Tribute to Tikvah Fund Ashkenazi Racist Ruth Wisse in Honor of Her Herzl Prize Award
David Shasha
'The Palestinians Should Have Been Federated with Jordan’
By: Maayan Jaffe-Hoffman
The Palestinian people should have been federated with Jordan in 1948. Arabs need to maintain the Jews as their enemy. The intersectionality movement has consolidated around the Palestinian cause and that’s just preposterous.
These are just some of the notions shared by Harvard Professor Ruth Wisse, who will speak at the Tikvah Fund’s upcoming Jewish Leadership Conference.
She said that in the United States there are “movements of grievance and blame,” such as the feminist, African American and LGBTQ movements.
Ruth Wisse is one of an expert lineup of speakers at this year's Tikvah Fund Jewish Leadership Conference. Other speakers include Ambassadors David Friedman and Ron Dermer, Senator Tom Cotton and Rabbi Meir Soloveichik. REGISTER NOW >> (Use code JPOST for a $50 discount)
“The life of women in the 20th century has been miraculously transformed,” Wisse said, noting that women have been granted the freedom to choose in all aspects of their lives, from family planning to career.
“Women should create a new prayer book of gratitude to thank those who invented all of these things,” she said. Instead, they blame the “patriarchy” for keeping them down.
She admitted that African Americans have more cause to be aggrieved, but “there is no formal ideology of racism in the US anymore.” And as for LGBTQ people: “There is no stigma anymore, they can marry each other - look how far they have come.”
Yet, “instead of all these groups blessing the freedoms they have gained, they have formed through intersectionality a movement of grievance and blame that has consolidated around the Palestinian cause,” Wisse stressed. “It is so preposterous. But it is our daily reality.”
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She said that the intersectionality has no reason to be against Israel or to fight for the Israeli-Palestinian cause and that the focus is unfounded.
However, the focus on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, the views of Israel as the aggressor, is rooted in antisemitism that has been festering in the United States since the 1970s through the media and the universities.
“The idea was pumped into the US the same way fascism pumped into the US in the 1920s and 1930s,” she said.
Wisse said that she defines antisemitism as “the organization of politics against the Jews.”
“One has to think about [antisemitism] in terms of its function for those who are organizing the politics against the Jews,” she said. “What purpose does it serve for the antisemites?”
In the case of the Arabs, she said that it started back in 1945 when the Arab League formed around the same time that the Second World War ended.
"The League originated around opposition to the emergence of Israel, which was the glue that united its otherwise warring elements,” Wisse explained. ”Though some of this has changed, and one is thankful when Arab and Muslim leaders accept the principle of peaceful coexistence, common enmity to Israel remains far too important in Arab and Muslim politics."
“The Palestinians should have federated with Jordan from the beginning and ended the story,” Wisse added. “But no. Why? They needed to organize against the Jews and that war will continue as long as they need it.”
Now, as antisemitism and anti-Israel sentiment is on the rise, American Jews have to avoid the same mistakes she said they made in the 1930s, when “they saw increasing danger to the Jews and the leadership was very lackadaisical in its response. They did not apply much pressure as it could on the administration, and did not seek to mobilize public opinion in the US.
“The record of American Jewry in the 1930s, especially among the intellectuals, is very sad,” she said.
“American Jews simply don’t want to live with that reality, don’t want to say that Israel has to stay on a war footing, be powerful enough so no one dares to go to war against it, and to the same degree, they have to fight the war of ideas with the same degree of commitment and dedication,” Wisse said.
She added that American Jews cannot pretend this assault against them and Israel does not exist. Rather, they have to go out and fight these ideas.
Wisse is being honored with the 2021 Herzl Prize by the Tikvah Fund. The elite online conference at which she will be honored is also named “the inaugural 2021 online conference on Jewish and Conservatism.”
“Democracy is not biologically transmitted,” Wisse said. “The US is forgetting that. The schools are not teaching basic text anymore, not thinking you have to conserve the best in order to ward off the worst.
“Conservatism is conserving liberal democracy - this great and complicated civilization” she concluded.
Ruth Wisse will be honored with the Herzl Prize on March 14, which was previously awarded to Natan Sharansky and Norman Podhoretz. Please join her in celebrating >> ($50 discount with code JPOST)
From The Jerusalem Post, March 7, 2021
Letter to Ruth Wisse
By: Norman Podhoretz
Dearest Ruth,
Having just emerged from a lengthy hibernation, I was pleased to learn that
Tikvah's fourth annual Jewish Leadership Conference—which I had assumed would fall
victim to the COVID crisis—will be held this year, after all, less than a week
from now on March 14-15. The first three conferences turned out to be perhaps
the most important effort yet made in America to think seriously about how
Jewish conservatives, like us, can deal with the enormous changes that have
taken place in the world over the past years. So I was very happy to hear that
the pandemic would not put a halt to this greatly important effort.
But what made me even happier was the news that this year's Herzl Prize would
be awarded to you. As I hardly need to remind you, I was the proud recipient of
the Herzl Prize in 2019. As I also hardly need to remind you, I am not famous
for my humility. And yet if it had been up to me, this great honor would have
gone to you as a worthier successor to Natan Sharansky, who was the first
recipient of the award. If old age hasn't altogether destroyed my ability to
count, I estimate that we first met about fifty (!) years ago. Apart from
becoming fast friends, we worked together when I was the editor of Commentary—a
collaboration that resulted (thanks more to Neal Kozodoy than to me) in a series
of articles in defense of an embattled Israel and in celebration of the riches
of Jewish culture. These articles, along with writings of yours that appeared
elsewhere, were marked by a beautifully courageous and wholly authoritative
defiance of the widespread denigration of everything Jewish in those years. It
all added up to a body of work that was as morally heroic as it was
intellectually superb.
