Jews and Power (Jewish Encounters) [Hardcover]

Ruth R. Wisse (Author)

Book Description

Release date: August 28, 2007 | Series: Jewish Encounters

Part of the Jewish Encounter series

Taking in everything from the Kingdom of David to the Oslo Accords, Ruth Wisse offers a radical new way to think about the Jewish relationship to power. Traditional Jews believed that upholding the covenant with God constituted a treaty with the most powerful force in the universe; this later transformed itself into a belief that, unburdened by a military, Jews could pursue their religious mission on a purely moral plain. Wisse, an eminent professor of comparative literature at Harvard, demonstrates how Jewish political weakness both increased Jewish vulnerability to scapegoating and violence, and unwittingly goaded power-seeking nations to cast Jews as perpetual targets.

Although she sees hope in the State of Israel, Wisse questions the way the strategies of the Diaspora continue to drive the Jewish state, echoing Abba Eban's observation that Israel was the only nation to win a war and then sue for peace. And then she draws a persuasive parallel to the United States today, as it struggles to figure out how a liberal democracy can face off against enemies who view Western morality as weakness. This deeply provocative book is sure to stir debate both inside and outside the Jewish world. Wisse's narrative offers a compelling argument that is rich with history and bristling with contemporary urgency.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

This survey of Jewish history highlights the political aspect of Jewish experience, beginning with the observation that in the Hebrew Bible, Jewish power came through military heroics. By the time of the Roman conquest in A.D. 70, the Talmudic rabbis changed the narrative, blaming defeat on internal dissension, thus elevating the need for political discipline above military power. A Harvard professor of Yiddish and comparative literature, Wisse is keen to study how the politics of Jews occasions the politics of what she terms anti-Jews. For instance, she asserts that Allied leaders entered WWII not to save Europe's Jews but in order to defeat the Nazis, who were also anti-Jews. Similarly, the author says, President Bush was provoked to fight anti-Jewish terrorists by 9/11. Yet in both cases, isolationists accused the administration of caving in to Jewish demands that damaged American interests. Even the founding of Israel, she implies, has not normalized Jews' political position in the world. Palestinians, she says, have forged a national identity in obsessive opposition to Israel, and other nations have exploited Israel for their own political ends. Although her prose is sometimes opaque, Wisse is in fine form with well-reasoned, self-assured arguments bound to provoke heated debate among interested intellectuals. (Aug. 28)
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From Booklist

Wisse believes that Jews figure more prominently in the study of religion than they do in the study of government or political theory. To address this deficiency, she writes, this book highlights the political aspect of Jewish experience. In particular, Wisse says, she wants to "see how the politics of Jews occasions the politics of anti-Jews. The tendency of Jews to seek fault in themselves is part of the harmful pattern I hope to expose." This is a difficult thesis to examine, but Wisse gets her points across in a clear and convincing way. This is the eighth volume in the Jewish Encounters series, and 18 more titles are forthcoming. Wisse, the author of The Sehlemiel As Modern Hero (1984), The Well, and The Shtetl and Other Modern Yiddish Novellas (1986), is a professor of comparative literature at Harvard University. Cohen, George

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 256 pages
• Publisher: Schocken; 1 edition (August 28, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0805242244
• ISBN-13: 978-0805242249
• Product Dimensions: 5.1 x 1 x 7.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (21 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #774,814 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

57 of 64 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent work against the current trend September 5, 2007

By J. A Magill VINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover

From King David, to the philosopher Spinoza, to boxer Barney Ross, the Jewish Encounter Series has been as varied as it has been excellent. Now, into this mix comes Ruth Wisse's thoughtful, provocative essay, "Jews and Power" polemical in the best sense of the word. Against a grain of modern scholarship that tends to run counterfactual in its effort to imagine Jews and the Jewish state as both ordinary and extraordinarily bad, Wisse produces a work which effectively demolishes both perspectives. Her relatively short book examines Jewish history from the period of the 2nd Commonwealth to the modern state of Israel in a manner both engaging and highly readable.

Wisse argues that the uniqueness of the Jewish community exists in a relentless self criticism going back at least to Roman times. Unlike other cultures which faced with powerlessness tended to blame the other, Jews through their first and second exile sought to affix the blame neither to their neighbors nor their stars, but to themselves. Moreover, Wisse shows no shyness about asking tough questions, such as those who imagine prefer being powerless and in danger to being strong. This will make some uncomfortable, but still she pulls no punches.

Another interesting topic covered is the contradiction in anti-Judaism, despising Jews for being both too weak (stateless, poor) and too strong (seizing control of the world, too smart, too rich, and though she gives it insufficient coverage, killing god). As it happens the same paradigm exists today. Two professors from distinguished universities raise a firestorm by arguing that neo-cons and the Israel lobby (read Jews) have seized control of the American government policy against the national interest (an impressive trick by any standard) even as others argue against all evidence that the world's perpetual denunciations of Israel is the same as the treatment of any other state.

To her great credit Wisse does not embrace the false modesty of imagining the Jews as the same as any other people, recognizing how, against all odds, they continue to make contributions to culture, the sciences, and philosophy that far outstrip their meager numbers. She likewise recognizes the uniqueness of the State of Israel, both in terms of the good (the return of an exiled people to their homeland, a thing without precedent in human history other than the last time they did it), as well as the bad the failure of the Zionist enterprise to achieve the normalization of the status of Jews that its founders imagined.

