual accident of my parents’ soft-R partisan affiliation, I entered the world of political consciousness as a self-identified Republican. By my early adolescence, my childish admiration for John McCain had blossomed into something much more dramatic: a tyrannical, rigid religious puritanism (much more Calvinist than Jewish in its character, little did I know), wedded to a Weekly Standard-style giddiness for imperial adventure. Political circumstance, having packaged these things together with a belief in unbridled corporatism, had me stumping for rock-bottom tax rates as well. To my credit, I was moderate on guns and immigration.

We’ve all been to yogurtland. The neon-and-antiseptic walls, the nave-like proportions; the blessed infinity of choices. The soulless negative of a charming, family-owned ice cream shop, but less likely to stop your heart. Self-serve frozen yogurt is the undisputed “in” dessert of the global bourgeoisie—but nary a good enough yogurt joint for the job in Harvard Square, the fermented dairy delight’s ideal market.

Until now: enter Yogurtland—capital Y—perched tastily between Maharaja and Bon Chon, its all-glass storefront beguiling the crowds of Winthrop Park. Its product—some dozen flavors of take-however-much-you-want, top-how-you-like, weigh-by-the-ounce yogurt—knocks the daylights out of vaunted neighborhood incumbents Berry Line and Pinkberry, which dispense yogurt behind the counter in fixed, unfree increments. No better place to throw my lactose intolerance to the wind, I remark to my roommates almost every other night as we round the corner to the coolest new place this side of Beat Hotel.

It is also perhaps the strangest. The presentation of a student ID (or sometimes, just a good-faith disclosure of student status) gets you three free ounces off the bat. With some audacity, you can manage six by getting seconds. The policy seems to be indefinite. Strawberries steep and bob in a water cooler up in a front alcove, flanked on each side by four stylized eyes. Your refreshing strawberry water—and all the rest!—brought to you by CBS.

While you were filtering back into Harvard, gearing up for a hearty week of lecture-hopping and back-slapping, an old friend of mine and I sat at the bar, chewing on Mexican tamarind candy and chatting up some strung-out Spice Girls rejects.

“At least you’ll only be missing shopping,” my Cornellian friend assured me.

“But shopping…” I trailed off.

As anyone forced to listen to me will confirm, I am practically made of opinions. But when debate rages on these pages and at the dinner table over affirmative action, gun control, abortion, and the like, I retreat to the sidelines and keep mum. The same goes for most arguments framed in terms of a Democratic side and a Republican side to the issue: I’ll calmly diagnose each tribe’s pathology, explain that third-trimester dilation and extraction is probably not a good idea, and hustle the conversation in some more salacious direction.

For many in the punditocracy and its feeder circles on university campuses, these debates mean everything. If it is noble to work on a Senate campaign, it is yet nobler to fight for a “struggle of our generation,” like marriage equality, national debt awareness, or wage increases for campus library workers. If it’s in front of our eyes and morally unambiguous, it simply must be world-historical.

This narrow political intellectual culture, perpetuated by an unimaginative caste of wonks, activists, and joiners, assumes away the technological and social transformations of the last three decades while ignoring the prospect that what’s debatable today might be utterly irrelevant by the middle of the century. That is to say, despite the fruitful explorations of our intellectual class, political discourse qua political discourse is simply missing the real issues. As three-dimensional printing stands on the cusp of igniting a revolution in the means of production and genetic engineering stands to radically transform the means of reproduction, the Institute of Politics continues to hold panels better-suited to the 1970s. It is high time that “issues”-minded folk broaden their sense of what constitutes an “issue.”

In “The Righteous Mind,” a magisterial 2012 work on the moral psychology of political ideology, New York University’s Jon Haidt dishes out some unwelcome news to his predominantly liberal readership: By the numbers, liberals don’t seem to get much about the conservative mind. The political reality at Harvard more than occasionally bears this out. However, in his attempt to push back against the prejudices of an overwhelmingly liberal field, Haidt all too often glosses over the pathologies and blind spots of the right.

In March 2010, a poll conducted by Harris revealed that 67 percent of Republicans surveyed thought President Obama a socialist, despite very ample evidence to the contrary. In light of this, the president has kept remarkably mum about his law school alma mater over the course of the last few years, lest he be tarred and feathered for association with the much-maligned “Kremlin on the Charles.”

