Remember Me To God, Myron Kaufmann’s debut novel, came out 54 years ago this month. As Josh Lambert noted on the 50th anniversary of the novel’s publication, the book has fallen out of favor, though it had been initially heralded by the likes of Norman Mailer and Alfred Kazin and appeared on New York Times bestseller lists. “Even excellent books fall into obscurity all the time,” Lambert explained, “no matter how popular they’ve been—particularly when, like Kaufmann’s, they spill out over nearly 700 pages of fine print.”

The novel tells the story of a Jewish family, the Amsterdams, in 1941, a year during which the older son, Richard, manages to ascend the social ranks at Harvard and earn a coveted spot on The Harvard Lampoon and induction into the Hasty Pudding Institute. His subsequent proposal to a Radcliffe-attending society girl (named Wimsy Talbot, no less) wreaks the expected havoc within his family—making the novel, in Lambert’s comparison, the emotional equivalent of an excruciatingly slow-motion car wreck, and inspiring Jewish leaders in the late 1950s to denounce the book as a literary documentation of Kaufmann’s own Jewish self-hatred.

Yet, Lambert argues, it actually offers a thorough analysis of the phenomenon of Jewish self-hatred, rather than simply serving as an example of it. “It is as an unusually evenhanded entry into this rich tradition that Remember Me to God deserves to be remembered,” Lambert wrote, “and as a finely wrought triumph of midcentury realism so precise in its observation that it captures perfectly the incline of streets in Harvard Square and the musty smell inside the Lampoon castle.”

Read Regatta Land, by Josh Lambert

The Obama Administration was compelled to join its European allies in going against Qaddafi, but what forced the Europeans to act were the scandals surrounding the British academic institutions—like Leeds University, Glasgow University, the School of Oriental and African Studies, King’s College London, and the London School of Economics—who’d enjoyed unseemly ties with Qaddafi. Most famously, Howard Davies was compelled to resign this month as director of the LSE, to which Qaddafi’s International Charity and Development Foundation donated £1.5 million (about $2.5 million), and which admitted to its doctoral program his son Saif al-Islam, now best known not for his academic endeavors, or even his expensive suits, but for exhorting his allies to “fight to the last man, until the last bullet” in a rambling speech that more closely recalled his father’s tirades than polite London dinner-party chatter.

These highly publicized scandals would make it very difficult for European governments to continue to deal with Qaddafi now that he has turned his country into a war zone. But the main problem for British Prime Minister David Cameron is that, as we recall from the recent spill in the Gulf of Mexico, the United Kingdom’s pension fund is tied to its BP portfolio, and BP has extensive deals with the Libyans. In other words, it is a vital British interest to get rid of Qaddafi, at the very least so that BP and London can continue their key relationship with a major oil-producing state.

The irony then is that it was the intellectuals whose peaceful outreach to Qaddafi made war against the Libyan strongman necessary. The U.K. intellectual and academic elite surely led the way, but their American colleagues weren’t far behind. They all congratulated themselves that they were shaping the dictator’s ideas.

For instance, Rutgers professor Benjamin Barber wrote just last week that he has “no doubt” that his engagement with Qaddafi “ameliorated the consequences of his rule and created conditions conducive to gradualist reform.” How Barber squares this assessment of his contribution to Libya’s future with events unfolding in the country is unclear. What is clear is that Barber turned a blind eye to Qaddafi’s past record, the murders, tortures, and disappearances that were the basis of Hisham Matar’s novel In the Country of Men, which was shortlisted for the 2006 Man Booker Prize.

In the same category as Barber is Joseph Nye, the Harvard professor famous for his ideas about soft power, or “the art of projecting influence through attraction rather than coercion.” “Sometimes people say soft power is too soft to accomplish anything,” Nye told an interviewer. “It’s an important part of the arsenal of power. When you ignore it, as we tend to have done, it turns out to be quite costly.”

Nye knows that Qaddafi “has long been seen as a bad boy in the West”—a sponsor of terrorism with little respect for human rights—“but in recent years, Qaddafi has appeared to be changing. He still wants to project Libyan power, but he is going about it differently than in decades past.” Does that mean the Bedouin chieftain in the big tent is interested in Nye’s intellectual framework? “Sure enough,” writes Nye, “a half hour into our conversation, he asked how Libya might increase its soft power on the world stage.”

It was clearly lost on the Harvard academic that he is part of Qaddafi’s “soft power” campaign to whitewash his regime’s image. But the Libyan strongman had him at hello—“Qaddafi ushered [Nye] into his tent, where he had five of Nye’s books laid out on a table.” Thus are intellectuals bought off, by showing an “interest” in their work.

Perhaps even more troubling than Nye’s easy virtue is that this academic who specializes in interpreting the behavior of states does not seem to understand that what altered Qaddafi’s behavior—what got him to drop his nuclear program and stop sponsoring terror attacks—was the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003. Qaddafi didn’t want to be the next Arab leader after Saddam Hussein caught live on TV crawling out of a spider hole into the waiting arms of U.S. soldiers. In other words, it was hard power the old-fashioned way that brought Qaddafi to heel, and violence remained the central pillar of the regime long after Nye and Qaddafi exchanged signed editions of their books.

What’s interesting about the intellectuals-and-Qaddafi controversy is that most of the reports have focused on the sums exchanged—the payments that the Monitor Group doled out to Nye, Barber, and the rest, or the contributions Qaddafi made to the LSE. But the issue is not simply money, or else Lee Bollinger and Columbia University would’ve charged the Islamic Republic of Iran for use of the auditorium space that it provided Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad the last two years.

The Qaddafi scandal is not an isolated case. Warming to violent rulers is the rule for Western intellectuals rather than the exception—and here the character type was made all the more irresistible by Qaddafi’s eccentric tastes: his Euro-Bedouin couture, the cadre of Amazon bodyguards, the bogus philosophical-political ramblings with third-world pedigree. But whichever way you cut it, this Pierrot of the Sahara is a murderer. If intellectuals can embrace Qaddafi, they will embrace anyone. The issue then is not simply the money.

To be sure, Libya and the rest of the oil-producing Arab states give tons of money to Western universities to promote their twisted versions of Islam and Middle Eastern politics. Cambridge has £8 million from Saudi Arabia and another £4 million from Oman, Kuwait donated $4.5 million to my alma mater, George Washington University, and so on. But if it were simply about cash, how do you explain why Harvard’s Arab alumni association chose to hold its 2011 Arab World Conference in Damascus, under the auspices of Asma al-Assad, wife of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad? Harvard’s vice provost for international affairs, Jorge Dominguez, will be delivering a keynote address in the city that the Syrian regime likes to call the capital of Arab resistance—which served as a transit route for foreign fighters like those same Libyan Islamists going in to Iraq to kill U.S. troops and Washington’s Iraqi allies. Syria has very little oil wealth, so that’s not why Harvard works with a regime that supports anti-U.S., anti-Israeli, and anti-Arab terror.

The relationship between the intellectuals and the regimes started with money, but in order to justify the cash the intelligentsia explained that they were not simply bartering their prestige but rather that the deal afforded them an opportunity to affect change. But what values do they have to share when the transaction has exposed their willingness to sacrifice their values?

This is not about money because no amount of it would enable these academic institutions to affect change among the societies they are engaged with, nor even to teach students from Arab societies. The problem here is not the Arabs, nor even their ruthless and often rich regimes—the problem is the intellectuals. The reason that the Western intellectual class is not able to judge a dictator by his actions is that it does not believe in the moral values that would give rise to the ability to make such judgments. The issue is simply vanity—by which I mean not merely an overabundance of self-regard but a deep and abiding emptiness. There is nothing humanitarian about the class that clamors for the end of a tyrant who had their prestige at a discount.

But the profile depicts someone much more complex than the caricature of Peretz, furthered by his enemies but buttressed by his own blogposts, as a ranting, right-wing, and—there’s really no denying it—occasionally racist pundit. Partly, this more balanced view of Peretz is the result of a peace process so stagnant that someone on the right cannot help but seem like a moderate (Palestinian President Salam Fayyad is “a very modernizing person, but I would doubt that he commands loyalty,” Peretz says, and one can easily imagine someone with opposite views nodding in agreement). And partly, this more balanced view of Peretz may also be the result of the fact that Peretz—despite being, as the article’s title has it, “in Exile” from most of the things that have defined his seven decades (the United States, Harvard, his now-ex-wife, The New Republic)—cooperated with the profile and so presumably had some ability to craft the narrative it tells. This is not pure supposition on my part: Earlier this fall, a reporter on assignment for Tablet Magazine tried to interview Peretz about his participation in an English-language teaching program in Jaffa (which the profile opens with), only to be told Peretz wanted nothing written about his trip.

