Keywords In and For the New Jewish Studies

Take the interesting case of Brandeis historian Stephen Whitfield, who proposes that Jewish religious tradition has fostered almost all significant modern intellectual achievements. 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? [...]oddly, Jewish thought gets sole credit for thinking in and about "binarisms"-in other words, Whitfield appears to suggest that rabbinical traditions so inform the evolution of the Jewish mind that Jews have a special talent for thinking in paired opposites. [...]Whitfield goes on to note (in the same passage quoted above) the special "dualistic" thinking of cultural theorist Marjorie Garber and comedian Lenny Bruce. Renowned communal spokespersons Earl Raab and Seymour Martin Lipset, for example, documented in 1995 that during the last three decades Jews have nude up 50 percent of the cop two hundred intellectuals, 40 percent of American Nobel Prize winners in science and economics, 20 percent of professors at the leading universities, 21 percent of high level civil servants, 40 percent of partners in the leading law firms in New York and Washington, 26 percent of the reporters, editors, and executives of the major print and broadcast media, 59 percent of the directors, writers, and producers of the fifty top-grossing motion pictures from 1965 to 1982, and 58 percent of directors, writers, and producers in two or more primetime television series.16 More succinctly, Ari Shavit referred in passing in the New York Times Magazine in 1997 to the "scores of Nobel Prize winners" among Jews.17 More elaborately again in 2005, Professor Ruth Wisse of Harvard, speaking at Princeton University, commented on the number of Nobel Prizes awarded to Jews despite the fact that Jews constitute a miniscule fraction of the world's population.18 And on a website entitled "Intellectual Output from the [Arab] Muslim World," an organization calling itself Masada2000 continues in 2006 to take pride in the 169 Nobel Prizes awarded to the mere 12 million Jews in the world, compared with the 7 total Nobels awarded to the 1.4 billion Muslims.19 One hears this sort of thing all the time in Jewish circles. The AJCongress worked for Civil Rights and was a vocal critic of Israel's Likud Party in the 1980s; its leaders and members worked for the rights of American immigrants, workers, and other di