Review of Nirenberg’s ANTI-JUDAISM

From Sunday’s WashingtonPost

Review of Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition. By David Nirenberg. Norton. 610 pp. $35

 

Oh, the Protestants hate the Catholics,

And the Catholics hate the Protestants,

And the Hindus hate the Muslims,

And everybody hates the Jews.

So sang Tom Lehrer in his satirical song “National Brotherhood Week.” It’s no news that even those who preach “love thy neighbor” have often combined their striving for community with the hatred of a scapegoat, the Jews. David Nirenberg’s “Anti-Judaism” is a thorough, scholarly account of why, in the history of the West, Jews have been so easy to hate. And this story goes back a very long way.

Nirenberg returns to ancient Egypt to examine traditions that portray Jews as “enemies of Egyptian piety, sovereignty, and prosperity.”This was already old in the 7th century BCE! Ancient Greeks and Romans would have their Jews, too; they found use for an “anomalous” people who stuck together and followed their own rules, who were “neither disenfranchised nor citizen, neither conquered nor conquering, neither powerless nor free.” Over the centuries, when there was trouble in the kingdom, be it corruption or military threat, famine or political chaos, pagan ideologues developed a handy solution: Attack the Jews.

Jews were useful for those who were contending for power in the ancient world, and the Egyptian model of scapegoating was often repeated. But it was the Christians who refined anti-Judaism into a core theological and political ideology. Christianity had a particular problem: to show that it had overcome Judaism — overcome its adherence to the laws of the “old” testament, overcome its tribal particularity with evangelical universalism. The idea of Judaism — together with the fact that there were still people in the world who chose to remain Jews — was an affront to that universalism. “To the extent that Jews refused to surrender their ancestors, their lineage, and their scripture, they could become emblematic of the particular, of stubborn adherence to the conditions of the flesh, enemies of the spirit, and of God.”

Throughout the centuries theologians returned to this theme when they wanted either to stimulate religious enthusiasm or quash some perceived heretical movement. Not that you needed any real Jews around to do this. You simply had to label your enemies as “Jews” or “Judaizing” to advance the purity of your cause. In the first through fourth centuries, Christians fighting Christians often labeled each other Jews as they struggled for supremacy. And proclaiming your hatred of the Jews became a tried and true way of showing how truly Christian you were. Centuries later, even Luther and Erasmus agreed that “if hatred of Jews makes the Christian, then we are all plenty Christian.”

Islam followed this same pattern of solidifying orthodoxy by stoking anti-Jewish fervor. Muhammad set Islam, like Christianity, firmly within an Abrahamic tradition, but that made it crucial to sever the new religion from any Judaizing possibilities. Rival Islamic groups, like rival forms of Christianity, often painted their adversaries as hypocritical Jews scheming to take the world away from spiritual truths essential for its true salvation.

Nirenberg shows how consistently the struggle for religious and political supremacy has been described as a struggle against the “Jews.” The quotation marks are especially important as his account moves beyond the medieval period, because between 1400 and 1600 Western Europe was more or less “a world free of Jews.” Banished from most countries, and existing only in the tiniest numbers through special exemptions, actual Jews were hardly ever seen. But it was in this period that “Christian Europe awoke haunted by the conviction that it was becoming Jewish.” In this period of cultural change and doctrinal and political disputes, patterns as old as the age of the pharoahs were reactivated: My adversaries must be extinguished for the polity to be purified; my adversaries must be Jews. And in early modern European eyes, the adversaries were especially dangerous if they were secret Jews who appeared to be Christian. Were Jews hiding everywhere?

Martin Luther brought this rhetoric to a fever pitch. In 1523 he accused the Roman Church of becoming “more ‘Jewish’ than the Jews,” and as he grew older he tried to convince his contemporaries that “so thoroughly hopeless, mean, poisonous, and bedeviled a thing are the Jews that for 1400 years they have been, and continue to be, our plague, pestilence, and all that is our misfortune.” Don’t believe in conversions, the aged Luther urged; the only way to baptize Jews was by tying millstones around their necks.

Nirenberg’s command of disparate sources and historical contexts is impressive. His account of the development of Christianity and Islam is scholarly yet readable. And his portrayal of the role that Judaism has played as a foil for the consolidation of religious and political groups is, for this Jewish reader, chilling. Nirenberg is not interested, as he repeatedly insists, in arguing that Christianity and Islam are “anti-Semitic.” Instead, he is concerned with tracing the work that the idea of Judaism does within Western culture. He shows that many of the important conceptual and aesthetic developments in that culture — from Saint John to Saint Augustine to Muhammad, from Shakespeare to Luther to Hegel — depend on denigrating Jews.That’s what’s so chilling: great cultural achievements built on patterns of scapegoating and hatred.