If one were to quibble with Wisse's book, its main shortcoming is that she could have delved further into the theological underpinnings of Jewish self identity. Does Judaism's relentless monotheism, lacking a serious conception of a devil foster the tendency towards self criticism that she describes? Is that Jewish theology embraces an oversized eschatological goal - the perfection of the world through Jewish action - likewise have an affect?

That said, this book, at less than 200 pages, could hardly be expected to be all embracing. What it is, however, is small and impactful to a degree that belies it size, just like the phenomenon it seeks to describe.

35 of 41 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars An excellent book September 5, 2007

By Jill Malter

Format:Hardcover

Ruth Wisse begins this book by exploring some of the ways in which Jews have traditionally examined their own behavior. And that's an interesting point of view. Is it really true that the Arab-Israeli conflict is partially cultural, with Jews tending to blame themselves for much of what happens? Is Arab culture different in this respect? If so, that could explain a tendency of both sides to examine Jewish behavior far more than Arab behavior, and it might explain what I consider an exaggeration of Israel's importance by both sides in the conflict.

Wisse is quick to point out that while Jews had been confined to ghettos for centuries, emancipation led to a different type of problem: modern anti-Semitism. The accusations by anti-Semites were intended to show that Jews "were unworthy of the legal and social position conferred upon them." And even when anti-Semitism reached epidemic proportions, the carriers of this malady saw no reason to stop: it appeared to put them at no disadvantage. Meanwhile, the Jews themselves were powerless to stop it, as they were the prey.

As Wisse explains, while some anti-liberal political parties were not "originally or innately anti-Semitic," there were "no anti-Semitic parties that were not innately anti-liberal."

We then get to Zionism, and Wisse explains some of its origins. But, as Wisse tells us, Zionism lacked one ingredient, namely "the military planning force that every nation assumes it needs in order to regain, gain, or maintain its land." Although Wisse traces the start of Jewish defence forces back to 1920, I think that only after years of even more calamities, topped by the 1939 British White Paper, did the majority of Jews realize the need for an independent state, including armed forces.

The most interesting part of this book deals with the innovations of anti-Zionism, and the ways in which it has gone beyond anti-Semitism. Once again, as in the case of anti-Semitism, the animus against the accused was "not directed to any correctable attribute or rectifiable lapses." But there were differences. While National Socialist Germany took the lead in anti-Semitic propaganda, it did not organize "a Pan-European movement around that issue." On the other hand, "opposition to Israel became the glue of Pan-Arabism."

European anti-Semites blamed Jews for their existing social crises (and I would add that they blamed the Jews for suffering the effects of anti-Semitism), but "Arab leaders created the crisis for which they blamed the Jews." That is, they refused to allow the resettlement of Arab refugees simply in order to blame Jews.

Although the European anti-Semites did sporadically boycott Jewish stores and businesses in the 1930s, Arabs went beyond this to arrange systematic boycotts of Israel. I agree: just ask yourself if you have ever seen Israel participate in the Mediterranean Games. I think we all realize that Israel has a Mediterranean coastline. Don't you ever wonder what the nations who go along with such a boycott are thinking? I think the threats of academic boycotts of Israel are also an example of this phenomenon.

I think most of us are aware of the mass rallies that the National Socialists held. Once again, as Wisse points out, anti-Zionists have gone beyond this to use weapons of mass communication.

A fifth aspect of the enhancement of anti-Zionism over anti-Semitism that Wisse mentions is the use (Wisse uses the word "conscription") of the United Nations. I would add two more aspects: the conscription of some of the Western media and some Western academic departments.

The author says that while the purpose of Zionism and Israel was to normalize Jewish existence, this did not happen, just as Jewish emancipation did not regularize the political status of European Jews. The Arab-Israeli conflict turned out to be "an asymmetrical attack by the Arab-Islamic world on the idea of a Jewish homeland." Yes, some folks say that the source of the problem is the fact that Israel has some territory in the West Bank. But Wisse answers that "since the disputed territories are Israel's as a result of Arab aggression, they could not retroactively have become its cause."

Wisse does discuss the Levantine Arabs, and says that Rashid Khalidi compares these people with peoples who lack independence, namely the Armenians and Kurds. Of course, Armenia actually exists now, but Wisse shows us that there really are huge differences between the Levantine Arabs and peoples who have long had their own language and culture. In addition, it is curious that the Kurds and Armenians (along with the Jews) have long been opposed by the Arabs.

Meanwhile, Wisse goes into detail about the extent to which the Levantine Arabs have fashioned their entire identity, myths, symbols, slogans, and domestic and foreign policies around opposition to the Jews. I agree that all this is terribly counterproductive, not only for what it does to the Levantine Arabs outright, and not only for the immediate threat to world peace, but also because of the precedent it has set: what goes around can come around.

The author does mention the terrible mistake of the Oslo agreement, which "triggered an immediate escalation of terror, not only against Israel but against the West." This was an avoidable error which many people easily foresaw but were unable to prevent. Wisse adds that no Israeli initiative could correct what went wrong in Arab societies, just as no Jewish initiative "could have solved the German problem" that led to National Socialism.

Wisse concludes by wisely explaining that aggressors against a democratic system can be invigorated by their anti-Semitism to move against society as a whole: "why stop at the Jews?" I agree: it is unlikely that anti-Zionism will stop with the Jews.

I recommend this book.

12 of 14 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars first rate historical analysis October 10, 2007

By Jonathan Kleinbard

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

Wisse presents a first-rate historical analysis of Jewish history in terms of the political influence they were able to exert in the context of their lives after the destruction of the 2nd temple, up to present times. Yes, the current analysis tends to be polemical, but justifiably so in laying out the situation as it is. Very well written and easy to read.