But after three years of appreciating that the reddest thing on the Charles is the brick-faced business school, it’s clear enough to me that if anyone needs a reality check as to what goes on behind enemy lines, it’s the conservatives. Inasmuch as Harvard is a solidly liberal place, campus socialists operate under just as much scorn as their religious conservative peers. On a campus where Obama walloped Romney by a 60 percent margin and self-identified Democrats outnumber Republicans nearly five-to-one, students live remarkably conservative lifestyles, flock to the financial services sector, and avoid radical protest like the plague.

I am not, and have never been, a “joiner.” While the instinct to lose oneself in the crowd and take part in mass spectacles is naturally human, it seems to have largely skipped me: Whether it’s a genetic defect or a design feature of my cultural Anglo-Americanism, I feel as though I’m not doing my job if I can be easily reduced to a type.

This spring break, I brushed up against the limits of my category-phobia and confessed, rather happily, to being a J Streeter. After months of correspondence and flirtation with J Street U, the university arm of “the political home for pro-Israel, pro-peace Americans,” I attended a national summit in Washington, D.C. and was instantly sold.

For quite some time, I had been in line with the moderate, common-sense principles of the five-year-old organization—a two-state solution, concern for Israeli security, an end to the occupation of the West Bank, and belief in political pragmatism—but was too shy to commit the nuances of my realist, Israel-aligned voice to any particular organized camp. What I found at J Street was a home for students in the thoughtful, nuanced middle who bravely resist the reduction of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to “the Arab culture of hate” or “the Zionist colonial enterprise.”

Tabloid, middle-aged, and each the same as the next, network crime shows are exactly the kind of thing one wouldn’t want to bring up in young, polite company. An occasional exception is Dick Wolf’s long-running Law & Order: SVU, which comes explicitly labeled as a show about “sexually-based offenses” and the “elite squad” that investigates them—but when it comes down to it, the model of the ready-made one-hour murder plot quickly runs up against diminishing marginal returns.

Fourteen seasons in, fatal patterns come into relief. Suspects under interrogation before minute 30 are never guilty; if the victim is a child, Detective Stabler will probably throttle someone against a wall. Though eminently watchable, SVU is at its core like all TV crime simulations: contrived, artless, grasping for straws.

Luckily enough for avid crime-watchers, there exists a parallel phenomenon out there on the higher channels, full of art and never desperate for original material: the true crime show. However, because of such feely things as decency and fear of the uncanny, one is even less likely to hear about true crime shows from the young, highbrow crowd. But as a semi-regular consumer of such riveting titles as Cold Case Files, The New Detectives, and City Confidential for the last decade, I’m surprised that their viewership remains largely limited to middle-aged women in the heartland.

In the wake of last September’s assault on the American consulate in Benghazi, the right-wing punditocracy stirred with rage, convinced that the tragic murder of Ambassador Chris Stevens and three colleagues was proof of an Obama administration unfit for the task of safeguarding American lives in the Middle East. Building on the fringe narrative of Obama As Malevolent Outsider, Glenn Beck speculated aloud, “This is impeachable; the president might go to prison for this one.”

Although nothing of a cheerleader for Obama administration foreign policy, I could not help but writhe with contempt over Beck’s newest outburst of on-air mania. Righteously incensed over the Benghazi boondoggle, the NATO intervention in the Libyan civil war, and the escalation of drone activity in South-Central Asia, partisan Republicans appear to have forgotten that 10 years ago, their own president sinned against America’s security on a far, far higher order.

On the backs of a white-hot, festering national trauma, a small circle within George W. Bush’s administration deceived and distorted its way to the March 2003 invasion of Iraq—launching a war for “Iraqi freedom” that would undermine America’s international legitimacy, destabilize a pivot of regional order, and bleed Treasury coffers dry to no clear positive end. As the occupation dragged out and insurgent ambitions flared, only on occasion could one expect to hear calls for genuine accountability—usually from the pacifist left—and the Bush-Cheney administration coursed, battered but protected, to the end of a second term.

As I puzzled over my college decision in April 2010, an interviewer from a smaller, quainter institution than Harvard sent me a detailed message, enumerating the reasons why not to go Crimson. For starters, life on the Charles was just too damned crowded, with eager undergrads swept to the wayside as the University doted on law, business, and medical students. Classes were oversized and understaffed. And if one could believe it, Harvard students were just as deprived outside the classroom—parties were anathema, and there was nary a Gothic steeple to be found.

Unimpressed by the Princeton representative’s hokum and unconcerned about the absence of Gothic towers, I chose Harvard and haven’t regretted it for a moment. Contra Harvard haters, the last five semesters have graced me with generous financial assistance, faculty friendships, one- and three-student classes, and my share of unforgettable college nights.

