The fact that the NYT goes on and on about destruction of school buildings in Gaza, but doesn’t ask anyone what they think about Hamas using those buildings as HQs or the fact that Hamas has used UNRWA funds and schools to indoctrinate Palestinians to the same level of racist hatred as the Nazis. As usual with ‘progressives’ in legacy media like NYT, they get the entire thing 180 degrees wrong.
Of course. 365 square kilometers and just by chance Hamas keeps using UNRWA schools and hospitals to store weapons, HQs and launch attacks from. Also those ammunition depots and tunnels leading into UNRWA schools weren’t “scholasticide”, apparently.
As an amateur historian who went to school and got a history degree, I applaud you for this article, Jill! 👏👏👏 The history field is definitely in decline and it’s doesn’t surprise me that the number of history majors are going down and departments are going away. The history field in the West is a victim of ideological capture and has been for some time now. The radical left is in control of the AHA a once respected organization that is now a complete joke and no serious history scholar should want anything to do with. It’s also totally inappropriate for historians to comment on politics or current events. That’s not their area of expertise. Passing resolutions against the Iraq War, invasion of Ukraine and the War in Gaza is totally inappropriate! Not to mention they seem to have chosen to support Hamas. Where were the AHA’s resolutions condemning October 7th or calling on Hamas to return the hostages? Nowhere to be found. Which shows you their inherent antisemitism and political bias. “Scholasticide” sounds like something out of a Monty Python sketch. By the way AHA, their is no genocide in Gaza that’s totally made up out of thin air. The AHA and NAI (which trains interpretative guides for national parks and I know from experience has the same problem) should be abolished. They are useless organizations that serve no purpose. Does anyone here remember Nikole Hannah-Jones’ garbage 1619 Project which claims America was founded to protect slavery? James Sweet the President of the AHA strongly criticized it for being presentist and judging people from the past by our moral standards today which you should never do. He was immediately met with furious backlash from the woke mob, was forced to recant and apologize and his career was ruined. Wow. What a surprise! I totally didn’t see that coming from a mile away! The 1619 Project is anti-American, Afrocentric, revisionist garbage with zero value. The fact in won the Pulitzer Prize for Journalism is just shameful. Now they’ve decided to go after Israel and be cheerleaders for Islamist groups and Iran. I wouldn’t be surprised if the AHA passed a resolution declaring solitary with Hamas at all. Jeffery Herf has no right to complain but he helped create this monster in the first place. The article asks: “how should we teach history?” Warts and all and without any political agenda in mind that’s how. Both the American Exceptionalism of the right and the political correctness of the left, are NOT the way to reach our nation’s history to our children! The history profession’s decline is their own fault. Period. Full stop. Having your students read not terribly reliable works like “A People’s History of the United States” and “Lies My Teacher Told Me” and telling them a version of American history made up to push a certain worldview rather than facts is definitely the wrong to go about it. There is no doubt the way American history was taught in the past was jingoistic and whitewashed, but today we haven’t corrected that but are now just as bad from the other extreme.
Yup. Precisely. Whatever the problems with the teaching of history were in the past, and absolutely there were many, they haven't been addressed. No one knows how to evaluate sources anymore, which frankly is the most important aspect of any history education. When you have a primary source--whether a letter, a document, or a TikTok video, you need to be able to evaluate bias. That skill is more important today than ever, and these dunces at the AHA don't even know that. To them, if everyone just read the boring, academese-filled books that THEY wrote, everyone would be far more enlightened. Let's just let go of the fact no one actually reads anything they write. A social media influencer can get more views on their content in 1 hour than most of these historians get in their entire lifetimes on their own work. Must be upsetting.
The so called "historians" who were the majority undoubtedly view everything through the woke lens of oppressor/oppressed and and all history as rooted from the framework of systemic racism, gender and climate. These people are not serious historians
I'm a strong critic of Israel's actions in Gaza but I have to note that I agree almost 100% with this article.
This sort of grandstanding is shallow and self-important, doubly so while the profession is collapsing around these folks ears.
The best thing anyone can do for Israel and Palestine is to develop a nuanced understanding of the very complex issues and then try to convey that to others who lack that perspective in an unbiased way. This is literally what historians are for.
Yes. That is the cruel irony of this entire situation - these are supposed to be very people whose profession it literally is to help others understand. They've failed miserably.
Yes, but I hate to dump all my criticism on any one group, so what if we flip this?
Go back 30 years and make these emeritus professors folks applying for tenure track positions. What can they realistically do within the constraints posed by that system to ensure their students develop a nuanced understanding of the history they teach?