In the modern period, revolutionaries and counter-revolutionaries continued to employ “the Jewish problem” as something to be overcome. “How could that tiny minority convincingly come to represent for so many the evolving evils of the capitalist world order?” Nirenberg asks. He shows that for thousands of years the patterns of anti-Judaism have evolved to provide great thinkers and ordinary citizens with habits of thought to “make sense of their world.” He doesn’t say that these patterns caused the mechanized, genocidal Nazi war against the Jews in the 20th century, but he argues convincingly “that the Holocaust was inconceivable and is unexplainable without that deep history of thought.”

Presaging Tom Lehrer, Sigmund Freud in 1929 wrote ironically that Jews, by being objects of aggression, “have rendered most useful services to the civilizations of the countries that have been their hosts; but unfortunately all the massacres of the Jews in the Middle Ages did not suffice to make that period more peaceful and secure for their Christian fellows.” Even when “everybody hates the Jews,” patterns of intolerance and violence remain intact. Nirenberg offers his painful and important history so that we might recognize these patterns in hopes of not falling into them yet again.

Baseball on a Roll: Another Little Three Crown!

The Wesleyan baseball squad took two out of three games from Amherst this weekend to secure first place in the NESCAC West division and gain the Little Three crown for this semester. Donnie Cimino ’15 had a powerhouse weekend at the plate, while Jeff Blout ’14 and Nick Cooney ’15 were all but unhittable from the mound.

Wesleyan Baseball Little Three Champs
Wesleyan Baseball Little Three Champs

We will be hosting the NESCAC baseball tournament, while the softball team will be traveling to the playoffs. The men’s lacrosse team will also be on the road for the semi-finals of the conference tournament, after a thrilling overtime victory against Bowdoin Saturday. Mike Giambanco ’14 and Quentin DellaFera ’15 had hat tricks for the Cardinals. All three teams were Little Three champs this semester.

Men’s and women’s tennis had shutout victories against Colby yesterday. Both teams have been having great seasons. Did you forget about rugby? The rugby men had an amazing come-from-behind victory against Williams over the weekend.

Go WES!!

Mad About Wes

Last night a few hundred Wesleyans gathered at the Director’s Guild Theater in New York to hear from Matthew Weiner ’87, creator of Mad Men. This was one of the kickoff events for our THIS IS WHY fundraising campaign, and the energy was terrific. I met some recent graduates who were eager to hear how Matt went from being a College of Letters major to a film and television writer. Older alumni were comparing notes with me about how the mania for period detail in Mad Men got the epoch just right.

Matt told a hilarious story about his poetry thesis and spoke warmly of the creative friends and teachers at Wesleyan who helped launch him into the world of ideas and media. Was it the Freud seminar taught by Elisabeth Young-Breuhl and Paul Schwaber, or the work in writing seminars with Anne Greene? COL director Kari Weil seemed to think that it was all those discussions about books that matter, and Matt provided plenty of evidence for that when he talked about Don Draper’s tenuous existentialism. It was a wonderful evening, and at the end we announced a new $600,000 donation to financial aid from an alumnus who wanted to celebrate the occasion. It was a great night for alma mater!

I’m heading back to campus today. There is so much happening on campus this weekend — from music and public life in Indonesia to great international theater at the CFA (not to mention Company at the Second Stage). Lots of great athletic action, too! Check out the calendar and find out why we keep saying, “THIS IS WHY.”

How to Choose a (Our) University

WesFest is over, and in the next ten days all those folks who are fortunate enough to have choices about what college to attend will make a big decision: choosing the college that is just right for them. They are trying to envision where they will be most likely to thrive. Where will I learn the most, be happiest, and form friendships that will last a lifetime? How to choose? I thought it might be useful to re-post my thoughts on this, with a few revisions.

Of course, for many the decision will be made on an economic basis. Which school has given the most generous financial aid package? Wesleyan is one of a small number of schools that meets the full financial need of all admitted students according to a formula developed over several years. There are some schools with larger endowments that can afford to be even more generous than Wes, but there are hundreds (thousands?) of others that are unable even to consider meeting financial need over four years of study. Our school is expensive because it costs a lot to maintain the quality of our programs. But Wesleyan has made a commitment to keep loan levels low and to raise tuition only in sync with inflation in the future.

