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Jews and Power
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.
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.
256 pages, Hardcover
First published August 28, 2007
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235 people want to read
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July 22, 2014
From 2009 until last year, I participated in a study group on the historical Jesus. My participation began around the time I read my first book of scriptural scholarship, The Voice, the Word, the Books: The Sacred Scripture of the Jews, Christians, and Muslims, by F.E. Peters, NYU professor and former Jesuit. I was thrilled by that book and by finding out such information was there for the reading and learning. Since it was my first such book, I thought it was "the cat's pajamas" (although if I were to read it now I might discover there are some things I no longer agree with and so forth).
The group met out of a local Unitarian church. Its leader and most of the other participants were Unitarians who considered themselves no longer Christians. They were educated people, readers, seekers, liberal-minded people. But eventually I saw they were Christian in all but name and belief in certain supernatural occurrences. That is, they still saw the world, and particular, the Jews, the same way. They still believed that Jesus came to reform Judaism (as monolith), that, although he was a Jew by descent, he was set apart from Judaism, and represented a fresh wind (from God, if you will) blowing away the old and outdated in favor of the new and improved. Meanwhile, I came to see that what they considered "Judaism" had little or nothing to do with actual Judaism or its history. Instead it was a story issuing out of Christianity for the purpose of being its foil and representing everything it said it was not. The group and I got stuck in a rut of being at odds over that. Meanwhile, too, it came out that some of the group were among those who consider Israel the main source of injustice in the world and the wrong they most needed to be addressing. They frequented lecturers on the evils of Israel toward the Palestinians and maybe attended demonstrations and the like, viewing themselves as participating in a social-justice initiative. One of the participants wrote me that in his belief the oppression of the Palestinian Arabs was the longest-lasting, most unjust and most maddening evil in the world since he was old enough to remember (he's around 70), and that what he was waiting for was a massive international intervention to destroy this unjust system. (To anchor those experiences of mine in time, the Arab Spring, or Awakening, had occurred and Syrian civil war had been raging for over a year.) What this book, Jews and Power, is about is the other side of that picture.
The book is divided into three parts. The first and the third parts are close to 80 pages each. The second is less than 20. The first part goes from biblical times up until the Enlightenment; the second goes from then until the Second World War and discusses the unexpected consequences of emancipation for the Jews, and the third focuses on Israel, the country.
Part One asserts Judaism originated as a political as well as a spiritual way but was divested of power after the Jewish Wars of the first and second century CE. Rome renamed Israel "Palestinia" for their storied enemies the Philistines, to break the ties of the Jews to the land. (The biblical Philistines were not today's Palestinian Arabs but themselves outlanders sometimes known as "the Sea People" from points west.) Subsequently the Jews were left to cope with powerlessness the best they could, which they did by making themselves indispensable to rulers wherever they found themselves, but, no matter how excellent they became, they were dependent on those rulers and on whether they happened to remain in power. Incidentally, when push came to shove, those rulers would sacrifice their Jews should it become politically expedient to do so. As powerless minority and designated "other," they were available for scapegoating and otherwise expendable. At times the protection of clergy and rulers proved no match for outpourings of populist hate.
I think the initial fate of the black population of New Orleans during/after Hurricane Katrina arguably represents an example of how a nation treats its designated other. In that case they were not targeted to release hostile tensions in society; they were treated as merely expendable.
After Constantine, Christianity had merged with political power. Ruth Wisse portrays Christianity as having become corrupted by power; becoming a state religion made them violate their founder's ethics.* Judaism, on the other hand, became corrupted by weakness. Although martyrdom had not originally been central to Judaism, the events of history had a distorting impact. Ruth Wisse is asserting that carrying out God's will requires staying alive to do it.
Judaism's take on martyrdom happened to be the subject of an article by James A. Diamond in the Summer, 2013 issue of Jewish Review of Books. He looked at applicable commentary and arrived at the same conclusion as Ruth Wisse.
In my own words, for example, I'd rather not be arguing with Christians about whether "the suffering servant" phrase from Isaiah refers to the Jewish people or to Jesus, because that Christian view of suffering and the Messiah is not the goal. For me, suffering may be a byproduct of struggle but isn't the point.
If carrying out God's will involves staying alive it also involves power.
Part Two deals with the effects of emancipation. As a result of the new emphasis on the rights of man and the downplaying of Church power in favor of secular states, Jews got to become part of the citizenry, instead of being isolated in ghettos or, in Eastern Europe, the pale of settlement. And they wanted to be part. They wanted to contribute. What wasn't foreseen was that, since now power came, not from a ruler, but by popular vote for politicians, whatever worked to rally the masses would be the ticket. While, pre-emancipation, conservative forces in society aimed to keep Jews separate, post-emancipation, any political party might make use of antisemitism. When antisemitism resonated with the masses--often when there was economic pain--politicians could get elected on that basis. The very success of Jews striving to contribute to their new secular societies became examples of how "the Jews were taking over." In this book Ruth Wisse doesn't go deeply into why some Jews succeeded so well in their new societies. She uses an analogy of athletic prowess, the Jews having conditioned themselves by dealing with the forces arrayed against them over the centuries. From the antisemitic perspective Jews were alien (foreign) elements whose success represented unfair competition, leeches on society draining it dry and taking what should belong to the supposed ethnic natives, and in short, to blame for all ills. If they tried to defend themselves, that, too, was taken as revealing their illicit power. Powerless, Jews still were vulnerable to being sacrificed to assuage populist passions.
I read another book, Emancipation: How Liberating Europe's Jews from the Ghetto Led to Revolution and Renaissance, that I thought meant to make these points, but Ruth Wisse does so more clearly in Part Two of Jews and Power.
In Part Three she deals with Zionism and Israel. The impetus for the movement lay with the Dreyfus trial and the growth of antisemitic political movements. Theodor Herzl and others believed that the cause of antisemitism was that the Jews were a nation without a land and that if they did have one, the attitudes of the rest of the world toward Jews would normalize.
