Hierarchy and Force in Teaching: Raising the White Flag

 

This post is an attempt to express my conflict over the hierarchal nature of teaching within the context of my own experience and to offer some theoretical context for it. I do not pretend to have a solution. It is likely that the principle of hierarchy is built into the relationship between teachers and students and we are left having to pay the price for that fact.

Human interactions can be divided into coercive and non-coercive ones. When we get our way with other people, it can be because we put a gun to someone’s head, broke their legs or otherwise threatened them with something truly unpleasant. Alternatively, people might choose to do what we want out of their own free will, because they like us or, perhaps, because we paid them. It is easy to understand the evil of coercion when on the receiving end of it. We have all sorts of words for other people wielding power over us, tyranny, injustice and oppression. Things are a little trickier when we are the ones a position of power. Our actions are always for the “benefit” of those in our charge or even for “humanity” at large. That our charges may not appreciate our “humanitarianism” simply demonstrates that they are “ungrateful” and “deserve” to be in a subordinated to our will. Even otherwise decent people are tempted to use force for no other reason than its mere simplicity. Picture any narrow problem involving other people and I challenge you to think of a more direct solution than to be in a position of power to threaten those who get in the way with physical harm for their continued defiance. The problem with such a view can only be perceived when taking a larger view that asks not how we can solve specific problems, but how to avoid oppositional relationships and create situations in which people have a reason to cooperate. Coercion will eliminate human obstacles, but it fails to turn those same obstacles into ladders that will allow us to rise.

 
This argument against hierarchical systems of power is most obviously relevant to politics. I am here interested in the question of teaching. If defenders of authoritarianism have, in the past, argued that a specific group was “like children” and, needed to be ruled over, teaching involves literal children, who presumably need to be kept in the care of adults. What I am attempting to grapple with here is not even the issue of corporal punishment. Modern education has eliminated corporal punishment, and I think that is a good thing. Regardless of whether there are cases where students truly deserve what is coming to them, such punishment corrupts the relationship between teachers and students by turning it into an oppositional one. This inhibits the larger project of transmitting values and methods of thinking that should be at the heart of education and are necessary for progress. That being said, even if teachers lost their paddles and yardsticks, teaching remains a fundamentally authoritarian process built around coercion. We still hold over students the threat of failing grades and by extension the long term likelihood of being denied a job and a ticket to prosperity. This power is strengthened by a presumed moral authority. Students know that they cannot touch us, but the school administration and even their own parents will support us if we act against them. Not only do we have the right to punish, but we will be affirmed as right in doing so. This authoritarian structure even manifests itself in the act of teaching in the form of the lecture. Such a system presumes the existence of a teacher in possession of the “right” answers and the masses of students in need of enlightenment. The teacher then stands in front and “transmits” knowledge from his mind to those of the students through speech or possibly visual aids. The logical corollary is that the teacher is in a position to stand in judgment, presumably through exams, as to how successful students have “absorbed” this knowledge and, therefore, has a moral right to reward or punish students with grades.      

A few years ago, I spent a year teaching high school history. I was fortunate in having a talented class. I remain in contact with several students, who continue to seek me out for whatever life or academic wisdom I can offer them. That being said, as with all human endeavors, there were regular conflicts of interest. At its most basic level, there was a conflict in the sense that students often wished to do other things than sit in class and listen to me. I am not a tyrannical person, greedy for power. On the contrary, I am an idealist, who believes in the cause of teaching. Furthermore, I felt pressure to justify the paycheck I received as a teacher by making sure I spent every moment doing things that an outside observer would recognize as productive teaching. Ironically, if I had cared less, I might have performed better. For example, I saw it as my responsibility to keep students in the classroom and refused to let more than one student out at a time to use the restroom. I even refused to let students leave, who I came to believe were abusing their privilege. I also objected to students doing work from other classes during my class. As I am sure readers would agree, when narrowly considered, everything that I did was in my rights. My mistake was that I perpetuated a mindset for myself and my students of confrontation in which it was me versus them. Perhaps the biggest sign of this was that it frustrated me when students did not do as I wished, which manifested in my doing a fair amount of yelling. Again, it is not a matter of whether I was in the right in specific cases. The very fact that I could get frustrated should have been a sign that I was not receiving something that I believed I had a right to and should have begged the question of whether these students owed me anything. For this reason, I owe all my students, particularly the “problematic” ones, an apology. That I was the true student, learning how to teach, may perhaps serve as a reason to treat my very real failings as a teacher with some charity.

This past year, I started tutoring a group of kids from a large family, ranging in age from toddler to teen, on a weekly basis. Needless to say, I do not work with all of these kids at the same time or on the same things. Theoretically, the first hour should consist of working with the younger set on their reading. The littlest ones should be able to pick out words in the story as I read to them. The bigger ones should be able to do some of the reading. The second hour should consist of me hosting a discussion about history and politics with the older set. Lessons rarely work out so neatly. Not all of the kids are interested in doing anything with me at a given time, and they are not always interested in the same things as another kid. In practice, I find myself jumping from kid to kid and vastly different topics with a fair amount of horseplay mixed in. My goal is not to control the situation, but to engage a few kids at a time for a brief period before moving on to something else.  