If only to pay homage to you, I would urge everyone who cares about the fate of
the Jewish people, both here and in Israel, to register for the conference. But in addition to honoring
you, they will be rewarded by what I'm sure you will agree is an unmatchable
list of speakers drawn from the political and cultural worlds. For the benefit
of those who wish to attend, I am attaching below a list of the speakers and
topics for the entire program.
As for you, Ruth, I send a heartfelt mazeltov (in, as is appropriate in
your case, the Yiddish version rather than the Hebrew mazal tov!).
My gratitude, and all my love,
Norman
2021 Jewish Leadership Conference Schedule
Sunday, March 14
9:30 AM ET to 11:30 AM ET
"The Meaning of American Leadership"
Sec. Mike Pompeo & Roger Hertog
"How Great Nations Depend on Great Families"
Yoram Hazony
"The Post-COVID Economy: East, West, and Israel"
Dan Senor & Michael Eisenberg
12:30 PM ET to 2:15 PM ET
"Farewell to the 'Little Jew'?"
Ruth Wisse's Herzl Prize Address
"The Significance of the Abraham Accords"
Amb. David Friedman & Martin Kramer
"Anti-Semitism, Anti-Zionism, and America's
Universities"
John Podhoretz & Jonathan Silver
"Can Jews and Christians Renew American
Institutions?"
Eric Cohen, Robert Nicholson, & Yuval Levin
3:00 PM ET to 5:00 PM ET
"The Future of American Conservatism"
Victor Davis Hanson & Matthew Continetti
"The Israeli Elections and the Future of Israeli
Conservatism"
Yaakov Katz, Ran Baratz, & Alex Traiman
"The Culture Wars: Comparing the U.S. and Israel"
Gadi Taub & Peter Berkowitz
"The Iran Threat: What is America's Strategy?"
Sen. Tom Cotton & Elliott Abrams
Monday, March 15
9:30 AM ET to 12:00 PM ET
"The Hebrew Bible and the American Soul"
Dr. Leon Kass & Ben Shapiro
"The Great Powers Collide: Major World Threats and How
to Face Them"
Gen. Jack Keane
"Does American Jewry Have a Strategy?"
Caroline Glick
"The Israeli Miracle and
the Universal Significance of Jerusalem"
Rabbi Meir Soloveichik
Rising to the Occasion: Bibi Netanyahu’s Heroic Speech
By: Ruth R. Wisse
Of all the discussions of the Netanyahu speech, Professor Wisse’s gets into the historical issue in a way that is extremely revealing.
For those not familiar with Haim Hazaz’s story “The Sermon,” it is an attack on Jewish history that is consistent with the Netanyahu philosophy of Jewish weakness and uselessness:
http://sophia.smith.edu/blog/fys186-01f11/2011/10/24/blogpost-3-the-sermon/
Hazaz rejects all Jewish history after the destruction of the Second Temple by the Romans as irrelevant to the Zionist project which seeks to re-establish “normal” Jewish life in Israel. The literary monuments of the Jewish tradition from the Talmudic literature to the poetry of Golden Age Spain and the works of the Maskilim are not a part of that restoration.
Wisse struggles to maintain the dignity of the Jewish Diaspora, but emphatically ignores the centrality of anti-Diasporism to the Netanyahu belief system.
In his speech to Congress Netanyahu made use of the Book of Esther in a way that ignored its Diaspora setting. Netanyahu does indeed promote a “heroic” Judaism along the lines of Vladimir Jabotinsky who saw Jewish existence in strictly Gentile terms. Rather than integrate Judaism with its many historical facets, this form of Zionism rejects the Diaspora and sees our history as an endless series of failures marked by degradation and violence.
While Wisse is quite correct in asserting the importance of our history, she fails to accept the fact that Benjamin Netanyahu, as he was taught by his father, does not value the Diaspora Jewish past. Like Haim Hazaz, the Netanyahu vision of Jewish identity is mired in blood and tragedy. This fatalistic view of Jewish history is one that rejects cultural achievement and demands confrontation rather than acculturation.
The current situation with Iran is an example of Zionist rejectionism and its inability to integrate into the world community. Seeking to “go it alone,” Netanyahu’s Spartan values have transformed Judaism from a culture which sought entente with the outside world to a politics of hatred and alienation. This is the new Jewish nihilism that contemporary Israel represents.
Rather than look for ways to enter into the community of nations and ensure its security, Netanyahu’s Israel scours the ancient Jewish past for signs of machismo and hauteur in order to loudly proclaim that Jews will punch you in the face.
And we all know where this has gotten us: Israel now represents a form of Jewish insecurity that flies in the face of all the promises of Zionism. Rather than empowering Jews, Israel has created a new category of Jewish weakness. The vast military power of contemporary Israel has not led to peace and stability, but – as we saw in the Netanyahu speech – an instability of epic proportions.
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On the day that Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu was leaving for the United States to give what the Washington Post called “the most important speech of his life,” my grandchildren were watching Big Hero 6. When I heard the smallest of the animated characters say, “We didn’t set out to be super-heroes, but sometimes life doesn’t go the way you planned,” it sounded like the tagline for Bibi’s launch as hero of the free world.
