Wisse Kokht Kugl mit Khazershmaltz!

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

by Joachim Martillo (ThorsProvoni@aol.com)

 

Ruth Wisse cooks kugel with lard

 

In "Jews and Power" versus "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy", I asked, "Should Harvard fire Ruth Wisse for moral turpitude?"

 

After giving an example of Wisse's vicious and public expression of racism, I concluded:

I can understand why [the eminent Yiddish scholar Khone] 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.

Yet, on second thought Jews and Power provides evidence that Wisse's prejudice is interfering with her scholarship in ways that makes her presence at Harvard University untenable.

 

The publisher put the Prologue of the book online. The text is worth reading carefully because Wisse's simultaneous expression of ethnic moral superiority and victimhood so perfectly recreates the inter bellum German version of such feelings.

Jews and Power: Prologue

By Ruth Wisse

 

In Warsaw in the autumn of 1939, shortly after the Germans captured the city and before they had walled up the Jews in a ghetto, a couple of Nazi soldiers were seen harassing a Jewish child on the street. The child's mother ran out of the courtyard, picked up her bruised little boy, placed his cap back on his head, and said to him, "Come inside the courtyard and za a mentsh." The word mensch—which in German means "man" or "human being"—acquires in Yiddish the moral connotation of "what a human being ought to be." In her Polish-inflected Yiddish the mother was instructing her son to become a decent human being.

Two years later in London, Shmuel (Samuel) Zygelboym described this incident to the Yiddish poet Itsik Manger. Manger had left Warsaw for Paris before the German invasion, intending to move on to Palestine, but once the war broke out, his ship was diverted and he was fortunate to make it to Liverpool, then to London. There he spent the rest of the war, haunted by the massacre that was overtaking his family back home. Zygelboym had been forced into the Warsaw Ghetto in November 1940 along with the rest of the city's Jewish population, but as a leader of the Jewish Socialist Bund he was smuggled out to England by members of his political movement to be their representative in the Polish government-in-exile. Zygelboym tried vainly to persuade Polish and Allied authorities to do whatever they could to help rescue Polish Jews who were being starved in the ghettos and exterminated in the death camps. When Manger later transcribed the Warsaw incident as Zygelboym had told it to him, he added that no other people on the darkening continent of Europe took as seriously as Jews did the injunction to be fully human.

What so impressed these men about the mother's instruction to her son was that rather than warn against his tormentors, she warned him not to become like them. Manger and Zygelboym ascribed great value to the mother's exact words, because although they no longer bothered to cover their heads, they felt that Yiddish had absorbed the moral values of Jewish religious civilization. The term mentsh conveyed to them the essence of Jewishness; they championed mentshlekhkayt—a commitment to human decency and mutual respect. Zygelboym took this a step further by adopting socialism as the new embodiment of Judaism for the modern age. "Za a mentsh" was thus the point at which these two modern Jews and the traditional mother still formed part of a common culture and could equally claim to be upholding the "golden chain" of Jewish values that ran from Abraham through Moses and the Hebrew Prophets to them.

I was raised in this same culture, studying Genesis alongside the poems of Itsik Manger. The Montreal Jewish school I attended drew no distinction between religion and nationality: Jewish values were transmitted as a passion for justice. We were expected to rescue the remnant of the Jews of Europe by helping to build a Jewish homeland in Palestine, as well as to improve Canadian society by good citizenship and good deeds. These teachings were reinforced by example in my home. Although my father had been decisively disabused of his Communist leanings when he was a university student in Poland, his greatest pride once he became a manufacturer was that his factory had never endured a strike. The Quebec labor leader who negotiated for the textile workers' union spoke admiringly of his decency and fairness. It was emphasized in my family, school, and community that far from granting us license, our laxity in the observance of Jewish ritual called for greater moral discipline in everyday affairs.

Need I say that I continue to honor this commitment to an ideal of social justice? Jewish moral idealism remains invaluable to the world for encouraging, despite much evidence to the contrary, faith in human potential of mentsh or its Hebrew equivalent, ben-adam, literally, "son of Adam" or "child of Man." I also understand why so many Jews join Manger and Zygelboym in seeking political or social ways of "repairing the world."

But my idea of human decency was also enlarged by something else that I learned in school when our principal addressed us in the auditorium about the carnage that had just taken place in Europe: "If each of you was to take a notebook and write on every line of every page the name of a different child, and if we collected all your notebooks, it still would not equal the number of Jewish boys and girls who were murdered by the Germans." On May 12, 1943, Shmuel Zygelboym had committed suicide in public protest against the Allies' indifference to the extermination of the Jews. This kind of information complicated the directive to be a mentsh. That little boy in Warsaw could not have done his mother's bidding, because becoming fully human presupposed staying alive. After most of its 380,000 Jews had been starved or deported to the Treblinka death camp and the Jewish resistance had launched its belated revolt, the Warsaw Ghetto was torched by the Germans, who then flushed out and killed the last pockets of Jews hiding in its attics and bunkers. Zygelboym's suicide acknowledged the political consequence of the moral solipsism he had admired four years earlier. The phrase moral solipsism describes a reckoning that is preoccupied with its own performance to the exclusion of everyone else's.

