Thanksgiving Shabbat dinner with lecture by Oxford Professor of American Literature Ron Bush

On November 25th the Oxford University Chabad Society held its annual Thanksgiving Shabbat Dinner at the Slager Jewish student centre. Guest of honour was Drue Heinz Professor of American Literature Ron Bush who has been teaching at St John’s College, Oxford for the last 14 years.

The topic of Professor Bush’s talk was ‘Ezra Pound and the Jews’ and the Professor was explaining to about 50 guests who were attending the dinner his fascination with the classic anti-Semite yet great poet, Ezra Pound.

Professor Bush made a connection between Pound and other famous literary minds with anti-Semitic tendencies, for example Henry James or Hemingway, and spoke of the deeply ambivalent attraction of modernist writers to Jews.

For his own conclusion as to where his fascination is coming from, Professor Bush quoted the Jewish American critic Alfred Kazin who wrote in 1949, “We cannot let them go nor can they let us go, for they imitate us, they are obviously fascinated by us,” and we in return are drawn not to modernist humanists “but precisely to the nasty ones.”

Professor Bush and the American as well as non-American guests of the Thanksgiving Shabbat Dinner were welcomed by president of Chabad Society, Oleg Giberstein, and Freida Brackman who once again delighted the crowd with a wonderful and traditional Turkey dinner.

Summary of the talk by Professor Ron Bush:

"Ezra Pound, one of the founders of Anglo-American modernism, was in some ways a classic anti-Semite of the early twentieth century who identified Jews with the bankers who profited from the Great War and also with the whole market system of modernity that reduced art (c.f. his “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley”) to the status of a commodity “in the market place”.

He was, however, also a great poet, without whom it is impossible to understand writing in English in the twentieth century.  

Examining his anti-Semitism raises interesting questions not only about the relations between the imagination and prejudice (questions that have more recently been pondered by Umberto Eco in 

As Jonathan Freedman has noticed, alienated and cosmopolitan critics of their own societies such as Henry James, Hemingway, T.S. Eliot, and Ezra Pound in their depictions of modernity obsessively presented rootless Jewish intellectuals as projections of what they most disliked and feared about their own situation.

And in response, several generations of Jewish American literary critics devoted their lives to containing, re-orienting and re-appropriating these writings in a larger project of associating the more positive aspects of modernity with themselves and with their community.

As the Jewish American critic Alfred Kazin wrote in 1949, “We cannot let them go nor can they let us go, for they imitate us, they are obviously fascinated by us,” and we in return are drawn not to modernist humanists “but precisely to the nasty ones.”"