The series, a historical fiction set during the Second World War and filmed in Paris, Budapest, and Tehran, casts Habib and Sarah as star-crossed lovers in a world at war, during the course of which Habib saves Sarah and her family from the Nazi concentration camps by facilitating their escape from France and Nazi persecution with Iranian passports. At the same time as Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was making international news with his Holocaust denial and vitriolic anti-Semitism—rhetoric that has become central to Iran’s foreign policy and saturated its domestic media since his presidential election in 2005—Zero Degree Turn’s frank engagement with the Holocaust as a historical reality, its depiction of secular culture, and its egalitarian, interfaith romance stunned Iran-watchers in the West. During the Ramadan fast, millions of Iranians gathered to watch the series finale, filmed amidst the ruins of Persepolis, in which Habib and Sarah reunite after years of hardship and persecution. “If Ahmadinejad perpetuates the Islamic Republic’s traditional attempts to undermine Israel’s right to exist by denying and/or trivializing the Holocaust,” asked the Jerusalem Post, “then why has Iranian state television produced Zero Degree Turn?”

Why indeed? While editorials rushed to put forward consequentialist readings, a more patient approach would instead be to step back and investigate instead what watching Zero Degree Turn can teach Western audiences about the way Iranians might imagine themselves, their histories, and their futures, beyond their rulers’ genocidal rhetoric. Especially now, several years after the series aired, in light of the disputed Iranian presidential elections of 2009, the ongoing Palestinian-Israeli conflict, and the developments of the Arab Spring, Zero Degree Turn offers a unique invitation to call attention to the relationship between popular media and affective engagement, and to cultivate new knowledge where political grandstanding too often trumps substantive engagement.

Without a doubt, the series merits broader attention; it should be seen, discussed, and engaged as a potential vehicle for positive cosmopolitan exchange and as a basis for a more productive future among contentious parties in a complex global system. More than anything else, I intend this post as an invitation to begin such a project; almost no one has watched Zero Degree Turn in the Anglophone world—coverage was limited to a few two-minute video clips and trailers linked to online editorials. Sources from BBC News to The Christian Science Monitor mapped similar political, historical, and ideological coordinates—citing the show’s uncharacteristically high production costs, its high viewership numbers, and the historical figures on whom Fathi based his hero. All then turn to rehash the well-documented anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial with which Ahmadinejad attempts to undermine the legitimacy of the Israeli state and bolster his domestic popularity.

As it turns out, one consequence of Iranian restrictions of press freedoms is an enforced monolingualism: despite its 2007 distribution in Europe on satellite television and a DVD release by a company in California, no complete subtitled version of Zero Degree Turn is available. Non-Farsi speakers like myself must watch online videos of varying quality, hosted by YouTube and other sites. Official links to the series on the Iran Broadcasting website are dead, but by cobbling together subtitled fragments posted by various YouTube users, a diligent Anglophone audience can gain access to episodes one, eight, and nine through the links provided here, and it is to these episodes that I turn my attention in this post.

The climax of the ninth episode occurs in a classroom that, in the melodrama’s exaggerated visual style, evokes a theater. The simple staging places Habib and Sarah side by side on the dais of a lecture hall facing a few dozen students, their contemporaries, who take notes and exchange conversation in the stadium seating; alongside them, but away from the lectern, stands a respected professor. The presentation, delivered by a complementarily attired Habib and Sarah, concerns their research on the philosophical views of, and possible connections between, seventeenth-century Shia theologian Mulla Sadra and his Dutch contemporary Baruch Spinoza. In speeches of equal length, Habib and Sarah present the fruits of a collaborative intellectual project, trading insights on Spinoza’s monism and Sadra’s rationalist conceptions of beauty, truth, and goodness. The episode stages analysis not as cultural contest but as an exchange in the Socratic, or Habermasean, public sphere.