That mother in Warsaw could not have known what lay ahead of her and her child. German thinkers and scientists, artists and musicians, had earned for their country a reputation as the most cultured nation in Europe. The moderately decent behavior of conquering German soldiers in Poland in World War I gave little inkling of their murderous potential. The jurist Raphael Lemkin had to coin the term genocide in 1942 to describe the unprecedented systematic extermination of an entire national, racial, political, or ethnic group. By no fair standard can European Jews be blamed for having failed to anticipate German intentions. The same cannot be said, however, for those who come after the genocidal war against the Jews—what English calls the "Holocaust," Hebrew, the Shoah, and Yiddish, the khurbn—the same term it uses for the destruction of the Temple. The obligation to be decent is complicated for Jews by the knowledge that other societies feel driven to eliminate them from the world. Those who aspire to be decent human beings would be morally obtuse to the point of wickedness were they to retell Zygelboym's story without considering its outcome.

Political thinkers normally include national defense as part of their planning. Plato situates the soldiers of his Republic right below rulers: he assumes that the just society must protect itself against enemies. In its reach for a perfect Union, the Constitution of the United States undertakes to "establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity" (my emphasis). Both Plato and the framers of the American Constitution thought it self-evident that their own nations might have to be defended. The Jews of Europe had no such provision or strategy for their common defense at the point when Hitler singled them out for extermination. Jews had concentrated on their moral improvement with no political structure in place to defend Jewish civilization or the children who were expected to perpetuate it.

* * *

This book honors the memory of the Warsaw mother who wanted her son to become a mentsh, as well as the civilization that perpetuates her teaching. That teaching made Jews into the comeback kids of a saga that defies historical probability. The creation of Israel in the same decade as the destruction of European Jewry seems to me a more hopeful augury than the dove's reappearance to Noah with an olive leaf after the flood. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran calls Israel a "rotten, dried tree that will be eliminated by one storm." I think not. Jews have lived to see the downfall of every Haman and Hitler. More likely, Ahmadinejad's words foretell the fate of a different desiccated society—his own.

And yet, Jews do seem to suffer from a political deficiency. Politics has been defined as the art or science of government or governing, especially the governing of a political entity, such as a nation. Though Jews have always constituted a nation, their political experience became the more exceptional the longer they flourished, and their atypical political patterns inspired the mistaken belief that they had no politics. This belief, in turn, prevented them and others from understanding their political interaction with other nations. To this day, Jews figure more prominently in the study of religion than they do in the study of government or political theory. Political science has shown little interest in a nation that doesn't fit its paradigms.

To address this deficiency as I see it, this book highlights the political aspect of Jewish experience. In particular, I want to see how the politics of Jews occasions the politics of anti-Jews. I look at the politics of Jews and anti-Jews in tandem because that is the way they coexist. Some readers may be concerned that such linkage would appear to hold Jews responsible for the aggression leveled against them. Rather, the tendency of Jews to seek fault in themselves is part of the harmful pattern I hope to expose. Psychologists do not demean their patients by inquiring into the patterns of abuse they have sustained. Neither should our inquiry into the patterns of Jewish political strategy be mistaken for reproach.

How did the Jews get to figure so prominently in the political sights of precisely those regimes that threaten the rest of the world? Why does the president of Iran feel entitled to call for the destruction of a member nation of the world organization that presumably secures their equal rights? Democracies, if they are to remain democratic, know they must come in on the side of the Jews, but why is it so hard for them to recognize that it is in their interest to do so? How and why did anti-Semitism become arguably the most protean force in international politics? To paraphrase the rabbis, the inquiry is not ours to finish, but neither are we free to desist from it.

Not only does Wisse make completely nonsensical historical claims with regard to the classical period in Jews and Power (as The Magnes Zionist has so ably pointed out in Tough Jewess), but her beliefs with regard to the Holocaust and the preceding decades are simply disconnected from reality when they are not carefully crafted to justify Zionist atrocities against Palestinians. See Comment from Tohar HaNeshek in Jerusalam Attack and More Jewish Genocide Denial.

 

Because Wisse is not an historian, demanding her dismissal for bad history is hard to justify, but in her Prologue Wisse is either lying about Yiddish or simply showing inexcusable ignorance.

 

When I read the first two paragraphs of the Prologue, I was dubious of the idea that the mother was thinking about any "injunction to be fully human." I discussed the story with my wife. We agreed that something was wrong, but neither Karin nor I are speakers of pre-WW2 Yiddish. Because she learned Yiddish after German while I had acquired German and Polish before I seriously studied Yiddish, I was reluctant to post anything to my blog and possibly demonstrate ignorance.