The best I've got is that they could focus more on teaching, despite their not being remunerated for this extra work in any way. And without any formal training on how to teach, as opposed to formal training in history.
Yes, grandstanding at conferences is terrible for the profession and for students. But going to conferences and ensuring that everyone sees you and knows you is a great way to get research funding and tenure. We get the results that we prioritize more highly.
It wasn't the responsibility of a single group of educators in a single profession--I am calling out this one in particular because that's the one the original NYT article that inspired this post was focusing on. What this group of academics is engaged in (without fully realizing it) is a crisis decades in the making, fueled by a variety of policy decisions at every societal level.
Higher education for sure has its issues that were never addressed properly and got worse over time, among them being the structure of the tenure track and bloated administrators making bad decisions having nothing to do with the educational experience. We could talk about those all day. Professors who began their careers 30 years ago simply became cogs in the broken system and only cared about it insofar as it didn't have a negative impact on their own careers. The education and well-being of the younger generations (read: the ones they were tasked with teaching) were never the top priority.
And now, we are seeing this phenomenon of projecting one's own failures onto a fictional "Palestine," and seeing that behavior tolerated. It's a sad state of affairs.
Absolutely love this critique. I’ve written a lot about how history has always been taught through a Marvel-fied lens. “Good guys” versus “bad guys”. History is best taught as something that happened, something nuanced, with zero morality attached to it. To judge history through a black and white lens is to be detached from human nature entirely. Did awful things happen? Yes! However, people were informed by the cultural norms of their time. There are probably many things we’ve normalized now that will be seen as unbelievable in the future.
TLDR: Moral relativism should be the lens we view history through, instead of using history as a way to promote ideology.
Jeffrey Herf is the author of Israel’s Moment, on the conditions and circumstances that led to its creation. It tells the unappreciated role the Soviet Union played in its creation and following 1967, its demonization. It is also illustrates how the Palestinian cause has been used by every supporter for their ends rather than to advance their political, economic and social lives.
The book also suffers from a common trait of academic histories. It is a difficult read, despite a very interesting narrative, because most historians are poor writers.
Also the decline in history predates Boomers. In the 1960s and 1970s a literate individual could name Arthur Schlesinger Jr or Barbara Tuchman, historians whose works made best seller lists. Eric Foner, was among the most respected historians of his generation, is unknown despite appearances on The Charlie Rose Show or writing book reviews for the Sunday Times Book Review. Historians are unknown because the Great Generation read and the generations following Boomers do not- at least works over 200 characters.
They watch videos, which as McLuhan observed is a cool medium and as PR types understand is the best way to subliminally influence what people think.
What this pro-Palestinian paroxysm requires is a historian to tell its story. Only the popular history books, Timothy Snyder excepted ( though who read Bloodlands?) are written by journalists seeking quick paydays with a few “gotchas.”
The story of how a single ideology captured the left in the academy needs to be told. The clever way Edward Said appended Palestinian goals to the New Left, especially the new ways Imperialism, colonialism and wars for liberation were framed, is a part of the story necessary to tell.
Only academics have become “jobnicks.” They focus on publishing works that 4 or 5 of their colleagues skim in order to amass a bibliography to advance professionally. They do not dare try to tell a story with grander pretensions since that work takes time and makes enemies, not the wise play for someone on a tenure track.
A shame you did not Google Herf. Also a shame you did not think a bit deeper on this topic. It is a subject in need of analysis.
How do you know I didn't Google him? I needed to do some research to confirm that he's an out of touch Boomer who writes history books that no one reads - oh wait, that was always 100% obvious.
"I didn't think deeper into this topic" - have you read any of my other articles on this issue? LOL
Wolfe falls into the trap that Hobsbawn and Rashid Khalidi dug for themselves. They have a thesis they want to find in the past and impose it on the narrative. Hobsbawn wanted to find a class struggle in English serfs and Khalidi that Jews are an arm of an imperial power, first Russia, later Britain, then the Soviet Union and finally the US. This list ought to have been a clue this is untrue since Jews fit none of the criteria of classical imperialism.
They come from 60 different nations, they use imperial powers to obtain their goal ( as do Arabs ) but Khalidi falls into an ancient tradition of elites explaining the Jewish invasion going back to the 1880s when Khalidi’s relatives reached the same conclusion.
There is no question that there is a mountain of evidence that Zionism sought to start a “colonizing” project. The word in Hebrew is Yeshuv or settlement. Settling in an area is not equivalent to colonialism. But Woulf equates the two as coequal. Only to someone with a religious bias would this be true. Syrian migrants settle in Europe. They are not part of settler-colonialism. The Jews fleeing Russian sponsored state violence over 1300 pogroms 1880-1920 and 300-500000 slaughtered during the Russian civil war.) These Jews are not tips of a Russian imperial sphere. They are refugees from state sponsored violence who use Ottoman laws with Russia ( eg, Russian citizens are not subject to Ottoman law and courts )when it advanced their interests.
