Jewcentricity

Adam Garfinkle

Description

Advance Praise for Jewcentricity

"Adam Garfinkle punctures the myth of the omnipotence of the Jews with such intelligence and reflective sweep that we still can go on discussing the 'exaggerations' forever."—Leslie H. Gelb, former columnist for the New York Times and president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations

"Jews, as the saying goes, are news. Why is that? In this elegant, witty, learned, insightful, always interesting, and occasionally alarming book, Adam Garfinkle explains the world's fascination with the practitioners of its oldest mono-theistic religion."—Michael Mandelbaum, author of Democracy's Good Name: The Rise and Risks of the World's Oldest Form of Government

"One would have thought that everything that could be written or said about the relationship between Jews and their environment has been written and said. It was a pleasure, though hardly a surprise, that Adam Garfinkle, thinker, scholar, editor, and iconoclast at large, has been able to offer us fresh insights into this complex issue and apply his original mind to the subject matter."—Itamar Rabinovich, former Israeli ambassador to the United States and former president of Tel-Aviv University

"There is a lot to argue about and ponder in this riveting manuscript. It is bound to cause a stir."—Robert D. Kaplan, author of The Arabists: The Romance of an American Elite

"One way of looking at this brilliant book is to see it as an extended commentary on an old joke that defines a philo-Semite as an anti-Semite who likes Jews. Garfinkle shows, with many examples, what both characters have in common—a wildly exaggerated notion of the importance of Jews in the world. Garfinkle's argument is scholarly, lucid, witty, and very persuasive. It deserves a wide readership."—Peter L. Berger, director, Institute on Culture, Religion and World Affairs at Boston University
Preface.

Introduction: Jewcentricity Defined.

Part One Jewcentricity in History.

1 Chosen.

2 On Philo-Semitism.

3 Anti-Semitism, Properly Understood.

4 Jewcentricity Globalized.

Part Two Jewcentricity in America.

5 Jewcentricity Central.

6 The Two Religions of American Jews.

7 Adjewlation: Jews in American Celebrity Culture.

8 Meet the JACs.

9 Professional Jews.

10 Self-Hating Jews.

Part Three Jewcentricity in the Middle East.

11 The Anti-Israel Lobby.

12 The (Non)-Centrality of the Arab-Israeli Conflict.

13 Muslim Jewcentricity.

14 Post-Zionism.

Epilogue: Now What?

Notes.

Index.

Sujets

• Histoire
• Jews
• Jewish studies
• Jewish history
• History

Informations

• Publié par: Turner Publishing Company
• Date de parution: 02 octobre 2009
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780470597811
• Langue: English

Extrait

Table of Contents
 
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Preface
Introduction
 
PART ONE - Jewcentricity in History
 
Chapter 1 - Chosen
Chapter 2 - On Philo-Semitism
Chapter 3 - Anti-Semitism, Properly Understood
Chapter 4 - Jewcentricity Globalized
 
PART TWO - Jewcentricity in America
Chapter 5 - Jewcentricity Central
Chapter 6 - The Two Religions of American Jews
Chapter 7 - Adjewlation: Jews in American Celebrity Culture
Chapter 8 - Meet the JACs
Chapter 9 - Professional Jews
Chapter 10 - Self-Hating Jews
 
PART THREE - Jewcentricity in the Middle East
Chapter 11 - The Anti-Israel Lobby
Chapter 12 - The (Non)-Centrality of the Arab-Israeli Conflict
Chapter 13 - Muslim Jewcentricity
Chapter 14 - Post-Zionism
 
EPILOGUE
Notes
Index

Copyright © 2009 by Adam Garfinkle. All rights reserved
 
Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey Published simultaneously in Canada
 
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:
 
