Mary Lefkowitz

Mary R. Lefkowitz (/ˈlɛfkoʊwɪts/; born April 30, 1935) is an American classical scholar and Professor Emerita of Classical Studies at Wellesley College. She is best known to non-Classicists for her book, Not Out of Africa (1996), where she criticizes the Afrocentric theory that Greek civilization was "stolen" from Ancient Egypt. She is the widow of Sir Hugh Lloyd-Jones, former Regius Professor Emeritus of Greek at Oxford University.

Biography

Lefkowitz earned her B.A. from Wellesley College in 1957, Phi Beta Kappa with honors in Greek, and received her Ph.D. in Classical Philology from Radcliffe College (now part of Harvard University) in 1961. She returned to Wellesley College in 1959 as an instructor in Greek. In 1979 she was named Andrew W. Mellon Professor of the Humanities, a position she held until her retirement in 2005. Lefkowitz holds an honorary degree from Trinity College (1996), which cited her “deep concern for intellectual integrity,” and also from the University of Patras (1999) and from Grinnell College (2000). In 2004 she received a Radcliffe Graduate Society Medal. In 2006 she was awarded a National Humanities Medal “for outstanding excellence in scholarship and teaching.” In 2008 she was the recipient of a Wellesley College Alumnae Achievement Award.^[1]

Lefkowitz has published on subjects including mythology, women in antiquity, Pindar, and fiction in ancient biography. She came to the attention of a wider audience through her criticism of the claims of Martin Bernal in Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization in her book Not Out of Africa: How Afrocentrism Became an Excuse to Teach Myth As History. In Black Athena Revisited (1996), which she edited with Guy MacLean Rogers, her colleague at Wellesley College, the ideas of Martin Bernal are further scrutinized.

Anti-Afrocentricism

In 2008, Lefkowitz published History Lesson, which The Wall Street Journal described as a "personal account of what she experienced as a result of questioning the veracity of Afrocentrism and the motives of its advocates."^[2] She was attacked in newsletters from the Wellesley Africana Studies Department by her colleague Tony Martin,^[3] which turned into a rancorous, personal conflict with anti-Semitic elements. Martin stated in May 1994 at Cornell University that "Black people should interpret their own reality. . . . Jews have been in the forefront of efforts to thwart the interpretation of our own history."^[4] In another incident described in her book, Yosef A. A. ben-Jochannan, the author of Africa: The Mother of Western Civilization, gave the Martin Luther King lecture at Wellesley in 1993. Lefkowitz attended this lecture with her husband, Sir Hugh Lloyd-Jones, Regius Professor of Greek at Oxford University. In that lecture, ben-Jochannan stated that Aristotle stole his philosophy from the Library of Alexandria, Egypt. During the question and answer session following the lecture, Lefkowitz asked ben-Jochannan, "How would that have been possible, when the library was not built until after his death?" ben-Jochannan replied that the dates were uncertain. Sir Hugh responded, "Rubbish!" Lefkowitz writes that ben-Jochannan proceeded to tell those present that "they could and should believe what black instructors told them" and "that although they might think that Jews were all 'hook-nosed and sallow faced,' there were other Jews who looked like himself."^[5]

Personal life

Lefkowitz was married to Sir Hugh Lloyd-Jones, Regius Professor Emeritus of Greek at Oxford University from 1982 until his death in 2009.^[6]

Books

• The Victory Ode : An Introduction (1976), ISBN 0-8155-5045-6 ISBN 978-0815550457
• Heroines and Hysterics (1981), ISBN 0-7156-1518-1 ISBN 978-0715615188
• The Lives of the Greek Poets (1981), ISBN 0-8018-2748-5 ISBN 978-0801827488
• Women's Life in Greece and Rome (1982), editor, with Maureen Fant, ISBN 0-8018-8310-5 ISBN 978-0801883101
• Women in Greek Myth (1986), ISBN 0-8018-8649-X ISBN 978-0801886492
• First-person Fictions : Pindar's Poetic "I" (1991), ISBN 0-19-814686-8 ISBN 978-0198146865
• Black Athena Revisited (1996), ISBN 0-8078-4555-8 ISBN 978-0807845554
• Not Out of Africa: How Afrocentrism Became an Excuse to Teach Myth As History (1997), ISBN 0-465-09838-X ISBN 978-0465098385
• Greek Gods, Human Lives: What We Can Learn From Myths (2003), ISBN 0-300-10769-2 ISBN 978-0300107692
• History Lesson (2008), ISBN 0-300-12659-X ISBN 978-0300126594

See also

• Classics
• Afrocentrism
• Zahi Hawass
• Frank M. Snowden, Jr.

References

External links

• Excerpts from Mary Lefkowitz's Not Out of Africa
• Afrocentrism, Talk of the Nation, 1997-07-09. NPR discussion with Lefkowitz and Maulana Karenga
• Audio interview with Lefkowitz at National Review Online
• Robert T. Carroll's book review of Mary Lefkowitz's Not Out of Africaat Skepdic.com
• Martin Bernal's review of Mary Lefkowitz's Not Out of Africa
• Black Athena and the debate about Afrocentrism in the US by Thomas A. Schmitz (PDF)
• The great Greek race odyssey an account of Lefkowitz's conflict with Tony Martin in her book: 'History Lessons' (The Times of London)