Jews and Power

by Ruth R. Wisse

Book Overview

Part of the Jewish Encounter series

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...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0805211748
• ISBN13: 9780805211740
• Release Date: February 2020
• Publisher: Schocken Books Inc
• Length: 256 Pages
• Weight: 0.62 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 5.1" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

Identifies and analyses the central issues and factors

This is one of the BEST books out there on the subject of anti-Semitism (hatred of Jews or the Jewish State). She takes us on a discussion from the loss of Jewish sovereignty in 70 CE, when Roman emperor Titus crushed the Jewish revolt against Roman rule in Israel, burning the Temple in Jerusalem and sending many Jews into Exile, up until the failure of the doomed Oslo Accords leading to the war of terror against the Israeli people launched by Yasser Arafat in 2000, On note of hope and courage she notes that to her the re-establishment of Israel only three years after the destruction of European Jewry is an even more hopeful augury than the dove's appearance before Noah with an olive leaf after the flood. She rightly pours scorn on modern day would be Hitler, Iranian dictator Mahmoud Ahmadinejad who branded Israel as ' a rotten dried tree that will eliminated by one storm', reminding us that Jews have lived to see the downfall of every Haman and Hitler. In fact most likely Ahmadinejad is foretelling the fate of his own decayed society. The basis of her essay is the dual discussion on Jewish survival and the realization that no other people developed a similar long-term culture of accommodation to defeat. In response to Russian pogroms of 1881 one of the early modern Zionist thinkers Leon Pinkser issued a call for Jewish self-emancipation, arguing that exile had turned the Jews into a nation of zombies. Hebrew poet Haim Nahman Bialik rebuked has fellow Jews for passively allowing themselves to be slaughtered urging self-liberation for Jews to determine their own future. Wisse points out how since ancient times the Jews have always been vulnerable to betrayal by the least satisfied people in their own, seeking revenge on their people for real and imagined slights. From the collaborators who worked with the Greeks and Romans during the occupation of Israel by their Empires, to the Jew-hating Jews oif today with their bottomless hatred of Israel and it's people, and their efforts to do Israel harm and encourage it's genocidal foes like Hamas, Hezbollah and the Iranian and Syrian regimes. In a detailed study of the Diaspora, the author notes how one of the most unfortunate developments in the exile was the loathsome moser (informer), the negative counterpart of the shtadlan (intercessor) who intercedes with the authorities who speak for the Jews to those in power. "The Jewish community was always hostage to it's unhappiest members who stood to gain by serving the powers that be." On the other hand the persecution of the Jews into the 19th century helped to galvanize the Jewish people into a coherent national movement that would restore the Jews to sovereignty in their own ancient homeland. Moses Leib Lilienblum, once a secular socialist, became a passionate Zionist as a result of the 19981-82 pogroms in Russia. Similarly Theodore Herzl was a committed assimilationist before covering the Dreyfuss Affair in France in 1894, after whi

Look at history to understand today's culture war

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

first rate historical analysis

Wisse presents a first-rate historical analysis of Jewish history in terms of the political influence they were able to exert in the context of their lives after the destruction of the 2nd temple, up to present times. Yes, the current analysis tends to be polemical, but justifiably so in laying out the situation as it is. Very well written and easy to read.