The article’s most important contribution to the public record is its filling in of the recent controversy surrounding Peretz’s remark, “Muslim life is cheap, most notably to Muslims,” and the brouhaha it led to at Harvard. There good reporting about his unhappy childhood and about his long, tapering, and finally finished marriage. There is some choice inside-baseball stuff (longtime literary editor Leon Wieseltier remains a close friend of Peretz’s, but they no longer discuss Israel, which makes sense; TNR writer John Judis “knows zero” about Israel, Peretz opines, which isn’t true). There is one timeless line—“I mean, fuck these fancy Upper West Side rabbis,” Peretz complains—and another, from the writer Fouad Ajami, that seems really to get at the man: “Arabs understand Marty. He has that Middle Eastern quality: me against my brother, me and my brother against my cousin, me and my cousin against the world.”

And yet the true defense of Martin Peretz (besides the fact that he and his wife funded the presidential campaign of maybe the most worthy politician of the past fifty years, Eugene McCarthy) comes in one of those indelibly New York-y sidebars that runs alongside the article. It depicts the chronology of The New Republic’s editors: Michael Kinsley; Hendrik Hertzberg; Andrew Sullivan; Peter Beinart; Frank Foer. Those are some of the best and most important journalists of the past quarter-century, and Peretz sponsored them all, and in certain cases discovered them. You could add in a dozen or two-dozen more writers—Charles Krauthammer; Margaret Talbot; Jonathan Chait; Hanna Rosin; James Wood; Ruth Franklin—whom we perhaps would not have heard of were it not for Peretz. This is to say nothing of Wieseltier, whom Peretz has given rein to run the back of TNR’s book for 30 years, to nearly everyone’s benefit (I say “nearly” because one is obliged to spill a drop for some of the writers reviewed there).

Peretz’s legacy is his magazine. And so the best news the article brings is that Peretz’s magazine will soon discontinue the worst thing about it—Peretz’s blog.

Peretz in Exile [New York]
Related: Facts on the Ground
Earlier: Harvard Cancels Peretz Speech

Ergenekon is the name given to a massive clandestine organization that the AKP says has plotted a host of conspiracies including plans to crash airplanes and bomb Istanbul mosques in the hopes of precipitating a military coup. The Turkish authorities have used these allegations to arrest hundreds of people who oppose Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s government—arrests that have been greeted in the West with confused silence.

However, according to Dani Rodrik, a Turkish academic now based in the United States, Ergenekon is not a threat to Turkey’s increasingly Islamist form of democracy but rather an elaborate political fiction created by the AKP and its ally, the mysterious billionaire religious leader Fethullah Gulen, in order to discredit, imprison, and silence opponents. Rodrik believes that the AKP and the Gulenists are looking to consolidate their power not just with a view to short-term political victories, but as part of a vision to change the nature of the fiercely secular Turkish republic. “You get a different perspective on what they’re doing internationally once you understand what they’re doing at home,” Rodrik told me by phone this week. “The AKP and its Gulenist allies are authoritarian at heart, one by one capturing state institutions and undermining the rule of law. What you’re going to get is not a more democratic Turkey.”

Rodrik, the 52-year-old Rafiq Hariri Professor of International Political Economy at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, is best known for his views on trade policy and the developing world. What does a Harvard economist who makes his home in the United States know about the pitched battle between the military and the Islamist political establishment in a proudly Muslim country? The fact that Rodrik is a member of Turkey’s dwindling Jewish community makes his charges against the AKP and Gulenists suspect to some. “There’s been a level of predictable anti-Semitism in some of the government-friendly media,” Rodrik said. “But it is important for the government to have the liberal intelligentsia with them on this, and persistent anti-Semitism rants wouldn’t go over very well with them.”

Still, this is not the same Turkey that once enjoyed a strategic alliance with Israel. The Turkish-sponsored Mavi Marmara dispatched to Gaza in May suggests that Ankara has instead joined the ranks of the resistance axis, a strange decision for one of Washington’s NATO allies. The writing was on the wall as early as March 2003, shortly after Erdogan took office, when the Turkish parliament rejected the George W. Bush Administration’s request to use Turkey as a launching ground for the invasion of Iraq.

If U.S. officials were slow to chart Turkey’s shift in the international arena, they have been oblivious to the mounting domestic crisis driving the Ergenekon affair. Rodrik himself wasn’t paying especially close attention to the spiral of weird conspiracy cases that have taken over the Turkish justice system until a relative was named in one of the many Ergenekon trials, this one related to allegations of a 2003 anti-government plot known as Sledgehammer. “When these cases came out three years ago,” Rodrik said, “I was where most Turkish liberals are today. I thought, maybe there were some improprieties in the way they were handled, but essentially the government was moving in the best way possible.”

In January a Turkish newspaper began publishing documents produced by an anonymous individual who claimed to be a retired military officer with knowledge of the Sledgehammer plan to bring down the government. Close to 200 active-duty and retired military officers have been charged as conspirators—for plotting terrorist operations like the mosque bombings intended to destabilize the state—all allegedly under the orders of retired four-star general Çetin Doğan, Rodrik’s father-in-law.

“I was skeptical from the beginning that he could be involved in such a thing,” Rodrik told me. “It’s horrifying stuff. Later, I became certain the documents were fabricated.”

What Rodrik and his wife found, he said, were obvious forgeries, clear to anyone “with a working command of Turkish.” The case is based on documents loaded onto three CDs, with no direct evidence tying them to computers where they are said to have been produced by Turkey’s First Army. As Rodrik has written: “Not a single one of the hundreds of officers questioned in the case has acknowledged ever hearing of the Sledgehammer plot or any of the other plans included in the incriminating CDs. The evidence that the three CDs in question are authentic comes solely from their metadata: the username and time information contained on the CDs and the Word documents therein. According to these metadata, the documents and the CDs were produced in 2003.”

It hardly takes a tech expert to alter such metadata, and according to Rodrik it is obvious that these documents could not have been made in 2003 but were produced sometime after, perhaps as late as 2008. Among other glaring anomalies is the fact that some of the organizations named did not exist when the plot was supposedly hatched. Journalists ostensibly blacklisted by the Sledgehammer conspirators were not writing about political issues at the time—one was a food critic, hardly an obvious target in a coup attempt.

“There are many reasons to be suspicious of the authenticity of the documents,” Rodrik told me. “But the zinger is that they are full of references to events that happened after 2003, literally dozens of these things. For instance, the documents mention a hospital by the name it uses after it merged with another hospital in 2008, they mention a company by the name that it took after it was sold to a foreign investor in 2008. Even without these anachronisms, there are enough inconsistencies that the case wouldn’t have gone forward in any legal system that takes the presumption of innocence seriously. But the anachronisms establish conclusively that the defendants have been framed.”

However, the legal system seems to be part of the problem. “Some crimes are based on evidence fabricated by the national police with the connivance of prosecutors,” said Rodrik. For instance, when an anonymous tip led the police to seize a DVD from a retired naval major’s house, the initial report, Rodrick wrote, “found nothing suspicious on the DVD, but a subsequent technical analysis uncovered a hidden file with details of a plan to intimidate non-Muslim minorities through bombings and assassinations. … Unaccountably, the prosecutors are on record questioning another defendant on this hidden file days before the technical analysis was conducted and the file was ‘discovered.’ ”

If the case against his father-in-law and the other alleged Sledgehammer conspirators is so patently flimsy, why, I asked him, isn’t anyone else doing the detective work he and his wife did? Those Turks most inclined to get in the weeds with him are the media and the liberal intelligentsia, are they are either too scared to say anything, said Rodrik, or they side with the AKP and the Gulenists.

Much of the Turkish media is owned by or affiliated with Fethullah Gulen, the supposedly charismatic but largely silent religious figure who has made his home in Pennsylvania since the late 1990s and is closely allied with the AKP. Gulen’s criticism of Ankara over the Mavi Marmara incident suggested to some that a breach had opened between his movement and the AKP, but Rodrik disagrees. “The criticism caught his domestic supporters off guard, because the local Gulenists are all on board with the IHH,” said Rodrik, referring to the Istanbul-based charity with ties to Islamic terrorist organizations, including Hamas. Gulen had good reason for seeing the incident from Washington’s point of view. “What’s important for Gulen is to be on the good side of the U.S. government.”

