Ruth Wisse on Sartre and Anti-Semitism

The Tikvah Podcast

Tikvah

Judaism, Politics, Religion & Spirituality, News

4.6 • 620 Ratings

🗓️ 15 March 2017

⏱️ 57 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

It may be the world’s oldest hatred, but anti-Semitism remains alive and well in the 21st century. The forces of anti-Zionism and mass immigration continually threaten the safety of Europe’s Jews. Anti-Semitism remains the norm in most of the Arab world. And even in the United States, hate crimes against Jewish Americans continue to occur at an alarming rate. The intractability of this bigotry invites asking fundamental questions: Who is the anti-Semite? What is the nature of his hatred? Will he always be with us?

In Anti-Semite and Jew, the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sarte offers his reflections on these very questions. Written shortly after the liberation of Paris from German occupation, the essay sketches Sartre’s portraits of the anti-Semite, the democrat, and the Jew. In this podcast, former Harvard Professor and Tikvah Distinguished Senior Fellow Ruth Wisse joins Eric Cohen to discuss this fascinating work. Wisse lays out the key characteristics of Sartre’s archetypes, critiques the essay’s flaws, and highlights the insights that remain valuable to us even today. Anti-Semitism, sadly, is not going away, and getting a clearer picture of this particular prejudice is as important as ever.

Musical selections in this podcast are drawn from the Quintet for Clarinet and Strings, op. 31a, composed by Paul Ben-Haim and performed by the ARC Ensemble, as well as Ich Grolle Nicht, by Ron Meixsell and Wahneta Meixsell.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the Tikva podcast on Great Jewish Essays and Ideas. I'm your host, Eric Cohen.
0:14.0	The enduring and pernicious challenge of anti-Semitism persists from generation to generation.
0:19.6	It seems to always find new political forms, new ideological
0:23.0	purposes, and yet the challenge endures. One of the most profound reflections on this subject
0:29.6	was written by the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre. It's called anti-Semite and Jew,
0:35.1	and it's the subject of our conversation today. I'm very pleased to be joined by Ruth Weiss. Professor Weiss was for many years a scholar and teacher of Jewish literature at Harvard. She's certainly one of the most important Jewish intellectuals of her generation, and she's now a distinguished senior fellow at the Tickley Fund. Ruth, thanks for joining us. Oh, I'm so glad
0:55.0	to be here, Eric. So before we get into the essay itself, maybe you could just say a brief word on
0:59.9	who was Sartre and what was the political situation in France, in the world, and among the Jews,
1:06.0	into which this essay was written. Well, there's much to say about Sartre, but in relation to this particular
1:12.4	essay, he was 39 years old when he wrote it. He wrote it apparently in the fall of 1944, and this was
1:22.8	just after the liberation of Paris. He himself had been imprisoned for a short while by the Germans.
1:30.2	He was associated with resistance, but after the war, there was a lot of controversy as to whether
1:36.1	he was really active in the resistance or whether he was merely a writer who sympathized with it.
1:41.1	But in any case, he saw himself on the part, on the side of the resistance
1:44.8	against the Vichy government that was a Nazi-run government in France. The situation of the
1:53.6	Jews at the time was, of course, very dire because by 1944, the final solution was almost
1:59.9	entirely final, and certainly it was for Western Jewry.
2:04.0	And at that time, a trickle of Jews were beginning to return to France.
2:08.3	So Sartre at this particular time, who was already known as one of the foremost thinkers of France,
2:15.3	very well established in at least in the intelligentsia,
2:21.1	as a philosopher, a playwright, a critic. I would say that he was probably the best known
2:29.3	intellectual of the time already. And in 1944, he wrote this short essay,
	...

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