19 (pt. 1)
THE ACCUSATION OF ANTI-SEMITISM
"Surely Jews understand that in identifying an anti-Semite one
and little horns, it is a giraffe."
-- Jewish comedian Jackie Mason and Jewish lawyer Raul
Felder, 9-2000, p. 57
and little horns, it is a giraffe."
-- Jewish comedian Jackie Mason and Jewish lawyer Raul
Felder, 9-2000, p. 57
"If you want to understand anti-Semitism, read the Old
Testament." -- George Orwell
"So long as there is a single anti-Semite in the world, I shall
declare with pride that I am a Jew."
-- Ilya Ehrenburg, Jewish
-- Ilya Ehrenburg, Jewish
Russian author, (in DERSHOWITZ, p. 14]
"Fighting anti-Semitism seems to be for some Jews more
important than any other expression of Jewishness ... The
danger appears when one becomes dependent upon them for
one's identity, so that one begins to need anti-Semitism."
-- Stanislaw Krajewski,
(Polish Jew)
"For some Jews and perhaps some of the Jewish leadership, the
fear is that if anti-Semitism completely disappears then the
Jewish community might erode or dissolve."
-- Stanley Rothman, (in STALLSWORTH, p. 67)
-- Stanley Rothman, (in STALLSWORTH, p. 67)
"And if real peace does come to Israel, the question will be
asked: Can we, and how do we, survive without an external
enemy?"
-- Avraham Burg, head of the Jewish Agency,
[HARTUNG, J., 1995]
-- Avraham Burg, head of the Jewish Agency,
[HARTUNG, J., 1995]
"The assumption of an eternal anti-Semitism ... has been adapted
by a great many unbiased historians and by even a greater
number of Jews. It is this odd coincidence which makes the
theory so very dangerous and confusing. Its escapist basis is
in both instances the same; just as anti-Semites understandably
desire to escape responsibility for their deeds, so Jews, attacked
and on the defensive, even more understandably, do not wish to
under any circumstances discuss their share of responsibility."
-- Hannah Arendt, Origins, p. 7
(Jewish historian)
"The discounting of anti-Semitism is itself anti-Semitic."
-- Evelyn Torton Beck, 1982, p. xxii
"[Jewish psychologist Jules] Nydes argues that such individuals
[representing the "paranoid masochistic character"] tend to see
themselves and groups within which they identify as victims who are
being persecuted. This sense of persecution derives partly from
unconscious feelings of guilt. The paranoid masochistic person
engages in aggression against others because he or she expects
to be attacked. His aggression, which is accompanied by feelings
of self-righteousness, is rarely satisfying. Indeed, he can often
achieve gratification only when he is punished, and the punishment
is interpreted as confirming his preconceived sense of
persecution ... The typology is suggestive. [Jewish psychoanalyst]
Theodore Reik, who was Nyde's teacher, suggested that a 'paranoid
masochistic' personality structure is modal among Jews."
-- Stanley Rothman and S. Robert Lichter,
Jewish authors, 1982, p. 133
"The discounting of anti-Semitism is itself anti-Semitic."
-- Evelyn Torton Beck, 1982, p. xxii
"[Jewish psychologist Jules] Nydes argues that such individuals
[representing the "paranoid masochistic character"] tend to see
themselves and groups within which they identify as victims who are
being persecuted. This sense of persecution derives partly from
unconscious feelings of guilt. The paranoid masochistic person
engages in aggression against others because he or she expects
to be attacked. His aggression, which is accompanied by feelings
achieve gratification only when he is punished, and the punishment
is interpreted as confirming his preconceived sense of
persecution ... The typology is suggestive. [Jewish psychoanalyst]
masochistic' personality structure is modal among Jews."
-- Stanley Rothman and S. Robert Lichter,
Jewish authors, 1982, p. 133
"I felt that the bigotry always blamed on those who said anything
negative about Jews was equally visible on the other [Jewish]
side of the fence." -- Evelyn Kaye, (Jewish author, p. 114)
"Privilege does not relieve the vulnerability to prejudice."
-- Michael Paul Sacks, concluding his article
about the "privileged" Jewish occupational
elite in modern Russia, and non-Jewish hostility
to it, 1998, p. 266
"For all my life, I have never felt any substantial anti-Semitism, and
was rather indifferent to the Jewish community. Then something clicked,
and I thought, Well, I am over 40, I have made a successful career,
I have made a forturne. But what will tell my children when I am 70?"
-- millionaire Leonard Nevzlin, upon becoming president of the
Russian Jewish Congress [GORODETSKY, L, 5-23-01]
"Privilege does not relieve the vulnerability to prejudice."
-- Michael Paul Sacks, concluding his article
about the "privileged" Jewish occupational
elite in modern Russia, and non-Jewish hostility
to it, 1998, p. 266
"For all my life, I have never felt any substantial anti-Semitism, and
was rather indifferent to the Jewish community. Then something clicked,
"We should be able to discuss Jews and their Jewishness, their
virtues or their vices, as one can any other identifiable group
without being called an anti-Semite. Frankness does not feed
anti-Semitism; secrecy, however, does."
-- Kevin Meyers, (British journalist), p. 26
-- Kevin Meyers, (British journalist), p. 26
"Telling the truth is not anti-Semitic. Am I right?"
-- Joe Wood, (African-American) p. 112
"It seems that [poet Allen] Ginsberg had traced an obscenity in
the dust of a dormitory window; the words were too shocking
for the Dean of Students to speak, so he had written them on a
piece of paper which he had pushed across the desk to my
husband: 'Fuck the Jews.' ... 'He's a Jew himself,' said the Dean.
'Can you understand his writing a thing like that?' Yes, Lionel
could understand; but he couldn't explain it to the Dean."
-- Dianna Trilling, (Jewish author) in BLOOM, p. 302
The foundation of modern Jewish identity is an ideological subscription to a presumed irrevocable omnipresence of irrational "anti-Semitism." Jewish defense to this threat is the common denominator that creates cohesion among even the most disparate peoples of worldwide Jewry. "Being Jewish" -- above all else, as archaic religious convictions have fallen to the wayside -- is still conceived to be the noble bearing of special, continuous persecution at the hands of the rest of the world. This conviction -- traditionally understood by Jews to be borne as punishment by God for transgressions against covenantal law -- has been the core of Jewish religious belief in their diaspora. Non-Jews are an important part of this world view. To the traditional Jewish perspective, says Mark Zborowski and Elizabeth Herzog:
"the goyim represent, quite literally, an act of God. When they are
persecutors they are also instruments of justice, punishing the Jews
for transgressing the Law, and in any case they do not know better."
[ZBOROWSKI, p. 154]
The Jew, noted Israel Zangwill in 1893, "looks upon the persecutor merely as the stupid instrument of an all-wise Providence." [ZANGWILL, I.,
The notion that Jews, scattered throughout the world, are collectively victims at the hands of all others [i.e., today categorized as "anti-Semitism"), is a conceptual framework, originally religiously based, that actually precedes authentic history and is self-fulfilling. The foundation to understand the Jewish victim complex can be found in their Torah (the Old Testament), for example in Deuteronomy 28. What is today called anti-Semitism was originally conceived as God's punishment of the Jewish people:
"And the Lord shall scatter thee among all people from one end of
the earth unto the other ... And among these nations shalt thou find
no ease, neither shall the sole of they foot have rest: But the Lord
shall give thee there a trembling heart, and failing of eyes, and sorrow
of mind. And they life shall hang in doubt before thee; and thou shalt
fear day and night and have none assurance of thy life ... and thou
shalt be only oppressed and crushed always."
It is clear that the Jewish conception of being continuously "persecuted" originates in religious conviction. As Jewish psycholanalyst Theodore Reik notes:
"The masochistic attitude of ancient Israel was recognized at least in their
in their relationship with God, whose punishment they took as deserved
without complaint. They considered also the cruelty with which they were
treated by their powerful neighbors as punishment for their sins, especially for
deserting their God. The paranoid attitude in the form of an idea of grandeur
is obvious in the Jewish claim of being the 'chosen people.' There is even
even a subterranean tie between the masochistic and the paranoid attitude in
the idea that God chastises those whom He loves. Such an exceptional
position has been claimed by the Jewish people since ancient time."
[REIK, T., 1962, p. 230-231]
When emptied of purely religious content in modern times, the grand idea of "Jewish punishment by God" is reduced to its areligious backbone: "Jewish persecution by non-Jews." The deep belief of the omnipresence of this is held by even secular Jews with as much conviction as any religion. And for most modern Jews this secular worldview still subliminally clings to the original Judaic paradigm: among other things, Jewish insistence upon a moral superiority above others. Throughout history, hostility for Jews, noted Charles Liebman and Steven Cohen, reinforced "their ethnocentric image as a 'chosen people' -- the special animus of non-Jews towards Jews demonstrate [d] the truth of the Jewish claim that they were different, privy to a special status in divine creation -- in short, superior to Gentiles." [LIEBMAN/COHEN, p., 36] In Jewish eyes, the evidence for such a self-congratulatory perch is (aside from Old Testament referral) to be found most recently in the Holocaust -- the terrible fruition of traditional canon, the proclaimed "most unique" of human-inflicted atrocities for which all non-Jews are held to be, in abstract, guilty. And all Jews, innocent.
"The masochistic attitude of ancient Israel was recognized at least in their
in their relationship with God, whose punishment they took as deserved
without complaint. They considered also the cruelty with which they were
treated by their powerful neighbors as punishment for their sins, especially for
deserting their God. The paranoid attitude in the form of an idea of grandeur
is obvious in the Jewish claim of being the 'chosen people.' There is even
even a subterranean tie between the masochistic and the paranoid attitude in
the idea that God chastises those whom He loves. Such an exceptional
position has been claimed by the Jewish people since ancient time."
[REIK, T., 1962, p. 230-231]
When emptied of purely religious content in modern times, the grand idea of "Jewish punishment by God" is reduced to its areligious backbone: "Jewish persecution by non-Jews." The deep belief of the omnipresence of this is held by even secular Jews with as much conviction as any religion. And for most modern Jews this secular worldview still subliminally clings to the original Judaic paradigm: among other things, Jewish insistence upon a moral superiority above others. Throughout history, hostility for Jews, noted Charles Liebman and Steven Cohen, reinforced "their ethnocentric image as a 'chosen people' -- the special animus of non-Jews towards Jews demonstrate [d] the truth of the Jewish claim that they were different, privy to a special status in divine creation -- in short, superior to Gentiles." [LIEBMAN/COHEN, p., 36] In Jewish eyes, the evidence for such a self-congratulatory perch is (aside from Old Testament referral) to be found most recently in the Holocaust -- the terrible fruition of traditional canon, the proclaimed "most unique" of human-inflicted atrocities for which all non-Jews are held to be, in abstract, guilty. And all Jews, innocent.
The combined post-Holocaust Jewish emotions of shame, guilt, fear, and anger have reconstituted a renewed and roiled Jewish identity that reaffirms and pledges its conceptual distance from the rest of the world. Yet Jewish canon, both religious and secular, now militantly demands the pseudo-religious interpretation of the Jewish Holocaust to be sacred, for everyone; the Jews who were murdered in the context of World War II (and not non-Jews) are likewise hallowed. The sheer gravity and allegedly incomparable scope of the mass killings of Jews is also proclaimed to render today's Jews -- genetic inheritors of the Tragedy of tragedies -- beyond moral reproach. Jews are held blameless, irresponsible. Then, now, and across history.
The framework for this Jewish moral dialectic against the non-Jewish Other rests upon "anti-Semitism," the age-old vehicle for Jewish punishment by God, still conceived as a metaphysical residue of hatred attested to by even secular Jews (post-Holocaust) in the ruins of an otherwise rejected Jewish religion. Underscoring the idea that it is the concept of Gentile hostility that most effectively binds Jews so tightly together, "When there is no anti-Semitism," candidly admits Menachem Revivi, director general of an Israeli support office, "it's much harder to maintain your Judaism." [HYMAN, M., 1998, p. 85] "[Jewish mythology declares that] anti-Semitism is a mystifying disease," note Charles Liebman and Steven Cohen, "one with perhaps many permutations and with diverse origins, but at root one that is fundamentally irrational. This irrationalism only compounds the innocence of the Jewish victim." These two authors, both Jewish, then feel obliged to add: "It is not our intention to challenge the truth of these myths, we subscribe in good part to most of them." [LIEBMAN/COHEN p. 33] "And who are the anti-Semites?" asked Milton Steinberg, "The mentally sick, the embittered, the frustrated, the sadists. And if they are not sick, then they are worse, they are unprincipled and conscienceless." [STEINBERG, M., 1951, p. 122]
In the political context of the modern nation of Israel, even its areligious state ideology -- Zionism -- includes Orthodox Judaism's old conviction of an omnipresent 'anti-Semitism" in all non-Jews to be central to its identity dogma. "Like the Nazi ideologues," wrote Jewish anti-Zionist William Zukerman in 1960, "the Zionists take it for granted the Jews are a foreign and inassimilable element in the body of all non-Jewish people ... [and] that hatred for the Jews is something instinctive and mystical, forever engrained in the subconscious of every non-Jew, which can never be eradicated or cured." [ZUKERMAN, p. 63]
"It is impossible to comprehend the largely irrational nature of [anti-Semitism], says popular Jewish polemicist Alan Dershowitz, "...The important point is that Jews are not to blame for anti-Semitism. Anti-Semitism is the problem of the bigots who feel, express, and practice it. Nothing we do can profoundly affect the twisted minds of the anti-Semites." [DERSHOWITZ, p. 102, 101] In a 1995 book about anti-Semitism in Japan, scholar David Goodman noted that "since anti-Semitism as we are defining it has nothing to do with Jews, much less 'Semites,' we will neither hyphenate nor capitalize the term." [GOODMAN, p. 11] Another Jewish scholar, Daniel Pipes, in a book dismissing as nonsense a variety of conspiracy theories, outlined his own personal lens to understand the world, saying, "I spell [antisemitism] in lower case, without a hyphen (not anti-Semitism), to signal that it refers to an ideology and to imply that the phenomenon has almost nothing to do with the actions of Jews." [PIPES, D., 1997, p. 27]
"The term Jew has been used as a term of abuse, a curse and an accusation for centuries," says Irene Bloomfield, a Jewish psychotherapist, "It expresses the anti-Semite’s virulent and unreasoning hatred and contempt and has so often been the preliminary of attacks, pogroms, persecution, and death ... The Jews had thus been an archetypical bad object and universal enemy from time immemorial." [BLOOMFIELD, p. 26] "Among most anti-Semites," adds another Jewish psychotherapist, Mortimer Ostrow, "we found that their irrational hatred was the expression of primary process thinking, that is, thought that is driven by feeling and not subjected to the discipline of reason, logic, and reality testing." [OSTROW, p. 176] Early, and prominent, Zionist Max Nordau declared that "the anti-Semitic accusations are valueless, because they are not based on a criticism of real facts, but are merely due to the psychological law according to which children, savages, and malevolent fools make persons and things against which they have an aversion responsible for their sufferings. Pretexts change, but the hatred remains. The Jews are not hated because they have evil qualities; evil qualities are sought for in them because they are hated." [HERTZ, J., 1954]
"Anti-Semitism," says prominent (Jewish) historian Barbara Tuchman, "is independent of its object. What Jews do or fail to do is not the determinant. The impetus comes out of the needs of the persecutors." [CUDDIHY, p. 24] "We all know that anti-Semitism really has nothing to do with Jews," says scholar Susannah Herschel, "It can flourish even in places where no Jews live." "The psychic needs of the Christians -- and not the actual characteristics of Jewish life," asserts Todd Endelman, "give anti-Semitism its power and appeal." "Jewish hatred is one-sided," adds Ruth Wisse, "... and functions independent of its object." "Anti-Semitism is oblivious to Jewish conduct," declared the Jerusalem Post in 1990, "it is independent of the very presence of Jews." [all: LINDEMANN, 1997, p. xvii]
"The existence of anti-Semitism and the content of anti-Semitic charges...," wrote Daniel Goldhagen in his best-selling 1996 book about Germany and the Jews, "are fundamentally not a response to any objective evaluation of Jewish actions ... anti-Semitism draws on cultural sources that are independent of the Jews' nature and actions." [Goldhagen's emphases; FINKELSTEIN, N., 1998, p. 11] "Let's face it," wrote Harry Golden, ""anti-Semitism can't possibly be explained; it can merely be recounted." "Understand and explain the problem [of anti-Semitism] as much as you may," said Lewis Naimier, "there remains a hard, insoluble core, incomprehensible and inexplicable." [LINDEMANN, p. 11]
In Jewish folklore, even intra-community jokes reflect the same theme of Jewish categorical innocence as the cause of anti-Semitism. In the following case, it is a Jewish-created defamation of Poles and Poland: a "Pollock" joke:
"A few months after the end of World War I, the premier of Poland
had a meeting with President Woodrow Wilson. 'If you don't meet
our nation's demands at the peace conference,' warned the premier,
'I foresee great troubles ahead. The Polish people will be very
angry, and they'll go out and massacre the Jews.'
'And if your demands are met?' asked Wilson.
'In that case,' responded the premier, 'my people will be delighted.
They'll go out in the streets and get drunk -- and then they'll massacre
the Jews.'" [NOVAK/WALDOKS, 1981, p. 60]
"When it comes to the millions of Jews who faced liquidation in Hitler's Europe," says Jewish author Michael Medved,
"historians make little effort to figure out what, precisely, the victims had done
to make Der Fuehrer so terribly angry. With racial and religious antagonisms,
we understand that rage can flourish with no basis in reality." [MEDVED, M.
11-12-01]
"Jews don't cause anti-Semitism," declares Jewish novelist Ann Roiphe, "nothing provokes it, it's always there ... The object of gentile racists and nationalist hate, chameleon-like, takes on the shape of that moment's Jew." [ROIPHE, A., 1992, p. 40] "The notion that anti-Semitism can be, in the slightest degree, the fault of the Jews," proclaims well-known Jewish author Cynthia Ozick, "is in itself -- even when it crops up, as it frequently does among Jews -- a species of anti-Semitism." [CUDDIHY, p. 24]Eventual New York Times Executive Editor A. M. Rosenthal and reporter Arthur Gelb put the standard Jewish theme this way:
"The circumstantial evidence is that anti-Semitism is a mental disorder, because
the anti-Semite sees certain human beings not as human beings but as objects. They
are reflections of his own needs and passions and his inability to recognize them for
what they are is such a severe form of irrationalism as to be a symptom of
mental malfunction. The anti-Semite suffers from a fear of demons, but since he
is not aware of his fear is convinced of the reality of demons -- a clinical example
of paranoia."[ROSENTHAL/ GELB, 1967, p. 65]
"historians make little effort to figure out what, precisely, the victims had done
to make Der Fuehrer so terribly angry. With racial and religious antagonisms,
we understand that rage can flourish with no basis in reality." [MEDVED, M.
11-12-01]
"Jews don't cause anti-Semitism," declares Jewish novelist Ann Roiphe, "nothing provokes it, it's always there ... The object of gentile racists and nationalist hate, chameleon-like, takes on the shape of that moment's Jew." [ROIPHE, A., 1992, p. 40] "The notion that anti-Semitism can be, in the slightest degree, the fault of the Jews," proclaims well-known Jewish author Cynthia Ozick, "is in itself -- even when it crops up, as it frequently does among Jews -- a species of anti-Semitism." [CUDDIHY, p. 24]
"The circumstantial evidence is that anti-Semitism is a mental disorder, because
the anti-Semite sees certain human beings not as human beings but as objects. They
are reflections of his own needs and passions and his inability to recognize them for
what they are is such a severe form of irrationalism as to be a symptom of
mental malfunction. The anti-Semite suffers from a fear of demons, but since he
is not aware of his fear is convinced of the reality of demons -- a clinical example
of paranoia."
"Not only does anything Jews do or refrain from doing have nothing to do with anti-Semitism," notes a non-Jewish scholar, John Michael Cuddihy, with incredulity and exasperation, "but any attempt to explain anti-Semitism by referring to the Jewish contribution to anti-Semitism is itself an instance of anti-Semitism!" [CUDDIHY, p. 24]
Such widespread Jewish Orwellian doublethink loops of logic to fend off blame and responsibility for their historical deeds stems from the old Chosen People syndrome itself, popularly secularized as an impenetrable fortress of denial against all non-Jewish (or Jewish) critical attack, an intellectual ghetto with locked gates: by self-edict declared separate, blameless, unaccountable, and completely untouchable. "This reductio ad absurdum," observes Cuddihy, "has stunning implications. It means that Jews have not been causal agents in their own history ... They did not act and interact causally and historically with other groups in history. Morally blameless, the Jews ... were outside of history, aspiring to ... 'angelism.'" [CUDDIHY, p. 24]
This outrageously ahistorical perspective is reflected in a comment by Elie Wiesel about the defining Jewish event of the 20th century: "The Holocaust is beyond politics and beyond analogies." [ELLIS, M., 1990, p. 76]
In the modern Jewish community post-World War II, notes Jewish critic William Zukerman, "criticism and self-criticism which were the basis of inspiration of the Enlightenment period, have been discredited as almost the equivalent of treason. By a kind of perverted chauvinistic reasoning, criticism of anything pertaining to Jews, whether it is of Israel, of the dominant nationalist party [of Israel], its institutions, or of its ideology, has been defined as anti-Semitism." [ZUKERMAN, p. 68] Irving Kristol calls it his peoples' "propensity to gloss over their own shortcomings and blame the always available anti-Semite for their misfortunes." [KRISTOL, p. 278] Milton Steinberg notes that:
"Unfortunately Jews, like other human beings, are so constituted as
to be reluctant to pass adverse judgment on themselves. Hence,
whether with justice or not they will hold their Jewishness at fault
for whatever goes wrong in their lives." [NEUSNER, J., 1972, p. 78]
"The Cult of Victimhood," observes David Klinghoffer, "performs two valuable services for us Jews with guilty consciences. First, as it does for everyone else, it assures us that, whatever we know we are doing wrong, we are really angels ... But it does something else for us, which it may not do for other groups. We believe that any hostility we can detect on the part of non-Jews is entirely unmerited. We have done nothing to deserve it ... We American Jews are not as ignorant as we seem. We know, in our souls, that we have gone astray; but, to borrow a hackneyed phrase of psychological jargon, we are in denial." [KLINGHOFFER, p. 10-13]
Facing this suffocating shield, once defined as an anti-Semite for the crime of criticizing Jews, the offending individual is completely marginalized in modern America. "During the late 1950s and 1960s," says Benjamin Ginsberg, "anti-Semitism has been successfully defined by Jews as a form of extremism in which only politicians on the lunatic fringe engaged. As a result, any effort to make political cause of anti-Semitism seemed fraught with risk." [GINSBERG, B., 1993, p. 187] Once labeled an "anti-Semite," the stigmatized individual is even subject to the most preposterous of slanders, a virtual canon in much of the Jewish community. Criticizing Jews is anti-Semitism, and therefore equivalent to sending Jews to death camps. Says Konstanty Gebert, editor of a Jewish journal in Poland, :
"The reality of [the Nazi death camp] Treblinka exists, irremovably, and
contemporary anti-Semites do not have the option of stating that it is not
their goal." [GEBERT]
Albert Lindemann notes such accusations with amazement: "Some writers go so far as to condemn the distinction ["between 'irritation' with Jews and calling for their systematic murder"] as morally dubious, thus making any irritation with Jews or criticism of them 'anti-Semitic,' a conclusion that takes on extraordinary dimensions when linked to such assertions as 'all anti-Semitism is essentially the same' or 'a little bit of anti-Semitism is a little bit of cancer.'" [LINDEMANN, 1997, p. xiv]
(Professor Lindemann wrote an extraordinarily unusual work, Esau's Tears: Modern Anti-Semitism and the Rise of the Jews (Cambridge University Press, 1997), a volume that seeks to "understand" anti-Semitism largely in terms of Jewish belief and action that elicits it. Not unexpectedly, the reviewer for the American Jewish Committee's influential Commentary magazine decried the work in an article entitled "Blaming the Victim" as "deeply pernicious" and Lindemann's "knowledge of Jewish history ... [is] little better than that of the anti-Semites whose arguments he echoes." [WISTRICH, 1998, p. 60-63] Likewise, John Landau reviewed Esau's Tears in the Zionist journal Midstream, linking Lindemann's reciting of the truths of history to Hitler fascism, warning readers that "It appears that anti-Semitism remains a respectable intellectual position on American and British college campuses, including history department, provided that it is expressed with a degree of good manners and restraint. We must not forget that the assault on Jews by German academics and intellectuals preceded, and helped to lay the groundwork for, the physical destruction of European Jewry." [LANDAU, J., FEB/MAR 99, p. 44-45]
Central to the modern Jewish world view is the so-called "Holocaust." "The Holocaust," says Joseph Amato,
"serves as the point from which Jews can morally survey the entire past
and classify all present society ... Some Jewish thinkers consider the
Holocaust [as] providing a singular point of wrong innocence against
which they can judge everyone else. It has consciously been chosen by
Jews to be their crucifixion: the great sorrow they must mediate. Non-
Jews are tried by two questions: What did they do (collectively or
individually, directly or indirectly, by commission or omission) to further
anti-Semitism? What did they do to stop the Holocaust? The most
severe judges find everyone guilty who did not risk his family's lives
to save Jews in the Holocaust." [AMATO, p. 181]
Reflecting again the old Chosen People theme, Jewish convention also insists that anti-Semitism is a "unique" form of prejudice. Non-Jewish historian John Higham, who had written about anti-Semitism in the 1950s, defended himself against Jewish attack, saying:
"[It is accused] that I have violated the uniqueness of anti-Semitism
by comparing it with other exclusionary movements -- illustrating
the unwillingness of some Jews to measure their own experience
on a general human scale, unless anti-Semitism is presented ... as
the very archetype of all prejudices and anti-democratic attitudes.
