More Ruth Wisse, Jews and Power

Nextbook’s second annual “festival of ideas” will be held Sunday in New York. This year’s theme is “Jews and Power” and it will feature thinkers like J.J. Goldberg and Ruth Wisse. In preparation, Wisse, who recently wrote a book bearing the same name as the conference, penned a piece for The Forward that argues how the world would have changed if the Jews had remained the masters of their own universe.

Had Jews always remained a self-governing people in their land, there would have been no Crusader wars over Jerusalem, no Spanish Inquisition and no Holocaust. Karl Marx would not have concluded that “the bill of exchange is the Jew’s actual god” and Stalin would not have mounted a lethal campaign against Jewish “rootless cosmopolitans.” Host nations would not have wreaked upon Jews some of the most terrible evils in the history of humankind. The Jewish contribution to the welfare of the world would have been all the greater had the Jews managed to secure for themselves their aboriginal land.