sensitive to this and attuned to it in part because of a very important book that was written in the 70s by ed said. said was a palestinian and activist but also a distinguished professor of english at columbia university and also a music critic for international publications. his book which was called orientalism, if he didn't coin the word, certainly made is significant so that no one could use the word oriental because it has a kind of negative connotation to it. it is a sense -- what said argued was that this is is a perception of the easterner that came from imperialistic colonial powers in the 19th century that den gated -- denigrated, a few years ago there was another book written called occidentallism, which was designed to show the other side of it, that is how easterners, particularly people from islam, muslims, how they depict the westerner, how they depict the christian society on the whole similar negative stereotypes and similar type casting so that we are embroiled in this kind of us versus them and the demonizing of the other. >> we are going to have to stop there and take a break. while we are talking to eric gruen, the topic is us and them, dodgers and giants, he's going to talk about the world today and look back at the ancient world and tell us his insights. we will be right back. stay with us. we are talking with dr. eric gruen. he studied antiquity, studied the greeks and the romans and the syrians and the carthoggenians and all those people. he's postulating that anyone in the world today, as we look out we can see people different than ourselves and we attribute bad feelings and demonize them as he was saying. you set up 10 or 20 different constructs in this post modern world that's kind of scary but you think that there's another way to look at all of this stuff. it's not us and them. >> well, the -- what got me going. as you said i'm ant ancient his -- an ancient historian. but what got me going is that the ancients are now getting the blame for all of this. there's a book that was published three or four years ago called worlds at war, the 2500 year struggle between east and west. 2500 years ranges back to the fifth century bce which refers to the conflict of the greeks and the persians and that this book traces all of our ethnic conflicts to antiquity and now the ancients have something to answer for. they did divide up the world and did different segments, greeks and bar barbarians, jews and gentiles, romans, so there was this kind of an phobia -- anaphobia, there was ethnic branding, there was racism and that's been emphasized in recent scholarship over the last couple of decades or more. my orientation has been different. that is, i have tried to see without denying some of the us and them attitude that was there, trying to emphasize the connectivity rather than the contrast, trying to emphasize the -- instead of otherness, a kind of togetherness in the sense that in order to show that antiquity can be a positive model and not just a negative model to our contemporary circumstances and i've always been, i guess, interested in the linkage between the past and the present and here's an instance in which the mutual perceptions and representations of one another by different peoples in antiquity shows a much greater complexity than just a -- the good guys and the bad guys, the us and them, that there is a great deal of overlapping, that there's a lot of borrowing from one culture to another and there's a way -- there are a number of ways in which individual cultures have reshaped their own sense of their past, their own sense of themselves by linking themselves to other cultures and other people. >> an example would be? >> well, for instance, where various greek cities and their own legends of their origins traced those origins to foreigners. in other words, rather than distancing the foreigner, they claim their kinship relationship to him, for example, they -- regarded by the greeks as the founder of the city of themes, the great city of themes. the romans had the same sort of thing. the romans saw themselves as descendants of the trojans. they saw themselves at partly the center from trojans, partly accident -- descendent from greeks, but the jews also created or appropriated, borrowed stories from the greeks and linked them to themselves. there's one wonderful legend or construct in which the jews saw themselves as related to the spartans because of, they claimed, both spartans and jews descended from abraham. there's nothing like that in the bible, but in post difficult times when the jews were part of a larger greek cultural community, they bought into some of these stories that created ties between the two cultures, so they did not feel that they needed to have a kind of altogether separate existence that everybody else was some -- needed to be kept at arm's length or reduced to a status of inferiority and to be despised and so on. i can give you a very good example of this kind of connectivity. there's a wonderful greek story about the -- or myth about perseus. you may -- >> remind us, perseus is? >> the son of jews and one of his many sons through his many consorts the jews had. the main story about perseus was he was the one that came and rescued the dallasle in -- damsel in distress and chained to a rock to be a victim of a sea moss ter -- monster. but perseus rescued the damsel. but other people bought into it. the persians decide well