The majority of the shots are taken either from in front of the lecturing pair or from Sarah’s side, where the camera angle and composition emphasize Sarah and Habib’s equal stature and confidence in oral argumentation. This composition is all the more striking when compared to other scenes in the series, particularly domestic interiors and thresholds, where Sarah appears inches shorter than Habib and looks up at him in moments thick with erotic tension. The message conveyed by the staging and content could hardly be clearer: two representatives of their respective cultures analyze leading liberal figures of seventeenth-century thought as equals under the secular codes of academic knowledge-production. Islam and Judaism are formally equivalent as objects of rational inquiry, independent of Habib and Sarah’s private affective commitments to their religions. One of the most striking aspects of Zero Degree Turn is the way the series depicts and celebrates secular social norms and practices distinctly at odds with the Islamic Republic’s constitutional regulation of dress, social comportment, and public morality. Not only does the series depict uncovered women, it revels in elaborate period costumes evocative of Paris in the 1940s and, more importantly, accurately portrays the secular norms of Iranian intellectual culture under Pahlavi rule. The first episode prominently features a damning critique of censorship and casts Habib as a staunch defender of a free press. In the ninth episode, the secular space of the classroom, governed by norms of free intellectual inquiry and expression, upholds both a democratic polity and an egalitarian romance under threat from an external totalitarian force.

Habib and Sarah’s presentation is interrupted by the entrance of a German Waffen SS officer and his contingent. In keeping with the careful attention to historical costume characteristic of Zero Degree Turn, the scene emphasizes the black formal uniform of the commanding officer, a haughty Sturmbannfuhrer wearing the SS runes, braids, stars, and cap attendant to his rank. Behind him stands a young officer named Schmit Mayer, a former classmate of Habib and Sarah’s during his pre-war days as a German student in Paris. In an inspection of a university regarded as a hotbed of potential resistance, the senior officer confronts first the professor and then Habib and Sarah about the content of their presentation. Discovering that their subject is Spinoza, the officer attacks Sarah with a question: “I think Spinoza was a Jew thinker of the bad and renegade type. Is this not so?” As Sarah stutters in fear, Habib interjects with a raised hand and deflects the conversation to his own identity as an Iranian. Drawing the officer skillfully into a discussion of Hölderlin, Habib springs a rhetorical trap, quoting the poet to the effect of cryptic adage and veiled critique: “As you have commenced, you shall always be likewise.” The officer refuses the bait, continuing his interrogation: “So your research is on the Jew Spinoza,” he continues. “Is there a Jew in this class?” Seconds of tense silence tick by with the camera panning the students, who keep their eyes averted until Habib again interjects to assert that “here we are more familiar with each other’s nationality rather than the religion or race we belong to,” a claim corroborated by the informant, Schmit Mayer.

Not only do the French and Iranian students conceal and protect Sarah’s Jewish identity, a German officer actively conspires with the students in a treasonous act against his own commanding officer. Later in the episode, Schmit takes Habib aside to pass on the warning that “They’re [the Gestapo] going to start identifying and arresting Jew (sic) nationals…separating the Jews and transferring them to concentration camps.” In numerous moments such as this Zero Degree Turn takes pains to emphasize the complex entanglements that motivate diverse people, most of ‘good’ hearts, to do what they do in times of emergency. As Schmit puts it to Habib during a rainy street scene in episode nine: “When a war breaks out, unfortunately, we ordinary people have this only (sic) chance to choose between the bad and worse.” An equivocation, clearly, and the series’ portrayal of the historical reality of the Holocaust does not imply its support for a Jewish state in the Middle East; instead, while sympathizing with the Holocaust’s Jewish victims, Zero Degree Turn casts the main villain as Sarah’s Zionist uncle Theodor (clearly named in reference to Theodor Herzl), a Mephistophelean figure who opposes Sarah and Habib’s love while colluding with the Nazis to facilitate the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine. In this way, the series attempts to disaggregate anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism, and thus to disconnect recognition of the Holocaust from recognition of Israel.

Nonetheless, the series marks a potential for substantive intercultural understanding, so often thwarted by censorship, corrosive politics, and the systematic preaching of hate. It reminds us of alternate histories to the one we now inhabit, where, as Benjamin Netanyahu argued in his May 24, 2011, address to a joint session of Congress, Israel regards Iran as the gravest threat to its security. During the reign of Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, and particularly during Muhammad Mossadeq’s administration, Israel and Iran enjoyed mutually beneficial ties: Iranian oil flowed to European markets through the Elat-Ashkelon pipeline, and Iran, like Turkey, and Ethopia, formed part of Ben Gurion’s “Alliance of the Periphery.” For those in the West, the popularity of Zero Degree Turn suggests at the very least that Iranians are willing to imagine far more nuanced engagements with the Holocaust than president Ahmadinejad’s denialist rhetoric would suggest.

