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Friday January 18, 2008

Book gives convincing argument for source of Jewish power

by polly m. zavadivker
correspondent

In 1977 Israel and Egypt initiated the first historic attempts at diplomacy ever undertaken between the Jewish state and an Arab country. During talks, Golda Meir reputedly told Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, “We can forgive you for killing our sons. But we will never forgive you for making us kill yours.”

Golda’s words are often proudly quoted for their acerbic wit and irony. But for Ruth Wisse, her statement exposed a profound weakness to her political foe: “Golda expressed more concern with Israeli children’s decency than with her enemies’ designs on them. She would have demonstrated greater understanding of her Egyptian counterpart … had she asked Sadat to convey to his people the message ‘We Jews are here to stay.’”

This bold interpretation lies at the heart of Wisse’s excellent new book, “Jews and Power.” A professor of Yiddish literature at Harvard, Wisse brandishes a mighty pen in her striking analysis of Jewish political traditions — and in her explanation of their implications for Israel’s precarious status in the world today.

Skillfully weaving a narrative that spans from the Second Temple era to modern-day Israel, Wisse identifies the Jewish relationship to power that enabled diaspora communities to survive in conditions of powerless. But a single burning question illuminates the work throughout its concise 184 pages: Have the Jewish people undergone the necessary self-transformation required for political sovereignty in Israel?

With Wisse as our history guide, we observe how Jews planted roots and lived for generations in each new land, from Babylonia to Spain and Eastern Europe. Lacking power and without means of self-defense, a central government or land, Jews relied on the tolerance of their host nations to ensure their survival. Their utter dependency evolved a strategy of appeasement and accommodation to the needs of their rulers.

But persecution wrought its damage in other ways too: with every successive expulsion and pogrom, Jews focused more intensely inward to their spiritual and religious culture, developing an elaborate system in which divine justice, ethics and decency functioned as a source of the power they lacked in the physical realm.

Despite their creative adaptation and, in some cases, assimilation to the necessities of life in new lands (Wisse proudly lists all the Jewish Nobel laureates in French, German, Russian, English, Hebrew and Yiddish literature), Jews were never able to escape their role as “no-fail targets” for rulers who needed ready-made explanations for their own political failures. Culture, however valuable and necessary to human existence, does not defend against annihilation.

The crimes against Jewish victims over two millennia in exile are well known. But to read Wisse’s coherent articulation of their effects provides an innovative lens with which Wisse reveals diaspora dynamics at play in the Jewish state.

Given the widespread lack of faith in divine justice that premodern ancestors possessed, Wisse concludes that “modern Jews today could not claim to be moral unless they themselves intended to supply the missing dimension of power.” That power is in Israel and its security.

Wisse convincingly proves how the security of each

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individual Jew depends on Israel’s existence and provides substantial evidence of the country’s enemies. But it is not clear whether, guns and uniforms notwithstanding, Jews have transcended a need for approval from those who would rather see them dead.

“Jews and Power” has provoked admiration from all camps for the forcefulness of its argument and the presentation of its evidence. Although Wisse steers clear of party-line agendas, she argues that Israelis should “remain morally confident and remind others that they are the plaintiffs, not the defendants, in the international arena.”

Most admirably, this work constitutes a profound act of resistance against the anti-Zionist sentiment that has become a profitable and hegemonic industry among academia today. “Jews and Power” offers a beacon of clarity in a world increasingly beset by political and moral confusion.

“Jews and Power” by Ruth R. Wisse (232 pages, Nextbook/Schocken, $19.95)

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