Ruth Wisse

Ruth R. Wisse is a Harvard University professor, where she is the Martin Peretz professor of Yiddish, and professor of comparative literature. Raised in Montreal, she was the first professor to introduce courses in Yiddish literature at McGill University, where she helped found the Jewish Studies Department. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts (more bio here).

In her new book, Jews And Power Wisse questions the way the strategies of the Diaspora continue to drive the Jewish state. In this provocative book, Wisse argues that "in displaying the resilience necessary to survive in exile, the Jews left too much to God. Not burdened by the weight of a military, they believed they could pursue their mission as a 'light unto the nations' on a purely moral plane. Wisse demonstrates how their political weakness increased Jewish vulnerability to scapegoating and violence."

This book, wrote Ruth Andrew Ellenson in the LAT "will cause liberals to question their self-consciousness about Israel, since Wisse's argument about Jewish apologism challenges liberal ideas of victimhood. For conservatives, the book offers an intellectual understanding of what otherwise might seem to be only tribalistic loyalties."

We will discuss the book and its conclusions. Readers can send questions to rosnersdomain@haaretz.co.il.


Dear Ruth Wisse,

Your work is wonderful to read. You have put something I have always
felt but have been unable to articulate into words. I am wondering
whether you would have anything to say about how in the light of your
thesis, israel could proceed at the present time on a practical level.

Janet Weinglass
Croton on Hudson, NY

To Janet Weinglass,

I try to say the obvious, and am very glad that you think I've done so.
What could it mean to proceed "on a practical level?" Israel would have to acknowledge and to make others acknowledge that the Arab League sealed its doom when it refused to accept the living presence of the Jews' rightful country; that Arab societies will keep spiraling into suicidal self-destruction unless they stop focusing on Israel and begin focusing on themselves.

Israelis are understandably discouraged after sixty years of political siege, wars, terrorism, economic boycott, and negative propaganda. They may have no incentive for counter-aggression because they want acceptance from the very people who attack them. The most important thing Israelis can do is to remain morally confident and to remind others that they are the plaintiffs, not the defendants, in the international arena. They are the ones being denied their country, they are the ones under perpetual assault. They have to demand their due from Arab and Muslim societies as much for their enemies' sake as for their own: respect for the national aspirations of the Jewish people, an end to boycott and aggression, trustworthy diplomatic exchanges, fulfillment of the terms of treaties, and a reorientation of Arab culture towards tolerance and cooperation. These demands may not be met right away, but they don?t stand a chance of ever being met unless they are voiced, repeatedly and insistently, again and again and again and again.

Israelis have shown incredible courage, patience, and decency. The Nobel Prize for Peace belongs almost annually to the IDF, perhaps (if facts become known) never more so than in 2007. Israelis certainly did not choose to be the fighting front line of the democratic world and would do almost anything to escape the role in which they have been cast. But no more than Jews of past generations have they been given the choice by their enemies. Israelis should expect Jews and good people everywhere to help them shoulder the responsibility of resisting Arab aggression in deed and word.

Dear Shmuel,

I have this question for Professor Wisse.

In March of last year you opined that your Harvard colleague Stephen Walt and his co-author John Mearsheimer had written "an essay with scholarship so inferior that it must, in all good conscience, be removed from circulation." Is this still your opinion? Do you think that Mearsheimer and Walt's new book, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy should also be banned?

Ira Glunts


To Ira Glunts,

Banned? I wrote that self-respect would have required Professors Walt and Mearsheimer and their schools to remove the paper from circulation. Instead, they were offered an exceptionally lucrative book contract. This is a free country, with free speech. How did you get from my fervent request to "banned?"

Anti-Semitism, anti-Zionism, everything is allowed in America. Since I don't believe in the imposition of laws against hate speech, I think people who value freedom, justice, tolerance, and truth must be vigilant and object to its every manifestation. The politics of blaming Jews is always false and dangerous to the society that resorts to it. Walt and Mearsheimer's thesis is dangerous and false: Not the Israel Lobby has brought about a change in American foreign policy, but the "Anti-Israel Lobby," including Arab use of the oil weapon, the export of violent Islamism, and Arab policies that are anti-American to the same degree that they are anti-Israel. The professors cannot convince Americans to invest their trust in the Arab League, so instead they cast suspicion on the "powerful" Jews. Their thesis undermines trust in American democracy by attributing its decisions to some undefined cabal. Bad ideas should not be allowed to drive out the good. Allowing free speech does not require encouraging injurious speech.

Referring to your previous response, could you please clarify for me how it can be ascertained with certainty from the question that the questioner is "a racist"? I'm really not following the steps involved, whatever the truths of either party's assumptions.

