In a quiet announcement just after New Year, the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office reported the repatriation of a looted Iron Age ceremonial spoon from disgraced billionaire Michael Steinhardt’s collection to Palestine. For all its tiny size, the object reveals the settler-colonial complex of adverse possession. If racialization is the most visible of the four “legs” supporting the pyramid of white sight, the others are the colonial seizure of land, the looting of cultural property, and bodily violation. Just so, Michael Steinhardt is a looter, harasser and settler colonist, who is such a supremacist he thinks he’s a king.
These multiple functions of adverse possession are the everyday life of white sight. It structures my own workplace, the so-called “Steinhardt” School of Education, Culture and Human Development at NYU. “Steinhardt” was renamed after the hedge fund manager in 2001 in exchange for a relatively miserly $10 million. Now there is the opportunity to start undoing adverse possession, beginning with its little looted objects with the goal of making its entire pyramid fall.
Adverse possession visualized
In standard settler colonial legal phrasing “adverse possession” means taking land without the consent of those who were already there and thereby acquiring title to that land. It remains an active and central part of US law. Such taking possession without consent is equally applicable to bodily violations of all kinds. Since the 16th century, Europeans have visualized colonialism as rape.
In the well-known drawing by Giovanni Stradano (1523–1605) representing the discovery of the Americas, Amerigo Vespucci is seen setting foot in the Americas, flag in hand, to claim sovereignty. He encounters a naked woman, of whom he takes possession as the symbolic form of “America,” whose name is spelled out in the image.
Giovanni Stradano, Allegory of America (c. 1587-89).Metropolitan Museum of Art Open Access Collection. Gift of Estate of James Hazen Hyde, 1959.
The scene depicts what can be called the rape of America, adapting a familiar theme from European art, epitomized by Titian’s Rape of Europa (ca. 1560), meaning the violent, material and symbolic taking possession of the Americas via a female body. Depicting a looted hammock and Tupinamba club he saw in the Medici collection of Indigenous art, Stradano’s work visualized all three aspects of adverse possession.
Steinhardt’s Looted Cultural Property
The ivory spoon (c. 800-700 BCE) is part of over $70 million of looted art that Steinhardt is being forced to return. It is the first looted object to be returned to Palestinian control. ArtNews reports “the cosmetic spoon would have been used by the Assyrian civilization to pour incense.” It is decorated with a human-headed winged lion. Immense stone versions of this theme can be seen in the Met and the British Museum (see below).
Ivory spoon looted by Michael Steinhardt repatriated to Palestine. Photo: Manhattan DA.
A widely disseminated report from the Manhattan DA in 2021 showed how “[f]or decades, Michael Steinhardt displayed a rapacious appetite for plundered artifacts without concern for the legality of his actions.” These words were borne out in the detailed findings that have now led to the return of 180 stolen antiquities and received a first-of-its-kind lifetime ban on acquiring antiquities. A Greek statue acquired by Steinhardt was broken into pieces, just to facilitate its smuggling. It’s a common practice among antiquities looters. The Park Avenue crowd want a classical head in a niche, not a six-foot tall statue.
Human-headed winged lion (lamassu) ca. 883–859 BCE. Metropolitan Museum. Gift of John D. Rockefeller Jr., 1932. Open Access collection.
In 2020 a looted golden bowl was brought to Newark for Steinhardt. According to the New York Times, it was “looted from Nimrud, Iraq, and purchased without provenance papers, officials said, for $150,000 in July 2020, at a time when objects from Nimrud were being trafficked by the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant.” That means that Steinhardt most likely bought bargain-priced looted art from ISIS (or ISIL), despite being an ardent Zionist.
Steinhardt’s Bodily Violations
Before these looting crimes became known, Steinhardt was credibly accused of serial sexual harassment in 2019:
“He set a horrifying standard of what women who work in the Jewish community were expected to endure,” said Rabbi Rachel Sabath Beit-Halachmi, a Jewish scholar. She said Mr. Steinhardt suggested that she become his concubine while he was funding her first rabbinical position in the mid-1990s.