The majority of Jewish refugees emigrated to the US. Palestine at this time was sparsely settled and full of swamps. If you look at emigration tables Jews did not choose Palestine until after WWI— and that was because in 1921 and 1924 immigration for Eastern European Jews was limited to tiny quotas. As pressure against Jews mounted the Jews who sought to leave found their choices limited. ( the Evian Conference in 1939 sought to deal with the problem of Jewish migration. The Australian representative summed up the prevailing view when he commented Australia “ has no Jewish problem and we have no desire to import one.”
But Zionist leaders used any super power to advance their interest in creating a Zionist state. Britain who commits to a Jewish state during WWI established immigration quotas on Jews in 1939. On other words, Britain supported Zionism on occasion for its own reasons and did not when its interests changed.
After WWII the US had an arms embargo preventing arms shipments to Jews. The USSR sponsored Israel and sold it arms through Czechoslovakia. ( As an aside American Jews purchased Israel’s Air Force, with American Jews raising money to purchase war surplus planes, especially B29, and illegally smuggling them out of the US, first to Italy and then Israel. American Jewish fighter pilots were integral in staffing and training the pilots who would fly in the War for Independence. The initial sorti against invading Egyptian and Iraqi armies was led by an American Jew.)
Even if you are familiar with Structuralism and post-modernism you need to know Soviet propaganda fallowing The Six Day and Yom Kippur wars when the ME became central the US-Soviet Cold War politics. You are correct, elements of the Frankfurt School are important, Black radicals add to the story ( not Just Angela Davis but the Black Panthers ) and Said, whose Orientalism is a polemic masquerading as an academic work that inserts the Palestinian struggle into 3rd world liberation struggles.
The left that has come to dominate the academy and capture progressive politics was a minor player in left politics but by 1990 it is the dominant voice in the academy.
They're not historians, but Yascha Mounk (The Identity Trap) and Christopher Rufo (America's Cultural Revolution) have recently published books examining how a single ideology captured the left, as you put it. Mounk focuses on actors like Michel Foucault, Edward Said, and Gayatri Chakravorty-Spivak. Rufo focuses on Herbert Marcuse, Angela Davis, and Derrick Bell, among others. Their perspectives differ in some ways, but I found both to be a valuable part of the discussion. Bari Weiss even put them together for a debate about these things on her podcast, which makes for an interesting listen. (Their biggest point of divergence is that Mounk thinks academia can clean up its own act.)
I would love to see a similar history of ideas focused on the history profession, with special attention given to Patrick Wolfe and other purveyors of "settler-colonialist" calumnies.
LOL. The only lazy idiot in this conversation is you, Alan. I took the time to write a long-form article. You're sassing off in the comments section like a pathetic turd. Keep it coming, you're showing your true colors for all!
You took the time but did you add anything to those of us interested in understanding why anti-Judaism ( another work of history I bank you have no acquaintance ) is omnipresent in the zeitgeist.
Did you ask why the Times only quoted emeritus professors? An accident? The only members willing to talk? Did you discover if members of AHS are mostly retired? You spent 10 minutes on Google but more time attacking me for pointing out that Herf wrote an important monograph on the founding of Israel, something an extra minute on Google might have illuminated.
I am sure you could have found a Cliff Notes version to save you from reading a good book on the Israeli history.
Was this why the Times quoted him on a story about the Professional organization of Historians, the last of Humanities Departments to succumb to the demands for ideological orthodoxy? A question you never thought worthy of asking, let alone attempting to answer.
I am speaking to ideas. You have not made a single defense of the rot you contributed. You desire praise. You need praise. Sadly, the Times covered the story infinitely better than you. You stole your article from the Times, critiquing it as well as the Historians the story quoted. Only you have no clue about these individuals save they are Boomers and you are a part of a demographic that blames Boomers.
Yet you want to denigrate me for criticizing your article. At least I read your article. I’ll take Herf’s contribution of illuminating the role the USSR’s played in the founding of the only Jewish state ( and the Soviet Union’s contribution to left antisemitism following the ‘67 war ). If we want to learn why the academy has embraced antisemitism Herf offers us a starting place.No, he does not shed a lot of light on this story because he is telling the story of Israel’s creation, not the origins of left antisemitism or how it became the dominant ideology of anyone on the left in the academy.
