Stanford University Press Blog

In Memory of Alan Mintz

Mintz’s commitment to Hebrew literature came through powerfully in his writing.

Select works of Alan Mintz. Photo by Kalie Caetano.

Last week, the field of Jewish Studies lost an influential scholar whose work leaves a lasting impression on the study of Hebrew literature. Alan Mintz passed away on May 20, just a few weeks before the planned publication of his latest book, a major critical study of S.Y. Agnon’s A City in Its Fullness.

We at Stanford University Press were grateful for the opportunity to work with Alan Mintz, whose intellectual commitment to interpreting and advocating for the importance of Hebrew literature came through powerfully in his writing. We extend our heartfelt condolences to the larger community of Alan’s colleagues, students, friends, and family who will keenly feel his loss.

Here, we share remembrances of Alan from current and former editors of the Stanford Studies in Jewish History and Culture series who worked with Alan throughout the years.

 

—STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

From the Vote to the Vatican

In the Trump era, the relationship between Catholics and U.S. politics is complicated.

by MANLIO GRAZIANO

Donald Trump and Pope Francis. Image by DonkeyHotey. CC BY-SA 2.0 via Flickr.

The November election showed a major shift in the Catholic vote: for the first time since 1968, the majority of Catholics did not vote in the same way as the majority of Americans. In 1968, the majority of Catholics voted for Hubert Humphrey, while the majority of the popular vote went, as we know, to Richard Nixon (though Humphrey lost almost 20 percentage points to the Republicans as compared to the 1964 elections). Even in 2000, Catholics voted in the same way as the majority of their fellow citizens: 51% of them chose Al Gore, who was eventually defeated by the Electoral College system. This identity between “Catholic vote” and popular vote has led many observers to state that a “Catholic vote” simply does not exist, or even that “Catholics are the bellwether voters: as go Catholics, so goes the nation.”

Last November, the majority of Catholics voted by a comfortable majority (55%) for the candidate who collected only a minority of the popular vote (46.1%), a difference of about nine percentage points. This is a noteworthy change, one that signals at least two things: first, that the Catholic hierarchy did not challenge Donald Trump, despite what certain statements made by Pope Francis during the campaign had led people to think; and second, that there is a majority of Catholics in the United States who want to carve their social, and therefore political, advancement in stone. And that these two phenomena influence each other.

Last November, the majority of Catholics voted by a comfortable majority for the candidate who collected only a minority of the popular vote.

 

In Rome We Trust » reveals how Catholics have come to play an increasingly significant role in American politics.

This thirst for social advancement can be explained in the following way: since the end of the World War II, Catholics have climbed the social ladder, achieving the pre-eminent role in the political life of the country that I describe in my new book, In Rome We Trust. The result is that they now have dreams of overcoming the traditional social hierarchy that identifies America with WASPs. Some of them want to see a “De-WASPing of America’s Power Elite,” as Robert C. Christopher puts it in Crashing the Gates–something achieved in the Supreme Court before the death of Antonin Scalia, when three Jews and six Catholics made up the country’s most important judicial body. Others (now clearly a majority) on the contrary, aspire to join the WASP ranks, thus distinguishing not from the WASPs themselves, but from those Catholics who remain on the lowest rungs of the social ladder, essentially, recent immigrants from Latin America and the Philippines. The most radical wing of this latter group has pushed its “WASP-ing” agenda to the point of abandoning Catholicism for militant evangelicalism (Mike Pence, Sarah Palin, Ted Cruz, and Neil Gorsuch are the best known examples).

Modern Politics in Premodern History

How national narratives have obscured the history of India’s most controversial king.

by AUDREY TRUSCHKE

This portrait of the Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb mounted on a horse, and ready for battle, was originally produced circa 1660.

In 1700, the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb was arguably the richest, most powerful man in the world. He ruled for nearly fifty years, from 1658 until 1707, over a vast empire in South Asia that boasted a population exceeding the entirety of contemporary Europe. Today, he has been forgotten in the West.

The Mughal Empire at Aurangzeb’s death in 1707. Reproduced with permission from Juggernaut Books.

