JWST 218 - Jews and PowerPopular conceptions of the relationship between Jews and power tend either to adopt (in the case of sympathetic accounts) a view of Jews as perennial victims or (in the case of hostile/antisemitic accounts) a view of Jews as overly or preternaturally powerful. This course attempts to complicate that bipolar framework by exploring a more diverse range of encounters between Jews and power from antiquity to the present. In addition to historical writing, we will also examine religious, philosophical, and political texts that exemplify different ways that Jews and non-Jews alike have imagined or understood the Jewish relationship to power.
Perhaps this topic is worthy of unbiased study. As we will see, it is difficult to teach in an unbiased way by the way it is framed. And the instructor, Matthew Berkman, is not unbiased.
Canary Mission documents his activities, at least before he joined Oberlin. He was a steering committee member of Jewish Voice for Peace Philly and a member of JVP as of April 2022.
He is a believer in the conspiracy theory that somehow Israeli police teach American police to attack Black people.
And Berkman was one of the organizers of PennBDS, where he showed he is so liberal and open-minded that he banned a reporter from a Jewish newspaper from attending their hosted conference.
His dissertation show a critical obsession with mainstream Jewish institutions being Zionist, blaming their pro-Israel stance after 1967 on local Jewish federations, even though the entire American Jewish community outside of a fringe were pro-Israel before 1967.
The course description itself is on the edge of being antisemitic. Jews are not a monolithic group, if anything it is difficult to find a group that is more heterogenous in their politics outside perhaps people with brown eyes.
The entire theory behind the course assumes that Jews hold the same opinions - and that they use their "power" for their own purposes. Is Bernie Sanders considered a Jew with power for the purposes of this course? If a Jewish senator is not part of this Jewish power system, then it makes no sense; if he is considered a part of the system, then there is no Jewish power system to speak of.
In reality, the majority of Jews outside the Orthodox, and the majority of Jewish politicians, do not vote and act primarily on "Jewish" issues like support for Israel or private school vouchers. Assuming that the disproportionate number of Jews in positions of power have an outsize effect on US positions is an assumption that can easily slide into classic antisemitism; for the topic to be taught by someone who is antipathetic towards the Jewish community altogether is problematic, to say the least.
(h/t D)
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"He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024) PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022) |
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