Spacious analogies: Teaching the local in the distant in the Israeli classroom

This essay explores how the social world intrudes on the Israeli classroom, where open discussion of relations between Palestinians and Jews can feel nearly impossible. I will consider the strategy of confronting societal conflicts with students through what I call spacious analogies—that is, by studying social and historical sites removed from the local context but analogous to it in provocative ways. My objects of analysis will be two ‘teaching stories’: my narratives of discussing Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice through the lens of Orientalism and Richard Wright’s Native Son in dialogue with Whiteness Studies scholarship. In both stories, social hegemony akin to racial whiteness manifested itself, in the way students identified with characters and in their classroom affect. Through the relative safety of literary texts from different social worlds, however, the students were invited to confront the hegemony of their own context and build resilience to the discomforts of doing so. I will propose that teaching by analogy can allow educators to scaffold the discomfort of students from the hegemonic group without recentering their needs over those of marginalized students or resorting to analytical models that sanitize histories of oppression.