I will be upfront. I have never met Mearsheimer, nor have I read any of his books or attended any of his classes. However, I have closely followed the recent controversy arising from a positive blurb he wrote for Gilad Atzmon’s The Wandering Who? and I can confidently conclude that the accusations hurled at him are wholly unfounded.
The fact of the matter is simply that Mearsheimer chose to write a positive review for a book that puts forth highly contentious points, written by a man who has made a name for himself as a radical, and—appropriately or not—as a Holocaust revisionist. It is not my intention here to vilify or praise Atzmon’s views. However, it is my intention to defend Mearsheimer’s decision to endorse his latest work.
The most recent accusations against Mearsheimer amount to nothing more than straw man arguments motivated by prejudice for a particular opinion. The Daily Sophist recently published an article titled “Professor Mearsheimer Insults Jews, Again.” It relies heavily on a piece written by Jeffrey Goldberg for The Atlantic in which he claims that Mearsheimer’s decision to associate himself with a man who has in the past been the author of arguably anti-Semitic comments is sufficient evidence that Mearsheimer himself is an anti-Semite.
Goldberg makes no reference to the text of The Wandering Who? but instead points out several anti-Israeli and anti-Semitic comments Atzmon has made previously in his career. He then claims that Mearsheimer is a “corrosive critic of Jewry itself” based on his decision to recommend Atzmon’s latest book. While his heart may be in the right place, Goldberg puts forth an obviously flawed argument. There is no reason to condemn Mearsheimer based on Atzmon’s previous controversial comments. The only acceptable criticism would be if he could prove that The Wandering Who? is itself anti-Semitic, and that Mearsheimer is guilty of praising those hateful elements. Goldberg does no such thing.
It has become easier to kindle controversy out of any comments surrounding the Israel-Palestine debate than it is to light a flame in an electric fireplace. Obviously there are serious historical, ethical, and religious considerations that must be taken into account. Yet these concerns, rather than shaping the environment for debate, are today used as grounds for dismissing and insulting those who try to instigate it.
The Daily Sophist post cites a former president of AEPi who claims that, in light of these events, he is embarrassed to call himself a graduate of the U of C. This is ridiculous. I in no way underestimate the sensitivity of this issue. However, it is quite clear that Mearsheimer seeks to participate in intelligent debate over controversial topics. The US-Israel lobby, the relationship between Jewish identity and the Holocaust, Palestinian statehood—none of these issues are black and white. In fact the demarcation between fact and emotion is impossibly difficult to identify.
I think we should commend anyone who seeks to push the boundaries and uncover the difficult truths, particularly when the questions are so messy. I am not saying I agree with Mearsheimer’s opinions on these issues: I don’t even know all of them. But I don’t care. For probably the first time since coming to this University, the words “academic freedom” mean more to me than justifying questionable investment practices. Atzmon may very well be an anti-Semite, but John Mearsheimer is not.
Colin Bradley is a second-year in the College majoring in Law, Letters and Society.
Colin,
Your reporting is factually incorrect. Goldberg’s original post included two quotations from The Wandering Who.
Goldberg provided these quotations from the book:
“Fagin is the ultimate plunderer, a child exploiter and usurer. Shylock is the blood-thirsty merchant. With Fagin and Shylock in mind, the Israeli treatment of the Palestinians seems to be just a further event in an endless hellish continuum.”
…..
“65 years after the liberation of Auschwitz we should be able to ask – why? Why were the Jews hated? Why did European people stand up against their neighbours? Why are the Jews hated in the Middle East, surely they had a chance to open a new page in their troubled history? If they genuinely planned to do so, as the early Zionist claimed, why did they fail? Why did America tighten its immigration laws amid the growing danger to European Jews? We should also ask what purpose Holocaust denial laws serve? What is the Holocaust religion there to conceal? As long as we fail to ask questions, we will be subjected to Zionist lobbies and their plots. We will continue killing in the name of Jewish suffering. We w’ill maintain our complicity in Western imperialist crimes.”
