[Cz-L] Article in the Washington Post by Czernowitzer Ruth Wisse

Dear Czernowitzers,

This article might interest you:

> Are American Jews Too Powerful? Not Even Close.
>
> By Ruth Wisse
> Sunday, November 4, 2007; B03
>
> These days, it's becoming downright chic to hint forebodingly that America's
> Jews are just too powerful. But whether it's the political scientists John J.
> Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt or former president Jimmy Carter
> <http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/related/topic/Jimmy+Carter?tid=informline>
> , those who accuse modern Jews of having excessive clout are getting it
> precisely backward. In the real world, Jews have too little power and
> influence. They also have too little self-confidence about defending
> themselves.
>
> Consider a basic paradox. Even anti-Semites often give Jews credit for having
> exceptional intelligence. Self-congratulatory Web sites reckon that Jews, who
> make up about 0.2 percent of the world's population, have been awarded more
> than 160 Nobel Prizes. But if Jews are so smart, why do 22 Arab League
> <http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/related/topic/League+of+Arab+States?tid=inf
> ormline> countries account for a tenth of the Earth's land surface while the
> Israelis struggle to secure a country that is 1/19th the size of California
> <http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/related/topic/California?tid=informline> ?
> If Jews are so powerful, why does Israel
> <http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/related/topic/Israel?tid=informline>
> attract twice as many venture-capital investments as all of Europe
> <http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/related/topic/Europe?tid=informline> , even
> while it's the only one of the United Nations
> <http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/related/topic/United+Nations?tid=informline
> > ' 192 member states that has been charged with racism for the crime of its
> existence? How powerful is that?
>
> In fact, there's an excellent historical reason why Jewish intellectual
> achievement sits alongside political weakness. Simply put, Jewish achievement
> in other areas has come at the expense of political strength, and the strange
> relationship of Jews and power has made them history's favorite prey.
> Centuries of survival in other people's lands prevented Jews from achieving
> full acceptance -- and access to the levers of government. Some individual
> Jews may have lived large, but the Jewish people as a whole lived on
> sufferance, afraid to antagonize those from whom they sought tolerance.
>
> These questions mean a lot to me. I'm often asked how I, a teacher of Yiddish
> literature, came to write about politics. But remember that the Yiddish
> language, developed by European Jews over almost a thousand years, was
> practically erased along with them in a mere six, 1939-45. So studying Yiddish
> literature, almost by definition, concentrates the mind on Jewish political
> disabilities.
>
> When Jerusalem
> <http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/related/topic/Jerusalem?tid=informline> was
> crushed by Rome
> <http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/related/topic/Rome?tid=informline> in the
> year 70 -- so brutally that, according to the historian Josephus, "no one
> visiting the spot would believe it had once been inhabited" -- some Jews
> stayed on, but the vast majority made their homes in foreign lands. For more
> than 18 centuries, Jews survived as a nation without three basic staples of
> nationhood: land, central government and independent means of self-defense.
>
> Instead, Jews turned to strategies of accommodation. They provided goods and
> services to their gentile neighbors in return for being allowed to stay in the
> country. They became money-lenders, bankers, minters, craftsmen, midwives --
> trades that gentiles would let them perform and that allowed Jews to observe
> their calendar, customs and religious laws. But they had no independent way to
> protect their achievements.
>
> Unlike their Christian and Muslim overlords, Jews had good reasons to avoid
> irking those from whom they sought acceptance. The German poet Heinrich Heine,
> who called conversion to Christianity his "ticket of admission" to European
> culture, likened Jews to a prince whom "black magic" had transformed into a
> dog: "All week long he goes on scraping/Through life's excrement and
> sweepings/To the mockery of jeers of street boys." Only on Friday evenings,
> while ushering the Sabbath into his own home, does the dog resume its human
> shape. Heine saw that the humiliation of the Jews was offset by a moral
> serenity, and that their moral serenity was offset by acute political
> vulnerability.
>
> The creation of the state of Israel in May 1948, after the carnage of the
> Holocaust, was supposed to change all this. But the newly formed Arab League
> made opposition to Israel the only common goal of its otherwise quarrelsome
> membership. The new United Nations, tribune of emerging post-colonial nations,
> did not protect Israel from assault, and over time the world body became a
> party to the Arab League's war against Jewish statehood.
>
> Of course, Israel now had an army, and a formidable one at that. But the
> Israel Defense Forces
> <http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/related/topic/Israeli+Defense+Forces?tid=in
> formline> did not change the Jews' existential condition as a minority;
> Israel was now a minority among the nations, contending with Arab states that
> sought to dominate or destroy it. Israel still lived by strategies of
> accommodation, trying to supply its neighborhood with useful services and
> goods such as medical, agricultural and technological know-how. In the 1990s,
> utopians such as Shimon Peres
> <http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/related/topic/Shimon+Peres?tid=informline>
> , now Israel's president, hailed a "new Middle East
> <http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/related/topic/Middle+East?tid=informline> "