Can such a hero prevail? Elected leaders of democratic societies can rarely rise to courage or bravery of heroic proportions because of the compromise it takes to get reelected and because critical electorates feel compelled to cut leaders down totheir size. In his nine nonsuccessive years heading Israel’s government, Netanyahu has taken as much political firepower as Israel has from its enemies. Nonetheless, like the country he heads, Netanyahu has grown stronger in every round. Despite attacks against him from both sides of the Atlantic, he gave Congress one of the boldest speeches in its great history—a speech its audience knew was as consequential for America as it was for the Jews.
Heroism needs a theater of opportunity to demonstrate its engagement with evil. Alas, the real and present danger is not in dispute. Running for office in 2012, President Barack Obama declared Iran “a threat to our national security” and vowed that it “would not get a nuclear weapon.” The danger has since then dramatically increased as Iran directly and through its terrorist proxies now controls the territory from Iran and Iraq through Syria, Lebanon, and the Mediterranean. Iran threatens America and Israel—the big and little Satan alike—but its boast that Israel will be “a one-bomb state” prompted Netanyahu to differentiate this week between the threats to America’s security and to Israel’s survival.
So it fell to the prime minister of Israel to explain the dangers the Obama administration’s proposed agreement with Iran posed “not only to Israel, but also [to] the peace of the entire world.” No doubt everyone would have preferred Netanyahu’s speech to be given by the commander in chief of the world’s superpower rather than by the leader of the Jewish state, if only because sooner or later American strength will be required to defeat the new super-threats. Even England could not defeat Nazism on its own. But the Talmud teaches, “In a place where there are no men, strive to be a man,” which Yiddish translates as being a mentsh, a worthy human being. In times of peril this apparently simple task may require heroic capacities. President Obama’s disinclination to identify let alone resist the forces of evil made it imperative for the prime minister of Israel to do so in his stead.
It was to be expected that as the son of a Jewish historian, Netanyahu would relate his appearance on the eve of Purim to events 2,500 years earlier, when a powerful Persian viceroy named Haman plotted to destroy the Jewish people. They were saved by courageous Queen Esther, who exposed the plot, persuaded the king to reverse Haman’s verdict, and won for the Jewish people the right to defend themselves against their enemies. “Today the Jewish people face another attempt by yet another Persian potentate to destroy us. Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Khamenei spews the oldest hatred of anti-Semitism with the newest technology. He tweets that Israel must be annihilated—he tweets. You know, in Iran, there isn’t exactly free Internet. But he tweets in English that Israel must be destroyed.” Enmity against the Jewish people remains oddly repetitive, and Netanyahu was claiming for the Jews of today the same right that Esther won to defend against their enemies.
A more familiar historical parallel than the one with ancient Persia is the
one Netanyahu drew between radical Islam and radical Nazism that likewise
targeted the Jews as warmup for the conquest of Europe. Depending on their
points of view, commentators
on the current scene invoke Chamberlain at Munich as an augury of appeasement
or Churchill before Congress after Pearl Harbor. The parallel is especially
painful, not only because Elie Wiesel was sitting in the gallery to remind us
of the missing third of the Jewish people but because of the similarities that
persist despite Netanyahu’s stated confidence that “Israel will stand!”
Much has happened since the Second World War to justify Bibi’s faith in the Jewish future. In a famous Hebrew story written in Palestine in 1942 ironically entitled “The Sermon,” an ordinary member of a kibbutz named Yudka announces to his colleagues that he strongly “objects” to Jewish history. He says Jewish history was made for the Jews by Gentiles, and ought never to be taught to the children: “It has no adventures, no conquering heroes, no great rulers or potentates. All it has is a mob of beaten, groaning, weeping, begging Jews. And you’ll agree with me that there’s nothing interesting about that – nothing!”
How very surprised Yudka would have been at the reception the U.S. Congress gave the leader of the Jewish state that his kibbutz helped bring into being. He might have been even more surprised that this “uninteresting” Jewish experience was what the allegedly “chickens—” Netanyahu used to warn the world against getting it wrong again.
In fact, the Jews were never the passive beggars Yudka described but rather a people constituted politically very differently from others. Religions that claimed to be universal tried to make others subject to their truth. Nations that claimed superiority tried to expand their reach and powers. Jews who were dedicated to pursuing their way of life among other nations were consequently dependent on the reciprocal toleration of other nations. Belligerents through the millennia found easy prey in people who had no incentive to aggress against them. The malignancy of some of those Gentile nations does not reflect on the achievements of the Jews.
In his conclusion, Netanyahu invoked Moses, who led the Jews from enslavement in Egypt and gave them a civilizing constitution. But Jews thrived in their homeland and wherever else they were admitted only if they could protect whatever they achieved. Time and again, the gap between their visible attainments and their ability to protect those assets invited stronger nations, envious neighbors, and even their former protectors to expropriate, expel, or exterminate them. Jews became the no-fail target of the world’s most murderous regimes—Nazism yesterday, Iran today. As targets of the foulest forces, they became a constant reminder of the evil that must be resisted. Netanyahu used this history to remind Americans: Unless you soldier effectively, you will incite genocidal hostility against you.