Being a tutor, as opposed to a teacher, means no yearly contract. Thus, the parents can get rid of me anytime they choose. This reality increases the pressure to perform “teaching” actions. I have this dread that the parents will walk in and see one kid playing a game on my kindle, another reading a book while I have a light saber duel with a third and decide that it would be cheaper to simply hire a babysitter, disregarding the fact that I was explaining the importance of conflict in narrative. Oddly enough, what makes tutoring workable for me is that, unlike teaching, there is no temptation to believe that I have any authority. Recognizing and accepting this fact means I am less likely to attempt to exercise this non-existent authority. Lack of job security is scary and certainly makes me anxious to hear that the family likes what I am doing, but it is not something I can control. So I have no choice but to focus on what I can control, and that is being the best resource for the kids that I can in whatever form they choose to take it. Hopefully, they have learned at least half as much as I have learned from them.

                

My Dissertation's Journey (Part II)

I spent most of the next two years adrift with my dissertation. It did not help matters that I spent the 2009-10 school year away from any real academic oversight while teaching high school over in Maryland. The Hebrew Academy experience itself was a positive one for me, but most of that time randomly reading. It also did not help matters that I was fairly depressed over being in my late 20s and still single. Perhaps someone with better guidance, more emotional stability and less stubbornness would have recognized the need to reign in one's thinking instead of allowing it to range over a wide variety of topics related to messianism, much of it with no particular connection to Judaism, producing little in the way of actually useful writing.

It was only in 2011, after spending months wadding through the issue of Sabbatianism, that I really found my big idea. This idea was that messianism, with its conflicts between its spiritual and political variants, was rooted in the conflict between, what I came to refer to as, military model, missionary and esoteric model religions. The military model, based around community and ritual, seeks the support of a politically successful state. The missionary and esoteric models, based around believing individuals, oppose the community and eschews worldly success such as that provided by a state. This manifests itself in messianism, which combines the military model dreams of political success with the anti-community hopes of spiritual redemption. In a sense, messianism requires the belief that a political state is so unimportant that God would destroy it, merely for the sake of creating a more faithful nation, and so important that God would organize history around the return of his people to one.

I was still trapped by the idea that this dissertation needed to be comparative and discuss Christianity and Islam. This cost me several more months until I finally forced myself to set aside what had already ballooned to over 100 pages of material and set it aside for a future book. This still left me attempting to conceive of a grand narrative of Jewish messianism placed within the context of an elaborate theory of religion. Last fall, after I crossed the 500-page mark, my advisor told me to cut my early modern material. This included the Sabbatian chapter that I had spent so much time on. A few months ago, he told me to cut the medieval material and only hand in the beginning part, which was then well over 200 pages. One problem with this was that it meant abandoning all the material that I had originally set out to write. A more serious problem was that I was now writing a dissertation on ancient history, an area that neither I nor my advisor possessed any official expertise on. Nevertheless, I continued away at this part of the dissertation, clarifying ideas and adding in more examples to serve as evidence, until it passed the 300-page mark. I knew that what I was writing was not the sort of thing that one should normally do for a dissertation, but I assumed that as long as I was coherent and my advisor supported me I was safe.

Disaster struck a few weeks ago when a professor my advisor wanted to serve on my committee objected to the fact that I was writing a work of general theory. Other professors were soon called in and they raised the same objection. None of them bothered to argue against anything I had written. They did not need to. I had, without realizing it and with my adviser's cooperation, broken an unwritten code and that was enough. This morning I received what appears to be the final verdict. My advisor has acknowledged that my project had been a mistake from the beginning. He now apologizes for his mistake and offers his aid in writing a new dissertation. After nearly five years and more than 800 pages, I seem to be back at square one.         

In Good Company With No Basketball Courts in Heaven

Rabbi Dovid Landesman recently came out with a book, There Are No Basketball Courts in Heaven. It is a collection of essays on various topics relating to Judaism. Many of the essays come from various guest posts he has done on blogs such as Cross Currents and Emes-Ve-Emunah. (For some strange reason, despite the fact that he is my uncle, he has yet to consent to guest post on this blog.) Admittedly there is a weakness in this in that the book has the feel of a random collection of essays. I could easily imagine myself at some point in the future attempting to take a collection of connected posts, such as the ones on the historical method and the Whig narrative, and use them as the base for a book. The slap-dash feel of the book is not enhanced by a childish cover and the fact that Rabbi Landesman was not able to get a mainstream publisher, even a Jewish publishing company such as Artscroll or Feldheim to put out the book. All of this contributes to the sense that this is a vanity project of no consequence. This may be true, but it is all the more the pity. Rabbi Landesman is a talented writer with a self-deprecating sense of humor, who deserves a larger hearing than just the Orthodox-blogosphere. His perspective and life experiences span the Orthodox world; thus allowing him to speak to both Haredim and the Modern Orthodox. Furthermore, I believe his is a voice that both of these worlds need to hear as he offers plenty of tough love for both sides. The fact that Rabbi Landesman could not get a major publisher tells us less about his talent as a writer and more about the sad state of affairs we are in today.

