← Previous Post: | Next Post:

 

Forty Jewish Plagitations

France’s chief rabbi sounds like a real prince. When plagiarism from Jean-Francois Lyotard was found in his book Forty Jewish Meditations, he tried to suggest that Lyotard had plagiarized from him.

Now that the whole damn book looks plagiarized, he blames it on his ghost writer.

Not that he acknowledged having a ghost writer. Only now does it turn out… Je suppose it doesn’t look very good for your meditations to have been written – er, collated – er, plagiarized – by someone else. Although Ghosted Meditations is a very beautiful, very suggestive title! … How would it be in French? … Fantôme MéditationsC’est beau!

I think… I think therefore I… I think therefore I hire a ghostwriter…

It’s strange how even the chiefest among us never learn. Didn’t Gilles Bernheim notice all the attention Jane Goodall got? Doris Kearns Goodwin? All those Harvard law professors? How high-profile does the hire-a-ghost-writer-because-you’re-too-grand-to-write-your-own-words-and-then-fail-to-read-the-resulting-plagiarized-manuscript routine have to be for someone like the chief rabbi of France to notice?

Margaret Soltan, April 3, 2013 2:41PM
Posted in: plagiarism

Trackback URL for this post:
https://www.margaretsoltan.com/wp-trackback.php?p=39490

2 Responses to “Forty Jewish Plagitations”

  1. University Diaries » An Aggregation of Difficulties… Says:

    […] on the plagiarism here. And now that people are scrutinizing Gilles Bernheim, other stuff has […]

  2. DM Says:

    “Fantôme Méditations” ->
    no, I’d rather say “Méditations fantômes”

    By the way, hiring a ghostwriter, then blaming him for any plagiarism or gross inaccuracies has been commonplace in the last few years in France. Curiously, the media does not find it odd that people who have not written a book come to talk shows to talk about the book… perhaps because the talk show hosts have not read it either.

Comment on this Entry

Latest UD posts at IHE

Archives

Categories