The AKP and the Gulenists, Rodrik explained, “are interlocking but independent. The Gulenists are an opaque movement. What they stand for is broadly in line with what the AKP wants: a culturally much more conservative Turkey, religious values, and practices. It’s an alliance based on perception of common interests. You can’t tell what’s happening in the Ergenekon affair without accounting for the role of the Gulen movement. The people who are responsible for fabricating evidence, intimidation, and wire-tapping, these are supporters of Gulen.”

The fact that the AKP is a broader umbrella than the Gulen movement, Rodrik argued, is yet another factor in keeping the Sledgehammer case rolling. “The AKP is supported by many liberals, who agree with them on issues of personal freedom, like the headscarf,” he explained. Sledgehammer and other cases that suggest a military plot to destroy Turkish democracy dovetail perfectly with the anti-military sentiment of secularists and liberals who might otherwise be worried by the AKP’s religious bent. “Liberals are anxious to see the military brought down to size,” said Rodrik. “And it’s true that they’ve been involved in some stuff in the past that’s not pretty. So with this narrative already in liberals’ heads, the case has been stage-managed extremely well.”

The storyline happens to fit the preconceptions of most U.S. officials as well. “Washington sees it something like this: The Turkish military and its allies have become too powerful, and now the AKP is trying to liberate the democratic system. This is a process of a deepening of democracy,” Rodrik said. “The narrative is very appealing on the surface. In Washington, I’ve been told it will change only with the arrest of U.S. citizens.”

In addition, Gulen’s public-relations apparatus reaches inside the Beltway. “Gulen encourages his devotees to contribute to members of Congress. When his supporters do an event in D.C., scores of congressmen show up. I have been told members of Congress go fishing on his compound in Pennsylvania,” Rodrik said. “You won’t see Gulen’s name on things, but he commands a vast network of schools, business associations, charities, and media outlets. It’s quite remarkable, how wide and influential this network is.”

To many U.S. officials then, Gulen is the model moderate Muslim, a Sufi who preaches coexistence and cooperation with the West—even as it is the Gulenists who are making war against the United States and Israel’s traditional allies in the Turkish military. But since Sept. 11, U.S. policymakers of both parties have been so giddy at the prospect of Islamic democracy that they have given a free pass to anyone clever enough to cloak their actions and intentions in the cloth of moderate Islam. The fact is that Erdogan and his allies are running roughshod over fundamental democratic principles—which is to say that the problem with Islamic democracy isn’t Islam as such, but rather the corruption and conspiracies of the governing party and its allies, who use Islam as cover for their own hunger for power. Washington, meanwhile, doesn’t dare criticize the domestic machinations of a Muslim democracy’s ruling Islamist party, for fear of crashing its own plans, and alienating Muslims.

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It tells us a lot about the younger man’s relation to his father, about the writer’s relation to his book, and about Cavell’s own complicated style of thought that the all-important conversation that should have taken place, didn’t. Cavell leaves it hanging. No ruminations on life and death; no dialectical exchange on duty. Instead, Cavell’s father falls asleep. The son—and Cavell is nothing if not an acute reader of Freud—goes off to find his mother. And that is that.

Cavell began writing Little Did I Know when he was about to undergo treatment for heart disease seven years ago. He saves the vignette about his father for the last pages of the book, as a kind of punch line. Cavell’s philosophy, quirky as it is, has always been about responsibility and, more important, about our tendency to avoid offering accounts of ourselves, about our unwillingness to stand by what we have done and what we should do. It is about missed connections, about our fear of paying proper attention to ourselves and the world. Little Did I Know is his accounting for himself.

It is not easy to give a brief take on Cavell, because he has always been, both figuratively and literally, all over the map. He was born in Atlanta to a musician mother and to an immigrant father (a frustrated, indifferent speaker of English who was also a frustrated and indifferent entrepreneur). The future philosopher spent his childhood traveling back and forth between business ventures his father was pursuing in Georgia and California. His father hated him; his mother loved him. He was a skilled musician, studied composition at UCLA, and did not so much flunk out of Juilliard as funk out. He got his doctorate in philosophy at Harvard, taught at Berkeley, then returned to Harvard and spent the better part of his very productive career in Cambridge. He has written both extensively and widely.

The memoir makes it tempting to cast Cavell’s career as a son’s wish to mediate between the severity of his father’s disappointments and the warmth of his mother’s creativity. After all, Cavell has spent the better part of five decades mediating between different schools of philosophy and between philosophy and the arts. He has written several books about film, and he is passionate about opera. It’s fair to say, though, that he does not just practice aesthetics, the philosophical description of the arts. One of his most stunning peculiarities is that he writes about the arts as if they were philosophy. Needless to say, Cavell’s approach doesn’t always work, but when it does, as in his 1994 article on the Marx Brothers in the London Review of Books, it can be liberating.

So, yes: Cavell is a conciliator, but to get at his insights, at his importance as an instigator, it makes sense to see him as a philosopher bent on disappointing disappointment. For Cavell, the scandal of our individuality is the source of a fundamental heartbreak. In becoming aware of ourselves, we lose the world. We doubt it and our knowledge of it.

We do not miss our appointment with the world through an error—we are indeed separate from it—but we are tempted to draw the wrong conclusions. We begin to the feel that objects as they “merely” appear to us are not what they really are, that there is something more out there. We feel that there must be a realm more real than the one we live in. Philosophy is all about this dilemma. It describes our desire to draw away from the ordinary, to locate reality elsewhere. By the same token, philosophy can try to turn us around, recover the everyday, and restore us to the pleasures of connection.

Nevertheless, our disappointment counts. It is not wrong. Things could be different, and they could be better. So, for Cavell, to return to the world does not mean accepting things as they are. To return to ourselves does not mean we should be content with our imperfections or with our discontent with them. His is a philosophy of what he calls “moral perfectionism.”

Cavell is worried about his right to say all this. How can he make such wide-ranging claims? Our individuality undermines our authority. His philosophy asks how personal experience can speak validly to and for others.

This is a tough one. We like to think of our lives in terms of their climaxes, breaks, and traumatic turns. These surprises might mark us, but they are not the stuff of the everyday. Cavell writes that “so much of what has formed me has been not events but precisely the uneventful, the nothing, the unnoted that is happening, the coloration or camouflage of the everyday.” The unnoted isn’t the stuff of story. We register it not as an event but as a mood. Mood tells us about ourselves and is our gateway to the world. It is the way that personal experience gets articulated and generalized.

So, it makes sense to read Cavell as he himself reads Emerson—as a philosopher of mood. But moods, like the tones that convey them, are hard to pin down and even harder to account for. As any reader of Marcel Proust and Henry James knows, you need a lot of space to summon forth a mood, and you need an eye for social or psychological nuance to keep things interesting. Cavell allows himself the space, but once young Stanley is out of his teens, Cavell the writer is not really that concerned with telling details. He is also too nice a guy to dish. He provides us with hundreds of pages of garrulous reticence about his friends, children, and wives, the books he has read, the books he has written, and the places he has visited. He is a bemused son and a loving father. He is the model of a grateful friend.

Gratitude is a virtue and like most virtues makes for dull reading. The most famous parts of the most famous memoirs of philosophers—Rousseau’s theft of a ribbon, Augustine’s theft of pears—turn on their vices. Sadly for the reader, Stanley Cavell is not a vicious man. He might not discuss death with his dad, but that is about as far as it goes. There is no villain in his divorce. What is more disappointing, Little Did I Know doesn’t provide us with any new or surprising insights into the turns of Cavell’s philosophy.

This is not Cavell’s first pass at autobiography. He went at it more pointedly and more concisely in 1994’s A Pitch of Philosophy. But, for all its longueurs, Little Did I Know is valuable to the extent that it makes it very clear just how much Cavell’s thinking owes to his immigrant Jewish background. The most obvious aspect of this debt—his insistence on what he calls moral perfectionism and his recourse to the theme of return—is perhaps the least intriguing. Equally obvious is the extent to which his concern with disappointment and despair is an attempt to come to terms philosophically with his father’s frustrated hopes. Cavell’s lonely childhood, his mother’s absences, and his father’s angry, angered distance must have led directly to his fascination with the ineluctable privacy of other people.

