Fred Gutmann

This is a nice personal memo from 2006. The rest was already out of date when published in 2013 and completely useless in 2019. There are many questions, starting with why does she call Egyptians Arabs? If the idea is to extrapolate her experiences to the wider Arab or Muslim world, the book is a failure. The sociology is myopic, missing education and lacking insight into Arab impressions of the West. Her metaphor on crowding isn’t followed by any discussion of population growth. She asks the question of whether the Jewish community of Cairo is viable. She answers it in the negative and wistfully refuses to accept her own answer. This is the main area where the book cries out for an update. After Arab Spring, the pivot, to Asia and two regime changes I’d expect a significant variation. She’s not the first writer to call the annexation of Egypt a Roman invasion, or to date Hitler’s rise to power from 1933, but both interpretations require a bit more than Instagram snippets, especially regarding her purpose. Name dropping a few pharaohs and Saladin might be interesting if she had related their legacy to modern Egypt. Does she realize that there’s not an Arab in the bunch? It seems that history is on the side of the Arabs, because the Arabs have better historians. In this case, much better. Like Hillary Clinton’s lectures on American democracy, this book is something of an embarrassment. I can only hope that Hannan Ashrawy hasn’t read it Ultimately, it’s not even a Jewish woman’s experience. Change ‘synagogue’ to ‘church’ and a few words here and there and it would read like a Christian woman’s experience. She had a Jewish experience among Jews, not among Cairenes, Egyptians, Arabs, Muslims or whatever she wants to call them. I’d be interested in an update of the Jewish community in Cairo, but I’m afraid that Rabbi Sohn is not the right author for that task. It’s better written than most vanity press efforts, but still surprising that she found a publisher.