For me the uniqueness of anti-Semitism was not a foregone
conclusion but a question." [HIGHAM, J., 1986, p. 225]
(It is interesting to wonder what Higham might have said more freely about the subject if he was not so beholding to the Jewish community -- his basic studies in this subject had been "generously" supported by the American Jewish Committee -- [HIMMELFARB, M., 1986, p. 197])
Despite the long historical list of very legitimate complaints against Jews by people all over the world through history, the institutionalized self-celebration of the Nazis as a polar German "chosen people," Hitler's heralding of the ruthlessness of war as a noble enterprise, the Nazi determination to rid Germany of Jews via the clinically brutal scientism of mass murder, Eli Weisel echoes many Jews in completely mystifying the Holocaust in his introduction to The Encyclopedia of the Shoah: "Unlike other tragedies, there was no logical reason underlying the tragedy of the Holocaust, and all attempts to discover rational reasons have failed." [March of the Living, p. 5]
Jewish blameless innocence throughout history, framing itself as an eternal scapegoats for the old religious nemesis of Christianity, is elaborately and imaginatively expounded upon by Jewish critic George Steiner. Hyam Maccoby notes that Steiner's
"theory of anti-Semitism [is that it] is caused by the atavistic pagan
element in western religion by which Jews are regarded as a collective
Executioner of a central human sacrifice. We have to do here with a
shifting moral responsibility, by which the individual lays his moral
burden firstly on Jesus himself, who dies to save him; and secondly,
on the Jews who bring about the necessary death of Jesus ... In any
event, the Jews have been elected, 'chosen' if you will, to the position
of scapegoat so that all others can escape guilt into the innocence of
childhood and recover the joy of Eden." [MACCOBY, p. 34]
Roger Aments notes his discomfort as a Jew when the beliefs he had been emphatically taught about the Holocaust were challenged by the Buddhist world view, that humans must take responsibility for their actions that effect their fate:
"I had been shocked, a little outraged, by what I'd heard about
the Buddhist view of the Holocaust. I could not accept that the
suffering of the Jews was somehow a result of their previous
actions. Wasn't the knowledge of shared victimization the source
of Jewish identification with the Tibetans? Weren't we fellow
victims, fellow innocent victims? ... In Buddhism, the whole
notion of an innocent victim carried little weight in assessing
how one responded to tragic circumstances." [KAMENETZ, R.,
1994, p. 185]
Note the American Jewish Congress fury at Israeli rabbi and Shas party leader Ovadia Yosef ("who plays a critical role in coalition politics in Israel") when he dared to challenge modern Jewish convention about the Holocaust. In 2000, he suggested that it seemed to him that "Holocaust victims were punished for sins in an earlier life." However one might interpret this view, it is something considerably less than innocence. The AJC's reaction was outrage, and formally, that
"Rabbi Yosef must be charged with knowing that his statements can
be used as an excuse for Nazi barbarisms, as a kind of Nazi apologetics
... He acknowledges the Holocaust but then claims God's justification
for its horrors. If that is not blasphemy, then nothing is." [PR
NEWSWIRE, 2-6-98]
Berel Lang looks upon the widespread Jewish effort to elude their own honest history and attendant moral responsibility for it with concern. In modern Jewish historical revisionism, "the reasonable ... concern to understand anti-Semitism has ... nothing to do with Jews. This view ... has served as a premise in the most serious historical attempts to analyze the phenomenon of anti-Semitism ... This resistance to the possibility of a connection between anti-Semitism and Jewish history is ... pernicious." [CUDDIHY, p. 23-24] "Jews," notes Robert Segal, "fear that a historical explanation [of anti-Semitism] will make Jews responsible for anti-Semitism, and will thereby excuse it." [CUDDIHY, p. 34] "It seems clear that Jews exhibit an all-too common human failing," says Albert Lindemann, "They actually do not want to understand their past -- or at least those aspects of their past that have to do with the hatred directed at them, since understanding may threaten other elements of their complex and often contradictory identities." [LINDEMANN, 1997, p. 535] "Jews come honorably to their paranoia," adds Cuddihy, "Nevertheless, when it comes to their own behavior, they go on a moral holiday." [CUDDIHY, p. 35]
This widespread Jewish "moral holiday," however secularly guised, is nonetheless rooted in the old rabbinical ghettos; as we have seen, many centuries passed with Jewish history self-understood to begin and end with itself, the sacred history of a "people apart" unrelated to the history of others around them.
There is also -- more importantly in a largely areligious age -- an entire "science" (albeit a newly-created, and distinctly Jewish, one, even built in some ways upon a rabbinical model; some have called it a "surrogate religion") [GAY, p. 19-20] to use in service to prove the modern Jewish theses of identity, an identity largely based upon an oppositional antithesis: lofty Jewish moral worth versus an omnipresent, generic, and irrational anti-Semitism. This controversial "science" to prove the major premises of Jewish self-conception is psychoanalytic theory, the invention of a Viennese Jew, Sigmund Freud, itself a field of endeavor and allegiance overwhelmingly populated, predominated, and propagandized by Jews to our own day.
Let us start with the fact that all 17 original members of Freud's Psychological Wednesday Society were Jewish and most of his patients, by which Freud developed his theories of human neurosis, were women from "eminent Austrian Jewish families." The original Society members, notes Dennis Klein, "were aware of their Jewishness and frequently maintained a sense of Jewish purpose and solidarity ... [Their] feeling of positive Jewish pride formed the matrix of the movement in the psychoanalytic circle ... it tightened the bond among members and powered their self-image of a redemptive elite." [KLEIN, p. vii] (Absorbed with notions of elitism and clandestine intrigues, by 1912, six die-hard loyalists to Freud were joined in a behind-the-scenes "committee," described by Freud as a "secret council composed of the best and most trustworthy among our men." This group, said The Master, "would have to be strictly secret [Freud's emphasis] in its existence and its actions." [MASSON, 1990, p. 113])
"Freud," says another Jewish author, Earl Grollman,
"may also have experienced the 'essence of Judaism' through his
community activities with other Jews. Many of his important
theories were delivered before the Fraternity of Jewish Students
and the B'nai B'rith organization. Most of the colleagues in his
movement were Jewish ... But whatever the reasons -- historical,
sociological, psychological -- group bonds did provide a warm
shelter with other Jews, informality and familiarity formed a kind
of inner security, a 'we-feeling,' illustrated even by the selection
of jokes and stories recounted in the group. It is what Freud called
'the clear awareness of an inner identity, the secret of the same
inner construction.'" [GROLLMAN, E., 1965, p. 41]
"All over the world," says Jewish psychoanalyst Earl Hopper, "Jews are drawn to the profession of psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic psychotherapy. The 1990 roster of the International Psychoanalytical Association reads like the membership list of a synagogue." [HOPPER, p. 18] "That vast apparatus of putative concern, psychiatry," wrote Roger Kahn in 1968, "is largely a Jewish monopoly." [KAHN, R., p. 53] "An area of medicine which Jews have made almost their own is psychiatry." [BERMANT, C., 1977, p. 119] "Jews," says Ann Roiphe, also Jewish, "have rushed to psychoanalysis as lemmings to the sea." [ROIPHE, 1981, p. 76] Psychotherapy is also in all respects so overwhelmingly a Jewish consumer domain that in a 1996 survey (in which nearly half of 17 psychoanalysts in a research project were expressly solicited as non-Jews), 75% of the patients for all of them (both Jewish and non-Jewish therapists) were found to be Jewish. [OSTROW, p. 27]
As James Yaffe observed in 1968:
"There is little question that a comparatively large proportion of the
patients undergoing psychoanalysis in America are Jewish. It
also seems to be true that Jewish parents are more likely than
equally affluent non-Jewish parents to send their children for
psychiatric treatment. Those who can't afford analysis are just
as enthusiastic about the blessings of less expensive psychiatry.
According to one leader in the field, 'If you open a mental health
clinic and don't advertise, Jews will be the only people who
flock to it.' In some sections of the Jewish community, in fact,
psychiatry has become a way of life, almost a substitute religion.
In southern California it's hard to find a Jewish family that hasn't
got at least one member in analysis." [YAFFE, J., 1968, p. 293]
With advancement out of the Jewish ghetto in the 18th century, and increased secular questioning about the religiously-based myths about themselves and how they fit into mainstream societies, over the last couple of centuries "the behavior pattern of assimilated Jews," says Hannah Arendt, "determined by this continuous concentrated effort to distinguish themselves ... created a Jewish type that is recognizable everywhere ... Judaism became a psychological quality and the Jewish question became an involved problem for every individual Jew." [ARENDT, p. 67] The Jewish novelist Franz Kafka, for instance, once remarked that poet Heinrich Heine's "conflict with Jewry" was "exactly what made him so typically Jewish," [SILBERMAN, p. 63] i.e., being Jewish, post-Enlightenment, was a war within the psyche about being Jewish.
"Whatever the reasons for their philosophical disarray and mental anguish," observes Gerald Krefetz, "Jews were among the first groups to seek relief from psychologists, psychiatrists, psychoanalysts, and psychotherapists ... perhaps psychiatry is today's secular rabbinate." [KREFETZ, p. 180] This theme is inverted from a negative to a positive and romanticized by Harriet Fromkin: "If we had no further illustration than the character of Freud, we should have a basis for suspecting some connection between the Jew and psychological genius." [KAHN, R., p. 72]
Freud eventually directed his projective obsessions towards his Old Testament Jewish heritage, asserting -- among other things -- that the revered patriarch, Moses, may not have even been Jewish. And that Jews killed him. "Biblical religion, according to Freud," said Joseph Campbell, "had the character of a neurosis, where a screen of mythic figures hides a repressed conviction of guilt which, it is felt, must be atoned, and yet cannot be consciously faced." [CAMPBELL, MASKS, p. 126] Freud believed that Jews had a continuous anxiety and resentment about breaking the many laws of their Father God. Freud wrote that
"In the religion of Moses itself there was no direct expression for the
murderer's father-hate. Only a powerful reaction to it could make
its appearance: the consciousness of guilt because of that hostility,
the bad conscience because one had sinned against God and
continued to sin. This feeling of guiltiness, which the Prophets kept
incessantly alive ... cleverly veiled the true origin of the feeling. The
people met with hard times... it became not easy to adhere to the
illusion ... they did not observe the laws. The need for satisfying
this feeling of guilt ... was insatiable, more exacting, but also more
petty ... It [the feeling of neurosis] bears the characteristic of being
never concluded ... with which we are familiar in the reaction-
formation of obsessional neurosis." [KREFETZ, p. 181-182]
In the Freudian worldview, Richard Rubenstein explains that the blueprint to understand the troubled anti-Semitic mind (and everyone's, for that matter) starts here:
"According to Freud, civilization and religion began with a 'primal
crime' in which the father of the original human horde was
cannibalistically murdered by his sons to gain sexual possession
of his females. The unconscious memory of the deed continues
to agonize the sons and their progeny, thereby causing the
murdered father to be imagined as the ever-lasting Heavenly Father.
For Freud, the supreme object of human worship [the Father God]
is none other than the first object of human criminality." [RUBENSTEIN,
p. 36]
From this bizarrely fictional speculation, a Judeo-centric argument can be, and is, often created that explains anti-Semitism in western tradition as Christianity's (psychoanalytically-based) conflict with Judaism. This includes Christian envy of God's favoritism of Jewry, traditional Christian belief that Jews were the killers of Christ (an echo of the "murder God" theme), Judaism itself as a "father" religion to Christianity, and on and on. In this scenario, Jews are scapegoated by Christians for the very death of God. Not surprisingly, the Freudian paradigm for the relationship between Christianity and Judaism is a violent one. "The Jews had a father religion," said Freud, "and the Christians a son religion, and the subconscious is to kill the father from time to time." [PERLMUTTER, p. 141] Hence, in this view too, Nazi fascism was not really (as declared and practiced by them) an anti-Christian creed, but -- however incongruous -- an expression of it. "In a sense," declares Rubenstein, "the death camps [for Jews] were the terminal expression of Christian anti-Semitism ... [RUBENSTEIN, R., p. 43] ... since the sins and guilts that beset the anti-Semites existence demands the death of the Jews." [RUBENSTEIN, p. 41]
Elsewhere in the psychoanalytic world, John Murray Cuddihy has even argued that the essence of Freud's unconscious "id" theory was really the Jewish "ordeal of civility," the struggle to "civilize," to acculturate into the interpersonal norms of Gentile culture. (Freud's name for frustrated human desire can even been seen as a pun on the Yiddish word for Jew: Yid). In this vein, Maurice Samuels reflected widespread social issues of the day when he suggested in 1932, however facetiously, that anti-Semitism was probably rooted in "a lack of niceness in the Jews. If the Jews would only temper their voices, their table manners and their ties, if they would be discreet and tidy in their enthusiasms, unobtrusive in their comings and goings, and above all reticent about their Jewishness, they would get along very well." [SILBERMAN, p. 30] Albert Lindemann notes also the undercurrent of agitated Jewishness (antithetical to non-Jewish Others) in three major Jewish-dominated ideologies in the last 150 years: "Such modern ideologies as socialism, (both Marxist and anarchist), Zionism, and various forms of the psychiatric worldview (Freudian psychoanalysis and related schools) all emphasize the tainted or sick qualities of Gentile existence, be it in exploitive capitalism, aggressive nationalism, or repressive Victorian prudery." [LINDEMANN, Esau's, p. 14]
On one hand deconstructing their traditional religious faith in terms of collective neurosis, the Jewish nature of the psychoanalytic community yet echoes the exclusivist tribal ethic -- the "chosenness" and "apartness" from others -- of classical Judaism. "Psychoanalysis from its origins," notes Kevin MacDonald, "has been a "science apart' from the rest of psychology and psychiatry, resulting in two separate and incompatible discourses about human behavior. Psychoanalysis was and remains a highly authoritarian movement in which group boundaries are rigidly maintained and in which heretics are expelled." [MACDONALD, p. 237] This ethos of a psychoanalytic chosen people was criticized by a Swiss psychiatrist, Eugen Bleuler, who was courted by Freud to join the early psychoanalytic movement. Bleuler resisted the absolutism of the Freudians, telling Freud that "this 'who is not for us is against us,' this 'all or nothing,' is necessary for religious and political parties ... for science I consider it harmful." [GAY, p. 145]
In 1990, a (Jewish) psychoanalyst, Jeffrey Mouisaieff Masson, former Projects Director of the Sigmund Freud Archives in London and thereby a member of the international psychoanalytic "inner circle," wrote a volume exposing the secretive behind-the-scenes foundations of the psychoanalytic community:
"No book has yet told what it is like to undergo training as an orthodox
Freudian psychoanalyst. Nor does any book tell what it is like to leave
that profitable and prestigious profession -- those who have been part of
the inner circle of psychoanalysis either do not leave, or have left in
discrete silence. Thus, until now it has been almost impossible to get
an internal view of the workings of this 'men's club' with its initiation
rites; expectations of membership loyalty over truth; pressures to accept
concepts handed down from the leader, no matter how irrational;
xenophobic banding together against outsiders; and the punishment
of anyone who poses questions or finally wants out. It is worth asking
why no book like this has appeared before, since people have written
accounts of leaving almost every other cult." [MASSON, J. M., 1990, p.
1-2]
Many Jewish scholars these days are trying to more openly claim Freud as one of their own and find in psychoanalysis its distinctly Jewish foundation. (An important impetus in Freud's construction of his theories of psychoanalysis is anti-Semitism. See Eric Grollman's Judaism in Sigmund Freud's World, for example, for a dose of this perspective). [GROLLMAN, E., 1965] While Freud always presented himself as an atheist and a completely "assimilated" Jew in mainstream Viennese society, there is evidence and argument that Freud was hiding his traditionally Jewish background and conflict with his (now believed to be) religious parents. Freud was even, beginning in 1897, a member of the Vienna chapter of the Jewish fraternal order, B'nai B'rith. Concerning their roots in traditional Judaism, Emmanuel Rice believes that Freud and his family were -- to the public -- deceptive at the least. "The fact," says Emmanuel Rice, "that these people were lying either did not occur to or seem to bother them." [RICE, p. 254] "It appears," continues Rice, "the family environment of Sigmund Freud's formative years was far more involved with Judaic scholarship, theological beliefs, and ritual practices than has been traditionally thought to be the case." [RICE, p. 257] This has significant implications -- by the very dictates of psychoanalytic theory which demands an exploration of childhood experiences for the roots of adult psychological behavior-- to understand what were Freud's own "internal conflicts." And it inevitably leads more deeply to a Jewish specificity in the very foundations of psychoanalytic theory, something that Freud emphatically resisted through most of his life, publicly conceding. Rice even asserts that Freud's last major work, Moses and Monotheism, which scandalized traditional Judaism, must be understood not as scientific theory, but "as a novel with autobiographical elements." [RICE, p. 235]
Freud was even married to a woman, Martha Bernaya, whose grandfather was the chief rabbi of Hamburg. Raised in an Orthodox household, after Freud's death she resumed traditionalist customs. [GROLLMAN, E., 1965, p. 70-71]
As Jewish scholar Samuel Klausner notes:
"Freud himself was a Jew, and most of the members of his immediate
Vienna circle were Jews. Admittance to the psychoanalytic
movement required analysis by a previous initiate, a sort of
'apostolic succession.' The original Jewish group tended to analyze
Jews. Unwittingly, psychoanalytic ideology may be couched in a
Jewish ethic strange to individuals socialized in the Protestant ethic."
[GROLLMAN, E., 1965, p. 43]
Karl Abraham, a close disciple of Freud, took issue with the Master's reluctance to concede that his completely rationalist view of human psyche -- putting the human mind into square pegs -- was particularly Jewish. "After all," said Abraham, "the Talmudic way of thinking cannot suddenly have disappeared from us." [GAY, p. 131] Freud's technique, in its exegetical method, he suggested, was "essentially Talmudic." [OSTROW, p. 25] Aaron Rabinowitz has even written a recent article that "enumerates and discusses some halachic [Jewish religious law] principles and values which are exerting influence on the practice of psychotherapy." [RABINOWITZ, A., 2000, p. 193]
Here's a bizarre excerpt from the Jewish Chronicle revolving around the relationship between Freudianism/psychoanalysis and Orthodox Judaism, the origin of Jewish identity:
"Alan Dundes, a leading academic folklorist, presents an avowedly Freudian account of the Orthodox propensity for 'circumventing halachic restrictions' as evidenced by the Shabbat elevator (one that stops automatically to allow Orthodox Jews to allow it on Shabbat). The argument is that Jews exhibit traits of an anal erotic nature -- that basically, pride in order and self-control, obsessions with cleanliness or purity, and even feelings of superiority (Jewish chosenness) can all be traced back to our potty training. There follows an extended discussion of such avowedly repressive anal components in halachah [Jewish religious law]; and an argument that circumventions are ingenious attempts to break out of the repressive restrictions while continuing to comply with them, attempts in which we delight like naughty children ... [I]f one is impressed by ideas like 'writing is an act of defecation' (as the book went on, I became more and more convinced) then this volume [is] the book for you." [RYNOLD, D, 11-22-02, p. 28]
(Speaking of "potty training," here's what Marsha Richman and Katie O'Donnell [in their satirical look at "The Jewish Man in the Bathroom"] have to say about it: "The door to his bathroom is always closed, even when he's not in there. He will lock the door when he is in there. If you should burst in, he will valiantly try to look like he's doing something else. He folds, never crumples, the paper. In his medicine chest you will find prescriptions to cover everything from hives to a slipped disc. The Jewish art of toilet training is accomplished with a lot of guilt; if he doesn't do the right thing in the right place, his mother might kill him, or herself or both. When he comes out of the bathroom you will see a great feeling of satisfaction on his face. You might be mistaken, but it often looks like he expects you to praise him for what he's done.") [RICHMAN/O'DONNELL, 1979, p. 39-40]
Later in life, Freud admitted in a private letter that "in some place of my soul, in a very hidden corner, I am a fanatical Jew. I am very much astonished to discover myself as such in spite of all my efforts to be unprejudiced and impartial." [HES, p. 232] In 1977, Freud's daughter, Anna, guest speaking at a psychoanalytic convention in Jerusalem, created a furor when she announced that the notion of psychoanalysis as a 'Jewish science' "can serve as a title of honor." [GAY, p. 118]
Here's a bizarre excerpt from the Jewish Chronicle revolving around the relationship between Freudianism/psychoanalysis and Orthodox Judaism, the origin of Jewish identity:
"Alan Dundes, a leading academic folklorist, presents an avowedly Freudian account of the Orthodox propensity for 'circumventing halachic restrictions' as evidenced by the Shabbat elevator (one that stops automatically to allow Orthodox Jews to allow it on Shabbat). The argument is that Jews exhibit traits of an anal erotic nature -- that basically, pride in order and self-control, obsessions with cleanliness or purity, and even feelings of superiority (Jewish chosenness) can all be traced back to our potty training. There follows an extended discussion of such avowedly repressive anal components in halachah [Jewish religious law]; and an argument that circumventions are ingenious attempts to break out of the repressive restrictions while continuing to comply with them, attempts in which we delight like naughty children ... [I]f one is impressed by ideas like 'writing is an act of defecation' (as the book went on, I became more and more convinced) then this volume [is] the book for you." [RYNOLD, D, 11-22-02, p. 28]
(Speaking of "potty training," here's what Marsha Richman and Katie O'Donnell [in their satirical look at "The Jewish Man in the Bathroom"] have to say about it: "The door to his bathroom is always closed, even when he's not in there. He will lock the door when he is in there. If you should burst in, he will valiantly try to look like he's doing something else. He folds, never crumples, the paper. In his medicine chest you will find prescriptions to cover everything from hives to a slipped disc. The Jewish art of toilet training is accomplished with a lot of guilt; if he doesn't do the right thing in the right place, his mother might kill him, or herself or both. When he comes out of the bathroom you will see a great feeling of satisfaction on his face. You might be mistaken, but it often looks like he expects you to praise him for what he's done.") [RICHMAN/O'DONNELL, 1979, p. 39-40]
Later in life, Freud admitted in a private letter that "in some place of my soul, in a very hidden corner, I am a fanatical Jew. I am very much astonished to discover myself as such in spite of all my efforts to be unprejudiced and impartial." [HES, p. 232] In 1977, Freud's daughter, Anna, guest speaking at a psychoanalytic convention in Jerusalem, created a furor when she announced that the notion of psychoanalysis as a 'Jewish science' "can serve as a title of honor." [GAY, p. 118]
"Although Freud openly questioned all religion," says M. H. Goldberg,
"including Judaism, he always thought of himself as a Jew and raised
his six children as Jews. In a letter to his fiancé written in 1882, Freud
concluded that 'something of the core, of the essence of this
meaningful and life-affirming Judaism will not be absent from our
home." [GOLDBERG, M. H., 1976, p. 30]
"Freud's Jewishness [was] ever present in his mind," suggests Benno Weiser Varon, "This mind, by the way, was a Talmudic mind, searching and speculative." [VARON, p. 9] Karl Krauss, a prominent Viennese leftist, journalist and baptized Jew, knew Freud and even declared psychoanalysis to be "the conquest of the confessional by the Jews of Vienna." [VARON, p. 9] He also asserted that "they have the press, they have the stock exchange, they also have the subconscious!" and that "psychoanalysis is the mental illness it purports to cure." [WINOKUR, J., 1992, p. 151-152]
Freud himself wrote a special preface to the Hebrew edition of his volume, Totem and Taboo, speaking of himself in the third person:
"[He] has never repudiated his people, who feels in essential nature a
Jew, and who has no desire to alter this nature. If the question were put
to him: 'Since you have abandoned all the common characteristics of
your countrymen, what is there left that is Jewish?' he would reply: 'A
very good deal and probably its very essence,' though he could not
express that essence clearly in words." [VARON, p. 9]
Freud once wrote to a Jewish friend that "racial relationship brings you closer to my intellectual constitution." [ARON, W., 1956-57, p. 290] Willy Aron adds that "in his famous address, 'On Being of the Sons of the Covenant,' delivered on May 6, 1926, on his 70th birthday, Freud spoke of 'the irresistible attraction of Judaism and Jews' and 'of the clear consciousness of an inner identity, the intimacy that comes from the same psychic structure.'" [ARON, W., 1956-57, p. 293] Freud further noted his link to the "racial" dimension of Jewishness, that "I can say that I am as little an adherent of the Jewish religion as of any other religion, i.e., I consider them all important as objects of scientific interest, but I do not share the emotional attitudes that goes with them. On the other hand, I have always felt a strong feeling of kinship with my race and have fostered it in my children." [ARON, p. 294]
Nathan Ackerman cites the following quotes by Freud about his Jewish identity: "A Jew must create a compensating culture or take the gamble of going stark crazy." ... "What bound me to Judaism ... was not belief, and not national pride ... There were other considerations which made the attractiveness of Judiams nad Jews irresistible ... many obscure forces and emotions, all the more powerful the less they were defined in words: ... Only to my Jewish nature did I owed the two qualities which had become indispensable to me on my hard road. Because I was a Jew, I found myself free of many prejudices and being a Jew, I was prepared to enter opposition and to renounce agreement with the compact majority." [ACKERMAN, N., 1965, p. xii] "However abused," adds Ackerman, paraphrasing Freud, "the Jew must remain true to his people; there is no other way: 'It always seemed to me [said Freud] not only shameful but downright senseless to deny it." [ACKERMAN, N., 1965, p. xiii]
"Psychoanalysis is widely thought of as a 'Jewish science,'" says Arnold Jacob Wolf,
"Indeed, Freud took pains to avart just such a notion, though he himself was,
the chief reason for it. The enemies of depth psychology still dismiss it as
peculiarly relevant to Jews; its friends note with gratifiation the biblical roots of
the new wisdom. Notonly are many practitioners of the art, like the very first
analyst, Jews by descent if not conviction, but there is a widespread conviction
that the method, the spirit, and even the conclusions of psychoanalysis are
para-Judaic ... [Freud's] ancestry and the impact of his ancestry upon his deepest
feelings are clearly and profoundly Jewish. His affinity for the Jewish style
both mystical and rationalist is unmistakable. His newly emphasized prudishness
together with his pioneering honesty in sexual matters is Talmudic."