I dislike turning what ought to be discussions about ideas into personal attacks. Why would I resort, as you have, to personal attacks
I think we have reached the end. You are clearly not up to the task of defending your ideas so let’s part with giving you the praise you crave. Great article full of verve and brio. It was long but not overly so.
I missed this article in the Times, so thank you for the nudge.
Is he an out of touch Boomer? Or is any discipline that requires students to read 600 pages each week and teaches critical thinking going to be unpopular with generations who used cell phones to cheat and seek the easy way out?
You did the least amount of work to provide an analysis that is less than superficial. Does this locate you into your demographic, of lazy, entitled brats?
Is there anything new here, save that historians have succumbed to academic intellectual fashion as you have for blaming Boomers for everything. Boomers reared you, that’s true. But you are stuck in year 2 of therapy. It’s your parent’s fault. You are supposed to do the hard work of repairing that damage.
This is a huge canvus. You needn’t explain everything but your analysis should, at least, rise to superficiality.
LOL, thanks for the unsolicited advice on my "analysis," I'll keep that in mind for the future. If you think that this article falls short, why don't you write one in an improved format that you believe everyone should be following, according to you? Judging by your extremely dry and vapid comments here, such a piece is sure to be a winner. Or is sassing off to people who actually put in the effort to write a long-form article just easier--you know, like lazily commenting on articles instead of producing original work on your own? You are showing your ass in these comments, Alan.
It's the ~Omnicause.~ We can't talk about a real issue without making it about ~all the problems in the whole world~ (real or mostly imagined). Issues have to be abstracted into nothingness because this sort of academic is focused on his pet ideologies and not on practical and very real issues like how Gazan institutions are going to be rebuilt in a way that promotes democratic values.
And every time you respond, it's clear that you have less understanding of an issue that you claim to care so passionately about than the day before - and now, we are in the negative numbers.
It wasn’t pretty but in this situation there will not be a partition of two Palestinian States into East P and West P. (Neither will emerge for a while.)
In the East there was a thorough purge of Nazi officials. In the West they prosecuted leaders and turned a blind eye to the middle management in favor of getting Germany functioning again. Germans spent a generation or two not really reflecting on what they had done, and there was no attempt to impress on them what they had done by occupation officials unless people got too loud about it. But, in hindsight, it's the Soviet East that has become the hotbed antisemitism today.
I believe that you have done a disservice to Professor Herf who is one of the minority of historians of his generation, my generation, who have stood up against the decline of the profession. I believe that not all history is written to be popularly read. Sometimes, like serious philosophy, economics, literature, or physics, it is meant to open new arenas to consideration in light of original research.
Herf, for example, has done exceptional work on researching the connections between Nazi propaganda and Islamism. I particularly recommend you read two of his books, even if they may seem to be a bit of a slog. (I take the references from his web page at the University of Maryland):
Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World (Yale University Press, 2009; pb. 2010). 2011, German Studies Association Sybil Halpern Milton Prize awarded for work on Nazi Germany and the Holocaust published in 2009 or 2010; and 2010 Bronze Prize of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy for works on the history of the Middle East. The work was published in Italian by Edizioni dell'Altana in 2010, in French by Calmann-Levy in 2012 and in Japanese by Iwanami Shotun in 2013.
The Jewish Enemy: Nazi Propaganda During World War II and the Holocaust (Harvard University Press, 2006). National Jewish Book Award for work on the Holocaust in 2006. Translated into Spanish.
There are social media influencers discussing those topics who will get more views on 1 video in an hour than Herf will get reads on his books in his entire career. And "opening new arenas to consideration" if useless is no one actually reads your work.
I can't speak to the extent to which Herf has stood up to the decline of his profession, but if he's retired and still trying to influence the decision making of the AHA over people who are actively working in the field, that is a major problem.
The Palestinians and Allies have effectively waged Scholasticide in Israel with their continual War, just as The Pakistanis are waging in The UK with their Rape Cults and targetting secondary schools. It is my belief that their doing it to shut down Public Education Systems as the founding Ideology of the Muslim Brotherhood outlined for a Global Caliphate.
The fact that the NYT goes on and on about destruction of school buildings in Gaza, but doesn’t ask anyone what they think about Hamas using those buildings as HQs or the fact that Hamas has used UNRWA funds and schools to indoctrinate Palestinians to the same level of racist hatred as the Nazis. As usual with ‘progressives’ in legacy media like NYT, they get the entire thing 180 degrees wrong.
Hamas had to use the school buildings for their resistance movement, obviously. I mean, what other choice did they have, really?
Of course. 365 square kilometers and just by chance Hamas keeps using UNRWA schools and hospitals to store weapons, HQs and launch attacks from. Also those ammunition depots and tunnels leading into UNRWA schools weren’t “scholasticide”, apparently.