*  *  *

NS: Some commentators have said that the uprisings now taking place are remarkable for being secular in nature. Do you think it’s helpful to speak of them that way?

JB: Well, I am not at all sure why they’re saying that. In Cairo, it was clearly the case that secular, Christian, and Muslim people were in the square, and that it was an impressive mixture. I would be interested to know who has access to the groups involved in Libya to know with certainty that they are secular. Perhaps some of us impose our ideological dreams on concrete situations that we either fail to investigate or have trouble finding out about.

NS: How relevant are these ideological dreams? Do you think that the question of whether these movements are secular is worth caring about?

JB: I myself do not care, and I wonder why people do. It seems to me that the secular/religious debate has not been at the forefront of these uprisings. They have been against censorship, military control, graft, and outrageous class differences, and they have been for various kinds of democratization. And we have seen women in these movements, veiled and unveiled, working together. It is clear that demands for democratization of various kinds are articulated through religious and secular discourses and practices, and sometimes a combination of the two.

NS: But isn’t that precisely what seems so secular about these events? That those religious divisions are no longer the central issue?

JB: Well, you could say that religious difference is not central, or you could say that religious difference is ever-present. Perhaps both are true.

NS: Let’s take a specific example. Would the revolution be “betrayed,” in your view, if, say, the Muslim Brotherhood came to power in Egypt? Or if something comparable to the regime in Iran were to emerge?

JB: If the Muslim Brotherhood is elected to positions in government, and the elections are free and unconstrained, then that is a democratic outcome. Whether or not one wishes for that outcome, it cannot be contested as undemocratic if it follows from open and free elections. Democracy often means living with results that we find difficult, if not abhorrent. But I have been somewhat shocked that, in the face of this most impressive of uprisings, the “specter” of the Muslim Brotherhood is raised time and again as a way of diminishing and doubting the importance of this mass movement and revolutionary action. I think those biased against Islam will have to get used to the idea that demands for democratization can and do emerge within Muslim lexicons and practice, and that democratic polities can and must be composed of various groups, religious and not. Islam is clearly part of the mix.

NS: Do these popular uprisings affect how we should think about power and sovereignty, as armed dictators are being coerced by nonviolent movements?

JB: I understand the desire to come up with theoretical generalizations. I spend a good deal of my time doing precisely that. But even though nonviolent practices have been important in some of these uprisings, we are also seeing new ways of interpreting nonviolence, and new ways of justifying violence when protestors are under attack from the military. The events in Libya are clearly violent, and so I think we are probably left with new quandaries about whether the line between violent and nonviolent resistance ever can be absolutely clear.

NS: Where in particular do you see that line blurring?

JB: We have to be careful to distinguish between nonviolence as a moral position that applies to all individuals and groups, and nonviolence as a political option that articulates a certain refusal to be intimidated or coerced. These are very different discourses, since most of the moral positions tend to eliminate all reference to power, and the political ones tend to affirm nonviolence as a mode of resistance but leave open the possibility that it might have to be exchanged for a more overtly aggressive one. I am not sure we can ever evacuate the political frame. Moreover, it is important to think about how one understands violence. If one puts one’s body on the line, in the way of a truck or a tank, is one not entering into a violent encounter? This is different from waging a unilateral attack or even starting a violent series, but I am not sure that it is outside the orbit of violence altogether.

NS: President Obama sometimes seems to be policing that distinction in his rhetoric about these uprisings: demanding that protesters and regimes both remain nonviolent, and then bringing U.S. military force to bear in Libya when the state turns to military force. But I would think the difference between how the movements in Egypt and Libya have progressed actually reaffirms that the line between violence and nonviolence is a useful one.

JB: Well, it is interesting that the U.S. affirms that the anti-government forces in Libya are resistance fighters and seeks to provide aerial bombing support to their forces on the ground. So it seems that even liberal public discourse makes room for justified armed resistance. What is most interesting is to figure out when certain forms of violence are considered part of an admirable struggle for freedom, and when, on the contrary, violence is understood as the terrorist activities of non-state actors. Do you have an answer to that?