The essays in the book are connected by three themes. The first are Rabbi Landesman's observations about Jewish education and teaching high school students. Closely connected to this theme is the second, what is wrong with the Modern Orthodox world, particularly its educational system. Rabbi Landesman was the Hebrew principal at the Modern Orthodox Yula high school in Los Angeles for a number of years up until a few years ago so he is speaking from practical experience. The problems as he sees them are mainly, a casual attitude toward Jewish law, particularly when it interferes with the desired teenage lifestyle and an obsession with getting into elite secular colleges and the whole buying into of secular definitions of success. Perhaps Rabbi Landesman's strongest words are reserved for Haredim, the third theme. Rabbi Landesman is the product of an older Haredi generation that to put it simplistically I would say was more "moderate." I think it is more accurate to say that they were still part of American society, held in check by it, and were not actively engaged in waging a war against it. It is this sort of world that could produce such a story as the adolescent Rabbi Landesman going to a Pirates (back when they were still worth watching) doubleheader against the Dodgers at Forbes field with Don Drysdale and Sandy Koufax pitching back to back and Rabbi Landesman praying that God not send the Messiah until after the second game. This sensibility was strongly enhanced by the fact that Rabbi Landesman grew up in McKeesport PA (where he literally married the girl next door, my father's older sister). His essays "Baruch Hashem, Nothing has Changed," "Yankel zt''l," and "The Day that Satmar Went Mainstream" are truly gut-wrenching. To top things off, Rabbi Landesman has plenty to denounce both sides with when it comes to crass materialism.

One thing that really struck me on a personal level when reading the book over Passover, (and it was certainly worth my while despite seeing the original posts and having read a rough draft a few months earlier) was the repeated theme that after all the years he spent teaching teenagers and having been one himself that he did not understand them. (See particularly "Get Plenty of Rest and a Daily Dose of Apathy.") Right before Passover, I was informed by the administration of the Hebrew Academy that I was not going to be offered a job to come back to for the fall. They were impressed by my dedication and the high level and quality of the lectures I gave. That being said, they felt that I lacked the "right touch" for dealing with teenagers. I had walked into this school into a difficult if not impossible task that I, as a new teacher that students had no reason to respect, should teach a course that they had every reason to regard as a freebie to pass the time in their last year in school before going on to Israel and college and actually put together a meaningful course. I refused to take the easy way out and my reward was to be let go. I found reading No Basketball Courts to be a big comfort; rather than being someone fired from a job, I was being placed in good company, Rabbi Landesman's. Maybe in a few decades, I will be as talented a writer and teacher as he is while still being let go by schools for not being the "proper fit."

Rabbi Gedaliah Anemer ztl: A Community Rabbi

This morning, I was sitting in the teacher's lounge in the Hebrew Academy, looking at my email, when I saw a message from the school administration that Rabbi Gedaliah Anemer had passed away. The school placed classes on hold for several periods and put the tenth through twelfth grades on buses to go to the funeral services being held at the Young Israel. Anyone even slightly familiar with Silver Spring Jewish politics might be forgiven for being taken aback for a second at this. Rabbi Anemer was the head of the Yeshiva of Greater Washington, the "other school," a Haredi rabbi, who could hardly have been viewed as popular or beloved at the Modern Orthodox Hebrew Academy. It says something about Rabbi Anemer that he managed to cross the community divide to be the rabbi of the entire community. Most leaders gain universal acceptance by being passive and bland to such an extent that no one could have any cause to object. What made Rabbi Anemer special was that, as anyone who ever spent more than a few minutes could tell you, he was a personality to be dealt with, who made no concessions for the sake of popularity. I spent two years in his class, within smacking distance of him. I was far from his greatest student; I am not, in any way, qualified, to evaluate him. But if you permit me, here are some thoughts from this member of the "opposition."

Silver Spring is hardly a bastion of Haredism. Its Orthodoxy is distinctively Modern Orthodox. One would never accuse Silver Spring of trying to recreate European Jewish life, but in one sense, for the past fifty years, we have done so in a way not matched probably by any Jewish community in America, certainly not the Haredi enclaves of Borough Park and Lakewood; we had a community rabbi and his name was Rabbi Gedalia Anemer. As I already said, it cannot be said that Rabbi Anemer was ever a popular rabbi. The yeshiva community in Silver Spring has always been a minority and on the defensive. It is unlikely that it would even exist if it were not for Rabbi Anemer's force of will. We, in the Modern Orthodox community, might not have "liked" Rabbi Anemer. We likely disagreed with him more times then we agreed. That being said, there was never a question that he was the rabbi of the Greater Washington area, not just of the yeshiva community, but of the entire community. He was able to maintain this position, because regardless of what you may have thought about this or that policy of his, there was no doubting the man. Agree with him or disagree with him, he was a scholar of the first rank and a man of unchallengeable integrity.