What is noteworthy here is the belief that something the Jews did or did not do is the cause of antisemitism. I remember coming across that belief in Out of Egypt: A Memoir, where some of the personalities would point to behavior of other Jews that they found unacceptable and say that those other Jews were the cause of antisemitism. And I have heard anti-Israel activists and ordinary liberal Jews alike say Israel is the cause of antisemitism, or, at least that it has only itself to blame for attitudes against it. Ruth Wisse' point is that antisemitism (or other forms of racism and hate) arises to meet a political need.
Hence, although one can do everything possible to live an exemplary life, that will not end the slurs, nor are deviations from perfection their cause, be they antisemitic or racist or whatever. (This is what Michelle Alexander means by contrasting a "Booker T. Washington" approach with a revolutionary approach in her book The New Jim Crow.)
Ruth Wisse gives a Sartre quote to the effect that if Jews didn't exist the antisemite would have had to invent them. What she does not say is that antisemites did--and do--invent antisemitism.
That claim might seem inconceivable to some people since it contradicts what they see before their very eyes. In that way it is like the notion that whiteness is an ideology, not a skin color, that I explored in a previous book review. Another example is the hoary belief, far from dead in America, that black people have a criminal nature that explains their treatment by society. I was a guest for five years with a liberal church that in their studies were at pains to dispel that racial illusion, while simultaneously instilling the belief in Israel as an evil entity that "explains" what happens to Israelis and Jews while justifying recommended approaches. There is a general movement to instill that viewpoint among receptive mainline American churches today. I am not talking about Jeremiah Wright's church, but about majority-white mainline churches. Of course, they, like my Unitarian friends, see it as social justice, their mantra being that "just criticizing Israel is not antisemitism." (Views of hate of and terrorism against America is a closely linked concept.)
In no way am I saying that most people in the anti-Israeli Left aren't sincere and well-intentioned. Most, like my Unitarian friend, truly see Israel (and Jews who support it) as a mean, evil bully and empathize with Palestinian suffering. What I am getting at is the disconnect between empathy, intentions, and consequences. Although the liberal Left are well aware of the manipulation of the Right by business interests, for example, they can't conceive that their own views could be less than objective or that their own actions could be reverberating in unintended ways.
All right; I've gotten off the track, as Ruth Wisse really doesn't deal that much with America and Christianity today; she's dealing with the Middle East. So I'll just say I have a hypothesis that, within Christianity, there is at least a tension between following Jesus and repudiating Jews, but further along the line away from traditional Christianity toward post-Christianity (cultural Christianity?), that tension can be lost, so that repudiation of the Jews can come to bear more and more weight as a cultural unifying force (that is, a belief necessary for political reasons). In traditional Christianity there is at least love.
I'm reminded of the approach of American liberals to the Israeli Left: it is not judged acceptable, even if they are standing in front of bulldozers. Israel must be condemned and repudiated. You can't love it. That's how I see repudiating Israel as having become the new loyalty oath, in that sense replacing the traditional Christian confession for the post-Christian Left.
Ruth Wisse asserts that anti-Israel ideology is the only force unifying the Arab countries of the Middle East. She says that's why they had to expel Egypt from the Arab League (I did not know that) when Sadat made the peace treaty with Israel that later resulted in his assassination. She says that the Palestinians are the only people with an entirely negative and derivative cultural identity† based on the role reversal by which Israel is victimizer and they themselves are the true victims. She says Palestinians are aware the Arab countries have rejected them for citizenship but still blame Israel. She says the other Arab countries keep them in limbo in that regard to capitalize on their suffering for political purposes--manipulating public opinion. She says that displaced persons from the other two societal paroxysms that temporally framed Israel/Palestine, have all been resettled. That is, the division of Korea into North and South and the division of India into India and Pakistan similarly led to great personal calamity and dispossession that is now resolved. She says people can choose to pity the Palestinians but that what that does is lock them into their current paralyzed victimhood. She says the Arab rulers, further, use anti-Israel and anti-Western attitudes to further their own power and avoid developing their own populations. She says that during their long period of exile in diaspora, Jews used everything they could to survive and develop themselves. She says that as soon as there was a chance they would have a country they went to work to develop infrastructure--not just roads and public facilities, you understand, but political and cultural and economic underpinnings.
She further disputes the oft-heard idea that Israel is a (or the) regional power. She says that is a rationale for accusing them of having become abusers of power. She points out that although Israel got a head start in defense that will be lost as the countries surrounding them inevitably catch up. She looks at the huge contrast in population and size.
I see all this not as a defense of all of Israel's actions but rather as demoting Israel from being the Antichrist and from being the locus of the (take your choice) first or second coming, to just another country. To see Israel as is often being done, as the scapegoat for all of civilization, requires a narrowing of the geographical and historical focus plus exclusion of inconvenient facts.
Nevertheless, the country of Israel is not devoid of power, so Ruth Wisse says it does have some use as an ally and isn't totally expendable. That's a change for Jews from their position over the last 2000 years. Still, they are in a terrible predicament. I thought this third section was the hardest to read. At first I couldn't understand. I thought maybe it was because her writing had an underlying current of despair. I have read two articles by her prior to reading this book and didn't notice any lack of clarity there. Finally, though, I did understand, at least at the level reflected in the present review.
One other point the author made about the fate of the Jews in WWII was shocking. She says that FDR's New Deal got called "Jew Deal." She says that societal forces wanting to keep the US out of WWII accused American Jews of trying to get Roosevelt involved in fighting their ("the Jews'") war (this being compared to current times, with isolationists accusing American Jews of trying to get the U.S. into war for Israel's sake). She says that, later, both Roosevelt and Churchill, albeit sympathetic, refrained from doing anything specific to help the Jews in Europe (e.g., bombing the railroad tracks) because they claimed the war effort could better help humanity in general by keeping the focus exclusively on Hitler. The Jews were powerless, of no use as an ally, hence were expendable and left to their fate. It is enough to slant one toward a "realist" political view (assuming I'm gleaning what that means), since, as the realists say, "morality" certainly had no impact.