Garfinkle, Adam M., date.
Jewcentricity : why the Jews are praised, blamed, and used to explain just about everything/Adam Garfinkle.
p. cm.
Includes index.
eISBN : 978-0-470-59781-1
1. Jews—Identity. 2. Antisemitism. 3. Jews—United States—Identity. 4. Jews in popular culture—United States. 5. Arab-Israeli conflict—Influence. I. Title.
DS143.G35 2009
305.892’4—dc22
2009006811
To Rachel Reinitz (1907-2007), my teacher
Preface
As The American Interest magazine prepared a few years back to move from a quarterly to a bimonthly publication, a question arose as to what to call our six issues. As founding editor of TAI , I rejected the standard January/February, March/April system as too bland for a magazine whose intention was to be anything but. The problem, of course, is that we have only four names for the seasons, leaving two issues to be dubbed something else. We decided to call July/August the “Vacation” issue and November/December the “Holidays” issue.
The latter term, of course, intended to evoke images of Thanksgiving and the ecumenical celebratory fecundity of December. It frankly didn’t occur to me that, schedules and lead times in the magazine business being what they are, the preparation of the “Holidays” issue would always occur close to the Jewish High Holy Days. As it happened, the first one went to press in September 2006 smack-dab between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur in what was then the Jewish New Year of 5767.
I confess, too (it was the season, after all), to having been awe-struck during those Days of Awe by an intense concentration of Jewcentricity: the assumption, idea, intimation, or subconscious presumption that Jews are to be found at the very center of many, if not most—in extreme cases all—important historical events. Examples of Jewcentricity from the silly to the sublime were everywhere I looked. It was for this reason, aided by the fact that some expected material never showed up, that I wrote the first “Holidays” seasonal note on “The Madness of Jewcentricity.”
It seemed to strike a nerve: the essay vaulted to the top of the “Arts & Letters” Web site and was mentioned in New York Times columnist David Brooks’s annual “Sydney Awards” column. As one result, literary agents started calling me from New York City, asking if they could represent me in selling the Jewcentricity book to commercial publishers.
“What book?” I answered.
“The book you have to write,” they replied.
“Oh, that book. . . . I see.”
I did see, you see, for I had written books before. I knew well how the excitement of an ambitious moment can morph into months of headaches, procrastination, and guilt. Nonetheless, suffering in the purse from the travails of financing three private college tuitions, I listened to these heralds of cash against my better judgment. In the end, I accepted their reasoning but not their help, turning instead to a friend who was also, in theory at least, my literary agent: Sharon Friedman.
I say “in theory” because our supposed business relationship, years old though it was, had never produced a nickel of income for either of us. The reason was that between writing federal commission reports and then speeches for two secretaries of state, among other things, I had not had the time to produce anything she could sell. I felt I owed her a first right of refusal on trying to market Jewcentricity , and she accepted the challenge.
Our business relationship thus renewed, Sharon and I headed off to see the wizards of the American publishing world in New York City, hoping to find the sort of yellow brick road one can follow all the way to the bank. I, for one, learned a lot there. One publisher asked me whether I realized the irony inherent in writing a book on the excessive, even obsessive, interest in Jews.
“What do you mean?” I asked, not apparently realizing.
“Well,” he answered, “don’t you think it’s odd to write a book whose purpose is to call attention to a phenomenon in order to persuade people not to call attention to it?”
After only a slight pause I responded, lying, “Not at all. After I get through with this subject, no one will want to discuss it for years.”
In any event, we did place the book (though not with him), and the rest, as they say (but only in America), “is history.”
This book intends to be elucidating and perhaps entertaining, but it makes no pretense to be of much use to scholars. It is for reasonably well-educated readers curious about the subject, not those whose day jobs consist of teaching about the various aspects of it. I have special sympathy for younger readers, defined as anyone who has yet to reach, say, thirty-five years of age. Over the years my students have sometimes stopped me in mid-lecture upon hearing about some event or piece of proper-noun vocabulary I took to be common knowledge—but wasn’t. The most common excuse in defense of their ignorance was along the lines of, “Hey, we weren’t born yet.” Fair enough: so some books must be written more to compensate for the derelictions of parents than to engage the academy. This is one of them.
It is just as well, for an exhaustive scholarly book on Jewcentricity is probably impossible for any single mortal to write. Jews have been around for a long time and have inhabited more countries and climes for longer periods than any other more or less specifically defined group of people in recorded history. It follows that the material for a scholarly book on Jewcentricity is so vast that a conscientious author pursuing the subject would end up not with a book but a multivolume encyclopedia.
As it is, there is a fair bit of history in this book, although it is not a book of history as such. I do not apologize for this. Most Americans, who I assume will make up the majority of my readership, have little patience for history in what is perhaps the most forward-looking, pragmatic, and future-friendly civilization ever. But nothing about Jewcentricity today can be understood properly, or in some cases understood at all, without some grounding in history.
Some of this material, too, may seem esoteric to many readers, despite my effort to disappoint true scholars. This presents a problem for a writer as for a classroom teacher: simplify too much, as I may have done by retelling familiar Bible stories, and some readers will scold the dumbing-down of a captivating topic; simplify too little and many will find words and concepts lapping up and over their cognitive nostrils. So I’ve tried to find a fair middle ground that does justice to the subject, but without bringing in excessive detail or using unnecessary jargon. I have thus avoided excessive references in the text and in the notes that follow, but that presents a problem, too. To many readers such accoutrements come across as off-putting clutter. On the other hand, references and notes enable a motivated mind to trace back a paper trail of intellectual influence,