Jewish Scholarship and the Misuse of Expertise

Scholars possess a unique kind of power: They are the "experts" on whom we rely to educate our children and our communities and to elevate our understanding of past and present. Communal organizations turn to scholars to provide information, perspective, and analysis, and to evaluate programs, conduct original research, and make policy recommendations. The power of the expert has long derived from the assumption that they bring objective, informed, and incisive analysis to the topics at hand. What those outside of academia may not understand, however, is that the standard of academic "objectivity" has long been eroding. Thanks to the postmodernist rejection of Enlightenment ideals of truth, objectivity, progress, morality, reason, and more, many scholars have come to instead embrace subjectivity, the influence of identity (or "positionality") in understanding the world, and critical theories that argue that the motivating forces behind civilization are struggles for power along the lines of gender, race, class, sexuality, and so forth.