President Barack Obama came into office believing that he could put an end to war and to the need for war. His make-believe has instead emboldened warmongers, encouraged expansionists, and fired up apocalyptic ideologues. When America gave up the task of “policing” the free world, it imperiled hope for maintaining order in any part of that world. Police are not infallible, but their absence makes evildoers implacable. No peaceable nation can expect to thrive without defensive power equal to its accomplishment. America itself is not too big to fail.
Netanyahu could not replace Barack Obama as leader of the free world. Unlike supermen in comic books or superheroes of animated film, he cannot protect America. But what Bibi could do, and did do, was to identify the dangers that the president and his followers have tried to obscure. Because of the cruelty directed against them in particular, Jews protect the world best when they best protect themselves and have something to teach about the necessary ratio of defensive power to peace. Neither Netanyahu nor the people of Israel set out to be heroes. Sometimes it simply requires taking up the task you were assigned.
Ruth R. Wisse, a former professor of Yiddish and comparative literature at Harvard, is the author of Jews and Power and No Joke: Making Jewish Humor.
From The Weekly Standard, March 16, 2015, re-posted to SHU 679, April 1, 2015
By: Ruth R. Wisse
The case of CHABAD and its Messiah has become a big issue in the Jewish world.
With the publication of a new book on Rabbi Menachem Schneersohn – this one by Modern Orthodox scholar Joseph Telushkin – the discussion has started up again:
This comes in the wake of Eliot Wolfson’s valentine of a few years back:
These revisionist assessments conflate the Right Wing elements in the Jewish community, who see CHABAD as a conservative presence in the religious world, and the current crop of scholars of Kabbalah led by Moshe Idel who promote an irrational and magical understanding of Judaism in a Zionist context.
I have discussed the matter of Kabbalah in the following article:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-shasha/dangerous-mystic-motifs-i_b_637535.html
For Right Wingers like Professor Wisse, CHABAD is a strong preserver of basic Jewish values in a world of anarchy and toxic liberalism. Its reactionary stance appeals to secular Jews who appreciate its rigidity and authoritarian values.
We saw this in an article by the Conservative Jewish scholar Jack Wertheimer included in SHU 645:
http://www.ou.org/jewish_action/06/2014/lubavitch-movement-thrives-absence-living-rebbe/
This development flies in the face of the anti-CHABAD advocacy of David Berger who has brutally castigated CHABAD for its neo-Christian messianism:
It would appear that Berger’s voice has been drowned out in the reactionary frenzy.
Even The New York Times has gotten in on the act with an unpaid advertisement for CHABAD from one of its missionaries:
Interestingly, Telushkin’s book begins the story in 1950 – after Schneersohn left his studies at the Sorbonne where he was matriculated for an engineering degree and where he read Proust!
A series of 1998 articles by Avirama Golan published in Haaretz fill in the picture of Schneersohn’s early years as a student – before he became the Messiah:
http://failedmessiah.typepad.com/failed_messiahcom/files/Golan-Habad_eng.pdf
With the failure of Modern Orthodoxy to achieve any tangible results in the Jewish community, the alliance of the Yeshiva world and CHABAD has created a vigorous Ultra-Orthodoxy that disdains the outside world; creating a hermetic bubble where occult Judaism can grow and thrive.
CHABAD is predicated on its messianism – the Rebbe died and will return as King of the Jews – and its duplicitous outreach programs. CHABAD houses all over the world are welcoming places for unaffiliated Jews looking for meaning in their lives. Once the Ba’alei Teshuva – returning Jews – are fully integrated into the system they lose their connection to the larger society and are caught inside a fundamentalist system whose religious values are of the most radical variety.
It is true that Rabbi Schneersohn was a master marketer and his magical allure continues to attract Jews who see in CHABAD a muscular Judaism that brooks no compromise and which rejects the Humanistic culture of Western civilization.
DS
“The Jews are better today because of him.” With this assurance, Joseph Telushkin concludes his new study of Menachem M. Schneerson, the seventh rebbe of Chabad, the Hasidic movement established in the Russian town of Lubavitch at the end of the 18th century—and which continues to flourish 20 years after his death. Although I am by temperament more skeptical than Telushkin, I have been brought to a similar conclusion. Genuine leadership is always in short supply and never more challenging than in modern times. The man who became known as “the Rebbe” did wonders with Jews, who are notoriously difficult to lead.
My first encounter with Chabad came indirectly one day in the 1970s during a conversation with one of my Montreal Jewish neighbors about the annual Combined Jewish Appeal that was then in full swing. I was astonished when he said he contributed most of his philanthropy to Chabad. Why would this trendy young man who drove a BMW and was decidedly not a Sabbath observer support a movement associated with the kind of mystical and ultra-Orthodox Judaism for which I had the least patience? He said that, as a businessman, he wanted to put his money to work “where it went farthest.” Having looked into what various institutions did with their resources, he concluded that meant Chabad.
At roughly the same time, as part of a course on American Yiddish literature that I was then teaching at McGill University, I organized a class trip to New York City that would travel by bus on Friday and spend Sunday touring historical landmarks of Yiddish culture on the Lower East Side. The problem was how to organize over Saturday, which the Department of Jewish Studies observed as the Sabbath. A student with Chabad connections offered to have all the students put up in Chabad homes in Crown Heights. This would provide secure, pleasant accommodations and exposure to Yiddish where it was spoken. The students’ subsequent evaluations unanimously, enthusiastically, and somewhat disconcertingly declared the Sabbath stay with Chabad families the most valuable part of the trip. I had tried to breathe life into the remnants of an almost vanished secular Yiddish culture whereas they had experienced Yiddishkayt—Jewishness—in full bloom.
