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The Canadian Jewish News. Thursday. December 12, 1991-Page 13
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M M E N T
R Y
By
RUTH WISSE
Every December, the Association for Jewish Studies holds its annual conference for those who teach about Judaism and the Jews at the college and university level. The growth of the membership from barely 80 in 1968 to 1.200 today reflects the rapid development of programs in Jewish studies everywhere across North America.
This year's conference, the largest ever, includes 63 separate panels on such topics as; Society and Culture in Medieval Cairo; Halachah in the Early and Late Modem Period; Bialik's Poetic Legacy: Yiddish Culture; Central Figures in Jewish Mysiicism; Epistemological Concerns in Jewish Philosophy; Jewish Ethnography; Jewish Ethics; Catastrophe and Jewish Identity. Trendiness plays its inevitable part in this field as in all others, with eight separate sections on women and gender as compared with four on bible, seven in all Zionism and Israel. There are also a number of sessioris on Holocaust studies.
We tend to be pleasurably surprised the rapid integration dfJewish studies into programs of higher learning. Certainly, anyone who attended university in the 1950s, as 1 did, or even as late as the early 1970s, may be astonished by the wide variety of Jewish .studies courses that now form part
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of the regular curriculum.
Indeed, when I was at college, there was opt a single course on any aspect of Jewish religion or peoplehood in either the humanities or the social sciences. I recall hearing the word **Jew" only twice — once in a course on European literature in connection with anti-Semitic passages in the work of Louis-Ferdinand Celine, and again in a course on modern poetry in connection with anti-Semitic passages in the work of f T: S. Eliot.
There were no references to the Jews, either, in general courses that seemed to require their inclusion. For example, in a full-year course on Introduction to Economic History that met three times a week between September and April, there was never a word about the Jews: limiagine that the professor was so uncomfortable with the Jews and their crucial role in economic history that he thought he was doing the gentlemanly thing by avoiding the subject altogether.
j\lljhi5.time. Jews wene very much in evidence at the university, since the quota limiting their admission had already been lifted. Thus, the really surprising element in this transformation of the curriculum is not the introduction of Jewish studies since the 1970s, but the absence prior to that of
Hebrew. Jewish histor>'. Jewish philosophy, Jewish religion, and so forth, as part of the general offerings. If the Jews were there in western society, why was it necessar> for universities to pretend that they didn't exist? How come the negative image of the Jews penetrated the classroom-before any discussion of who they were?
The answers to these qiiestions can't be found in Jewish studies, but in a course that has not yet made it into the average curriculum — a course on Gentile at-Wisse titudes toward the Jews. No matter how much we may learn about Jewish civilization from the Bible to Begin, it will not explain how certain Christian authorities demonized the Jews, or how some Muslim societies degraded the Jews as part of their own quest for religious supremacy. Study of Jewish texts and ideas, regardless of its thoroughness, will never explain the triumph of anti-Jewish ideology in Europe during the first half of this century, or in the Middle East during the second half.
Learning about the Jews, in other words, will never tell us anything about anti-Semitism, which has thrust the Jews into the centre of world history not as an autonomous subject, but as the target of other people's hatred. Unpleasant as it may be. the study of that hatred is at least as important to the future of our civilization as is jhe study of
the Jews. For unless we understand the success of anti-Semitism, we will never be able to help curb it. and anti-Semitism cannoi be understood until it is studied like any other disease.
Many people think that courses on the Holocaust serve this purpose. The Holocaust is probably the most widely-taught subject in Jewish Studies programs. Donors to Jewish Studies program are eager to endow these courses, hoping that education will cure what the historian Salo Baron called "the dislike of the unlike." Yet while courses on the Holocaust in programs of Jewish Studies can investigate the tragedy of the Jews, they cannot properly pose the question of what went wrong in European civilization. Courses on the Holocaust will nevex explain why my Canadian professor once-fek compelled to erase the Jews from his lectures, or why the most developed countries in the world tried to erase the Jews from their midst.