In modern-day India, however, Aurangzeb is alive in public debates, national politics, and people’s imaginations. From Mumbai to Delhi to Hyderabad, Indians debate his legacy and, overwhelmingly, condemn him as the cruelest king in Indian history. The list of charges against Aurangzeb is severe and, if they were all true, shocking. Aurangzeb, a Muslim, is widely thought to have destroyed thousands of Hindu temples, forced millions of Indians to convert to Islam, and enacted a genocide of Hindus. As I am reminded daily on Twitter, many Indians sincerely believe that Aurangzeb was Hitler and ISIS rolled into one with a single objective: To eradicate Hindus and Hinduism.

My narrative of Aurangzeb in Aurangzeb: The Life and Legacy of India’s Most Controversial King—based on extensive research and relying on primary source documents—does not match his current reputation. Accordingly, much of the response to Aurangzeb in India, published in February 2017 under the title Aurangzeb: The Man and The Myth, has been fierce. I am the target of daily, sometimes hourly, hate speech on social media. I am regularly attacked on the basis of my gender, nationality, race, and perceived religion. I have even faced (so far, limited) calls to ban Aurangzeb and even to ban me from India. In this blog post, I explore the roots of the controversy over Aurangzeb, my role therein as a historian, and the harsh realities of producing historical analysis in a world where many privilege politically expedient falsehoods.

Negotiating North Korea

Given the mixed results of the past, could sanctions work on North Korea moving forward?

by STEPHAN HAGGARD and MARCUS NOLAND

"North Korea Victory Day." Photo by Stefan Krawsowski. CC BY 2.0 via Flickr.

Following the Mar-a-Lago summit, President Trump touted his cooperation with President Xi Jinping on North Korea as a diplomatic win. In the weeks since the summit, the outlines of the administration’s policy toward the peninsula have become more clear. Under the name of “maximum pressure and engagement,” Secretary Tillerson has outlined a strategy that includes more aggressive sanctions, while leaving military options open. Yet at the same time, he has promised that the United States would be willing to engage in negotiations—long a Chinese demand—were North Korea to express a willingness to discuss denuclearization. He has even stated that the United States is not seeking regime change nor unification and could provide North Korea security guarantees.

Hard Target » captures the effects of sanctions and inducements on North Korea and provides a detailed reconstruction of the role of economic incentives in the bargaining around the country's nuclear program.

The history of such two-track efforts, which have resurfaced repeatedly since the first North Korean nuclear crisis some 25 years ago, are often plagued by complications that undermine the strategy. In Hard Target: Sanctions, Inducements, and the Case of North Korea, we investigate the history of these efforts, which are dogged by two problems. The first is that sanctions require coordination. At various times the United States has faced difficulty aligning not only China, but South Korea as well, around more robust pressure on the North. Since the onset of the second nuclear crisis in 2002, multilateral and other sanctions have had the perverse effect of pushing North Korea’s trade toward China, which now accounts for nearly 90 percent of bilateral merchandise trade. The changing geography of trade compounds these coordination problems. Getting North Korea to move has increasingly become a question of how to get China to move.

Xi Jinping’s decision to cooperate with the United States with respect to North Korea was also influenced in part by US sticks and carrots. Military blandishments might have helped spur China’s new engagement on the issue, reminding Beijing that North Korea is a strategic liability. The decision to abjure naming China a currency manipulator and threats of secondary sanctions—placing sanctions on Chinese entities doing business with North Korea—also might have had some effect. But the basis of cooperation with China undoubtedly rests on US commitments to re-enter negotiations if North Korea signals interest, with the inevitable discussion of quid-pro-quos and inducements that such negotiations necessarily entail.

Modern Iran in 8 Songs

From classical melodies to rap, Iran’s music reveals its long struggle for political freedom.

by NAHID SIAMDOUST

Public domain via Pixabay.

 

Soundtrack of the Revolution » offers a striking account of Iranian culture, politics, and social change to provide an alternative history of the Islamic Republic.

