It is often thought, as the great German sociologist Max Weber put it in two influential essays, that politics as a vocation [Beruf, “calling”] and scholarship as a vocation were inimical, indeed antithetical. Scholarship, he thought, demanded an objectivity distorted by necessarily partisan power-political engagement; while politics, committed to transforming reality, required practical compromises in contradiction with truly dispassionate scholarship.
This tragic antinomy between thinking and doing is, rarely, overcome in the life and work of exceptional individuals. Barry Rubin, a truly outstanding contemporary student of Middle Eastern society and politics, was such a remarkable individual, whose life and work exemplify this overcoming. He was the rare academic able to maintain the highest standards of scholarship while engaging in a public discourse capable of playing a role in the realm of politics and power.
Barry recognized the key role true scholarship can play in the arena of public opinion as an analytic instrument in the political give-and-take of Israel’s unending struggle against both Arab and Palestinian enmity, and the often-hypocritical stance of “the international community”. His books and articles and teaching, his editorship of scholarly journals and chairing of research centers, and his media work, blogs and public appearances, trained generations of students and developed a remarkable, appreciative, and influential following.
In recent years, his often-caustic and sometimes parodically humorous eviscerations of American Middle Eastern and Israeli policy, and of the Obama Administration’s obtuseness and dishonesty, in particular, were beacons of sanity in an increasingly irrational political, diplomatic and media universe.
Barry was, out of knowledge, a realist about the Middle East: the relative backwardness of the Arab-Muslim states was endemic, despite the efforts of Western leftists and “post-colonial” apologists to paper over their contradictions and airbrush the essential brutality of their dictatorial governments. The UN was a hopeless, and toothless, entity, whose muddled interventions usually served only to worsen matters; and anti-Semitism, far from disappearing after the Holocaust, had taken on renewed life in ever-changing left-, right-, and on-campus forms—not least of which the boycott and BDS movements, the hypocrisy of which Barry mercilessly exposed.
Israel, to which he had made aliyah, was, despite its own faults and mistakes and constant Arab and Muslim enmity nevertheless an admirable, embattled democracy. Embodying the great legacy of the historic Jewish people, it was well worth a principled and intellectually powerful defense, one indeed demanded by our own integrity as scholars and as Jews.
With the advent of the computer and internet, the ether abounds today with self-appointed commentators and pundits of all kinds, both independent and institutionally-related, all claiming remarkable insights and unique “points of view”. Most of this self-servingly termed “first draft of history”, uninformed by knowledge, is passing Zeitgeschichte, what Plato long ago called opine, mere uninformed, and transient, opinion.
Barry Rubin’s work, however, is informed by a deep knowledge of history, politics, and language, of both Israel and the Arab world and of Western diplomacy in the region. Informed by a high scholarly standard, and by a drive to make such knowledge an instrument not only of understanding, but of politics in the deepest sense, it is the negation of such journalistic opinion, a scholarly oeuvre which will long endure.
It is my honor, and duty, to dedicate this issue of CIJR’s Isranet Briefing to Barry-–he fought for Israel down, almost literally, to his last breath, addressing the current “peace process” charade with all his waning strength and energy. He exemplified a rare, courageous and, I am afraid, declining breed, the engaged intellectual and, increasingly, the even more rare consciously Jewish and pro-Israel scholar. He bridged Weber’s distinction, and in so doing both illuminated the field of Israel and Middle East studies, and defended the well-being of the Jewish State and People. He will be deeply missed: and we will not, I fear, see his likes soon again.
(Prof. Krantz is Director of the Canadian Institute for Jewish Research,
and Editor of the Daily Isranet Briefing)