As an amateur historian who went to school and got a history degree, I applaud you for this article, Jill! 👏👏👏 The history field is definitely in decline and it’s doesn’t surprise me that the number of history majors are going down and departments are going away. The history field in the West is a victim of ideological capture and has been for some time now. The radical left is in control of the AHA a once respected organization that is now a complete joke and no serious history scholar should want anything to do with. It’s also totally inappropriate for historians to comment on politics or current events. That’s not their area of expertise. Passing resolutions against the Iraq War, invasion of Ukraine and the War in Gaza is totally inappropriate! Not to mention they seem to have chosen to support Hamas. Where were the AHA’s resolutions condemning October 7th or calling on Hamas to return the hostages? Nowhere to be found. Which shows you their inherent antisemitism and political bias. “Scholasticide” sounds like something out of a Monty Python sketch. By the way AHA, their is no genocide in Gaza that’s totally made up out of thin air. The AHA and NAI (which trains interpretative guides for national parks and I know from experience has the same problem) should be abolished. They are useless organizations that serve no purpose. Does anyone here remember Nikole Hannah-Jones’ garbage 1619 Project which claims America was founded to protect slavery? James Sweet the President of the AHA strongly criticized it for being presentist and judging people from the past by our moral standards today which you should never do. He was immediately met with furious backlash from the woke mob, was forced to recant and apologize and his career was ruined. Wow. What a surprise! I totally didn’t see that coming from a mile away! The 1619 Project is anti-American, Afrocentric, revisionist garbage with zero value. The fact in won the Pulitzer Prize for Journalism is just shameful. Now they’ve decided to go after Israel and be cheerleaders for Islamist groups and Iran. I wouldn’t be surprised if the AHA passed a resolution declaring solitary with Hamas at all. Jeffery Herf has no right to complain but he helped create this monster in the first place. The article asks: “how should we teach history?” Warts and all and without any political agenda in mind that’s how. Both the American Exceptionalism of the right and the political correctness of the left, are NOT the way to reach our nation’s history to our children! The history profession’s decline is their own fault. Period. Full stop. Having your students read not terribly reliable works like “A People’s History of the United States” and “Lies My Teacher Told Me” and telling them a version of American history made up to push a certain worldview rather than facts is definitely the wrong to go about it. There is no doubt the way American history was taught in the past was jingoistic and whitewashed, but today we haven’t corrected that but are now just as bad from the other extreme.
Yup. Precisely. Whatever the problems with the teaching of history were in the past, and absolutely there were many, they haven't been addressed. No one knows how to evaluate sources anymore, which frankly is the most important aspect of any history education. When you have a primary source--whether a letter, a document, or a TikTok video, you need to be able to evaluate bias. That skill is more important today than ever, and these dunces at the AHA don't even know that. To them, if everyone just read the boring, academese-filled books that THEY wrote, everyone would be far more enlightened. Let's just let go of the fact no one actually reads anything they write. A social media influencer can get more views on their content in 1 hour than most of these historians get in their entire lifetimes on their own work. Must be upsetting.
The so called "historians" who were the majority undoubtedly view everything through the woke lens of oppressor/oppressed and and all history as rooted from the framework of systemic racism, gender and climate. These people are not serious historians
I'm a strong critic of Israel's actions in Gaza but I have to note that I agree almost 100% with this article.
This sort of grandstanding is shallow and self-important, doubly so while the profession is collapsing around these folks ears.
The best thing anyone can do for Israel and Palestine is to develop a nuanced understanding of the very complex issues and then try to convey that to others who lack that perspective in an unbiased way. This is literally what historians are for.
Yes. That is the cruel irony of this entire situation - these are supposed to be very people whose profession it literally is to help others understand. They've failed miserably.
Yes, but I hate to dump all my criticism on any one group, so what if we flip this?
Go back 30 years and make these emeritus professors folks applying for tenure track positions. What can they realistically do within the constraints posed by that system to ensure their students develop a nuanced understanding of the history they teach?
The best I've got is that they could focus more on teaching, despite their not being remunerated for this extra work in any way. And without any formal training on how to teach, as opposed to formal training in history.
Yes, grandstanding at conferences is terrible for the profession and for students. But going to conferences and ensuring that everyone sees you and knows you is a great way to get research funding and tenure. We get the results that we prioritize more highly.
It wasn't the responsibility of a single group of educators in a single profession--I am calling out this one in particular because that's the one the original NYT article that inspired this post was focusing on. What this group of academics is engaged in (without fully realizing it) is a crisis decades in the making, fueled by a variety of policy decisions at every societal level.