More quotations from the book not quoted by Goldberg:
“I will try to elucidate this idea through a simple and hypothetical yet terrifying war scenario. We, for instance, can envisage a horrific situation in which an Israeli so-called ‘pre-emptive’ nuclear attack on Iran that escalates into a disastrous nuclear war, in which tens of millions of people perish. I guess that amongst the survivors of such a nightmare scenario, some may be bold enough to argue that ‘Hitler might have been right after all.’”
…..
“You may wonder at this stage whether I regard the credit crunch as a Zionist plot or even a Jewish conspiracy. In fact the opposite is the case. It isn’t a plot and certainly not a conspiracy for it was all in the open.”
…..
“Some Jews are rather unhappy with Charles Dickens’ Fagin and Shakespeare’s Shylock, who they regard as ‘anti-Semitic’.”
……
“Anne Frank wasn’t exactly a literary genius. Her diary is not a valuable piece of literature. She wasn’t exceptionally clever either. She was in fact a very ordinary girl and this is exactly her power within the post WWII Western cultural discourse. She was just an innocent, average girl. In fact, the attempt to make Anne Frank into a cultural hero may be a genuine reflection of the Jewish ideological inclination towards sameness. Frank mirrors the desperate attempt to prove to the world that ‘we, the Jews’ are people like other people. Moreover, the success of Anne Frank’s Diary is there to suggest the West’s willingness to accept Jews as people amongst other people.”
……
“In spite of Julia and David’s dismissal of the Jewish faith, they still very much want to be part of the Jewish community. I wonder why? What is it that they need from the Jewish community? Why don’t they just ‘get on’ with their ‘socialist agenda’ and join the human family as ordinary people?”
…..
““The Holocaust religion is, obviously, Judeo-centric to the bone. It defines the Jewish raison d’etre. For Zionist Jews, it signifies a total fatigue of the Diaspora, and regards the goy as a potential irrational murderer. This new Jewish religion preaches revenge. It could well be the most sinister religion known to man, for in the name of Jewish suffering, it issues licences to kill, to flatten, to nuke, to annihilate, to loot, to ethnically cleanse. It has made vengeance into an acceptable Western value.”
……
““To a certain extent, we are all subject to this religion; some of us are worshippers, others are just subject to its power. Those who attempt to revise Holocaust history are subject to abuse by the high priests of this religion. The Holocaust religion constitutes the Western ‘real’. We are neither allowed to touch it, nor are we permitted to look into it. Very much like the ancient Israelites who were to obey their God but never question Him, we are marching into the void.”
In Mearsheimer and Walt’s response they said they could find no evidence of Holocaust revisionism or antisemitism. They also defended Atzmon in general, “In sum, Goldberg’s charge that Atzman is a Holocaust denier or an apologist for Hitler is baseless. Nor is Atzmon an anti-Semite.”
Check out some of these lovely quotations from Atzmon (all linked from his official website):
“I am left puzzled here; if the Nazis ran a death factory in Auschwitz-Birkenau, why would the Jewish prisoners join them at the end of the war? Why didn’t the Jews wait for their Red liberators?
I think that 65 years after the liberation of Auschwitz, we must be entitled to start to ask the necessary questions. We should ask for some conclusive historical evidence and arguments rather than follow a religious narrative that is sustained by political pressure and laws.”
……
“I’m not only a self-hating Jew, I’m a proud self-hating Jew! When you try to think of the biggest humanists ever, Spinoza Marx [sic: Marx was born and raised a Christian, albeit of Jewish descent] and Christ were basically proud self-hating Jews also. Why? Because of growing up in this kind of racist, nationalist, tribalist, chauvinist, supremacist society — and this is exactly what they stood up against.”
….
“I don’t think it was a credit crunch, I think it was a Zionist punch.
This war in Iraq may have something to do with energy but largely it was America acting as an Israeli mission for fighting the last pockets of resistance, led tactically by Neoconservatives and the Federal Reserve.
Alan Greenspan’s job was to create a financial boom so America’s people were not concerned with the tactics used in the Middle East.
It should have worked but it didn’t work because the all-American boom was done at the expense of the most deprived Americans, and they just couldn’t pay the mortgages so it all collapsed.
It’s not only Jews that have adopted this world view either. Bush behaved Jewishly (ideologically) — he is a supremacist, he was a tribalist, but he is not a Jew as far as I’m aware.”
