Ruth R. Wisse
Jews & Power.
Shocken, 256 pages, $19.95
For some eighteen hundred years, from A.D. 70 to 1948, to be exact, the Jews had a rather odd relation to power. The story goes that in Poland in the 1920s, two orthodox Jews, father and son, skinny, pale, and harried, were rushing along a street when they encountered two strapping Polish youths, tall and blond and brawny. “Look at them,” says the father to the son, “this is what will become of you if you don’t study.”
Ruth R. Wisse, a professor of Yiddish and comparative literature at Harvard University, opens her incisive new book Jews and Power with a similar story, but you’ll see right away how the changed setting and our knowledge of what happens next sours the fun to produce the bitter taste of undeserved tragedy:
In Warsaw in the autumn of 1939 … a couple of Nazi soldiers were seen harassing a Jewish child on the street. The child’s mother ran out of the courtyard, picked up her bruised little boy, placed his cap on his head, and said to him, ‘Come inside … and za a mentsh.’”
The word mensch, Wisse explains, “acquires in Yiddish the moral connotation of ‘what a human being ought to be.’” In her Polish-inflected Yiddish the mother was instructing her son to become a decent human being.
The political lesson seems clear. Without brawn or guns, which is to say,