The Jews are a fascinating subject, and the burgeoning field of Jewish Studies is very stimulating and rewarding. BUi the most troubling aspect of Jewish history belongs properly in other departments — in the investigation of those ideas and forces that, sought to eliminate the Jews. HopeftiUy, the study of Gentile attitudes to Jews willsoon be included alongside the study of the Jews as part of North American university curricula.
NECHEMIA MEYERS
There won't be many tourists at the inns ;of Bethlehem this Christmas; the intifada has seen to that. But elsewhere in the Holy Land, tourists are once more in evidence and accomodation for them, at least in certain popular spots, is apt to be in short supply.
After a slow but steady recovery since the Gulf War. the tourism industry is now pleased to be welcoming back visitors from its traditional mar- ■ kets in Western Europe and North America, and is looking forward io the prospect of new markets, particulariy in the Far East.
Up to this point, the ubiquitous Japanese
tourist, a common sight in Disneyland, the Louvre and the Tower of London, has been almost completely absent from Massadai and the Western Wall (except for members of the fervently pro-Zionist Mikoya sect).
Indeed, no more than a few thousand of the 10 million Japanese who go abroad each year have shown up in Israel. There are soon likely to be a lot more of them, however, thanks to the Toyota Motor Corporation's recent decision to promote tourism to this country and the Tokyo government approval of an El Al charter service to Japan, starting^ in the summer of 1992.
El Al and other airiines are also active elsewhere, either boosting the number of their flights , tp Israel (as in the case with Lufthansa and Olympic), or dispatching larger planes to Ben-Gurion
Airport (like TWA). - .
Tourists who fly in are .likely to head for jerusalemrT'el Aviv or Eilat, but increasing efforts are being made to attract them to the Dead Sea and the Galilee: the former being billed as a natural health farm (particularly for people with arthritis and skin diseases), and the latter as a mecca for people seeking an active vacation.
As I can testify from what I saw last weekend, there is. indeed, plenty to keep one active in the Galilee. It offers lots of horseback riding and swimming, as well as an opportunity to go floating down the Jordan in an inner tube during the summer, or skiing down the slopes of Mount Her-mon during the winter.
Available all year round is ice skating, thanks to the rink opened recently at the luxurious Cana-
da Sports Centre in Metulla, a town hitherto best known a$ the target of terrorist attacks from Lebanon.
Should the latter return, however, the former -would undoubtedly disappear; as was evident earlier this year when Iraqi Scuds kiUed4he-lp-cal tourist industry.
N(3w, says Avi Etgar. director-general of Jhe Tour Operators Association, tourism is bouncing back, with the number of visitors in 1991 likely to be 10 percent higher than in 1989. the last reasonably normal year. So rather than laying people off, as members of his group were doing not so long ago, they are busy looking for new personnel.
Should the Middle East remain quiet, he adds, they will be hiring even more in 1992.
By . ARNOLD AGES
Heinrich Heine, the great German-Jewish poet, would be happy today. For years he and his colleagues in the famous Wissens-chaft des Judentums (Science of Judaism) hankered after acceptance in the world of the German university,
Alas, this was not to be. Scholars such as Leopold Zunz, Abraham Getger iind Morris Steinschneider produced outstanding works of Jewish scholarship in Bible, Talmud, history: philosophy, liturgy and Jewish literature but they accomplished it outside the framework of the German university, where a baptismal certificate was indispensable for entr>' into that worid. '
li is said, moreover, thai one of the reasons Heine converted to Christianity was in the hope that this would be his passport to a professional position in the German halls of learning. In his case not even conversion worked and he died as an expatriate German poet in^ Paris in 1856. ^
I was thinking about Heine and how times have changed when I recently perused the program of the forthcoming annual meeting of the Modem Languages Association which is being held in San Francisco at the end of December.
