History As Bunk (Extract)

By MATT NESVISKY
Extract from an article in Issue 11, September 15, 2008 of The Jerusalem Report. To subscribe to The Jerusalem Report click here. A personal account of an academic spat reopens the question of teaching standards on racially polarized American campuses Some wag once observed that American universities lost their way when they stopped teaching King Lear and started teaching King Kong. I know whereof the wag speaks. I teach in the English department of just such an institution. The department offers courses in movies, science fiction and detective fiction, but affords no instruction in Romantic poetry or the Victorian novel. Equally peculiar, the English faculty also touts courses in African drama, poetry and fiction. Some of the latter literature is "English" only by virtue of translation. Mary Lefkowitz, a classicist at Wellesley College outside of Boston, has likewise been disturbed by courses taught at her campus. But at least when I raised questions about offerings at my college, nobody called me a "racist Jew bitch." Lefkowitz's trials began some 15 years ago when she wrote a review for The New Republic that discussed several books promoting the "stolen legacy" theory, a key concept in what has become known as Afrocentrism. The books included "Black Athena," by Cornell University professor of government Martin Bernal, "Stolen Legacy," by George G.M. James, a Guyanese-born scholar, and "Africa: Mother of Western Civilization," by Yosef A.A. Ben-Jochannan, whom Lefkowitz identifies as a "Falasha or Ethiopian Jew." All of these books maintain that what we know as ancient Greek thought actually originated in Egypt, and hence that the foundation of all Western philosophy, science and mathematics is African. Support for this notion comes from the assertion that Aristotle visited Egypt and stole all of his ideas from the great library at Alexandria. That no evidence whatsoever exists for this alleged act of cultural larceny does not trouble the Afrocentrists. Nor does the well-documented fact that the Alexandrian library was not even established until 100 years after Aristotle's death. Lefkowitz says she wrote a critical but temperate and reasoned review of these Afrocentric works, stressing that scholars and historians must base their ideas about the past on documentary and archaeological evidence and not on possibility, plausibility or wishful thinking. The reaction to her review was swift. In short, she was accused of being part of a conspiracy to suppress the great contribution of Africa to intellectual history. Alternately, she was simply labeled by more than one reader of her review a "racist Jew bitch." At about the same time as the publication of her review, Lefkowitz discovered that Anthony Martin, a professor in the Africana Studies Department at her own college, was teaching courses centered around the "stolen legacy." Lefkowitz felt personally hurt. She was, after all, a classics scholar of some 30 years' standing and knew her Greek and Latin sources. In her view, Martin was subjecting his students to myth in the guise of history and scholarship. The Wellesley College administration, according to Lefkowitz, was of no help whatsoever in this dispute. Its attitude was, "You have your view and he has his." Interesting viewpoint: Presumably David Irving or some other Holocaust denier could find a congenial roost at Wellesley College. Martin and Lefkowitz were soon trading barbs and publishing broadsides that challenged each other's views, if not their agendas. Although Lefkowitz writes in a reasoned and sensitive manner, between the lines lurks a feisty and perhaps even abrasive individual. She also made what I consider some ill-considered moves; among other things, she attempted to get her college's academic council to change the name of one of Martin's courses, this at a meeting in which Martin was not present. Meanwhile, in taking on Tony Martin she was inviting trouble. For openers, Martin was black (born in Trinidad), and one simply cannot criticize any black person on an American campus today without being regarded in some quarters as a racist. In addition, Martin was by some accounts volatile. In one incident, he apparently verbally abused a Jewish female student so harshly that she withdrew from the college. (Wellesley eventually settled a suit brought by the girl's parents for an undisclosed sum.) For that matter, Martin himself was litigious, having sued Wellesley in 1987 for discrimination because he disagreed with its evaluations of his scholarly work. (Wellesley again made a monetary settlement.) He sued the college once more in 1999, claiming racial bias for his denial of merit pay. (He lost that one and its appeal.) Martin would ultimately sue Lefkowitz for libel, a case that would drag on for more than five years before it was thrown out of court. Yet because Lefkowitz is not always judicious in her word choice, I suspect Martin may have grounds for another suit against her. For instance, she writes in her new book: "Ironically, in their quest to find racism in everything they disapprove of, race professionals like Cudjoe, Martin and Wilson too easily turn themselves into professional racists." The antagonism between Lefkowitz and Martin has long been manifested in their publications. In 1996, she published "Not Out of Africa: How Afrocentrism Became an Excuse to Teach Myth as History." But even before that (1993), Martin published (under his own imprint), "The Jewish Onslaught: Dispatches from the Wellesley Battlefront." This book was advertised in the Nation of Islam's periodical, "Blacks and Jews News." The Nation of Islam had also published "The Secret Relationship between Blacks and Jews," a 334-page work by unnamed "scholars" that purports to prove that Jews financed the slave trade. Martin and many of his students and colleagues heartily endorsed this thesis. Martin was among those who demanded that Jews pay reparations to African Americans. Both Lefkowitz and Martin have now retired from teaching at Wellesley College, but the problems persist. For one thing, the fraught relations between blacks and Jews in the U.S. and particularly in academia are no secret. For another, Lefkowitz raises several issues that her short book only touches upon. For example: Should a tenured professor be free to say or teach anything in class - including myths and nonsense, such as that the earth is flat? Is tenure in fact a tenable idea? Can professors claim a First Amendment right to teach whatever they want? If a scientist falsifies data, he or she gets chucked out; should that hold true for a historian? Is Lefkowitz correct to decry the post-modernist notion that all interpretations are equally valid? Must the desire for ethnic diversity at colleges incorporate the principle that all cultures and societies are equal in their contributions to the world of ideas? Can only an African American teach African American History, or a Jew teach Jewish studies? (At my university, the History Department's Holocaust survey is taught by a Roman Catholic, and by all accounts he does a superb job.) Mary Lefkowitz's depressing new book largely leaves such questions unanswered, and so do I. I'm still struggling to figure out if it's racist, elitist, Eurocentric or perhaps textist to suggest that studying "King Lear" is more rewarding than watching "King Kong?"• Contributing Editor Matt Nesvisky frequently writes about books. Extract from an article in Issue 11, September 15, 2008 of The Jerusalem Report. 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