Music was one of the first casualties of the Iranian Revolution. Ayatollah Khomeini decreed early on that music was “opium for the masses” and so it was banned in 1979. But music has deep roots in Iranian culture and quickly crept back into public life. Indeed, in the absence of a free official public sphere, music has offered one of the most important vehicles for political expression in the face of government repression, creating a channel of mass communication that has transformed public culture within the limits of an authoritarian state. At the same time, Iranian music tells the story of the evolution of the state itself, from a severe republic of mourning to one that allows for a certain type of controlled fun. Now more than thirty-five years on from the revolution, both the children of the revolution and their music have come of age and the art they have produced offers a striking account of Iranian culture, politics, and social change. Taken together, the eight songs below shed light on issues at the heart of debates in Iran—about its future and identity, the quest for political freedom, and changing notions of religiosity.

11 Indie Booksellers We Love

More than retailers, bookstores are cultural anchors—and these are a few of our favorites.

by THE STANFORD PRESS STAFF

Public domain via Pixabay.

An independent bookstore is more than a retailer; It’s a resource and a refuge for the readerly and the writerly, often doubling as a community space (sometimes tripling as a cat enclave). Local booksellers are cultural anchors, connecting us with information, knowledge, and worlds beyond and it is this cherished institution that we celebrate today, on Independent Bookstore Day. Indies across the country are marking the occasion with great events and special offers and we’re commemorating the day with a list of some of our all-time favorite bookshops.

The Cold World of Deindustrialization

As in times past, poets are responding forcefully to the economic conditions of the day.

by JASPER BERNES

Public domain via Pixabay.

What happened? There was a brief moment, after Trump’s surprise victory, when the people whose faces appear on TV or whose words appear in newspapers were shocked enough that they were willing to consider tough answers to this question. The economy always rears its ugly head in a crisis, and for a few weeks in November and December 2016, you could actually hear some of these pundits acknowledge that the economy of the 2010s had failed almost everyone who wasn’t already affluent and that, as a result, many who could generally be relied upon to vote Democrat, both white and non-white, either stayed home, voted third party, or voted Trump. Putinoia and fake news about fake news eventually crowded these stories off the front page and into more marginal venues, but the question remains for anyone paying attention: What the hell happened? To hear Bay Area poet Tongo Eisen-Martin tell it,

a man lost a wager

with the god of good causes,
you know,
stood up for himself
a little too late
(maybe too early)

I can still see
Twenty angles of his jaw
Zig zagging through
The cold world
Of deindustrialization

“art to it,” I will tell my closest friends one day.

I quote the end of this poem, “Wave at the People Walking Upside Down,” not only because I think it’s brilliant, like all of Eisen-Martin’s work, but because I think it answers as well as any text the question briefly entertained by the pundits. The best poets have always responded forcefully to the economic conditions that surround them. In the 1960s, during the height of industrialization, poets were enormously perceptive about the destructiveness of factory and office, workplaces that were, at the time, organized according to Frederick Winslow Taylor’s “scientific management” and Henry Ford’s assembly line in ways nearly everyone who worked in them felt were stultifying, joyless, and soul-killing. Against the brutal repetitions of the assembly line or typing pool, poets and other artists instead imagined forms of laboring together that were participatory, creative, varied, and open-ended. In other words, they imagined that work could be made more like art.

Poets imagined that work could be made more like art.

The Sway of Economists in Public Policy

How have economic experts come to wield so much influence in policy making?

by JOHAN CHRISTENSEN

Public domain via Pixabay.

During the Brexit campaign, the British politician Michael Gove famously stated, “I think people in this country have had enough of experts […] saying that they know what is best and getting it consistently wrong.” The Trump administration’s indifference to the scientific consensus on climate change and promotion of “alternative facts” is only a more extreme expression of what has become a hallmark of the current wave of populist politics: a profound rejection of experts and facts. Indeed, the populist movements raging in the U.S. and Europe can be understood as a reaction against the power of experts in contemporary policy making—whether the targets are the “technocrats in Brussels,” the scientists in the Environmental Protection Agency, or more vaguely, the élites who make policy decisions.

Since the 1980s, economists have had an outsize influence on the design of public policies in many Western countries.

Some of the fiercest of these attacks have been directed at economists and their political sway. Since the 1980s, economists have had an outsize influence on the design of public policies in many Western countries, pushing neoliberal reforms that have increased the reliance on the market and often produced widening income gaps. The deregulation of financial markets and the privatization of parts of the public sector are only a few examples.