Higher education for sure has its issues that were never addressed properly and got worse over time, among them being the structure of the tenure track and bloated administrators making bad decisions having nothing to do with the educational experience. We could talk about those all day. Professors who began their careers 30 years ago simply became cogs in the broken system and only cared about it insofar as it didn't have a negative impact on their own careers. The education and well-being of the younger generations (read: the ones they were tasked with teaching) were never the top priority.
And now, we are seeing this phenomenon of projecting one's own failures onto a fictional "Palestine," and seeing that behavior tolerated. It's a sad state of affairs.
That closing quote!
I knew someone would appreciate. =P
Appreciate? I'm gonna be using that daily!
Absolutely love this critique. I’ve written a lot about how history has always been taught through a Marvel-fied lens. “Good guys” versus “bad guys”. History is best taught as something that happened, something nuanced, with zero morality attached to it. To judge history through a black and white lens is to be detached from human nature entirely. Did awful things happen? Yes! However, people were informed by the cultural norms of their time. There are probably many things we’ve normalized now that will be seen as unbelievable in the future.
TLDR: Moral relativism should be the lens we view history through, instead of using history as a way to promote ideology.
Thank you for writing this 🩷
That Marcus Aurelius had quite the mouth!
A slight revision of history on my part. ;)
Jeffrey Herf is the author of Israel’s Moment, on the conditions and circumstances that led to its creation. It tells the unappreciated role the Soviet Union played in its creation and following 1967, its demonization. It is also illustrates how the Palestinian cause has been used by every supporter for their ends rather than to advance their political, economic and social lives.
The book also suffers from a common trait of academic histories. It is a difficult read, despite a very interesting narrative, because most historians are poor writers.
Also the decline in history predates Boomers. In the 1960s and 1970s a literate individual could name Arthur Schlesinger Jr or Barbara Tuchman, historians whose works made best seller lists. Eric Foner, was among the most respected historians of his generation, is unknown despite appearances on The Charlie Rose Show or writing book reviews for the Sunday Times Book Review. Historians are unknown because the Great Generation read and the generations following Boomers do not- at least works over 200 characters.
They watch videos, which as McLuhan observed is a cool medium and as PR types understand is the best way to subliminally influence what people think.
What this pro-Palestinian paroxysm requires is a historian to tell its story. Only the popular history books, Timothy Snyder excepted ( though who read Bloodlands?) are written by journalists seeking quick paydays with a few “gotchas.”
The story of how a single ideology captured the left in the academy needs to be told. The clever way Edward Said appended Palestinian goals to the New Left, especially the new ways Imperialism, colonialism and wars for liberation were framed, is a part of the story necessary to tell.
Only academics have become “jobnicks.” They focus on publishing works that 4 or 5 of their colleagues skim in order to amass a bibliography to advance professionally. They do not dare try to tell a story with grander pretensions since that work takes time and makes enemies, not the wise play for someone on a tenure track.
A shame you did not Google Herf. Also a shame you did not think a bit deeper on this topic. It is a subject in need of analysis.
How do you know I didn't Google him? I needed to do some research to confirm that he's an out of touch Boomer who writes history books that no one reads - oh wait, that was always 100% obvious.
"I didn't think deeper into this topic" - have you read any of my other articles on this issue? LOL
Wolfe falls into the trap that Hobsbawn and Rashid Khalidi dug for themselves. They have a thesis they want to find in the past and impose it on the narrative. Hobsbawn wanted to find a class struggle in English serfs and Khalidi that Jews are an arm of an imperial power, first Russia, later Britain, then the Soviet Union and finally the US. This list ought to have been a clue this is untrue since Jews fit none of the criteria of classical imperialism.
They come from 60 different nations, they use imperial powers to obtain their goal ( as do Arabs ) but Khalidi falls into an ancient tradition of elites explaining the Jewish invasion going back to the 1880s when Khalidi’s relatives reached the same conclusion.
There is no question that there is a mountain of evidence that Zionism sought to start a “colonizing” project. The word in Hebrew is Yeshuv or settlement. Settling in an area is not equivalent to colonialism. But Woulf equates the two as coequal. Only to someone with a religious bias would this be true. Syrian migrants settle in Europe. They are not part of settler-colonialism. The Jews fleeing Russian sponsored state violence over 1300 pogroms 1880-1920 and 300-500000 slaughtered during the Russian civil war.) These Jews are not tips of a Russian imperial sphere. They are refugees from state sponsored violence who use Ottoman laws with Russia ( eg, Russian citizens are not subject to Ottoman law and courts )when it advanced their interests.