Such experiences kept multiplying. Before her wedding, I accompanied my daughter to a new Chabad-based ritual bath, ormikveh, near Boston. The daughter of our son in New York attended Chabad nursery school in New York, and our son in Los Angeles briefly attended a Chabad synagogue there. I learned of Chabad couples who ran drug-rehabilitation clinics and provided pastoral care for prison inmates. The network of Chabad institutions I visited during a trip to Russia included a kosher vegetarian restaurant that underplayed its Jewish auspices and used a large television to draw in local youth; Jewish schools that were incrementally upgrading their facilities; and a group home for Jewish children, some of whose still living parents were too damaged to raise them, that had been spontaneously organized by a Chabad couple already supervising several other local projects. It had become hard to imagine—and in the former Soviet Union impossible to conceive of—Jewish life without the initiatives of Chabad.
Through all this I never once thought of Menachem Mendel Schneerson. When shluchim—Chabad’s young emissaries—spoke to me of their projects, they invoked “the Rebbe” no more than we mention the CEO of a company whose brand we trust. Thus, quite unlike Dorothy’s discovery of the deceiver behind the wizardly effects of Oz, only gradually and mostly after his death did I recognize the man behind these efforts. All those schools and outposts and myriad initiatives and even the rising Jewish birthrate of Chabad families had been generated by Schneerson’s “campaigns.” He fostered a culture of independence that required every Chabad effort to stand on its own, but the people staffing those efforts had unquestionably been propelled by their inspirational guide.
So it was not surprising that some of his followers saw him as a messianic figure, if not the messiah himself. In 2001, in this magazine, the respected Jewish historian David Berger documented emerging claims that the man now universally known as the Rebbe was the long-awaited messiah. Berger’s academic interest in the phenomenon was sharpened by his anxieties as a believing Jew that sectors of the Chabad community were spreading this belief, and by concern that the rest of Orthodox Jewry was apparently indifferent to the heresy.
Two new and complementary biographies1 seem designed to lay such anxieties to rest, one by playing down the intimations of transcendence and the other by trying to get at their core. Joseph Telushkin’s earthbound study introduces “the most influential rabbi in modern history” by documenting the incremental process through which his influence was acquired. Unabashedly partisan in his admiration, Telushkin quotes the kind of hagiographic testimonials Hasidim traditionally trade when speaking of their rabbis, except that among Schneerson’s admirers are heads of state, military leaders, writers, intellectuals, and people who were and are not otherwise his followers. From Telushkin, a polymathic rabbi who has written highly regarded and well-read works on prayer and Jewish belief as well as mystery novels, we learn of the Rebbe’s effect on adherents and admirers through their own accounts of one-on-one meetings with him.
For his part, Adin Steinsaltz, the prodigious translator-editor of the Talmud and a charismatic figure in his own right, speaks from within the Lubavitch movement to sustain his Rebbe’s aura of sanctity starting with the Hasidic teaching that “life as we see it is not all there is.” Both books subordinate the private man to the public figure.
Nothing Testifies as powerfully to the status of Menachem Mendel Schneerson in the Chabad movement as the fact that on his account his predecessor became known as the Frierdiker, orprevious rebbe, although it was to this predecessor that he owed his position and inspiration. The sixth Lubavitch Rebbe, whose name was Yosef Yitzchak Schneerson, had only daughters. Since succession in Hasidic movements is not strictly hereditary, he paid special attention to finding them husbands who might credibly succeed him. He arranged an excellent rabbinic match for the eldest but apparently recognized the more exceptional qualities of his relative Menachem Mendel, son of the chief rabbi of Yekaterinoslav (Dniepropetrovsk), to whom he introduced his second daughter, Chaya Mushka. In 1927, when Yosef Schneerson secured his own release and that of his immediate family from the Soviet Union, he persuaded the Communist authorities also to release Menachem Mendel—though he could not secure the release of the young man’s parents. So when the couple was married, Yosef Yitzchak assumed responsibility for his son-in-law and in some way filled in for the father the son was never to see again.
“Chabad” is a Hebrew acronym combining the words for wisdom, insight, and knowledge. Realizing that a modern leader would have to be better armed than his predecessors to confront the modern world, the Frierdiker Rebbe supported his son-in-law’s desire to include formal university studies in acquisition of “knowledge.” Menachem Mendel Schneerson studied philosophy in Berlin and, later, engineering in Paris, becoming proficient in several languages and disciplines. During his university years, he befriended Joseph Soloveitchik, who would become his non-Hasidic counterpart as the leading figure of Jewish Orthodoxy in America; their intense encounter with Western culture undoubtedly enabled both men to engage confidently with non-Jewish ideas and society. Yet Menachem Mendel’s knowledge of the world and his practical intelligence may have derived less from exposure to secular learning in Europe than from experience of its two totalitarian movements—Communism as implemented in the Soviet Union and Nazism, from which he and his wife fled as it overran France in 1941.
Menachem Mendel Schneerson arrived in New York in 1941. Not long after the death of his father-in-law in 1950, he was acknowledged as the new rebbe. Interestingly, he dismissed the classic European formula to “be a Jew at home and a man in the street”—which he felt bespoke a lack of confidence in the local population—and instead sought to “take Judaism out into the world.” While assimilating Jews spearheaded challenges to public displays of Christianity and other Orthodox leaders circled the wagons against secularism, Schneerson encouraged the practice of religion in the public square through demonstrative lighting of Chanukah menorahs. He sent Chabad youngsters out to invite Jewish men to resume the practice of putting on phylacteries and Jewish women to light Sabbath candles.