their name persian came from perseus. the egyptians borrowed a story in which ultimately the forefathers of perseus were egyptians, so he is simply carrying on an egyptian tradition and even more interesting, i think, the jews, because one of the versions of the perseus story has him sleigh the sea monster off the coast of jaffa which is a coastal city near tel aviv and in fact so important to the story it becomes that it serves as a kind of tourist attraction so that guides for people who gave to visit -- came to visit jaffa would point to a red spring saying this is the blood of perseus that he washed off his hands after he killed the sea monster and on that rock over there, you can still see the marks of the chains where andramada was chained. and even to this day i've visited jaffa a couple of years ago, there's a rock out there of the middle of the water there which they call the rock of an drama da -- andramada. this is the overlapping borrowing cultural commingling as it were that really, i think, eclipses the whole idea of the us and them. >> we are talking about dr. eric gruen, he's talking about how that ancient world and how it connected. i have a feeling he's going to connect it to our 21st century when we come back and we are going to learn a little bit more about him. stay with us. one of the treasures of the bay area is dr. eric gruen. he's kind enough to be with us today. he's an emirates professor of the history and the classics at cal berkeley. share with us some of the -- where did you grow up? >> i grew up actually? washington, d.c. -- actually in washington, d.c. then went to columbia as an undergraduate and oxford to do an ma and harvard to finish a ph.d. before i came to berkeley. >> why were you growing up in washington, d.c.? >> well, my parents were refugees during the nazi period from vienna and had relatives in washington, d.c. and it was the relatives who had to authorize the fact -- or guarantee that they would be responsible for any people in their family who came over, if there were any economic problems, they would be responsible, and they happened to live in washington so we moved to washington and that was it. >> and there you were. >> yes. >> so columbia and then you said oxford. how did you decide to go to oxford rather than somewhere else? >> i got a scholarship. >> you're over there and you're studying something and at some point you've got to make a decision. how did you get into studying kind of antiquities in the classroom? >> started when i was an undergraduate at colombia, i had a wonderful professor, a great scholar and marvelous human being and who said to me -- and i went into his office because he was congenial and i said i'm not sure what i should do. and he said, well, you did pretty well in my class. why don't you become an ancient historian. okay. that was that and i never looked back. so he's responsible for inflicting me upon the profession. >> and you landed in berkeley, you said, after you had gotten your master's -- >> after i got the ph.d. at harvard. >> and what was your dissertation? >> my dissertation was on roman politics and the criminal courts, which was a dissertation kind of book when it came out. but the important -- first important book, maybe the only one, if any is important, was the last generation of the roman republic. >> i've got this here and i think mike is going to throw it up there. last generation of the roman republic and it is a small tome running 540 pages which i've been reading for 20 years: it's a fascinating thing because you say it's a topical work, that -- >> yeah. >> -- by writing this, you're reflecting on your time in the late '60s, early '70s in -- >> correct, correct. >> help us with that. >> it's not a coincidence that i wrote this book on the subject of the -- the turmoil, the turbulence, the upheavals that took place in the last generation of the roman republic leading to the fall of the republic. it's been written on by many, many people who always tried to find the reasons for the decline and the fall and why all this turbulence. i took a somewhat different slant on this that had a great deal to do with the years that i lived in berkeley writing this book in the late '60s, early '70s, because what impressed me most about the upheavals that were going on on campus daily, some of them, you know, demonstrations, some leading to violation and so -- violence and so on. what impressed me most was the continuities that went on even through this period of constant uncertainty that for the most part even when there were major demonstrations on campus, students still went to class, students still wrote their papers, took their exams, got their degrees and they -- this was not hypocrisy on their part. some of them very actively involved in the movement, the antiwar movement and civil rights, et cetera, but that the sense of an ongoing process, an ongoing educational process, which was what they were really there for was not going to be sacrificed to this. >> sounds like there's a silver lining. >> there is and that's why i took this line in the book which not everybody has bought which is to emphasize the continuities rather than the change. >> and that comes in bearing my time here, not to cut you off or interrupt you, rethinking the other in antiquity is a later work, but -- >> much later. >> but the antiquity -- rethinking the other, the theme of this discussion, the other, the bad guys, the