NS: I certainly can’t think of a consistent rule that would apply to all cases, and probably for good reason. The case of Israel-Palestine comes to mind.

JB: Indeed, it does.

NS: What do you think the Arab uprisings mean for Israel, surrounded by them on all sides as it is?

JB: We can only hope that the movement toward greater democratization will affect Israel as well, so that we can finally see widespread public demands for Israeli Palestinians to be treated on an equal basis, widespread public acknowledgment that the occupation is illegal according to every standard of international law, and a similar affirmation of the right to self-determination of Palestinians. The public acknowledgment of these obvious truths would, in fact, constitute one of the most remarkable advances in the democratic revolutions underway. I think as well that any legitimate democracy would have to provide restitution to those inhabitants whose lands were confiscated. So let us hope that democratization finally comes to Israel and Palestine.

NS: If I may raise the question again, does the religious or secular character of these movements affect how Israelis perceive them?

JB: Israel, of course, is asking its Palestinian citizens to swear loyalty to a Jewish state, which is hardly a very secular thing to do. So, though Israel seems to support secularization in countries where Islam is predominant, it seems to except itself from that standard. This leads to a question of which religions are set in opposition to secularism and which are not? It seems to me that those who call for a secular state in Israel, which would mean separating citizenship from religion or religious status, are often accused of trying to destroy Israel. So we have to watch these debates carefully to see when and where secularism is treated as if it were the very sign of democracy, and when and where secularism is treated as if it were equal to genocide. Public discourse has yet to arrive at very consistent positions here.

NS: In The Power of Religion in the Public Sphere, you find reasons to critique Israeli state violence in a kind of Jewish thought articulated by Walter Benjamin and Hannah Arendt. Yet this seems far from what seems to count as Jewishness in public discourse today. Do you think those thinkers can be made to matter in public?

JB: I have no idea. Let’s remember that we are also in the midst of a paroxysm of anti-intellectualism within the U.S., coupled with an attack on public education and the academy. So your question implies these broader issues.

NS: What, then, would you say anti-intellectualism is keeping people from realizing?

JB: In order for democratic principles to have a chance in Israel-Palestine, there has to be a recognition of the ways in which Zionism, though understanding itself as an emancipatory movement for Jews, instituted a colonial project and the colonial subjugation of the Palestinian people. In order for this contradiction to be understood and effectively addressed, we have to be able to tell two histories at once, and to show how they converge, and how the claim of freedom for one became the claim of dispossession for another. Benjamin made use of Jewish intellectual resources to criticize the kind of progressive narrative that underwrites Zionism, and he concerned himself with the question, avant la lettre, of how the history of the oppressed might erupt within the continuous history of the oppressor.

NS: Asking people to remember two histories at once does seem like a public-relations challenge. And what can we learn from Arendt?

JB: Arendt was herself involved in public politics, actively defending notions of federated authority for Palestine in the 1940s, prior to the catastrophic founding of Israel on the basis of Jewish sovereignty in 1948. Her own views were problematic, often racist, and yet she knew that the production of a new stateless class would lead inevitably to decades of conflict.

NS: Why do you turn to Jewish sources like Benjamin and Arendt to criticize Israeli militarism? Why not appeal to something more universal?

JB: One doesn’t need to turn to Jewish sources, and I’ve never argued that one should. One could criticize not only present-day Israeli militarism but the occupation, the history of land confiscation, or even Zionism itself, without any recourse at all to Jewish sources. One could do it on the basis of universal rights, human rights, a history and critique of settler colonialism, a politics of nonviolence, a left understanding of revolutionary struggle on the part of the stateless, legal rights of refugees and the occupied, liberal democracy, or radical democracy. In fact, if one only used Jewish sources for the critique of Israeli state violence, then one would be unwittingly establishing the Jewish framework, again, as the framework of reference and valuation for adjudicating the competing claims of the region. And even if such a framework were Jewish anti-Zionism, it would turn out to be effectively Zionist, producing a Zionist effect, since it would tacitly hold to the proposition that the Jewish framework must remain dominant.

NS: I also see how some Jews in turn could perceive those claiming to speak in “universals” as potential oppressors. But—among Jews, at least—does it make sense to have the discussion within the framework of Jewish tradition?