Ruth Wisse says that, traditionally, in the case of antisemitism, Jews haven't spoken out to their tormentors, since those would often be the same people on whom they were dependent and whom they were trying to please. Of course, everybody argues about Israel now, but that seems to be sort of a proxy issue that we can butt heads over. Otherwise, in the public square we are supposed to keep up our approved "e pluribus unum" language, while in relative private we have our various movements to bring into reality our visions, some of which entail throwing "the enemy" into "the outer darkness." I'm not an organizer or a protestor. When I began to be aware of and hear all these sorts of things for the first time about six or seven years ago, I didn't know what to do. It's scary, and I would get angry. I thought it best to try to learn and become more articulate, although the latter sometimes isn't very socially acceptable.
Of note is that, although I have been using "antisemitism" in a general way to reflect conspiracy theories about and political targeting of Jews, Ruth Wisse is using the term in a more particular way. She spells it "anti-Semitism," using it specifically to refer to the political movements that arose in Europe, especially in the German-speaking countries, near the end of the 19th century. She uses "anti-Zionism" to refer to later developments around Israel, and she does some comparison and contrast of the two. I prefer Jerry Z. Muller's more mixed approach. Picture a sort of snowball rolling through history, accumulating the various versions of antisemitism, of which anti-Zionism is the most recent. Even though the anti-Israel movement's strategy is to speak only of Israel/Palestine, and not, for example, of Jews as controlling the economy, the other modes haven't disappeared; they are just not what works best publicly in the West in this day and age. Politically, it has to work. It has to be something that good, well-intentioned people will sign on to.
*I would like take the author's statement about Christianity's alleged corruption by power after Constantine as a simplification and defer to the hundreds of books that doubtless have been written on the subject.
†Since studying Karen L. King I'm alert to polemic; this particular construction raises a red flag. It suggests that Ruth Wisse is making victimization "heretical" to Judaism, assigning it to "the other" instead. See my review of What Is Gnosticism? for further discussion.
(Footnotes added July 22, 2014)
The group met out of a local Unitarian church. Its leader and most of the other participants were Unitarians who considered themselves no longer Christians. They were educated people, readers, seekers, liberal-minded people. But eventually I saw they were Christian in all but name and belief in certain supernatural occurrences. That is, they still saw the world, and particular, the Jews, the same way. They still believed that Jesus came to reform Judaism (as monolith), that, although he was a Jew by descent, he was set apart from Judaism, and represented a fresh wind (from God, if you will) blowing away the old and outdated in favor of the new and improved. Meanwhile, I came to see that what they considered "Judaism" had little or nothing to do with actual Judaism or its history. Instead it was a story issuing out of Christianity for the purpose of being its foil and representing everything it said it was not. The group and I got stuck in a rut of being at odds over that. Meanwhile, too, it came out that some of the group were among those who consider Israel the main source of injustice in the world and the wrong they most needed to be addressing. They frequented lecturers on the evils of Israel toward the Palestinians and maybe attended demonstrations and the like, viewing themselves as participating in a social-justice initiative. One of the participants wrote me that in his belief the oppression of the Palestinian Arabs was the longest-lasting, most unjust and most maddening evil in the world since he was old enough to remember (he's around 70), and that what he was waiting for was a massive international intervention to destroy this unjust system. (To anchor those experiences of mine in time, the Arab Spring, or Awakening, had occurred and Syrian civil war had been raging for over a year.) What this book, Jews and Power, is about is the other side of that picture.
The book is divided into three parts. The first and the third parts are close to 80 pages each. The second is less than 20. The first part goes from biblical times up until the Enlightenment; the second goes from then until the Second World War and discusses the unexpected consequences of emancipation for the Jews, and the third focuses on Israel, the country.
Part One asserts Judaism originated as a political as well as a spiritual way but was divested of power after the Jewish Wars of the first and second century CE. Rome renamed Israel "Palestinia" for their storied enemies the Philistines, to break the ties of the Jews to the land. (The biblical Philistines were not today's Palestinian Arabs but themselves outlanders sometimes known as "the Sea People" from points west.) Subsequently the Jews were left to cope with powerlessness the best they could, which they did by making themselves indispensable to rulers wherever they found themselves, but, no matter how excellent they became, they were dependent on those rulers and on whether they happened to remain in power. Incidentally, when push came to shove, those rulers would sacrifice their Jews should it become politically expedient to do so. As powerless minority and designated "other," they were available for scapegoating and otherwise expendable. At times the protection of clergy and rulers proved no match for outpourings of populist hate.
I think the initial fate of the black population of New Orleans during/after Hurricane Katrina arguably represents an example of how a nation treats its designated other. In that case they were not targeted to release hostile tensions in society; they were treated as merely expendable.
After Constantine, Christianity had merged with political power. Ruth Wisse portrays Christianity as having become corrupted by power; becoming a state religion made them violate their founder's ethics.* Judaism, on the other hand, became corrupted by weakness. Although martyrdom had not originally been central to Judaism, the events of history had a distorting impact. Ruth Wisse is asserting that carrying out God's will requires staying alive to do it.
Judaism's take on martyrdom happened to be the subject of an article by James A. Diamond in the Summer, 2013 issue of Jewish Review of Books. He looked at applicable commentary and arrived at the same conclusion as Ruth Wisse.
However, this valorization of martyrdom was always inconsistent with mainstream Jewish theology....
R. Naftali Tzvi Yehuda Berlin, the dean of the famous yeshiva in Volozhin and one of the most prominent rabbinic personalities of the 19th century, once declared his preference for “worshipping God by fulfilling the commandments while I am still alive,” over dying for God. The name of God is sanctified when life is preserved, not when it is proclaimed great an instant before life is obliterated.