 

While Wisse is correct that the Yiddish and German meanings or connotations of apparently cognate German and Yiddish words often differ immensely, the reason does not arise because Germans and Jews have different ethical or religious views but because Yiddish is a Slavic language that has been relexified to a German vocabulary. (See Les origines des juifs actuels, The Origins of Modern Jewry, and Two-tiered Relexification in Yiddish by Paul Wexler.)

 

In real Yiddish usage, Yiddish mentsh overlaps much more closely with the Slavic (Polish) word mężczyzna meaning man, male or he-man according to the Kościuszko Foundation Dictionary by Kazimierz Bulas, Lawrence L. Thomas and Francis J. Whitfield, The derivative adjective mężny shows the real connotation even more clearly because it means brave or valiant according to the same dictionary. (Note that the pronunciation of mężny is far closer to mentsh than the Polish orthography suggests.)

 

I thought the mother in Wisse's story was simply telling her son not to be a crybaby.

 

I now feel much better about my command of Yiddish because the following item recently appeared on The Mendele Review: Yiddish Literature and Language.

2)---------------------------------------------------

Date: 27 March 2008
From: ed.
Subject:  mentsh revisited

In the Prologue with which Ruth Wisse opens her Jews and Power (New York: Schocken, 2007), she writes: In Warsaw in the autumn of 1939, shortly after the Germans captured the city and before they had walled up the Jews in a ghetto, a couple of Nazi soldiers were seen harassing a Jewish child in the street. The child's mother ran out of the courtyard, picked up her bruised little boy, placed his cap back on his head, and said to him, "Come inside the courtyard and za a mentsh." The word mensch – which in German means "man" or "human being" – acquires in Yiddish the moral connotation of "what a human being ought to be." In her Polish-inflected Yiddish the mother was instructing her son to become a decent human being.

A few pages later, she continues: This book honors the memory of the Warsaw mother who wanted her son to become a mentsh, as well as the civilization that perpetuates her teaching.

I am in complete sympathy with all the higher registers of the multivalent term mentsh, but reading Wisse's anecdote as a straightforward account of a real incident, trying to understand what precisely happens in the described scene, I fail to see an ethical epiphany and what I do see recalls an older and more widespread meaning of mentsh than that said to be expressed in the mother's words to her son: "za a mentsh." [Again I refer readers to my comments in TMR 01.005.] The three English words "Be a man" at the top of the sheet music cover of the Yiddish music hall song "A mentsh zol men zayn" [see TMR 12.004], crude call to manliness or virility though it may be, is closer to what I see as the focus of the anecdote than the reading by Wisse (and others whom I will not add to this discussion).

The mother is protectively instructing her little boy to behave sensibly, maturely in a potentially volatile situation wherein two Nazi soldiers harass a young boy, perhaps teasing him and attempting to elicit behavior from him that could charge them for more cruel actions than knocking off his hat – headcover of an observant child? – or ridiculing his Germanlike Yiddish speech. The uniformed figures suggest authority and the traditional Jewish attitude is that one must placate, buy off and not rebel against authority. The mother may have quickly sensed that she is not witnessing familiar Polish anti-Semitism. Her injunction is not one to be moral – these are hardly the circumstances for inculcating philosophic attitudes. The child is being warned that he must be careful of his behavior, must be a grownup. He is being commanded to part with his childhood.

While the above comment does not correspond to my understanding, it does not disallow it, and my interpretation both makes more  sense and also better reflects the social reality, for concepts of Jewish toughness and manliness figure prominently in Yiddish literature of the inter bellum period. (See Steel and Iron by Israel Joshua Singer, who was in my opinion a much better writer than his Nobel Prize-winning brother Isaac Bashevis Singer.)

 

Israel Joshua Singer photo taken by Carl Van Vechten, 1938

 

Because I doubt that Wisse understands Yiddish less well than I do, I can only conclude that Wisse's racist ideas about Jewish ethical superiority are distorting her analysis and ultimately her scholarship in her own field.

 

Wisse's public statements and writings indicate that she adheres to a politicized ethnic fundamentalist ideology that combines racism, extremist organic nationalism, biological determinism, eugenics, theories of national decline through race-mixing, concepts of national revival through racial purity, social Darwinism, essentialism, and primordialism. Applying to Wisse the same political definitions pertaining to non-Jews would identify her as a rather prolix academic Nazi.

 

Wisse would probably accuse anyone reaching that conclusion of anti-Semitism, but the belief that Jews of all peoples could not develop their own form of Nazism is itself a racist belief in Jewish ethical superiority over non-Jews.

 

Just as academics based in German Nazi ideology is completely unacceptable in the modern American university, there should also be no place for Wisse's tainted Jewish Nazi scholarship at Harvard.

 

Harvard must terminate Wisse in order to maintain the University's integrity.

[BTW, according Born to Kvetch, Yiddish Language and Culture in All of its Moods, by Michael Wex, p. 191, "kugel with lard" is Yiddish idiom "for non-Jewish ideas in Jewish garb. A century ago, this is what most religious Jews thought of Zionism." See Introduction to "Kvetch" and More Information on Kvetch for the meaning and origin of the word kvetch.]

 

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