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Joseph Campbell's private expressions of antisemitism have been documented by his acquaintances, his students, and even his friends. But Campbell's own writings attest to his prejudice. Nearly all of his references to Jews and Judaism are disdainful and hostile. Campbell's dislike of Judaism does stem in part from his dislike of Western religions generally and to that extent cannot be said to reflect antisemitism. But his dislike ofJudaism is especially uncompromising and, more, appeals to common antisemitic stereotypes. At the same time Campbell applauds the mythology of Judaism, as he does every other mythology, and really seeks to substitute the mythology for the religion. There are those who like both Jews and Judaism. There are those who dislike Jews but like Judaism. There are those who like Jews but dislike Judaism. In the companion article to this one Robert Ackerman argues that James Frazer came to be such a person. Finally, there are those who dislike both Jews and Judaism. Sadly, Joseph Campbell, the celebrated scholar of myth, falls here. Ever since Brendan Gill broke the news of Campbell's antisemitism, 1 confirmations have abounded. Arnold Krupat, a longtime colleague of Campbell's at Sarah Lawrence College, relates an incident at a faculty gathering : At some point in the evening, Campbell, responding to a remark I can't recall, said something to the effect that he could always spot a Jew. I, a Jew, said,`Oh?' Whereupon Campbell went into a description of how the New York Athletic Club had ingeniously managed for years to keep Jews out. He went on and on, telling his story in the most charming and amiable fashion, without any self-consciousness about the views he was expressing and, indeed, without any overt animus-for all that he obviously relished the notion of keeping Jews out of anywhere any time, forever. 2 Even more unsettling is the recollection of Eve Feldman, a former student of Campbell's. Having told her teacher that she was Jewish and that she wanted to study the Hebrew Bible, she was informed : that the God of the Hebrews was an evil God, and that the American Indians' feeling for color and beauty was totally absent from the Bible. .. . [I]mmediately after this opening gambit Campbell became agitated. `He was sweating and pacing and running his fingers through his hair. He began to spew out this
Shofar, Volume 40 (1), 2022
American Jewish History, 2017
This work argues that American Jewish identity cannot be understood apart from the context of the national religious culture, specifically the intense bibliocentrism that has characterized American Protestantism from its beginnings. Even as Jews have often been considered grievously misguided in their beliefs and practices, they have also been imbued by the Protestant gaze with a unique spiritual power, linked to their alleged connection to the "pure, heartfelt religion of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob." My book traces the implications of this dual vision of the Jew through a range of cultural works by Jews as well as Christians-including poems in a "prophetic" mode, spiritual autobiographies, and Hollywood Biblical epics.
Canadian Jewish Studies Etudes Juives Canadiennes, 2003
Shofar, 2022
Early in my career I taught an evening course at a Jewish institution in New York City. At the beginning of one session I posed the question "what is Jewish literature?" One of my more voluble students raised his hand. "In my opinion," he said, "[ Jorge Luis] Borges is Jewish literature. He was interested in Jewish themes and he liked Jewish people. It's only the parochialism of the rabbis that has prevented us from recognizing him as a great Jewish writer. " It wasn't exactly the answer I was soliciting, but I tried to challenge him as he was challenging me. Was it really fair, I asked, to annex a non-Jewish writer to the study of Jewish literature? Can we define "Jewish literature" more rigorously than "things Jewish people like to read"? Most significantly, before we define "Jewish literature," don't we need to define what literature is? The questions "what is literature?" and "what is Jewish literature?" as well as "what is Jewish about Jewish literature?" are deliberated, defined, and deferred in Adam Zachary Newton's magisterial study Jewish Studies as Counterlife. A Borgesian intensity characterizes AZN's prose -and referring to him by his initials mimics his proclivity to designate Jewish Studies throughout the book as "JS" -because like Borges he conveys the impression of having read every book ever written. He's the only writer I know of whose "Acknowledgements" include footnotes! The book consists of five chapters connected by six "interchapters" that link themes examined in the chapters, often via reference to popular culture. The volume is neither a history of Jewish Studies nor a prognostication of where it should go, so much as a deconstruction of its task, along with the challenges that make conflicts within the field so difficult to resolve. AZN is an ideal author to pose these questions. Having served for many years as a professor of English and comparative literature at Yeshiva University in New York City, he is not a person "between two worlds," like the Russian Jewish ethnographer Sh. An-ski, so much as a latter-day Walt Whitman who contains multitudes in his command of literary theory, several national literatures, an encyclopedic knowledge
Jewish Review of Books , 2024
Anti-Israelism It's not just the old story in a new guise. 32 reviel netz Of "Good Jews" and Bad Binaries How Israel became taboo on campus.