Judaism, as a sociological fact, if not a religious one, is also a form of privacy, a kind of unbridgeable separation that stands between the Jew and the outside world. This must have seemed especially true to generations of immigrants and their children. You can hear it in Cavell’s almost punctilious worry about his authority to speak and his warrant to be heard. There were plenty of Jews in Philosophy and English departments in the 1950s and the ’60s, but it couldn’t have been all that comfortable. (I know of a tenure case as recent as the 1980s in which a senior faculty member complained that a Jew couldn’t teach Shakespeare.) Jewish academics of my cohort did not experience this. In fact, with and without reason, a Jewish professor nowadays would feel comfortable claiming that Jewishness is in itself a claim for authority. The difference is telling, not the least in terms of our moods and therefore our thought.

We can learn something from Little Did I Know, but let’s be honest: There is no reason for most people to read it. For a good introduction to Cavell’s turn of mind, you might want to go to the wonderful The Senses of Walden or to his book on Hollywood comedy, Pursuits of Happiness. Cavell’s memoir does not explain his philosophy as such nor how it works out in the end. But, in its own elliptical and sometimes maddening way, it does show where the thinking came from and how it got its most salient aspect: the wisdom of its elegiac optimism, its tone of disabused affection.

But we actually ended up with Facebook. It is perhaps the dominant Website for the most people on the globe; it boasts 500 million users; the company is probably worth $33 billion. The barricades of privilege that its creator overcame were not run-of-the-mill, but the ultimate: Facebook was not created at a Harvard manqué; it was literally created at Harvard. And the outsider? He is not a random, one-type-out-of-many outsider, but the ultimate type of outsider: He is not a Jew manqué; he is literally a Jew. So is his co-founder (Eduardo Saverin), and one of his two first employees. I can’t prove this isn’t coincidental, but the circumstantial evidence is on my side. Chiefly: We were going to end up with something very like Facebook, but we actually ended up with Facebook, where everyone is the president of their own elite club of one—the Platonic embodiment of the indelibly Jewish alloy of self-hatred and striving.

The Social Network does not need to prove this coincidence: An independent work of creative art, merely based on reality, it is free to impose the Jewish-outsider-takes-on-Harvard narrative, and it does so thrillingly. Zuckerberg, played curly-haired and runt-ish in a hooded sweatshirt by Jesse Eisenberg, is driven by many things—the girlfriend who breaks up with him in the first scene, the excitement of his own genius—but top among them is the slight he feels at having never gained entrée to Harvard’s elite final clubs. (Crucially, Facebook was intially open only to Harvard students, and pretty soon solely to students at elite schools; its present democratic phase is comparatively recent. In the film, Zuckerberg gets off at this exclusivity.)

Zuckerberg can’t stand that Saverin, his best friend, was “punched” by one of the clubs. He can’t stand the Winklevoss twins—the hunky specimens of entrenched WASP masculinity who first approach him with the idea of a Facebook-like site—who, as per house rules, will not admit him past the “bike room” of their club’s house. On the night that he came up with the idea, he and Saverin were attending a supremely tacky Caribbean-themed party at—as he tells the others seated around the table at one of his depositions (both the Winklevosses and Saverin are suing him)—“Alpha Epsilon Pi.” “What’s that?” a lawyer asks. Zuckerberg is almost too mortified to say the words: “A E Pi. It’s the Jewish fraternity.” (Zuckerberg was a member in real life.)

Yet I have to wonder whether The Social Network’s narrative of Jew-against-all is not a bit dated. After all, long gone are the days when Jews were true outsiders at Harvard and (nearly) everywhere else. In 1969, Philip Roth’s Alexander Portnoy could have parents who marveled at their son’s invitation to Gracie Mansion; today, we live in Gracie Mansion (or, rather, we host parties there, and live in a $30 million townhouse in a better neighborhood). One of my favorite lines from my favorite movie, 1978’s Animal House (set in 1962), is: “Bad news: I just checked with the guys at the Jewish house, and they say all our answers to the Psych test were wrong.” Today, you’d make that joke about the Asian house, or the Indian house—the Jewish house is just another house. At Harvard, I can personally attest, there are Jews in even the most elite final clubs. (Myself, I’ve been inside one of them, The Fox, because my oldest friend was a member. I obviously was not allowed upstairs, but I didn’t particularly care.)

One of the best and most telling moments in a movie stuffed with great and telling moments is a line from one of the few characters in the movie older than 22. Saverin notes that, when Facebook launched, Zuckerberg became the Big Man on Campus at a place filled with Nobel Prize winners, Pulitzer Prize winners, a president who had been the Secretary of the Treasury (by the way, the Larry Summers scene is hilarious), and countless other celebrities, including “a movie star.” “Which movie star?” Zuckerberg’s middle-aged lawyer asks with gossip-y curiosity. Zuckerberg and Savarin, by now mortal enemies, nonetheless share the same grimace.

In my personal experience, elite institutions like Harvard have been democratized such that our parents are much more fascinated by the fact that we are friends with a senator’s son or classmates with a movie star than we ourselves are. At Harvard, the final clubs’ upstairs/downstairs dynamic is a relic, and everyone knows it, and so almost nobody cares. (At Columbia, where I matriculated, the closest thing to a final club is St. A’s, which is known mainly for cocaine and the cover of Vampire Weekend’s first album.) So I am tempted to lend greater credence to psychological portraits of Zuckerberg that downplay his Jewish aspect (incidentally, he identifies as an atheist), and the larger “The final club didn’t let me in” story-line (which Zuckerberg explicitly rejects). As I say, I don’t believe Facebook’s overwhelmingly Jewish origins are pure coincidence: There is surely something left over from our ancestors that, like a line of computer code, commands a greater proportion of us to be more boldly innovative than any other people. But I think this explanation can only take us so far.

The lawyer’s question about the Harvard movie star is also, I’m pretty sure, meant as an in-joke: A young attorney taking notes in the deposition room is played by Rashida Jones, a famous actress who graduated in 1997 from, yup, Harvard. In fact, the inaugural cover of 02138, a magazine for Harvard alums, famously declared, over a picture of Jones, “She’s Harvard. So Are You. (Discuss.)” In fact, even as a student Jones was a celebrity, of a sort: Her father is the legendary music producer Quincy Jones.

Of course, her mother is a Jewish woman. She’s Harvard. So’s Zuckerberg. So are many, many other Jews. There is not much else to discuss.

• Hamas’s West Bank leadership may be quietly against its more extreme cohort in Gaza and Damascus, who have stepped up terrorist activity in response to the talks. [JPost]

• Speaking in Britain to a group that included the Royal Family, Pope Benedict XVI compared “atheist extremism” to Nazism. [AOL News]

• The Conservative movement has brought out its first revision of its Mahzor (High Holiday prayerbook) in nearly 40 years. Awesome! Awe-inspiring! [NYT]

• Some Harvard teachers and groups are protesting a forthcoming ceremony that will honor Martin Peretz, who has come under fire for writing in his blog for the The New Republic (of which he is editor and an owner), “Muslim life is cheap, most notably to Muslims” (he has apologized for and retracted the sentence). [NYT]

• Some asshole drew another swastika on Omri Casspi on that Sacramento, California, mural. [Sacramento Bee]

From the moment he stormed into our graduate seminar in the storied “Room G” of Harvard’s Widener Library to deliver the first of his series of talks on East European Jewish Culture in 1977—the first classes ever held in Yiddish at Harvard—I was enthralled by the power of his personality, mesmerized by his brilliantly poetic rendition of otherwise dry academic subjects, and awed by his mastery of, and love for, his subject.

Following the session, which took place in the former office and personal library of Harry Wolfson, we were asked by our teacher, the late Isadore Twersky, to take Mr. Grade to lunch. Instead, after delivering his exhausting tour de force about the contrasts between the worlds of Hasidim and Misnagdim, Grade sprang from his chair and demanded of us—a small group of Yiddishly literate graduate students—to show him where Harry Wolfson’s Spinoza books were shelved. (Among his many major works, Wolfson was the author of the magisterial two-volume The Philosophy of Spinoza.)

“I want to be sure that Wolfson didn’t own any Spinoza books that I don’t have,” he said. “Lunch can wait.”

At the time, I was a young, earnestly Orthodox Jew, and I naively asked Grade why he was so interested in Spinoza. He positioned his nose inches from mine, laughed, and then shouted: “He who has not read the Tractatus, knows nothing about modern thought.” That evening, I discreetly picked up a copy of Spinoza’s notorious critique of religion, took it home, and over the next three weeks studied it—though only, I should add, while on the toilet. After all, such heretical works—known in the yeshiva world as trayf-posuls (both unkosher and forbidden to use)—are allowed no place other than the one in which a kosher book is forbidden.