In my own words, for example, I'd rather not be arguing with Christians about whether "the suffering servant" phrase from Isaiah refers to the Jewish people or to Jesus, because that Christian view of suffering and the Messiah is not the goal. For me, suffering may be a byproduct of struggle but isn't the point.
If carrying out God's will involves staying alive it also involves power.
Part Two deals with the effects of emancipation. As a result of the new emphasis on the rights of man and the downplaying of Church power in favor of secular states, Jews got to become part of the citizenry, instead of being isolated in ghettos or, in Eastern Europe, the pale of settlement. And they wanted to be part. They wanted to contribute. What wasn't foreseen was that, since now power came, not from a ruler, but by popular vote for politicians, whatever worked to rally the masses would be the ticket. While, pre-emancipation, conservative forces in society aimed to keep Jews separate, post-emancipation, any political party might make use of antisemitism. When antisemitism resonated with the masses--often when there was economic pain--politicians could get elected on that basis. The very success of Jews striving to contribute to their new secular societies became examples of how "the Jews were taking over." In this book Ruth Wisse doesn't go deeply into why some Jews succeeded so well in their new societies. She uses an analogy of athletic prowess, the Jews having conditioned themselves by dealing with the forces arrayed against them over the centuries. From the antisemitic perspective Jews were alien (foreign) elements whose success represented unfair competition, leeches on society draining it dry and taking what should belong to the supposed ethnic natives, and in short, to blame for all ills. If they tried to defend themselves, that, too, was taken as revealing their illicit power. Powerless, Jews still were vulnerable to being sacrificed to assuage populist passions.
I read another book, Emancipation: How Liberating Europe's Jews from the Ghetto Led to Revolution and Renaissance, that I thought meant to make these points, but Ruth Wisse does so more clearly in Part Two of Jews and Power.
In Part Three she deals with Zionism and Israel. The impetus for the movement lay with the Dreyfus trial and the growth of antisemitic political movements. Theodor Herzl and others believed that the cause of antisemitism was that the Jews were a nation without a land and that if they did have one, the attitudes of the rest of the world toward Jews would normalize.
What is noteworthy here is the belief that something the Jews did or did not do is the cause of antisemitism. I remember coming across that belief in Out of Egypt: A Memoir, where some of the personalities would point to behavior of other Jews that they found unacceptable and say that those other Jews were the cause of antisemitism. And I have heard anti-Israel activists and ordinary liberal Jews alike say Israel is the cause of antisemitism, or, at least that it has only itself to blame for attitudes against it. Ruth Wisse' point is that antisemitism (or other forms of racism and hate) arises to meet a political need.
Hence, although one can do everything possible to live an exemplary life, that will not end the slurs, nor are deviations from perfection their cause, be they antisemitic or racist or whatever. (This is what Michelle Alexander means by contrasting a "Booker T. Washington" approach with a revolutionary approach in her book The New Jim Crow.)
Ruth Wisse gives a Sartre quote to the effect that if Jews didn't exist the antisemite would have had to invent them. What she does not say is that antisemites did--and do--invent antisemitism.
That claim might seem inconceivable to some people since it contradicts what they see before their very eyes. In that way it is like the notion that whiteness is an ideology, not a skin color, that I explored in a previous book review. Another example is the hoary belief, far from dead in America, that black people have a criminal nature that explains their treatment by society. I was a guest for five years with a liberal church that in their studies were at pains to dispel that racial illusion, while simultaneously instilling the belief in Israel as an evil entity that "explains" what happens to Israelis and Jews while justifying recommended approaches. There is a general movement to instill that viewpoint among receptive mainline American churches today. I am not talking about Jeremiah Wright's church, but about majority-white mainline churches. Of course, they, like my Unitarian friends, see it as social justice, their mantra being that "just criticizing Israel is not antisemitism." (Views of hate of and terrorism against America is a closely linked concept.)
In no way am I saying that most people in the anti-Israeli Left aren't sincere and well-intentioned. Most, like my Unitarian friend, truly see Israel (and Jews who support it) as a mean, evil bully and empathize with Palestinian suffering. What I am getting at is the disconnect between empathy, intentions, and consequences. Although the liberal Left are well aware of the manipulation of the Right by business interests, for example, they can't conceive that their own views could be less than objective or that their own actions could be reverberating in unintended ways.
All right; I've gotten off the track, as Ruth Wisse really doesn't deal that much with America and Christianity today; she's dealing with the Middle East. So I'll just say I have a hypothesis that, within Christianity, there is at least a tension between following Jesus and repudiating Jews, but further along the line away from traditional Christianity toward post-Christianity (cultural Christianity?), that tension can be lost, so that repudiation of the Jews can come to bear more and more weight as a cultural unifying force (that is, a belief necessary for political reasons). In traditional Christianity there is at least love.
I'm reminded of the approach of American liberals to the Israeli Left: it is not judged acceptable, even if they are standing in front of bulldozers. Israel must be condemned and repudiated. You can't love it. That's how I see repudiating Israel as having become the new loyalty oath, in that sense replacing the traditional Christian confession for the post-Christian Left.
Ruth Wisse asserts that anti-Israel ideology is the only force unifying the Arab countries of the Middle East. She says that's why they had to expel Egypt from the Arab League (I did not know that) when Sadat made the peace treaty with Israel that later resulted in his assassination. She says that the Palestinians are the only people with an entirely negative and derivative cultural identity† based on the role reversal by which Israel is victimizer and they themselves are the true victims. She says Palestinians are aware the Arab countries have rejected them for citizenship but still blame Israel. She says the other Arab countries keep them in limbo in that regard to capitalize on their suffering for political purposes--manipulating public opinion. She says that displaced persons from the other two societal paroxysms that temporally framed Israel/Palestine, have all been resettled. That is, the division of Korea into North and South and the division of India into India and Pakistan similarly led to great personal calamity and dispossession that is now resolved. She says people can choose to pity the Palestinians but that what that does is lock them into their current paralyzed victimhood. She says the Arab rulers, further, use anti-Israel and anti-Western attitudes to further their own power and avoid developing their own populations. She says that during their long period of exile in diaspora, Jews used everything they could to survive and develop themselves. She says that as soon as there was a chance they would have a country they went to work to develop infrastructure--not just roads and public facilities, you understand, but political and cultural and economic underpinnings.