The power of economists in politics takes many forms—from the influence of international economic expert institutions, such as the International Monetary Fund or the World Bank, to the role of advisory bodies, such as the Council of Economic Advisers in the U.S. But scholars also point to the symbolic power of economics: Having economic expertise is seen as a guarantee for sound and responsible policies. Every time Italy is in deep financial trouble and needs to reassure investors, who do they call on to lead the government? An economist.

“Wrong Time, Wrong Place”

The clarion call of two men wrongfully detained in Guantanamo.

by DANIEL HARTNETT NORLAND

Guantanamo Camp X-Ray, January 2002. U.S. Army Military Police escort a detainee to his cell in Camp X-Ray at Naval Base Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Photo by Photographers Mate 1st Class Shane T. McCoy. Public domain.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions recently described the military prison at Guantanamo as a “very fine place.” I’d like to introduce him to two men who know better: Lakhdar Boumediene and Mustafa Ait Idir, who spent seven years in Guantanamo before establishing their innocence.

Lakhdar and Mustafa were living quiet, peaceful lives in Sarajevo when, in October 2001, they were arrested by Bosnian police and accused of participating in a terrorist plot. After a three-month investigation uncovered no evidence, all charges were dropped. However, instead of releasing them, Bosnian officials—acting under the cover of darkness and intense U.S. pressure—handed them over to American soldiers who brought them, blindfolded and shackled, to Guantanamo.

Lakhdar and Mustafa were living quiet, peaceful lives in Sarajevo when, in October 2001, they were arrested by Bosnian police and accused of participating in a terrorist plot.

By 2002, military intelligence officers realized that the charges against Lakhdar and Mustafa were—as acknowledged in emails that surfaced years later—“bullshit.” Nevertheless, it took six-and-a-half years and a landmark Supreme Court ruling, Boumediene v. Bush, for Lakhdar and Mustafa to even have a chance to appear before a federal judge and argue their innocence. When they finally did, that judge, George W. Bush–appointee Richard Leon, was stunned by the weakness of the government’s case and ordered their release.

Tempting Fate in Northeast Asia

Fear of instability in Northeast Asia mounts as US intentions in the region remain unclear.

by THOMAS FINGAR

U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson shakes hands with China's President Xi Jinping before their bilateral meeting in Beijing, China, on March 19, 2017. Photo by the U.S. State Department. Public domain.

To depict President Trump’s rejection of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) as the functional equivalent of Britain’s withdrawal from the European Union would be an exaggeration, but because trade is the primary instrument of regional integration in Northeast Asia, its implications are more worrisome than those of Brexit. While Europe has cultivated a system of shared values and made conscious efforts to overcome historical animosities and reduce the risks of war by building interlocking institutions and fostering a “European” identity, Northeast Asia has eschewed integrating mechanisms and the dilution of national identities. What integration has been achieved is the result of market-based economic decisions and American engagement. Trump’s rejection of TPP and repudiation of Obama’s “rebalance” to Asia undercuts both pillars of regional stability and prosperity.

Trump’s actions would be cause for concern under any circumstances, but they are especially worrisome because the region is more unsettled than it has been for several decades. North Korea is adding to its nuclear arsenal. China’s economy is slowing but Beijing’s military buildup and use of economic and political leverage to pressure its neighbors have intensified. South Korea’s president has been impeached and imprisoned; her approach to North Korea and “Comfort Women” agreement to reduce tensions with Japan might be repudiated after the upcoming special election. Japan’s modest adjustments to military policy in response to threats from North Korea and Chinese pressure over disputed islands have unsettled domestic constituencies and enraged Chinese and Korean politicians.

Trump’s actions would be cause for concern under any circumstances, but they are especially worrisome because the region is more unsettled than it has been for several decades.

The Not-So-Secular Age

In times of neoliberal precariousness, religion helps master everyday dread and ignominy.

by VIKASH SINGH

An image from Kanwar, India's largest annual religious pilgrimage. Photo by Vikash Singh.

