Subject: Weisberg's Virtue, Wieseltier's Venom

Re: "{{Ballot Box: Bill Bradley's Naomi Wolf#31972:Show=11/15/99&idMessage=3998}}"

From:{{michael berube#2:mailto:m-berube@uiuc.edu}}

Date: Sun Nov 21

Kudos to Jacob Weisberg for reading Cornel West on his own instead of relying on Leon Wieseltier's version. Wieseltier's 1995 essay on "the decline of the black intellectual" wasn't really the "devastating critique" of West's work that Weisberg once took it to be, and it's relatively good to hear that although Weisberg had hitherto set his lights by it, he no longer agrees with Wieseltier's conclusion that West's work is "almost entirely worthless."

The truth is that Wieseltier's piece was a shameful, spite-ridden hatchet job on West, motivated almost entirely by the fact that West had been profiled in TheNew Yorker in 1994 and then assessed (along with lesser lights bell hooks and Michael Dyson) by me in a January 1995 essay that likened contemporary black intellectuals to the New York intellectuals of the postwar period. (Robert Boynton in the Feb. 1995 Atlantic Monthly had pressed the same analogy, by reference to Skip Gates, Shelby Steele, and Stanley Crouch, and the analogy sent all too many black and Jewish intellectuals into frenzies of identity politics and territorialism. Wieseltier's reaction was the worst, somewhat akin to his frantic, ill-informed denunciation of the essay by Lionel Trilling's son in a recent issue of the American Scholar.)

It's true that West can be formulaic, derivative, clunky, and annoyingly self-absorbed (though surely in this last category Wieseltier is more than a match for him). And he really is a mass of contradictions. But his virtues are considerable nonetheless, and as Weisberg writes, suit him well for the role of Bradley's counselor. This is much more than can be said for Wieseltier, hence the venom of his essay. A tip of the hat, then, to Mr. Weisberg, whose work I've enjoyed often in the past five years--ever since his devastating critique of The Bell Curve in a fall 1994 issue of New York magazine.

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[Michael Berube is the author of Life as We Know It

A Father, a Family, and an Exceptional Child.]

Subject: Weisberg's Chekhov