Yes, I was that frum. Or so I had believed.

As the only member of our little group of graduate students who owned a car—the happiest perk of a part-time rabbinical position in Boston—I became Grade’s designated driver, picking him up at Logan Airport and then shuttling him back and forth to campus. And so we got to know each other over the next few months—during which Grade developed notions about my soul that were entirely different from my own.

One night, Grade arrived very late due to a flight delay, and this time the food could not wait: He insisted that we stop at a Burger King, the first restaurant we passed after exiting the airport tunnel. When he offered to buy me a Whopper, I protested that I couldn’t eat it.

“Farvos nisht?” Grade impatiently demanded. (“Why not?)

“Vayl ikh bin frum; nit nor frum, nor a Rov!” I said. (“Because I am not only religious; I am a rabbi!”)

“A Rov?” he laughed, “Du bist der Royter Rov!” (“You are the Red Rabbi.”) There was a tinge of red in my beard back then, but what Grade really meant was that there was more than a touch of red subversiveness in my soul, of which I was not yet aware.

He never again called me by any other name. And over the years, I slowly, often painfully, grew into the fullness of that very loaded nickname, bestowed on me by this prophetic poet, a former Talmudic prodigy destined himself to be a great rabbi, but who chose instead the life of a secular poet; who had survived the Holocaust only thanks to the Godless Soviet Red Army.

In Yiddishist circles, Grade was famous for (though not particularly loved on account of) his gruff and stormy personality and his explosive temper. He suffered neither fools nor mediocre writers lightly. But these harsh traits masked a passionate humanism. He always displayed an earnest, probing curiosity about each of the students who attended his seminar, one that far transcended conventional academic interests. Like all great writers, he peppered us with personal, often “inappropriate,” questions, half of whose answers he angrily rejected as self-delusion. He berated us mercilessly for our naiveté, for our lack of introspection, and especially for our emotional immaturity. But the loving, parental concern lying behind those harsh admonitions was evident—and moving.

In fact, more than any of my other teachers, Grade took a deep interest in my studies. When I told him I was planning to write my doctoral dissertation about the history of halakhic literature in early modern Germany, he quickly dismissed the theme as both boring and ill-suited to my personality. Instead, he called my attention to an obscure Lithuanian maggid named Pinchas of Polotsk, a disciple of the Gaon of Vilna. The next day, I skeptically searched the Widener card catalog for titles by him and came across a little masterpiece, Keter Torah, a powerful polemic against both Hasidism and the Enlightenment.

A day later, I informed Twersky that I had decided to write my dissertation about the Misnagdim, based on Pinchas’s work. Twersky, unfamiliar with this author, was reluctant, but when I told him the idea came from Grade, he approved the proposal immediately. Years later, long after Grade’s death, I published my first book, about the Misnagdim. And today, several bookshelves in my home groan from the weight of my Spinoziana, in English, Hebrew, and Yiddish. I have often wondered if Grade had any books missing from those shelves.

The greatest moment in Grade’s brief career at Harvard was a public lecture he delivered in Yiddish about the Hebrew national poet, Hayyim Nachman Bialik, before hundreds, many of them survivors. The very first work of Grade’s I had studied—just a few years before he appeared at Harvard—was his masterful epic ballad Mussernikes, depicting the austere lives of the students in Lithuania’s most-demanding yeshivas. While listening to Grade’s lecture, Bialik’s poem, “ha-Masmid,” about the last lonely Yeshiva bokher in Lithuania, rang in my ears. As he went on, I began to understand how deeply Grade identified with Bialik; that, in fact, Grade was the Yiddish Bialik, encompassing in his stormy soul all of the pathos and painful contradictions that defined Zionism’s greatest poet’s work, to say nothing of his prophetic voice.

Grade never expected to be lecturing to young students at Harvard, and the surprising experience enlivened him, even as it did us. For too many decades his only audience had been a dying generation of native Yiddish readers, mostly survivors. He told me, after our last seminar, that the visits to Harvard gave him a renewed energy to write, as had a life-changing trip to Israel in the 1960′s. Before boarding his last flight out of Logan Airport, Grade asked me to read his poem “Oyf Mayn Veg Tsu Dir” (“On My Way to You”)—the title work of his Yiddish-Hebrew bilingual collection (Tel Aviv, 1969) inspired by that visit to the Holy Land. It ends,

My lonely destiny, I once sadly thought determined
But our surprising encounter too was divinely destined.
God had finally dragged me from my old, alien bed
And forged from our fresh encounter a new being

It is no easy matter to love equally the heretic Spinoza and the religiously intolerant Maggid of Polotsk; to embrace the secular world and enjoy a good Whopper, all the while dedicating one’s life to erecting a magnificent literary monument to the lost world of Lithuanian Jewish piety, which is Grade’s greatest bequest to Yiddish literature. The unbearable burden inherent in maintaining an abiding love for the Jewish religious past and a lifelong dedication to preserving its memory, embedded in the heart of a true apikores who still believes God is acting in his life, defined the pain that Grade shared fully with Bialik, and one he transmitted, at least in some small part, to me. It is a cross I humbly and so gratefully have carried since Grade’s passing, almost three decades ago. Had God not dragged Grade from that tired bed and allowed me to share a small part of his burden, I would never have discovered who I really am.

The premise of the piece—titled “The New American Jew on Israel”—is that “what it means to be ‘pro-Israel’ is changing, particularly among younger Jews.” And the corollary of this paradigm shift is that traditional definitions of “pro-Israel”—as represented, say, in polls—have not yet caught up, which could explain the meager 48 percent of Democrats who say they “support” Israel.

For Singal, the organization that epitomizes this New American Jew is, of course, J Street. He reports from a talk J Street head Jeremy Ben-Ami gave at the Harvard Hillel:

fear of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad wasn’t, for the most part, what had brought them to Cambridge on a rainy February evening.

Rather, they were worried about the grim prospects that face Israel if it can’t make peace with the Palestinians. Given the region’s demographic patterns, absent a two-state solution, Israel will soon have to choose between being a Jewish state and a democratic one.

While J Street does strongly oppose the possibility of Iran getting nuclear weapons, the demographic crisis, not an attack from Iran, is the greatest threat facing Israel, said Ben-Ami.

Some are skeptical about this logic, but: if you support the continued existence of Israel as a Jewish democracy; and you think that the biggest threat to Israel is the demographic problem; and you think that current Israeli settlement policies are forestalling a Palestinian state and therefore a solution to the demographic problem; then you could very well tell a pollster that you don’t “support” Israel in its refusal to freeze West Bank settlements.

Anyway, at some point the argument becomes one of semantics. But just as the Democratic Party would be foolish to tolerate opposition to Israel beyond criticism of specific policies among its prominent politicians, Republicans should be concerned with alienating the increasing number of Jewish voters who see unconditional support for Israel as no support at all.

The New American Jew on Israel [Boston Globe]
Earlier: Is the GOP The Pro-Israel Party?

As she worked, though, New found herself playing a part in an entirely different chapter of the American Jewish story—as the girlfriend and then wife of Larry Summers, Harvard’s first Jewish president, who is now Barack Obama’s chief economic adviser. “Wedging a wedding canopy into this bastion of WASP gentility might turn out to be my greatest contribution to Jewish civilization,” New wrote of their wedding ceremony at Elmwood, Harvard’s official presidents’ residence, held just 65 years after Summers’ uncle, the Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Samuelson, was denied tenure at the university because he was Jewish.

The result of what people who know New describe as the dramatic “scene changes” in her personal life—from her quiet academic’s existence in Brookline to being a political wife, of a sort—is a book that, despite glancing past the details of Summers’ sometimes controversial and highly public career, and of her own adult life, is billed as “a memoir in five generations.” It is the intricately detailed tale of how her Lithuanian great-grandfather Jacob Levy became a successful textile manufacturer in Maryland, and how his own sons wound up running the storied Carreras tobacco company in London. “For a long time I wanted to tell the story of these three places, and for a long time I didn’t understand that the only thing that connected them was my family,” New explained over coffee one recent morning in New York as she passed through on her way to join Summers in Washington for the weekend. “So I feel like I’ve done something meaningful for my family, and as a Jew.”

