Beyond Accommodation: The Necessary Contradictions of Power

By SANFORD PINSKER

JEWS AND POWER
By Ruth R. Wisse
231 pages. Schocken Books. $19.95.

Jews and Power is part of “Jewish Encounters, ” a series of book-length ruminations edited by Jonathan Rosen. What's truly excellent about the first eight volumes (18 more are in the works) is the seamless fit of writer and subject. Thus, the poet Robert Pinsky writes about David, the novelist Rebecca Goldstein writes about Spinoza, and Ruth Wisse writes about the need for Jews to rethink their attitude toward power. The downside of the series, especially for Wisse, is that she is forced to fit her historical survey of Jewish powerlessness into short chapters that beg for greater detail and elaboration. I point this out not as a criticism but rather because Jews and Power is one of the few books that readers will wish was longer.

Wisse is a passionate defender of Israel at a time when far too many dinner parties on New York’s Upper East Side are filled with Israel-bashing conversation and far too many Jewish intellectuals on the Upper West Side make sure that their Leftist bone fides contain appropriate sympathy for “oppressed” Palestinians as well as for those who regard Israel as a “criminal state.” Such liberals find it easy, even incumbent, to support any noble cause under the sun—except, of course, those central to Jewish interest.

Small wonder that Wisse means to make a case for Israel by focusing on the necessary, always complicated, relationship between politics and power. The writer Johanna Kaplan calls Wisse “our Joan of Arc” because, more than any other essayist about the Middle East, she combines passionate intelligence with fearless candor.

Wisse is especially valuable when she notes the conditions that swirled around, and ultimately destroyed, much of European Jewry, and then contrasts them to the contemporary Middle East. In the Warsaw of autumn, l939, a young boy was being harassed by its Nazi occupiers —this at a time when the Germans had captured the city but before they walled in the Jewish ghetto. The boy’s mother came out from the courtyard, picked up the bruised little boy, fixed his cap on his head, and said, “ Come inside the courtyard and za a mentsh.” Za a mentsh, which Wisse, a renowned Yiddishist, defines as acting like “what a human being ought to be,” was the very cornerstone of mentshlekhkayt, the Yiddish world’s commitment to human decency and the source of its vivid culture.

It was important that the mother school her son in traditional Yiddish values lest he adopt those of the soldiers who beat him, but what that mother, and the other Jews of Warsaw, did not, could not know was that a horrible death awaited them all. Israelis live in a very different world, surrounded by enemies who make no bones about hoping to drive them into the sea and to crush the Zionist dream. Let me hasten to add that Wisse is not only respectful of the mother and the wish that her son become a mentsh rather than a mugger, but nostalgia for the Yiddish world she teaches about at Harvard does not blind her to the realities that survival in the Middle East requires.

I have long believed that a good deal of garden variety anti-Semitism would disappear if only Western Jews would commit themselves to failure rather than to success. Apparently the late I.B. Singer would agree with me because I remember when he learned that Eudora Welty, the great Southern writer, had won a literary prize for which he had been nominated. “Good,” he said, adding that “It’s not so good when Jewish writers win too many prizes.” I hasten to add that he did not think this way about the Nobel Prize which he coveted and thought he’d never win after the award went to S.Y. Agnon.

Unfortunately, anti-Semitism has many irrational faces, only one of which sees the Jews as too successful, too pushy, too powerful. The underside of the coin sees the Jews as weak, pathetic, and parasitical. People who hate the Jews will always find reasons to hate the Jews.

The new anti-Semitism differs from its older counterpart because it is focused almost exclusively on Israel and slurs that can be easily found on Arabic websites now emanate from the mouths of heads of state such as Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad: his call, in 2005, that Israel be “wiped off the map” represents a widely wide view that Zionist visionaries such as Theodor Herzl:

Unable to see themselves through the eyes of their enemies, they [the early Zionists] could not fathom that their utility as a political target rather than their actions defined their role in the politics of their opponents. The animus against them was not directed to any correctable attribute or rectifiable lapses.

Indeed, Wisse goes on to disabuse the notion that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is merely a limited squabble; rather, it is ground zero of a potential global struggle between millions of Muslims against a tiny handful of Jews. In such a world it is well to remember the Warsaw mother and to remember the core human values nearest to her heart but it is also incumbent that Jews, especially those living in Israel, remain firm.

Those who have followed Wisse’s articles in Commentary magazine know that she is suspicious of the Oslo Accords and positively apoplectic about Peace Now. But Wisse does not write about Jews, power , and Israel from the distance, and safety, of the Diaspora. She and her brother, David Roskies, a highly regarded literature professor at the Jewish Theological Seminary, jointly own a home in Jerusalem and each spend a portion of the year there.

Ruth Wisse says that all of her life went into the writing of Jews and Power. It is a reading of Jewish history that is honest, unsparing, and perhaps above all else, disturbing.