Noa Tishby needs to learn how to cite her sources
I just finished the book Uncomfortable Conversations with a Jew by Emmanuel Acho and Noa Tishby, and I found it to be a pretty bland and disappointing read. I wish it had lived up to its title a bit more and featured more organic conversations between the two authors, with more back-and-forth discussion that delved deeper into the uncomfortable topics it purported to cover.
My thoughts on it are fairly similar to those of Glenn Altschuler who reviewed the book for the Jerusalem Post. I’ll only add that I think Emmanuel had to dance a very fine line here, because Noa goes so far as to admit in the book that there was a moment during the book’s development where she almost walked away from the project because Emmanuel’s line of questioning actually made her too uncomfortable. I get the sense that Emmanuel then made the choice to dial his side of the exchange back…after all, better to have a watered-down book than no book at all.
But I don’t want to delve too far into subjective criticism here, or waste too much time reading between the lines. I have a very objective issue with this book: Noa Tishby is bad at citing sources.
In this book, Noa Tishby qualifies herself as someone who stands in the public sphere to offer a Jewish, Israeli, and Zionist POV on current events and issues. In this book she constructs a series of persuasive arguments and uses exterior sources as evidence to support her claims. I learned this in high school so I might be a bit dusty, but if I recall correctly it is important when constructing a persuasive argument to clearly cite your sources, so that if another person wants to more deeply engage with the conversation you are presenting, they can look at those sources themself and attempt to reconstruct the conclusion you have drawn.
So here’s my primary problem: Uncomfortable Conversations with a Jew has a fairly lackluster bibliography.
Source: Tishby, Noa, and Emmanuel Acho. “Notes.” Uncomfortable Conversations With a Jew, Simon Element, New York, New York, 2024, p. 285.
This is not how you cite sources! There is more to it than pasting in links. You cite the year it was posted, you credit the author…you give the reader a trail of breadcrumbs back to the source in case the link is ever adjusted or changed. The internet is an ever-changing space, you have to provide more context for your sources than a fully typed-out hyperlink that might be broken tomorrow.
There is one properly cited source in the photo above, and ironically it’s Emmanual Acho’s other book, so clearly they know how to do it, they just chose not to for all the other sources.
“But Jacob, you could be cherry picking…maybe the rest of the bibliography looks good and correct and this is the one bad part” — Well the good news is, you can go and double check my evidence for yourself, because I cited my source for you!
Additionally, there is a combination of sources here that are primary and secondary sources, and the book tends to treat them as one and the same, both in the main text of the book and in the sources. When constructing a persuasive argument, it is important to identify the difference between these two kinds of sources and use them appropriately. When you use primary sources, your interpretation of those materials is the only interpretation coloring the presentation of that information. When you cite a secondary source as established fact, you are also citing that source’s underlying bias or inaccuracies as established fact.
For example, on page 189 of the book, Tishby quotes a statement from Omar Barghouti, a co-founder of the BDS movement. In order to support her argument that BDS is just a veiled cover for underlying anti-semitism, Tishby quotes Barghouti saying “[Palestinians have a right to] resistance by any means, including armed resistance. [Jews] aren’t indigenous just because you say they are…” (Tishby, Noa, and Emmanuel Acho. Uncomfortable Conversations With a Jew, Simon Element, New York, New York, 2024, p. 189.) Now that’s a pretty intense quote that features some very direct evidence to support Tishby’s claim. However, I noticed that a lot of the words in that quote were bracketed. Usually when quotes are bracketed, it means that their contents have been paraphrased or adjusted to provide more context for the reader, but they aren’t the speaker’s original words. In this case, all the operative words of the sentence, the words that support Tishby’s argument, are the words that have been bracketed. Without the bracketed words, this sentence is like the world’s worst MadLib… “[Plural Noun 1] have a right to resistance by any means…[Plural Noun 2] aren’t indigenous just because you say they are…”
In totally unrelated news, this quote is followed by Noa Tishby listing some of her favorite foods. She says: “I like [eating green eggs and ham, I do like them Sam I Am].” What a fun fact!
So my initial curiosity was: what did Barghouti originally say, and why did Tishby choose to update his phrasing? I’m assuming this was just for readability, and the original quote will carry the same sentiment Tishby presents in her book.
I went to the bibliography, which cited this webpage: https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/bds-in-their-own-words
And here’s the quote on the webpage…
Well that’s annoying. Noa Tishby wasn’t even citing the primary source! The reason her quote was bracketed, is because the quote she cited was also bracketed! That feels so lazy to cite a website that’s just a compiliation of out of context information that someone else put together…do you think a bunch of her other sources in the book are like this? That would be pretty intellectually dishonest for a book handling so many important subject matters she’s supposed to be a public resource about.
I wanted to learn more….I’ll be back.
Okay so I just spent a solid half hour digging around for the original quote…and guess what, everyone who uses this quote is citing the Jewish Virtual Library page. And the Jewish Virtual Library page is citing this article from the Jewish Journal
Which only partially resembles the quote everyone is citing, and is totally missing the second half of the quote about whether [Jews] are indigenous. It looks like Barghouti gave a talk at UCLA on January 15th, 2014, and I was able to find coverage about it from several sources (including not one but TWO op-eds in the Jewish Journal, this coverage in the Los Angeles Review of Books, and this writeup by a representative of LA Jews for Peace). But none of these firsthand accounts of the talk feature the direct quote that the Jewish Virtual Library has opted to circulate.
I wish I could ask the author of the Jewish Virtual Library page where they got the rest of the quote from, and why they chose to bracket the words and phrases they did. Unfortunately for me, the page everyone pulls this quote from doesn’t have a listed author. Even if an error has been made here, or something has been lost in transcription, there’s no one to hold accountable for it. So I’m gonna call the search done for now, I’ve got other things to do.
Look, I didn’t opt to dig into this to clear the name of Omar Barghouti…quite the opposite. He’s said many other things where his larger intentions and POV are very clear, and I doubt he was saying anything very nice underneath those brackets…but that’s beside the point. I want to know what he said in his own words, not someone else’s. And I’d hope Noa Tishby would too, especially when pulling a quote to use as evidence to support an argument she’s making in her book. In fact, I’m rooting for her! I want her to do better!
It’s frustrating when you dig into the sources an author provides only to be unable to reach the same conclusions they did, or realize they’ve constructed their arguments on shakier ground than you initially assumed. It’s a breach of trust between the reader and the author. I shouldn’t be here doing Noa Tishby’s homework for her. And again, I am trying to avoid engaging with this book on a subjective plane here. This is me documenting my experience trying to trace down and verify sources of information that the book presents as objective facts. I am not a public figure, I’m not getting paid to write a book, I don’t have the resources Noa Tishby had. But I think when it comes to selecting and citing sources in a book about contemporary issues that are rife with misinformation and selective omission, Noa Tishby didn’t do a very good job.
Hey but at least she didn’t do anything horrifically egregious like cite Wikipedia, because that would be really bad form…
Oh…bummer.