[WOLF, A. J., 1965, p. 133]
Nathan Ackerman cites the following quotes by Freud about his Jewish identity: "A Jew must create a compensating culture or take the gamble of going stark crazy." ... "What bound me to Judaism ... was not belief, and not national pride ... There were other considerations which made the attractiveness of Judiams nad Jews irresistible ... many obscure forces and emotions, all the more powerful the less they were defined in words: ... Only to my Jewish nature did I owed the two qualities which had become indispensable to me on my hard road. Because I was a Jew, I found myself free of many prejudices and being a Jew, I was prepared to enter opposition and to renounce agreement with the compact majority." [ACKERMAN, N., 1965, p. xii] "However abused," adds Ackerman, paraphrasing Freud, "the Jew must remain true to his people; there is no other way: 'It always seemed to me [said Freud] not only shameful but downright senseless to deny it." [ACKERMAN, N., 1965, p. xiii]
"Psychoanalysis is widely thought of as a 'Jewish science,'" says Arnold Jacob Wolf,
"Indeed, Freud took pains to avart just such a notion, though he himself was,
the chief reason for it. The enemies of depth psychology still dismiss it as
peculiarly relevant to Jews; its friends note with gratifiation the biblical roots of
the new wisdom. Not
analyst, Jews by descent if not conviction, but there is a widespread conviction
that the method, the spirit, and even the conclusions of psychoanalysis are
para-Judaic ... [Freud's] ancestry and the impact of his ancestry upon his deepest
feelings are clearly and profoundly Jewish. His affinity for the Jewish style
both mystical and rationalist is unmistakable. His newly emphasized prudishness
together with his pioneering honesty in sexual matters is Talmudic."
[WOLF, A. J., 1965, p. 133]
Earl Hopper, who acknowledges that "my identity as a Jew is inseparable from my identify as a psychoanalyst," understands psychoanalysis to be of course a "Jewish science," but ascribes its roots to Freud's view that psychoanalysis represents the revolutionary insights of a "marginalized" people, i.e., Jews had been in the past conceptually lumped by gentiles together with thieves, lepers, and misfits of all kinds. [HOPPER, p. 19] The insightful Jewish world view, this argument insists, has therefore keener "outsider" perceptions of the norms of mainstream cultures of the Jewish diaspora. And Jewish genius is to criticize and deconstruct them. (It is interesting that this "marginalized victim people" concept emerges from the minds of rich, elitist Jewish psychoanalysts who imprint their paradigms of victimhood upon usually affluent patient-sponges, Jewish or not).
Arnold Meadow and Harold Vetter even argue that Freudian theory is based on the "Judaic value system" including Judaism's "this life" (not afterlife) orientation, a "rationalist control over ... sexual urges," the "hidden meaning of words," and the presence of the "Oedipus complex ... in Jewish culture, perhaps in peculiarly intense form." [MEADOW, p. 164] This includes Freud's notion, claim the authors, that a woman tries to make her husband her child to "act the part of a mother to him." Furthermore, the authoritarian nature of psychoanalysis emphasizes "rationality as a basis for authority [which] closely parallels the authority relationship found in Jewish culture." [MEADOW, p. 163] The patient's resistance to the psychoanalyst's insights into the patient's troubles "is diminished by the analyst's rational interpretation, or by the patient's positive transference toward the analyst." [MEADOW, p. 162] To follow the logic of psychoanalysis as an intrinsically Jewish revelation andworld view, the patient's "transference" is ultimately -- whatever else it is claimed to be -- a sensitization to "being Jewish."
Economist Peter F. Drucker -- whose parents knew Freud -- has argued that one of the major reasons for the early resistance to Freud was not only his strange theories, but his elitist and exploitive ethics:
"Freud did not accept charity patients, but taught instead that the
psychoanalyst must not treat a patient for free, and that the patient will
benefit from treatment only if made to pay handsomely ... Medical
Vienna did not ignore or neglect Freud, it rejected him. It rejected him
as a person because it held him to be in gross violation of the
ethics of healer." [TORREY, p. ]
Freud, notes Sylvia Rothchild, had an
"inability to take any experience at face value. He treated his pupils as
patients, urged them to 'absorb things, not argue back.' Freud had no
wish to serve suffering humanity. He saw in that wish only sadism,
'the apparent desire to help the sick a device to conceal from oneself
the wish to do the opposite' ... He feared death, chased after money,
position and reputation." [ROTHCHILD, S., 11-26-98, p. 24]
(Yet, in allegiance to his Jewish identity, "whenever any of his works were translated into Hebrew or Yiddish, Freud refused to accept royalties.") [ARON, W., 1956-57, p. 294]
In 1988, Jeffrey Moussaieff, the former Projects Director of the Sigmund Freud Archives and also Jewish, wrote one of his volumes attacking the psychoanalytic community, this book entitled Against Therapy, which outlines his enormous disillusionment with the principles and Thought Police practices of psychoanalysis. This includes Masson's outrage over the field's innately authoritarian manner, its manipulative control of patients, abridgement of ethical norms, and the systematic exploitation for personal profit of the emotionally vulnerable. Masson's observations of the psychoanalytic community include many general themes from Jewish history we have often seen before. "It is the world of therapy," he charges,
"it is therapy itself that is at the core of the corruption I have described
in this book. Every therapist, no matter how kindly and benign in
appearance and behavior, is sooner or later drawn into that corruption,
because the profession itself is corrupt. A profession that depends
for its existence on other people's misery is at special risk. The very
mainspring of psychotherapy is profit from another person's
suffering ... [MASSON, p. 251] ... Abuse of one form or another
is built into the very fabric of psychotherapy -- that power corrupts,
that psychiatric power corrupts just as political power does and that
the greater the power [over patients], the greater the propensity for
corruption ... The psychotherapeutic relationship is a self-policing
profession. The psychotherapeutic relationship is a privileged one,
protected by a tradition of secrecy." [MASSON, 1988, p. 168]
In another volume, Masson observes that Freud's teachings became a "profitable profession with all the trappings of a jealously protected guild. The price for joining this fraternity is silence about its membership policy. Corruption is incorporated, not exposed; prejudice and bias have been accepted, even embraced." [MASSON, 1990, p. 4] In this volume, Final Analysis, Masson exposes the Orwellian, irrational, and totalitarian world of the psychoanalytic community. As part of his training to become a psychoanalyst, Masson was forced to undergo five years of psychoanalysis himself (at a 1971 cost of $75 an hour, five days a week). [MASSON, 1990, p. 21] Masson discovered soon that the psychoanalyst, Irvine Schiffer (also Jewish), for his sessions was a manipulative, unethical, maniacally sexist, two-faced and exploitive dictator/liar who eventually sought to exploit Masson to further his own career, insisting that a paper Masson planned on writing should be partially credited to his therapist. [MASSON, 1990, p. 69-70, 75, 82-83] This therapist was also the president of the Toronto Psychoanalytic Institute. [MASSON, 1990, p. 21] In telling one's most intimate and embarrassing secrets to another (with no parallel exchange), the confessor becomes profoundly vulnerable and beholding to the Listener. As in all of psychoanalytic terrain, the therapist ultimately holds the revelations of the Confessor as a potential weapon against him. Masson was also outraged when the therapist inanely decided that Mr. Masson's fundamental psychological problem was that he wanted to be a beautiful woman! [MASSON, 1990, p. 104] In his training to become a therapist in the secretive and authoritarian world of psychoanalysis, Masson was also told by a professor that copies of some psychoanalytic journals could not be exposed to the "lay public." [MASSON, p. 111] Another taught that spies should sometimes investigate patients' lives. [MASSON, p. 110]
In the early days of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud was actually relieved to count Carl Gustav Jung -- a non-Jew -- as an adherent to the psychoanalysis bandwagon and was careful to keep him in the fold. "Gentile proselytes," notes John Murray Cuddihy, "could shore up [Freud's] self-doubt that psychoanalysis might not be, as its adherents claimed, a "science" at all ... but a social-cultural movement of Diaspora Jews." [CUDDIHY, p. 77] Without non-Jews in the psychoanalytic fold, Freud and his Jewish associates ran the profound risk -- with the emphasis on the likes of penis envy, the Oedipal Complex, strange sexual obsessions, the Death Wish, the focus on neurosis and anxiety, and all the rest of it -- of being mercilessly ridiculed and humiliated as merely participants in a bizarre Jewish cult, evidence, for anti-Jewish critics, of Jewish degradation.
Freud, in a letter to fellow Jewish psychoanalyst, Karl Abraham, wrote: "You are closer to my intellectual constitution because of racial kinship while he [Jung] as a Christian and pastor's son finds his way to me only against great inner resistances. His association with us is very valuable for that. I nearly said that it was only by his appearance on the scene that psychoanalysis escaped the danger of becoming a Jewish national affair." [CUDDIHY p. 77] Later, in another letter to Abraham, Freud added: "Our Aryan comrades are really completely indispensable to us, otherwise psychoanalysis would succumb to anti-Semitism." [CUDDIHY, p. 82] There are those who even suggest that Sabina Spielrin, a Jewish woman (and, as one journalist put it, "a compulsive masturbator") who was Jung's patient and lover, was a "'honey trap' offered by Freud ... to keep Jung in the analytic movement." [KELLAWAY, K., p. 10]
Freud was a contemporary in Vienna of Theodore Herzl, the acknowledged "founder" of Zionism and modern state of Israel. "Freud had a high regard for Theodore Herzl and was closely acquainted with him." [MEITLIS, J., p. 21] Herzl, remarks Cuddihy, believed that non-Jews are found "in two and only two varieties, namely ... overt and covert anti-Semites. Any wide reading in Freud puts it beyond doubt that he shared this conviction." [CUDDIHY, p. 78] "Freud "always gave a generous contribution" to the Zionist youth organization Hechaluz [the Pioneers] and in 1936 finally "openly aligned himself with the Zionist cause." [BERKELEY, p. 235, p. 191] "Zionism," Freud wrote in a private letter in 1930, "awakened my strongest sympathies, which are still faithfully attached to it today." [GAY, p. 123] "We are all of the same blood," Freud once told Jewish friend Jacob Meitlis. "Basically, all are anti-Semites. They are everywhere. Frequently it is latent and hidden, but it is there." [MEITLIS, p. 20]
Dr. Leo Goldhammar, a friend of Freud, noted an arresting dream Freud had in the early 1900s. Goldhammar
"recorded a dream of Freud about Theodore Herzl. In this dream, as
told by Freud, Herzl conveyed to Freud the idea of immediate action
regarding Palestine if the Jewish people is to be saved. Freud remarked
in his lecture on the dream that never before had he been interested
in Herzl's ideas. Some time later he met the real person of his
dream on a bus and was struck by the great resemblance of the
real Herzl to the image beheld in his dream." [ARON, W., 1956-57,
p. 294]
Freudianism proved useful in arguing Zionist theory. "The Zionist critique of assimilation ... [i.e., that Jews are perpetually destined to be a 'nation apart' as an inassimilable people in non-Jewish lands]," notes Donald Niewyk, "... rested on a certain conviction that all efforts to blend with non-Jews must lead unswervingly to deformed Jewish lives. The new discipline of psychoanalysis was mustered to demonstrate the neurotic effects of divided consciousness. Rootlessness and inferiority complexes were shown to generate everything from revolutionary activity to Jewish anti-Semitism, extreme German nationalism, and suicide." [NIEWYK, D., p. 126]
"Freud's Jewish identity," says Sander Gilman, "echoes throughout the history of psychoanalysis as part of its rhetoric." [GILMAN, p. 93] As such, it was -- and is -- a warped and constrictive system for a non-Jew. "When one rebels within or against psychoanalysis," adds Gilman, "one seemingly natural rhetoric in which this rebellion takes place in articulation is an opposition to the 'Jewish' nature of the field."
What non-Jew would respond positively, favorably, to the inevitable manifestations of Freud's core belief about himself and his people, (an undercurrent of psychoanalysis), and how Jews traditionally treat those outside their own community? Freud wrote it this way:
"We may start from a character of the Jews which
dominates their relationship to others. There is no doubt that
they have a particularly high opinion of themselves, that they
regard themselves as more distinguished, of higher standing,
as superior to other peoples. " [FREUD, p. 105-106]
This is the very paradigm of the foundations of psychoanalysis itself. As Freud wrote, the doctor-patient relationship is a "situation in which there is a superior and a subordinate." [MASSON, p. 3] That subordinate, of course, is the patient who, by virtue of the very principle of psychotherapy, does not negotiate understanding with an overseer, but must entirely bend to the analyst's dictatorial will. And this dictatorial will, by conceptual origin, rationalist method, and omnipresent propagation, is Jewish-centered.
Freud's sense of Jewish superiority was documented a number of times, once expressed in the context of the death of a Jewish colleague. "We were both Jews," said Freud, "and knew of each other that we carried that miraculous thing in common which -- inaccessible to any analysis so far -- makes the Jews." [GAY, p. 133] One scholar notes that "Freud's undefined sense of Jewishness represents a special case of his obstinate belief in the inheritance of acquired characteristics," as manifest in their "harsh, obsessive, self-punishing religion." [GAY, p. 133] Among Freud's later disciples, A. A. Roback, a Jew and Russian-American psychologist, sought "the actual causes of the Jewish birth and nursing of psychoanalysis in the peculiar makeup of the Jew." [GAY, Moment, p. 48]
Understandably, eventually Freud and Jung began having serious disagreements. Jung, attributing many of the Jews' psychological problems to their own particular sense of rootlessness, decided that Freud's special Jewish hang-ups couldn't be generalized and universalized onto everybody else’s' psyche too. Said Jung:
"The Jewish problem is a regular complex, a festering wound...
Are we really to believe that a tribe which has wandered
throughout history for several thousand years as 'God's
Chosen People' was not put up to such an idea by some
quite special psychological peculiarity? If no difference exists,
how do we recognize Jews at all? ... All branches of humanity
unite in one stem -- yes, but what is a stem without separate
branches? Why this ridiculous touchiness when anybody
dares to say anything about the psychological differences
between Jews and Christians?" [HANNAH, p. 224-225]
Among Jung's earliest rebellions against his mentor was to challenge Freud's theory that children have incestuous desires for their opposite gender parents. And what, one wonders, of traditional Jewish obsessive concern with the prestige and pedigrees of their respective genealogical lineages (called "yicchus") in association with Freud's claim that all people reject their parents (Freud's were not well off) and imagine them to be "members of an aristocratic and/or royal family"? [RICE, p. 239] Jewish author Frederic Grunfeld dismisses Jung's disenchantment with the Jewish base of Freudianism thusly: "Freud was accused, not only by fools but even by C. G. Jung, of purveying 'Jewish psychology.'" [GRUNFELD, F., 1996, p. 21]
Jung eventually defected from Freud and his Jewish circle, and became influential in the field of psychology in his own right. And what did this defection signify to Freud?
Jung eventually defected from Freud and his Jewish circle, and became influential in the field of psychology in his own right. And what did this defection signify to Freud?
Early Freud follower Ernest Jones noted his sense of the nature of the Jewish psychoanalytic field:
"I became, of course, aware somewhat to my astonishment of how
extraordinarily suspicious Jews could be of the faintest sign of
anti-Semitism and of how many remarks or actions could be
interpreted in that sense ... Freud himself was pretty sensitive in
this respect." [GROLLMAN, E., 1965, p. 105]
One of the Freudian explanations for this anti-Semitism, "the deepest source of anti-Semitism," says Judy Cooper, is "the Jewish practice of circumcision ... [Freud] considered this to be a primeval custom used as a symbolic substitute for castration and an expression of subjugation to the father's will." [COOPER, p. 7]
Freud, like most Jews in our own day, saw in any resistance to his will the latent pulse of anti-Semitism. When "the first foreign [Swiss] recruits to psychoanalysis rejected Freud's 'theory of anal-eroticism,'" says Cooper, he saw it as an anti-Semitic attack on the Jews of Vienna. Freud complained that
"There [in Switzerland] one hears just the argument I tried to avoid by
making Zurich the centre [of psychoanalysis]. [They say that] Viennese
sensuality is not to be found anywhere else! Between the lines you can
read further that we Viennese are not only swine but also Jews."
[COOPER, p. 6]
Freud, says Cooper, argued that Jews were "free from prejudice which restricted others in the use of their intellect," whereas "the Swiss [i.e., non-Jews] had to rid themselves of deep cultural attitudes, beliefs and prejudices to which they were profoundly attached, even though they considered themselves to be fully emancipated. "[COOPER, p. 6] Other anti-Semites in Freud's eventual sphere, claims Cooper, included Virginia Woolf, one of Freud's publishers; Ernest Jones, one of his biographers; and much of the early French Psychoanalytic Society of the 1920's. [COOPER, p. 9]
A rare Pakistani psychotherapist, Masud Khan, who lived and worked in Britain, is afforded special attention by Judy Cooper (a Jewish psychotherapist who spent six years in therapy under him) as an anti-Semite. Khan complained that "the strength of the Jews is that they have no sensitivity about the contempt in which others hold them," "what makes Jews insufferable is that in order to love themselves they have to be hated by others first," and "the impact of the Judaic-Yiddish-Jewish bias of psychoanalysis was neither small nor slight to me." [COOPER, p. 11] None of these Khan comments of course have any verifiable basis in reality for Cooper except as evidence for his irrational anti-Semitism.
Even Jeffrey Moussieff Masson, a Jewish critic of the "corrupt" foundations of psychoanalysis, blamed a Gentile (in training to become a psychoanalyst) for the death of a Jewish patient. Why? Because the non-Jew would not/could not bend to see the patient's very particular Jewish world, one which is singularly welded to the lens of an omnipresent anti-Semitism. This (and a non-Jewish irritation with Freud's compulsion for Jewish "themes"), decides Masson, is itself an act of anti-Semitism. To both the patient and Masson, the non-Jew learning to be a psychoanalyst is an anti-Semite. Masson's comments reflect the implicit Jewish/Gentile divisive undercurrent about anti-Semitism within the psychoanalytic, and any other, field. "One of my fellow candidates was Catholic," decides Masson,
"and was preoccupied with a Catholic theology. He had the misfortune
to have as a patient a Jewish survivor of the concentration camps. During
one of the case seminars [at a Toronto university] he explained to the
class that this patient suspected him of anti-Semitism. Since he had
once complained to me that Freud was too preoccupied with 'Jewish'
themes, I was sympathetic to her concerns. 'I am asking for help,' he
said, looking miserable. I thought this only fair. No doubt he wanted
to ask somebody else, somebody more sensitive to these issues, to
take over the case. 'How can I get her to understand that this is merely
a projection, and a paranoid one at that? She is being chased all right,
but her tormentors, her persecutors, are inside her own head. She
can't see that, and she thinks the worst problem is that she has fallen
on a bad analyst.' She was right, I thought. The class and the
supervisor all urged him to redouble his efforts to provide this woman
with 'insight.' But from class to class, things got worse. 'She is
convinced that she is locked into a life-and-death struggle with me,
and if she cannot get me to change, she is going to kill herself. How
do I get her to see that the change must be in her, not me?' I could
not see how this attitude could possibly help her. One day he came
to class and was crying, 'She killed herself.'" [MASSON, J. M., 1990,
p. 106]
At root in this story here, Holocaust victim or not, there is indeed a profound therapist-patient struggle. It centers upon the Jewish demand that non-Jews sensitize themselves to the peculiar particulars of "being Jewish," especially an insistence that non-Jews are, virtually by nature, irrationally anti-Semitic and that to deny this alleged "fact" is itself an expression of the irrational "disease."A clear example of this psychotherapy-induced Gentile sensitization to being Jewish is the case of non-Jewish journalist Ross Wetzsteon ("I was immediately drawn to the Jews because they seemed so attractive and because the WASPs seemed so repellent.") Wetzsteon, after asserting the truths of Jewish "pushiness" and "vulgarity" as verifiable social traits ("Jewish vulgarity, in short, became a kind of intellectual and moral critique of the WASP mentality"), as well has his alienation from his own family and WASP culture, turns to explain how psychotherapy has liberated him from the "deceitful facade" of WASP identity. "I'll never forget," he writes,
"how much my therapy had to do with my pleasure. For me, therapy was
primarily a means of liberating my inner vulgarity, of releasing a kind of
pushiness and ostentation in my psychic life -- it was a way of discoverin g
that the things I valued most were radically opposed to the WASP ideals I'd
internalized ... The imporant point is that it was quite clear to me that the Jew
and the psychotherapist joined forces in the abolition of WASP hypocrisy,
WASP decorum, and WASP censorship. I even came to see a parallel --
while obviously aware of the disparities -- between Jewish social liberation
and my own psychological liberation. My ghetto was my head, my
assimilation was through therapy ... So when I say that psychotherapy
revealed to me the autheticity of feeling, I'm saying that the experience was
a way of becoming a mensch [Yiddish for 'good man']. Thus, to me,
psychotherapy became what Freud most feared -- a Jewish science ...
I regard myself as an 'honorary' Jew."
[WEZSTEON, R., SEPT 6-12, 1998]
"how much my therapy had to do with my pleasure. For me, therapy was
primarily a means of liberating my inner vulgarity, of releasing a kind of
pushiness and ostentation in my psychic life -- it was a way of discoverin
that the things I valued most were radically opposed to the WASP ideals I'd
and the psychotherapist joined forces in the abolition of WASP hypocrisy,
WASP decorum, and WASP censorship. I even came to see a parallel --
while obviously aware of the disparities -- between Jewish social liberation
and my own psychological liberation. My ghetto was my head, my
assimilation was through therapy ... So when I say that psychotherapy
revealed to me the autheticity of feeling, I'm saying that the experience was
a way of becoming a mensch [Yiddish for 'good man']. Thus, to me,
psychotherapy became what Freud most feared -- a Jewish science ...
I regard myself as an 'honorary' Jew."
[WEZSTEON, R., SEPT 6-12, 1998]
Freud's broad version of psychoanalysis as a respected "science" to this day has a constrictive ideological foundation. And what is the essential spirit of it? "The negative character of psycho dynamic theory," suggests Martin Gross, "with its emphasis on abnormalities ... is a magnificent legacy of Freud's own neuroses." Freud's official biographer, wrote that for nearly a decade up to 1900 the founder of psychoanalysis had his own "considerable psycho neurosis, characterized by swings of mood from extreme exhilaration to profound depression and twilight states of consciousness." [EYSENCK, p. 38] Freud was also addicted to cocaine, and he prescribed it to others. [GROSS, p. 234-235; ROTHCHILD, S., 11-26-98, p. 24]
And, if one resists Freudian dictates? For the psychoanlytic Thought Police, it is evidence, of course, of anti-Semitism. Whether one addresses the Jewish dimensions of the field, psychoanalysis is so overwhelmingly Jewish that in some quarters critics of Freudian theory are considered instant anti-Semites, "not just allies of the Christian far right but as latter-day Nazis hunting down 'Freudian Jews'." [CREWS, F., 1998, p. xxi]
And, if one resists Freudian dictates? For the psychoanlytic Thought Police, it is evidence, of course, of anti-Semitism.
In recent years a firestorm of material has been published that attacks Freudian theory and "it's malignant affect ... on American thought and culture." [TORREY, Title Page] Freud, writes H. J. Eysenck, "was, without doubt, a genius, not of science, but of propaganda, not of rigorous proof, but of persuasion ... His place is not, as he claimed, with Copernicus and Darwin, but with Hans Christian Anderson and the Brothers Grimm, tellers of fairy tales." [EYSENCK, p. 208] "Freudians are finding themselves on the defensive," noted Frederick Crews in 1998, "and the strategies of special pleading that they adopt are themselves symptomatic of intellectual bankruptcy ... Thus it was Freud's closest friend Fliess who pointed out in 1901 that Freud was ascribing his own thoughts to the minds of his patients." [CREWS, F., 1998, p. xxviii]
Not unexpectedly, even Orthodox Jews have attacked Freudian theory and its perceived corrosive effect on traditional values. "The priesthood of Freud's cult," wrote Martin Kushner, "as a vested interest, tries to strengthen and perpetuate itself, not unlike any other vested interest." [GAY, p. 97]
Freud's influence in Western culture to this day remains incredible; it has permeated all facets of modern life, from literature to toilet training. Psychoanalysts head over half of the departments of psychiatry at American medical schools. "I am bewildered," said Dr. William Sargent, a former head of St. Thomas Hospital in England, "at the way direction and control of American psychiatry has been taken over since World War II by psychoanalysis." [GROSS, p. 145] And as Kate Millet has noted, "The prestige of Freud's sexual theories did not arrive at, still less maintain, such complete ascendancy [in Europe] as they achieved in the United States. In America, the influence of Freud is almost incalculable." [MILLET, p. 178]
So where does this all lead us, per the subject at hand: Jews, non-Jews, and the subject of anti-Semitism? This is what Freud had to say about the reasons for anti-Semitism:
"With regard to antisemitism, I don't really want to search for explanations; I feel
strong inclination to surrender to my affects in this matter and find myself confirmed
in my wholly non-scientific belief that mankind ... by and large are a wretched lot."
