Honoring Wisse, Insulting Walt

Dog Doodoo as Harvard Scholarship
by Joachim Martillo (ThorsProvoni@aol.com)

In Faculty of Arts and Sciences Names Walter Channing Cabot Fellows the Harvard Gazette reports a flagrant conflation of propaganda and incompetence with scholarship:

The history of the Jewish people encompasses thousands of years, many divergent traditions, and a broad geography. Ruth Wisse, Martin Peretz Professor of Yiddish Literature, professor of comparative literature, and Harvard College Professor, explores Jewish history through a political lens in her book "Jews and Power" (Random House, 2007). Wisse received a Cabot Fellowship for this study, which explores the politics of Jewry across the centuries, from the Roman era to medieval Spain, through World War II and on to today.

Hebrew University Jewish Studies Professor Jeremiah Haber discussed Jews and Power in The Magnes Zionist: Tough Jewess -- Wisse's "Jews and Power". He points out:

... "Jews and Power" is a tendentious mix of personal biography, Zionist historiography, and cherry-picking of Jewish literature and history,in the grand tradition of Zionist polemics. Somewhere halfway through the book, Wisse completely loses the train of her argument about power and just provides a ZOA-approved guide to the establishment of the State of Israel through the Oslo accords, the sort of thing that Netanyahu, Dershowitz, and Bard could do in their sleep.

Wisse repeats uncritically the narrative of "Exile and Return" that has been debunked time and time again by serious scholars; she manages to get around to David Biale's "beguilingly contrarian" thesis of Jewish power and powerlessness, which is a direct challenge to her book, on p. 174, ten pages before its conclusion. She does not give Biale's book any serious attention; on the contrary, she seems to think that his point is that Jews in the diaspora glorified powerlessness, whereas Biale showed that the Jewish experience in political power had not ended as good for the Jews as the Zionist historiography pretended.

Professor Haber is offended by

the mind-numbing shallowness of the book -- as if a professor, any professor, can write a short book on Jewish power and powerlessness that takes in (I quote from the jacket) "everything from the Kingdom of David to the Oslo Accords." When Baer wrote his work on Galut, for all of its Zionist tendentiousness and superficiality, at least he had some grip on Jewish history.

I report in Wisse Kokht Kugl mit Khazershmaltz! that she bases the key idea of her book on an outrageous misunderstanding of Yiddish idiom.

I wonder what Harvard Kennedy School of Government Professor Stephen Walt thinks about the award. It seems like an insult because unlike Wisse, who appears to have written her book off the top of her head with no research, Walt made a serious effort to learn how the official American Jewish community functions.

I can quibble about my disagreements with him, but The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy straddles history, sociology, practical political science and policy analysis. It provided many new insights and opened up a discussion that had been almost completely blocked. By the terms of the award, Walt should have received it.

[Please note that Jeremiah Haber is a pseudonym. He writes in his profile:

Why do I write under a pseudonym? Not because I am afraid of being hounded like Norman Finkelstein -- thank God I have tenure. But because I want to keep my academic persona and my polemical persona distinct. Writing under a pseudonym allows me to be more "unbuttoned." Maybe that's a copout; maybe not. But if your really insist on knowing who I am, contact me off-blog at: jeremiah.haber@gmail.com.

Israel and Censortship at Harvard by J. Lorand Matory discusses Wisse's mindset. Because bigots like Wisse are so common in Jewish Studies, Haber probably simplifies his life tremendously by maintaining a separate web identity.]

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