A Good Read

AFSI stalwart Ruth Wisse has published a new book.

Jewish. Zionist. Straightout.

A book, on the other hand, that celebrates the Jewish return to sovereign power, in all its promise and complexity, is as unusual as it is welcome. Wisse has written just such a work. “Jews and Power,”...is a good, fighting book that contains much information in few pages, and offers a simple argument. Zionism is the solution to Jewish powerlessness; Israel is the guarantor of the Jews’ safety. Further, the Jewish nation’s resumption of sovereignty in 1948 created opportunities for the Jews to bring benefits to humanity as a whole.

“Jews and Power,” then, is a Jewish book, though the topic is of immense — one might say disablingly immense — interest to anti-Semites, too. What is the difference between “Jews and power” and “Jewish power”? “Jews and power” is empirical, while “Jewish power” is fantastical. “Jews and power” identifies a real, changing relationship between, on the one hand, the Jews conceived as a nation, plural but one; and on the other hand, political power conceived, at its apex, as self-government by a people in a nation-state...



Wisse begins her book, “The loss of Jewish sovereignty was the defining political event in the life of the Jewish people.” And she ends it, “In defending themselves, Jews have been turned into the fighting front line of the democratic world.” Within these boundaries, marked by loss and retrieval, Wisse offers an entire history of the Jews. What begins with a reverse for the Jews concludes with a gain for the world, or the democratic world. It is a story, then, with a provisional happy ending...


A professor of Yiddish and comparative literature at Harvard who escaped Nazi Europe as a child, Wisse writes, “I feel as if I have been writing this book all my life.” It is an experience that will resonate with many of her readers. It rehearses many of the arguments familiar to those Jews of the diaspora who have grown up in contact with the Zionist project. Certainly, the book reads as a setting-down of conclusions reached across several decades of controversy and reflection. But it also has a certain delicacy, in particular in its openness to alternative histories, alternative political arrangements. “It is worth considering how the Middle East might have evolved had Arab rulers accepted the partition of Palestine,” she writes. There would have been some voluntary shifts of population. Arab Palestine might have federated with Jordan. Regional priorities would have dictated new patterns of trade, commerce and development. Jews and Arabs who wanted to live in the other’s land could have traveled back and forth.

It is good to be reminded of such possibilities by someone who is also such a doughty defender of Israel. It has always been an aspect of Zionism’s utopianism, this vision of Jewish-Arab cooperation, a mutual flourishing in the one region. This book is both an acknowledgment of that openhearted, clearsighted desire for peace, but also — and so to speak — in the meantime, a celebration of the new Jewish ability to await its arrival. If there is not to be peace, Jews at least will be able to defend themselves against their self-declared enemies. This, in the end, is what it means for Jews to have power.

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