Myers and Kurp are racists and sexists pure and simple -- the worst kind too, masquerading as principled intellectuals. And if they didn't want to be called such, they should have avoided the ghastly stupidity of putting an obviously slanted "canon" out for public consumption. Myers denying that his white maleness is a significant characteristic doesn't make it non-significant, it just means he's in complete denial of reality and ought to have studied some sociology along with his beloved literature. New of the Hitler Rule. First one to call “Racist! ” loses the argument. How convenient to invoke self-serving rules on the fly. It won't wash, though. In all seriousness, Mr Murtha, your comment is the perfect illustration of my point in “Identity and Freedom.” I do not get to decide my own identity for myself. You decide—and the fact of my being an Orthodox Jew disappears into “white maleness.” And this from someone who throws that notorious antisemite Henry Adams in my face!
So, no matter what decisions you may make about how which identifications you wish to emphasize -- and I agree those ought to be respected for what they are worth -- you cannot be un-raced (not in this society, you can't), you cannot be un-gendered. You cannot float free of human markers. Nor can I -- I am a white male, too. It carries baggage (positive as well as negative -- you and I have both been privileged by it). You are quite right about ethnicity, but your point extends to race and gender as well. Literature Review are not default positions. I hardly expect you to cave on these points if you have been manning the fort for twenty-plus years (it must have been exhausting). But I do want you to know: to a non-academic without a dog in the fight, you come across as preposterous, self-blinded, and, for someone who presumably has tenure, a sorry specimen.
While it is always nice to see oneself quoted (from eight years ago too! Two more years to literary immortality!), and while it is even nicer to learn that Patrick Murtha has been following my career for so long, it would be nicest of all to be quoted accurately. Even sorry specimens deserve that much. Murtha quotes from an exchange of letters in the American Historical Review. It can be found here. I wrote to defend the historian Robert S. Wistrich, whose scholarship was accused of being “characterized by neo-conservative polemic and a fervent nationalistic/ethnic partisanship.” The same critic attacked Lucy S. Dawidowicz, Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, and me—in strikingly similar terms. The four of us, I wrote in reply, “all have one thing in common. We are unashamed of our loyalty to the Jewish people.” After quoting Dawidowicz on a historian’s loyalties, I wrote the lines that Murtha quotes out of context. “. . . believe there is a fundamental difference between integrity and neutrality. This data was done by https://essayfreelancewriters.com!
We know that no one can attack Jews for being ‘nationalistic/ethnic partisans’ from a neutral standpoint. To mount such an attack, he must take up his position somewhere. Unless the word is code, it is not only Jews who are ‘ethnic’; everyone is. There is no not having ethnicity. We are a bit suspicious, then, of the uncritical hurry to equate ethnicity with nationalism. Note well that it was not I but an accuser of the Jews who equated (Jewish) ethnicity with nationalism. Neither the term ethnicity nor nationalism were originally mine, but the accuser’s. To merge my views with those of someone who holds that Jewish loyalties suffocate scholarly integrity, then, is to get things exactly backwards. The “uncritical hurry” to accuse anyone loyal to his own people of being a “nationalist” is an effort to discredit the loyalty. It is also to treat one’s own loyalties as transparent. Content has been created with the help of Essay Freelance Writers!
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