In C.L. de Wet and W. Mayer (eds), Revisioning John Chrysostom: New Approaches, New Perspectives, Critical Approaches to Early Christianity 1, Leiden: Brill, 2019, 58-136.
The preaching in Syrian Antioch by John Chrysostom of a series of sermons against the Jews has frequently been viewed both as some of the most extreme anti-Jewish Christian discourse and as a watershed moment in the emergence from anti-Judaism of antisemitism. In the wake of the horror of the Holocaust, the problem of reconciling these disquieting sermons with John’s status as one of the most admired Christian preachers of all time has led scholars to respond in a variety of ways. The bulk of these explanations have sought to explain the author’s intent or the context that gave rise to this particular set of sermons. Little attention has been paid to quantifying the sermons’ original impact. This is despite the fact that the sermons’ negative impact in later centuries—that they contributed to antisemitic sentiment—has long been assumed. In light of current events in Syria in which some of the same language of “infidels” and “dogs” is being employed not by Christians against “Jews,” but by radical Muslims against western “secular” governments and their constituents, in this chapter we seek to revisit these sermons within the larger context of religious conflict and the radicalising impact of language upon the listener. In particular, using explanatory models from moral psychology, conceptual metaphor theory and the neurosciences we conclude that the intent of the author, the original context or social reality, and even the reasoned argument, matter less than we would like to think. Of insidious influence are the pre-conscious conceptual frameworks and intuitions that the words employed activate and neurally strengthen in the brain of the listener. This finding supports the pessimistic claim of John Gager that, if “the Judaizers are the targets of [John’s] wrath,” it is “the Jews [who are] its victims.”
A theory not uncommonly heard in and out of the academic world is that anti-Black racism originated with the ancient rabbis. The Talmud and Midrash, it is claimed, first expressed that sentiment which led eventually to the horrors of racism in western civilization. These claims are not of recent vintage. Seventy five years ago, Raoul Allier, Dean of the Faculté libre de théologie protestante of Paris, urged Christian missionaries to protest what he saw as anti-Black talmudic passages, "born in the ghetto, of the feverish and sadistic imagination of some rabbis." 1 In this country, the claim made its first appearance about forty years ago in academic circles and was quickly repeated in works of all sorts, in history, sociology, psychology, religious studies, and theology. 2 A professor at the University of Pennsylvania not long ago summed up the view: In its "depth of anti-Blackness," rabbinic Judaism "suggests how repugnant blacks were to the chosen people," and how the Jews viewed Blacks "as the people devoid of ultimate worth and redeeming social human value." 3 It wasn't long before this assault spread beyond the university campus to the African American community. Black biblical scholars and theologians repeated the claims and, at times, drew explicit connections to recent history. Charles Copher, a minister in the United Methodist Church and formerly Dean of the Faculty and Professor of Old Testament at the Interdenominational Theological Center in Atlanta, wrote: "Racial myths [were] created and employed by the first interpreters of the so-called Old Testament, the ancient Jewish rabbis. They then continue through the use of myths inherited from the rabbis…. As is well known, the Old Hamite Myth was used by Jews down through the ages, and was adopted by Euro-American interpreters of the Bible to justify the enslavement and later segregation of the Negroes." 4