There is a common attitude toward rabbinic leadership to look for gedolim, people with a claim of leadership over the entire Jewish world. No one who knew Rabbi Anemer could question the fact that he was a scholar deserving as any to be viewed as a gadol, a leader of the generation. Certainly he deserved the honor of sitting at the head table at the Shiyum Hashas and to address major conventions. If anyone had ever seriously questioned Rabbi Anemer's integrity (even the most sincere displays could just be an act), my response would have been that if Rabbi Anemer was ever really just out for himself then he would have been out of Silver Spring a long time ago. He would have moved to greener communities, where people would have given him the respect he actually deserved. He would have issued declarations on the issues of the day and made sure that his students would be out there to defend his honor and make sure that he was recognized as "the leader of the generation."

I doubt Rabbi Anemer 's passing is going to make front page news in the Yated or Hamodia. I do not expect them to mourn his passing by calling him a gadol hador. I have no intention of correcting them; I am not going to cheapen Rabbi Anemer by calling him a gadol or even "a leader of the generation." There are already plenty of those. Instead I will praise him by calling him by what he deserved, the rabbi of a community, of Silver Spring and the greater Washington area.

My Ideal Job

As I mentioned earlier, I am not going to be back at the Hebrew Academy for the fall. The administration might have liked what I did, but they decided that they did not have anything to suit my particular skills. While this was going on, as a favor to the school librarian, Gila Suchter, who has been a very dear friend in letting me take over her library as my private office, I have been serving as a semi-official research paper guide for the elementary school students doing projects on the Holocaust. This has mostly consisted of me answering basic questions and gently angling them away from Wikipedia toward internet sources that end in .gov or .edu. If things go really well I try to get the student to open a printed book. While talking over my predicament with Mrs. Suchter, it hit me that this semi-official job would be the perfect official job for me. I could be the school's official research advisor.

To the best of my knowledge, this is a job that I am making up, but there has to be someone out there who is already doing this at their own school; the need is just too obvious. Think about it; research projects, usually papers are something that all schools give out, starting at a young grade. All sorts of classes, science, English, and history, assign research projects. It is a perfectly reasonable way to get students to apply what they have learned in class to a project of their own choosing and which they have to take responsibility for. The problem with an assignment that is so reasonable that every class would resort to it is that everyone knows that everyone else is doing it so no one feels any responsibility to teach research skills and it falls through the cracks. I am just as guilty as anyone of this; my students have had several months to do their research papers. Every once in awhile, I have opened the floor to questions about the paper, even allowing the majority of a class period for this, and am always available outside of class, in person, by phone or by e-mail, to talk. That being said, I do not formally teach research skills. Writing a paper is something from outside of class to be grafted on. Time must be made for it, but it is not an integral part of the class and as such it all too easily gets pushed aside in favor of official course material. (The Alfie Kohns of the world would use this to argue against research assignments and they may even have a valid point.) What is needed is someone to take on this job as an official responsibility. It is not enough for research skills to be a side thing that all teachers in theory teach. If no one is actively taking responsibility then it will not get done.

This does not need to be an official class. I could simply be on call a given number of hours a week in the library for students who need me and I could make my rounds to the various classrooms to give ten-minute introductions advertising my services to students. This is not a writing center, though it could easily be incorporated into one even if I personally would prefer to work out of the library. In my experience, writing centers are run out of English departments and therefore focus on the technical mechanics of writing. If students ask for help in terms of research ideas, that is secondary. I am a historian; my primary training is not as a writer. Whatever skills I picked up in writing came on the side. (One of my justifications for this blog is that it serves as an ongoing exercise to help me become a better writer.) I can be useful, at a pragmatic level, for helping students formulate a thesis and getting evidence for it. If I actually know something about the topic, I can point you to something specific. Even if it is something that I really know nothing about, I have good enough instincts to usually be able to guess where you might want to go with a topic and what some of the potential issues might be. Everyone needs an intelligent person to throw around ideas with, particularly in the beginning stages of research. In my own personal experience, not having someone usually leads to boredom and inefficiency.

This is the perfect job for me. It involves me doing what I love best, jumping around various ideas to see where they lead. It plays to my strengths while avoiding my weaknesses. I get to be the intelligent, enthusiastic, likable person who actually cares about teaching students, while avoiding having to engage students, maintain classroom discipline and teach a specific course. Most importantly, it gives me an excuse to sit in the library every day and read. With this job, any book interesting enough for me to read is probably going to be something for me to recommend and therefore a necessary part of my job.

The administration loved the idea. They agreed that they could use someone to fill such a position and that I would be the perfect person for it. Unfortunately, they do not have the budget to do it. If anyone out there is in a position of influence at an elementary or high school and likes this idea and would like having me on board to put it into practice, feel free to contact me. (Keep in mind that hiring me comes with the bonus of having me running around your school and all the unforeseen consequences that come with it.)