Jacob’s Cane is named for a walking stick embossed with the cities inhabited by the Levy brothers on their way out of Lithuania, which an elderly cousin casually offered to unearth from a closet for New’s inspection in 1998, inspiring her to start looking into the family’s history and to make a “roots trip” to Eastern Europe the next year. But the project has its origins in a paper New wrote as a freshman at Brandeis for a class on the history of the family. Armed with a tape recorder, New asked her three great-aunts to tell her the story of how the family had worked its way up from New York’s tenements into genteel, white-glove Maryland society. “They looked at me and said, ‘Oh, no, honey! New York was where we went to have dinnah—we weren’t just anyone! We were from Bal-tee-mewer,’” New, now 51, said, imitating the high-pitched singsong cadences of an earlier generation. “It was confusing, because I had this idea that everyone came from the shtetl and went to New York. I thought we were aberrant Jews.”

It turned out that, in fact, they weren’t. Jacob Levy was born in 1867 in the commercial town of Shavli, outside Riga, part of the first generation of completely emancipated European Jews. As a young man, he followed his older brother, Paul, to Riga, and then accepted an invitation from Paul’s girlfriend’s brother, Bernhard Baron, to join his fledgling tobacco company in Baltimore, which Baron had started after starting as a cigar-roller on New York’s Lower East Side. Like many Jews from the trading towns of the Baltics, all three men grew up familiar with the world of international commerce and were part of the emigration of entrepreneurial Jews to as far afield as Shanghai and the Amazon. And, as it happened, there was a good backstory, too: New’s great-uncles betrayed her great-grandfather by following the family patron, Baron, to London and adopting his name to become heirs to his sizeable fortune, which they then squandered. And, of course, there was a branch of the family that stayed behind in Lithuania, who were liquidated by the Nazis—except for one cousin, Riva, whom New tracked down in Israel through the Yad Vashem archive.

New, ever the scholar, spent years poring over turn-of-the-century credit ratings reports and city directories from Baltimore to New Haven amassing a trove of loose clippings and items, all correlated with footnotes and citations intended to underpin a detached documentation of those German-speaking Jews who established themselves in bourgeois, turn-of-the-century East Coast society. “For my whole career I’ve had a double life—I started out as a poetry scholar who had an interest in things Jewish,” New explained. “I’m attracted to the austerity and coolness of Protestantism but I love the hotness and rowdiness and anxiety and urbanism of Jewish writing.” As a graduate student, she published papers on the Jewish poet Delmore Schwartz and the links between classic Midrash and deconstructionist literary theory, and while her professional reputation was made on her work linking the work of poets like Emerson to their Protestant backgrounds, she also teaches undergraduate classes on American Jewish literature, from Emma Lazarus to Philip Roth, whom she describes as “the greatest living American writer.”

As it happens, it was Roth’s close friend—and New’s book editor—Charlotte Maurer who suggested refashioning the chronicle of Jewish traders into a family memoir. Growing up in Washington, where her father was a physicist for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and her mother worked as a party planner, New hated the pedantry of her Reform Hebrew school, but she was always fascinated by Jewish texts and traditions, and spent stints living in Israel after high school and as a doctoral student. She embarked on her research into the history of Jews in Shavli, Baltimore, and London as a family effort, taking her oldest daughter, Yael, along, first as a bat mitzvah present and later because Yael, having learned to speak Russian fluently, could act as an interpreter. (She now works for a Russian television channel in New York.) “For a long time I wanted to tell the story of these three places, and for a long time I didn’t understand that the only thing that connected them was my family,” New said. “It took a bunch of years before I realized that it was the story of my family, that Yael was in it, and not to think it was narcissistic.”

The book, as New’s Harvard colleague Louis Menand put it, “is a memoir only an academic could have written,” full of detailed archival references and organized around the idea of the fancy walking stick as a metaphor for the journey the Levy family made. “It’s really what an English professor would produce if you told her to write a memoir,” Menand said.

It’s also a book that, New says, she could not have written without finding “general happiness and serenity” in her marriage with Summers, with whom she rarely appears in public, despite her regular commutes down to Washington. “His thing is not my thing, and my thing is not his thing,” explained New, who contrasted her penchant for unfolding complicated ideas through language with his economist’s “bottom-line, what-is-the-point” focus. “There is a joy in having a spouse who regards what you do with bemusement.”

This month, Myron S. Kaufmann’s debut novel, Remember Me to God, turns 50, and so far there have been no signs of celebration. Though it was hailed on publication as one of the finest novels ever written about American Jews and remained on The New York Times bestseller list for an entire year, almost no one remembers it today. It goes unmentioned in bibliographies of American Jewish fiction, and so obscure is Kaufmann in this Internet age that searching for his name turns up nary a stub on Wikipedia.

Only by examining contemporary essays will you find references to Kaufmann’s novel. In 1959′s Advertisements for Myself, Norman Mailer proclaimed, “Of the novels about Jews which I have read, his is easily the best since Meyer Levin’s The Old Bunch,” a novel published two decades earlier. Mailer didn’t mention that Kaufmann had been his classmate at Harvard in the early 40s, or that Kaufmann had once dated his sister; but critics with no such vested interests and with greater authority, such as Alfred Kazin, were quick to second this assessment.

Remember Me to God details a year in the life of a Jewish family in Boston. When the novel opens, in 1941, Adam Amsterdam has risen from an orphanage to a legal career, a minor judicial appointment, and a home in well-to-do Newton—all thanks to the relentless hectoring of his wife, Bessie. Things should be wonderful for his family, but they’re not: Adam’s teenage daughter, Dorothy, lives an isolated existence, cut off from her classmates because of her tendency to stutter, while her brother Richard, a sophomore at Harvard, has much deeper problems.

Struggling to find a place for himself on a campus overrun with genius and seething with genteel anti-Semitism, Richard is drawn to the patrician culture of blue-blood Boston and to the college’s social organizations. Through a squash buddy, he lands a spot on The Harvard Lampoon, the comedy magazine and social club, and from there finagles election to the Hasty Pudding Institute of 1770, one of the oldest social organizations in the country, and a feeder for Harvard’s even snootier final clubs.

He soon proposes to a simpleminded Radcliffe first-year student named Wimsy Talbot, a Christian and genuine member of Boston society. The expected familial turmoil ensues, and ultimately Adam and Richard come to blows in the courtyard of a Harvard dorm.

Kaufmann brings a remarkable degree of psychological acuity to his representation of the family’s tortured relations, and his deliberate pace allows him to display behaviors developing almost microscopically: The novel reads, excruciatingly, like the emotional equivalent of a film of a car wreck played back in the slowest slowmotion.

Kaufmann’s subject itself isn’t, of course, terribly original. Half a century earlier, Ezra Brudno’s 1908 novel The Tether tracked a young Jew’s rise from immigrant peddler to Harvard student to suitor of a Baptist’s daughter, and anyone seeking stories about Jews and intermarriage probably skips Kaufmann, and Brudno, too, in favor of Ludwig Lewisohn’s somewhat-less-neglected classic The Island Within or Woody Allen’s Annie Hall. And of course even excellent books fall into obscurity all the time, no matter how popular they’ve been—particularly when, like Kaufmann’s, they spill out over nearly 700 pages of fine print.

With that in mind, what shocked me about Remember Me to God when I discovered it this spring was not that it isn’t better known, but simply that no one had ever thought to recommend it to me. I’m working on a PhD in American Jewish literature, and I’ve had advisors inside and outside of the academy as knowledgeable about the field as anyone on the planet. Most of these mavens know that, like Richard Amsterdam, I arrived at Harvard College some years ago, a middle-class kid from a traditional Jewish family, and that when I graduated my yearbook profile mentioned exactly two affiliations, precisely as Richard’s would have: the Lampoon and the Hasty Pudding.

My advisors couldn’t recommend Remember Me to God, though, because they hadn’t read it. By the time they were devouring American Jewish fiction, the book had already been dismissed by the critics of 1960s. Some Jewish leaders rejected the novel’s sexual frankness, but the most common objection was the one that equated Kaufmann with his protagonist and read the novel as a document of Jewish self-hatred.

Typical of these responses was an attack made by Rabbi David Seligson on Kaufmann, along with Philip Roth, at Manhattan’s Central Synagogue in June 1963. Seligson argued that such novelists paint a distorted and hateful picture of contemporary Jewish life. While Roth blasted back against Seligson in Commentary, Kaufmann didn’t mind the attention.