Excellent work against the current trend

From King David, to the philosopher Spinoza, to boxer Barney Ross, the Jewish Encounter Series has been as varied as it has been excellent. Now, into this mix comes Ruth Wisse's thoughtful, provocative essay, "Jews and Power" polemical in the best sense of the word. Against a grain of modern scholarship that tends to run counterfactual in its effort to imagine Jews and the Jewish state as both ordinary and extraordinarily bad, Wisse produces a work which effectively demolishes both perspectives. Her relatively short book examines Jewish history from the period of the 2nd Commonwealth to the modern state of Israel in a manner both engaging and highly readable. Wisse argues that the uniqueness of the Jewish community exists in a relentless self criticism going back at least to Roman times. Unlike other cultures which faced with powerlessness tended to blame the other, Jews through their first and second exile sought to affix the blame neither to their neighbors nor their stars, but to themselves. Moreover, Wisse shows no shyness about asking tough questions, such as those who imagine prefer being powerless and in danger to being strong. This will make some uncomfortable, but still she pulls no punches. Another interesting topic covered is the contradiction in anti-Judaism, despising Jews for being both too weak (stateless, poor) and too strong (seizing control of the world, too smart, too rich, and though she gives it insufficient coverage, killing god). As it happens the same paradigm exists today. Two professors from distinguished universities raise a firestorm by arguing that neo-cons and the Israel lobby (read Jews) have seized control of the American government policy against the national interest (an impressive trick by any standard) even as others argue against all evidence that the world's perpetual denunciations of Israel is the same as the treatment of any other state. To her great credit Wisse does not embrace the false modesty of imagining the Jews as the same as any other people, recognizing how, against all odds, they continue to make contributions to culture, the sciences, and philosophy that far outstrip their meager numbers. She likewise recognizes the uniqueness of the State of Israel, both in terms of the good (the return of an exiled people to their homeland, a thing without precedent in human history other than the last time they did it), as well as the bad the failure of the Zionist enterprise to achieve the normalization of the status of Jews that its founders imagined. If one were to quibble with Wisse's book, its main shortcoming is that she could have delved further into the theological underpinnings of Jewish self identity. Does Judaism's relentless monotheism, lacking a serious conception of a devil foster the tendency towards self criticism that she describes? Is that Jewish theology embraces an oversized eschatological goal - the perfection of the world through Jewish action - likewise have an affect?

An excellent book

Ruth Wisse begins this book by exploring some of the ways in which Jews have traditionally examined their own behavior. And that's an interesting point of view. Is it really true that the Arab-Israeli conflict is partially cultural, with Jews tending to blame themselves for much of what happens? Is Arab culture different in this respect? If so, that could explain a tendency of both sides to examine Jewish behavior far more than Arab behavior, and it might explain what I consider an exaggeration of Israel's importance by both sides in the conflict. Wisse is quick to point out that while Jews had been confined to ghettos for centuries, emancipation led to a different type of problem: modern anti-Semitism. The accusations by anti-Semites were intended to show that Jews "were unworthy of the legal and social position conferred upon them." And even when anti-Semitism reached epidemic proportions, the carriers of this malady saw no reason to stop: it appeared to put them at no disadvantage. Meanwhile, the Jews themselves were powerless to stop it, as they were the prey. As Wisse explains, while some anti-liberal political parties were not "originally or innately anti-Semitic," there were "no anti-Semitic parties that were not innately anti-liberal." We then get to Zionism, and Wisse explains some of its origins. But, as Wisse tells us, Zionism lacked one ingredient, namely "the military planning force that every nation assumes it needs in order to regain, gain, or maintain its land." Although Wisse traces the start of Jewish defence forces back to 1920, I think that only after years of even more calamities, topped by the 1939 British White Paper, did the majority of Jews realize the need for an independent state, including armed forces. The most interesting part of this book deals with the innovations of anti-Zionism, and the ways in which it has gone beyond anti-Semitism. Once again, as in the case of anti-Semitism, the animus against the accused was "not directed to any correctable attribute or rectifiable lapses." But there were differences. While National Socialist Germany took the lead in anti-Semitic propaganda, it did not organize "a Pan-European movement around that issue." On the other hand, "opposition to Israel became the glue of Pan-Arabism." European anti-Semites blamed Jews for their existing social crises (and I would add that they blamed the Jews for suffering the effects of anti-Semitism), but "Arab leaders created the crisis for which they blamed the Jews." That is, they refused to allow the resettlement of Arab refugees simply in order to blame Jews. Although the European anti-Semites did sporadically boycott Jewish stores and businesses in the 1930s, Arabs went beyond this to arrange systematic boycotts of Israel. I agree: just ask yourself if you have ever seen Israel participate in the Mediterranean Games. I think we all realize that Israel has a Mediterranean coastline. Don't you ever wonder what the