Ruth Wisse’s “Jews and Power” gets a great review (and I should know) in The New York Sun:
At the end of "Jews and Power," Ruth Wisse writes, "I feel I have been writing this book all my life." It is a measure of her achievement that, in a book with 184 pages of text, she has produced a work of breath and depth, synthesizing and extending themes she has explored throughout her career.
The immediate genesis of her book is the essay she published in 2001 in Azure, "The Brilliant Failure of Jewish Foreign Policy." That essay considered the political strategies Jews had developed to survive during centuries of exile, after the Romans destroyed their state. She explained how those strategies continued in Jewish consciousness even after the reestablishment of Israel, making it the first state "to arm its declared enemy with the expectation of gaining security."
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Ms. Wisse’s prior book was "The Modern Jewish Canon," a study of the essential works of Jewish writing. "Jews and Power" not only belongs in the next edition, but — even more importantly — can play a role in the survival of the people that produced those works. It is essential reading.
Wisse’s principal themes are the relationship of Jews and their historical experience to the exercise of power, and reflections on the mistaken morality of powerlessness, but her book is extraordinarily insightful even in its peripheral observations.
As an example, here is her reflection on Palestinian nationalism, the “only nationalism to be recognized by the United Nations prior to statehood.” In a single paragraph, she captures the all-encompassing negativity of a movement that fashions its identity almost exclusively in terms of the destruction of its neighbor:
The most important date in the Palestinian calendar is no Muslim, Arab, or native Palestinian commemoration or celebration, but May 14, 1948, the day of Israel’s founding. Drawing their images from both the destruction of the Temple and the mass murder of the Jews of Europe, Palestinians commemorate the birthday of Israel as their nakba, or cataclysm. They refer to the nakba as “Palestine’s endless Holocaust,” describing the flight of Arabs during Israel’s War of Independence in terms that imitate Holocaust commemoration. Web sites offer “survivors’ testimonies” and allege “mass deportations,” ascribing to Palestinians the role of Jews and to Jews the role of Nazis. A Palestinian calendar that offers up the Palestinian story “from before the British mandate and up to today’s Apartheid Wall [sic]” contains not a single entry that is independent of Israel. January 7 is Martyr’s Day, commemorating the “documented deaths” of Palestinians as a result of Israeli occupation. February 17 highlights “the Lavon Affair,” marking the day in 1955 when the Israeli defense minister Lavon was forced to resign after exposure of an Israeli spy ring in Egypt. The entry for Palestinian Mother’s Day, March 21, reminds us that tributes of flowers are no longer to be brought to mothers but laid by them on the gravesites of their martyred children. April is the cruelest month: 3 to 12 marks the “massacre of Jenin in 2002” and April 9 the 1948 massacre of Deir Yassin, but by way of compensation, April 16 honors the start of the first “Great” Arab uprising, led by Haj Amin al Husseini (see earlier), anticipating December 9, which the calendar marks as the date of the second – not the first – intifada against Israel in 1987. An Addams Family caricature could not do justice of the ghoulish delight this document takes in self-torment, self-pity, self-punishment, and self-destruction at the hands of demon-Israel.
Even without the disputed territories, the major part of Mandate Palestine (which included what is now Jordan) is already in Arab hands, and the Palestinian Arabs could have had a second Arab state on all or most of the disputed territories in 1937, 1947, 2000, 2001, 2003 and even thereafter, but the Palestinian national identity has always focused not on the achievement of a state but on the destruction of another one. They have used power not to build but to destroy.
Ruth Wisse has had a distinguished career that mixes literary criticism and political commentary in a fashion that few others (with the possible exception of Norman Podhoretz) have matched. Her April 1995 essay “What My Father Knew” may be the single best combination of autobiography, history and political criticism published in recent decades in COMMENTARY. Her new book is a classic contribution to modern Jewish writing.