[ZUKIER, H., 1999, p. 118]
"With regard to antisemitism, I don't really want to search for explanations; I feel
strong inclination to surrender to my affects in this matter and find myself confirmed
in my wholly non-scientific belief that mankind ... by and large are a wretched lot."
[ZUKIER, H., 1999, p. 118]
With the rigid conviction that anti-Semitism is an irrational, baseless animosity towards Jews, immediately after World War II and in the stormy months before the founding of Israel, American Jewish organizations began, quite literally, to plan their propaganda strategies. The revelation of Hitler's atrocities against Jews publicly elevated Jews to widespread sympathy and an uncontested "higher moral ground," disarming to our own day any public criticism of Jewry and only rarely the rising Jewish state of Israel. The practical question for Jewish organizations (particularly, but not only, the Zionist ones) was: how do Jews best ride this wave of popular sympathy for their plight under Hitler into the far future? To deflect any argument from the historical record scathing of Jews, it was deemed extremely important to implant in American public opinion the notion that any criticism of Jews had no rational causal basis and was, by definition, originated in mental illness. And an entire "science," albeit a disguised Jewish one, was at their command to "prove" it.
As Jewish psychoanalyst Rudolf Lowenstein declared in 1951:
"Inaccessibility to reason is also one of the most typical characteristics
of the anti-Semite, who is unable to re-evaluate his opinions and
prejudices in the light of factual evidence that refutes them. The
passions and the unconscious motives and mechanisms involved
in his anti-Semitic feelings are too powerful to yield to reason or
experience. We find therefore that although anti-Semitism cannot
be placed in any one of the well-known clinical categories it is
nevertheless frequently an indication of some sort of mental
disturbance that could be classified among the social mental
diseases." [LOEWENSTEIN, R., 1951, p. 18-19]
Among the powerful Jewish lobbying organizations seeking to disseminate such notions was the American Jewish Committee, one of the many Jewish groups that actively support the state of Israel. (AJC's efforts to effect social change in America include "the elimination of expression of religion in the public schools with special reference to the observation of Christmas," opposition to quota-oriented affirmative action legislation (because it hurts Jews), and "continued campaigns ... to make people aware of Arab funding over American educational institutions." [DOBKOWSKI, p. 39] The AJC also was actively involved in the successful lobby of the Vatican to formally change traditional Catholic teachings that Jews killed Christ. [DOMBKOWSKI, p. 37]
Jewish communal organizations have long been active in socially engineering non-Jewish perceptions of the Jewish community against any instinct towards criticism (i.e., "anti-Semitism.") As Eli Ginzberg noted in 1949, "Today at least among large numbers of American Jews, the 'defense activities' have usurped a position of priority. This was more or less inevitable since many of these Jews have lost all interest in positive Jewish values; their entire adjustment is externally oriented. Finally, we are confronted with the amazing belief among American Jews ... that the basic attitudes of the Gentiles toward the Jews can be significantly altered, if only the right 'techniques' are discovered and employed." [HERTZBERG, A., 1989, p. 331]
A good example of this is the American Jewish Committee's efforts to use Freudian theory to explain, and diffuse, the anti-Semitic threat. "A recent conference called by the most outstanding Jewish defense agency [AJC] in this country," wrote Max Horkheimer (head of an AJC committee) in 1946, "... was attended by experts from all over America. Many questions were presented: In setting up a defense program against anti-Semitism, what type of propaganda should be used? What should be said? ... Should there simply be an appeal for fair play, to a sense of justice in the individual, to the ideals of democracy? The psychoanalytic answer would be in the negative. A mere appeal to the conscious mind does not suffice, because anti-Semitism and the susceptibility to anti-Semitic propaganda spring from the unconscious." [HORKHEIMER, p. 2]
Here Horkheimer asserts that a rational appeal to democratic principles of fairness, justice, equality, and humanitarianism in an open and civilized forum to "clear the air" of anti-Jewish complaint will never work because the source of such complaint is -- by the psychoanalytic definition -- purely emotional and irrational. Jews, in this scenario, are always scapegoats for non-Jewish problems. A critique of Jewish identity and behavior is not, to the "normal" mind, even on the map. It is, by psychoanalytic definition, rationally impossible. Criticism of the Jewish community is thereby merely a manifestation of human psychological sickness. The only option for Jews, as Horkheimer and his psychoanalytic colleagues see it, is a "propaganda" that entirely denies "anti-Semites" (generally broadly considered to be anyone who criticizes Jews or Israel) a forum for their grievances. Hence, no credence or attention is afforded whatsoever to the very materially concrete and well-documented socio-economic roles of Jews that oppressed others through history; the centrality of money-making and exploitation of others in the Jewish world view and the traditional Jewish double moral standard towards this task; public animosity towards Jews throughout history as financiers, economic middlemen, and money dealers; legal sanctions for unethical conduct towards Gentiles in the Talmud; religiously sanctioned Jewish separatism, racism, and contempt for non-Jews; and the implications of all this to international Jewry, Israel, and modern times. (Horkheimer, by the way, was a refugee from Nazi Germany where he had been the Director of the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt, a school noted for its Marxist and Freudian foundations. "Most of the roughly 50 members of the institution's staff," notes Nachum Gidal, "were of Jewish origin)." [GIDAL, p. 354] "Germans of Jewish background," note Stanley Rothman and S. Robert Lichter, "dominated another important group of intellectuals during the Weimar period, the Frankfurt-based Institut fur Sozialforschung, whose leading members became collectively known as the 'Frankfurt School.' This roster included some extraordinarily distinguished and inflential figures, including T. W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Erich Fromm, Herbert Marcuse, and Walter Benjamin. With the exception of Karl Wittfogel, who left the Institute rather early to become an anti-Marxist conservative, all the inital members were of Jewish background (Adorno was half-Jewish). Most of the Frankfurt School were the sons of successful businessmen." " [ROTHMAN/LICHTER, 1982, p. 86]
"In 1943," notes Stuart Svonkin, when the Institute for Social Research set up shop at Columbia University in New York City,
"the American Jewish Committee entered into a contract with the ISR under
which the institute was to investigate contemporary American anti-Semitism."
[SVONKIN, S., 1997, p. 33]
"In 1943," notes Stuart Svonkin, when the Institute for Social Research set up shop at Columbia University in New York City,
"the American Jewish Committee entered into a contract with the ISR under
which the institute was to investigate contemporary American anti-Semitism."
[SVONKIN, S., 1997, p. 33]
The fortification of the Jewish people and their influence over American public opinion by legions of committed Jewish psychoanalysts and their "science” in the hunt for the omnipresent anti-Semite and to eradicate its attendant irrational "prejudice" was begun in earnest. "In the first week, and months, after the end of the second World War," notes J. J. Goldberg, "the organized Jewish community launched a broad ranging campaign to end prejudice and discrimination in America ... It was a huge, coordinated campaign, waged in the courts and the legislature, in the media and in the streets." [GOLDBERG, J.J. p. 119] The result of this profoundly powerful lobbying effort is a ruthless political weapon, a one-way dictatorship of accusation against any kind of critic of Jews. As Rabbi Daniel Lapin notes the situation today, even "the unfounded charge of 'anti-Semite' brands the victim and leaves the accuser absolved." [LAPIN, D., 1999, p. 285]
Jewish author Stuart Svonkin notes that in the late 1930s
"the AJC and the ADL each launched ambitious programs aimed at unmasking
rabble-rousers and 'immunizing' Americans against anti-Semitism ... Using the radio,
the press, and other mass media, the AJC and ADL embarked on a joint
campaign of public education that portrayed anti-Semitism as the opening
gambit in a Nazi scheme to 'divide and conquer' the United States. Both
agencies spent large sums of money producing and distributing leaflets,
pamphlets, and books that provided a positive image of Jews while
depicting Nazism as atheistic, antidemocratic, and un-American -- not
simply anti-Semitic ... The Jewish agencies' propaganda campaign reflected
the assumption that anti-Semitism was rooted in ignorance about Jews and
Judaism ... Like their counterparts at the AJC, ADL staff members formed
working relationships with reporters, publishers, newspaper columnists, radio
station managers, and moviemakers, through which they were able to counteract
anti-Semitic stereotypes and emphasize the importance of interreligious unity.
The ADL and the AJC both obscured the Jewish origins of theeir efforts
by unobtrusively subsidizing newspapers, church groups, labor unions,
professional organizations, and German American organizations that spread
anti-Nazi, pro-democratic propaganda." [SVONKIN, S., 1997, p. 15-16]
Glen Jean Sonne describes one of the successful American Jewish prototypes to silence a critic of Jewry, this one a preacher and right-winger, Gerald K. Smith, in the 1940s:
"Indeed there was a Jewish plan ('plot' is too strong a word); and it was more
effective than many of Smith's opponents anticipated. The strategy devised was
to deny Smith any publicity. This plan evolved after several years of spirited
debate within the Jewish community; it required a herculean effort to convince
and coordinate the press as well as fellow Jews. Although never completely
effective, the strategy reduced Smith from a highly publicized public figure
in the 1930s to a pariah in the postwar period ..." [SONNE, J., 1986, p. 153]
Popular Jewish convention also held --as one 1950s study of Jewish American colleges students found -- organized Jewish efforts to thwart anti-Jewish hostility should be accomplished "secretly." "The desire to please and appease the powerful Gentile," noted Joseph Adelson in discussing the results of his survey of Jews, "is reflected in the belief that organizational response to anti-Semitism, when it is necessary, should be of a quiet, secret, conspiratorial nature. Organizations such as the Anti-Defamation League should avoid stirring up public attention." [ADELSON, J., 1960, p. 478]
Jewish author Stuart Svonkin notes that in the late 1930s
"the AJC and the ADL each launched ambitious programs aimed at unmasking
rabble-rousers and 'immunizing' Americans against anti-Semitism ... Using the radio,
the press, and other mass media, the AJC and ADL embarked on a joint
campaign of public education that portrayed anti-Semitism as the opening
gambit in a Nazi scheme to 'divide and conquer' the United States. Both
agencies spent large sums of money producing and distributing leaflets,
pamphlets, and books that provided a positive image of Jews while
depicting Nazism as atheistic, antidemocratic, and un-American -- not
simply anti-Semitic ... The Jewish agencies' propaganda campaign reflected
the assumption that anti-Semitism was rooted in ignorance about Jews and
Judaism ... Like their counterparts at the AJC, ADL staff members formed
working relationships with reporters, publishers, newspaper columnists, radio
station managers, and moviemakers, through which they were able to counteract
anti-Semitic stereotypes and emphasize the importance of interreligious unity.
The ADL and the AJC both obscured the Jewish origins of theeir efforts
by unobtrusively subsidizing newspapers, church groups, labor unions,
professional organizations, and German American organizations that spread
anti-Nazi, pro-democratic propaganda." [SVONKIN, S., 1997, p. 15-16]
Glen Jean Sonne describes one of the successful American Jewish prototypes to silence a critic of Jewry, this one a preacher and right-winger, Gerald K. Smith, in the 1940s:
"Indeed there was a Jewish plan ('plot' is too strong a word); and it was more
effective than many of Smith's opponents anticipated. The strategy devised was
to deny Smith any publicity. This plan evolved after several years of spirited
debate within the Jewish community; it required a herculean effort to convince
and coordinate the press as well as fellow Jews. Although never completely
effective, the strategy reduced Smith from a highly publicized public figure
in the 1930s to a pariah in the postwar period ..." [SONNE, J., 1986, p. 153]
Popular Jewish convention also held --as one 1950s study of Jewish American colleges students found -- organized Jewish efforts to thwart anti-Jewish hostility should be accomplished "secretly." "The desire to please and appease the powerful Gentile," noted Joseph Adelson in discussing the results of his survey of Jews, "is reflected in the belief that organizational response to anti-Semitism, when it is necessary, should be of a quiet, secret, conspiratorial nature. Organizations such as the Anti-Defamation League should avoid stirring up public attention." [ADELSON, J., 1960, p. 478]
By 1950, the "Department of Scientific Research" (headed by Horkheimer) of the AJC sponsored an influential study, led by Dr. Nathan Ackerman of Columbia University, designed to equate mental illness and anti-Semitism. The resultant volume,Anti-Semitism and Emotional Disorder (co-authored with Marie Jahoda), became an authoritative source and is cited in the bibliographies of many later books about anti-Semitism. Ackerman's research was not exploratory investigation per se. Cloaked beneath the robes of psychoanalytic scientism, it was closer in spirit to a McCarthy-inspired witch hunt, which entered American political life a few years later. Information was merely solicited from American psychoanalysts by open invitation in this study to prove the thesis that anyone who complains about any aspect of Jewish behavior is crazy. (In 1996, Jewish psychoanalyst Mortimer Ostrow reported upon his own 9-year research project sponsored by the "Psychoanalysis Research and Development Fund" on the same topic: "We anticipated that the psychoanalytic method could be usefully applied to the phenomenon of anti-Semitism, since anti-Semitism seems to be largely irrational. Its ubiquity and presence cannot be explained by any realistic considerations.") [OSTROW, p. 3]
The bedrock for such a study originates here: "[Freud's] historic neurotic personality," says Martin Gross," has had a profound effect on our culture. It has thrust Freud's worst indispositions into our language, our mental habits, and our psychology ... one trait was his bad-tempered insistence that secret hostility was paramount in the human psyche." [GROSS, p. 243] (Might this be a clue, one wonders, to distinctly Jewish "secret hostility.")
In the introductory statements to his study of anti-Semitism, Ackerman notes that he and his colleagues are Jews. He then bluntly confesses his emotional bias on the subject of anti-Semitism, dismisses objectivity and "detachment from the issue" as being "logically and psychologically untenable," declares that "value judgments enter into every step of social research," and then begins -- paradoxically and hypocritically -- a discussion of the evils of "prejudice" and "prejudgment" (as expressed by anti-Semites) on the very next pages! [ACKERMAN, p. 1-4] "Inherent," he boldly pronounces, " in the process of prejudgments is the danger of stereotypical thinking." Lost in his zealous dedication to diagnose his preconceived world of endemic Jew-haters Ackerman somehow misses -- from the very start -- that his own "value judgments" are quintessential prejudgments.
Ackerman conjures up a broad definition of anti-Semitism, wide enough to catch virtually anyone in his "prejudicial" net (including plenty of Jews, as we shall see): "Anti-Semitism is any expression of hostility, verbal or behavioral, mild or violent, against Jews as a group, or against an individual Jew because of his belonging to that group." [ACKERMAN, p. 19] That's the entire definition. This net that even includes "any-mild-verbal-hostility" catches a lot of minnows, and anyone short of a saint. In fact, it catches -- as intended -- everyone. Lest anyone dare to think that they are not themselves fertile grounds for the disease of anti-Semitism, Ackerman notes that "the difference between the 'sick' and the 'healthy' personality is one of degree and quantity rather than one of quality." [ACKERMAN, p. 18]
This professor, in consort with the American Jewish Committee, contacted a number of "accredited" New York city psychiatrists -- some were Jews, some were not. He doesn't provide exact numbers or proportions. Ackerman only says that " a small number of psychiatrists were first approached." [ACKERMAN, p.11] Later he says "the cooperation of psychoanalysts was then enlisted on a large scale," [ACKERMAN, p.15] and he leaves it at that, except to add that some case histories were further solicited from two social-welfare agencies. [ACKERMAN, p.16] Suspiciously, he does not ever note, other than in these vague terms, the number of psychiatrists who participated in his project, let alone how many were Jewish and how many Gentile. Whoever they were, he asked them to submit case histories of patients who exhibited "signs of anti-Semitism" (the psychiatrists were to determine the "signs" as they wished -- "The psychoanalyst was completely at liberty to include any fact that seemed relevant to the patient's anti-Semitism)." [ACKERMAN, p. 11] Ackerman doesn't note if the patients gave consent to use their personal traumas, fears, and pains for this study, or even if they were informed of its existence.
Ackerman then decided that it was "essential" that those under his employ (who interviewed the New York psychiatrists about anti-Semitism) had to be themselves psychoanalyzed. "This," he says, "helped to establish quickly an atmosphere of confidence between the psychoanalyst and research personnel." [ACKERMAN, p.15] It would also, of course, be an invasive and authoritarian way to weed out anyone who might have questions about the direction, or methodology, of his project.
The conclusions reached by Ackerman and his colleagues from the collection of random case histories volunteered to them are self-fulfilling, and sometimes outright bizarre. Whose "prejudices and prejudgments" are we hearing about when Ackerman states that "some of the psychoanalysts said that they had not encountered a single case of anti-Semitism in all their practice, others declared that every patient they had ever treated, whether Gentile or Jew, showed some traces of it"? [ACKERMAN, p. 20] (Ackerman discreetly avoids telling us how Jewish and Gentile psychiatrists line up behind these opposite experiences).
A few highlights from his research conclusions are as follows:
* "Anti-Semitic reactions are found in psycho neurotics in
various types; in character disorders, perhaps more
particularly of the sado-masochistic type."
* "All individuals ... suffer from anxiety.... In most cases
it was of a special nature: it was diffuse, pervasive,
relatively unorganized, and not adequately channeled
through specific symptom-formation."
* "Plagued by a vague apprehension of the world at-large,
these patients seem to derive little, if any, strength from
their own identity."
* "It is extremely difficult for these anti-Semitic personalities
to achieve satisfactory personal relationships."
* "The very existence of the Jews ... is a constant and
painful reminder of the anti-Semites own emotional
deficiencies."
* "The emotional deficiencies of these patients, extending
beyond the sphere of human relations, seem also to have
impaired their capacity to establish a satisfactory
relationship with external objects."
* "At the psychic level, anti-Semitic hostility can be viewed
as a profound though irrational and futile defensive effort
to restore a crippled self."
* "In a pathetic and futile attempt at genuine acceptance
by other human beings, these persons are often driven
into a slavish imitation of habits and ideologies by those
who represent cohesive power in their community." [p.
69]
This is, of course, an entire volume of such material. But one of Ackerman's more summary insights into the generic, stereotypical enemy is this: "The tendency to blame the outside world rather than oneself accompanies all the reactions of the anti-Semite." This rebellious trait against the "outside world" and the refusal to blame oneself for the social, economic and political failings of the world would have to be considered endemic to the world's greatest social thinkers and revolutionaries, humanitarians, artists and intellectuals of all kinds (including Ralph Waldo Emerson who wrote that "Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members ... The base doctrine of the majority of voices usurps the place of the doctrine of the soul." Ironically, conversely, the tendency to "blame the outside world rather than oneself" has also always been a Jewish defense mechanism in denying Jewish responsibility for anti-Semitism.
Among the most extraordinary findings in Ackerman's research was the ethnicity of the "anti-Semites" he and his cohorts discovered. Of the 40 case studies cited in the book, 8 individuals were themselves born Jews, another 3 were "half-Jews," one more was "part Jewish," another was married to a Jew, and yet another was "half-Jewish" and adopted by a Jewish couple. Only one of the non-Jewish anti-Semites, as Ackerman tells us, was "colored." [ACKERMAN, p. 95-129] (Ackerman, of course, decides that the Black woman's dislike of Jews was displaced. Didn't she know that she really hated Whites? "But," says the professor, "to admit hostility against all whites was realistically too dangerous, particularly since she was being advised by a white psychiatrist worker. She, therefore, displaced her hostility to the Jews.")
Does this tell us, as these kinds of researchers would propagandize, that evidence of such great Jewish self-disdain merely evidences that the scourge of anti-Semitism is so prominent in American society that even large numbers of Jews blindly absorb it like mindless sponges? Or might it indicate that being Jewish is not sacrosanct, and that some parts of the Jewish experience -- like any other people on earth -- warrant reasonable criticism? And, further, might it not be psychologically healthy for those troubled with their Jewish identities to give free vent to their complaints and concerns in an open forum towards resolution, rather than stifle and deny some of the uncertainties of Jewish identity in the real world.
The function of Ackerman's study was Orwellian in nature: its intent was to obfuscate real social, political, and economic realities regarding Jews and replace them with the world of Sigmund Freud: implanted illusions of personal inadequacies and mental illnesses. Such a "study" never once even remotely considered that the slightest "hostility" towards a single Jew, or Jews in general, was in any way legitimate. Rather, anyone who dares to question anything whatsoever about Jewry is categorized as a veritable species -- an "anti-Semite," this term itself a quintessential stereotype.
Ackerman even psychoanalyzed (by remote control) professional colleagues who refused to work with him on this study. For those principled psychoanalysts who declined to participate in Ackerman's biased undertaking "for fear [that it] might detract from the more fundamental social and economic causes of anti-Semitism ... [Ackerman decided that] it appeared to us, in a few cases, as rationalizations for the wish not to be concerned with anti-Semitism at too close range, as an attempt to keep away from its horror and to avoid identification with its victims -- in short, it seemed to be an expression of self-preservation." [ACKERMAN, p.20]
The entire construct of this dubious scientific study would not merit the slightest attention 50 years later, except that its theses and conclusions remain the foundation of Jewish public opinion today. In this "study" we find one of the monster embryos for the vast Jewish propaganda machinery against what is generically known today as "anti-Semitism." Ackerman and co-author, noted the volume, "both are convinced that decisive social action should and can be taken to prevent the spread of anti-Semitism ... Indeed, one of the motives for undertaking this study was the concern for its potential pragmatic value." [ACKERMAN, p.2]
There are precedents for such psychoanalytically-based manipulation which stretches to preposterous lengths in a socio-political context. Sigmund Freud himself turned into a naked political hack in using psychoanalysis in a book -- finally published 28 years after his own death -- to defame a U.S. President, Woodrow Wilson. It was, according to Martin Gross, "a classic of historical distortion" that was "greeted with an embarrassed apology from the psychological community." [GROSS, p. 72-73] Even Jewish historian Barbara Tuchman wrote that [Freud and his co-author] "have allowed emotional bias to direct their inquiry, which has led to undisciplined reasoning, wild overstatement, and false conclusions." [GROSS, p. 73]
It must be admitted, however, that widespread Jewish faith in psychoanalysis to explain the world for them, and sometimes impugn historical figures who are long dead, is not discriminatory. In 1993 a Jewish psychoanalyst, Avner Falk, turned his probe for neurosis onto Theodore Herzl, the Jewish Zionist hero. Falk's book, subtitled "a Psychoanalytical Biography," declares, according to one Jewish reviewer, that Herzl was "inwardly dependent on his parents, stunted emotionally, extremely arrogant and supercilious, completely self-obsessed, and [was] ... never really able to sustain close personal relationships." [ADLER, p. 44] Herzl had a miserable personal life. He had three children. Pauline died of drug addiction, Hans converted to Catholicism and later committed suicide, and Trude spent a "lifetime of mental illness." Of these Herzl children, only Trude had a child, Stephan, who also committed suicide. [STEWART, D., Genealogical chart, 1974]
Another Jewish psychoanalyst, Jay Gonen, even takes Freudianism so far as to explain the core of collective Jewish neurosis like this:
"Because of their covenant with God, because of their obedience to Him,
the sons of Israel end up with shorter penises. Having yielded to
circumcision, they will never be endowed with the same phallic prowess
as the Gentiles, and will never have as good and big a penis as their
mighty father. Thus, they have to be careful that Jewish women do not
learn that Gentiles are more satisfying and they have to continue to love
the God-Father whom they also unconsciously hate." [GONEN, p. 14]
And what does the greatest symbol of anti-Semitism -- the Nazi swastika -- mean to a Freudian? Bizarrely enough, copulation! As Frederic Grunfeld describes it:
"Since the swastika is a schematic yet recognizable representation of two
human figures in coitus, it acts as a powerful stimulus in deep layers
of the psyche, according to the [also Jewish] psychoanalyst Wilhelm
Reich --- 'a stimulus that proves to be much more powerful the more
dissatisfied, the more burning with sexual desire, a person is.'" [GRUNFELD,
F., 1996, p. 71]
"Vamberto Morais records Hitler's repeated mention of 'Jews in caftans' and the
'filth' and 'stench' of those caftan-wearers. He tells us 'this becomes all the more
ironical when one learns 'that according to companions of Hitler who knew him
when he was a younger man, and an artist, he himself 'wore a long, shabby overcoat
very much like a caftan, which had been given him by a Hungarian Jewish dealer in
old clothes.' And from Hitler's fellow artist Ganisch we learn that he 'had a dirty,
unkempt aspect.' But of course, we have known all along who 'the Jew' really was.
We have known all along that this 'Jew' was Hitler himself." [GRIFFIN, S., 1981, p.
197-198]
(Where might such a world view for Ms. Griffin have come from, that, on Freudian terms, Adolf Hitler -- the consummate "anti-Semite" -- sought to destroy himself through a scapegoat of innocent Jewry? In her dedication page to her work, Griffin notes that "I discussed the ideas in this book from the beginning with [Jewish feminist] Kim Chernin and we read one another's manuscripts. She led me toward essentially psychological insights ... Tillie Olsen's Silences and Adrienne Rich's Of Woman Born deeply affected my thought as did Hannah Arendt's Origins of Totalitarianism. [All these authors are Jewish] ... Although I take issue with certain of [Jewish author] Susan Sontag's idea on pornography, her work On Photography entered my thinking continually. I feel especially indebted to the scholarship and insights of Lucy Dawidowicz regarding the Holocaust ... ... In addition to reading the manuscript and giving me invaluable support, Lind Levitsky shared with me a collection of racist images which she compiled for a study of racist stereotypes ... My daughter, Becky Levy, shared her school research into images of women on television." [Did Mr. Levy dump her? No mention of him in the credits/dedication.] ) [GRIFFIN, S., 1981, p. vii, viii]
And what does the greatest symbol of anti-Semitism -- the Nazi swastika -- mean to a Freudian? Bizarrely enough, copulation! As Frederic Grunfeld describes it:
"Since the swastika is a schematic yet recognizable representation of two
human figures in coitus, it acts as a powerful stimulus in deep layers
of the psyche, according to the [also Jewish] psychoanalyst Wilhelm
Reich --- 'a stimulus that proves to be much more powerful the more
dissatisfied, the more burning with sexual desire, a person is.'" [GRUNFELD,
F., 1996, p. 71]
"Vamberto Morais records Hitler's repeated mention of 'Jews in caftans' and the
'filth' and 'stench' of those caftan-wearers. He tells us 'this becomes all the more
ironical when one learns 'that according to companions of Hitler who knew him
when he was a younger man, and an artist, he himself 'wore a long, shabby overcoat
very much like a caftan, which had been given him by a Hungarian Jewish dealer in
old clothes.' And from Hitler's fellow artist Ganisch we learn that he 'had a dirty,
unkempt aspect.' But of course, we have known all along who 'the Jew' really was.