In his 1967 book, The Sacred Canopy, sociologist, Peter Berger, famously argued that religion would decline and become redundant as the world modernized. Three decades later, equally famously, he did a volte-face and said he had been proven wrong; religion was back with vengeance. Like so many “theorists of modernity,” Berger had made the mistake of thinking of modernization as abstract history instead of concrete social reality, a tack sociologists inherited from Enlightenment philosophy. The philosophes of that era entertained a conceptual understanding of history as a long arc with an inbuilt direction, purpose, or goal (telos) and seen through this lens the decline of religion, as science and technology took over, was regarded as an inevitable, scientific truth—one of sociology’s own “laws” to rival the inviolable rules that govern the hard sciences. Yet in our fascination with science, carried away by the systematic biases of Cartesian objectivity, we have ignored something critical: the concrete conditions of human existence.

We are wont to approach the resurgence of religion, as it is often called, with suspicion, as fundamentalist and fanatic. But one must be careful.

I spent about a year, studying the Kanwar, a religious movement in India, in which millions of people carry water from the river Ganga to local Śiva shrines. This used to be a modest event, involving a few thousand people, but the pilgrimage has grown explosively over the last couple of decades. We are wont to approach such resurgence of religion, as it is often called, with suspicion, as fundamentalist and fanatic. And considering the rapid political ascendancy of the Hindu right over the same period of time, there may be some justification for such a reading. But one must be careful, because that is precisely the trap of abstraction.

As soon as I approached these subjects in their situated material and moral circumstances, I found not “fanatics,” but poor young men and women coming of age in conditions of hopeless uncertainty. These were people trying to find a meaning for their lives and find a path to life, livelihoods, and honor, in a sea of traumatic misfortunes and deprivation. In an exclusive global economy, premised on seducing and ingesting people as consumers while violently rejecting them as workers, religion becomes an alternate field for performed existence as well as social and self-recognition. In conditions where the overwhelming majority of workers are informally employed, and the prospects of a stable livelihood and respectable future are faint if not illusory, the often painful journey repeats, performs, and prepares for a daunting transition to an elusive adulthood. It is an open and freely accessible, yet formidable and valued stage for people to practice and demonstrate their talents, resolve, and moral worth.

Common Sense Science

The search for the cause of yellow fever reveals a lot about the early American republic.

by THOMAS APEL

During the yellow fever epidemic of 1793, Philadelphia authorities sent carriages around the city to pick up the dead and dying.

In August 1793, pestilence struck Philadelphia, the political capital of the nascent United States and its center of economic, cultural, and scientific activity. Those stricken exhibited high fever, chills, and delirium; in the worst cases, their skin turned yellow, and they emitted the infamous “black vomit,” a foul mixture made of partially digested blood that had hemorrhaged from the organs. Doctors who attended the sick identified the disease as yellow fever, a wasting illness that usually prevailed in tropical environments and struck down as many as half of those afflicted. By November, when the fever finally relented, more than four thousand people had died. Those who survived hoped that it would never return.

With the future of the republic hanging in the balance, thinkers hoping to prevent the disease posed a deceptively simple question: What caused yellow fever?

To the consternation of Americans, yellow fever reappeared annually from 1793-1805. The disease killed thousands in Philadelphia and New York, and hundreds more in Boston, Baltimore, Charleston, and New Orleans. Yellow fever was the most pressing natural problem of the era. Besides the deaths, the fever incited frantic mass evacuations. It halted trade in the nation’s busiest commercial centers for months at a time and led to burdensome quarantines and expensive sanitary reform measures. To many, yellow fever also seemed to erode public virtue, the cornerstone of a healthy republic, as fearful citizens turned against each other. For many others, the fever constituted a direct challenge to American exceptionalism, the pervasive belief that Americans were God’s people and were destined to escape the cycles of history that doomed past peoples.

Race and the Cold War

Outspoken iconoclast, Andrew Young, brought a new worldview to the Carter presidency.

by NANCY MITCHELL

Andrew Young and Jimmy Carter meet in the Oval Office.

“A lot of times I think back about mistakes that I made as president, the things I would have done differently,” Jimmy Carter said, sitting opposite me in his modest living room in Atlanta, at the Carter Center. He mentioned the first mistake with a wry smile. “Frivolously, I would say—one more helicopter for the Iran rescue mission. Which is where I generally stop.”

But this time the president went further. After a pause, he added, “The other thing that I did that doesn't cause me to be proud was letting Cy Vance force me in effect to fire Andy Young after he had met with the PLO.... I wish I hadn't done it. But Cy Vance threw down his gauntlet and said, in effect, it was Andy or him.... I wish I had let Cy resign.”