A Student’s Letter of Recommendation

This past week I found out that the Hebrew Academy was not going to bring me back for next year. The administration decided that even though they loved the fact that I taught at a very high level, in essence offering a college level course, I lacked the right touch for dealing with high school students. One of my students, without me asking, was kind enough to write the administration a "letter of recommendation" for me. The student sent me a copy and allowed me to reproduce part of it here.

I am writing because recently I have heard some criticisms from other students about Mr. Chinn's class, so I would like to describe my experience in Modern Jewish History. Since the beginning of the year Mr. Chinn's class has been one of my favorites. He conveys the information with great energy and he really makes the material interesting. He always manages to connect what we are learning in class to current events, which helps me learn the material much better. His quizzes and tests are challenging, but fair. They always reflect the material covered in class which is more then I can say for other classes I've taken. He encourages really thinking about the material, and will often teach by asking the students questions about, for example what the motivation of a historical figure might have been. There is always a lot of dialogue between Mr. Chinn and the students on the material, and it really makes for a charged and energized learning environment.  

…

In short I feel that Mr. Chinn was a really excellent teacher and I am glad to have had the privilege of taking his class.

It looks like I am going to be back in Columbus next fall to use my final year of funding. That is unless someone else has a use for an eccentric graduate student in medieval and early modern history, with a loud theatrical style of lecturing.

Playing the Devil’s Advocate for Affirmative Action

I serve as the faculty advisor (otherwise known as the resident adult) for the political science club here at the Hebrew Academy. We have a very talented and outspoken group of guys and even a few girls and I am honored to be able to work with them. (I think it would make for an interesting study as to general male to female ratio in high school political science clubs. Is there something about being in a room full of people arguing with each other, often with raised voices, that pushes teenage girls away? I do make the extra effort to make sure that girls get to say their piece and are made to feel at home.) I guess it says something about white male Orthodox Jewish teenagers from middle-class backgrounds attending private school, but it is a fairly conservative group in terms of its politics. This has put me in a funny position. Politically I am what most people would view as a conservative, even if I am still to the left of many of these kids. Regardless of my politics, I do not think my role as a teacher is preaching my politics. I am here to pass on a method of critical analysis, one that will likely lead students to very different conclusions from mine. In general, I think this is the critical defense in terms of keeping one's own biases in check. It is okay to have strongly held opinions as long as you care more about the process that leads to such ideas than the actual ideas themselves. This leaves me in the ironic position where for me to be silent would be to guarantee a strongly conservative tilt to discussions. My solution to this problem has been to speak up from time to time to play the role of the "liberal." Not because I wish these students to become liberals, but because, regardless of what I might think, I am not about to allow, on my watch, students to walk away without hearing what an intelligent liberal sounds like. I may be speaking to the future leaders of the Republican Party, but a general political science club should not be the same thing as the Young Republicans.

This past week, I ended up speaking more than I usually do. The reason for this was that the topic of the week was affirmative action. Certainly a good topic to discuss since it directly affects these students in the here and now. Within a year or two, all of these students, if they have not done so already, will be applying to college, many them even to elite colleges. This is also precisely the sort of topic to bring out the most conservative tendencies in the group. The group is the very picture of an argument against affirmative action. These are white male middle-class private school students and in this case being Jewish is not going to win them any minority points. Looking around at the group, I know someone here is going to lose out on their college of choice. Essentially affirmative action in this context translates into: kids you need to sacrifice your slot at an elite college, which you have earned through your hard work and intelligence, to a total stranger for the good of society; all of this despite the fact that no one in the room, including me, is old enough to remember segregation.

So for the first time in my life, I found myself standing in front of a public audience and defending affirmative action. What I learned from the experience was that the case for affirmative action works to the extent that it is a moderate short-term pragmatic solution to a present-day problem. No, affirmative action does not mean that you are going to get a D+ black doctor working on you. It might mean that you end up with a B+ doctor, but you need to keep in mind that the focus on grades privileges the white student at the expense of other means of evaluation that might favor our black student. No one is going to be getting anything, not a job, not admittance to college, which they are not qualified for. I went to Ohio State where much of the student body comes from rural Ohio, which is predominantly white. Many of these students have grown up not personally knowing many blacks. We have a societal interest in changing this; no one should be able to go through four years of college and not regularly interact with students of a different color. You can talk all you want about improving education and that might help students in kindergarten, but we have to deal with students applying to college in the here and now. And let us be honest, you kids have benefited, even if it is just a little bit, from the legacy of racism that continues to live on in this country, just as your black competition has suffered ever so slightly from it. Is it not fair and reasonable to agree to at least a moderate level of affirmative action?

I eventually got stopped and asked: but you are a libertarian, how could you support affirmative action? I must admit that this was an argument I could not talk myself around. At the heart of my Libertarianism is an attempt to get around and deny the very relevance of the sort of liberal arguments I was using.  Only direct physical suffering is relevant to the government so all side effects of a racially charged culture are off the table. I do not recognize the existence of racial groups, only free and equal individuals. Government serves to protect people from physical harm not to make people more moral or build a more tolerant society. Bent over a barrel, I had to admit to playing the devil's advocate here. I guess I might be able to personally go along with affirmative action if we were talking about private institutions. I already am willing to put up with Aryan coffee shops.

