Letter to the Editor

Letter

To the Editor:

The Summer 2006 issue of Shofar includes an article entitled "Smart." Its author, Michael E. Staub, ascribes to a 1999 book of mine the following opinions: the intellectual achievement of Jews is historically due to their religion; continued Jewish intellectual achievement will require piety; Jews have a monopoly on binary thinking; Jewish identity now pivots on faith. "Get religion," he paraphrases me as advising, "and maybe your child will grow up to be the next Claude Lévi-Strauss . . ." (pp. 5–6). I agree with Staub that such views need not be treated with anything but derision. They are vulgar as well as erroneous. But the nasty bit of business perpetrated in his article is this: In Search of American Jewish Culture does not express such opinions. I emphatically deny holding them, and resent the malicious inventiveness with which he impugns my scholarship.

Anyone taking the minimal trouble to check the pages he cites (pp. 12, 237) can quickly discern which of us is accurate. My book is not about intelligence but about culture. I do make one brief reference elsewhere (pp. 23–24) to "some psychometric evidence" that Jewish test-takers rank above the norm in verbal aptitude but aren't so impressive in demonstrating visual and spatial abilities. Even if that passage could be distorted to invoke superior Jewish intelligence, Staub doesn't even try to refute psychometric data (or, for that matter, to show any awareness of the literature on this topic). As for binarism, its centrality to historic Judaism—again, a claim that Staub does not dispute—permitted me to speculate about the consequent proclivities of some Jews. Then, one page later, my book suggests that binary thinking is what tends to get discarded in a democratic, diverse, and hospitable America.

From who-knows-where he has concocted the ludicrous notion that I believe that the smartest Jews have been religious, or were smart because of their religion. Admittedly I foresee no basis in this country for a viable Jewish life without Judaism. Nor am I alone in noting the dramatic decline among the young of earlier alternatives such as ethnicity or Yiddish (or Zionist) secularism or the fear of antisemitism. These observations are about trends, placed within a chapter entitled "Prospects"; and fair-minded readers might have noticed disclaimers, because non-religious options have not entirely disappeared. Here again Staub does not challenge such conjectures with counter-evidence; he prefers innuendo, and even detects some sinister "ideological work being done." What that is, he fails to specify, leaving me guessing what it might be.

Perhaps my floundering is due to the "circular logic" (p. 6) that is supposed to tarnish my work. The opening page of his article in Shofar describes a cinematic psychiatrist whose "goatee, horn-rimmed glasses, and a pipe . . . would surely remind even the most casual viewer of Sigmund Freud." Because Freud sported a beard and smoked a cigar and was commonly photographed without horn-rimmed spectacles, I don't think Staub should be advising others to be more logical.

Michael E. Staub responds:

Readers of Stephen Whitfield's letter might be forgiven for concluding that my essay, "Smart," somehow focuses on the writings of Stephen Whitfield. It does not. In truth, my essay devotes a mere four paragraphs to Whitfield.

For those who have neither my essay nor Whitfield's book close at hand, let me again quote the Whitfield passage I found "circular":

Because binarism is deeply encoded in historic Judaism, can it be mere coincidence that the sociologist who analyzed religion in terms of the gap between sacred and profane, Emile Durkheim, was the son of a rabbi? Nor is it surprising that the anthropologist who insisted that binary opposition (nature/culture, raw/cooked, "hot"/"cold") is locked into all social structures and mental processes is Lévi-Strauss, the grandson of a rabbi. A third French...