Best Regards,
David Gottlieb
Yardley , PA USA

Thanks for your request for clarification. Racism is the belief that one people is intrinsically inferior or superior to another. Much of the Arab world believes that Jews are intrinsically inferior to Muslims and Arabs. According to this supremacist racism, Arabs are entitled to twenty-two countries, covering one-tenth of the land mass of the globe, while Jews are entitled to not even one.

Jewish racism is its flip side, teaching that Israelis are responsible for Arab misery. This liberal racism believes that if Arabs have autocratic or despotic forms of government, self-destructive and aggressive patterns of behavior, traditions of male domination, including honor killings, that at odds with the concept of individual rights, and a political culture of scapegoating that prevents the emergence of mature self-government¬why, then, it must be the fault of their Jewish neighbors and the responsibility of those Jewish neighbors to "cure."

Liberal racism in America was practiced by Whites who believed that former Black slaves were so inherently damaged that their anti-social behavior had to be indulged and excused. In the name of "conscience" and "kindness" they encouraged in others violent forms of conduct they would never have tolerated in themselves or their children. Israeli self-blame for what the Arabs have done to themselves is a similar, equally damaging form of contempt. If my correspondent had a shred of respect for Arabs, he would expect of them the same standards of restraint and accountability he demands of Jews.

Dear Ruth Wisse,

As a professor of Yiddish, a language I presume you love, how can you defend Zionist ideology, when that same ideology despises the Yiddish language and culture as something associated with the shtetl, the 'weak' diasporic Jew? No one has made more strenuous efforts to destroy the Yiddish language, its literature, its songs and its newspaper output than Ben Gurion. Yiddish and Zionist Israel are sworn enemies. Do you have a masochist streak?
Sincerely yours,

Ben Alofs

I really suggest you read the section of my book that discusses the Jewish relation to language. This quick summary does not do it justice:

Jews created many languages in their long history, of which Yiddish was indeed the most richly developed. Creating, adopting, and adapting languages was part of the Jewish strategy of adjustment to place after place. When Jews determined to reclaim their homeland at a time of emerging nation states, they knew they would have to use the only language that united all Jews in time and space. Yiddish was not the language of Iraqi Jews, Ladino was not the language of Lithuanian Jews, German was not the language of Ukrainian Jews, and Temani Hebrew was not the language of anyone but Yemenite Jews. The adoption of Hebrew could not be prevented by Herzl¬who would have preferred German¬or dictated by Ben Gurion, much as he might have tried. Language cannot be successfully imposed by fiat, and since when would Jews have submitted to orders from a fellow Jew? The largely spontaneous reclamation of living Hebrew was one of the most remarkable features of the rise of modern Israel. No other nation has ever performed such a feat.

Mr. Alofs wants to make an idol of a language, Yiddish - but idolatry is forbidden to Jews in every form.

Dear Ruth,

Another one from a reader: The idea, in your book, that Ben Gurion desired to live peacefully with his Palestinian neighbors is refuted by his own designed Plan Dalet, the ethnic cleansing of Palestine which violently, systematically disposed over 750,000 civilians. Could you address this and something your book, disingenuously, ignores Israel's, despicable, treatment of the Palestinians today. You must know the Palestinian people endure daily incursions by the IDF, extrajudicial executions, arbitrary arrests, torture, interminable imprisonments, house demolitions, humiliation at hundreds of checkpoints, economic strangulation, living with a bombed out infrastructure and the continual theft of their land.


My correspondent and I consult a different history, demography, and map. Mine is objectively verifiable from publicly available facts and figures. Unlike him or her, I am not a racist: I hold Arabs responsible for their own miseries. I believe that Arabs determine their own fate (alas, their autocratic rulers more than their subjects). Unfortunately, they seal their doom when they organize their politics against Israel instead of accepting the partition of Palestine and getting on with their lives. Were the demographics reversed, 1.1 billion Jews might be held responsible for the welfare of one besieged polity in the Middle East. As it is, I blame Arab and Muslim leaders for the war they prosecute against the Jewish state, and for all the consequent demoralization their people endure.

Israel's only offense against the Palestinians was to have imposed Yasser Arafat as their overseer. That Israel did this in concert with Arab demands does not make the act any less despicable. Arafat was then the world?s leading terrorist, and there was no doubt that he would treat his subjects only marginally less ruthlessly than he treated Jews and Israelis. Palestinians were once the most accomplished people in the Middle East. Otherwise, not the Jews and Israel, but a politics of enmity against them has led to precipitous Palestinian decline.


Dear Ruth,

Questions from readers are already coming in, and the first one I picked is from Shalom Freedman in Jerusalem:

As a strong supporter of Israel how do you explain the whole business of much of the Israeli elite, including a good share of the editorial staff of the newspaper you are being interviewed by, adopting the narrative of its enemies? How do you explain that is an abject abnegation of political responsibility and power on the part of those elites?