Izgad 2009: The Highlights

We are finishing off the third complete year of Izgad. This year saw two hundred posts (counting this one). There were over eighteen thousand unique visits. (This was due, in large part, to one particular post.) I know that is not a lot compared to some other sites, but it marks a major step forward for me. To my loyal readers, your comments are appreciated particularly when you disagree with me. In case you missed it, here are some of the highlights.

I taught two-quarters of History 112, Modern European History, for Ohio State. This gave cause for numerous discourses about the nature of history and the historical method. There was my presentation on Wikipedia and why it is not a legitimate source. This would later lead to a letter published in the Columbus Dispatch. In my classes, I did not hold back from issues like slavery, absolutism, and the denial of equal rights to women even at the risk of going against politically correct orthodoxy. I am now teaching at the Hebrew Academy where I have had the opportunity to defend Martin Luther.

I posted my notes of a presentation given by noted atheist biologist P. Z. Myers. This turned out to be my most successful post to date in terms of hits and comments when Myers kindly put up a link. This led to several fruitful exchanges with readers of Myers' Pharyngula, who proved to be quite respectful.

My fantasy series, Asael, is beginning to take shape. For those of you who have not been following the story, there are two narratives about two different Asaels. Asael bar Serariah lives in a monastery library and is studying for the priesthood while trying to come to terms with a series of dreams involving a creature named Vorn and the legacy of his grandfather General Serariah Dolstoy. Decades earlier, Asael's uncle, Asael Dolstoy, has found himself taking a front seat to a game of scacordus and history as his father, Professor Serariah Dolstoy, takes his first steps to becoming the future legend. Both Asaels, in their own ways, must face their world's equivalent of the Enlightenment. So polish your musket, sharpen your bayonet and your Talmudic skills for things are about to get really interesting (and violent). Already there is one well toasted corpse left by an alter of a religious sanctuary, courtesy of an enforcer angel with a flaming sword.

The battle is never finished when you are fighting neurotypical bigots. Unfortunately, I also had to confront zealots from my own side. My problem is that when I talk about rights and liberty I actually mean very specific things. These are not catchphrases that you can slap on to whatever cause you wish to support at the moment. Despite my best intentions, I do seem to manage to get myself into trouble.

There were book reviews and discussions on both works of fiction and non-fiction. Christine Garwood took on flat earthers and creationists to boot. Frank Schaeffer was patient with God. (I would later lose patience with Schaeffer.) Jesus became a good Aryan Nazi. Europe lost its military culture. Harry Potter became a historical source. Did Charles Dickens have a mind-controlling beetle up his skull?

In the world of film, the Book of Esther managed to be butchered despite having some of the best talent Lord of the Rings had to offer. Transformer robots wiped Israel off the map. My favorite neighborhood vampires are starting to prove sparkly and dull, but I still love them and will defend them from the vampires of my past. Avatar might not be as liberal as many of its supporters and detractors believe.

Traveling to the very bowels of the Haredi world yielded numerous interesting conversations and tell us much about what is really going on in that world. I will not back down from exposing the followers of the late Rabbi Avigdor Miller and their apologists. You can blame me if Hershey Park gets banned. On this blog, we engaged in some friendly clashes with Bray of the Fundie over articles of faith and moral principles. At least Bray is not Authentic Judaism.

The summer trip to England yielded numerous adventures and mishaps. From my headquarters next door to Animal Farm, I hung out at Oxford and pursued acts of pilgrimage to shrines of C. S. Lewis, including a pint at his favorite pub. Burning heretics at the stake can be a worthwhile activity as long as it is done in a tolerant and ecumenical fashion. The Chabad couple in Oxford was really nice. I am not sure though if they would want me back anytime soon.

I presented papers at three different conferences. That brings my total of conference presentations up to three. At Purdue, I presented on David Reubeni and his use of violence. At Leeds, I presented on Jewish attacks on philosophy in fifteenth-century Spain. Finally, at West Georgia I presented on Orson Scott Card and the historical method.

My politics are a blend of my rationalist theism and my Libertarianism, which gives me the opportunity to make all sorts of fun arguments. Children should be given political and religious labels. People should be allowed to practice medicine without a license. We should seriously consider giving children the right to vote (and drafting them into the military).

See you all in 2010.

