[wvns] Should Harvard fire Ruth Wisse for moral turptitude?
Schocken and Nextbook released Ruth Wisse's new book on August 28,
2007. 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. [Obviously
these are not serious publications -WVNS.]
In the same time frame only The National Interest 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
reviews have so far only appeared on-line. (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. [Could this resentment have something to do with
Ruth's inability to find a loving husband? -WVNS]
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 the 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 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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