JB: It depends on whether you are working within an identitarian Jewish framework or a non-identitarian one. One could argue that the obligation to the non-Jew forms the core of any Jewish ethic, which means that we do not sustain obligations only to those who are also Jewish, but equally to those who are not. This means that one is under an obligation, even a Jewish obligation, to displace the exclusive Jewish framework. Otherwise, one’s ethic is bound by nationalism, sameness, even xenophobia.

NS: Do you think it’s necessary for Jews around the world to feel somehow responsible, or especially concerned, for the actions of the Israeli state?

JB: It’s strange that you ask about “necessity.” It assumes that if we could show that, logically, it isn’t necessary for Jews around the world to have such a reaction, then Jews would be freed from the grip of such a conviction. These forms of identification are, fortunately or unfortunately, more profound and less logical than that. Indeed, it would be great if we could all be liberated through reason, but I think it only gets us part of the way. After all, someone may have a very logical view, but for other reasons we may still fail to hear what that person says, or we may turn their words around so that they are understood to say the opposite. The task is really to find ways of addressing deep-seated forms of fear and aggression that make it possible to hold to manifestly inconsistent views without quite acknowledging them.

NS: Where do you see logic breaking down in this case?

JB: For instance, my view is that many liberal and radical democrats, leftists, socialists, and progressive people are willing to name and oppose colonization, to name and oppose illegal occupation, even to name and oppose forms of racism in all parts of the world—except in Israel, for fear that to speak out against those injustices will somehow implicate one in anti-Semitism. We have to ask how this lockdown of thought and politics became possible, and why the world believes that Palestinians should pay the price for the Nazi genocide of the Jews. This is nonsense, and yet it persists. For those of us who emerged from within Jewish and Zionist backgrounds, criticism of Israel was regarded as nothing more than an excuse for anti-Semitism. And if Jews voiced such positions, then they were regarded as self-hating. My belief is that public discourse in general will not be able to express the same outrage over the colonization of Palestine and the ongoing violent occupation of its lands and people until we are able finally to separate anti-Semitism, which is in every instance wrong and must be opposed, and the colonial subjugation of the Palestinian people, which is in every instance wrong and must be opposed.

NS: But what strikes me is that many more of these “progressive people” in the U.S. feel compelled at least to take a stand about Israel-Palestine, as opposed to, say, various conflicts in sub-Saharan Africa or the dispute in Kashmir. And the difference seems much more than merely secular. Do you think Israel-Palestine would be better off if, as in Egypt’s uprising, religious divisions became subsumed in more worldly goals?

JB: I am not sure I agree that religious divisions have been subsumed in worldly goals. It sure seems that religion is very worldly at the moment. But the idea that a religious attachment to the land is what finally fuels Israel is, I think, probably wrong. I understand that it is part of the rationale and legitimating discourse for land confiscation and ritual expulsion, but we are dealing with a savvy military state, a reformulation of settler colonialism, an institutionalized form of racism—and we cannot derive all of these, or, perhaps, any of these, from religious grounds alone.

NS: How implicated do you feel personally in what Israel does, compared to any other country?

JB: I only feel implicated and enraged when Israel claims to represent the Jewish people, since there are myriad strands of diasporic Judaism and Jewishness that have never felt represented by Israel, that no longer feel represented by that state, and who dispute the legitimacy of that state to represent the Jewish people or Jewish values. Those who insist on the representative function of the Israeli state are trying to make it true. They know it is not true, but they are battling to deny and dispute those fault-lines. But even as one opposes such formulations, it is important not to become identitarian or even communitarian in response. After all, the point is to live in a complex world, not in an enclave, and not in separatist polities. If we are looking for signs of democratization, then surely we are looking as well for forms of living on equal terms in and among cultural differences. Many religious and non-religious traditions point to this possibility.

NS: While others point away from it. What do you think will make people choose, in the terms you draw from Arendt, to “cohabit the earth” with each other?

JB: It does not matter whether or not they choose it. Remember, Arendt claimed that Eichmann erred when he sought to choose with whom to inhabit the earth. The populations with whom any of us inhabit the world precede our existence and exceed our will. It has to be that way if we are committed to an anti-genocidal position.