David Hirsh responds to the absurd attack on him penned by Jacqueline Rose and Antony Lerman (you can read my own debate with Lerman here.)
“The issue which Rose and Lerman seek to avoid is antisemitism. The campaign to exclude Israelis from the academic, cultural, sporting and economic life of humanity flows from the way of thinking which Rose and Lerman fight for. Rose works for the exclusion of Israeli colleagues, but no others, from UK universities. Lerman legitimizes the antisemitic demonization of Israel by blurring the distinction between this and political criticism of the policies of Israeli governments.
Rose and Lerman do not answer my points concerning the way they single out Jews as having a pathological inability to live at peace with their neighbours. They leave untouched my criticism of their psychological explanation, which essentializes the conflict as a Jewish neurosis. Rather, we should treat it as a political problem for which we can strive to find political solutions.
Rose and Lerman are fond of speaking ‘as Jews’. The effect of their project is to reassure the British intelligentsia that antisemitism is not currently an issue about which we need to be seriously concerned. This reassurance, doggedly and consistently offered, is dangerous because it educates anti-racists to recognize claims of antisemitism only as manifestations of dishonest pro-Israel propaganda. We should support the Israeli and Palestinian peace movements but we must never think that working for reconciliation is incompatible with vigilance about antisemitism.”
It seems to me that Rose et al, in their mindless support of Palestinian terror as well as making excuses for it, are behaving pathologically.
I would disagree though, David, that we can separate out the psychology of Palestinian terror behaviour from the sociology and politics of it. All of those disciplines have much to contribute to our understanding of it, although to use psychology as Rose does, to denigrate and objectify those who disagree with her, contributes nothing.
And you may be sure that whenever Rose, Lerman and their ilk speak “as Jews” they do so because they are not sure of validity of their arguments as people and they seek to give those arguments a specious certainty.
I posted the following on the Engage website:
zkharya “My essential problem with Rose is this: I am not sure psychoanalysis is especially well equipt to investigate history as it is itself an offshoot of modern historiographical method and science.”
I agree that psychoanalysis is not well equipped to investigate history. In the US, at least, psychoanalysis does not have the kind of intellectual legitimacy it seems to have in Europe, especially in the UK and France. It is used mostly among literary critics while it is eschewed by most professional psychologists.
It is therefore ironic that a literary critic should have published a book psychoanalyzing Jewish history.
A number of critics have shown that her knowledge of Jewish history is very modest. One should also question her qualifications as a psychoanalyst.
In any case, Rose’s “psychoanalitic” argument is dangerous in that it sees all modern Jewish history as the result of a trauma. This is an argument that used to be very fashionable among antisemites in the 19th and early 20th century. This kind of thinking questions the very legitimacy of the Jewish people since it argues that what holds Jews as a people together is antisemitism. It is therefore telling that Rose should focus on Shabtai Tzvi a figure reacting to the larger scale pogroms that took place in Poland and the Ukraine in the 17th century.
Rose’s argument that the Holocaust has so traumatized the Jewish people that they basically can’t tell get along with non Jews can be used retrospectively to justify the antisemitism of pre Holocaust days. If Jewish history is one long trauma and if as a result Jews can’t get along with non Jews then antisemites are in effect justified to some degree in their hatred.
If Rose doesn’t believe this she needs to explain not just the post Holocaust trauma of the Jewish people but pre Holocaust antisemitism.
I don’t believe that Rose argument is legitimate. Her book offers no comparative analysis of other people’s experiencing large scale traumas. There is no mention of Irish famine and hoe Irish society dealt with it, or of post Slavery Black Americans or of the many peoples like Armenians, and others.
Why, and how, have these other peoples been able to overcome their own historical traumas and not the Jewish people?
Finally, Rose argument is dangerous because once it becomes part of mainstream thinking it will in the minds of the average person lay the onus of responsibility of Jewish suffering on the Jews themselves. It will in effect absolve antisemites of all responsibility for their actions.
Rose argument also needs to be judged by her own belief that Jews should cease being a people and either assimilate or to live like Marranos. This is a view she expressed in a later book:
Jacqueline Rose’s The Last Resistance. Reviewed here by Ben Gidley:
“’The Marranos’, Rose writes, ‘cherish their identity as something to be hoarded that also sets them irrevocably adrift. Jacques Derrida liked to compare his Jewishness with theirs, because they do not belong, while still remaining Jewish, even if they reached the point where they “no longer knew in what their Jewishness consists.”‘ (p.17)”
http://www.democratiya.com/review.asp?reviews_id=187
Rose’s post modernist view of Jewish identity is of a piece with her critic of Zionism.
From this point of view there is no stable identity and Jews and only Jews should cease insisting on holding on to such an identity.
Identities though are not a matter of personal choice and to exchange the identity of the Jews for that of the Marrano (a term coined by their enemies and which means pig in Spanish) is to accept the status of a non person in the modern world.
http://engageonline.wordpress.com/2009/04/24/antony-lerman-jacqueline-rose-and-david-hirsh/
I would like to add:
I would like to suggest that someone address romantic vision that Rose and others (JOel Kovel comes to mind) use when they argue that Jews should live “without frontiers.” They often point to well known Jews like Freud, Einstein and a few others who they say weren’t partial to any country.
This is obviously a bogus argument. However, these days we have to point to the obvious as not everyone is familiar with historical facts nor do they know how to think critically about them.
Yes, a few well known Jews were always able to escape the daily misery, the occasional massacres and expulsion the rest of the Jewish community had to endure. But to use this as a model for Jewish existence is like arguing for extreme laissez faire capitalism because a few people manage to become very wealthy.
Such arguments are seldom offered in good faith since those who argue for Jewish existence sans frontiers see themselves as exceptions. They see themselves independent of the Jewish community at large. Hence it’s not a surprise that they seem to value the notion that they offer an “independent voice” in these debates.
This of course contradicts the view held by many of these same people (often citing Lacan and Derrida, and other post modernists) that there is no self.
It’s also ironic since while Freud himself and some members of this immediate family were able to escape Nazi Austria many other members of his family did not and some died in the death camps.
Here is the source for the Joel Kovel quote:
“The idea that Pinsker already recognized as delusive, however, still has the power to seduce. The notion that the Jews do not need a state because they have a universal mission — that it is possible to be a light unto the nations without being a nation — is at the heart of much contemporary Jewish anti-Zionism. In a virulent book called “Overcoming Zionism,” Joel Kovel invokes this theme, writing that “the true glory of being Jewish is to live on the margin and across boundaries.” He goes on to give a familiar catalog of geniuses — Marx, Freud, Proust, Einstein, Kafka, and more — who are alleged to be the fruit of such virtuous deracination.”
http://www.nysun.com/arts/israels-jewish-defamers/66878/?print=1257760421
Neither Marx nor Proust were, of course Jewish, though their ancestors were. (Proust, though his mother was Jewish was a practicing Catholic.)
Kafka moreover became a Zionist towards the end of his life.
To confront anti-Zionism we have to confront the Romantic myth of a Jewish Golden age in exile which lasted for thousands of years and which was destroyed by Zionism’s narrow nationalism.
Even a cursory glance at Israel would reveal more as much creativity there, in a half a century of its existence, then in a thousand years of precarious Jewish life in exile.