She further disputes the oft-heard idea that Israel is a (or the) regional power. She says that is a rationale for accusing them of having become abusers of power. She points out that although Israel got a head start in defense that will be lost as the countries surrounding them inevitably catch up. She looks at the huge contrast in population and size.
I see all this not as a defense of all of Israel's actions but rather as demoting Israel from being the Antichrist and from being the locus of the (take your choice) first or second coming, to just another country. To see Israel as is often being done, as the scapegoat for all of civilization, requires a narrowing of the geographical and historical focus plus exclusion of inconvenient facts.
Nevertheless, the country of Israel is not devoid of power, so Ruth Wisse says it does have some use as an ally and isn't totally expendable. That's a change for Jews from their position over the last 2000 years. Still, they are in a terrible predicament. I thought this third section was the hardest to read. At first I couldn't understand. I thought maybe it was because her writing had an underlying current of despair. I have read two articles by her prior to reading this book and didn't notice any lack of clarity there. Finally, though, I did understand, at least at the level reflected in the present review.
One other point the author made about the fate of the Jews in WWII was shocking. She says that FDR's New Deal got called "Jew Deal." She says that societal forces wanting to keep the US out of WWII accused American Jews of trying to get Roosevelt involved in fighting their ("the Jews'") war (this being compared to current times, with isolationists accusing American Jews of trying to get the U.S. into war for Israel's sake). She says that, later, both Roosevelt and Churchill, albeit sympathetic, refrained from doing anything specific to help the Jews in Europe (e.g., bombing the railroad tracks) because they claimed the war effort could better help humanity in general by keeping the focus exclusively on Hitler. The Jews were powerless, of no use as an ally, hence were expendable and left to their fate. It is enough to slant one toward a "realist" political view (assuming I'm gleaning what that means), since, as the realists say, "morality" certainly had no impact.
Ruth Wisse says that, traditionally, in the case of antisemitism, Jews haven't spoken out to their tormentors, since those would often be the same people on whom they were dependent and whom they were trying to please. Of course, everybody argues about Israel now, but that seems to be sort of a proxy issue that we can butt heads over. Otherwise, in the public square we are supposed to keep up our approved "e pluribus unum" language, while in relative private we have our various movements to bring into reality our visions, some of which entail throwing "the enemy" into "the outer darkness." I'm not an organizer or a protestor. When I began to be aware of and hear all these sorts of things for the first time about six or seven years ago, I didn't know what to do. It's scary, and I would get angry. I thought it best to try to learn and become more articulate, although the latter sometimes isn't very socially acceptable.
Of note is that, although I have been using "antisemitism" in a general way to reflect conspiracy theories about and political targeting of Jews, Ruth Wisse is using the term in a more particular way. She spells it "anti-Semitism," using it specifically to refer to the political movements that arose in Europe, especially in the German-speaking countries, near the end of the 19th century. She uses "anti-Zionism" to refer to later developments around Israel, and she does some comparison and contrast of the two. I prefer Jerry Z. Muller's more mixed approach. Picture a sort of snowball rolling through history, accumulating the various versions of antisemitism, of which anti-Zionism is the most recent. Even though the anti-Israel movement's strategy is to speak only of Israel/Palestine, and not, for example, of Jews as controlling the economy, the other modes haven't disappeared; they are just not what works best publicly in the West in this day and age. Politically, it has to work. It has to be something that good, well-intentioned people will sign on to.
*I would like take the author's statement about Christianity's alleged corruption by power after Constantine as a simplification and defer to the hundreds of books that doubtless have been written on the subject.
†Since studying Karen L. King I'm alert to polemic; this particular construction raises a red flag. It suggests that Ruth Wisse is making victimization "heretical" to Judaism, assigning it to "the other" instead. See my review of What Is Gnosticism? for further discussion.
(Footnotes added July 22, 2014)
September 3, 2019
This is one of the BEST books out there on the subject of anti-Semitism (hatred of Jews or the Jewish State).
She takes us on a discussion from the loss of Jewish sovereignty in 70 CE, when Roman emperor Titus crushed the Jewish revolt against Roman rule in Israel, burning the Temple in Jerusalem and sending many Jews into Exile, up until the failure of the doomed Oslo Accords leading to the war of terror against the Israeli people launched by Yasser Arafat in 2000,
On note of hope and courage she notes that to her the re-establishment of Israel only three years after the destruction of European Jewry is an even more hopeful augury than the dove's appearance before Noah with an olive leaf after the flood. She rightly pours scorn on modern day would be Hitler, Iranian dictator Mahmoud Ahmadinejad
who branded Israel as ' a rotten dried tree that will eliminated by one storm', reminding us that Jews have lived to see the downfall of every Haman and Hitler.
In fact most likely Ahmadinejad is foretelling the fate of his own decayed society.
The basis of her essay is the dual discussion on Jewish survival and the realization that no other people developed a similar long-term culture of accommodation to defeat.
In response to Russian pogroms of 1881 one of the early modern Zionist thinkers Leon Pinkser issued a call for Jewish self-emancipation, arguing that exile had turned the Jews into a nation of zombies. Hebrew poet Haim Nahman Bialik rebuked has fellow Jews for passively allowing themselves to be slaughtered urging self-liberation for Jews to determine their own future.
Wisse points out how since ancient times the Jews have always been vulnerable to betrayal by the least satisfied people in their own, seeking revenge on their people for real and imagined slights. From the collaborators who worked with the Greeks and Romans during the occupation of Israel by their Empires, to the Jew-hating Jews oif today with their bottomless hatred of Israel and it's people, and their efforts to do Israel harm and encourage it's genocidal foes like Hamas, Hezbollah and the Iranian and Syrian regimes.