Myron Kaufmann in 2007

“There was this whole business of articles in Jewish publications and sermons about ‘Isn’t this terrible,’” Kaufmann, now 86, recalls. “People would hear these sermons and go out and read the book, and they liked it, and would recommend it to other people.” But as more and more critics refused to recommend the book, eventually word of mouth died down, and the novel disappeared.

Critics were not mistaken in reading Richard Amsterdam as a self-hating Jew. Their error was assuming that Richard’s views stood in for Kaufmann’s just because author and character attended Harvard during the same period. Richard, however, is the son of a butcher who became a judge, while Kaufmann’s father inherited a delicatessen and worked as a salesman. Richard grows up in Newton with a sister; Kaufmann is an only child whose parents struggled through the Depression across the river, in Arlington. At Harvard, the two young men could not have occupied more disparate social positions: While Richard is, however insecurely, a member of the Lampoon and Pudding—both organizations that in those years withheld membership from all but a few token Jews—Kaufmann sat on the editorial board of the daily Crimson, joined a less exclusive club called the Signet, and rowed crew. What would have mattered most to the Jewish leaders repulsed by Kaufmann’s depiction of a boy’s pursuit of a non-Jewish wife is that Kaufmann himself was no adherent of intermarriage: When asked in what ways his experiences as a young man differed from Richard’s, he replied, “I never dated a girl who was not Jewish.” Outside of his career as an author, which has produced two further novels, Kaufmann’s major activity has been his participation in the Orthodox community of Sharon, Massachusetts, which he helped found. As it turns out, then, Kaufmann had a lot less in common with his protagonist than I do—and not only when it comes to club memberships.

In my sophomore year at Harvard, I briefly dated a Cuban American classmate, but broke off the relationship after a week or two. I offered up the usual anti-intermarriage platitudes (“Sorry, I don’t date non-Jewish girls,” I told her), though not without feeling doubt, confusion, and guilt about doing so, for all the reasons Kaufmann enumerates in Remember Me to God. “Did it ever occur to you,” Richard asks his dad, “that it might be morally wrong to treat the human race as two different sets of animals that shouldn’t marry each other?” From there, it only got worse: In the spring, the campus literary magazine published a short story à clef I’d written in a furor of conflicted emotions and submitted for publication without so much as warning the girl. I hadn’t changed enough of the details to protect her from being identified with the story—which was satirical, surreal, and somewhat ham-handed—but enough so that the clear implication was that she and I had had sex, when in reality we barely kissed. She called me in a rage that summer, when word of the story got around to her, and much later told my roommate that the fall of her junior year had been ruined for obvious reasons.

My behavior may not have been quite as appalling as Richard’s—thankfully, I was never inspired, as he is, to author a handbook advising how classless Jews can behave like proper gentlemen, or to indulge in sexual fantasies about refugees from Nazi Germany—but it was regrettable enough. In Richard I see my own silly and pernicious self-involvement, my adolescent blindness to the fact that, whatever the stakes were for me in deciding whether or not I could comfortably date a non-Jewish woman, there was another party involved whose feelings I should have considered before working out such issues in public.

Of course, Kaufmann wasn’t describing my experience, or even my Harvard, really. As he noted at the time of his 25th class reunion in 1968, the school had changed in ways that would have been unimaginable in the 1940s, and by the time I arrived in 1997, Harvard had become a place where Jews of every stripe could profess their beliefs and opinions without fear of any consequences. Richard isn’t me any more than he is Kaufmann or anyone in particular—”I am pleased,” Kaufmann once wrote to his fellow alums, “that my classmates have been unable to identify the character as anyone we know”—but rather a fictional composite, and it is a testament to the author’s extraordinary skills that a figment of his imagination felt so palpable as to mislead otherwise sensible critics into reading the book as a thinly veiled autobiography. Remember Me to God is not an example of Jewish self-hatred, but rather a penetrating analysis of that phenomenon.

Why would a committed Jewish author devote hundreds of thousands of words to a detailed exposition of the lust of a Jewish boy for a gentile wife? The literary critic Leslie Fiedler offers a brilliant answer in an essay he published while Remember Me to God was still on the bestseller list (but which does not mention Kaufmann). Surveying the field of American Jewish writing—the “essential problems” of which, he says, are “identity and assimilation”—Fiedler notes that typically “it is in the role of passionate lover that the American-Jewish novelist sees himself…and the community with which he seeks to unite himself he sees as the shikse.”

This point holds true in everything from The Tether to Philip Roth’s 1969 hit, Portnoy’s Complaint (“to me…America is a shikse,” Portnoy declares). When authors or filmmakers—not only men, but also women like Emma Wolf or Anzia Yezierska; want to talk about what it means to be Jewish and American, they introduce a non-Jewish love interest into their narratives and let the passions and tensions of the romance stand in for the fraught relations between the two communities.

It is as an unusually evenhanded entry into this rich tradition that Remember Me to God deserves to be remembered, and as a finely wrought triumph of midcentury realism so precise in its observation that it captures perfectly the incline of streets in Harvard Square and the musty smell inside the Lampoon castle. I can’t say that reading it at 19 would have prevented me from embarrassing an innocent girl, but hopefully it would have made me a little more aware of the callousness of my actions. Remember Me to God remains, as Mailer wrote, a work of invaluable honesty, one that explores difficult terrain with perspicacity and confidence. Even given the peculiarities of literary history, I will venture to hope that it will be more widely read 50 years from now than it is today.

It may seem that there are two Ruth Wisses. One, the eminent Harvard professor of Yiddish and comparative literature, is the author of The Shlemiel as a Modern Hero, and the editor of some half-dozen anthologies of Yiddish prose and poetry, much of which she has translated herself. The other, a political firebrand, is the author of If I Am Not For Myself: The Liberal Betrayal of the Jews, a frequent contributor to Commentary and The Wall Street Journal‘s editorial page, and staunch public defender of politically incorrect positions. (She blamed “feminist dogma” for the ouster of Harvard president Larry Summers, comparing his very public downfall to a “Soviet show trial.”)

There is just one Ruth Wisse, of course, and for her there is no disconnect between these two aspects of her career. Her deep study of Yiddish literature, she says, taught her about “the corrupting potential of powerlessness”—a notion she elaborates in Jews and Power, the eighth book in the Jewish Encounters series from Schocken and Nextbook. Not only does the book examine the history of the Jews’ complex and unique relationship with political power, it also argues forcefully that the very survival of Israel and world Jewry may depend on a deeper understanding of the topic.

Your book is meant to be, among other things, a corrective to the notion that the political experience of the Jews has been largely ignored in favor of their religious and cultural significance. Why is this an important endeavor?

The book could have been called Jews and Anti-Jews, because it is ultimately about the way in which the Jewish relationship to power is quite opposite to that of many other nations. This dichotomy has created political tensions that have so far largely been ignored.

What makes the Jewish relationship to power so unusual?

In the Diaspora, Jews developed what I would call a politics of accommodation. I mean accommodation not in any pejorative sense, but as a strategy, a means of survival. Jews wanted to maintain their way of life but couldn’t do it in their own land. So they went about trying to prove themselves useful to rulers in return for protection. Most other nations judge themselves according to how much land they can acquire, how much power they can exert, etcetera. So the coming together of these two very different political outlooks throughout the history of the Jews has had its own consequences.

That bargain—usefulness in exchange for protection—never seemed to last.

Right. Sometimes the arrangement worked for hundreds of years. But inevitably there came a time when the protection was withdrawn. At that point the Jews were extraordinarily vulnerable because they had no independent means of self-protection.

You write that Jews sometimes have a tendency to romanticize that kind of powerlessness.

Well, here is how it happens. Jews decide to live a certain way because of their covenant and relationship with the Almighty. Sometimes the consequences of that were weakness and poverty. I think it’s reasonable to say to yourself, “I will accept the consequences of poverty if I must because they are unfortunately the price I have to pay for remaining a Jew.” But when Jews then take that a step further and say that to be a Jew is to be weak and powerless—this is the romanticization, because Jews never wanted to be weak or poor. And until recently they certainly never made a virtue of it. But there’s a lingering temptation to take the negative consequence and turn that into a positive value.