After answering the question of which schools one can afford, how else does one decide where best to spend one’s college years? Of course, size matters.  Some students are looking for a large university in an urban setting where the city itself plays an important role in one’s education. New York and Boston, for example, have become increasingly popular college destinations, but not, I suspect, for the classroom experience. But if one seeks small classes and strong, personal relationships with faculty, then liberal arts schools, which pride themselves on providing rich cultural and social experiences on a residential campus, are especially compelling. You can be on a campus with a human scale and still have plenty of things to do. Wesleyan is somewhat larger than most liberal arts colleges but much smaller than the urban or land grant universities. We feel that this gives our students the opportunity to choose a broad curriculum and a variety of cultural activities on campus, while still being small enough to encourage regular, sustained relationships among faculty and students.

All the selective small liberal arts schools boast of having a faculty of scholar-teachers, of a commitment to research and interdisciplinarity, and of encouraging community and service. So what sets us apart from one another after taking into account size, location, and financial aid packages? What are students trying to see when they visit Amherst and Wesleyan, or Tufts and Middlebury?

Knowing that these schools all provide a high-quality, broad and flexible curriculum with strong teaching, and that the students all have displayed great academic capacity, prospective students are trying to discern the personalities of each school. They are trying to imagine themselves on the campus, among the people they see, to get a feel for the chemistry of the place — to gauge whether they will be happy there. That’s why hundreds of visitors came to Wesleyan last week for WesFest. They went to classes and athletic contests, musical performances and parties. And they asked themselves: Would I be happy at Wesleyan?

I hope our visitors have gotten a sense of the personality of the school that I so admire and enjoy. I hope they feel the exuberance and ambition of our students, the intelligence and care of our faculty, the playful yet demanding qualities of our community. I hope our visitors can sense our commitment to creating a diversity in which difference is embraced and not just tolerated, and to public service that is part of one’s education and approach to life.

Whatever college or university students choose, I hope they get three things out their education: discovering what they love to do; getting better at it; learning to share it with others. I explain a little bit more about that in this talk:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-LzN8sGkRXg[/youtube]

We all know that Wesleyan is hard to get into (even more difficult this year!). But even in the group of highly selective schools, Wes is not for everybody. We aspire to be a community committed to boldness as well as to rigor, to idealism as well as to effectiveness. Whether in the sciences, arts, humanities or social sciences, our faculty and students are dedicated to explorations that invite originality as well as collaboration. The scholar-teacher model is at the heart of our curriculum. Our faculty are committed to teaching and to shaping the fields in which they work. The whole country seems to be in a debate about MOOCs, massive on-line classes in which many thousands of students enroll. At Wes most of our classes are small, but we are also the only liberal arts college currently offering several MOOCS. While the Homerathon was taking place on campus these last few days, thousands of students around the world were listening to Andy Szegedy-Maszak’s lectures on Greek History. Lisa Dierker’s statistics class, to take another example, is being used in graduate programs and businesses, with students enrolling from all over the world. Here in Middletown, Prof. Dierker’s students are working to improve local schools with the lessons they learn from analyzing the district’s data. Good teaching all around. Effective scholarship that makes a difference in the world and right here on campus.

The commitment of our faculty says a lot about who we are, as does the camaraderie around the completion of senior projects that we’ve seen these past weeks. We know how to work hard, but we also know how to enjoy the work we choose to do. That’s been magically appealing to me for more than 30 years. I bet the magic will enchant many of our visitors, too.

Softball Wins Little Three!!

The mighty Wesleyan softball team is the Little Three Champ for the just the second time in our history (the other win was in 2008). Jill Gately ’15 continued her phenomenal season, breaking the Wes RBI record. Frosh pitching sensation Su Pardo ’16 was devastating on the mound. She now has 125 Ks in 88 innings of work this year with a 12-0 record and 1.91 ERA. The Wes women are at home next weekend to wrap up their season against Middlebury.

Softball Little Three Champs
Softball Little Three Champs

 

Wesleyan also had great success over the weekend in baseball and lacrosse. The baseball team swept a double-header against Middlebury, and the lacrosse squad came from behind to beat the highly-ranked Tufts team. Lots of momentum as we move toward the end of the semester!!