In a detailed study of the Diaspora, the author notes how
one of the most unfortunate developments in the exile was the loathsome moser (informer), the negative counterpart of the shtadlan (intercessor) who intercedes with the authorities who speak for the Jews to those in power. "The Jewish community was always hostage to it's unhappiest members who stood to gain by serving the powers that be."
On the other hand the persecution of the Jews into the 19th century helped to galvanize the Jewish people into a coherent national movement that would restore the Jews to sovereignty in their own ancient homeland.
Moses Leib Lilienblum, once a secular socialist, became a passionate Zionist as a result of the 19981-82 pogroms in Russia.
Similarly Theodore Herzl was a committed assimilationist before covering the Dreyfuss Affair in France in 1894, after which he became the father of modern day Zionism.
Wisse's study of how this Jew-hatred led to Jews becoming committed Zionists resonates with me.
The 2000 war of terror ('intifada') of 2000, accompanied by the massive growth of the vicious anti-Israel industry of the Muslim world and international left, who control the media, universities and United Nations, among other things, turned me into a committed Jew and passionate Zionist. Especially the violent and venomous international hate fest against Jews and Israel of 2001 in Durban, ironically in Orwellian fashion called the 'UN Conference Against Racism', and a campaign by Jewish mosers to outdo their gentile counterparts in hatred of Israel and demands for that country's destruction.
Part Three of this book is about the Jew's Return to Zion and the struggle of Israel to survive against an Arab world obsessed with her destruction. She illustrates how "Although European anti-Semites blamed Jews for their existing social crises such as poverty, unemployment and loss of spiritual direction, Arab leaders created the crisis for which they were blamed' in rejecting partition and refusing the resettlement of Palestinian refugees they deliberately sustained the refugee crisis because Israel could be charged for fake moral repsonsibility of the refugee crisis as long as the crisis could be prolonged.
Contrary to the image the world has been brainwashed with by the international left and Muslim power networks, the entire conflict has in reality revolved around Israeli efforts at accommodation against Arab aggression and expansionism.
Therefore when Golda Meir told Sadat that "We can forgive you for killing our sons, But we will never forgive you for making us kill yours" she was admitted an unhealthy attitude of ceaseless efforts at accommodation against a relentless aggressor , whose political traditions interpreted her confession as a weakness.
The author correctly tells us that she would have demonstrated greater understanding of her Arab adversary, as well as mutual decency. tolerance and realism of both sides (instead of all decency, tolerance and accommodation coming form the Israeli side as it has for the last 60 years) if she had told him "WE Jews are here to stay."
The Arabs Soviet tutors supplied the Arabs with far more potent ideological language than the right wing type anti-Semitic language used by Hitler's mufti, when they taught them to invert reality and accuse Israel of 'racism' and 'imperialism'.
The author explains how the Palestinians have built a national identity based PURELY on bottomless hatred of another people and obsessive determination to destroy them rather than any cultural traditions of their own.
Their language, culture and traditions are identical to that of other Arabs in the Middle East, unlike real national minorities like the Kurds and Maronites. Only hatred of Israel has been used to forge a national identity.
What if, the author asks if the Palestinians had concentrated on "how to 'improve education, health care, governance, trade and commerce, and public works- had they prepared to build their own society rather than destroying someone else's".
The author also does not spare condemnation of the perfidy of the United Nations when she points out that 'In the 1960s the Arab-Soviet bloc used opposition to Israel to take political control over the world organization for which America was footing the bill. Resolutions attacking Israel's "racism" and "discrimination" routinely divert attention away from their sponsors, who unlike Israel,institutionalize racism and discrimination (including against women) in their countries. Professional observers have buy now provided ample evidence of how the Arab war against Israel "debased the UN, sullied it's charter, perverted the meaning of human rights and ransacked international law and it's highest court".
It all boils down to the fact as the author tells us that a genuine chance of peace depend on how soon Israel is accorded the rightful place it has earned in the family of nations.
Violence continues for the same reason it took place in 1920 and before.
The refusal of the Arabs to accept the presence of the Jewish people in their ancient homeland.
And peace will only come when the Arabs and their backers realize once and for all that the Jews of Israel are there to stay.
She takes us on a discussion from the loss of Jewish sovereignty in 70 CE, when Roman emperor Titus crushed the Jewish revolt against Roman rule in Israel, burning the Temple in Jerusalem and sending many Jews into Exile, up until the failure of the doomed Oslo Accords leading to the war of terror against the Israeli people launched by Yasser Arafat in 2000,
On note of hope and courage she notes that to her the re-establishment of Israel only three years after the destruction of European Jewry is an even more hopeful augury than the dove's appearance before Noah with an olive leaf after the flood. She rightly pours scorn on modern day would be Hitler, Iranian dictator Mahmoud Ahmadinejad
who branded Israel as ' a rotten dried tree that will eliminated by one storm', reminding us that Jews have lived to see the downfall of every Haman and Hitler.
In fact most likely Ahmadinejad is foretelling the fate of his own decayed society.
The basis of her essay is the dual discussion on Jewish survival and the realization that no other people developed a similar long-term culture of accommodation to defeat.
In response to Russian pogroms of 1881 one of the early modern Zionist thinkers Leon Pinkser issued a call for Jewish self-emancipation, arguing that exile had turned the Jews into a nation of zombies. Hebrew poet Haim Nahman Bialik rebuked has fellow Jews for passively allowing themselves to be slaughtered urging self-liberation for Jews to determine their own future.
Wisse points out how since ancient times the Jews have always been vulnerable to betrayal by the least satisfied people in their own, seeking revenge on their people for real and imagined slights. From the collaborators who worked with the Greeks and Romans during the occupation of Israel by their Empires, to the Jew-hating Jews oif today with their bottomless hatred of Israel and it's people, and their efforts to do Israel harm and encourage it's genocidal foes like Hamas, Hezbollah and the Iranian and Syrian regimes.