We have known all along that this 'Jew' was Hitler himself." [GRIFFIN, S., 1981, p.
197-198]
(Where might such a world view for Ms. Griffin have come from, that, on Freudian terms, Adolf Hitler -- the consummate "anti-Semite" -- sought to destroy himself through a scapegoat of innocent Jewry? In her dedication page to her work, Griffin notes that "I discussed the ideas in this book from the beginning with [Jewish feminist] Kim Chernin and we read one another's manuscripts. She led me toward essentially psychological insights ... Tillie Olsen's Silences and Adrienne Rich's Of Woman Born deeply affected my thought as did Hannah Arendt's Origins of Totalitarianism. [All these authors are Jewish] ... Although I take issue with certain of [Jewish author] Susan Sontag's idea on pornography, her work On Photography entered my thinking continually. I feel especially indebted to the scholarship and insights of Lucy Dawidowicz regarding the Holocaust ... ... In addition to reading the manuscript and giving me invaluable support, Lind Levitsky shared with me a collection of racist images which she compiled for a study of racist stereotypes ... My daughter, Becky Levy, shared her school research into images of women on television." [Did Mr. Levy dump her? No mention of him in the credits/dedication.] ) [GRIFFIN, S., 1981, p. vii, viii]
With Adolf Hitler and the Nazis ever seen in the grim horizon, and with the dubious moral position of the state of Israel to prop up, the psychological breakdown of the sick "anti-Semite" has been, for decades now, a booming industry for Jewish psychiatrists and the Jewish community at-large. As always, an anti-Semite is defined extremely loosely for it is believed that anyone with even a seed of disenchantment towards Jews, left unchecked, could turn into an unwieldy monster.
Over the years, the Department of Scientific Research of the American Jewish Committee has in fact funded not only Anti-Semitism and Emotional Disorder, but a series of academic studies and volumes about the subject, including Dynamics of Prejudice, Prophets of Deceit, and the most referenced, The Authoritarian Personality (1950). Such studies had their conceptual origin during World War II. The motivation for them, and their sweeping judgments, must be understood in the context of their root, fear and paranoia. In the 1940's Jewish organizations were extremely apprehensive of the possibility of a spreading Nazism.
The Authoritarian Personality is a thousand page tome stuffed with largely impenetrable statistical evaluations of American sample categories from interviews the authors conducted: college students, psychiatric patients, merchant marine officers, prison inmates, Unitarians, members of the United Electrical Workers Union, the PTA, the Kiwanis Club, and others. The volume elaborates similar premises and findings as Anti-Semitism and Emotional Disorder; criticism of Jews is equated with "the superstitious belief in witchcraft" which was eradicated thanks to "the results of modern science." [p. ix] The authors likewise "hold the belief that anti-Semitism [which they never define] is based more largely upon factors in the subject and his total situation than upon actual characteristics of Jews ... " [p. 3] And, of course, "For theory as to the structure of personality, we have leaned most heavily on Freud..." There are even chapters on the "ethnocentric ideology" of the generic anti-Semite, most peculiar since the Jewish tradition of the Chosen People has, throughout history, refined ethnocentrism as tightly as any people can to perfection. Essentially, notes sociologist John Higham, "the Authoritarian Personality "assigned to anti-Semitism an extraordinary importance by arguing that critical attitudes toward Jews reveal a basic personality type that threatens the survival of democratic society." [HIGHAM, p. 174]
Gordon Allport, a Jewish psychologist and author of the influential The Nature of Prejudice (1954) remarked in 1981 that The Authoritarian Personality "stirred up the social sciences, particularly social psychology, perhaps more than any book published in this century ... There are some 500 studies based on this work ... The very fact that they called the authoritarian person "F," measured by the F-scale which stood for Fascist, reflects the historical times ... everyone was anti-Hitler and everything he stood for, and it was to some extent a cultural product ... " [EVANS, p. 63, 64]
In 1958, based upon the dubious Freudian premises of The Authoritarian Personality, another Jewish academic, Joseph Adelson, published the results of a survey of 242 Jewish American college students. The study examined Jewish acceptance of the reality of negative Jewish social traits or, as Adelson phrased it in political academeze of the era, it was "a study of minority group authoritarianism." What Adelson was interested in was to what degree "anti-Semitic" attitudes were reflected in Jews themselves. (This is popularly known as "self-hatred" in the Jewish community and will be discussed a little later). The Jewish college students were asked to response to a variety of sentences. They were given the choice of six numbered responses to each question. A "7" represented complete agreement and a "0" complete disagreement with the statement. Here are the Jewish scores for acceptance of some of the most "anti-Semitic" questions: (the "Mean for Total Group" follows each statement):
"There are many Jews to whom anti-Semitic statements do apply." (4.49)
"I feel personally ashamed when I see Jews making themselves conspicuous." (4.31)
"The Jewish group in this country would get along better if many Jews were not so clannish." (4.12)
"I have often been embarrased by the anti-social conduct of certain Jews in public life." (4.05)
"Too many Jews try to intrude themselves into circles where they're not wanted. (3.33)
"Most Jews who meet a great deal of anti-Semitism bring it about by their own obnoxious behavior." (3.20)
"A lot of anti-Semitism is caused by the number of Jewish radicals." (3.19)
[ADELSON, J., 1960, p. 481, 484]
In other words, a lot of Jews put some stock in "anti-Semitic" beliefs as part ofverifiable reality. So how does Adelson (and his kindred apologists) explain this away? (-- which was the ultimate purpose for this study). By ascribing JEWISH criticism of Jewish behavior -- in psychoanalytic terms -- as identification with a hostile, more powerful, Gentile society. "Prejudice [against the genre of Jew who is criticized by other Jews]," says Adelson,
'is viewed as 'rational'; its cause is the deviant behavior of the 'bad kind of Jew.'
Still further, the definition of the self as a 'good' Jew permits a kind of identification
with the aggressor, a sense of affiliation with the Gentile ... Perhaps it is unnecessary
to note that the authoritarian image of the outgroup [Jews in Gentile society]
incorporates the essential elements of the anti-Semitic stereotype; even the
contradictions are retained, as in the attribution of both seclusive and intrusive motives.
One important component of Gentile anti-Semitism is omitted; the Jews is never
seen as a sinister or dangerous force. The theme of Jewish power, when it does
appear, is greeted not with hostility, but with pride and admiration." [ADELSON, J.,
1960, p. 477] (In other words, Jewish "power," a staple of the anti-Semitic charge
which is publicly denied always, is secretly celebrated]
In essence, Adelson's study attempts to explain widespread Jewish admission to truths about popular stereotypes about Jews as merely Jewish distancing efforts to gain acceptance to the world of the prejudicial, irrational, "authoritarian" Gentile majority culture.
In 1958, based upon the dubious Freudian premises of The Authoritarian Personality, another Jewish academic, Joseph Adelson, published the results of a survey of 242 Jewish American college students. The study examined Jewish acceptance of the reality of negative Jewish social traits or, as Adelson phrased it in political academeze of the era, it was "a study of minority group authoritarianism." What Adelson was interested in was to what degree "anti-Semitic" attitudes were reflected in Jews themselves. (This is popularly known as "self-hatred" in the Jewish community and will be discussed a little later). The Jewish college students were asked to response to a variety of sentences. They were given the choice of six numbered responses to each question. A "7" represented complete agreement and a "0" complete disagreement with the statement. Here are the Jewish scores for acceptance of some of the most "anti-Semitic" questions: (the "Mean for Total Group" follows each statement):
"There are many Jews to whom anti-Semitic statements do apply." (4.49)
"I feel personally ashamed when I see Jews making themselves conspicuous." (4.31)
"The Jewish group in this country would get along better if many Jews were not so clannish." (4.12)
"I have often been embarrased by the anti-social conduct of certain Jews in public life." (4.05)
"Too many Jews try to intrude themselves into circles where they're not wanted. (3.33)
"Most Jews who meet a great deal of anti-Semitism bring it about by their own obnoxious behavior." (3.20)
"A lot of anti-Semitism is caused by the number of Jewish radicals." (3.19)
[ADELSON, J., 1960, p. 481, 484]
In other words, a lot of Jews put some stock in "anti-Semitic" beliefs as part of
'is viewed as 'rational'; its cause is the deviant behavior of the 'bad kind of Jew.'
Still further, the definition of the self as a 'good' Jew permits a kind of identification
with the aggressor, a sense of affiliation with the Gentile ... Perhaps it is unnecessary
to note that the authoritarian image of the outgroup [Jews in Gentile society]
incorporates the essential elements of the anti-Semitic stereotype; even the
contradictions are retained, as in the attribution of both seclusive and intrusive motives.
One important component of Gentile anti-Semitism is omitted; the Jews is never
seen as a sinister or dangerous force. The theme of Jewish power, when it does
appear, is greeted not with hostility, but with pride and admiration." [ADELSON, J.,
1960, p. 477] (In other words, Jewish "power," a staple of the anti-Semitic charge
which is publicly denied always, is secretly celebrated]
In essence, Adelson's study attempts to explain widespread Jewish admission to truths about popular stereotypes about Jews as merely Jewish distancing efforts to gain acceptance to the world of the prejudicial, irrational, "authoritarian" Gentile majority culture.
Along with this, and many AJC-sponsored titles about anti-Semitism, we can find on the library shelves other such titles as Anti-Semitism: A Social Disease, Anti-Judaism: A Psychohistory, and still flowing, in 1990, Anti-Semitism: A Disease of the Mind, and, in 1996, Myth and Madness. The Psychodynamics of Anti-Semitism (i.e., the "anti-Semite's" myths are expressed by "madness"). At one major Midwestern state university library a computer subject search of "anti-Semitism" coughed up 719 titles. By comparison, the generic word "flowers" only had 632 listings and "anatomy" 1110. The word "Polish" (including anything whatsoever about Polish people anywhere, as well as the word's other potential meanings, including car wax) had 1361. Even the generic word "racism" (any kind, anywhere, at any time in history, of everyone else on earth) had 802 listings, only about 80 more than those texts that focused solely on injustices to Jews, a minuscule part of the world's population. In our American society that has, even by many scholarly Jewish accounts, anti-Semitism "under control," The Index of Jewish Periodicals listed 196 new articles on the subject in 1996 alone.
While a pair of Jewish psychiatrists write that "the higher the income of the father, the greater the proportion of anti-Semite," (Else Frenkel-Brunswik and R. Nevitt Sanford, p. 103] in the same book a colleague writes that anti-Semitism is found "in those places where ... the pariahs of society meet. By this I refer to the cheap locales where chronic alcoholics, addicts, and psychopathic criminals gather. These are the psychological slums ... [that are used] as strategic positions in which to spread anti-Semitism.; they need mental sanitation..." [SIMMEL, p. 75]
"At some point in the course of analytic treatment," says Rudolf Loewenstein, "almost all non-Jewish patients will manifest varying degrees of anti-Semitism." [PERLMUTTER, p. 64] Moshe Leshem, joins in to note that "Freud attributed Christian resentment of the Jews to the son-father tension in the superego." Maurice Samuel out-Freuds Freud in suggesting that anti-Semitism is an outlet for the yearning of Christians to free themselves from the inhibitive yoke of Jewish morality inherited in their faith and to open wide the gates to the pagan, orgiastic "id." [LESHEM, p. 62-63]
Freud himself said, about his own invention: "Nor is it perhaps entirely a matter of chance that the first advocate of psychoanalysis was a Jew." [THE JEWISH MYSTIQUE, p. 55] "Freud believed," says Richard Bank, "in the inheritance of acquired characteristics and that in some unknown fashion, his Jewishness became part of his phylogenetic heritage. Thus, Freud identifies certain Jewish traits in himself and his adherents which provided a predisposition towards psychoanalysis." [BANK, p. 21]
Some studies have even suggested that Jews are "prone" to "have fast and frequent mood swings ... alternative periods of elation and depression ... manic depressive psychosis, neurotic symptoms, and somatic complaints (nervousness, feeling uneasy, shortness of breath)." [MACDONALD, p. 211] In the 1970s a University of California study of 421 therapists "revealed that they feel irrepressibly superior [to others] ... [yet] one concern among professionals, whispered within the establishment, is that [the psychoanalytic/psychiatric field] attracts people who are particularly anxious about their emotional stability ... Psychiatrists appear at the top of the [occupational] list [of suicides]." [GROSS, p. 45]
Even one of Freud's earliest disciples, Isidor Sadger, once ventured that "the disposition of the Jews to obsessive neurosis is perhaps connected with the addiction to brooding ... characteristic of them for thousands of years." [GAY, p. 135] Molly Katz jokes that
"Natural-born Jews leave the womb with a worry reservoir that is
filled early and replenished constantly. We worry about everything.
Worrying is as essential to our well-being as a balanced breakfast.
It is our duty, our birthright, and our most profound satisfaction.
There are no exceptions to this rule. All Jews worry all the time. If
there is nothing handy to worry about, we are breath-stoppingly
creative at finding something." [KATZ, M., 1991, p. 47]
James Yaffe blames Jewish neurosis largely on the Jewish family: "Psychoanalysts ... see a great many Jewish neurotics. The conditions of family life, both its virtues and its weaknesses, go a long way toward accounting for this." [YAFFE, J., 1968, p. 294] In an article on Jewish family life, Fredda Herz and Elliot Rosen also observed that "hypochondriasis is a common Jewish syndrome." [HERZ/ROSEN, p. 367] Rudolph Loewenstein also makes note that it "occurs frequently in Jews." [LOEWENSTEIN, R., p. 131-132] Other "possible" common "neurotic" Jewish traits he also cites are extremes of miserliness and ostentation -- "[Some Jews] are spendthrift to the point of extravagance, driven in their spending by a compulsion to efface their sense of inferiority, an exaggerated terror of anti-Semitism," and a "feeling of terror at being Jewish." [LOEWENSTEIN, R., p. 132-133]
Indeed, more often evident than the proposed mental unbalance of the generic anti-Semite Everyman in the many volumes about the generic mental illness of anti-Semitism are hints of their Jewish authors' own peculiar neuroses:
"The anti-Semite is often both envious and suspicious
of Jewish talking." -- Theodore Rubin, p. 75
"Reference is often made to the opinion once expressed
by Freud that anti-Semitism is connected with the Jewish
custom of circumcision ... Even today, we find deep in the
unconscious of man the fear that his penis may be cut off
if he sins ... " -- Otto Fenischel, p. 27
"We have come to know that in certain cases the basic
complex at the bottom of the individual obsessional
idea of the anti-Semite is the latent homosexual complex,
that complex which produces hate as a defense against
the dangers of homosexual love ... "
-- Ernest Simmel, p. 35
"In the mind of [some anti-Semitic] patients ... the Jewish analyst
is conceived as alternately as a mephistophelean personage
or as an effeminate, emasculated man. The fact that
Jews are circumcised and so in a sense mutilated stirs
up in them superstitious horror, thereby revealing their
unconscious fear of being mutilated or castrated as a
punishment for forbidden desires. In some patients the
analyst can observe at first hand the sadistic satisfaction
derived consciously or unconsciously from the idea of
Jews being tortured and massacred. Neurotics who
suffer from an intense sense of guilt and who live in
anticipation of punishment protect themselves by projecting
their faults onto the Jewish analyst or onto Jews in general."
-- Rudolf Loewenstein, 1951, p. 34]
"The anti-Semite sees in the Jew everything which brings
him misery -- not only his social oppressor but also his
own unconscious instincts which have gained a bloody,
dirty, dreadful character from their socially induced
repression." -- Otto Fenichel, p. 29
"The anti-Semites most buried and unconscious secret
-- from himself and others -- is to be a Jew ... He believes
that to be a Jew is to be able to transcend everything
material, religious, and racial; to be a Jew is to be free;
to be a Jew is to be the ultimate individual ... "
-- Theodore Rubin p. 79
(This bizarrely narcissistic conviction is not unusual
in Jewish psychoanalytic circles. Another therapist,
Herbert Strean, suggests that this secret desire to be a Jew
is "an envy which lies buried deep behind all
anti-Semitic attacks." [COOPER, p. 14]
"Norman Cohn ... stresses the role of the Jews as
the castrating father in the paranoid fantasies of the
anti-Semite. There is merit to Cohn's hypothesis...
For a balanced evaluation of the attempt to understand
anti-Semitism primarily in terms of castration anxiety,
see Erickson, Childhood and Society."
-- Richard L. Rubenstein, p. 313
"The historical facts are that the anti-Jew trying to free
himself from the pangs of anxiety, turns the tree of life
into the tree of death, the cross, nailed his Christ onto it,
and transformed his anxiety to this product of his perverse
sado-masochistic imagination."
-- Ernest Rappaport, p. 282
"It is a strange thing that the Jews have always been
attacked -- even before the rise of Christianity. The
attacks have been so stereotyped, they have always
followed the same pattern so closely that one is tempted
to say that though the Jews, who have changed much
in the course of history, are certainly no race, the anti-
Semite in a way ARE a race, because they always use
the same slogans, displaying the same attitudes, indeed
almost look alike." -- Max Horkheimer, [in Simmel,
p. 6]
Here Horkheimer declares the most preposterous of stereotypes, that "anti-Semites" across history, language, and culture are "in a way" racially linked. John Murray Cuddihy is on the right track when he raises up the obvious mirror to all the Jewish "analysts" who entirely obfuscate Jewish history, identity, religion, and deeds in their bizarre inventions of the roots of anti-Semitism: "The ideology of the Jewish intellectual is frequently a projection onto the general Gentile culture of a forbidden ethnic self-criticism. Shame for 'one's own kind' is universalized into anger at the ancestral enemy." [CUDDIHY, p. 5]
In 1951, Milton Steinbeg put Jewish "shame for one's own kind" (very common in the Jewish community and called "self-hatred" -- to be discussed a little later in this chapter) like this:
"[A Jew's] association with the Jewish group is likely to touch him more
intimately, at the very core of his being. For, as a Jew he is subject to certain
psychic influences, of which he may be unaware but which may affect his
personality adversely nonetheless. Thus, he tends to regard himself as not
altogether wanted by the majority society of which he wishes to be a part,
the approval and acceptance of which he desires earnestly. Again, he is inclined
to feel that his Jewishness exposes him to a speical set of insecurities beyond
those which are the lot of all men of his station ... The anti-Semite when he talks
about Jews rarely addresses himself to them, but Jews overhear and may quite
readily be convinced that the criticisms are quite justified by the facts, and applicable,
not to them, of course, but to their fellows. The upshot of all this is that many an
American Jew is in mortal peril of losing his sense of worth, his self-respect, his
dignity in his own eyes. He may feel secretly ashamed of his Jewishness ... He may
be haunted by the misgiving that, by the very virtue of the fact that he is Jewish,
he is somehow a human being inferior to the Gentile." [STEINBERG, M., 1951, p.
87-88]
In 1951, Milton Steinbeg put Jewish "shame for one's own kind" (very common in the Jewish community and called "self-hatred" -- to be discussed a little later in this chapter) like this:
"[A Jew's] association with the Jewish group is likely to touch him more
intimately, at the very core of his being. For, as a Jew he is subject to certain
psychic influences, of which he may be unaware but which may affect his
personality adversely nonetheless. Thus, he tends to regard himself as not
altogether wanted by the majority society of which he wishes to be a part,
to feel that his Jewishness exposes him to a speical set of insecurities beyond
those which are the lot of all men of his station ... The anti-Semite when he talks
about Jews rarely addresses himself to them, but Jews overhear and may quite
readily be convinced that the criticisms are quite justified by the facts, and applicable,
not to them, of course, but to their fellows. The upshot of all this is that many an
American Jew is in mortal peril of losing his sense of worth, his self-respect, his
dignity in his own eyes. He may feel secretly ashamed of his Jewishness ... He may
be haunted by the misgiving that, by the very virtue of the fact that he is Jewish,
he is somehow a human being inferior to the Gentile." [STEINBERG, M., 1951, p.
87-88]
There are, of course, other angles on the "all non-Jews are automatically anti-Semites" theme. Reflecting millennia-old Jewish hostility, special targets for odium are those who define themselves, or were raised, as Christians. There are no protective multi-million dollar Christian lobbying organizations and no generic word, like "anti-Semitism," to brand Jewish hatred of, and prejudice against, Christianity into a defensive slogan that can be thrown in the face of critics. So Jews have a completely open field.
Some Jews go so far as to believe that, according to David Novak, "hatred and murder of Jews is something particularly Christian. Those that assert this position claim that the Nazi program for the extermination of the Jews is the direct historical consequence of Christian contempt for Jews. They thus hold that all Christians -- whether actual perpetrators of atrocities against Jews or not -- are considered to be eo ipso incorrigible anti-Semites. Dialogue with such incorrigible enemies can hardly be regarded as anything other than group masochism." [NOVAK, DIA. p. 5]
There are many innovative angles reflecting Jewry's contempt for Christianity. Maurice Samuel, for instance, decided that "the basic factor in intense anti-Semitism is hatred of Christianity -- a hatred that cannot be openly acknowledged and is therefore projected onto Jews. When this factor enters, according to Samuel, an essentially unique phenomenon, not just another prejudice, is created." [SIMPSON/YINGER, p. 330]
In the emphatic context of the Holocaust, Christians and Christianity itself are bitterly condemned today by many Jewish thinkers. Those Christians in good stead are considered to be only those who revise traditional Christian texts towards support of Jewish "particularism" and its modern political expression: Zionism. Any "Christian dialogue with Jews," demands Emil Fackenheim, is predicated upon "the 'destructive recovery' of the whole Christian tradition." [p. 282] Among Christian obligations to Jews, he declares that "Christians after the Holocaust ... must be Zionist on behalf not only of Jews but also of Christianity itself." [p. 303]
Mark Gelber echoes this common Jewish blanket condemnation of Christianity in the Jewish Journal of Social Studies: "The widespread acceptance of anti-Semitic legislation and the nearly ubiquitous complicity of Gentile populations in the attempted Nazi destruction of the Jewish people is totally incomprehensible without the extensive background of the centuries-old phenomena of Christian anti-Semitism." [GELBER, p. 4]
There are a number of Christian activists for Jewish/Zionist causes who have subsequently absorbed a guilt-laden notion about the Holocaust, accepting the presumption that Christianity and an innate anti-Semitism within it were a major part of the Holocaust's cause. Among the most important to this movement of Christian Zionism were two authors of German heritage, Paul Tillich and Reinhold Niebuhr, whose apparent shame of their German link was reconfigured along Christian lines. An ideological descendent, Robert Everett, a pastor in the United Church of Christ, goes so far as to say
"I see the Christian response to Israel and her survival as a sign of
whether or not Christians care about Jews. The forces of Ultimate
Evil seem again ready to strike against Jews ... Only those voices
that speak of solidarity with Israel and her right to exist are able to
call themselves servants of Life." [p. 11]
There are a number of books that have appeared over the years that argue Christian culpability in the Holocaust. Christian Zionist writers have sometimes served as honorary Jews to more diplomatically deliver the hatchet blows of condemnation to other Christians. "As a Methodist minister," says Richard Libowitz, "[Franklin Littell] maintains a credibility of Christian witness which make his charges far more difficult for Christian audiences to refute." [LIBOWTIZ, p. 73]
Franklin Littell, founder and chairman of the Zionist-oriented Christians Concerned for Israel, focuses on indicting themes in his book, The Crucifixion of the Jews. His central thesis is that Nazi fascism was the natural expression of Christianity which, he argues, has always been "contemptuous or demeaning" of Jews. He argues this despite the fact that German Nazism was expressly anti-Christian and murdered masses of clergy in its extermination programs. (In Poland alone the Nazis murdered 1,932 priests, including six bishops, 850 monks, as well as 289 nuns. [BART, Convert, p. 150] Littell then goes for maximum slander against the rival faith by claiming that "Christendum ... led directly to genocide." [p. 1] If that's not contemptuous and demeaning enough of Christians, he stuffs his whole volume full of this venomous, libelous hysteria, including "Before the Holocaust, the spirit of murder ... was well advanced in Christian circles." [LITTELL, p. 49] and "Adolf Hitler ... and the death camps ... were legitimate offspring of a 'Christian civilization ... [which] was formless and heathen at heart." Littlell's questionable conclusions were published by a major publisher, Harper and Row in 1975, and his "research" was funded by a faculty research grant at Temple University and the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture.