UPDATE: Men’s and Women’s tennis continue their winning ways. Both teams won against Connecticut College on Sunday!

The Wesleyan Festival Continues

April is a terrifically busy month, and also one in which there are so many delights to behold. Take athletics — from the men’s lacrosse team’s classy triumph over Trinity to the softball teams FIRST EVER sweep of Trinity’s women. Men’s tennis is also on a roll, dispatching Hamilton and then beating Tufts FOR THE FIRST TIME SINCE WW II. The crew teams are having the kinds of success that send rankings soaring, while rugby sends opponents falling. And the baseball team seems to be having almost as much fun with its winning ways as the spectators up on Foss Hill. 

From almost anywhere on campus you can hear the drummers, who have taken to lawns of the CFA, sometimes accompanied by dancers. I couldn’t help but shake a little bit as I headed for this week’s senior artist exhibition in the Zilkha gallery. What a fantastic show! From the photographs of imposters to the paintings of (photographs of) Versailles, there is lots of great art to see. Check out the amazing blend of the conceptual and the beautiful! 

There are seminars and panels, lectures, films and shows over these next few days. After witnessing Lily Haje’s ’13 amazing immersive theatrical experience last week, I am looking forward to catching Eurydice at the Patricelli 92 theater. And after catching Sam Friedman’s ’13 UNBELIEVABLE senior concert last week, I’m looking forward to some great jazz at the CFA this weekend. 

Wednesday morning I met with WesFest families bright and early. There were folks from Bangkok and Brooklyn, Los Angeles and Berkeley…even Kansas City! I reminisced with them about my student days at Wesleyan, particularly at Alpha Delta Phi. Feeling nostalgic, I headed over to the Star and Crescent for a delightful lunch. I spent many happy hours in the kitchen there when I was a student, and I felt that great Wes spirit alive and well there yesterday. But don’t believe the Facebook photos… 

I’ll be back talking about liberal arts education with parents and pre-frosh this morning. They’ll be off to a day of meeting with students, professors and staff, learning about Wesleyan. There is an especially exciting event today: 

Global Produce founder and CEO Marc Shmuger ’80 – Previously, Marc worked as CEO and chairman for Universal Pictures. He will host a special pre-release presentation of the film, We Steal the Secrets: The Story of Wikileaks, at 8 p.m. in the Center for Film Studies, Goldsmith Family Cinema. 

Wesleyan in the springtime. The festival is off and running. THIS IS WHY.

 

The Non-Sense of Violence (Again)

When I emerge from my seminar on photography and representation each Monday afternoon, it takes me a little while to tune in to the real world. In class we are wrestling with abstract ideas, beautiful or disturbing images, and questions concerning the representation of suffering and telling the truth. Yesterday, I had a rude awakening when I got back to the office. The Boston Marathon had been bombed. There were deaths and many casualties.

The images from Boston are horrific, overwhelming. They show terror and pain, courage and generosity. Many ran to care for the injured, all were shocked by this brutal attack. We remain in shock, trying to figure out what happened and what’s next. That will take some time.

Now, our hearts go out to the victims of yesterday’s bombing. Our university shares in their sorrow and in the determination to stand against terror and violence.

Sometimes we joke about the Wesleyan “bubble,” the safety of a campus that facilitates the broadly experimental and creative learning that we cherish. Of course, we know that we aren’t in a bubble, and that we have many of the same problems of the world off campus. But when an attack like this happens, we are reminded that our community thrives only insofar as we can reject the non-sense of violence — that our freedom to learn depends on the absence of terror.

We mourn the losses in Boston and we recognize that around the world many people were afflicted by violence yesterday and every day. And we should be reminded of the importance that our community places on the refusal of violence as a necessary condition for education.

 

THE STORY UNTIL NOW: Kit Reed’s radiant imagination still accelerating

The press sings the praises of Wesleyan writers on a regular basis. But this weekend the notices for Kit Reed’s recent collection of stories stopped me in my tracks.

From the first paragraph of the Wall Street Journal review:

The title of Kit Reed’s selection of her own short stories, The Story Until Now (Wesleyan University Press, 442 pages, $35), reminds us that although she has been writing award-winning fiction for some 50 years, she’s still accelerating. The scope of these 35 stories is immense, their variety unmatched.

And this from a recent Vanity Fair: “The Story Until Now unleashes new and classic stories fired by a radiant imagination.”

