John Mearsheimer endorses a book by a crazed antisemite
I've long resisted the movement to label Professor John Mearsheimer, noted scholar of international relations and long time critic of American support for Israel, an anti-Semite. His scholarly work is certainly of the highest caliber and, although his book (co-written with Stephen Walt) The Israel Lobby would embolden antisemites, I had long thought it was simply far too easy to dismiss it as simple anti-semitism. Indeed, though the book plays into the hands of many old antisemitic tropes about Jews, particularly vis-a-vis money and political power, nothing in the book was itself antisemitic, and nothing in the authors' backgrounds would suggest that they were secret antisemites. Pejman Yousefzadeh has a good run down on the charge here. But now I'm not so sure.
Mearsheimer, still the R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago, has seemingly endorsed a book by Gilad Atzmon, a self described "self hating Jew" who has made a name for himself calling into question the veracity of the Holocaust and has wanted to "reexamine" the terms of the Blood Libel.
Jeffery Goldberg and David Bernstein rather extensively document the vile and insane rantings of Atzmon, and really question what Mearsheimer could be thinking endorsing a book by such a lunatic.
As disheartening as I think this is, to see such a great scholar wade into the dark and disgusting work of antisemitism, I think it does raise some serious questions about Mearsheimer's judgement. My question is: what should the University of Chicago community response be to this? I do not think that he should, necessarily, be censured or have anything official happen to him, nor do I think that there needs to be a negative response. As vile as this stuff is, Mearsheimer himself never said it, although he has done a tremendous disservice to the intellectual community by validating its existence.
What do you think?
- Comment (1)
- · Quote
- · UnfollowFollow (0)
Comments:
Aug '11
Re: John Mearsheimer endorses a book by a crazed antisemite
I read the link you posted to your longer article at Chequer-Board. This post and the longer post were very good.
I'm hesitant to discuss things in terms of "racist" (anti-Semitism/racism, same deal) and such. Could it be that there ideas are just very wrong? Why do we need to ask the anti-semite question? The question deals with emotions and not logic. And please don't think I'm trying to excuse anti-semitism, because I'm not.
We should go after their ideas. And if you think they're anti-semites, just go after them harder!
Near the end of your longer post you begin to catalogue some of the professor's startling inconsistencies. Christopher Hitchens wrote an essay on the trial of (historian) David Irving where he noted that we should indeed be troubled when a person's mistakes and inconsistencies run in only one, anti-Jewish, direction.
Also, the whole "Jews control this or that" trope-- I get really nervous when I read stuff like that.