Lunchtime Book Recommendations: An Idea as to How to Create Must Read Books

I often eat lunch in the Hebrew Academy lunchroom during the same time as some of the elementary school grades. The other day, I was in the lunchroom when I saw one of the teachers do something very interesting. Towards the end of the half hour period, when students were beginning to finish, she took the microphone and asked if any students would be interested in coming up to tell everyone about a book they recently read and would recommend. The teacher then asked for a show of hands as to who has read the book. A young friend of mine recommended Diary of a Wimpy Kid. It seems that the vast majority of the kids have read the series. I am not familiar with these books but they clearly seem to be very popular. Another kid came to the floor carrying a copy of Garth Nix’s Lirael and suggested the first book in the series, Sabriel. When asked what he liked about the books the kid did not say anything so I shouted out “Mogget.” Mogget is a cat shaped spirit, who likes sleep and fish and will kill you if you take his collar of. His main role in the series is to be the sardonic voice of reason, saying “this is stupid and we are all going to die.” I raised my hand, but was not called upon. I wanted to recommend Suzanne Collins’ Hunger Games. This is a teenage book about a reality show in which twenty-four kids are thrown in a giant arena; the last one alive wins a life of fortune and fame. Think of it as Theseus meets Lord of the Flies with a totally awesome heroine armed with a bow and arrow.
This whole idea of allowing kids to come up and make book recommendations is an excellent exercise in controlled chaos. We are handing a microphone over to kids without any prescreening and they get pitch any book they so wish. I also think it is a brilliant way to sell reading to kids. One of the advantages that movies and television have over books is that they start with a wider audience and there are fewer of them to compete for an audience. This allows for the creation of a “must see” factor; people will watch films and television shows, regardless of their actual merit, simply because they know that other people are watching these things and they do not want to be left out when these things are being discussed say around the office water-cooler. The model here is for committed individuals to take an interest in something. Once a critical mass is reached, these individuals become a group and the object of their interest becomes a lightning-rod for others to bring them into the group. A larger and larger group of people will “tune in” to find out what the whole fuss is about.

It is certainly possible for books to do this. Harry Potter and Twilight are proof. In both cases, Goblet of Fire for Potter and Breaking Dawn for Twilight, these series had a moment where they went from just being very successfully books to being “cultural phenomenon.” The key to this was that these books became big enough to catch the attention of the media. The media, true to its fashion, made these books front page news as they “examined” the phenomena. Of course being front page news sold more copies of these books, bringing more “examinations” and continuing the cycle. Potter and Twilight succeed through a bit of luck and because they possessed certain qualities to give them mass appeal. The question becomes, how do you create a dozen Potters and Twilights? Take Nix’s Abhorsen series mentioned earlier, these are the sort of books that have the right mixture of in theory being for children while having more adult content to appeal to a mass audience. All that is needed is that bit of luck to create the needed critical mass in order to attract media attention and make them “must read” books.

Having kids come up and recommend books to their peers in a public forum allows for the creation of small groups around a book. I get up and recommend a book. Someone else raises their hand to show that they read it. Now I have something to go over to that person with in order to talk to them. A third person in the audience in the crowd sees that two people have read this book and are excited about it. This person then goes and reads the book. Now you have three people interested in something. Interest gathers interest and before you know it you have chain reaction of people reading the book to find out what everyone else is talking about. And you have it, Must Read Books!

Luther Wanted to Burn Down Synagogues But He Was Not an Anti-Semite

I spoke about Martin Luther the other day. I asked my Hebrew Academy students to define anti-Semitism and whether Luther was an anti-Semite. (As an early modernist, one of my personal goals is that after a year of my class my students, when they hear the name Martin Luther, should not think of a black preacher with a dream but a fat, beer-drinking German.) Almost every one of my students defined anti-Semitism as hating Jews. They also all saw Luther as an anti-Semite. I sympathize with my students’ feelings. When I was younger I agreed with my students. In my ninth grade history class, I called Luther a bum. The history teacher, Mr. Jesse, responded that he was a Lutheran. I guess you can say oops. (Mr. Jesse was the perfect middle school teacher. He was physically intimidating as in over six feet tall, built like a brick wall, yelled, and threw stuff. He also had a basic command of the material, was a genuinely likable person, and had a great sense of humor.)

There are certainly good reasons for viewing Luther as an anti-Semite. After taking a fairly positive attitude toward Jews early in his career, Luther turned on Jews with a vengeance in On the Jews and their Lies (1543). Luther advises:

First, to set fire to their synagogues or schools and to bury and cover with dirt whatever will not burn, so that no man will ever again see a stone or cinder of them. …
Second, I advise that their houses also be razed and destroyed. For they pursue in them the same aims as in their synagogues. Instead they might be lodged under a roof or in a barn, like the gypsies. …
Third, I advise that all their prayer books and Talmudic writings, in which such idolatry, lies, cursing, and blasphemy are taught, be taken from them.
Fourth, I advise that their rabbis be forbidden to teach henceforth on pain of loss of life and limb.
Fifth, I advise that safe-conduct on the highways be abolished completely for the Jews. For they have no business in the countryside, since they are not lords, officials, tradesmen, or the like.
While this aspect of Luther was mostly ignored until the twentieth century, the Nazis made use of Luther, viewing him as a precursor of theirs. The modern Lutheran Church has officially rejected all statements of Luther’s regarding Jews.