Why was firing Andrew Young one of Jimmy Carter's main regrets?

A leader in the Civil Rights Movement, Young had been appointed by Carter as the US ambassador to the United Nations in 1977. But Young was much more than a diplomat and Carter's point man in Africa. He was the outlier, the iconoclast. In an administration that embodied the traditional view of the Cold War, Young expressed, again and again, an alternate view of reality.

In an administration that embodied the traditional view of the Cold War, Young expressed, again and again, an alternate view of reality.

Young got into hot water almost immediately. In an interview with Dan Rather on January 31, 1977, he said: “There's a sense in which the Cubans bring a certain stability and order—to Angola, for instance.” He went on to explain that, for him, communism was not the worst enemy. Young had been at Martin Luther King, Jr.'s side when the FBI had tried to discredit him as a communist. Young told Rather, “Most colored peoples of the world are not afraid of communism. Maybe that's wrong but communism has never been a threat to me. I have no love for communism. I could never be a communist. I could never support that system of government. But—it's never been a threat. Racism has always been a threat—and that has been the enemy of all of my life.”

Embodying History

How Fred Korematsu’s story reveals history’s evocative and empathetic power.

by KAREN M. INOUYE

The Google doodle from January 30th, 2017 commemorated the 98th birthday of Fred Korematsu.

In 1942 Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, directing over 100,000 people of Japanese descent to leave their homes and relocate to prison camps bounded by barbed wire and guard towers. Most of those affected were American citizens, including Fred Korematsu who became one of a handful of Japanese Americans to challenge the presidential order, not once, but twice. Facing a conviction for evading internment, he first brought his case before the Supreme Court in 1944, which, in a landmark ruling, affirmed the validity of the executive order. That decision rested on the reasoning that protection against espionage outweighed Kormatsu’s individual rights as a citizen and it stood until 1983 when a district court in northern California struck it down.

The case, Korematsu v. United States, turned its namesake into a civil rights hero whose memory was honored earlier this year with a Google Doodle commemorating Korematsu’s birthday, January 30th—a date that in California is now remembered officially as Fred Kormatsu Day. Remarkably, despite this legacy, Karen Korematsu-Haigh first learned the history of her father, Fred Korematsu, not at home but in high school. As she told NPR:

It was a social studies class when my friend Maya got up in front of all of us to give a book report, an oral book report, about the Japanese-American internment. Her book was called “Concentration Camps USA” [by Roger Daniels]. And when she was talking about the Japanese-American internment, it was a subject I had not heard of before. No one spoke about it in my family. And then she went on to say that someone had resisted the exclusion order and resulted in a famous Supreme Court case, Korematsu v. the United States. Well, I sat there and said that’s my name. And the only thing I knew is that Korematsu is a very unusual Japanese name.

The Downfalls of Data

Our future successes will rely less on data and more on decisive action.

by JULIAN BIRKINSHAW and JONAS RIDDERSTRȦLE

 

We live in the information age—a period in human history in which data is the gospel and information is touted as the preeminent source of competitive advantage—for individuals and companies alike. In today’s business landscape many observers say the power to harness information is the key to future success. The McKinsey Global Institute has called big data the “next frontier for innovation, competition, and productivity,” while technophiles like Google’s Ray Kurzweil say the basis of advantage in the years ahead is simple: more data, more information, more knowledge.

But, where some see a world of accelerating change, we see the seeds of creative destruction taking hold. To be clear, technological innovation is a big part of our future, and harnessing information will continue to be an important part of every firm’s strategy—but we believe the case for big data and advanced analytics is overstated. Information overload at the individual level leads to distractedness and poor decision-making. At a corporate level, we end up with a bias toward rational, scientific evidence at the expense of intuition or gut feel. These pathologies have a deleterious effect, lessening the quality and speed of decision-making. What’s more, as data becomes ever more ubiquitous and search costs trend to zero, the capacity of information to provide any leading edge declines.

To be clear, technological innovation is a big part of our future, and harnessing information will continue to be an important part of every firm’s strategy—but we believe the case for big data and advanced analytics is overstated.