If you are interested in actually researching this issue instead of providing a knee jerk defense of a man you don’t know and whose work you are completely unfamiliar with check out these articles:
http://rothkopf.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2011/09/27/mearsheimer_picks_a_winner_finally_a_revealing_book_jacket_blurb
http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/wrm/2011/09/23/john-mearsheimer-dances-with-the-dark/
http://andrewsullivan.thedailybeast.com/2011/09/mearsheimer-and-the-jewish-anti-semite-ctd.html
http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2011/09/john_mearsheimer_ready_for_ros.html
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/09/26/1020371/-John-Mearsheimer-does-his-best-to-prove-critics-right
http://jewssansfrontieres.blogspot.com/2011/09/few-point-for-occasion-of-atzmon-saga.html
http://volokh.com/2011/09/29/john-mearsheimer-and-gilad-atzmon-update/
http://volokh.com/2011/09/26/a-challenge-to-john-mearsheimer/
http://hurryupharry.org/2011/09/26/mearsheimer-and-walt-defend-antisemite-who-thinks-hitler-will-be-proved-right/
This is an embarrassingly unresearched editorial. If you are going to criticize an author for not reading the work of another before making their criticism, you should damn well read their work, yourself, as Daniel so clearly pointed out.
Also, are you calling for us to censor the people who criticize Mearsheimer? How exactly does that support free academic discourse?
I’m not sure I agree with Mr. Bradley on all his points but I think these comments need to be responded to..
from what I can tell Goldberg did NOT quote the Wandering Who in his original post. The quotes that “Daniel” wants to attribute to that book are actually from Atzmon’s article titled “Truth, History and Integrity.” Its still a very anti-semitic article, but it’s definitely not the book that Mearsheimer commented on.
And I don’t think this columnist is asking anyone to censor anyone. thats kind of the point, right?
Stephen,
Incorrect. Those two quotations are from The Wandering Who. For links to the text in Googles Books see:
http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/09/a-mearsheimer-falsehood-and-other-reactions-to-atzmon/245711/
Stephen,
I just rechecked each of the quotations I attributed to The Wandering Who using Google Books. You should be able to verify that each one appears in the book:
http://books.google.com/books?id=028jkw0GVY4C&printsec=frontcover&dq=wandering+who&hl=en&ei=I7iITuC6O6HL0QHu1YjvDw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CC0Q6AEwAA#v=onepage&q&f=false
For those interested Dr. Hussein Ibish, a senior research fellow at the American Task Force for Palestine, wrote an interesting blog post on Mearsheimer’s endorsement of The Wandering Who and response to Goldberg’s criticism:
http://www.ibishblog.com/blog/hibish/2011/10/01/gilad_atzmon_and_john_mearsheimer_self_criticism_self_hate_and_hate
This is a fair summary of the latest battle in the ‘Atzmon wars’. A bit too fair. It accepts that maybe Atzmon has written ‘anti-semitic’ things. It gives the impression that Mearsheimer’s ‘critics’ are mistaken – their hearts ‘may be in the right place’. That is not so. There is a concerted attempt to slander Mearsheimer because he blew the whistle on the Lobby. To attack freedom, in order to help ethnic cleansing.
Is ‘Jay Knott’ a pseudonym of John Mearsheimer’s?
I ask, because there is no discernible difference in their beliefs:
What Atzmon has written is not ‘anti-semitic’
and
The all-powerful Lobby ( Jewish or Zionist, or a bit or both with some Freemasonery thrown in?) will destroy anyone who shines a light on its evil practices
Atzmon has a problem . He can never escape the (for him unpalatable ) fact that he is a Jew . He was born of a Jewish mother and much as he would like to rid himself of the association there is no mechanism within the religion to self excommunicate one self . His presence in a synagogue would be greeted like something that you brought in on the sole of the shoe but nevertheless he would maintain the option of attending .
All this must be maddeningly frustrating for Atzmon, knowing that in reality his fellow Jew hating holocaust denying associates see him as a Jew no less . In fact they probably have even less respect and a good deal more hate on the basis that he is in effect a Judenrat.
