Product Description
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.
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 Jews and Power
Fascinated by Wisse's point of view. She is an excellent writer, whose very clear style makes the reading of it very comfortable.
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Look at history to understand today's culture war ( wallachfamily )
The Jews are a unique people. No other people in the history of the world have been quite like them. Every other nation, after it's been conquered, and even dispersed to the four winds of the globe, has disappeared - most often because they assimilated into the societies which were victorious over them. The Jews lost their country and were dispersed all over the world and yet, after almost 2000 years, they are not only still identifiable as a separate people, but have gone back to reclaim their ancestral lands and reconstituted the country of Israel. This is even more surprising when one considers how small of a people the Jews really are.
This book asks the questions of why that historical anomaly occurred and what made the Jews so special.
The answers provided by Ruth Wisse are very interesting and combined led me to give this book 5 stars. First, Ms. Wisse points out that the Jews believe in the ultimate power of god as being the King of Kings. That meant that God is the ultimate ruler who will wreak vengeance on the enemies of the Jews if that vengeance is deserved. Jews do not have to revere their local rulers - they revere God. In any land they find themselves, and regardless of the political situation there at the time, the Jews adapt and find ways to make themselves useful so as to earn the right to remain. So, they give local tribute to the temporal power while leaving to God the business of taking revenge and playing out the relative merits of one society over another.
That adaptability and the liberal and democratic traditions that grew along with it are the single and strongest characteristics of the Jewish people and are what allowed them to survive for so many centuries while every other nation and ethnic group persecuted and murdered them.
Ms. Wisse points out the differences between the main monotheistic religions in showing how Christianity - which started out as a Jewish sect - got subverted by power and the church and the state joined forces. Islam is a religion that does not distinguish between the state and God and views the ruler as the ultimate arbiter. So, in essence, Jews and Moslems grow up with completely opposite points of view and completely opposite ways of acting and reacting to events.
In terms of helping the rest of humanity move forward, the Jews are the most evolved group and were successful throughout history because their special adaptability and capabilities were needed throughout the centuries and throughout the world. As long as Christian societies were stuck in feudal or monarchical forms, the local rulers needed and encouraged the Jews to stick around to provide their special talents ... and become the occasional victims of violence as a tool of the state. The Jewish "invitation" throughout Europe ended in the mid 19th and 20th centuries as European societies started evolving away from the old political organization and became more democratic. The problem for the Jews was that such a change produced huge disruptions in society who could no longer count on things being the same that they were - the Jews, being the most adaptable, quickly found ways to profit from these changes while the rest of those societies found that the despised Jews were more successful. This led to the pogroms and rise of anti-semitism that poisoned so much of the history of those two centuries in Europe. All of this culminated, of course, in the rise of Nazism and the Holocaust.
The strange thing was that the Jews started to return to Israel at that precise moment in time. The land of Israel was closed to them by the politics of Britain at the time of most need, but still, the country of Israel was born in 1948 in its ancestral home and currently flourishes as one of the most advanced, liberal, and democratic nations of the world - probably second only to the United States in all those measures.
The Arabs and Moslems are still caught up in the feudal and tribal culture that has held them captive since the seventh century. They have not made the same progress that the Christians have made as a society and this clash between a vibrant, liberal, and democratic culture and an anti-democratic, stagnant, and regressive culture is leading to the wars seen since 1948. These are wars were Israel is on the front lines of the culture war that will either end with the victory of liberalism and a move forward for all of humanity - or a descent to the dark ages of yore. Clearly this is a war that all civilized beings should encourage Israel to win and reading this book will lead you - as it did me - to understand its deeper implications.
While the book is relatively short at 200 small pages, I believe it will have an indelible impact on those who read it carefully. It is not a difficult read and I managed to devour it in about three nights. I highly recommend this book to understand the culture clash we are engaged in and as a summary of what brought Israel and the U.S. together as such strong allies and partners.
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Jews and Power ( beaconresearch )
Gave me an unexpected and refreshing perspective on the history of the Jewish people. They have much to be proud of, I learned, particularly in their need to excel without armies, national power, or centralized wealth and influence in the centuries before establishment of the present State of Israil. The perspective is especially interesting in considering the current conflict with Palestinians in the Middle East.
