From Bears to Berman

History has always played a large part in the life of history teacher Dr. Zachary Berman, who is unsurprisingly also a passionate world traveler. He has a reputation of telling his students all about his trips across the globe, most of which are to places with an enriching history.

Some of his most noteworthy trips were to Colorado, China, India, and especially, Egypt. As an experienced traveller, Dr. Berman prefers a unique style of travelling, saying the following: “I love getting lost. I love getting to a new place and wandering around and eating street food.” Though Berman claims that his favorite destination is ever changing, it seems as though he has a special connection to Egypt and its intriguing people, food, and history.

In fact, the region has such a rich background that Dr. Berman decided to intensively research it when working for his PhD. He explored the meaning of British and Egyptian imperialism as well as the responsibilities of conquerors by proposing the following: “If Egypt is part of the British Empire, is the Empire of Sudan then part of the British Empire? Does the transitive property apply?”

However, Dr. Berman began to lose interest in the project midway. “I kept doing it because I felt that I should finish. I realized I really didn’t like doing research, especially historical research, which is mostly spending time by yourself in the archive,” he explained. Dr. Berman found that looking through these records was the most challenging part about earning a PhD. “Your dissertation ends up being not that you have interesting ideas, but more that no one has had your ideas before,” he said. He found that this requirement strayed from his love of history and speculations about the subject, culminating in his motivation for earning a PhD.

Dr. Berman was inspired by his seventh grade history teacher to learn about history in-depth and to appreciate the rich culture in history. “He had a lot of freedom over his curriculum, so he decided to teach only about Indians. We learned about Native American tribes and Ancient India. We read an abbreviated version of the Bhagavad Gita,” he said. History, he realized, was even more interesting in detail.

Perhaps it was for this reason that Dr. Berman decided to become a teacher, starting at Stuyvesant in the midst of writing his paper. Yet, not all of his connections to Egypt bring back lonely, stressful memories from his student days, for he also talked about the fantastic culture he experienced when travelling.

Dr. Berman utilized his environment in Egypt to improve his fluency in Arabic by using an unorthodox strategy. At first, he was disappointed when most Egyptians he encountered spoke English to him. “The upper class could speak English well—better than I could speak Arabic,” he said. To learn more Arabic, he then observed the working class. Noting that working-class men all had mustaches, Dr. Berman decided to grow a mustache to blend in with the locals and discovered that he could use this assimilating trait to initiate conversations. “I would walk by buildings, and it was easy to start a conversation with someone by saying ‘Nice mustache! (in Arabic).’ I got positive vibes and nice conversations,” he said.

While in Egypt, Dr. Berman visited various museums and archives, but he did not have the easiest time doing his research there. The archives were poorly organized, and the documents were in Arabic, which Dr. Berman was familiar with. But, the messy Arabic coupled with “archaic spelling” made reading the old manuscripts a slow and difficult process.

Outside of research, Dr. Berman particularly enjoyed how the architecture and areas of Egypt differed by their time period. “One had to be a historian just walking around town,” he said. “[At] one thousand years old, Cairo is the Islamic part of town, full of meandering narrow streets and countless beautiful old mosques. [At] two thousand years old, Cairo has churches and synagogues from before Islam. [At] three thousand years old, Cairo is the pyramids and the museum full of items from the times of the pharaohs,” he described. Dr. Berman loved how even in the present, this layered history is preserved and continues to grow all the time.

When Dr. Berman is not teaching or traveling, he likes to bicycle, cook, and read science fiction. He recollected various stories from his college days, when he led backpacking trips with groups of children. They would hike a mile and a half, “and you feel great about it,” he said.

On one particular occasion, there was a bear who took one of the children’s backpack. All of the children have been told to remove food from their backpacks and put it away in a special bag so the bears could not get it. However, one child had left gummy worms in his backpack, and as a result, a black bear had come to the campfire, holding that backpack in its mouth. While the other children ran away with their backpacks, Berman had to face the bear by throwing rocks at it. In the end, the bear dropped the backpack, which was returned to the child.

This summer, Dr. Berman is going on a backpacking trip with his brother in Yosemite, where they carry the supplies necessary for a few days and hike for miles in the wilderness. “I did that a bunch when I was in college and after college, so I’m excited to do that again,” he said.