Another non-Jewish writer, Alan Davies, in Anti-Semitism and the Christian Mind: The Crisis of Conscience, demands "that every Christian owes to every Jew [an apology] for the part which historic Christendom has played in the shaping of modern anti-Semitism." Others of this ilk include a Jewish convert to Christianity, John Oesterreicher, Director of the Institute for Judeo-Christian Studies at Seton Hall University. As Alfred Lilenthal noted in 1983:
"Oesterreicher makes support for Israel 'a test for every Christian,'
advocates arms aid for the Zionist state; rejects as 'absolutely ridiculous'
the proposition that Palestinian self-determinism is essential to
peace; and has publicly rhapsodized that 'we must shout from the
housetops that this state [Israel] has a right to live.'" [LILIENTHAL, A.,
1983, p. 494]
The continuous trashing of Christianity for crimes against Jews is a veritable cottage industry these days. Rosemary Ruether, described as a "female theologian,” worked with the Jewish lobbying group, the Anti-Defamation League, and one of its rabbis on her book Faith and Fraticide. Reuther is so Judeo-centric (as a guilt-ridden Christian) in her appraisal of Christianity that she claims that her faith would virtually collapse without its alleged basis of anti-Semitism: "Possibly anti-Judaism is too deeply embedded in the foundations of Christianity to be rooted out entirely without destroying the whole structure." [RUETHER, p. 27] (Curiously, this is a counter-echo to the notion [often raised in scholarly circles] that modern Jewish self-identity needs the threat of omnipresent anti-Semitism to ensure its very survival against assimilation).
Widely heralded by the Jewish community as a splendid blow against Christian anti-Semitism, ironically, Faith and Fraticide didn't protect Reuther's later writings from the charge of anti-Semitism. Reuther was publicly word-whipped by a fellow feminist (Jewish of course) for making the sinful inference that the undeniably wrathful, dictatorial, and patriarchal Jewish Old Testament God was considerably more harmful to women than the Christian's Jesus, patient champion of the dispossessed and downtrodden. [PLASKOW, p. 102] The publishing of the fact that the ancient male-centered Israelites exterminated people (including the Canaanites) whose religion included the worship of goddesses is also not appreciated. Reuther's (and others') allusion to the ideology of male domination enforced by the Jewish God was deemed by many Jews to be "anti-Jewish." One guilt-ridden feminist of German-Christian heritage noted that [the criticism of Reuther] made clear to me once more how very necessary constant external [i.e., Jewish] correction is to us and how wrong it is to think we can finally rest at the present level of awareness.") [WACKER, p. 113]
Not only was Reuther harangued for attacking Jewish male-centeredness, she reversed field since Faith and Fraticide and dared to attack in another book -- with her husband -- the holiest of Jewish holies, Israel. Denounced as a "liberal," she came under attack from the aforementioned Christian Zionist, Franklin Littell, for her book, The Wrath of Jonah, which Littell calls "one of the most viciously partisan tracts to appear in the 'Palestinian' cause in the English language." [LITTLE, Judaism, p. 518]
Reuther's fall from Jewish grace is sharp. Her book about Israel, wrote David Biale, "is an anti-Zionist diatribe cloaked in the sweet light of Christian universalism; as such it stands as a singular warning of how a Christian critique can slide unwittingly into the swamp of anti-Semitism. [BIALE, p. 406] ... [The Reuthers'] wild and unsubstantiated conspiracy theories, which inflate Zionist power beyond recognition, smell suspiciously like the older myths of a world Jewish conspiracy." [BIALE, p. 409] Reuther, it seems, successfully confirmed the Jewish myth that all non-Jews -- no matter what they say or do to defend Jews -- are, inevitably at root, sooner or later, revealed to be vile anti-Semites.
Traditional Jewish martyrological canon insists that the most hated anti-Semites by Jews must be generic Christians because of their reputed persecution through the ages and the fact that the Holocaust happened in Christian Europe. "The crime against the Jewish people," declares Rabbi Eliezer Berkovitz, "is the cancer at the very heart of Christianity... [HALBERSTAM, p. 232] ... In order to pacify the Christian conscience it is said that the Nazis were not Christians. But they were all the children of Christians ... [p. 226] ... Without Christianity's New Testament, Hitler's Mein Kampf could never have been written." [HALBERSTAM, p. 238] "Let's not shy away from the hard truth," says Joshua Halberstam, "For many Jews, the unspoken lesson of the Shoah is that they cannot trust Christians with their children. Tens of thousands of Christians with crosses around their necks sent millions of innocent Jews and millions of other innocent men, women, and children to their horrid deaths while many of their fellow Christians cheered." [HALBERSTAM, p. 226]
Stanislaw Krajewski, a Polish citizen and a Jew, writing from a land of firsthand experience, has argued that the common "Christian anti-Semitism is central to the Holocaust" theme is ridiculous. Krajewski writes that
"[Polish Christians] perceived their bond of common suffering [during
the Holocaust] with Jews to be stronger than the bond of common
Christianity with Germans. This is one reason why arguments to the
effect that in Auschwitz Christians were murdering Jews sounds very
strange in Poland, and to me as well. There are also other more
objective reasons. For one thing, Christians were killed in Auschwitz
too, and moreover there were anti-Semites among the victims. For
another, Nazis attempted to revive paganism, not to express
Christianity. Priests imprisoned in Auschwitz were treated with extra
cruelty. Finally, as Jews were killed because they were Jews,
homosexuals were persecuted and imprisoned because they were
homosexuals. Yet to say that homosexuals were victims of
heterosexuals in Auschwitz seems most inappropriate. The
moral is that looking for the answer to the question who was killing
whom in Auschwitz, we should take facts at face value. Nazis were
the perpetrators and it was of supreme importance for them that they
were Germans. That is why Germans have to share the responsibility.
Not Christians: most of the Nazis at least neglected their nominal
Christianity." [KRAJEWSKI, p. 40]
"To put excessive emphasis upon anti-Judaic strictures of Christianity," says Oliver Cox, "is to obscure the critical tribal form and meaning of Judaism ... Judaism has remained essentially a tribal religion..." [COX p. 185] In other words, Christian chauvinism has always been a reaction to the seminal Jewish version of the same thing. And if one is to make the leap that blames the tenets of Christianity for the Holocaust, then one might better leap to a more evidential source for championing genocide, that explicitly evidenced in the Jewish Old Testament [See Holocaust chapter].
One of the pillars of Jewish belief that Christianity has served as a foundation for modern anti-Semitism is the "blood libel" tradition: in the Middle Ages a widespread belief circulated amongst Christians that Jews needed Christian blood -- particularly from children -- for their rituals. In 1993 an Israeli scholar, Yisrael Yuval, published an article in the Israel Historical Society's journal that undermined Jewish interpretive convention about the blood libel tradition. Among other things, Yuval suggested that medieval Christian notions that Jews killed Christian children for their blood might have origins, however misconstrued, in authentic Jewish practice. Jews in Europe had been known to commit suicide en masse, with parents killing their children "as an act of piety," when under forcible threat to convert to Christianity in the Middle Ages. Yuval also wondered if Jewish circumcision rites could have been mistakenly perceived and distorted by Christian observers as a quest for blood.
Yuval doesn't mention this, but would not, to medieval peasant eyes, the sight of a Jewish mohel (circumcision specialist) cutting an infant's penis, and then sucking its blood at the wound, as part of the traditional circumcision ritual, be a strong factual basis for sensational rumors? And how might the ancient Sephardic Jewish "folk practice" of eating parts of ancient human bodies be construed by local peasants in understanding Jewish tradition? As Raphael Patai noted in 1971:
"One of the most popular remedies among the Sephardi Jews was the
mumia (i.e., mummy). This consisted of a piece of mummified human
body which was pulverized and taken internally (often with honey-
water, as a cure against all kinds of complaints. Its origin goes back
to antiquity ... By the twelfth century, in response to growing demand,
the Jews of Alexandria had developed a lively mummy trade. Among
the Sephardi Jews mumia continued to be taken internally down to the
present time, even among the Sephardim living in Seattle, Washington."
[PATAI, R., 1971, p. 149] [Patai says that this medicinal practice became
"popular" in the non-Jewish European community in the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries. One would imagine that to be inevitable,
especially given the fact that Jews have been so numerous as
physicians throughout the centuries: "The Jews as physicians have
always played an important part in the life of the human race ... In
Spain and Italy their only competitors were the Moors."] [OSBORNE,
S., 1939, p. 22]
"The suggestion [by Yuval] that the Jews themselves," remarks David Biale, "might have been responsible, even if indirectly, for the blood libel fell like a clap of thunder on the Israeli academic community ... Yuval's opponents accused him of anti-Semitism and attempted to block his university promotion ... These intellectuals could not accept Yuval's implicit assumption that Jewish practice might have some influence, no matter how indirectly, on the formations of anti-Semitism. According to this view, anti-Semitism is a set of irrational paranoid fantasies that is utterly disconnected from the Jews." [BIALE, p. 39-40, 45]
So numerous are the Jewish academic ideologues who research and reiterate real and imagined victimization of Jews at the hands of non-Jews through history that Norman Davies, a British scholar with expertise about Poland, has sardonically labeled them not to be professors of history, but professors of anti-Semitism. [DAVIES, N.]
Jews who spend entire careers, entire lives, dreaming up new angles of anti-Semitism have broken it down into a multitude of possibilities. There is "religious anti-Semitism, Christian anti-Semitism, anti-Christian anti-Semitism, pagan anti-Semitism, economic anti-Semitism, social anti-Semitism, racial anti-Semitism, black anti-Semitism, pathological anti-Semitism, eternal anti-Semitism, political anti-Semitism, Jewish anti-Semitism, and literary anti-Semitism, to name some of the most common types." [GELBER, p. 13] Rudolf Loewenstein includes three of the above in his own demarcations, adding "xenophobic anti-Semitism." [LOEWENSTEIN, R., 1951, p. 64] Sylvia Rothchild says that "zoological anti-Semitism" is the "irrational behavior of the [Russian] government." [ROTHCHILD, 1985, p. 20]
Letty Pogrebin, a founding editor at Ms magazine, defines anti-Semitism in the women's movement into three types: "invisible" anti-Semitism, "insult" anti-Semitism, and "internalized oppression" anti-Semitism. The "invisible" genre is when non-Jews resist the Jewish propensity to incessantly rail about the Holocaust, as well as Gentile reluctance to accept "Jewish paranoia" and "Jewish self-centeredness." "Insult" anti-Semitism is the demeaning of Jews in commentary, often disguised. "Internalized oppression" anti-Semitism is Jewish self-hatred [KESTENBAUM, p. 30] (i.e., when Jews realize that non-Jewish criticisms about Jews have truth to them). "Every culture," Daniel Pipes informs us, "has its own brand of anti-Semitism." [GRENIER, R., 11-13-85, p. C21]
Ernest Volkman's own categorization of the "three major types of anti-Semitism" are "realistic anti-Semitism," "Xenophobic anti-Semitism," and "Chimeric anti-Semitism." [VOLKMAN, p. 53-54] At the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, there is a department called the Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Anti-Semitism which publishes studies on "anti-Semitism, ancient or modern, from a broad range of perspectives: historical, religious, political, cultural, social, psychological, and economic." [MODRAS, TITLE PAGE]
A sure sign of anti-Semitism in Madison, Wisconsin, noted Evelyn Tornton Beck, was that "I heard someone say that Jews were 'taking over' the local chapter of the national lesbian feminist organization in Madison." [KESTENBAUM, p. 30] "I believe that Jewish lesbian feminists have internalized much of the subtle anti-Semitism of this society," declared Irene Klepfisz, "They have been old that Jews are too pushy, too aggressive; and so they have been silent about their Jewishness, have not protested against what threatens them." [KLEPFISZ, I., 1982, p. 46] Recent anti-Semitism in the Australian lesbian movement? There was a 1999 article written to keep us informed of the subject by Hinde Burstin. [BURSTIN, 1999]
At every turn Jews find offense and insult. For instance, notes Kayla Weiner, "For many Jews, to be wished 'Merry Christmas' is to deny their personal reality and uniqueness." [WEINER, p. 121] And, "any lack of sympathy for Israel and its survival on the part of Christians," says Peter Medding, " is, for many Jews, indistinguishable from anti-Semitic prejudice." [MEDDING, p. 110]
It is unfathomable for such Jews that Gentiles are largely disinterested in undying Jewish crusades of self-pity and victimization as central themes in their own (non-Jewish) lives. For Ruth Wisse, Gentile silence is not just silence, it "may be [because non-Jews are] reluctant to confront the subject of Jew-hatred because they are worried about stirring up latent anti-Semitism in themselves or others." [WISSE, p. 48]
Complaining about the lack of sufficient homage by Gentile writers to "Jewish suffering," Guy Stern's obsession with Jewishness is probably the most audacious in blatantly encompassing the passively innocent as anti-Semites. It is what Stern calls "the anti-Semitism of silence. It is difficult to define ... Silent literary anti-Semitism is ... definitely an omission of a declaration of sympathy for Jewish suffering." [STERN, p. 304] In this genre of accusers who essentially demand everyone to be activists for Jewish causes (and those who do not are anti-Semites), is Ernest Volkman, who labels this the "anti-Semitism of indifference." In this view, there are those non-Jews who do not "attack Jews directly, but ...[they] assume that Jews do not even exist, that their concerns and survival are not even relevant questions." [VOLKMAN, p. 12] Even when Jews aren't even around to be anti-Semitic towards, the fact that they aren't present may, of course, be evidence of anti-Semitism. Indeed, the lack of Jewseverywhere, always, for some, may evidence latent anti-Semitism. Jewish Exponent reporter Michael Elkin, for example, was concerned that there were no Jews in the first "Survivor" TV episode. Was this because Jews don't have enough of a macho reputation? "So 'Survivor' may be stereotyping Jews by having none?" he reasoned. [ELKIN, M., 7-13-00] (In a later Survivor episode, a Jewish man won the contest).
Jewish lesbian Irene Klepfisz also declares that "the anti-Semitism with which I am immediately concerned, and which I find most threatening, does not take the form of the overt, undeniably inexcusable painted swastika on a Jewish gravestone or on a synagogue wall. Instead, it is elusive and difficult to pinpoint, for it is the anti-Semitism either of omission or one which trivializes the Jewish experience and Jewish oppression." [KLEPFISZ, I., 1982, p. 46] "The accusation of anti-Semitism against the [political ] Left," adds Arthur Liebman, "has not been limited solely to its critical or anti-Zionist position on Israel. Jewish liberals and Leftists have charged the Left with being anti-Semitic stemming from insensitivity to Jews and their problems, particularly anti-Semitism." [LIEBMAN, A., 1986, p. 353]
On the other hand, Alvin Rosenfeld turns with outrage to Gentile writers who dare to pay sympathetic attention to Jews and the Holocaust in an unacceptable manner, i.e., using poetic license to appropriate Holocaust imagery and Jewish victimhood to address (non-Jewish) personal suffering in their poems. Rosenfeld attacks the poet Sylvia Plath (ultimately a suicide) for this crime. He quotes this excerpt from one of her poems:
An engine, an engine
Chuffing me off like a Jew.
A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen.
I begin to talk like a Jew.
I think I may well be a Jew.
The snows of the Tyrol, the clear beer of Vienna
Are not very pure or true.
With my gypsy ancestress and my weird luck
And my Tarok pack and my Tarok pack
I may be a bit of a Jew.
This literary evidence moves Rosenfeld to proclaim that Plath's lament of personal suffering, is at "its deepest level a poem about ... 'what-I-do-to-you, you-Jew." [ROSENFELD, p. 180]
In the silent -- and, hence, unsympathetic and, hence, anti-Semitic -- vein, George Steiner expresses outrage that T. S. Eliot's Notes Towards a Definition of Culture failed "to face the issue [of the Holocaust and Nazi anti-Semitism], indeed to allude to it in anything but an oddly condescending footnote ... It is acutely disturbing. How, only three years after the event ... was it possible to write a book on culture and say nothing?" [STERN, p. 304] Probably, one suspects, in the same way Eliot neglected to mention Hiroshima, the Japanese "rape of Nanking," the sack of Rome, the Irish Potato Famine, or non-Jewish concentration camp victims in the same volume. Not only that. As Peter Novick notes in his critical book The Holocaust in American Life, about how the Holocaust has evolved into a strong social and political tool (and obsession) for the Jewish community,
"Between the end of the war and the 1960s, as anyone who has lived through
those years can testify, the Holocaust made scarcely any appearance in
American public discourse, and hardly more in Jewish public discourse --
especially directed to gentiles ... The memories and autobiographies of many
highly committed Jews bear out the contemporary evidence that suggests the
Holocaust wasn't much talked about [until the late 1960s]. Alan Dershowitz,
growing up in an intensely Jewish neighborhood in Brooklyn in the forties and
the fifties, recalls no discussion of the Holocaust either with his schoolmates or
at home." [NOVICK, P., 1999, p. 102-103]
"Between the end of the war and the 1960s, as anyone who has lived through
those years can testify, the Holocaust made scarcely any appearance in
American public discourse, and hardly more in Jewish public discourse --
especially directed to gentiles ... The memories and autobiographies of many
highly committed Jews bear out the contemporary evidence that suggests the
Holocaust wasn't much talked about [until the late 1960s]. Alan Dershowitz,
growing up in an intensely Jewish neighborhood in Brooklyn in the forties and
the fifties, recalls no discussion of the Holocaust either with his schoolmates or
at home." [NOVICK, P., 1999, p. 102-103]
This demand by Jewish critics for gentiles to pay requisite homage to Jewish victimhood mythologies (the neglect of which, to such complainers, is a symptom itself of anti-Semitism) is reflected also in Norma Rosen's disdain for Eliot's essay, The Idea of Christian Culture. "Though this book," says Rosen, "... no where slanders Jews, it nowhere mentions them, either as contributors to, or victims of, ... modern society." [ROSEN, p. 10] Would Rosen argue that books and essays about "The Idea of Jewish Culture" would be similarly lacking without references to Christian accomplishment and Jewish anti-Christian sentiment?
"There is no consensus," adds Anthony Julius, "on the number of references to Jews in Eliot's work. Sometimes in the absence of any reference to Jews in an essay, or the refusal to acknowledge the anti-Semitism of a favored writer, [this] may be anti-Semitic." [JULIUS, p. 6]
Jewish outrage for the lack of non-Jewish support towards Jewish self-absorption and their obsession with victimhood is manifest in other ways. During Israel's 1973 Yom Kippur War against the Arabs, Adolphe Steg, a "leader of French Jewry," complained that French Jews' "anxiety" over Israel's battles "found only a faint echo in their [French] environment, and the silence of their [non-Jewish] colleagues during those terrible days was painful. Not only did their colleagues remain silent, but when appealed to they could not help sharing irritation with the problems of the Jews, which they defined as an obsession ... By uncovering the extent of the lack of comprehension shown by these circles to [the Jews'] deepest concerns, the Yom Kippur War may have slowed the rush towards [Jewish] assimilation in France." [HERMAN, p. 41-42]
Steg is clearly stating, hardly veiled, that a lack of French sympathy to transnational Jewish war aims was grounds for withdrawing French Jewry's full commitment to their own (French) country, which accentuates the recurring cycle of accusation: Jews in the Diaspora are accused of holding dual national loyalties -- one for Israel (possibly the foremost loyalty), and another for the Diaspora nation. Jews, in turn, as always, accuse their accusers of anti-Semitism.
Under such a world view, based on the infectious and omnipresent nature of anti-Semitism, Jews must be wary, to this day, of non-Jews everywhere. Covering all flanks in the political sphere, Abe Perlmutter warns that it's not only the right wing gentiles who are anti-Semitic: "Accustomed to the rumblings of anti-Semitism from the far right, (our social scientists) are alert in one direction ... Violence from the right, it would seem, is extremism. From the left it is social protest. To Jews, scapegoated by both, the difference is without distinction." [PERLMUTTER, p. 101] "Take, for example, "says Arthur Liebman, "the following which apeared in the U.S. Communist party's Daily World on June 5, 1979: 'Has nationalism wrapped in money turned all the 'leaders' of the Jewish people into stone?' This type of language, the Left's critics contend, either is anti-Semitic itself and/or contributes to anti-Semitism through reinforcement of traditional anti-Semitic stereotypes." [LIEBMAN, A., 1986, p. 350]
Michael Lerner, editor of the left-wing Jewish journal Tikkun, confirms this fear of leftist non-Jews in his book, The Socialism of Fools: Anti-Semitism on the Left, which was advertised in his own publication with a drawing that connotes crowds entering the gas chambers of the Holocaust. The "Socialism of Fools" phrase is credited to August Bebel as a description of anti-Semitism in the leftist community. It refers to traditional socialist animosity towards prominent Jewish European bankers, capitalists, and war profiteers -- major symbols of class oppression since the development of Marxist theory in the nineteenth century. Many socialists were also hostile to transnational Jewish "nationalism" and its attendant chauvinism. Even "Bebel, the socialist leader who stood in the vanguard of the fight against anti-Semitism in Wilhelmian Germany, called Jewish socialists brilliant but pushy, difficult to subject to party discipline." [MOSSE, G., 1985, p. 67] "Long barred by anti-Semitic laws and customs from agriculture, guild occupations, and the professions," says apologetic Jewish scholar Arthur Liebman, "in the nineteenth century Jews were largely to be found in middlemen occupations: merchants, hucksters, estate managers, loan and mortage collectors, and money lenders. These were popularly considered (and by segments of the Jewish community like the labor Zionists as well), to be non-productive or 'parasitic' occupations ... Many late nineteenth- and twentieth century Leftists obviously shared this economically rooted hatred of Jews as well as the long-engrained religious prejudice against them." [LIEBMAN, A., 1986, p. 331]
Illustrating the all-encompassing latitude of the charge of "anti-Semitism," a term that is applied by Jews -- as the need for it suits them -- in any direction, an influential Russian Jewish Zionist and socialist of the early twentieth century, Ber Borochov, even proclaimed that "we must strike at the anti-Semitism of the Jewish capitalist." [BOROCHOV, p. 82]
And what of this specifically Jewish socialist tradition, of which there was so much, with its origins in Eastern Europe? Says Israel Shahak,
"[Many] East-European Jewish socialists ... were themselves tainted with
a ferocious anti-peasant attitude inherited from classical Judaism ...
A typical example is their opposition to the formation of peasant
cooperatives promoted by the Catholic clergy, on the grounds that
this was an act of anti-Semitism." [SHAHAK]
Jewish obsession with anti-Semitism in all directions has even afforded them their own share of draconian book burners. E. L. Dachslager argues for a ban of all books in American public schools that "defame, vilify, or otherwise promote a negative image of Jews." [GELBER, p. 8] A lot of book shelves for classical Western literature would have to go empty. "Anti-Semitic" works cited here to be banned or censored could include books by William Shakespeare, Geoffrey Chaucer, Christopher Marlowe, Charles Dickens, Frank Norris, Theodore Dreiser, Ernest Hemingway (especially The Sun Also Rises), Celine, Henry Adams, Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, E.E. Cummings, Henry Miller, Byron Scott, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Henry James, Dostoyevsky, Trollope, Thomas Wolfe, and Ezra Pound. [GELBER, p. 8, 12] "I cannot resist the opportunity," wrote Jewish author Richard Lewontin in the New York Review of Books in 1990, "... of making a remark about the anti-Semitism of American intellectuals during the early decades of this century. It was pervasive, if in a somewhat genteel form." [LEWONTIN, R., 10-25-90]
Poet and literature critic Ezra Pound is among the most emphatic anti-Semites in the literature field. Sympathetic to Mussolini, Ezra Pound had regular radio broadcasts from Italy that "urged America to stay of of the war [World War II] and concentrated on anti-Semitism as his chief message: 'Clever Kikes,' he said, were 'runnin' ALL our communications system.'" After the war, Pound, an American citizen, was indicted for treason. Psychiatrists deemed him certifiably crazy and he was sent to the St. Elizabeth Federal Hospital for the Insane. There, in 1948, "he was awarded the prestigious $10,000 Bollingen Prize for Poetry. Congress then ordered the prize's sponsor, the Library of Congress, to give no more awards." [KNAPPMAN, E., 1995, p. 197, 198]
"The Jew is a persistent figure in [Henry] James' fiction," notes Jewish author Michael Dobkowski, "He appears in ten of twenty novels, in eight short stories, one critical essay, and several travel essays. The Hebrew symbolizes basically the same areas of human experience that James explored in other literary themes -- internationalism, bourgeois corruption, social stratification, genteel decline, the conflict between money and manners, and the exploitation of one human being by another for gain." [DOBKOWSKI, M., 1979, p. 85]
Dobkowski sites other Jewish critics to add Anthony Trollope, Emile Zola, Guy de Maupassant, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, among others, as those who wrote anti-Semitic text about "the parasitic and usurious nature of the Jew." Still others writing objectionable passages about Jews include major 19th century American authors William Cullen Bryant (Jews' "unquenchable lust for lucre") and Oliver Wendell Holmes ("the principal use of the Jews seemed to be to lend money ..."). [DOBKOWSKI, M., 1979, p. 79, 105]
William Faulkner? Dobkowski notes that:
"In the beginning of Faulkner's first novel, Soldier's Pay, (1926), we meet a salesman
named Schluss who says to some returning soldiers of World War I: 'I would
have liked to fought by your side, see. But someone got to look out for the
business while the boys are gone.' In his second book, Mosquitoes (1927)
another sad-eyed Jewish salesman is said to remark: "You can't ignore money ...