His commitment to Israel’s place in the world was as bold as his program for American Jewry. Among Israelis who came to consult with him, politicians and military experts were surprised by his detailed knowledge of their country’s local affairs and international situation on strategic and diplomatic fronts. His trust in America contrasted sharply with his distrust of Israel’s self-declared enemies. He opposed giving back lands that Israel had retaken and won in 1967, less on account of God’s promise to Abraham—“For all the land that you see I give to you and your descendants forever” (Genesis 13:15)—than for the way he knew a smaller and more vulnerable target would invite greater appetite for Israel’s conquest.
The most illuminating feature of Telushkin’s book is his account of Schneerson’s realpolitik, which was neither cynical nor defensive but tempered with hard-won knowledge of political realities. On the principle of pikuach nefesh, translated by Telushkin as “the saving of endangered lives,” Schneerson favored preemptive attacks over diplomatic attempts at gaining international sympathy for Israel, and he repeatedly pointed up the delusional fallacy of what others called “territorial compromise for peace.”
Some considered it strange that a religious leader who spoke so passionately about Israel never visited the country. The Frierdiker Rebbe had inspired the founding of the Lubavitch town Kfar Chabad in Israel in 1949; surely the Russian Jews who settled there would have rejoiced in such a visit, and Israelis at large would have welcomed his tangible show of support. Here one may turn for guidance to Steinsaltz, who writes from inside the movement to illuminate what it means to have a “spiritual mission.” He definesruach hakodesh as the holy spirit within a person that connects him to a reality beyond our world and gives those with special aptitude and training “the ability to know things in the present or the future.” Much as Schneerson might have wanted to fly in for a visit to the terrestrial Israel that he respected and loved as a sovereign state, he experienced the land of Israel as a pivotal feature of God’s plan for the Jewish people. How then, being very much part of that plan, could he go there and leave?
The question of why he did not visit Israel was once put to him with characteristic bluntness by Geulah Cohen, a fiery right-wing member of the Israeli Knesset. He replied that he would be in Israel “one minute before the messiah comes.” Steinsaltz interprets this to mean that Schneerson loved the entire Jewish people and wished to be returned to the land only at the time of ultimate redemption, as Exodus has it, “with our young and with our old.” Perhaps he remained in America because he believed it was where he could function most effectively for the entire Jewish people. Though he did not join those religious Zionists who saw the political state as the beginning of redemption—atchalta de’geulah—his identification with Israel prompted him to explain the relation of Jews to the Almighty through the metaphor of the soldier who goes to war. As opposed to earlier Jewish paradigms of the obedient child or dutiful slave, the soldier “has a loving and emotional relationship with the leader,” according to Steinsaltz. “Mirroring the son’s love and willing devotion to the father, he is supremely loyal and capable of enormous self-sacrifice.” The definition of meaningful Jewish life as soldiering correlates with the life of Israelis who must soldier as part of their birthright.
Writing as a disciple, Steinsaltz devotes the latter part of his book to his teacher’s connection with the Divine and tries to guide readers through what is for many an unfamiliar terrain of miracles, souls after death, and belief in the world beyond. I will not venture into what remains for me terra incognita except to say that Schneerson could not have accomplished what he did without the strength he derived from that added stratum of human experience. Whatever messianic potential he felt in himself and ignited in his followers, only the confidence drawn from their Chabad ancestry and the Jewish traditions behind their movement can help to account for their collective achievement. This part of Steinsaltz’s book is constructed haphazardly, as if to avoid touching the third rail, which is the Jews’ yet-unrealized messianic expectation, but it puts us on notice that there is only so much of the man’s inner life we can ever hope to know.
The Chabad movement was not without its friction, and its culture of decentralized responsibility suggests that there will be more of it in years to come. Tensions between the Rebbe and the family of his brother-in-law flared after the death of the Frierdiker Rebbe and led to a breach that had to be adjudicated in the local courts. Since Menachem Mendel Schneerson’s passing, a minority that identifies him as the messiah threatens to split the movement, which at its core tries to tamp down this claim while nurturing Chabad’s vibrant faith. Meanwhile what came to be known as “the Rebbe’s army” inspires other Jewish organizations worldwide to become equally effective.
The recent canonization of two former popes is a healthy reminder that Judaism lacks the symbols and structures of supreme human authority, as a result of hard-won experience. Kingship was suspect, prophets were reluctant, rabbis from earliest times had to compete for influence. It remains the case that leaders in every branch of Jewish life must gain and maintain their authority by evidence of worth. Obviously qualified as he was for leadership, Menachem Mendel Schneerson had first to win his right to lead Chabad, and if he then exceeded the expectations Jews had of their religious leaders, it is worth studying how and why his method worked. He harnessed American freedoms not to free Jews from the perceived limitations of their national religion but to demonstrate the power and attractiveness of the Jewish way of life. His welcoming confidence inspired confidence in the way of life he was offering and the faith tradition he embodied.
Footnotes
1 Rebbe: The Life and Teachings of Menachem M. Schneerson, the Most Influential Rabbi in Modern History, by Joseph Telushkin (HarperWave, 640 pages); My Rebbe, by Adin Even-Israel Steinsaltz (Maggid Books, 224 pages).