This annual conclave, the most important on the university literary calendar, brings together more than 10,000 professors and students of modem languages and literanire to argue, debate and give papers on various:
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aspects of culture and modemity. , At this year's meeting not only is there a special session on Heine's poetry, his sources and connections to German mythology, but the Jewiish fact, in multiple literary, historical and sociological dimensions, is also being asserted al the MLA in a way that is totally new.
When I first started going to the MLA in 1960, there were no papers given on Jewish themes as such. Occasionally diere might be mention of a Jewish factor (usually negative) within the context of the works of a major author. In 1991 a radical change has occurred.
This year more than 30 papers on Jewish drama. Arherica-Jewish. Sephardi, French-Jewish and Yiddish writers are going to be presented at the San Francisco meetings. An entire session will be devoted to Jews and Other Differences.
How does one explain this phenomenon? Several reasons can be adduced. First, Jewish literature, whether composed in westem languages or in that other uniquely westem tongue called Yiddish, is making more and more of an impact on the world of the imagination. The fact that four Jewish npjvelists, Elias Canetti, Saul Bellow, Elie Wiesel and I. B. Singer have won Nobel prizes for literature (and peace) in recent years explains also the esteem in which Jewish writing is now held.
There is another factor involved in the renewed interest in Jewish literature and this
can also be seen in the program of the MLA. In the past decade and half, literatures and disciplines which were absent from or which existed on the periphery of the major clusters of English, French, German, Russian and Spanish literatures (which have traditionally occupied centre stage at the MLA), have benefited from a kind of affirmative action.
Thus the MLA now offers symposia on subjects which did not.command attention when I began going to the meetings three decades ago: feminist issues, sexual orientations, cinema criticism, visions of Utopia, ethnographical concems, humor, political correctness, autobiogra-Ages phy, Puerto Rican studies, archival research, race, oral narratives, proletariat- writing, censorship. Chicano literature and "historicizingspectatorship."
The new flexibility in the MLA's perspective has permitted consideration (as it will do this year) of the writings of Philip Roth. Cynthia Ozick. Lynhe Sharon Schwartz and Saul Bellow. It is auspicious that the 1991 meetings are recognizing the Sephardi fact as well. Four papers on the Jews of Curacao, Sephardi biblical criticism, the Sephardim of Mexico and the 1492 commemorations will. be featured at San Francisco.
What is especially attractive is the attention being focused, on Yiddish literature at the MLA this year. Professors from Mas-sachussetts, North Carolina, Maryland,
Ohio and Texas will be delivering addresses on the.poetry of CeliaDropkin, the writings of Anne Margoliii. the criticism of Moyshe Kulbak and Sholom Afeichem and the anti-Yiddish manifesto of Uri Tsvi Greenberg, A Canadian, Adam Fuersten-berg of Toronto's Ryerson Polytechnical Institute, will be giving a paper on Canadian Yiddish poetry between the two world wars.
Three Jewish writers have sessions devoted entirely to them this year. In addition to the symposium on Heinrich Heine, four papers are to be given on the mystical writings of the French-Jewish writer. Edmond Jabes and the same number of talks will highlight the poetic muses which inspired Allan Ginsberg's famous poem Kaddish.
One session at the MLA is entitled Taking Stock: Jewish Literary Scholarship in the American Academy and it will feature presentations on Lionel Trilling and Harold Bloom. In this context the literary study of Midrash will also be addressed.
An especially innovative program this year willinclude discussion of the American Jewish stage and will explore Elie Wiesel's Trial of God, women performing artists, and, the writing of the American Jewish play.
Most of the titles which advertise the talks that will be given at the MLA in San Francisco are quite clear. There is one title, however, that has completely mystified me. It is called-Hbjpalong Cassidy and the Jewish-Pirobiem, and it's being given by Shimon Wincelberg of Beveriy Hills, Calif.
Now that's a title!