It took my people to teach the world that ...' Faulkner does not use this major
character's name, calling him 'the Semitic man' and 'fat Jew.' It is as if
this anonymous entity -- the Jew -- represents something mysterious and
pernicious that has infiltrated into American society." [DOBKOWSKI, M.,
1979, p. 103]
Another Jewish critic, Daniel Walden, "would have [all of T.S.] Elliot's poetry placed under general suspicion." [GELBER, p. 10] Doris Grumbach adds H. L. Mencken, Edith Warton, and Willa Cather onto the list of prominent literary anti-Semites. [GRUMBACH, p. A23] More current writers cited by Jewish critics who might qualify for censorial action include Imamu Amiri Baraka (Leroi Jones), Katherine Ann Porter, Gore Vidal, Truman Capote, Richard Kostelanetz, and John Cheever. Alvin Rosenfeld sees in all authors writing critically of Jews "the dangerous possibility, gruesomely actualized in Europe between 1933 and 1945, of proceeding from literary Jew-hatred to literal murder of whole communities." [GELBER, p. 11] "[There is a] prevailing opinion," wrote Mark Gelber, a professor at Yale, in 1979, "that there is a 'risk inherent for world Jewry,' and by implication mankind, by 'exposing works like The Merchant of Venice, Oliver Twist, and certain poems by T. S. Eliot to high school and college students." [GELBER, Teaching, p. 1]
Poet and literature critic Ezra Pound is among the most emphatic anti-Semites in the literature field. Sympathetic to Mussolini, Ezra Pound had regular radio broadcasts from Italy that "urged America to stay of of the war [World War II] and concentrated on anti-Semitism as his chief message: 'Clever Kikes,' he said, were 'runnin' ALL our communications system.'" After the war, Pound, an American citizen, was indicted for treason. Psychiatrists deemed him certifiably crazy and he was sent to the St. Elizabeth Federal Hospital for the Insane. There, in 1948, "he was awarded the prestigious $10,000 Bollingen Prize for Poetry. Congress then ordered the prize's sponsor, the Library of Congress, to give no more awards." [KNAPPMAN, E., 1995, p. 197, 198]
Dobkowski sites other Jewish critics to add Anthony Trollope, Emile Zola, Guy de Maupassant, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, among others, as those who wrote anti-Semitic text about "the parasitic and usurious nature of the Jew." Still others writing objectionable passages about Jews include major 19th century American authors William Cullen Bryant (Jews' "unquenchable lust for lucre") and Oliver Wendell Holmes ("the principal use of the Jews seemed to be to lend money ..."). [DOBKOWSKI, M., 1979, p. 79, 105]
William Faulkner? Dobkowski notes that:
"In the beginning of Faulkner's first novel, Soldier's Pay, (1926), we meet a salesman
named Schluss who says to some returning soldiers of World War I: 'I would
have liked to fought by your side, see. But someone got to look out for the
business while the boys are gone.' In his second book, Mosquitoes (1927)
another sad-eyed Jewish salesman is said to remark: "You can't ignore money ...
It took my people to teach the world that ...' Faulkner does not use this major
character's name, calling him 'the Semitic man' and 'fat Jew.' It is as if
this anonymous entity -- the Jew -- represents something mysterious and
pernicious that has infiltrated into American society." [DOBKOWSKI, M.,
1979, p. 103]
Ann Roiphe turns (almost with hysteria) the Accusation upon William Styron's novel Sophie's Choice:
"The book tells the story of a Polish woman who survived the
[Nazi concentration] camp only to die at the hands of a Jewish madman
in Brooklyn. I try to explain [to my non-Jewish friend] why I feel the book
is so subtly anti-Semitic, why it offends me. The animus of the work
seems directed at the Jewish literary establishment that Styron fears
may steal his limelight or not allow him a piece of the pie ... As I talk
I find I am trembling; my hand is shaking. My kind friend is looking
at me, puzzled. 'You certainly feel strongly about it, don't you?'"
[ROIPHE, 1981, p. 176]
British poet James Russell Lowell? He once wrote, says Stanley Weintraub "an anti-Semitic diatribe against [Jewish prime minister Benjamin] Disraeli in the guise of a novel critique for the North American Review." [WEINTRAUB, S., 1993, p. 601] Poet Baudelaire? By the year 2000, another scholar was writing an entire article about "Charles Baudelaire's anti-Semitism." [BOWLES, B., 2000, p. 195] And Sander Gilman, in a scholarly article about alleged Gentile interest in Jewish sibling incest declares that "[Edgar Allan] Poe's description of Roderick Usher, in 'The Fall of the House of the Usher' (1839), the last offspring of a highly inbred family, was visualized as degenerate and, therefore, as Jewish. Gilman cites as evidence Poe's description of Usher's "nose of a delicate Hebrew model." "In complex ways," decides Gilman, "the siblings [in the story] were Jews for no other reason than their incest." [GILMAN, 1-31-98]
Thomas Mann? "What is striking," says Gilman, "about Mann's text [in The Blood of the Walsungs, 1905] is that it is as much a critique of the Jew as parvenu in the (mocked) world of German high culture as it is a critique of the Jews as incestuous sibling." [GILMAN, 1-31-98] Aubrey Beardsley? "Beardsley in England," notes Jewish scholar George Mosse, "had satirized the fascination which the newest in art and literature held for rich German Jews through an opulent and corpulent Jewish audience in his black-and-white sketch of 'Male and Female Wagnerians at a Performance of Tristan and Isolde." [MOSSE, G., 1985, p. 23]
The great poet William Blake? Jewish professor Karen Shabetai looks with concern as she scans his work for anti-Semitism, foregrounding the usual categorical, angelic Jewish innocence as the lens before her:
"Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno stressed the
'blindness and lack of purpose of anti-Semitism' for often its targets
'are interchangeable according to circumstances.' This underlying of
anti-Semitism comes close to what occurs in Blake. Blake's shifting
attitude, marked by shrill moments of intense hostility [against Jews],
bespeaks at the very least classic symptoms of anti-Semitism ranging
from demonological superstitions inherited from the Middle Ages to
resentment and anxiety about the Jews as the chosen people. More
importantly, Blake's anti-Semitism, while greatly at odds with his
largely humanitarian program, casts a shadow -- a haunting specter,
perhaps -- upon this received wisdom." [SHABETAI, p. 149] What about other titans of American literature? How about the great novelist Herman Melville (best known for Moby Dick)? Some of his "gallery of Jewish or judaised characters," says David Meier, "[are] disturbing." [MEIER, D., 9-2-99] Novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne, of Scarlet Letter fame? "InThe Marble Fawn," says another Jewish scholar, Robert Michael, "Hawthorne refers to the Jews as the ugliest, most evil-minded people, resembling ... maggots when they over-populate a decaying cheese. Hawthorne's essay in his English Notebooks provides the clearest exprression of his hatred of Jews ... [He writes about the brother of the Jewish Lord Mayor of London, that] 'for the sight of him justified me in the repugnance I have always felt for his race.'" [MICHALE, R., 9-4-99]
Social critic Frank Norris, author of the classic The Octopus? His McTeague, says one Jewish critic, has "one of the most anti-Semitic portrayals in American fiction." This is Norris' description of a Polish Jew, Zerkow:
"He had the thin, eager catlike lips of the covetous; eyes that had grown keen as
those of a lynx from long searching amid muck and debris; and clawlike,
prehensile fingers -- the fingers of a man who accumulates, but never disburses.
It was impossible to look at Zerkow and not know instantly that greed -- inordinate,
insatiable greed -- was the dominant passion of the man. He was the Man with the
Rake, groping hourly in the muck heap of the city for gold, for gold, for gold. It
was his dream, his passion; at every instant he seemed to feel the generous
solid weight of the crude fat metal in his palms." [DOBKOWSKI, M., 1979,
p. 91]
What about George Orwell, creator of the great novel 1984 -- the indictment of totalitarian thinking? "No doubt many Jews who read his first, autobiographical book, down and Out in Paris and London (1933) which, like Homage to Catalonia, did not sell, suspected he was anti-Semitic," says Milton Goldin. "This was not a far-fetched assumption, given three Jewish characters in the book, the first of whom owns a second-hand clothing shop and swindles his customers." [GOLDIN, M., 9-4-99]
J. R. Tolkien (The Hobbit, Lord of the Rings) and James Joyce (Ulysses) have also come under Jewish scrutiny for signs of anti-Semitism. Both, barely, at least in the following Jewish magazines, evade the smear. But the Cleveland Jewish News asks:
"Was J. R. Tolkien antisemitic? ... Most troubling for many is Tolkien's love for
and use of the Norse pagan myth -- the same ones the Nazis (and many present-day
White Supremacists) turned to for inspiration. Also the Roman Catholic Church of
his era (he was born in 1892), which he loved so fiercely, was known to harbor
many with anti-Jewish sentiments ... Tolkien once said: 'The Dwarves [in my fiction],
of course, are quite obvious -- wouldn't you say that in many ways they remind you
of the Jews? Their words are semitic obviously, constructed to be semitic. The
Hobbits are just a rustic English people.' That well may be his only recorded
comment linking Jews with the Lord of the Rings. The stereotype is there if one
wants to use it. The dwarves' primary weakness, as revealed in the saga -- to their
own detriment as well as harm to the quest of the Fellowship -- is a lust for gaining,
protecting and hoarding jewels, gold and silver."
The author of this article ultimately spares Tolkien the indictment of antisemitism, especially since the author is also on record as having rejected Aryan Nazism and praising Jewry. [BIRD, C.,12-14-2001, p. 56-]
The Jewish ethnic magaizne Sho far , in the case of James Joyce, says:
"Joyce was both praised and condemned by critics for creating so prominent
a figure in literature [Leopold Bloom, a Jewish character in Ulysses] either for
putting Jews once more on the literary map or for venting his own inherited
antisemitism." [BOWEN, Z., 4-3-2001, p. 171-]
Even influential writings in the lesbian and feminist worlds have come under attack from Jewish lesbians as being anti-Semitic. When Z. Budapest, in her The Holy Book of Women's Mysteries, Part II, blames Judaism for destroying a goddess cult and instituting patriarchy, Jewish lesbian Evelyn Torton Beck can't stand it. Budapest's offending passage is this:
"The Jews carried a deep burden of guilt about what they had done to Lilith,
the Great Goddess, and to cherubs in general. Lilith cursed them as a result,
and in effect told them that nothing would go right for Jews again until her
worship had been reinstated. Could this be the final solution to the Middle
East crisis?" [BECK, E., 1982, p. xx]
"This passage," says Beck,
"which is blatantly anti-Semitic, not only blames the Jewish people for
bringing Jew-hating upon themselves, but it also suggests that they
deserve it. Even worse, Budapest seems to support Hitler's 'final
solution' to the Jewish question -- the annihilation of all Jews. The
fact that several of Budapest's coven sisters and supporters are
themselves Jewish in no way mitigates the anti-Semitism of the passage;
in fact, it serves to highlight the ways in which some Jewish women
have internalized anti-Semitism." [BECK, E., 1982, p. xx]
"Leading" lesbian fiction writer Rita Mae Brown is also accused of anti-Semitism for this passage about a Jewish character in her novel Rubyfruit Jungle:
"[Barbara Spangenthau] always had her hand in her pants playing with
herself, and worse, she stank. Until I was fifteen I thought that being Jewish
meant you walked around with your hand in your pants." [BECK, E., 1982, p. xxiv]
Lesbian author Bertha Harris? Her "novel lover," continued Evelyn Torton Beck, "shocked me by its reliance on Jewish stereotypes, associating Jews with violence, sex and money." [BECK, E., 1982, p. xxiv] What about Norta Koertge's Who Was That Masked Woman? "This is a book," says Beck, "in which most of the Jewish characters are ostentatiously rich, superficial, and sexually promiscuous." Koertge also dares to write the following "anti-Semitic" passage:
"Take the Jews -- they aren't very well liked but they do okay -- get into Who's Who
and all that stuff while the Poles stay down in Chicago and work in the steel mills
-- and the blacks -- they're even worse off. What makes the difference? Is it a
case of native intelligence or cultural heritage or what?" [BECK, E., 1982, p. xxiv]
Even Black feminist Judy Simmons is singled out for attack for this part of one of her poems:
"Mine is not a People of the Book/taxed
but acknowledged; their distinction is
not yet a dignity; their Holocaust is lower case. "
Social critic Frank Norris, author of the classic The Octopus? His McTeague, says one Jewish critic, has "one of the most anti-Semitic portrayals in American fiction." This is Norris' description of a Polish Jew, Zerkow:
"He had the thin, eager catlike lips of the covetous; eyes that had grown keen as
prehensile fingers -- the fingers of a man who accumulates, but never disburses.
It was impossible to look at Zerkow and not know instantly that greed -- inordinate,
insatiable greed -- was the dominant passion of the man. He was the Man with the
Rake, groping hourly in the muck heap of the city for gold, for gold, for gold. It
was his dream, his passion; at every instant he seemed to feel the generous
solid weight of the crude fat metal in his palms." [DOBKOWSKI, M., 1979,
p. 91]
What about George Orwell, creator of the great novel 1984 -- the indictment of totalitarian thinking? "No doubt many Jews who read his first, autobiographical book, down and Out in Paris and London (1933) which, like Homage to Catalonia, did not sell, suspected he was anti-Semitic," says Milton Goldin. "This was not a far-fetched assumption, given three Jewish characters in the book, the first of whom owns a second-hand clothing shop and swindles his customers." [GOLDIN, M., 9-4-99]
J. R. Tolkien (The Hobbit, Lord of the Rings) and James Joyce (Ulysses) have also come under Jewish scrutiny for signs of anti-Semitism. Both, barely, at least in the following Jewish magazines, evade the smear.
"Was J. R. Tolkien antisemitic? ... Most troubling for many is Tolkien's love for
and use of the Norse pagan myth -- the same ones the Nazis (and many present-day
White Supremacists) turned to for inspiration. Also the Roman Catholic Church of
his era (he was born in 1892), which he loved so fiercely, was known to harbor
many with anti-Jewish sentiments ... Tolkien once said: 'The Dwarves [in my fiction],
of course, are quite obvious -- wouldn't you say that in many ways they remind you
of the Jews? Their words are semitic obviously, constructed to be semitic. The
Hobbits are just a rustic English people.' That well may be his only recorded
comment linking Jews with the Lord of the Rings. The stereotype is there if one
wants to use it. The dwarves' primary weakness, as revealed in the saga -- to their
own detriment as well as harm to the quest of the Fellowship -- is a lust for gaining,
protecting and hoarding jewels, gold and silver."
The author of this article ultimately spares Tolkien the indictment of antisemitism, especially since the author is also on record as having rejected Aryan Nazism and praising Jewry. [BIRD, C.,
The Jewish ethnic magaizne Sho
"Joyce was both praised and condemned by critics for creating so prominent
a figure in literature [Leopold Bloom, a Jewish character in Ulysses] either for
putting Jews once more on the literary map or for venting his own inherited
antisemitism." [BOWEN, Z., 4-3-2001, p. 171-]
Even influential writings in the lesbian and feminist worlds have come under attack from Jewish lesbians as being anti-Semitic. When Z. Budapest, in her The Holy Book of Women's Mysteries, Part II, blames Judaism for destroying a goddess cult and instituting patriarchy, Jewish lesbian Evelyn Torton Beck can't stand it. Budapest's offending passage is this:
"The Jews carried a deep burden of guilt about what they had done to Lilith,
the Great Goddess, and to cherubs in general. Lilith cursed them as a result,
and in effect told them that nothing would go right for Jews again until her
worship had been reinstated. Could this be the final solution to the Middle
East crisis?" [BECK, E., 1982, p. xx]
"This passage," says Beck,
"which is blatantly anti-Semitic, not only blames the Jewish people for
bringing Jew-hating upon themselves, but it also suggests that they
deserve it. Even worse, Budapest seems to support Hitler's 'final
solution' to the Jewish question -- the annihilation of all Jews. The
fact that several of Budapest's coven sisters and supporters are
themselves Jewish in no way mitigates the anti-Semitism of the passage;
in fact, it serves to highlight the ways in which some Jewish women
have internalized anti-Semitism." [BECK, E., 1982, p. xx]
"Leading" lesbian fiction writer Rita Mae Brown is also accused of anti-Semitism for this passage about a Jewish character in her novel Rubyfruit Jungle:
"[Barbara Spangenthau] always had her hand in her pants playing with
herself, and worse, she stank. Until I was fifteen I thought that being Jewish
meant you walked around with your hand in your pants." [BECK, E., 1982, p. xxiv]
Lesbian author Bertha Harris? Her "novel lover," continued Evelyn Torton Beck, "shocked me by its reliance on Jewish stereotypes, associating Jews with violence, sex and money." [BECK, E., 1982, p. xxiv] What about Norta Koertge's Who Was That Masked Woman? "This is a book," says Beck, "in which most of the Jewish characters are ostentatiously rich, superficial, and sexually promiscuous." Koertge also dares to write the following "anti-Semitic" passage:
"Take the Jews -- they aren't very well liked but they do okay -- get into Who's Who
and all that stuff while the Poles stay down in Chicago and work in the steel mills
-- and the blacks -- they're even worse off. What makes the difference? Is it a
case of native intelligence or cultural heritage or what?" [BECK, E., 1982, p. xxiv]
Even Black feminist Judy Simmons is singled out for attack for this part of one of her poems:
"Mine is not a People of the Book/taxed
but acknowledged; their distinction is
not yet a dignity; their Holocaust is lower case. "
Bizarrely, in the relentless Jewish search for "anti-Semitic" books and authors that -- by the above standards -- literally merit censorship and vilification, sinister culprits are to be found in the most astonishing of quarters: Jews themselves. This genre of literary anti-Semitism must be somehow excused by the Jewish Thought police, however, or their very logic of oppression implodes. Modern Jewish authors like Philip Roth, for example, whose unflattering stories about his people make his "Jewishness suspect," [GELBER, p. 11] pose special problems to Jewish critics; as a Jew, however, he is generally afforded more anti-Semitic slack. The "anti-Semitic" genre in American literature includes a significant number of Jewish writers in the early and mid-twentieth century. In-house Jewish self-critical commentary is one thing, but when it leaks into the non-Jewish world it can be an embarrassing problem. Charles Angoff and Meyer Levin note that such authors
"began to produce 'realistic' portraits that, in a closed ghetto world,
might have been accepted as self-critical, ironic, and satirical, but
that in an open English-reading world had the unhappy effect of
confirming from Jewish sources the most strident anti-Semitic
summations of 'Jewish character.' Thus, Ben Hecht's A Jew in
Love was about a name-changed Jewish publisher who put all his
energy into seducing young women, usually Gentile. This bestseller
was followed by Jerome Weidman's I Can Get It for You Wholesale
and Budd Schulberg's What Makes Sammy Run?, two skillfully
written novels about Jewish business cheats ... A host of lesser
works pictured Jews as gangsters and exploiters, to the point
where the Jewish community began to ask, "Is there anything
decent to write about?" [ANGOFF/LEVIN, p. 10]
Across the world, Jewish literature contributing to anti-Semitism by today’s' Jewish standards even includes Theodore Herzl, the revered "father" of Zionism and the modern state of Israel, who was also a playwright. Bernard Avishai notes that "in 1894, Herzl wrote what he thought was his best play, The New Ghetto, which was full of anti-Jewish stereotypes -- lives revolving around social climbing, marriage made for profit, stock-market manipulations." [AVASHAI, p. 36] Herzl also loved the music of 19th century German nationalist and vehement anti-Semite Richard Wagner. So inspired was Herzl by Wagner's music, he wrote: "Only on those nights when no Wagner was performed did I have any doubts about the correctness of my [Zionist] idea." [RASKAS, p. 11] Likewise, in the literature tradition of Israel, there is the traditional Zionist condemnation of the European "ghetto Jew," condemnations that closely parallel classical anti-Semitic attacks. [See chapter on Israel] In Shalmo Golan's novel, The Death of Uri Peled, for example, an indigenous Israeli tells a Diaspora Jew who has moved to Israel that "the fighters of our War of Independence died for you, so that this land could absorb the likes of you -- refugees who arrive from many exiles. We spilled our blood for this country, and you, I'm telling you, don't you turn it into a pigsty with your swinish galut [exilic/diaspora] wheeling and dealing." [RUBINSTEIN, A, p. 135]
In Germany, prominent Jewish author Kurt Tucholsky had "created a character called Herr Wendriner as the protoype of the Jewish German businessman. Wendriner was interested only in money. He was egocentric, petty, cruel, and stupid. As Harold Poor, Tucholsky's biographer, notes, these sketches were extremely popular in Germany during the [pre-Hitler] Weimar period." [ROTHMAN/LICHTER, 1982, p. 124]
In Germany, prominent Jewish author Kurt Tucholsky had "created a character called Herr Wendriner as the protoype of the Jewish German businessman. Wendriner was interested only in money. He was egocentric, petty, cruel, and stupid. As Harold Poor, Tucholsky's biographer, notes, these sketches were extremely popular in Germany during the [pre-Hitler] Weimar period." [ROTHMAN/LICHTER, 1982, p. 124]
Books about the Holocaust are especially delicate for the Jewish Thought Police. "The fact of the Holocaust and the anguish of its victims are not items for conjecture or debate," demands professor Richard Libowitz, "To legitimate these materials [controversial books about the Holocaust, most which argue that the Nazi mass murder of Jews was not as large as popularly claimed], and to suffer their continuing presence within our libraries is to provide passive support for anti-Semitism in its latest guise. Individuals should check the periodical contents of their own institutions and should these items appear, initiate the procedure for their removal." [LIBOWITZ, ASKING, p. 72]
David Gershom Myers, a Jewish associate professor of English at Texas A&M University, was also busy banning books within his reach in 1996. There were ten that drew his attention and ire. As the Austin American-Statesman editorialized about this censor in academe,
"[Myers] is on a crusade to remove from the college library books
that deny the Jewish Holocaust under Nazi Germany ... Once works
denying the Holocaust are prohibited, what's next? Many, many
books are offensive to someone, and banning any of them is a slippery
slope indeed." [AUSTIN AMERICAN-STATESMAN, 4-12-96, p. A14]
Myers successfully lobbied the university library to add new subheadings ("Errors and Inventions") to the books' listing under "Holocaust, Jewish History." Some volumes were even cross-listed to his satisfaction under "anti-Semitism."
Some of the early violence-threatening poems of the African-American poet Imamu Baraka -- which in later years he publicly repudiated -- expressed extreme hostility towards the Jews and were, by anyone's standards, malicious. Rooted in a Black man's perceptions of Jewish exploitation of his community, such poems are direct attacks of Jews; a resultant discussion, not of Jews per se, but of Jewish-Black relations are not only necessary but inevitable. Such poems are expressly about that subject. The still broader context of such work is the common 1960's rise of "Black rage," rooted in African-American frustration and disillusionment, and reckless expressions of hopelessness and anger. Baraka's ravings against Jews were no more severe than his (and many other Black writers’) bitter writings against "white society" in general. (Interestingly, Baraka, formerly Leroi Jones, was once married to a Jew, Hettie Cohen).
There are various means to thrust the Jewish Thought Police's self-obsession of their alleged misportrayals across history onto center stage of classical works of English literature. In an introduction to a reissue of Charles Dickens' classic novel, Oliver Twist, for example, published by Bantam Books in 1981, Jewish author Irving Howe was afforded space to force the reader's attention (for nearly four pages) to modern Jewish polemics surrounding Dickens' character 'Fagin,' an "archetypical Jewish villain." As preface to the novel, readers are served a mini-history of Jewish objection to the Fagin persona -- a Jewish woman, it seems, had even written a complaint to Dickens that the character was too negatively stereotypical. Dickens actually wrote back to her, saying, "Fagin is a Jew because it is unfortunately true, of the time to which the story refers, that that class of criminal almost invariably was Jewish." [HOWE, p. 369-373] (A real life model for Dickens may have been Ikey Solomon who had undergone a much publicized trial in England a few years before the book was written). The disturbing precedent Howe's framing of the novel sets, of course (for those who have the power to enforce such things), is that any literature must be subject to polemical rebuttal in a kind of aggrieved "class action" to begin (and essentially merge with, and reframe) the original writing itself. Hence, a novel becomes -- first and foremost -- a polemical course on Jewish history and identity.
In 1962, Oliver Twist was recreated as a British musical comedy. Reflecting the revisionist times, the actor who played Fagin expressed the character, as one reviewer observed, "as the dottiest old dear imaginable." [BELTH, p. 56]
This strategy of revisionism has become common. In 1997, for example, bowing to Jewish pressure, the Marin Center Showcase Theatre in San Rafael, California, agreed to a Jewish Community Relations Council question-and-answer discussion after each performance of Geoffey Chaucer's "Prioress' Tale," from his famous Canterbury Tales. "Hotly debated," noted the Jewish Bulletin, "is whether the 'Prioress' Tale' is indeed a satire of ... violently anti-Semitic attitudes or merely an expression of them." [STERLING, 1997, p. 30]
One of the most famous negative portrayals of Jews in English literature is the character Shylock in Shakespeare's play, Merchant of Venice. Written in 16th and 17th century England, Shylock reflects the Christian perceptions of the era; he is depicted as usurious, villainous, fraudulent, exploitive, and cruel. "The most effective way of making the play acceptable to post-Holocaust sensibilities," notes Jewish critic John Gross, "in the view of many directors, is to underscore the prejudices of the Christian characters, and generally show them in an ugly light." [GROSS, p. 329] In some productions of the play, Shylock is even completely reconstituted, as in Arnold Wesker's version, where Shylock became "scholarly, impetuous, and warm-hearted." [GROSS, p. 335] One French critic, Pierre Spriet, has even went so far as to dismiss the play entirely, suggesting that the work is so anti-Semitic, "it must be abandoned." [GROSS, p. 345] In 1999, an actor on tour from South Africa, Percy Sieff, was portraying Shylock as "a worldly, successful businessman who has become embittered by discrimination and compensated by focusing on money." [BLOCH, F., 9/10-16/99]
In 1994 Rabbi Richard Litvak spearheaded a protest of a performance of the Merchant of Venice by a Shakespeare theatre group in Santa Cruz, California. Jewish lobbying resulted in a plan for "discussion groups" and "program notes" about Jewish concerns about the Shylock character. Rabbi Litvak noted the effect of Jewish protest, turning the performance of a Shakespeare play into quite something else: "The director and the festival have expressed a commitment to try to make the play a vehicle for raising awareness of anti-Semitism." [ROSENBERG, N., 5-27-94, p. 35]
"It was with great trepidation that I agreed to undertake the responsibility of commenting on yet another production of William Shakespeare's 'The Merchant of Venice,'" wrote censorial Jewish professor Racelle Weinman in 2001,
"In this instance the venue is the PBS Masterpiece Theatre series ... I have come
to the conclusion that the Holocaust negates the untenable premise of 'The
Merchant of Venice.' It should not be produced ... [T]he bottom line is that the
text remains the text ... [Director Trevor] Nunn tries to make the character of the
Jewish usurer, Shylock, more palatable by casting a Jew, Henry Goodman, in the role."
