At a party Wednesday to celebrate the publication of her new book, “Jews and Power,” Ruth Wisse, a professor of Yiddish and comparative literature atHarvard, saidshewastakenaback when a friend told her she was halfway through her “depressing book.”

“I thought I’d written an exhilaratingbook,”Ms. Wissesaid, explaining that “setting out a problem is the beginning of the process of making things better” and noting that she felt her book “made a dent” in defining the problem — the effects of the Jewish political experiment of prolonged survival in exile.

“This experiment was incredibly successful in its own terms. Jews thrived wherever they were allowed to do so,” Ms. Wisse said yesterday in a telephone interview, “but it had the unanticipated consequences of provoking a politics of blame against them that became progressively stronger and more dangerous and more widespread.”

The book explores the Jews relationship to political power, starting with their loss of sovereignty under the Romans and ending with the prospects for peace in Israel. It describes the politics of accommodation that allowed Diaspora Jews to live in exile for thousands of years. “They learned to do this economically and culturally, to make themselves useful wherever they were allowed to live,” Ms. Wisse said.

The success of their adaptation has had a price: “Since they had no powers of self defense, they could never protect themselves. They became a no-fail target,” Ms. Wisse said.

This situation fostered anti-Semitism and, she argues, a Jewish culture of self-blame. And this is whereMs. Wisselaysoutananswer: “Jews have to start holding others accountable for the aggression leveled against them,” Ms. Wisse said. “It’s not the Jews’s fault that others can’t tolerate them. The Arabs should develop a politics of self-accountability.”

It’s not an answer leaves her exhilarated, necessarily, butratherthe idea that her book will bring some clarity to the state of affairs in the Middle East and the Diaspora.

The host of the party was Nextbook, a nonprofit that promotes Jewish literature, culture, and ideas, and which co-published the book with Schocken Books as part of its “Jewish Encounters” series. The editor of the series, Jonathan Rosen, introduced the author and praised her “heroic intelligence and moral conviction.”

Celebrating with Ms. Wisse were the editor of Commentary magazine, Neal Kozodoy, to whom Ms. Wisse dedicated the book; the longtime Commentary editor, Norman Podhoretz, who is now editor-atlarge of the magazine and whose latest book is “World War IV: The Long Struggle Against Islamofascism” (Doubleday); the novelist and essayist Cynthia Ozick; novelist and essayist Daphne Merkin, who is contributing a book on the German Renaissance diarist Glückel of Hameln for the “Jewish Encounter” series; Eli Evans, who told The New York Sun he spent the summer working on a book about Jews in the South while at his home in Quogue, L.I.; Ron Rosenbaum, the 2007 Vare Nonfiction Writer-in-Residence at the University of Chicago, and the author, most recently, of “The Shakespeare Wars: Clashing Scholars, Public Fiascoes, Palace Coups” (Random House), and Ruth Westheimer, who is co-teaching seminars at Yale and Princeton on “The Jewish Family.”

A younger generation of editors, writers, and academics were also present: The New Yorker’s Web editor, Blake Eskin; Vanity Fair’s Web editor, Andrew Hearst; a professor at Columbia University, Jeremy Dauber, who is at work on a book on early modern Yiddish; Ellen Umansky, a former editor at the New York Sun who has completed her first novel; the arts and culture editor of the Forward, Alana Newhouse, and the executive editor of ArtNews, Robin Cembalest.

Several members of Ms. Wisse’s family attended the event, including her husband, Leonard, a retired lawyer; her brother, David Roskies, a professor at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America who is working on a book about the year 1943 as a turning point of Jewish life, and his wife, Shana; Ms. Wisse’s daughter, Abby Wisse Schachter, a journalist at the New York Post, who brought her 3-month-old daughter, Sonia; her son, Jacob, an associate professor of art history at Yeshiva University, and his wife, Rebecca Lieberman, a daughter of Senator Lieberman of Connecticut.

Ms. Wisse will be speaking and signing copies of her book on September 19 at the Barnes & Noble on Broadway and 82nd Street.

Defining ‘Conservative’ at JTS

In his inauguration speech Wednesday, the new chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary, Rabbi Arnold Eisen, outlined his immediate goals in the position in a speech titled “Torah, Scholarship, and the Mission of The Jewish Theological Seminary.”

Rabbi Eisen said he has initiated a review of the institution’s curricula with an eye to strengthen future rabbis’s and cantors’s “understanding of the sociology of the communities they will serve.” He also said he plans to clarify this year what the Conservative movement of Judaism stands for. “Some believe that we stand for nothing in particular, or for everything, so long as it is somewhere in the middle between Orthodoxy and Reform,” he said, without going into specifics.

He did, however, give a sense of his approach to the task. “Nuanced remembrance is key to all that we observe and preserve, including most especially what we preserve by changing it,” Rabbi Eisen said. “We do not see full participation in the society and culture surrounding us and total immersion in our tradition as irreconcilable, but rather, mutually reinforcing.”

The ceremony marked the start of the seminary’s 121st school year, with 28 students starting at the Rabbinical School, 8 students starting at the H.L. Miller Cantorial School, 29 students starting at the William Davidson Graduate School of Jewish Education, 20 beginning master’s or doctoral work in the Graduate School, and 40 freshmen enrolling in List College’s dual-degree programs with Barnard and Columbia.

Central Park Is Framed

Starting today, the Central Park Conservancy will be selling large-format prints of photographs of the park taken by its photographer and historian of 23 years, Sara Cedar Miller. The Central Park Collection is available at the Conservancy’s Web site, www.centralparknyc.org. Duggal is handling printing and fulfillment. Many of the photographs appear in Ms. Miller’s book “Central Park, An American Masterpiece” (Harry N. Abrams).

Several of the prints are on display in the windows of the Paul Stuart store at Madison Avenue and 45th Street until September 30. Ms. Miller said she hopes the revenue from the sales of her photographs will help ease the burden of annual fundraising. The conservancy typically needs to raise about 85% of its annual budget, or $20 million, from private sources.

agordon@nysun.com