Friday, February 10, 2006
Volokh's David Bernstein is excellent on Columbia's Joseph Massad:
All You Need to Know About Joseph Massad of Columbia
If one needed any fresh evidence of this, one need only consult Massad's recent review of Spielberg's Munich. "Lunatic" would not be too harsh a description of the review. For example,many of us are familiar with the ship "Exodus," made famous by the movie of that name. The ship was one of many ships carrying Holocaust survivors trying to get from Europe to Palestine after World War II, only to be captured by the British and diverted to Cyprus, where the refugees were placed in internment camps. [The actual passengers on The Exodus were sent to internment camps in Germany, but in the movie they may have been sent to Cyprus, were most "illegal" Jewish immigrants were sent]...
...Here is how Massad describes the movie's plot: "Exodus tells the story of the Zionist hijacking of a ship from Cyprus to Palestine by a Zionist Haganah commander." This is analogous to saying that Schindler's List was a movie about Jews taking a working vacation in Poland...
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It is not "lunacy", or merely sub-par scholarship and political indoctrination, that results in pablum like Massad's review, but a studied disengagement from anything authentically Jewish. It is, in short, politicized ignorance. Read More
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, p.30
I'm no Martin Kramer, but what I do know about Middle East studies continually reaffirms a suspicion of mine. That is: post-Edward Said Middle East Studies, beyond being thoroughly politicized, is in itself a political statement about the relationship of Jews to the Middle East.
What do I mean? Consider the stars today of Middle East Studies -- people like Massad and Juan Cole. They (at least putatively) have a general knowledge of the region, they have their areas of cultural specialization, and they are of course steeped in postcolonial, that is Saidian, theoretics. You also have the sundry scholars of Islam. But is there any one of them whose area of cultural specialization is Jews? Any one who is a scholar of Judaism? Any one who learned the Bernard Lewis/Chatham House ouevre before rejecting it?
Clearly then, for the Saidian set of Middle East scholars, a political statement about the relationship of Jews to the Middle East is being made: that there is no relationship between the two besides that of Zionist-colonial depredation. Jews are mere interlopers, fanged colonists, European bagmen, even Nazis. They are not -- cannot -- be indiginous to the region, and worthy of study themselves.
It is therefore not just "lunacy", or sub-par scholarship, or political indoctrination that results in pablum like Massad's review, but a studied disengagement from anything authentically Jewish. It is, in short, politicized ignorance.