Anyway it all means very little . Atzmon is just one more antisemite , who will not be remembered for anything positive . His legacy will be hate which is always such an unproductive fruitless waste of ones short space of allotted time
Colin should ask himself: “Do I agree that the most recent world economic meltdown was caused by Zionists, or Jews?” And, two, “are Shylock and Fagin historically accurate representations of Jews?”
If he answers “yes” then he is an anti-Semite just like Atzmon is.
And if Mearsheimer can recommend a book containing such anti-Semitic slurs, then he is one too.
If I were to endorse a white supremacist who said that David Duke’s top work only has 2-and-a-half pages about blacks, I would have no credibility in the academy. A reasonable person may even question if I am a racist myself. Sure enough, Atzmon, whose reputation proceeds him in a ticker tape parade of “did-he-really say that too“, has been caught saying that Mein Kampf talks about Jews on about 2-and-a-half pages. Mearsheimer had a choice to recognize this, as well as some of the nastier crap in the very book he endorsed. Mearsheimer is either sloppy, desperate to be fashionable among the people who adore Atzmon’s “globalized ‘antizionism’” especially since he’s a Jew courtesy of his mother’s side, or something else that I dare not ponder. Since I can’t climb into his head regarding the darker corners of what that something else could be, I have I must in fairness defer to the two latter alternatives — neither of which reflect well on him professionally without even needing to question where he stands on Jews and antisemitism.
I am a U of C alumnus (AB ’83, MD ’87) and have written and said much that is critical of Israel the state, and Zionism in general, and have defended Prof. Mearsheimer in a letter to the U of C Magazine. So I think I have some credibility in terms of being open-minded about Israel and Zionism. That said, having downloaded Atzmon’s The Wandering Who to my iPhone and read much of it, expecting an informed and intelligent analysis of what constitutes a Jew and the sense of peoplehood, I had to just stop reading what was clearly a poorly-written and blatantly antisemitic screed. It read, to my eyes, much like Henry Ford’s The International Jew, just written by an Israeli Jew.
Atzmon conflates Judaism (the religion/culture) with Zionism, and the Israeli Lobby with a “Jewish Lobby.” I’ve mentioned an Israeli Lobby many times and have no issue with discussing or reading about it. But a “Jewish Lobby” is an antisemitic construct that even Mearsheimer and Walt took great pains to distinguish themselves from criticizing in their essay.
In contrast, Shlomo Sand’s book “The Invention of the Jewish People,” whether one agrees with all of its points or not, is a well-researched and intelligently written book that, while anti-Zionist, is not at all antisemitic. Many Jews like myself are critical of Israel and the Israeli Lobby (AIPAC, Christian Zionist groups, etc). Just as many Americans like myself are critical of many US policies and actions. But criticizing my own government doesn’t make me anti-American. Criticizing Israel hardly makes me an antisemite, either. But if a critic of Israel and Zionism (ie, me) feels that Atzmon’s book is nothing more than an antisemitic screed, I think that has a pretty good positive predictive value that it is indeed antisemitic. And much as I have supported Mearsheimer and Walt’s essay The Israel Lobby, I am astonished and disappointed by his endorsement of this poorly-written, bigoted and idiotic book.
@David Toub — Shlomo Sand’s argument that Judaism is only a cultural construct has been disproven by genetic studies. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Invention_of_the_Jewish_People#DNA_analysis
As for Mearsheimer’s endorsement of the “The Wandering Who — I used to think that Mearsheimer was a borderline anti-Semite, mostly because he once distinguished between what he determined “good Jews” and “bad Jews” in a speech. But now, after reading his defense of The Wandering Who, there is no question in my mind — he is a fully-fledged anti-Semite.
Dear Alumna (note that I’m using my own name-perhaps you’d have more credibility in my book had you used yours): the genetic argument is without merit scientifically. To be sure, there are links that define Jewish subpopulations. But one can also find studies showing common alleles between Jews and Palestinian Arabs, so all that tells you is that people who live in particular areas and who share common ancestors have some common genes. Not a surprise. But once you start claiming a “Jewish gene” exists, as opposed to common genetic elements among people from a particular region, you’re starting to sound a lot like several Nazi scientists who believed Judaism was a defined race. It isn’t. There is no credible scientific data I am aware of that this is the case.