However, there’s a grain of truth at the heart of the anti-Harvard polemicist’s argument when it comes to the finishing touches. That is to say, as much as I enjoy the elegant neo-Georgian snowfall proceeding outside my window, the University’s lack of attention to good campus grooming will come back into relief when the sun comes out in melting force. While Harvard’s aesthetic charm—rendered in colonial brick, river-spanning bridges, and breezy courtyards—needs no introduction, our beautiful campus is pockmarked with both landscaping mistakes and architectural abominations. As the University gears up for a billion-dollar House renewal campaign, it must seize the opportunity to put things right—for the sake of its students’ happiness and its legacy of good taste.

In a world that has witnessed the rise of digital interfaces, online avatars, and one-click transactions, a basically conservative reaction has become fashionable in circles both left and right: A creeping depersonalization is killing everything we hold dear. As a fundamental optimist about the future, it’s my tendency not to put much stock in such arguments. Albeit some changes in platform, the social content of our lives would still be eminently familiar to our great-grandparents: We build friendships, go to work, pair off, and make homes. Same as it ever was.

This said, a few days ago, my faith in online platforms as seamless extensions of humanity was faced with a crisis of tangled wires and mislabeled files. Recoil if you must, but like many of my peers, I’m in the midst of the career recruiting season and engaged in the online dating world. Both pursuits of a better life require abstraction into profiles, reduction to essential tidbits, and careful curation of flattering perspectives.

The overlap is surprisingly non-trivial. Both company applications and OKCupid ask you to put your qualifications in terms of drop-down categories; CVs and selfies (whose form, we’re told, says as much as their content) need to be uploaded, lest no one care how eager you are to get onboard. Contra tech messianism, we’re still miles away from pure representation in the digital space.

“Wouldn’t you eventually get bored?” Like clockwork, the question arises when I tell someone quixotically, arrogantly, that I plan on living forever. From the limited perspective of 20 years, even the prospect of living another six or seven decades in full color can be impossible to envisage. Hedging, I answer that assuming a world where radical life extension is possible, there will be no telling as to how different the human experience will be from what we know—that is to say, where 200-year-olds won’t merely be stuck playing very, very slow mah-jongg.

Not to speak of the tremendous gains in average life expectancy made over the last few years, radical life extension is no longer the fringe interest of a few high-tech narcissists. In a private competition sponsored by the Methuselah Foundation, genetic researchers engineered a house mouse to perdure for five years, a dramatic improvement over Mus musculus’ average lifespan of one and a half to two. Following the assumption that aging is above all a material process with discrete genetic and biochemical components, we can be sure that it’s possible—in more than theory—to reverse-engineer and manipulate a process that has bounded and shaped every creature’s existence from time immemorial.

In one sense, the chance to extend our lives through pharmacological supplements, hormone therapy, body part replacements, and cryonics could mark Homo sapiens’ most decisive step away from creaturehood. And unsettling though it may be to many readers, the future of the next few generations will be defined by the moral and policy implications of humanity’s technological lurch toward immortality. Anticipating these developments, it’s important to challenge the base assumptions about mortality—there is no life without death, manipulating nature is fundamentally sinful—all the while acknowledging how difficult it is to shake them.

What it is, my friend explains, is an investment in my brand. “When you bring a woman back to your room and put on these CDs, you’re stating something.” I thumb through my bright yellow checkout bag to reaffirm the presence of the Persian funk, Fon pop, Swedish electro-folk, and Khmer classical albums that I’ve bought off the Princeton Record Exchange’s discount rack. I nod, answering absently, “That would be nice.”

My brother, an all-American devotee of the Chili Peppers and The Doors, insists that I’ve forced a taste for world music. Whenever my car stereo choices get too sappy or too thuggish, too fast or too slow, I’m met with the familiar passenger-side refrain: “You wouldn’t like this if it were in English.”

To the best of my understanding, my music preferences are not deliberate; any signaling effect, however pleasant, is unplanned and incidental. The answer is not, however, that I enjoy songs incomprehensible to me simply as crunchy background noise. The lion’s share of my foreign music collection comes in three flavors: Hebrew, Spanish, and Arabic, languages I speak and understand in various degrees short of my native tongue.