Among other things I would like to draw attention to with this book is that the corruptions of powerlessness are no less a danger than the corruptions of power. Yiddish literature is one of the things that has made me acutely aware of this this tendency to turn poverty and weakness into virtues. Many Yiddish writers, people like Sholem Aleichem and I.L.Peretz, when they were looking for Jewish heroes, found Jewish heroism in people who were able to overcome the debilitating effects of powerlessness. But others went further: they assumed that power was evil in and of itself, and ascribed moral heroism to powerlessness because it lacked power, not necessarily because it performed any good.

Still, you point out that the “politics of accommodation” has also been a source of great strength for Jews.

Yes. It turns out to have been a brilliant political experiment because what Jews perfected along the way was the power to adapt. And more so today than ever before, nothing is more valuable than that kind of elasticity.

Adaptability is often thought to be an especially effective tool in modern times and under liberal, democratic political regimes. Yet, the so-called period of Emancipation, when modern democracies were born and Jews were for the first time being granted civic rights in places like France and Germany, proved to be a particularly difficult time. Why?

When Emancipation came, modern Jews felt that this would so much work to their benefit—that once you no longer had tyrannical leaders and instead had a democratic culture under which everyone was considered equal, surely that would mean an end to discrimination.

It turned out quite differently. The shift to democracy was accompanied by tremendous social, economic, and cultural upheavals. Those upheavals had to be explained. Politicians had to win over the population by persuasion. So demagogues found in the Jews the perfect explanation and an ideal target for “negative campaigning.” You’re unemployed? The Jews are taking your jobs. You’re poor? The Rothschilds are taking your money. Anti-Semites cast liberal democracy as a Jewish plot to take over the country from within. The 1879 pamphlet that officially launched modern anti-Semitism, called The Victory of Jewry over Germandom, says just that: that the Jews have already won a victory over us. It says, in effect, “You think that democracy is this wonderful thing? You think that your democracy is going to give you greater freedom? Oh, no—that’s not what happens. It’s the Jew who is using that argument in order to take advantage of our nation.”

Are you suggesting that anti-Semitism is endemic to democracy?

Yes and no. Anti-Semitism is available to every kind of government. But I think there’s a difference between formal democracy, meaning universal suffrage, and “constitutional culture”—democracy that is not just skin deep, democracy where the population has internalized democratic culture such as you see in the United States. In the U.S. people have come to understand that the entire population is in it together and has to solve its problems collectively. So the politics of blame don’t work against an alien entity. Instead, Democrats accuse Republicans and Republicans accuse Democrats, but it is always understood that “they” is a different segment of the same polity. That’s why scapegoating the Jews has not worked very successfully in the American political system. But it assuredly can and does work wherever demagogues can convince people that “others” are responsible for their distress.

That notion helps explain why pockets of anti-Semitism pop up. It tends to rear its head in cultures that don’t feel, for example, that the rule of law is being uniformly applied.

Or where they do not have a culture of self-accountability. There are minorities that blame others for their weaknesses and there are majorities that blame others for their weakness. It’s not one kind of group or another. Demagogues can arise and sometimes they can channel this kind of negative energy to their own advantage. And if a population is vulnerable at a given point, they fall for it. Blaming others is extremely dangerous because it’s a deflection of the problems. It’s a misidentification of the problems. And so it exacerbates the problem. Any population that begins to rely on anti-Semitism becomes deformed. It is putting off for a longer and longer period of time the real solution to these problems, which will have to come from within itself.

That’s why anti-Semitism should not be tolerated. Jews often make the point on moral grounds: “Look, it isn’t fair to target the Jews; it’s an act of discrimination.” And all of this is true. But I think one should make the political argument, which is much more powerful and much more objectively provable—namely, that a society that resorts to anti-Semitism will destroy itself.

Exactly. The Zionist movement attributed the problem of anti-Semitism to the fact that Jews did not have a land. The idea was that you would make the Jews unexceptional by reclaiming the land, a reasonable hypothesis at a time of emerging nation-states. No one understood that by then anti-Semitism had become such a potent political instrument that it could be used whether or not Jews had a land. In fact, no sooner had Hitler been defeated than the Arab League formed around opposition to Israel. Arabs began to use the politics of blame much more vigorously than Europeans ever did. Anti-Semitism is even more important to Arab societies and to some Muslim societies than it was for European societies, because they feel they are starting from so much farther behind the West in the process of modernization. They feel so much more threatened by modernity and the concept of equal rights.

Anti-Semitism is treated as merely a form of discrimination. It gets a cluck-cluck of the tongue and then everyone says, “Oh, isn’t that horrible. They hate the Jews. They shouldn’t hate the Jews.” There is no sustained analysis of why these countries need it so profoundly—of what role it is playing in their political culture and in their political institutions and actions.

Is that what compelled you to write this book?

Absolutely. We have an old-fashioned approach to this. The time has really come when political science has to take much more seriously that anti-Semitism is a political phenomenon, the most successful ideology of modern times. It is the only ideology that made its way from Europe to the Middle East, and played a central role among so many different peoples. Jews have to become much more comfortable with analyzing the political aspects of their existence. Yes, they are a religious civilization. Yes, they have a rich culture. But their political existence is what has become most problematic. The politics of blame ultimately kills more people than AIDS, for example, because it foments aggression which, ultimately, the Jews are too small to contain.

So, anti-Semitism is not just a Jewish problem?

It is not. Politics organizes against the Jews because they are a convenient target. It’s safer to foment aggression against the tiny Jewish people than against Britain or America. But as we see in retrospect, Hitler’s war against the Jews was a generative force for the war against all that the Jews represented, and the same now holds true for the Arab war against Israel. Bush and Blair have come in on the side of the Jews against terror for the same reason that Roosevelt and Churchill had to come in on the side of the Jews of Europe, because the enmity against the Jews is directed, ultimately, against them.

In the book you describe a recurring figure that one sees throughout Jewish culture and history: the Jewish traitor—someone who left the community and in some way betrayed it.

The level of hostility against the Jewish minority is sometimes so great that inevitably a percentage of people will want to escape. Now, those who simply assimilate, or change their religion, fine—goodbye. But others take a more complicated route. You have this phenomenon in Jewish history of people taking pride in the fact that they’ve turned against the Jews for the sake of some higher, more universal idea. This happened at the time of the Roman assault when Christianity defined itself as a higher form of Judaism, and closer to our time, when Jewish Communists said that they were a higher order of egalitarians. From their perspective, these people may feel they have the greater interests of humanity at heart. But when this “transcendence” occurs at a time of hostility against the Jews, it frequently involves blaming the Jews for causing that hostility. In the book, I describe the case of anti-Jewish converts in Christian Spain, but I’m also interested in the ferocity with which Jewish Communists went about denouncing Jewish religion, Jewish nationalism, and Hebrew.

Accusing Jews of betraying Jews is a complicated business, though, wouldn’t you say?

The line between reformers and betrayers is very thin. And it has happened that you have reformers and suddenly they will understand that in their zeal of reforming, they have actually given the enemy ammunition. Some stop short and completely re-evaluate what they have been doing. But many boast of their loftier sympathies for the oppressed.

It sounds like you’re saying it’s not okay to criticize the state of Israel?

Of course it is. I am very critical of the state of Israel for various things it does. Why shouldn’t one be? But often what’s being directed against Israel is not criticism. It is a politics of blame. The fact is if you join in the context of blame and hold Jews responsible for what befell Palestinians or hold Jews responsible for the problems of the Arab world—that’s a politics of blame. That’s not criticism. The Arab countries caused the Palestinian plight. They are the ones who did not accept partition. They opposed the Palestinian entity, preferring to keep the Palestinians homeless as evidence of Jewish iniquity.

This kind of argument has made you a controversial figure in the academic world and at Harvard. Is it a role you seek?

It never occurs to me to be controversial. I much prefer consensus and I long for agreement. But I can’t accept what seems to me the cowardice of people who will not face unpleasant facts. Many people give me advice: “Huddle as close as you can to the center because then we’ll get everybody on board.” But my feeling is that public debate resembles a tug-of-war. Your task is to state your case as forcefully and persuasively as you possibly can. If you can afford to be the outside person and pull the hardest, then you let other people huddle at the center and pull the center towards you more strongly. So few people are prepared to be that outside person and to pull as hard as they can, as effectively as they can.

Were you trying to do that with this book—pull the center towards you from the outside?

All I mean to do is to write the obvious. Sometimes I am appalled at the fact that people don’t find it obvious. In Hebrew one would say muvan meelav, it’s self-explanatory, axiomatic. But if others don’t yet find it obvious, then your job is to set it out as compellingly as you possibly can.