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Heeb Issue #5 : InterviewElder of Zion
(excerpted from original article)
Cornel West is nearly as at home in the New York Jewish intellectual scene as he is in the black community. He has spoken in countless synagogues, Hillels and JCCs, is the cochair, with Michael Lerner and Susannah Heschel, of the Tikkun Community, and is a frequent writer on black-Jewish relations.
Yet for all West’s engagement with the people of the book, members of the tribe have been among his most vociferous critics. Several Jewish pundits have derided West’s credentials, calling his success in the Ivy League a monstrous mistake brought upon by affirmative action, white guilt and the academy’s leftist bent. Author David Horowitz called him “an incredible intellectual lightweight” and a “racial demagogue.” Neo-cons Hilton Kramer and Irving Kristol boycotted a conference at which West was to deliver the keynote address, claiming he was “not enough of scholar.” And the critics are not limited to right-wingers; writing in The New Republic in 1995,liberal Leon Wieseltier dismissed West’s entire corpus as “worthless.” West’s work, he wrote, was “noisy, tedious, slippery, sectarian, humorless, pedantic and self-endeared.”
These attacks, and unease with West in many Jewish circles, stem from several incidents. In the ’90s, West challenged Louis Farrakhan to become more proactive, inspiring the idea for the Million Man March. West had condemned Farrakhan’s homophobia and anti-Semitism, but many Jews still felt that any contact with the controversial minister only helped legitimate a bigot who should be marginalized. Years later, West was arrested with Lerner while protesting Israel’s escalation of its war with the Palestinians. This, paired with West’s public camaraderie with the late pro-Palestinian scholar Edward Said, raised Jewish eyebrows.
The climax came in the wake of a famous dispute with Harvard President Lawrence Summers in 2001 and 2002. Summers had accused West of not being a responsible academic, claiming West skipped classes and had not produced a serious scholarly work in many years. During that time, West had released a hip-hop album, teamed up with the Wachowski brothers to guest star as a wise counselor of Zion in The Matrix sequels, stumped for Bill Bradley, Ralph Nader and Paul Wellstone, and signed on to Al Sharpton’s presidential campaign.
Deeply offended, West announced that he was thinking about leaving Harvard for his old post at Princeton. Summers’ public apology, a petition by Harvard faculty asking West to stay and West’s 2002 departure for Princeton’s Religion Department all prompted critics in Commentary and elsewhere to weigh in, often harshly, on Summers’ side.
West would later quip on NPR’s Tavis Smiley Show that the Jewish Harvard president was the “Ariel Sharon of higher education,” a comment that set off accusations of anti-Semitism. To many Jews, West now looked like yet another black demagogue, one tenured in the heart of the Ivy League.
Cornel West is nearly as at home in the New York Jewish intellectual scene as he is in the black community. He has spoken in countless synagogues, Hillels and JCCs, is the cochair, with Michael Lerner and Susannah Heschel, of the Tikkun Community, and is a frequent writer on black-Jewish relations.
Yet for all West’s engagement with the people of the book, members of the tribe have been among his most vociferous critics. Several Jewish pundits have derided West’s credentials, calling his success in the Ivy League a monstrous mistake brought upon by affirmative action, white guilt and the academy’s leftist bent. Author David Horowitz called him “an incredible intellectual lightweight” and a “racial demagogue.” Neo-cons Hilton Kramer and Irving Kristol boycotted a conference at which West was to deliver the keynote address, claiming he was “not enough of scholar.” And the critics are not limited to right-wingers; writing in The New Republic in 1995,liberal Leon Wieseltier dismissed West’s entire corpus as “worthless.” West’s work, he wrote, was “noisy, tedious, slippery, sectarian, humorless, pedantic and self-endeared.”
These attacks, and unease with West in many Jewish circles, stem from several incidents. In the ’90s, West challenged Louis Farrakhan to become more proactive, inspiring the idea for the Million Man March. West had condemned Farrakhan’s homophobia and anti-Semitism, but many Jews still felt that any contact with the controversial minister only helped legitimate a bigot who should be marginalized. Years later, West was arrested with Lerner while protesting Israel’s escalation of its war with the Palestinians. This, paired with West’s public camaraderie with the late pro-Palestinian scholar Edward Said, raised Jewish eyebrows.
The climax came in the wake of a famous dispute with Harvard President Lawrence Summers in 2001 and 2002. Summers had accused West of not being a responsible academic, claiming West skipped classes and had not produced a serious scholarly work in many years. During that time, West had released a hip-hop album, teamed up with the Wachowski brothers to guest star as a wise counselor of Zion in The Matrix sequels, stumped for Bill Bradley, Ralph Nader and Paul Wellstone, and signed on to Al Sharpton’s presidential campaign.
Deeply offended, West announced that he was thinking about leaving Harvard for his old post at Princeton. Summers’ public apology, a petition by Harvard faculty asking West to stay and West’s 2002 departure for Princeton’s Religion Department all prompted critics in Commentary and elsewhere to weigh in, often harshly, on Summers’ side.
West would later quip on NPR’s Tavis Smiley Show that the Jewish Harvard president was the “Ariel Sharon of higher education,” a comment that set off accusations of anti-Semitism. To many Jews, West now looked like yet another black demagogue, one tenured in the heart of the Ivy League.
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