The majority of Jewish refugees emigrated to the US. Palestine at this time was sparsely settled and full of swamps. If you look at emigration tables Jews did not choose Palestine until after WWI— and that was because in 1921 and 1924 immigration for Eastern European Jews was limited to tiny quotas. As pressure against Jews mounted the Jews who sought to leave found their choices limited. ( the Evian Conference in 1939 sought to deal with the problem of Jewish migration. The Australian representative summed up the prevailing view when he commented Australia “ has no Jewish problem and we have no desire to import one.”
But Zionist leaders used any super power to advance their interest in creating a Zionist state. Britain who commits to a Jewish state during WWI established immigration quotas on Jews in 1939. On other words, Britain supported Zionism on occasion for its own reasons and did not when its interests changed.
After WWII the US had an arms embargo preventing arms shipments to Jews. The USSR sponsored Israel and sold it arms through Czechoslovakia. ( As an aside American Jews purchased Israel’s Air Force, with American Jews raising money to purchase war surplus planes, especially B29, and illegally smuggling them out of the US, first to Italy and then Israel. American Jewish fighter pilots were integral in staffing and training the pilots who would fly in the War for Independence. The initial sorti against invading Egyptian and Iraqi armies was led by an American Jew.)
Even if you are familiar with Structuralism and post-modernism you need to know Soviet propaganda fallowing The Six Day and Yom Kippur wars when the ME became central the US-Soviet Cold War politics. You are correct, elements of the Frankfurt School are important, Black radicals add to the story ( not Just Angela Davis but the Black Panthers ) and Said, whose Orientalism is a polemic masquerading as an academic work that inserts the Palestinian struggle into 3rd world liberation struggles.
The left that has come to dominate the academy and capture progressive politics was a minor player in left politics but by 1990 it is the dominant voice in the academy.
They're not historians, but Yascha Mounk (The Identity Trap) and Christopher Rufo (America's Cultural Revolution) have recently published books examining how a single ideology captured the left, as you put it. Mounk focuses on actors like Michel Foucault, Edward Said, and Gayatri Chakravorty-Spivak. Rufo focuses on Herbert Marcuse, Angela Davis, and Derrick Bell, among others. Their perspectives differ in some ways, but I found both to be a valuable part of the discussion. Bari Weiss even put them together for a debate about these things on her podcast, which makes for an interesting listen. (Their biggest point of divergence is that Mounk thinks academia can clean up its own act.)
I would love to see a similar history of ideas focused on the history profession, with special attention given to Patrick Wolfe and other purveyors of "settler-colonialist" calumnies.
Very mature. Not surprising you took the lazy way. Your next response will surely be “I know you are, but what am I.
You are capable of better work- and a more mature response.
LOL. The only lazy idiot in this conversation is you, Alan. I took the time to write a long-form article. You're sassing off in the comments section like a pathetic turd. Keep it coming, you're showing your true colors for all!
You took the time but did you add anything to those of us interested in understanding why anti-Judaism ( another work of history I bank you have no acquaintance ) is omnipresent in the zeitgeist.
Did you ask why the Times only quoted emeritus professors? An accident? The only members willing to talk? Did you discover if members of AHS are mostly retired? You spent 10 minutes on Google but more time attacking me for pointing out that Herf wrote an important monograph on the founding of Israel, something an extra minute on Google might have illuminated.
I am sure you could have found a Cliff Notes version to save you from reading a good book on the Israeli history.
Was this why the Times quoted him on a story about the Professional organization of Historians, the last of Humanities Departments to succumb to the demands for ideological orthodoxy? A question you never thought worthy of asking, let alone attempting to answer.
I am speaking to ideas. You have not made a single defense of the rot you contributed. You desire praise. You need praise. Sadly, the Times covered the story infinitely better than you. You stole your article from the Times, critiquing it as well as the Historians the story quoted. Only you have no clue about these individuals save they are Boomers and you are a part of a demographic that blames Boomers.
Yet you want to denigrate me for criticizing your article. At least I read your article. I’ll take Herf’s contribution of illuminating the role the USSR’s played in the founding of the only Jewish state ( and the Soviet Union’s contribution to left antisemitism following the ‘67 war ). If we want to learn why the academy has embraced antisemitism Herf offers us a starting place.No, he does not shed a lot of light on this story because he is telling the story of Israel’s creation, not the origins of left antisemitism or how it became the dominant ideology of anyone on the left in the academy.
I dislike turning what ought to be discussions about ideas into personal attacks. Why would I resort, as you have, to personal attacks
I think we have reached the end. You are clearly not up to the task of defending your ideas so let’s part with giving you the praise you crave. Great article full of verve and brio. It was long but not overly so.
When you write anything publicly you invite criticism, where you like it or not.