The complaint was upheld by Hillel International: the Foundation for Jewish Campus Life, not known as one of the cutting-edge “woke” organizations out there. Hillel “quietly” removed his name from its board of governors. While many of us in NYU protested that his name continued to be circulated every time someone sends an email or gives out a business card—as the “naming” process intends—the NYU Board of Trustees declined to act, issuing a statement in mid-summer while students were on vacation.
The pattern repeated itself in 2021 in relation to looting. Relying on the gaslighting “defense” that the Manhattan DA had not pressed charges—a quid pro quo to ensure faster return of looted cultural property—Steinhardt denied wrongdoing. Only in August 2022, again during the campus holiday, did he “resign” from the Board of Trustees, claiming he did not wish to be a distraction.
Steinhardt’s possessive behaviors are entirely connected. CEO of the National Council of Jewish Women Sheila Katz reports that when he propositioned her, Steinhardt declared that he was the “King of Israel.” Such supremacy is the sorry end of the long campaign to make Jews “white.” Steinhardt founded the organization Birthright Israel, which funds free trips to Israel for Jewish young people believing, in his own words, in “ a significant Israel experience as a way of bridging the gap between world Jewry and Israel.” That’s very thinly coded to mean that being in Israel will counteract any criticism of the Israeli regime among the Jewish diaspora to bolster its settler colonialism.
Looting Palestine
There are 7,000 archeological sites in the Occupied West Bank and more than half are located in Area C, under Israeli military control. Palestinian architect Dina Srouji has noted “Israel’s weaponization and militarization of archaeology between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.” Sometimes a spoon is not just a spoon, it’s a phallic index of adverse possession
The repatriated spoon was looted before 2003 from an ancient site Khirbet al-Kum close to the present-day village of al-Kum (indicated with my arrow on the map). As you can see in this detail from the interactive map of West Bank settlements maintained by Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem, al-Kum is located in a narrow archipelago of Palestinian-controlled territory (marked in brown) between Israel’s separation wall (the green line) and a militarized zone of settlements reaching north from Hebron (marked in blue).
Detail of B’Tselem Interactive Settlement map showing al-Kum
Palestinians in al-Kum are thus contained on the one side by the 16 meter high wall and on the other by the illegal settlement of Adora, founded in 1984, which identifies with the far-right ideas of Jabotinsky. It was reported in November 2022, that “a group of settlers from there have destroyed agricultural fields in the Ain Fara area, irrigation networks and destroyed agricultural crops.” Perhaps Adora settlers once looted on behalf of Michael Steinhardt?
It’s as likely that Palestinians, so-called “subsistence looters” may have been responsible. According to Palestinian scholar Adel H. Yahya, looting “surged dramatically after the outbreak of the al-Aqsa Intifada in October 2000 as a consequence of the closure of the Palestinian areas by Israel.” Unemployment drove people to loot but also reduced the prices they were paid. Steinhardt purchased the spoon in January 2003, via Gil Chaya, an Israeli antiquities dealer, who bought antiquities “directly” from looters. Assuming this to be the case, Israel’s counterinsurgency enabled Steinhardt’s art looting at bargain rates.
What now?
The spoon was returned by the Manhattan DA in Bethlehem at a ceremony attended by the U.S. Homeland Security Investigations (“HSI”), the U.S. State Department and Rula Maayah, Palestinian Authority, Minister of Tourism and Antiquities. and other PA officials There’s no word on what the Palestinian Authority, who have more than a few issues on hand, intend to do with it. For all the hesitations there are about the PA, the repatriation does at least recognize the existence of Palestine’s cultural legacy.
Steinhardt’s loot returned at the US Office of Palestinian Affairs, 1.5.23. Photo: State Dept.
There’s next to no chance this item will lead to any change in the name of my school. Apparently, there’s no legal case to compel a name change without, in an unamusing irony, Steinhardt’s consent. That means, I assume, that there was no morals clause in whatever agreement was signed. I wonder if NYU was too cautious to propose such a clause or if Steinhardt demanded there not be one?
The name remains as a salutary reminder at the beginning of every work day that everything I do, like it or not, is enabled by adverse possession.