Re: [ha-Safran]: Encyclopedia on Race and Racism
I called Gale and confirmed that John H. Moore is indeed the Dr. John Hartwell Moore currently at the University of Florida. Bingo. Give that librarian a kewpie doll. Anne Jaron New York Messages and opinions expressed on Hasafran are those of the individual author and are not necessarily endorsed by the Association of Jewish Libraries (AJL) === Submissions for Ha-Safran, send to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] SUBscribing, SIGNOFF commands send to: Listproc @ lists.acs.ohio-state.edu Questions, problems, complaints, compliments;-) send to: galron.1 @ osu.edu Ha-Safran Archives: Current: http://www.mail-archive.com/hasafran%40lists.acs.ohio-state.edu/maillist.html History: http://www.mail-archive.com/hasafran%40lists.acs.ohio-state.edu/history.html AJL HomePage http://www.JewishLibraries.org
Re: [ha-Safran]: Encyclopedia on Race and Racism
I'm back from my vacation and wanted to follow up on a couple of items I posed earlier. I did a search for John Hartwell Moore in Academic Search Complete (EBSCO) (Moore, John H.) and Web of Science (ISI) (moore jh). It is difficult to distinguish one John H. Moore from another -- none of the articles I looked at are signed "Hartwell" -- so this report lacks the sort of authority I'd prefer. The most prolific John H. Moore writing in a field I would think related to racism is a professor of anthropology at University of Florida who specializes in "kinship, demography, Marxism, N. Amer Indians." However, though he teaches a class on Race and Racism, his campus profile, his own Web page and his outdated vita do not mention editing a major, prize-winning encyclopedia, so he seems a at first glance to be a doubtful candidate. http://web.anthro.ufl.edu/faculty/Moore.shtml If I'm wrong and this is our guy -- he's been writing overtly political pieces about "Race, Ethnicity and Biological Warfare" more recently for _Covert Action_ which is rife with anti-Israel screeds. So then again, maybe this IS our guy, and he just hasn't updated his vita yet. He does not appear to have written anything in scholarly journals (or any monographs, for that matter) about racism. Nor does he appear to have any publications in print later than 2003. If this is our guy, Gale was scraping the bottom of the barrel in terms of academic credibility. I have not identified another likely candidate by any variation on J.H. Moore, or any likely author Moore who has written on racism. Following the same strategies and sources, it appears that Noel Ignatiev is an even bigger cipher. This is not to say that Ignatiev hasn't published some well regarded material at some point in his career but he seems to have gone horribly off track ten or more years ago. For instance, he authored a book, _How the Irish Became White_ (Routledge, 1996) and was featured in the PBS documentary "Africans in America" (1998) but disappears from the scholarly radar soon after. Ignatiev's subsequent work shows up in his own "journal" http://RaceTraitor.com, which has the slogan "treason to whiteness is loyalty to humanity." If you go to his site, you can look at a May 2004 article entitled "Zionism, Antisemitism, and the People of Palestine," that closely mirrors the encyclopedia article. If anyone find other material that either supports or refutes my findings, please share it with the list. This is the material we need to assemble if we are going to counter these outrageous publications. I've become convinced that there is little point playing the anti-Semitism card. Those who don't already care, aren't going to take up the cause. Far more effective, in my view, is a strategy demonstrating how low in the academic world you need to stoop or how far outside of good scholarly practice you have to stray in order to get this sort of work published. Let's let the publisher know that they've failed to meet basic scholarly criteria in putting this material in print. And we should begin to collect such documentation and make it available on the AJL site in order to have it available for anyone to view. -- Lee Jaffe, UC Santa Cruz Messages and opinions expressed on Hasafran are those of the individual author and are not necessarily endorsed by the Association of Jewish Libraries (AJL) === Submissions for Ha-Safran, send to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] SUBscribing, SIGNOFF commands send to: Listproc @ lists.acs.ohio-state.edu Questions, problems, complaints, compliments;-) send to: galron.1 @ osu.edu Ha-Safran Archives: Current: http://www.mail-archive.com/hasafran%40lists.acs.ohio-state.edu/maillist.html History: http://www.mail-archive.com/hasafran%40lists.acs.ohio-state.edu/history.html AJL HomePage http://www.JewishLibraries.org
Re: [ha-Safran]: Encyclopedia on Race and Racism
