Jews and Power

Ruth Weiss, a Harvard professor of Yiddish, dedicated her new book to the history of the Jewish relationship with power from ancient times to the present day. Examining key milestones in Jewish history: the collapse of state sovereignty, medieval life in the diaspora, emancipation and assimilation, antisemitism and Zionism, and finally, the Holocaust and the state of Israel, — Weiss traces a stable and often fatal tendency to distance oneself from power and politics as something corrupt and instead of building a system of collective security, to improve one's talent for adaptation to the conditions set by the outside world.