Kit Reed
Kit Reed

 

Kit has been inspiring students and readers for decades. A resident writer at Wesleyan, she stopped teaching full-time years ago, but she still works with students and publishes stories and novels that receive critical acclaim and a devoted readership. Speaking of devotion, the labyrinth at the south-east end of the CFA (behind the anthropology house) was installed by alumni to honor Kit and Joe Reed (Professor of English and American Studies, Emeritus). Stroll the labyrinth, and if you see Kit walking by on campus with her terrier, Killer, give her a high five. Better yet, pick up a copy of The Story Until Now. I bet she’ll be willing to sign it.

UPDATE: RAVE REVIEW IN NYT BOOK REVIEW:

 

 

Diversity Work this Weekend: Blueprint Roundtable

Thanks to VP Sonia Mañjon and the Invisible Men group, Blueprint Roundtable will hold a workshop on Saturday at Wesleyan. Three of our colleagues (and students) from California College of the Arts (Chris Johnson, Hank Willis Thomas and Bayete Ross Smith) began this work as an outgrowth of an innovative transmedia art project, Question Bridge: Black Males. Question Bridge creates a platform to represent and redefine Black male identity in America. Question Bridge is on exhibit at the Hartford YMCA, hosted by the Amistad Center for Art and Culture, Hartford, CT. The Blueprint Roundtable is a collaboration with the Amistad Center for Art and Culture.

While filming Question Bridge, the artists heard a compelling exchange between a younger participant and an older civil-rights activist, “Why didn’t you leave us the blueprint?” This sparked a series of multi-generational conversations about how to pass along experience and wisdom. Wesleyan’s Invisible Men, a forum for people who identify as men of color, will host Blueprint Roundtable with three goals:

  1. To solidify a working group of inter-generational male participants to take part in a community conversation about issues facing Black and Latino men,
  2. To galvanize support for Invisible Men at Wesleyan University, and
  3. To reach out to younger male students and older Black and Latino men in Middletown to establish a framework for support, mentoring, and further collaboration.

This program reaches beyond the borders of campus. The Roundtable will be moderated by acclaimed actor Delroy Lindo, star of Romeo Must Die and Malcolm X.

Panelist and performers include:

Wesleyan Students: Ismael Coleman, Reese Poddel, Jalen Alexander, Phabinly Gabriel, Shasha Brown, Nkosi Archibald and Maurice Hurd.

Middletown Youth: AJ Hart (senior, Capital Prep Magnet School), Zyan VanEwyk (freshman, Capital Prep Magnet School), Deontrae Taylor (Middletown High School graduate, current Job Corp member)

Middletown Community Leaders: Antonio Rivera (former Wesleyan Prison Education Project participant), Tony Bostick (Wesleyan Associate Director Public Safety), Pastor Willis McCaw (Ministerial Alliance), Ronald Edens (Community Leader), Kevin Woodard (United Fathers) and Grady Faulkner, P’11 (Common Council)

Blueprint Roundtable

 

Sexual Assault Awareness Month

April on campus is typically a time of intense work for faculty and students (exams, theses) and liberating play (Foss Hill in the sunshine, drumming in the CFA).  April is also “sexual assault awareness month.”  Sexual assault remains one of the greatest threats to freedom and well-being around the world, and college campuses are not immune.  Our campus is not immune, as we were made so painfully aware last weekend when one of our students was attacked.  Sexual assault is an act of violence. It terrorizes groups, most often women, in ways that can destroy individual lives and distort society. Awareness matters because sexual assault is often so hidden away. Survivors of assault must be supported in every way possible, and all of us must find ways to change the elements of our culture that fuel this violence.

College campuses are the front lines in the battle against sexual assault, places where we can raise awareness and generate a real community response to eliminate this form of terrorism. Here at Wesleyan we have been making strong efforts in these regards, from the ongoing work of Alysha Warren, our sexual assault resource coordinator in CAPS, and that of our SART team to the work of student groups such as Students for Consent and Communication and the Peer Health Advocates. Such efforts, however, do not make the event of last weekend any less painful.  I’ve tried to make sure we were doing everything possible to support the survivor of the attack and to assist in apprehending the perpetrator.

Now we must do what we can to raise campus awareness, to ask ourselves what else we can do to eliminate sexual assault from our campus, to commit to working with and supporting those on campus already doing this critical work. We aspire to be a community of compassionate solidarity in which people can learn with inquiry and openness. Sexual assault is one of the greatest threats to our educational mission. We must work together to stamp it out.