In a detailed study of the Diaspora, the author notes how
one of the most unfortunate developments in the exile was the loathsome moser (informer), the negative counterpart of the shtadlan (intercessor) who intercedes with the authorities who speak for the Jews to those in power. "The Jewish community was always hostage to it's unhappiest members who stood to gain by serving the powers that be."
On the other hand the persecution of the Jews into the 19th century helped to galvanize the Jewish people into a coherent national movement that would restore the Jews to sovereignty in their own ancient homeland.
Moses Leib Lilienblum, once a secular socialist, became a passionate Zionist as a result of the 19981-82 pogroms in Russia.
Similarly Theodore Herzl was a committed assimilationist before covering the Dreyfuss Affair in France in 1894, after which he became the father of modern day Zionism.
Wisse's study of how this Jew-hatred led to Jews becoming committed Zionists resonates with me.
The 2000 war of terror ('intifada') of 2000, accompanied by the massive growth of the vicious anti-Israel industry of the Muslim world and international left, who control the media, universities and United Nations, among other things, turned me into a committed Jew and passionate Zionist. Especially the violent and venomous international hate fest against Jews and Israel of 2001 in Durban, ironically in Orwellian fashion called the 'UN Conference Against Racism', and a campaign by Jewish mosers to outdo their gentile counterparts in hatred of Israel and demands for that country's destruction.
Part Three of this book is about the Jew's Return to Zion and the struggle of Israel to survive against an Arab world obsessed with her destruction. She illustrates how "Although European anti-Semites blamed Jews for their existing social crises such as poverty, unemployment and loss of spiritual direction, Arab leaders created the crisis for which they were blamed' in rejecting partition and refusing the resettlement of Palestinian refugees they deliberately sustained the refugee crisis because Israel could be charged for fake moral repsonsibility of the refugee crisis as long as the crisis could be prolonged.
Contrary to the image the world has been brainwashed with by the international left and Muslim power networks, the entire conflict has in reality revolved around Israeli efforts at accommodation against Arab aggression and expansionism.
Therefore when Golda Meir told Sadat that "We can forgive you for killing our sons, But we will never forgive you for making us kill yours" she was admitted an unhealthy attitude of ceaseless efforts at accommodation against a relentless aggressor , whose political traditions interpreted her confession as a weakness.
The author correctly tells us that she would have demonstrated greater understanding of her Arab adversary, as well as mutual decency. tolerance and realism of both sides (instead of all decency, tolerance and accommodation coming form the Israeli side as it has for the last 60 years) if she had told him "WE Jews are here to stay."
The Arabs Soviet tutors supplied the Arabs with far more potent ideological language than the right wing type anti-Semitic language used by Hitler's mufti, when they taught them to invert reality and accuse Israel of 'racism' and 'imperialism'.
The author explains how the Palestinians have built a national identity based PURELY on bottomless hatred of another people and obsessive determination to destroy them rather than any cultural traditions of their own.
Their language, culture and traditions are identical to that of other Arabs in the Middle East, unlike real national minorities like the Kurds and Maronites. Only hatred of Israel has been used to forge a national identity.
What if, the author asks if the Palestinians had concentrated on "how to 'improve education, health care, governance, trade and commerce, and public works- had they prepared to build their own society rather than destroying someone else's".
The author also does not spare condemnation of the perfidy of the United Nations when she points out that 'In the 1960s the Arab-Soviet bloc used opposition to Israel to take political control over the world organization for which America was footing the bill. Resolutions attacking Israel's "racism" and "discrimination" routinely divert attention away from their sponsors, who unlike Israel,institutionalize racism and discrimination (including against women) in their countries. Professional observers have buy now provided ample evidence of how the Arab war against Israel "debased the UN, sullied it's charter, perverted the meaning of human rights and ransacked international law and it's highest court".
It all boils down to the fact as the author tells us that a genuine chance of peace depend on how soon Israel is accorded the rightful place it has earned in the family of nations.
Violence continues for the same reason it took place in 1920 and before.
The refusal of the Arabs to accept the presence of the Jewish people in their ancient homeland.
And peace will only come when the Arabs and their backers realize once and for all that the Jews of Israel are there to stay.
March 4, 2020
What begins as a fairly interesting look at the historical origins of anti-Semitism launches into an un-nuanced, simplistic, and biased defense of Israel which erases necessary complexity from the conflict.
April 19, 2014
Interesting subject but very dense, had difficult time getting passionate about this book, and really understanding what point the author was trying to make after the first chapter. Interesting though, just not the most exhilarating read.
May 2, 2021
This book offers both the historical and current-event context of the Jewish relationship to power. A thought-provoking book and a good addition to any Jewish/Judaism book collection.
January 2, 2010
Well-argued, but overstated in part. I'd have to re-read it (it's been more than a year) to say how she came out on the themes, and how she made her case. Just read Gershon Scholem's autobiography of his youth in Germany 1910's and 20's and realized how multitudinous and important these positions are and were.
December 24, 2017
One of the best books I’ve read about Jews so far. This is a fast and easy read that goes over how Jews were exploited for generations, how them having power over their community was consistently used for anti-semitic purposes to undercut them and then goes beautifully into how the anti-semitism became anti-Zionism. Amazing book, a must read for anyone curious about Jews and antisemitism.
February 18, 2008
The book does not fulfill the promise of its title. The subject is important and the Author’s facts unassailable. However, she fails to synthesize them into an overarching theory. Never confronts head-on the (very real) problem the Jews have exercising power.