From Commentary magazine, June 1, 2014, re-posted to SHU 647, August 20, 2014
What the ‘Lobby’ Knows about Animus for Israel
By: Ruth Wisse
While there is formally a blanket separation between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism made by Israel’s more circumspect supporters, we can always count on committed Right Wing Zionists to blur the two things.
In this article, which loudly supports the equally disputed idea that there is an all-powerful, monolithic Jewish Lobby, we see that Israel and Judaism are seen as one and the same thing even though Israel is not a religious state and Judaism is a religion.
This substitution allows rabid Zionist partisans like Professor Wisse to impose the Zionist equivalent of religious value tests on critics of Israel. The article makes it crystal clear that Israel embodies the totality of Jewish identity which means that any attack on Zionism is an attack on Judaism.
That Judaism and Zionism are not the same thing is something that is impossible for people like Wisse to accept. But the distinction between traditional Judaism and contemporary Israel must be drawn and processed in order to prevent Zionism from replacing Torah in the Jewish identity.
It is also worth noting that in the course of her discussion of Palestinian refugee claims, she – as has become common in Zionist circles – makes use of the Arab Jewish refugee argument which once again co-opts Sephardim for the benefit of Ashkenazi interests.
DS
The confirmation process for those slated to guide American foreign policy can profitably be used to clear up at least one point of confusion. What's at issue is not the degree of their affection for Jews or for Israel—despite the consternation caused by the nomination for defense secretary of Chuck Hagel, who said in 2006: "The Jewish lobby intimidates a lot of people up here, but I'm a United States senator. I'm not an Israeli senator."
The Nebraskan's imputation of excessive Jewish influence in Washington is less worrisome than his failure to recognize why the "lobby" exists. Never mind the Jews: Opposition to Israel camouflages a much more virulent hostility to America. How does an American statesman assess the anti-Jews who attack Israel as a proxy for this country?
Let's start with basics: The cause of the long-running Arab war against the Jewish homeland is not Israel, it is Arab leaders' need for war against a "foreign intruder." Seven Middle East countries rallied their citizens by forming the Arab League in 1945 to prevent the creation of Israel. Failing in that effort, the Arab League eventually expanded to 21 members, which organized their domestic and foreign politics against the Jewish state. When Anwar Sadat signed a peace treaty with Israel in 1979, Egypt was suspended from the league, expelled from the Islamic Conference and ousted from other regional and financial institutions. Re-admission for Egypt came only after the assassination of Sadat and his successor's abrogation of almost every term of the treaty.
Opposition to Israel is the only glue of pan-Arabism and the strongest common bond of otherwise warring Muslim constituencies. Even those inclined to end the war are afraid of the consequences (including assassination) of giving up hostilities.
Like the anti-Semitism from which it derives, anti-Zionism is less about the Jews than about the larger aims of those aggressing against the Jews. When the League of Anti-Semites formed in Germany in the 1870s, its primary goal was to prevent the spread of liberal democracy. Rather than denounce a freer, more open society, the league called democracy the ruse that allowed Jews to conquer Germany from within.
In the same way, anti-Zionism today unites conservatives and radicals in the Middle East against all that Israel represents—religious pluralism, individual rights and freedoms, liberal democracy, and Western ideas of progress. Jews and Israel are merely a convenient face or emblem for the huger bastions of those same ideals. Israel, "little Satan," is a handier target than the "big Satan."
The Arab war against Israel has cost thousands of Jewish lives, but its damage to Palestinians is arguably greater, destroying the moral fabric of a society that was once relatively prosperous and culturally advanced. Anti-Jewish politics works by misdirection, drawing attention away from real concerns toward the alleged Jewish violator. Thus, Arab leaders who tried to deny Jews their country accused Jews of denying Arabs their country. To make the charge stick, the leaders have kept Palestinian Arabs in perpetual refugee status while millions of other refugees around the world—including 800,000 Jews from Arab lands—were resettled and started their lives anew.
Many societies have identified Jews as the threatening alien, but Palestinian Arabs are the first people ever to shape their national identity exclusively around opposition to the Jews. The special ingredient that sets Palestinian nationalism apart from that of surrounding Syria, Lebanon, and Jordan—and reputedly makes it the strongest form of Arab nationalism—is the usurpation of Jewish symbols and history. The most important date in the Palestinian calendar is not any Arab or Muslim holiday or event, but the day of Israel's founding, commemorated as Nakba, the catastrophe that ostensibly spurred the creation of Arab Palestine. Commemorated as "Palestine's endless Holocaust," Nakba simultaneously libels the Jewish homeland and demeans the Shoah by appropriating the Nazi genocide of Europe's Jews.
A new logo for the Palestinian political party Fatah claims the entire map of Israel. Fatah's rival, Hamas, is led by Khalid Mashaal, who recently called for the liberation of "Gaza today and tomorrow Ramallah and after that Jerusalem then Haifa and Jaffa." Clearly, both factions remain more intent on destroying their neighbor than on bettering Palestinian lives.
A perfumer in Gaza has named his new fragrance "M-75" after the "pleasant and attractive" missiles used by Hamas to attack Israel. A Facebook page for Fatah shows a mother strapping her child into a suicide belt; when he asks his mother why him and not her, the mother says that she must bear more children to sacrifice for Palestine. Civil war in Syria, turmoil in Egypt, crisis in Iran and an Islamist threat to Jordan—all follow from the same ruinous politics of grievance and blame.