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 Good analysis of Diaspora politics; bad analysis of Arab politics ( tysoe5 )
As a book that seeks to begin a debate about Jews' ambiguous relationship to (and even more ambiguous feelings about) political power, this book works quite well. It works far less well, however, when Ruth Wisse strays into an analysis of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Here's where the book works. Wisse traces the Jewish communities' Diaspora politics of accommodation which resulted in highly flexible and democratic communities whose first instinct was to see whether there was anything that the community could have done or could do better in the existing circumstances and a desire to please others at the community's own expense. Wisse also does a good job of pointing out the spiritual facet of that politics which made the Jewish communities reluctant to assume political or military power and, in turn, made a fighting force the last institution the Jews developed under the Mandate. (In this context, it would have been interesting to see Ruth Wisse comment on whether this political tradition--which put so much emphasis on not doing wrong as opposed to risking doing wrong in the name of the community--had anything to do with the fact that, Ben Zakkai, a pacifist was instrumental in launching Diaspora politics.)
The book breaks down however in Wisse's analysis of anti-Semitism (it's the non-Jews' problem) and in her analysis of the Israeli-Palestinian/Israeli-Arab conflicts. Firstly, it is true that the nobility found it easy to "sacrifice" the Jews to fend off the mobs. However, in most of Europe, the majority of Jews were not well off. So the argument that they stood out more than the Gypsies did not convince me. Anti-Semitism has been described as "the rumor about Jews," in other words the West's and the East's longest-running conspiracy theory. Rather than dismiss this argument (or rather not even mention it), Ruth Wisse would have done herself and us a great service by frankly engaging with it.
Secondly, there is her treatment of the Israeli-Palestinian and Israeli-Arab conflict. Although she dismisses the claims of both the ultra-Right and the ultra-Left ("the first [claim] is not subject to proof; the second is demonstrably bogus") she essentializes Arabs (a people who she says are the opposite of Jews) and Palestinians (a people who are the opposite of Jews and who seek to take on Jewish symbols) and hence makes any sort of analysis of the conflict impossible. What is more this whole line of argument was not even necessary for Ruth Wisse to make her point. All she had to do was point out the callousness with which some Jews treat Jewish claims--and contrast that to the sensitivity these same Jews show to (identical or equivalent) Arab and Palestinian claims. That, I feel, would have made her point (that Diaspora politics plays a tremendous role in shaping Israeli politics) far better than what she did. This, after all, is a book about Jewish; not Arab politics--and when it sticks to its subject it works well; when it does not it does not work and sometimes becomes downright insulting.
For anyone interested in a stimulating discussion about Jewish Diaspora politics I would recommend this book with the proviso to read section on the Arab/Palestinian-Israeli conflict with more than a grain of salt.
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No mention of the word "oil" ( theo1934 )
To me the strangest thing about the "Arab-Israeli" conflict is that while the facts on the ground are similar to what has happened in many other parts of the world (Indian/Pakistani conflict, Greek/Turkish conflict, etc) one of the sides (the Arabs) has never accepted the reality. While Indians and Pakistanis or Greeks and Turks may not love each other, they have accepted the results and resettled their own refugees. Why the Arabs refuse to accept reality and why many countries support them? Wisse points out the unusal situation but she does not point to the not so secret Arab weapon, the oil. Even some of the "friends" of Israel are too concerned about the "feelings" of the major oil producers. Two of the Arab countries that made peace with Israel (Egypt and Jordan) are not oil producers. The large social problems of the Arab countries make it necessary for their rulers to look for a scapegoat and Israel fits that role perfectly. While there are several Israeli actions that could be criticized, I do not think a different Isreali behavior would have made a difference, given the above factors.
Wisse covers a long period of history and, as a result, she does not treat it with depth. She considers the failed revolts against the Romans as the start of the Jewish diaspora even though she mentions that a large Jewish community existed in Alexendria two hundred years earlier. The travels of Paul of Tarsus (that took place before the revolts) point to the existence of numerous Jewish communities quite far more Israel. She also metions briefly the role of Jews as the "middleman minority" without considering that this may have a characteristic of the Jews going all the way back to the Egypt of the Hyksos times.
There are several historical details that, in my view, Wisse got wrong. For example, the Armenians were not the only middleman minority in the Ottoman empire, Jews also filled some of the role, and, most numerous were the Greeks. I have read that the estabishment of a Greek state in early 19th century was part of the inspiration that led Herzl to Zionism. Here was a "middleman minority" that established an ethnic state in a land with whom had ancient links, even though at the time "Greeks" lived all over the Balkan peninsula, Asia Minor and other lands of the Byzantine Empire. Wisse mentions that Herzl was inspired by the re-unification of Italy but that parallel seems far weaker.
In short, it is a book that presents a thesis (with which I generally agree) but with no serious analysis backing it. In other words the author "preaches exclusively to the choir."
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