August 14, 2022
I will begin by admitting that I am somewhat in love with Ruth Wisse… As an economist I couldn’t care less, but as a Jewish theorist and Yiddishist? Inject her into my veins please. I spent my last class on Yiddish literature in college defending her opinions on the role the language has in the modern world, taking much scorn by my classmates but happily becoming some kind of underground Zionist leader for those last few weeks of college. Try as you might, you can’t intimidate your fellow student’s into silence forever…
Anyways, this is a situation where her ideas are not organized well for a book. It felt like I was reading her notes after a bad dream. I don’t agree with her on everything, but you can’t not love someone who sticks to their guns so passionately about something you believe in. She’s a polemic and she knows it.
Not gonna lie, I’d pay a lot for a Finklestein vs. Wisse debate. It’d be fucking INSANE!!!
Anyways, this is a situation where her ideas are not organized well for a book. It felt like I was reading her notes after a bad dream. I don’t agree with her on everything, but you can’t not love someone who sticks to their guns so passionately about something you believe in. She’s a polemic and she knows it.
Not gonna lie, I’d pay a lot for a Finklestein vs. Wisse debate. It’d be fucking INSANE!!!
June 13, 2024
Zionist propaganda.
Ruth Wisse is a masterful hasbarist, with a one track mind: keep Israel safe, and convince everyone on the planet that white settlers like her actually belong there.
Wisse has a long history of racism, ethnocentrism and virulent anti-Palestinianism and has only one goal: launder Israel.
As expected, she injects the typical white feminists are 'victims' in the narrative, demonizing 'Arab' men.
Racist, ethnocentric drivel courtesy of yet another arrogant, entitled white woman.
Ruth Wisse is a masterful hasbarist, with a one track mind: keep Israel safe, and convince everyone on the planet that white settlers like her actually belong there.
Wisse has a long history of racism, ethnocentrism and virulent anti-Palestinianism and has only one goal: launder Israel.
As expected, she injects the typical white feminists are 'victims' in the narrative, demonizing 'Arab' men.
Racist, ethnocentric drivel courtesy of yet another arrogant, entitled white woman.
December 9, 2024
Jews have spent more time weak and dispersed than sovereign in their homeland. To survive, Wisse argues, they found strength in adversity. But strength that can’t offer security is pitiable. Worse yet, Wisse observes, it misfitted them for renewed sovereignty. Jews imagined that all would appreciate in the State of Israel what they developed through terrible hardship: an accommodating spirit and a need for everyone in the group to thrive. Accommodation, it turns out, looks like weakness, and many nations don’t want what’s best for their people and resent the example. Wisse’s book is a tightly argued case against naivety, against the belief that the power learned in powerlessness can substitute for real politics.
July 18, 2025
A sagacious and scrupulous analysis of the political (and thereby now military) power of the Jewish people. Comprehensive historical analysis, though focused on touchstone events to draw her argument.
What particularly resonated with me is the consistency of contradictory arguments against Jews in power - a nation blamed for its weaknesses, and admonished for its strengths and successes. Jew hatred is paradoxical - it always has been.
Compelling read. The final chapter had me feeling hopeful and optimistic.
What particularly resonated with me is the consistency of contradictory arguments against Jews in power - a nation blamed for its weaknesses, and admonished for its strengths and successes. Jew hatred is paradoxical - it always has been.
Compelling read. The final chapter had me feeling hopeful and optimistic.
February 9, 2023
After reading Ruth Wisse’s autobiography, I thought this would be a better, more interesting and more forceful book. It is, but most of it is repetition of history I know. A few things I hadn’t heard before. Her analysis in the last chapter was the best thing about the book though it didn’t require the first 90% as background. It’s encouraging to see that the book has found an audience among people who I wouldn’t expect to read it.
April 27, 2023
Incisive, brisk, and deeply insightful! Wisse takes the reader on a tour of Jewish history through the lens of power - who has it, what is it, and how it's used. Her grasp of a vast range of topics is impressive, as is her ability to cut to the heart of a matter and explain that clearly and decisively.
The later chapters could form the basis of an entire curriculum. An important, clear-eyed look at the current state of Jewish life.
The later chapters could form the basis of an entire curriculum. An important, clear-eyed look at the current state of Jewish life.
August 22, 2023
This is my bad for not looking up the author before hand but the author is quite racist and apathetic towards arabs which was incredibly disappointing as I was looking for a nuanced look at the Israeli-Palestinian conflict from both sides. I’m Jewish and therefore a strong believer in equal treatment for all as I believe all oppressed groups should strive for that for all too out of common interest at the very least and the blatant disinterest and complete disregard for any suffering on Palestines part and abuse of power on Israels was very underwhelming. I expect more from adults who should know better than to think such things are so black and white. Also finding out the author was against feminism was a shocker, just generally morals and ethics I can’t get behind.
October 9, 2023
This is a scholarly review of how Jews survived the millennia without power and then since the founding of the State of Israel, how they struggled with the power they now have. She has a lot of interest to say about Anti-Semitism. I found this book though a bit difficult to read, especially towards the end when I got lost in her arguments. In the end, she was a bit conservative for my taste. I don't think this book is for the lay reader.
December 5, 2023
A fascinating, important history and analysis of the Jewish people and homeland. Covers the Jewish exile from Israel during Roman rule through modern times. Highlights the constant struggle of Jews to fight the antisemitism that threatened to destroy them. This book couldn't be more relevant as we face the current terror and spiraling antisemitism. Rugh Wisse is brilliant.
May 19, 2021
Clear and important.
July 4, 2022
Wisse is one of the geniuses and clearest voices of our generation. She explains the horrible world that we Jews live in and the new Jew hate that came with the historically unimaginable creation of the modern Israel. Jew hate thrived when Jews were powerless and became scapegoats to powerful governments. Today Jew hate thrives on the same scapegoat mechanisms and Jews have not learned how to change the power relationship. Israel longs to be known as the gentle generous giant of the world but Islam, Christianity, the same old autocrats, American Lefties and the UN have refashioned Jew hate to new purposes.
July 17, 2013
a political/historical manifesto that's a little too conservative for my tastes
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