I believe that it is important that for anti-Semitism to mean something it has to mean something more than hating Jews. The English hate the French and vice versa. At Ohio State, we have a Hate Michigan Week every November. Pretty much every group on the planet has been hated by someone else, has been the subject of bigotry, discriminated against, and even on occasion killed. Anti-Semitism is something beyond that. Jews are unique in the sort of hatred they have consistently evoked in so many different places and people. What other group of people has something to compare to the blood libel or the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, one of the best-selling books of the twentieth century? The Nazis hated lots of different groups of people yet there was something about the Jews that made them a special target. For example, the German war effort in 1944 was literally sabotaged in order to massacre Hungarian Jewry. So anti-Semitism is not just people hating Jews but people having a pathological hatred of Jews, a hatred of Jews that goes beyond reason.

When dealing with Christian-Jewish relations it is important to distinguish between Christians who were hostile to Jews for what they were and a Christian hostility that went beyond all reality. Let us be clear, medieval Jews were heretics, unbelievers, and blasphemers, who hated Christians. Toldot Yeshu was accepted as fact by Jews. They believed that their ancestors really did kill Jesus and were proud of it. To them, Jesus was a bastard, a heretic, and a magician while the Virgin Mary was a whore. From this perspective, Luther was being perfectly reasonable. All his accusations were things that Jews would have admitted to. Jews cursing Christians was a fact. When Jews, in the sixteenth century, said the curse for heretics in the eighteen benedictions they meant Christians. It was a fact that Jews referred to Christians as goyim. Jews called Jesus the ‘hanged one.' Jews practiced usury. Luther refers to the blood libel accusations. He was agnostic about these charges but argued that Jews hated Christians enough to murder Christians. Again this was a very reasonable assumption.

Luther was a polemicist, who wrote in an aggressive manner; even by the standards of the day Luther’s universe was highly Manichean one, sharply divided between the saved and the unsaved with no grey area in between. It was not just Jews whom he believed to be satanic. He believed that the Catholic Church and even fellow Protestants who disagreed with him were also of the Devil and going straight to Hell. So there was nothing particularly anti-Jewish about his demonization of Jews. The fact that they were Jews was incidental to the fact that they were people who disagreed with him.

In the pre-modern period, all government authority was inherently religious. It was assumed that it was God’s will that a certain person rule. Because of this, there was, almost by definition, no such thing as a non-political religious claim. Every religious claim had political implications and anyone who went against the established religion was by definition engaging in political subversion. For example, if God is not a Catholic then God clearly would not want the Catholic Charles V to rule over his German people and take care of their spiritual welfare like he has the Pope look after their spiritual welfare. Therefore anyone who was not a Catholic in early sixteenth-century Germany was implicitly advocating for the overthrow of Charles V. Because of this it is impossible to ever accuse a pre-modern, Luther or anyone else, of being intolerant of other religions. Luther was perfectly in his rights to advocate the use of violence against Jews or any other religious subversives just as we accept the legitimacy of the use of violence even today against political traitors. And in fact, Jews got off much easier than Luther’s Christian opponents. Luther explicitly warned against directly harming Jews. The fact that Luther only wanted to destroy Jewish property, interfere with the ability of Jews to earn a livelihood and practice their religion while at the same time advocating physical violence against Catholics and Anabaptists begs the question not why Luther was hostile to Jews but why he was not more hostile to them. One suspects that it had something to do with his strong Augustinian leanings.

In conclusion, I do not think it is accurate or helpful to view Luther as an anti-Semite. He was an active opponent of Judaism which is nothing remarkable as to be a Christian, unless you are a very liberal one, requires that one be at least a passive opponent of Judaism, along with every other religion. Luther’s opposition to Judaism was internally consistent. His accusations against Jews are all grounded in solid fact; there was nothing fantastical about them. He took these things to their logical conclusion and endorsed a very reasonable sixteenth-century solution to the problem. Jews today do not have any legitimate grounds for any personal animosity against Luther himself let alone to use Luther as a polemical club against modern-day Lutherans.

History Quiz

I gave a quiz today to my Modern Jewish history class at Hebrew Academy with two questions and a bonus.

1. How is the historical method different from the scientific method? Does this mean that historical claims are just random guesses or leaps of faith? (I cannot prove that Napoleon ever existed, but I believe in my heart that he did. Believing in the existence of Napoleon gives meaning to my life and makes me a better person. I therefore believe in him just like I believe in fairies, floating invisible teacups in outer space and flying spaghetti monsters.)

2. Name five prominent Jewish historians.

One bonus point for each historian that you can match with their choice for the starting point for modern Jewish historian.

For more detailed discussions of the historical method than I wanted from my students see the posts on Philosopher Football, Dragonseed, and evolution as history. As for the historians, the ones that I discussed in detail in class along with their views on modern Jewish history were Gershom Scholem (Sabbatai Sevi), Heinrich Graetz (Moses Mendelssohn), Shimon Dubnow (French Revolution), Isaac Jost (Frederick the Great), and Benzion Dinur (Yehudah Ha-Hasid). Other historians mentioned either in class or in my student’s readings were Josephus, Jacques Basnage (not Jewish but certainly a historian of Jews), Haim Hillel Ben-Sasson, Shmuel Ettinger, Michael Meyer, Salo Baron and Yosef Yerushalmi.