Chuck Hagel does not have to like Jews, but if he expects to defend the United States, he needs to understand the nature and scope of the war against Israel, including its corrupting effect on Arab societies. The alignment between Israel and America is dictated by those who burn the flags of both countries on the same pyre. By contrast, those who lobby for Israel's protection axiomatically have America's back.
Ms. Wisse, a professor of Yiddish and comparative literature at Harvard, is the author of "Jews and Power" (Schocken, 2007).
From The Wall Street Journal, January 16, 2013, re-posted to SHU 569, February 20, 2013
Who is a Jewish Writer? Arguing the Legacy of Ruth Wisse
By: Elaine Margolin
Arguing the Modern Jewish Canon, Edited by Justin Cammy, Dara Horn, Alyssa Quint and Rachel Rubinstein, Harvard University Press, 2008
Unlike other Jews, Harvard professor Ruth R. Wisse never seems to have been at war with herself. In fact, there isn't a hint of romanticism about her. She is a hard-nosed intellectual pragmatist who does not seek your sympathy or empathy, but rather demands your attention. Her target audience is secular Jews whom she fears have become misguided.
In Wisse's universe, Jews are perennially in trouble. Her masterful thesis The Modern Jewish Canon: A Journey through Language and Culture reflects her life's thinking along these lines. Wisse fully embraces the "otherness" that Judaism bestows upon her and wears it proudly. She is wary of the rhetoric of the anti-Zionist Left and other political forces that seduce Jews into a false sense of security.
Wisse decided to study Yiddish literature after being questioned by Yiddish poet Abraham Sutzkever about her plans for her future. When first approached by him, she mocked his inquiry replying, "And what would I do? Teach Sholem Aleichem?"
Guilt pangs soon followed and she wondered how she could have ever belittled the tradition in which she had been raised. Her parents had fled Romania, where her maternal grandmother had run a Yiddish publishing house, during the late 1930s. Wisse went on to become the first professor to introduce courses in Yiddish literature at McGill University in Canada where she was raised.
Wisse is bothered by how many Jews still consider it their burden to appease gentiles to win their favor. She points out how the politics of blame has simply been shifted from European politicians at the beginning of the 19th century to the Muslim and Arab rulers of today who prefer to blame Jews for their own shortcomings. She cautions Israel against adopting a "failed Diaspora strategy of accommodation."
In The Modern Jewish Canon Wisse attempts to identify
what she considers the best prose fiction by contemporary Jewish writers from
all over the world that capture the inner life of the modern Jew. Cynthia Ozick
describes Wisse's journey as nothing short of a spiritual quest devoted to
finding authors whose material is filled by "an imagination so infused by
Jewishness that the voice of the writer would emerge within the adopted
language as a choral voice, a communal voice, the echo of the Lord of
History."
Harvard University Press has now published a huge volume of essays by a wide variety of writers who reflect upon Wisse's opinions about Jewish identity and culture and its representation in literature, and elaborate with their own insights about what precisely constitutes a modern Jewish canon. Many of them take issue with her on a number of points.
For example, Hillel Halkin does not understand why Wisse rejects Lionel Trilling from her canon even though he possessed a strong Jewish identity that he was unable to transfer to his fiction. He is confused why Marcel Proust is discarded because he did not possess a strong Jewish identity but still was able to write brilliantly about Jews. Finally, he is baffled by the fact that Wisse allows Franz Kafka in her canon, since Halkin believes he "felt Jewish like Trilling but like Trilling kept Jews out of his fiction." He is thrilled by some of the writers Wisse includes, such as Mendele Mocher Sforim, David Grossman, Primo Levi, Yosef Haim Brenner, S.Y. Agnon, Aharon Appelfeld, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Abraham Cahan, Henry and Philip Roth and Saul Bellow.
Ilan Stavans resents Wisse's focus upon Ashkenazi literature and claims that the work of writers like Alberto Gerchunoff, Moacyr Scliar and Isaac Goldember should not be overlooked. Alan Mintz believes Wisse has ignored much of Israeli literature.
Jewish identity often is confusing for Jewish writers; they are forced to grapple with their own complex relationship to their native language, the land of their birth and a sense of multiple loyalties. Henry Grynberg's remarks capture this dilemma: "I am a Jew who lives in America and writes in Polish about Jewish fate. For the Poles, I am a Jewish writer, for the Americans a Polish writer, for the Chinese, an American writer. My soul is Jewish and Polish and Polish-Jewish, but my mentality has become American. Americans are my brothers, with the Jews I share my fate, with the Poles my language and wounds (without my wounds I could perhaps forget to be Jewish). I am a child of the Jewish fate who has been adopted by America but the most important part of myself has remained in my Polish language."
Wisse describes herself simply as a "skeptical rationalist of Lithuanian stock" rather than a "hassidic enthusiast," but the reader senses an underpinning of zealotry about her. One senses she doesn't hear competing drumbeats in her head, but only her own reasoned arguments, which she has been espousing for decades.
Some of the essayists in this volume, a few of them her former students, seem to be goading her to consider some alternatives to her established doctrines. But she is immovable and convinced that the Jewish struggle is not about land or borders or anything tangible, but a more frightening and pervasive force that targets Jews everywhere. She will not allow us to forget this uncomfortable truth and marches on comfortably out of step with the dominant ethos of the liberal academy.
From The Jerusalem Post, March 6, 2009, re-posted to SHU 362, April 22, 2009