It’s rare for a college president to publicly denounce a book written by a professor, but the head of Wellesley College has done just that.
Diana Chapman Walsh wrote a letter last month to students, professors, and alumnae repudiating a new book that many on the campus view as anti-Semitic. Its author is Tony Martin, a professor of Africana studies at Wellesley.
In The Jewish Onslaught: Despatches From the Wellesley Battlefront, Mr. Martin claims to be the latest victim of “the Jewish attack on Black progress.” The book chronicles a campaign of “lies, distortions and scurrilous attacks” that Mr. Martin says has been carried out against him, largely by Jews, since last spring.
The trouble began, he says, when he required students in his course on African-American history to read passages from a book published by the Nation of Islam, a religious group led by Minister Louis Farrakhan. The book, The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews: Volume One, contends that Jews played a major role in the African slave trade.
While Mr. Martin defends the book as a definitive study, many scholars and Jewish leaders denounce it as anti-Semitic, exaggerated, and inaccurate.
Since using the book in his course, Mr. Martin says he has been subjected to hate mail and threats. He says Jewish organizations have pressured the college to fire him. He decided to write The Jewish Onslaught, he says, because campus and regional newspapers had denied him an opportunity to defend himself. (The book was published by Mr. Martin’s own company, the Majority Press, in Dover, Mass.)
Shortly after his book was released last month, President Walsh sent out her letter. “We are profoundly disturbed and saddened by Professor Martin’s new book,” she wrote, “because it gratuitously attacks individuals and groups at Wellesley College through innuendo and the application of racial and religious stereotype.”
In an interview, Ms. Walsh acknowledged that it is highly unusual for a president to comment on a particular professor’s work. “It was a step we didn’t take lightly,” says Ms. Walsh, who has held the Wellesley presidency only since October.
The administration, she says, has not sought to silence Mr. Martin or fire him. “What we are saying in writing the letter,” she says, “is that with freedom of speech comes responsibility -- a responsibility not to suppress speech that is intolerant, but to expose it.”
Mr. Martin says what he seeks to expose is an effort to “demonize me.” He disputes the president’s criticism that he “gratuitously” attacked people. “This is her way of saying that Black people are not allowed to respond to Jews as Jews,” he wrote in Blacks & Jews at Wellesley News, a newsletter he circulates both on and off the campus.
His book takes aim at Jewish students at Wellesley and several of his Jewish and black colleagues. A chapter called “Massa, We Sick?” discusses two black professors on the campus who have criticized his use of The Secret Relationship.
In his book, Mr. Martin also describes his belief that Jewish attitudes toward blacks have always included a measure of self-interest. He says Jews were slave owners but became active in the civil-rights movement when they wanted to be accepted by the liberal white establishment.
He writes: “It may be that the Jewish establishment has concluded that a prostrate African American population, to be oppressed or paternalized as the times warrant, will continue to be its insurance against a Euro-American reversion to European anti-Jewish activity.”
While Mr. Martin accuses his detractors of “half-truths,” Ms. Walsh and many others say the same of The Jewish Onslaught.
Leonard P. Zakim, executive director of the New England office of the Anti-Defamation League, calls the book “a conspiracy-laden, paranoid reflection of Martin’s anti-Semitism.”
Mr. Zakim says his group and other Jewish organizations asked the college to review Mr. Martin’s tenure -- not because he used The Secret Relationship in class, but because of his conduct, such as his attacks in his newsletter on a Jewish colleague.
Mr. Martin has a right to express his views, Mr. Zakim says, “but that doesn’t mean that because he uses his First Amendment rights, we lose ours.”
Mr. Martin seems to have strong support among black students at Wellesley. Thalia V. Shirley, a senior, calls The Jewish Onslaught an accurate depiction of events on the campus. She was enrolled in a course on the history of the Caribbean where Mr. Martin first used The Secret Relationship in fall 1992. She says Mr. Martin did not single out Jews, but also discussed Christian, Arab, and African involvement in slavery.
Some black professors at Wellesley also support Mr. Martin, although they say they may not agree with everything he has written.
Jean A. Stanley, an associate professor of chemistry, says she is bothered by Mr. Martin’s references to some black professors as “Toms.” “The title in and of itself spells trouble,” she says. But Ms. Stanley also says the college has failed to discuss some key issues, such as the right of professors to choose books for their classes.
“I’m sure there are other professors saying things that upset various groups,” she says. “The president hasn’t reprimanded them.”
Many other professors, however, applaud the president’s action. Some say she didn’t go far enough.
Mary R. Lefkowitz, a professor of classics, has been a critic of Mr. Martin’s use of The Secret Relationship and calls his new book “hate literature.” She figures prominently in it as “a national leader of the Jewish onslaught.”
“Tony has said The Secret Relationship is an excellent study of the Jewish role in the slave trade,” she says, “but no responsible historian would make such a statement.”
She adds: “It’s a great shame that instead of trying to educate people, Tony is trying to indoctrinate them.”