Yes, you’re free to criticize all you want. In your case, you show your ass when you do so, and very openly.
I missed this article in the Times, so thank you for the nudge.
Is he an out of touch Boomer? Or is any discipline that requires students to read 600 pages each week and teaches critical thinking going to be unpopular with generations who used cell phones to cheat and seek the easy way out?
You did the least amount of work to provide an analysis that is less than superficial. Does this locate you into your demographic, of lazy, entitled brats?
Is there anything new here, save that historians have succumbed to academic intellectual fashion as you have for blaming Boomers for everything. Boomers reared you, that’s true. But you are stuck in year 2 of therapy. It’s your parent’s fault. You are supposed to do the hard work of repairing that damage.
This is a huge canvus. You needn’t explain everything but your analysis should, at least, rise to superficiality.
LOL, thanks for the unsolicited advice on my "analysis," I'll keep that in mind for the future. If you think that this article falls short, why don't you write one in an improved format that you believe everyone should be following, according to you? Judging by your extremely dry and vapid comments here, such a piece is sure to be a winner. Or is sassing off to people who actually put in the effort to write a long-form article just easier--you know, like lazily commenting on articles instead of producing original work on your own? You are showing your ass in these comments, Alan.
It's the ~Omnicause.~ We can't talk about a real issue without making it about ~all the problems in the whole world~ (real or mostly imagined). Issues have to be abstracted into nothingness because this sort of academic is focused on his pet ideologies and not on practical and very real issues like how Gazan institutions are going to be rebuilt in a way that promotes democratic values.
Step 1: DeNatzification of Palestinians and their ideology.
You're going to really hate hearing about how DeNazification of Germany actually went.
Yeah, it involved a lot of U.S. tax dollars, which I am sure you oppose.
Every time you respond to me it's really clear that you are arguing against positions I do not hold and have never asserted.
And every time you respond, it's clear that you have less understanding of an issue that you claim to care so passionately about than the day before - and now, we are in the negative numbers.
You're free to enlighten me about what you feel I am missing. You could at least ~try~ it once.
It wasn’t pretty but in this situation there will not be a partition of two Palestinian States into East P and West P. (Neither will emerge for a while.)
In the East there was a thorough purge of Nazi officials. In the West they prosecuted leaders and turned a blind eye to the middle management in favor of getting Germany functioning again. Germans spent a generation or two not really reflecting on what they had done, and there was no attempt to impress on them what they had done by occupation officials unless people got too loud about it. But, in hindsight, it's the Soviet East that has become the hotbed antisemitism today.
Shalom Jill.
Thank you for this article.
I believe that you have done a disservice to Professor Herf who is one of the minority of historians of his generation, my generation, who have stood up against the decline of the profession. I believe that not all history is written to be popularly read. Sometimes, like serious philosophy, economics, literature, or physics, it is meant to open new arenas to consideration in light of original research.
Herf, for example, has done exceptional work on researching the connections between Nazi propaganda and Islamism. I particularly recommend you read two of his books, even if they may seem to be a bit of a slog. (I take the references from his web page at the University of Maryland):
Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World (Yale University Press, 2009; pb. 2010). 2011, German Studies Association Sybil Halpern Milton Prize awarded for work on Nazi Germany and the Holocaust published in 2009 or 2010; and 2010 Bronze Prize of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy for works on the history of the Middle East. The work was published in Italian by Edizioni dell'Altana in 2010, in French by Calmann-Levy in 2012 and in Japanese by Iwanami Shotun in 2013.
The Jewish Enemy: Nazi Propaganda During World War II and the Holocaust (Harvard University Press, 2006). National Jewish Book Award for work on the Holocaust in 2006. Translated into Spanish.
There are social media influencers discussing those topics who will get more views on 1 video in an hour than Herf will get reads on his books in his entire career. And "opening new arenas to consideration" if useless is no one actually reads your work.
I can't speak to the extent to which Herf has stood up to the decline of his profession, but if he's retired and still trying to influence the decision making of the AHA over people who are actively working in the field, that is a major problem.
The Palestinians and Allies have effectively waged Scholasticide in Israel with their continual War, just as The Pakistanis are waging in The UK with their Rape Cults and targetting secondary schools. It is my belief that their doing it to shut down Public Education Systems as the founding Ideology of the Muslim Brotherhood outlined for a Global Caliphate.
A member of Substack threatened to murder a “Kike” and use his skin to decorate his home and Substack did nothing about it.
https://substack.com/@guidelinesnotenforced/note/c-88687078?r=569wkl&utm_medium=ios&utm_source=notes-share-action
She said my posts were moronic and pitched a sniveling temper tantrum when I asked what she objected to in my posts.