Best

Rosner

There is no simple answer to this important question. As a political minority committed to living among other nations, Jews developed a strategy of accommodation. They had to adapt to local conditions, earn their living by supplying whatever was in demand, and be of enough use to local rulers to win their protection. They did all this in order to maintain their own way of life ? you might call it socio-economic and political adaptation for the sake of religious and cultural autonomy.

Jews today enjoy much fuller autonomy in the Land of Israel than they did in the Diaspora, governing themselves, developing their own economy, and providing their own defense. But, politically, they are still subject to acceptance or rejection by their neighbors, with all that implies. The Arab war against Israel is one of the longest, most varied, and most lop-sided wars in history.

Jews have no incentive to attack those from whom they crave acceptance. They fight militarily, but many of them tire, and would rather pretend that they have no enemies.

Jewish history is full of converts, informers, sell-outs of every type?and how could it be otherwise, since it has been, in the words of Isaiah Berlin, ?an unbroken struggle against greater odds than any other human community has ever had to contend with.? Parts of the Israeli intelligentsia claims to feel sorry for the Palestinians. In fact, they feel sorry for themselves for having to stand up to vicious, ongoing aggression. If they respected Arabs, they would require of them the same standards of tolerance they require of themselves. They are disappointed in Zionism for not having erased evil from the earth, and they don?t want to be the ones to have to confront it.

I agree that the Israeli intelligentsia is the most disappointing part of the Jewish people, not in their capacity as soldiers, but asintellectuals?precisely where it counts. The citizenry, however, so farprovides the mettle that the intellectuals lack.


Dear Ruth,

I'll start with the most basic question, as to give our readers some sense of what your book is all about.

In the book, you're making an argument concerning the unique political life of the Jewish people, something you trace back to the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem. You claim that this event is still relevant if one wants to understand the decisions made by Jewish (and mostly Israeli) leaders today.

Can you please sum up for the readers in a short manner, what is the inherent flaw that you see in the political ways of the Jews.

Best,
Rosner

I see no "inherent flaw" in the political strategy of the Jews. Quite the opposite. My book describes how the Jews were able to rebound from their catastrophic defeat at the hands of the Romans almost 2,000 years ago, and to flourish as a nation without three staples of nationhood - without their land, without a central government, or independent means of self-defense. Certain features of the Jewish way of life, including a constitutional culture, made it possible for Jews to adjust to different languages, cultures and societies. I suggest that Jews succeeded wherever and for as long as they were allowed to do so. Their "political experiment" of surviving in exile was an unquestionable success.

But here's the rub: Jews had no way of protecting whatever they acquired or accomplished. Wherever they settled, Jews needed the protection of the ruler, which was granted only as long as he found it convenient. The more power Jews acquired, the more dependent they became on those who guaranteed their safety. Jews accepted this arrangement because they drew their ultimate assurance of protection from God. They prided themselves on being indestructible, since a remnant always bounced back from catastrophe.

Meanwhile, the nations among whom they lived came to the opposite conclusion that Jews were easy prey because they lacked the powers of self-defense. Jews became a "no-fail" target - easy to destroy at no political cost. Jews had no incentive for counter-aggression because they sought acceptance from the very people who wished to destroy them.

By the modern period of emerging nation states, some Jews realized that they would have to normalize their political situation by reclaiming their land with a central government and independent means of self-defense.

Establishing the third Jewish commonwealth was the most difficult project the Jewish people had ever undertaken, and its realization in the same decade as the Holocaust is an achievement of the kind the Bible would have called "miraculous."

But Arab rulers opposed the creation of Israel as no country had ever been opposed before. Given the preposterous imbalance between the Arab-Muslim world on one side and the shrunken Jewish people on the other, the Arabs were certain they could drive the Jews into the sea. Arab and Muslim rulers opposed Israel not only militarily, but ideologically, as the outpost of Western influence, and turned Israel into the excuse for Arab failure and "backwardness."

My book points out the ways in which anti-Zionism goes beyond anti-Semitism in its determination, geographic reach, political power, and media effectiveness.

Truly spectacular as it was, the Jews' return to Israel did not change their politics of accommodation, since they were still a tiny, visible, and successful minority in the midst of authoritarian nations. Even as the Arab League demonized Israel and worked to destroy it, the Jews dreamed of becoming the same helpful "middleman-minority" they had always been.

Many Israelis and Jews find Arab enmity so painful that they deny its ferocity, or try to find some correctible fault in themselves that could win Arab acceptance. This misplaced blame for problems they cannot solve is the flaw in Jewish politics. Not the Jews, but the anti-Jews, not Zionism, but anti-Zionism has been the scourge of the modern world.

Israel cannot reduce those noxious ideologies except through confident resistance in word and deed that lasts until its Arab neighbors begin to concentrate on their own improvement.