people there who are different from us we embody them with evil and so on, rethinking that, but still it's a book for our times, i assume. >> well, i would like to think it is a book for our time because, as i said, i'd like to see antiquity as a positive model rather than a negative model for our times in terms of these enter connections and the sense of a mutual regard, a mutual respect that ancient society has had for one another, that i would like to see a similar kind of attitude that goes beyond the demonizing, that goes beyond the detachment and distancing of other ethnic groups and national groups because i think that is much more the -- it goes much more to the heart of the ancient attitudes than does this kind of demonizing and i can give countless illustrations of that too. >> well, we say that persia is still in our time being cast here with all sorts of evil, evil stuff and then you're saying before we go to break, that if you look back in antiquity, if you look at the roman empire and you have seven or eight things of civilizations, that's not necessarily true. you're suggesting the better model for our understanding people who are different from ourselves in this day and age? >> that's right. >> we will be right back. didn't mean to put words in your mouth. >> no. >> eric gruen. stay with us. eric gruen, he's the scholar of antiquities, he sees a lot of things going on there as pretty helpful and optimistic to us here. you're working now on and concerned about ethnicity. talk to us about that, sir. >> i'm trying to investigate just what the ancient sense of ethnicity was and whether it was as it so often is today, a kind of dominate force in how we understand ourselves and other people, that our own identity depends on an ethnic background. the ancients were much more broad minded about this, the romans considered themselves not as single ethnic entity but that they are a combination of trojans, greeks, and so on, that the jews even, because they encouraged as we know converts, god fearers who were attached to the jewish faith, even though they weren't jews, that they were not held back by a sense of ethnicity as their identity and there was inter marriage among the jews which's often forget about, abraham married hagar, the made servant of sarah, joseph married an egyptian. moses married an ethiopian. sampson married a fillstein -- filistein. the issue was jews didn't feel they had to have a pure ethnic identity. it was a kind of mingled and monday gal gall -- mongral identity. you marry a foreign woman and she leads you to worship her god, that's bad but it's not the ethnic mixture itself that was apored. if i have one last time for an anecdote. >> you have a minute. >> there's an anecdote, who -- went to a bath house, it was a bath house that was the -- aphrodite. you went to the bath house and came out and one of his friends said rabbi, how could you go into a pagan shrine decorated by a statue of avenue diety of all -- aphrodite of all people? he said look, i came to take a bath and they didn't make the bath house for the statue. they made the statue for the bath house so i didn't go into aphrodite's domain, she came into mine and this i think is typical of the kind of overlappings and the broad mindedness of the ancient. >> there is hope for a pluralistic america i find, very optimistic man, delightful, dr. eric gruen emeritus professor from berkeley, thank you for your time, sir. >> my pleasure. >> hope you have enjoyed this as much as we have and ron wisher will be back with you -- ron swisher will be back with you next month. i'm hugh burroughs -- burrows. bye-bye. chitchatting away here. welcome to bay sunday. i'm your host frank mallicoat. if you've got an idea, we'd love to hear from you, go to cbssf.com, click on connect and scroll down to bay sunday and we can chat. the canfest center for asian-american media once known as the san francisco asian- american film fest festival kicks off on thursday on an 11 day run in the bay area. some of the nation's top asian filmmakers, actresses, musicians, chefs are all going to be here in the city celebrating a new wave of creative women and men in the industry as well and we've got their festival director and a filmmaker with us, pleased to welcome them. how are you? >> good. thank you. >> welcome, jennifer, aboard. >> thank you so much. >> 130 films and you have seen all of them? >> yes, i have to see all of them and give them my thumbs up. >> it kicks off in a couple more days? >> yeah, we have been programming about a year now. right after the last festival stops we restart for this year. >> and that thursday night when you kick it off, a big gala afterwards, a big night but the film that you guys are premiering that night has some bay area roots here, doesn't it? >> yes, it's lin-sanity, about jeremy lin from palo alto. a hometown audience excitement for the -- >> skyrocketed to fame last year, now with the rockets. the filmmaker takes it from soup to nuts, right? >> exactly. the filmmaker asked him very

Related Keywords

United States , Berkeley , California , , Egypt , Israel , Iran , Tel Aviv , Turkey , Colombia , Vienna , Wien , Austria , Syria , Lebanon , Washington , District Of Columbia , Ethiopia , Greece , Turks , America , Egyptians , Greeks , Serbs , Persia , Greek , Palestinian , Syrians , Ethiopian , American , Egyptian , Hugh Burroughs , Jeremy Lin , Ron Swisher , Sea Moss , Deric Gruen ,