First, can I do a bit of bibliographic verification here? I frequently see the publisher of this text given as Gale in the messages on this list. However, when I followed the link to Amazon, the publisher is given as Macmillan. The Macmillan edition on Amazon is three volumes and has a publication date of 2007 (ISBN 978-0028660202). But searching Google by title I found the same item on Gale's site, but again with the Macmillan imprint but with 2008 publication date. I just want to make sure that we're talking about the same edition and suggest that identify the publisher as Macmillan (or at least Gale/Macmillan) to be consistent with the information others will see. Second, I've added my review of the Zionism article to the Amazon site. Third, has anyone found anything about John Hartwell Moore, the editor? I'm on vacation so I don't have access to my academic sources, but he doesn't show up anywhere in Google except in connection with this edition. The article's author, Noel Ignatiev, however, is a nut-job with a long history of beyond-marginal racial issues. He runs a Web site called RaceTraitor.com with the theme that all racial identity is wrong. He was fired, according to Wikipedia, from a position as a tutor at Harvard for opposing the installation of kosher toasters in a dining hall. He has published academic works on the issue of race but it looks like it's been a while and I don't see anything in the mainstream press on Israel or Zionism. This seems to be an increasingly popular tactic on the anti-Israel front. Find a genuine PhD with no credentials or marginal credentials in any of the related areas to write a pseudo-academic article superficially about Zionism. Since they don't know anything about Zionism, they skate over the facts, or make them up off the top of their heads, whatever suits their larger theme. Terms like "post-Zionism" meaning that the concept is obsolete are showing up more and more. The "racist" tag is an older and once-discredited ploy that's making a comeback in a number of creative ways. "Proving" that Zionism, the foundational ideology behind the creation of the modern State of Israel, is flawed is part of a strategy to attack Israel. (Similar to those who claim there was no Holocaust, or that it was exaggerated, or was a ploy to bolster the Zionist movement, if you can undermine the founding drive to create a Jewish state, that there was no legitimate motivation, it's easier to criticize Israel.) It is important to ignore qualified scholars in the field because a hack will do the kind of half-assed hatchet job you need, overlooking the evidence that might undermine his position and highlighting the most skewed and prejudicial evidence available. We had a "conference" on post-Zionism at UCSC where the panel included a couple of reputable scholars, such as Judith Butler, but was mainly filled out by C-list academics. None of the panelists had any scholarly publications on Zionism to their credit. But all the panelists had taken active roles opposing Israel in their personal lives. That's what it takes to get on a dais or published in an encyclopedia these days, just a willingness to trash Israel without any qualifications or attention to scholarly standards. The convener was an anthropologist who does not teach, conduct research or write on the topic, not a political scientist or historian or Middle East scholar, and she refused any suggestions for speakers qualified to speak on the topic. Ironically, Butler choose to speak on Hannah Arendt as an example of opposition to Israel, however admitting that she hadn't read the _Jewish Writings_ while the editor of that edition sat in the audience. I read an exchange between Norman Finkelstein and one of his reviewers. The reviewer had trashed _Beyond Chutzpah_ saying F. had failed to do scholarly research. F. responded in the letters column that he'd combed through thousands of documents as part of his research. In the same issue, the reviewer responded to F. saying, "Yes, but you brought forward only the evidence that supported your thesis and ignored the rest, and that's not scholarship." I spoke to a local scholar -- a real, dyed-in-the-wool scholar -- about this situation, and he said the thought American academia had come to model itself on the U.S. judicial system where opposing attorneys spend all their efforts trying to suppress the evidence that would hurt their case. Academics today seem to focus completely on establishing their thesis by selectively choosing which evidence to include and ignoring the rest. Had the anthropologist who convened the UCSC "post-Zionism" event conducted her research with the same focus on personal prejudice over scholarly integrity as she brought to assembling a panel of speakers, she could have been accused of academic fraud. There are some fields where "cherry-picking" evidence is not acceptable, but I fear that the so
RE: [ha-Safran]: Encyclopedia on Race and Racism
Unfortunately, Gale and many of the main publishing houses, are not favorable to the Jewish position in general. I always look very carefully when thinking of purchasing a book, many times finding questionable statements. Even in the back of a Gale Holocaust book, they mentioned that if Israel would treat the Arabs better, they would avoid another Holocaust. Alas, between the Anti-Semitism and the fact that the Israeli PR is terrible, we are not seen in a favorable light. Rayna Rayna Clark YULA GIRLS HIGH SCHOOL 1619 S, Robertson Blvd. Los Angeles, CA 90035 tel (310) 203-0755 Messages and opinions expressed on Hasafran are those of the individual author and are not necessarily endorsed by the Association of Jewish Libraries (AJL) === Submissions for Ha-Safran, send to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] SUBscribing, SIGNOFF commands send to: Listproc @ lists.acs.ohio-state.edu Questions, problems, complaints, compliments;-) send to: galron.1 @ osu.edu Ha-Safran Archives: Current: http://www.mail-archive.com/hasafran%40lists.acs.ohio-state.edu/maillist.html History: http://www.mail-archive.com/hasafran%40lists.acs.ohio-state.edu/history.html AJL HomePage http://www.JewishLibraries.org
