"Jews and Power" versus "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy"

On August 28, 2007 Schocken and Nextbook released Ruth Wisse's new book entitled Jews and Power.  It is a piece of intellectual fluff that is interesting only because it manages to regurgitate all the major falsehoods that Jewish Americans believe about themselves. Yet it has already been seriously reviewed in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, the International Herald Tribune, and Commentary. 

In the same time frame only The National Interest (TNI) publisher and Nixon Center president Dimitri K. Simes, Nixon Center senior fellow Geoffrey Kemp, Centre of International Studies senior fellow Stefan Halper and Ben Fishman of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy have responded to the publication of John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt's politically relevant and (theoretically) highly controversial book entitled The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy. In contrast to the treatment of Wisse's book, Simes's, Kemp's, Halper's and Fishman's very brief reviews have so far only appeared in TNI on-line and may already have been removed from the website as of September 6th. (See http://www.nationalinterest.org/Article.aspx?id=15318, http://tniprod.nationalinterest.org/Article.aspx?id=15290, http://tniprod.nationalinterest.org/Article.aspx?id=15310, http://tniprod.nationalinterest.org/Article.aspx?id=15292.)

Obviously, there is something wrong with editorial priorities, and terms like media gatekeeping or facilitation are usually applied to this sort of journalistic dysfunction. 

Opposing the tide of the American political and intellectual culture seems practically impossible, and since the barbarians have claimed the right to vivisect publicly the intellectual output of Barnard anthropology professor Nadia Abu el Haj, similar analysis must be applied to Wisse because the Harvard Jewish studies professor and her writings are apparently so much more significant than Mearsheimer, Walt and their oeuvre.

Should Harvard fire Ruth Wisse for moral turpitude?
by Joachim Martillo (ThorsProvoni@aol.com)

The Modern Jewish Canon by Ruth Wisse (Harvard University) provides a particularly good example of using Jewish Studies as a soapbox to serve Zionist racism and to demonize Palestinians or Arabs in general. She writes on p. 98.

The logic of language imposed itself on the kindred writers, Kafka and Brenner, to spectacularly different ends. Brenner's hero Hefetz went mad within the security of Hebrew while his author was murdered by Arab assailants who imported the pogrom politics of Europe into the Middle East.

We all know that there were problems between the native Palestinian population and the Ashkenazi colonists, but to claim that the Palestinians were importing pogrom politics from Europe is over the top, corresponds to the most extreme Revisionist defamation of the native population and was not the opinion of most of the Zionist leadership. She could simply have stated that Arab assailants killed Hefetz during the violence of 1929. Anything more crosses the boundary into propaganda, and one has to question the decision to inject Zionist anti-Palestinian politics into a book that is supposed to be a semi-scholarly survey of modern Jewish literature.

Her comment also shows the typical Zionist lack of imagination. The racist anti-Arab nonsense in The Modern Jewish Canon almost looks plagiarized from Hitler's Professors, for Max Weinreich unfortunately and irrelevantly incorporated almost identical bigotry into his rather useful book. He probably unconsciously absorbed these ideas from the standard 1930s Zionist anti-Palestinian propaganda.

Wisse's race hate is not confined merely to typical Zionist demonization of Palestinians or Arabs in general. In November 1997, she authored a Commentary article entitled "Yiddish: Past, Present and Imperfect." She writes the following.