> of economic and political cooperation. When Peres and Israel's late prime
> minister Yitzhak Rabin
> <http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/related/topic/Yitzhak+Rabin?tid=informline>
> installed Yasser Arafat
> <http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/related/topic/Yasser+Arafat?tid=informline>
> as the head of a Palestinian proto-state, they began another doomed Jewish
> political experiment -- making Israel, as best I can figure, the first country
> in the world ever to arm its enemy in hopes of gaining security.
>
> What about American Jewry? Mearsheimer and Walt allege that a Jewish cabal
> dictates U.S. policy in the Middle East, helping Israeli interests and hurting
> U.S. ones. So have American Jews really begun to mobilize effectively to
> protect Israel, or are people again overstating Jewish power and its supposed
> dangers?
>
> Consider the halls of ivy where, if anywhere, the intellectual firepower of
> Jews might be expected to be on display in defense of Jewish interests. At
> Columbia University
> <http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/related/topic/Columbia+University?tid=infor
> mline> , the late Edward Said used his authority as a teacher of comparative
> literature to apologize for Palestinian terrorism and condone Arab violence
> against Israel, including, in one instance, by personal example. (In 2000, a
> photographer for a French news agency snapped him in southern Lebanon
> <http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/related/topic/Lebanon?tid=informline>
> tossing a rock toward an Israeli position.) Much of the Jewish professoriat
> looked the other way or signed his petitions.
>
> Elsewhere in the academy, Jewish professors themselves lead the anti-Israel
> barrage. In fact, Mearsheimer and Walt expected Jewish organizations to
> sponsor their talks and complained of "censorship" when the groups did not.
> Clearly, there is nothing quite as fun -- or as lucrative -- as baiting Jews.
>
> This is not the whole story, though. American Jews have learned from
> experience, and the United States has encouraged their maturation. During the
> 1970s and '80s, American Jews who were inspired by the biblical imperative to
> "redeem the captive" helped free their fellow Jews under Soviet rule. The
> Soviet Jewry movement gained traction in part because its goals coincided with
> Washington's Cold War strategy of encouraging communism to collapse from
> within.
>
> Likewise, in the post-9/11 fight against terrorism, American Jews can draw
> confidence from another intersection of interests, this time between Israeli
> and U.S. self-defense. The Arab war against Israel and radical Islam's war
> against the United States are in almost perfect alignment, which means that
> resistance to one supports resistance to the other. "We are all Jews now,"
> former CIA
> <http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/related/topic/Central+Intelligence+Agency?t
> id=informline> director R. James Woolsey Jr. said after the September 2001
> attacks. "We should all reflect upon the historic reality that when
> anti-Semitism raises its head, the rest of us, unless we are willing to live
> with a foot on our necks, will be the next targets." Since the days of
> Pharaoh, Jews have functioned as a lodestar of religious and political
> freedom: The Jews' attackers oppose such liberties, and their defenders
> promote them. The attackers have included Adolf Hitler
> <http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/related/topic/Adolf+Hitler?tid=informline>
> and Joseph Stalin
> <http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/related/topic/Joseph+Stalin?tid=informline>
> , extreme nationalist parties from France
> <http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/related/topic/France?tid=informline> to
> Poland <http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/related/topic/Poland?tid=informline>
> , Arab autocrats trying to hold onto power and Islamist challengers trying to
> seize it. This rule of thumb has less to do with Jewish actions than with
> those who deal in anti-Jewish politics. A small people whose foes are prone to
> hugely inflate their image, Jews make a handy scapegoat for dictators. In its
> August meetings, according to the Hudson Institute
> <http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/related/topic/Hudson+Institute?tid=informli
> ne> , the "revamped" U.N. Human Rights Council directed three-quarters of its
> indictments of individual states against Israel -- and 2 percent against the
> thuggish regime running Burma
> <http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/related/topic/Myanmar?tid=informline> .
>
> I understand why some Jews and Israelis try to escape this assault through
> assimilation or denial, or even by joining their assailants. It's seductive to
> hope that by accommodating our enemies, we will be allowed to live in peace.
> But the strategy of accommodation that historically turned Jews into a no-fail
> target is the course least likely to stop ongoing acts of aggression against
> them. Indeed, anti-Jewish politics will end only when those who practice it
> accept the democratic values of religious pluralism and political choice -- or
> are forced to pay a high enough price for flouting them.
>
> ruthwisse_at_yahoo.com
>
> Ruth Wisse is a professor of Yiddish and
> comparative literature at Harvard

> Her latest book is "Jews and Power."
>
>
 
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
This moderated discussion group is for information exchange on the subject of
Czernowitz and Sadagora Jewish History and Genealogy. Messages sent to the
 group are archived at <http://czernowitz.ehpes.com>. Please post in "Plain
 Text" if possible (help available at:
<http://www.jewishgen.org/InfoFiles/PlainText.html>).

To remove your address from this e-list follow the directions at
http://www.cit.cornell.edu/computer/elist/lyris/leave.html

To receive assistance for this e-list send an e-mail message to:
owner-Czernowitz-L_at_list.cornell.edu
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Received on 2007-11-05 15:09:31