Discussion+Questions+Week+8


 * Ruth Wisse, //Jews and Power//**


 * 1) What attitudes, strategies, and relationships to power did Jews develop during their pre-diasporic and diasporic periods, as described by Wisse in part 1? What effect did Jewish powerlessness have on how others treated them? What effect did powerlessness have on how Jews treated themselves?
 * 2) What are the "unanticipated consequences" of modernity described in part 2, positive and negative? How does modern antisemitism exploit Jewish powerlessness, and the Jewish relationship to modernity?
 * 3) Why does Wisse see many Zionist thinkers as having failed to accurately diagnose and address the nature of Jewish power and powerlessness? In what ways does she see pre-Zionist Jewish attitudes towards power persisting into the 20th and 21st centuries, even among Israelis?
 * 4) How has contemporary anti-Zionism continued and transformed earlier patterns of antisemitism? What, according to Wisse, has been its effect on Jews? On Arabs? What does Wisse mean by the creation of "surrogate Jews" through the Palestinian "usurpation of Jewish symbols, history, and identity"?