I have described that trip before, and it was actually as a consequence of my article about it in these pages ("Poland's Jewish Ghosts," January 1987) that Khone's manner toward me cooled. I, too, was thrilled by the rise of Polish liberalism, and drawn by powerful emotions to the Polish home of my parents and ancestors. It was stirring to explore the physical landscape where so much of Yiddish literature had been created. But in my article I also noted the presence of what I called "the phantom limb" an anti-Semitism that continued to make its presence felt in Poland long after the Jews had been physically excised from the country. While it was important that Jews protect the visible memory of their past, and promote scholarly exchanges as Shmeruk was doing, I believed they should not ignore the anti-Jewish cast of modern Polish nationalism, including its present-day variety. Khone did not appreciate my cautionary approach, any more than a lover wants to hear about his sweetheart's failings. His critical attention was shifting, from the internal contacts between Yiddish and Hebrew to relations between Jewish and non-Jewish literatures, Polish in particular. I did not understand the import of his growing interest, or recognize its every facet. One of them was this: he had fallen in love with a Polish Christian woman, Krystyna Bevis, who shot the documentary film of our trip, and shortly after the death of his wife in 1989 he married her, and she bore him a son. He named the boy Avigdor, after his father. WHEN SHMERUK officially retired from the Hebrew University in 1989, he began to divide his time between Warsaw and Jerusalem, teaching and guiding research in both places but with the stronger pull coming from Europe. How many reasons, in addition to the fact of his new family, one might offer for his attraction to Poland! He would certainly not have been the first Israeli to chafe at the constrictions of a tight society, or to leap at the opportunity to spend time abroad. Cut off for so many years, he now had access to Poland's archives and its scholars. A lifelong teacher, he welcomed the chance to pioneer Yiddish studies in a new country: he could do as much, if not more, to protect the Jewish past in Poland by training Polish students in Jewish research as by preparing students for the task in Israel. Jews habitually visit keyver oves, ancestral graves; is it not understandable that Khone Shmeruk, who left his family one day in 1939, should have wanted to forge a link with his martyred parents in Poland? But I think it was also the enticement of life, not death, that drew Khone so powerfully to Poland: the allure of his interrupted youth, when he was just starting out as a historian with all his years ahead of him. One night during our 1986 trip I returned with Khone from a performance at the Yiddish theater. We were strolling along a tree-lined street (Grzybowska, I believe), and Khone said, "This is where I used to walk with girls in the evening when I was a student." Before there was a professor of Yiddish there had been a young man who felt the promise of romance and the prospect of greatness and who adored the complications of his city. Now that Poland was free again, what was to prevent that man from starting all over, in the city of his youth, in the university that had once humiliated him; what was to prevent him from creating a new Polish-Jewish symbiosis in his own person? One of Shmeruk's most interesting and far-reaching studies concerns the legend of Esterke, which exists in both Polish and Yiddish versions. Obviously based on the biblical book of Esther, the story tells how the Polish king Casimir the Great (1310-70) fell in love with a Jewish maiden and took her for his mistress. This tale has served as a litmus test for perceptions of Polish-Jewish relations. To Polish anti-Semites, the king's out-of-wedlock liaison with a Jewish concubine has long been a reminder of the perils lurking in their country's hospitality to the Jews. To philo-Semites, especially in the 19th century, it seemed to confirm the generosity of native Polish impulses. What interested Shmeruk was something else: the unequal way the story developed in Polish and Yiddish literature. Whereas modern Yiddish writers were aware of and responded to the various Polish versions of the legend, Polish writers in general paid scant attention to the Yiddish. Shmeruk's study interprets this as still another paradigm for the inequality at the heart of Polish-Jewish relations. But his study itself, simply by virtue of existing, establishes a connection between the two cultures that the cultures had failed to make, and consummates a kind of union between two peoples otherwise doomed to remain apart. Khone must have felt uniquely qualified to help bring about a new rapprochement between Poles and Jews. While Poland was still under Soviet occupation, he had extended many invitations to Polish academics to attend conferences in Jerusalem, making "the West" available under the auspices of Jewish studies. Now that Israel was strong and free, the Jew could return to Poland not as a supplicant but as a benefactor, bringing Western know-how to a society that had stagnated under Communism. Perhaps he even wanted to play out the Esterke romance in reverse, as the munificent Jew coming to the rescue of the Polish maiden. If so, however, this is not how it felt to those he left behind. During the last stages of his illness, when he deliberately flew from Jerusalem to Poland because that is where he wished to be buried, he imprinted a wound on the hearts of his countrymen. I cannot speak for his daughters, his colleagues, or his students, but I know how his attraction to Poland affected our own relations over the past decade, and how a sense of rejection has compounded my grief. In effect, everything that his postwar life, the land of Israel, and scholarly achievement had brought him could not replace what he had lost in Warsaw. His life also reminds us that, even in the newly constituted Jewish commonwealth, Jewish dreams of exogamy, in both the personal and cultural sense, are not soon likely to fade.

Not only is the nasty sarcasm and a not too subtle criticism of miscegenation somewhat offensive albeit unsurprising in the context of the garbage Commentary has published about Edward Said, but Wisse in this article has reached a whole new level of insipidity for Commentary with the implication that the preeminent scholar in her field was thinking with his dick because he did not happen to share her anti-Polish prejudice. Even though her phraseology is rather less direct than mine, I found it truly amazing that a full Harvard professor would publish such a comment in a national journal.

Wisse's hatreds also cloud her scholarly judgment. Her analysis of the Esterke literature is questionable. Polish anti-Jewish prejudice typically took the form of a demand that Jews convert to Catholicism and intermarry with other Catholics. Wisse is projecting a Nazi prejudice onto Poles.

The debacle in the former Yugoslavia has provided graphic illustration that ethnic hostility is and was more or less the norm in Eastern Europe and the Balkans. The hatred has been completely mutual among all the groups since modern völkisch nationalism fused with Eastern European confessionalism, and there is no reason for someone of Eastern European Ashkenazi background to take a pose of ethical superiority over other Eastern European ethnic groups.

I can understand why Shmeruk might have cooled in his relations with Wisse, and I feel very sorry for the Arab, the Pole or the member of a Jewish non-Jewish couple that takes an interest in Yiddish literature at Harvard.  Nevertheless, I am reluctant to recommend her dismissal. Even though Wisse's scholarship leaves much to be desired, her works do often contain useful material.  She is such a classic example of ethnic Ashkenazi extremism, fanaticism, and bigotry that she almost merits a professorship at Harvard so that she can be studied and remain in the public eye as a flagrant example of the dark side of Eastern European ethnic Ashkenazi culture.

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