As Israel and Hamas draw closer to tragic confrontation, a vast class of amateur pundits has come out of the woodwork to weigh in on the comparative rights and wrongs. Dodging in and out of vitriolic Facebook arguments, I came upon a piece in Rutgers’ student newspaper, the Daily Targum, nondescriptly titled “Israel Must Act Responsibly”.

In her brief column, Amani Al-Khatahtbeh poses a standard pro-Palestinian argument about conditions on the ground in Gaza, well within the expected range of opinions that populate my heated, Middle East-heavy news feed. What stands out most is a peculiar claim about American media coverage of the conflict: “We are basically being told, ‘It’s OK that our largest-funded ally is killing all those brown people—they asked for it.’”

Aside from the unexamined fact that many Israelis are browner than many Palestinians, I was struck by the utter incongruity of Khatahtbeh’s resort to racial language, folded in amongst arguments that draw from international law and political economy. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict, a dense thicket of conflicting dreams and grievances about land ownership, national identity, and religion, is anything but a matter of skin color.

In four days, legions of young people born between 1990 and 1994 will follow in Lena Dunham’s footsteps, losing our electoral virginity in a cascade of curtains, levers, buttons, and beeps. And although I whiled away countless middle school evenings dreaming of my civic “first time”, my twenty-year-old self could not be less excited for the big day.

Living in Cambridge, I will probably have to deal with weeks of Barack Obama As Sexual Experience, professors and punks alike dumbly smiling on the street, their heads held high for no reason other than that the Messiah has come again. This is not to say that I’d prefer a Republican victory: I have little patience for light beer, prayer circles, or live ammunition.

But for me, there will be no post-electoral bliss. I am voting for Gary Johnson, the Libertarian candidate for president—a former governor of New Mexico who is just as accomplished as he is unassuming. More, he is absolutely certain to lose.

I once loved an insectivore. Not long after her adoption, Hedgie, as we called our family hedgehog, learned to relax her spines, unclench from her defensive ball, and share her love as well as any cat or dog. But in spite of how well we came to know her, nothing astounded my younger brother and me more than Hedgie’s feeding ritual. Every night after work, my father would scoop our furry friend out of her cage, open the PetSmart-brand tub, and call us over as Hedgie snapped up crickets or mealworms with animal relish.

Although we lost Hedgie in 2005, it would take me until January 2012 to understand truly what she was made of. Amidst the bustle of a night market off Beijing’s trendy Wangfujing Street, I made final communion with my late pet hedgehog: for about $3, I polished off two chili-sprinkled grasshoppers and four baby scorpions. I became an insectivore.

It was a long time in the making. Aside from Hedgie’s daily example, I grew up admiring “Strange Foods,” an artful coffee table book by Jerry Hopkins with features on the many ways to eat “grasshoppers,” “ants and termites,” “spiders and scorpions,” “beetles,” “crickets and cicadas,” “butterflies and moths,” and “flies.” Even then, I was struck by the moral clarity of Hopkins’ assertion: “while it is true that in some cases in undeveloped or still-emerging countries, people eat insects out of necessity, generally speaking it is the abundance, accessibility, nutritional value, and taste that makes insects popular as food, and not the threat of starvation.” In other words, it makes sense to eat bugs.

Although it seems unlikely that “The Innocence of Muslims” will be nearly as impactful as Mohamed Bouazizi’s fateful self-immolation in 2010, the wave of violence across the Islamic world since its dissemination has thrown Western observers for a loop. In the wake of Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens’ murder in Benghazi, a multi-tiered narrative has emerged in the American press, drawing together repudiations of the film, passionate defenses of free speech, and questions as to whether American policymakers have any control over events on the ground.

And while it’s clear that there is more than enough blame to go around, one emerging story of culpability might be most illustrative. In early press correspondences, a man identifying himself as Sam Bacile, an “Israeli Jew” living in California, claimed to have produced the film with the support of “100 Jewish donors.” Just as American Jews had begun to reconcile themselves to the unfortunate truth—despite lingering suspicions: since when is Bacile a Jewish name?—the Associated Press reported the Bacile identity to be nothing more than an alias for Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, a Christian Egyptian-American at the helm of the film’s production.

We cannot be sure what motivated Nakoula to pose as an Israeli Jew, but the damage wrought by his subterfuge cannot be undone. As the Wall Street Journal and Associated Press spread word that a Jewish cadre had financed a film mocking the Muslim prophet Mohammed, rioters accepted the news as further validation of a global Zionist conspiracy—a ubiquitous, hate-filled theme in the political discourse of the Middle East.