[WEINMAN, R., 10-4-01, p. 23-]
"It was with great trepidation that I agreed to undertake the responsibility of commenting on yet another production of William Shakespeare's 'The Merchant of Venice,'" wrote censorial Jewish professor Racelle Weinman in 2001,
"In this instance the venue is the PBS Masterpiece Theatre series ... I have come
to the conclusion that the Holocaust negates the untenable premise of 'The
Merchant of Venice.' It should not be produced ... [T]he bottom line is that the
text remains the text ... [Director Trevor] Nunn tries to make the character of the
Jewish usurer, Shylock, more palatable by casting a Jew, Henry Goodman, in the role."
[WEINMAN, R., 10-4-01, p. 23-]
As early as 1912 Jewish American organizations were successfully lobbying the College Entrance Examination Board to remove the Merchant of Venice as a required reading for its tests. "School superintendents in all cities of 10,000 population or more" were then lobbied by the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith to remove the text from study. "Between 1917 and 1920 many school systems discontinued study of the play." [BELTH, p. 51-52]
Mother Goose was censored of its Jewish contents by the late 1930s:
"Jack sold his egg
to a rogue of a Jew
Who cheated him out
of half his due.
The Jew got his goose,
Which he vowed he would kill
Resolving at once
His pockets to fill. [DOBKOWSKI, M., 1979, p. 104]
A curious angle to all this, in view of the fact that the Shylock stereotype of the Middle Ages -- a figure that symbolizes classically Orthodox Jewish separatism from non-Jews, exploitation and manipulation of Gentiles, communal resistance to defense obligations to the country in which they live, double moral standards for Jews and non-Jews, cheats, liars, ghetto-loving, et al -- is held to be totally groundless today, yet it is a fact that the closest parallels in our own time to the Orthodox Jews of Elizabethan England are the black-dressed, self-cloistered Orthodox Hasidim of which there are today hundreds of thousands in Israel and America. (Eventually, the ultra-Orthodox Hasidic movement, which was created in the 1700s and represents a particular back-to-basics strand of Judaism, numbered about half of the Eastern European Jewish population. [LEVIN, M., 1966, p. xi] David Berger notes that "with the dawn of the 19th century, Hasidism .. became the dominant form of Judaism in much of Eastern Europe, the heartland of 19th-century Jewry." [BERGER, D., 2001, p. 24] Jewish scholar Solomon Poll even notes, for example, that, according to a Hungarian government report in 1914, Orthodox Judaism dominated the Jewish community in that country. And the attitude of Hungarian Jews not part of this traditional community? "Among the less observant and nonobservant Jews," says Poll, "... they considered the observant Jews "old-fashioned," "bigoted," and "unreasonable.") [POLL, S., 1969, p 14-15]
Not surprisingly, the perception by many secular Jews today -- most particularly in Israel -- of the self-segregated Hassidim (also called Haredi) communities is extremely similar to the classical non-Jewish Shakespearean-era perception of Shylock. An Israeli professor, Menachem Friedman, notes the characterization of these Ultra-Orthodox talmudists by secular fellow Jews in Israel: "The alienation and isolation of the Haredim, their eagerness to claim exemption from service in the Israeli army, their demands for increasing allocations for their society of scholars and sometimes unrestrained use of political power arouses resentment and even hatred among large sections of the Israeli public." [FRIEDMAN, M, p. 190] [See also former, and later, chapters].
"Hatred of the ultra-Orthodox has deep roots [in Israel]," noted Israeli critic Laor Yitzhak in 1998,
"There is no offense so great that one cannot tag it on the Haredim --
especially the guy with the black hat, frock coat, and side curls beloved
of modern anti-Semites ... 'Death to the black hatters' is scribbled on
toilet doors at the Tel Aviv School of Humanities; if fliers showing
Haredi children and screaming 'Kill them while they're young!' are being
distributed in Kfar Saba, then it is those who participate in fomenting
hatred against the Haredi minority who must prove there is not something
behind their behavior frighteningly like anti-Semitism." [LAOR]
Israeli scholar Yeshayahu Leibowitz notes the conflicts between secular Jews and the Ultra-Orthodox, and that "Perhaps we will reluctantly arrive at a separation into two nations [in Israel], with a differentiation not only from the aspect of marriage, but also with each going his historic way imbued by intense hatred [of the other]." [HUPPERT, U., 1988, p. 40]
In 1986 the Jerusalem Post reported an Israeli poll that found one-fourth of its secular Jewish respondents called the Ultra-Orthodox -- who like their ancestral counterparts have retreated into self-created ghettos, even in Israel -- "opportunists, liars, and charlatans." [LINDEMANN, Esau's, p. 24] "There is much hostility to the Orthodox rabbinate among the majority (about 70% of the Jewish population) of secular Israeli Jews," says Adam Garfinkel, "They see the rabbis as coercive and intolerant ... excessively political and unspiritual ... seeming never to have a word to say about kindness, humility, and God's love for humanity ... To be blunt, some secular Israelis see the haredim as fanatical atavistic freeloaders who have yet to discover modern hygiene." [GARFINKEL, p. 140]
In 2000, the results of study by Jerusalem's Hebrew University about "hate" in 168 secular Israeli schools indicated that "47% of the Jewish students hate haredim." [PRINCE-GIBSON, E., 9-17-2000] A Jewish religious organization, Ahavat Israel, has even posted an entire section at its Internet site about what it calls "anti-Semitism in Israel":
"Today, the attack upon the religious Jewish population is most heavily felt
in the Israeli media, including newspapers, radio and TV ... In a recent 9 (Dec
98) column, Israel Eichler charges that many of the stereotypes used by the
Nazis against Jews have been translated into Hebrew and employed to
delegitimize the haredi (religious) public ... [Meretz political party founder]
Shulamit Aloni described the haredi population as 'suck[ing] from the
same sinister passions which nurtured the Nazis' ... 'We have to storm Mea
She'arim [a famous Jerusalem ultra-Orthodox enclave] with machine guns
and mow them down,' recommends left-wing darling Uri Avneri. 'I would
take all those weird people from Shas, Aguda, and Degel Hatorah and tie
all their beards together and light a match,' says Popolitika's Amnon
Danker. Yonaten Gefen announces his wilingness to cast the first stone
in the intifada [uprising] against haredim, and Prof. Uri Arnon tells a
Kol Ha'ir interviewer, 'Haredim should be suspended on an electricity
pole' ... Today 'bloodsucker' is a favored term for haredim ... 'Parasite'
has become used so frequently in connection with haredim that the
two have become virtually synonymous ... 'When I see the haredim
surrounded by their large families, I understand the Nazis,' wrote
sculptor Yigal Tumarkin -- a statement which did not prevent him
from being honored by Yad Vashem [Israel's Holocaust memorial
center]. And Tommy Lapid sees the haredim as having usurped
the traditional Jewish role of 'taking advantage of the gentile,
trading in his blood, and laughing at him,' only this time with
the secular [Jewish] public in the role of the gentile."
[AHAVAT ISRAEL, 2001]
At another site, the Freeman Center for Strategic Studies, a Jewish author sites a list of anti-chasid charges compiled by the editor of the Israeli magazine NATIV:
"'Black ants.' 'Dogs tied up in the back yard, barking psalms all nights.' 'Humming
locusts.' 'Forces of darkness and kidnappers of Souls.' 'Vulgar baboons.'
'Barbarians, the Black Front ... representing the magical, bewitched and
most primitive ... whose schools are colleges of darkness.' 'The darkest and
and most horrible phenomena (sic) of our age,' (by a senior Israeli diplomat
in the United States). From two different members of the Knesset: 'Leeches,
snakes, suckled on the same evil urges as Nazism, greedy and domineering,
evil and primitive, corrupt, parasites, ambitious.' 'A horrible evil, a black
devil.' Finally, Arie Stav quotes one of Israel's best known writers: 'A
band of armed gangsters comitting crimes against humanity, sadists,
pogromchiks and murderers." [WINSTON, E., 10-98]
"Stav [the editor of NATIV]," says Emmanuel Winston, "quotes even worse examples of statements and caricatures that are actually blood libel by the self-styled 'intellectual elite of the Israeli Left. They are authors, members of the Knesset, senior journalists, diplomats and professors." [WINSTON, E., 10-98]
In 2000, the Cleveland Jewish News reported that, in Israel, "there have been many instances of anti-haredi graffiti on haredi synagogues, and even, in 1998, the torching of two haredi classrooms in Pardess Hanna, where local secular [Jewish] residents tried to keep haredim from moving into their neighborhood." [DERFNER, L., 6-30-2000, p. 10-]
Robert Eisenberg, whose parents are Yiddish-speaking Jews from Eastern Europe, even notes what a Holocaust survivor had to say about the ultra-Orthodox. Here Eisenberg speaks to an older Jewish couple in New Jersey:
"My [husband] Morris was in Auschwitz. Ask him what he thinks of the Hasidim.
Morris, come here,'' she orders. He shuffles in like a Foghorn Leghorn auditioning
for a part, cigar clenched firmly between his teeth. 'What do you think of the
Hasidism?' Without missing a beat in he begins to intone,
Huset Ganef
Geh Ka' Chrzanow
Koif a fayert
Lieg in drayert.
(Hasid, you crook
Travel to Chrzanow, for a look
Buy a horse
Then drop dead, of course.)
It's a child nursery rhyme my grandmother used to chant on
those rare occasions when she saw a Hasid in Nebraska."
[EISENBERGER, R., 1995, p. 158]
In a 1982 book Jewish American author Earl Shorris noted the Hasids in a chapter about Jewish shame ("anti-Semitism?" "Self-hatred?") for the behavior of other Jews. Here Shorris is troubled by an encounter with Hasidic salesmen at a photo shop in New York City:
"As we neared [the sale counter], now sweating like everyone else in the
salesroom, I saw that the salesmen were all young Hasidic Jews. A fat boy
in his twenties -- his white shirt smudged; his fly partly unzipped below
his bulging belly; his spotty, untrimmed beard curling with sweat --waited
on the customer next to me. When my turn came, he said, Well?
I want an AM-FM portable radio, one that sounds reasonablly good.
You want ten dollars? A hundred dollars? what?
Somewhere in the middle. Fifty.
He thrust a catalogue in front of me, opened it to the pages devoted to portable
radios, and said, When you know, you'll tell me.
The Hasidim have given up ritual bathing, I thought, for I could smell him
from across the counter. He stank of the gruel of seat and detritus that collects
in the creases of the body and sours. His clothes stank. He eyeglasses were
smudged. His hands were pale and dirty ... He went to another customer. I
could not think of the radio, only of him, of this Jew who had presented himself
to me. I chose a radio ... [A second Hasidic salesman comes over to help him]
... We stared at each other for a moment, as if to compare our lives. I , too,
wear a bear, a curly Jewish beard, once black, now turning gray. He knew what
I was thinking. Well, what? he said. He did not hide his irritaion at my
examination of him ... Hostility grew between us. He saw in my eyes what the
Ostjuden [Eastern European Jews] had seen in the eyes of the German Jews. He
could dance, he could fly, he could tell stories of the Baal Shem Tov that even
Martin Buber did not know. How dare I look at him with scathing eyes! ... [As
he left, he paid a female cashier for his purchase] ... I gave her the money. She
gave me the package. We did not speak. She told me that she knew what I was
thinking and that she had known similar thoughts. She smiled. It was not a real
smile. It seemed to belong to a prisoner ... It's difficult to be in a place like that
... I'm so put off by them. I have to keep reminding myself that we're brothers."
[SHORRIS, E., 1982, p. 67, 68] ... Is it possible that Jews could rise completely
above the pain of disapproval that we call shame?" [SHORRIS, E., 1982, p. 72]
In the 1990s, secular Jewish professor Stephen Bloom tried to connect to his Jewish heritage via a Chabad Lubavitcher (ultra-Orthodox/Hassidic) community in the little town of Postville, Iowa. He went there with the legends of Jewish historic identity and was stunned with what he found. "Many of the Hasidim I had encountered in Postville pretended to be holy," he wrote,
"but their actions displayed bigotry and racism of the worst degree. The book
[Bloom wrote, entitled Postville] explored taboo topics such as bargaining, poor
hygiene, atrocious manners, disrepair of homes, Jewish elitism, sexism, crime
and prejudice directed a gentiles. In response, I've received dozens of hate letters,
all from Orthodox Jewish readers, who essentially pose the same question as my
father's. To these readers, to criticize any aspect of Judaism is patently unacceptable.
To them, I wasn't a journalist doing my job. I was a self-loathing Jew, the worst
kind of anti-Semite. I was embarrassing the family ... When journalists parachuted
into Postville, if the locals said anything bad -- or even neutral -- about the Hasidic
Jews, the response was swift and to the point. Mayor John Hyman was labeled an
anti-Semite when he told a reporter for the Minneapolis Star-Tribune that the
Jews in Postville don't pay their bills on time [which Bloom found to be a true
assessment]." [BLOOM, S., 2000, p. 355, p. 340]
"Today, the attack upon the religious Jewish population is most heavily felt
in the Israeli media, including newspapers, radio and TV ... In a recent 9 (Dec
98) column, Israel Eichler charges that many of the stereotypes used by the
Nazis against Jews have been translated into Hebrew and employed to
delegitimize the haredi (religious) public ... [Meretz political party founder]
Shulamit Aloni described the haredi population as 'suck[ing] from the
same sinister passions which nurtured the Nazis' ... 'We have to storm Mea
She'arim [a famous Jerusalem ultra-Orthodox enclave] with machine guns
and mow them down,' recommends left-wing darling Uri Avneri. 'I would
take all those weird people from Shas, Aguda, and Degel Hatorah and tie
all their beards together and light a match,' says Popolitika's Amnon
Danker. Yonaten Gefen announces his wilingness to cast the first stone
in the intifada [uprising] against haredim, and Prof. Uri Arnon tells a
Kol Ha'ir interviewer, 'Haredim should be suspended on an electricity
pole' ... Today 'bloodsucker' is a favored term for haredim ... 'Parasite'
has become used so frequently in connection with haredim that the
two have become virtually synonymous ... 'When I see the haredim
surrounded by their large families, I understand the Nazis,' wrote
sculptor Yigal Tumarkin -- a statement which did not prevent him
from being honored by Yad Vashem [Israel's Holocaust memorial
center]. And Tommy Lapid sees the haredim as having usurped
the traditional Jewish role of 'taking advantage of the gentile,
trading in his blood, and laughing at him,' only this time with
the secular [Jewish] public in the role of the gentile."
[AHAVAT ISRAEL, 2001]
At another site, the Freeman Center for Strategic Studies, a Jewish author sites a list of anti-chasid charges compiled by the editor of the Israeli magazine NATIV:
"'Black ants.' 'Dogs tied up in the back yard, barking psalms all nights.' 'Humming
locusts.' 'Forces of darkness and kidnappers of Souls.' 'Vulgar baboons.'
'Barbarians, the Black Front ... representing the magical, bewitched and
most primitive ... whose schools are colleges of darkness.' 'The darkest and
and most horrible phenomena (sic) of our age,' (by a senior Israeli diplomat
in the United States). From two different members of the Knesset: 'Leeches,
snakes, suckled on the same evil urges as Nazism, greedy and domineering,
evil and primitive, corrupt, parasites, ambitious.' 'A horrible evil, a black
devil.' Finally, Arie Stav quotes one of Israel's best known writers: 'A
band of armed gangsters comitting crimes against humanity, sadists,
pogromchiks and murderers." [WINSTON, E., 10-98]
"Stav [the editor of NATIV]," says Emmanuel Winston, "quotes even worse examples of statements and caricatures that are actually blood libel by the self-styled 'intellectual elite of the Israeli Left. They are authors, members of the Knesset, senior journalists, diplomats and professors." [WINSTON, E., 10-98]
In 2000, the Cleveland Jewish News reported that, in Israel, "there have been many instances of anti-haredi graffiti on haredi synagogues, and even, in 1998, the torching of two haredi classrooms in Pardess Hanna, where local secular [Jewish] residents tried to keep haredim from moving into their neighborhood." [DERFNER, L., 6-30-2000, p. 10-]
Robert Eisenberg, whose parents are Yiddish-speaking Jews from Eastern Europe, even notes what a Holocaust survivor had to say about the ultra-Orthodox. Here Eisenberg speaks to an older Jewish couple in New Jersey:
"My [husband] Morris was in Auschwitz. Ask him what he thinks of the Hasidim.
Morris, come here,'' she orders. He shuffles in like a Foghorn Leghorn auditioning
for a part, cigar clenched firmly between his teeth. 'What do you think of the
Hasidism?' Without missing a beat in he begins to intone,
Huset Ganef
Geh Ka' Chrzanow
Koif a fayert
Lieg in drayert.
(Hasid, you crook
Travel to Chrzanow, for a look
Buy a horse
Then drop dead, of course.)
It's a child nursery rhyme my grandmother used to chant on
those rare occasions when she saw a Hasid in Nebraska."
[EISENBERGER, R., 1995, p. 158]
In a 1982 book Jewish American author Earl Shorris noted the Hasids in a chapter about Jewish shame ("anti-Semitism?" "Self-hatred?") for the behavior of other Jews. Here Shorris is troubled by an encounter with Hasidic salesmen at a photo shop in New York City:
"As we neared [the sale counter], now sweating like everyone else in the
salesroom, I saw that the salesmen were all young Hasidic Jews. A fat boy
in his twenties -- his white shirt smudged; his fly partly unzipped below
his bulging belly; his spotty, untrimmed beard curling with sweat --waited
on the customer next to me. When my turn came, he said, Well?
I want an AM-FM portable radio, one that sounds reasonablly good.
You want ten dollars? A hundred dollars? what?
Somewhere in the middle. Fifty.
He thrust a catalogue in front of me, opened it to the pages devoted to portable
radios, and said, When you know, you'll tell me.
The Hasidim have given up ritual bathing, I thought, for I could smell him
from across the counter. He stank of the gruel of seat and detritus that collects
in the creases of the body and sours. His clothes stank. He eyeglasses were
smudged. His hands were pale and dirty ... He went to another customer. I
could not think of the radio, only of him, of this Jew who had presented himself
to me. I chose a radio ... [A second Hasidic salesman comes over to help him]
... We stared at each other for a moment, as if to compare our lives. I , too,
wear a bear, a curly Jewish beard, once black, now turning gray. He knew what
I was thinking. Well, what? he said. He did not hide his irritaion at my
examination of him ... Hostility grew between us. He saw in my eyes what the
Ostjuden [Eastern European Jews] had seen in the eyes of the German Jews. He
could dance, he could fly, he could tell stories of the Baal Shem Tov that even
Martin Buber did not know. How dare I look at him with scathing eyes! ... [As
he left, he paid a female cashier for his purchase] ... I gave her the money. She
gave me the package. We did not speak. She told me that she knew what I was
thinking and that she had known similar thoughts. She smiled. It was not a real
smile. It seemed to belong to a prisoner ... It's difficult to be in a place like that
... I'm so put off by them. I have to keep reminding myself that we're brothers."
[SHORRIS, E., 1982, p. 67, 68] ... Is it possible that Jews could rise completely
above the pain of disapproval that we call shame?" [SHORRIS, E., 1982, p. 72]
In the 1990s, secular Jewish professor Stephen Bloom tried to connect to his Jewish heritage via a Chabad Lubavitcher (ultra-Orthodox/Hassidic) community in the little town of Postville, Iowa. He went there with the legends of Jewish historic identity and was stunned with what he found. "Many of the Hasidim I had encountered in Postville pretended to be holy," he wrote,
"but their actions displayed bigotry and racism of the worst degree. The book
[Bloom wrote, entitled Postville] explored taboo topics such as bargaining, poor
hygiene, atrocious manners, disrepair of homes, Jewish elitism, sexism, crime
and prejudice directed a gentiles. In response, I've received dozens of hate letters,
all from Orthodox Jewish readers, who essentially pose the same question as my
father's. To these readers, to criticize any aspect of Judaism is patently unacceptable.
To them, I wasn't a journalist doing my job. I was a self-loathing Jew, the worst
kind of anti-Semite. I was embarrassing the family ... When journalists parachuted
into Postville, if the locals said anything bad -- or even neutral -- about the Hasidic
Jews, the response was swift and to the point. Mayor John Hyman was labeled an
anti-Semite when he told a reporter for the Minneapolis Star-Tribune that the
Jews in Postville don't pay their bills on time [which Bloom found to be a true
assessment]." [BLOOM, S., 2000, p. 355, p. 340]
What does all this mean? The foundation of animosity (defined as "anti-Semitism") towards "traditional" Jewish behavior, as best manifest today by the cloistered, seclusionist, Jewish haredim/hasidic communities -- a behavior that was a mainstay for centuries by all Jews in Europe and throughout the world, is so great that even other (secularized) Jews today express vehement disdain and outrage towards their obsessively "particularist" -- and exploitive -- fellows. And this is crucial: today's haredim merely reflect meticulous attention to the ages-old religious laws of Jewish orthodoxy. As Michael Govrin notes, living under the Halacha -- Jewish religious law -- "until two hundred years ago was the only way a Jew could define him or herself." [GOVRIN, M., 2001]
As Israeli Amos Elon notes, more mildly, about the tensions within the secular Jewish psyche when they visit Mea Shearim (the hasidic ghetto in Jerusalem):
"Modern Israelis ...are attracted to the notion of encountering their
own roots and at the same time they are repelled ... When they gaze
now at these bearded men, with their alarmingly pallid faces, at their
ringlets and strange clothes, so unsuited to the climate, and at their tired
looking wives, modern Jews are torn by conflicted feelings ... They see
their own grandfathers and grandmothers, who went up as smoke
through the chimneys of Auschwitz and Treblinka. 'Because of Hitler
you have no right to oppose this kind of Judaism,' the [Israeli] novelist
wrote in 1982." [ALON, 1991, p. 189]
Melford Spiro, in a study of the Israeli kibbutz system (known for his socialist system), has the following commentary:
"Religious Jews -- or more accurately, orthodox Jews whose 'visibility'
is pronounced -- are the objects of similar attitudes [among residents of
the kibbutz]. A fourth-grade girl, asking her father if he had ever prayed,
proceeded to describe with much laughter how the 'Jews in Europe' had
prayed. Her description, accompanied by grotesque gestures, was in
the tradition of anti-Semitic caricature. And from the other end of the
age scale came this comment from an adult sabra [native born Israeli]:
'I hate them (the orthodox Jews), and when I see them I can understand
why people are anti-Semitic." [SPIRO, p. 388]
Yet another angle on all this is Israeli Ashkenazim (Jews from Europe) views of their Sephardic (Jews from Arab countries, Iran, et al) fellow citizens. As Raphael Patai notes: "In addition to instability, emotionalism, impulsiveness, unreliability, and incompetence, the Oriental [Sephardic] Jew is accused [by other Israeli Jews] of habitual lying and cheating, laziness, uncontrolled temper, superstitiousness, childishness, lack of cleanliness and in general 'primitivity' and 'lack of culture.'" [PATAI, in Selzer, p. 58] (This, of course, probably also reflects racist Jewish views of Arab culture, by which the Sephardic were inevitably tainted). In former centuries, "in some countries and places Ashkenazim and Sephardim refused to intermarry. At one time in the eighteenth century the Sephardic Jews in the town of Bordeaux in France tried to persuade the Christian authorities to forbid Ashkenazic Jews to live there. Here was the unbelievable spectacle of one group of Jews urging the government to banish another group of Jews!" [GITTELSOHN, R., 1964, p. 32]
In the early years of the 20th century, German Jews ostracized Jews from Eastern Europe. For example, "[In a small midwestern town] a student rabbi," says Rabbi Roland Gittelsohn,
"there for the Holydays, was interested in discovering why the women of his Reform
congregation seemed to be antagonistic to Hadassah, the women's Zionist
organization. After questioning several women and receiving answers which he knew
were merely excuses, he finally found a young woman, new to the community,
who explained the situation honestly. 'Our women stay away from Hadassah,'
she said, 'because the present members of the organization are mostly Russian
and Polish Jews. Most of them are rather poor, and some of them haven't
completely lost their foreign accents. Because these women were the organizers
of Hadassah here, our women, who are mostly German Jews, wealthier and more
Americanized than they, rarely join Hadassah." 'GITTLELSOHN, R., 1964, p. 34]
Incredibly, intolerant ultra-Orthodox Jews of Israel are themselves guilty of what one Israeli newspaper called "Jewish antisemitism." While a graffiti-laden Jewish tombstone in, say, Bulgaria is international news, the following kind of story never gets beyond in-house Jewish ethnic news circles. As part of inter-religious conflicts between Orthodox and Reform/Conservative Judaism movements in Israel, the Cleveland Jewish News noted the following in 2000:
"The Israeli political and religious establishment condemned Saturday night's
arson at a Jerusalem Conservative synagogue, but something was missing from
their statements -- any hint that the fire might have been started by Jewish
extremists, or Jews at all ... Chief Rabbi Yisrael Meir Lau, who in the past
compared Reform Jewry (the term Israelis use for all non-Orthodox Jewry) to
Hezbollah terrorists, condemned the arson, but couldn't bring himself to use the
term 'synagogue.' Instead he called it a 'building specified for prayer by a stream,'
without specifying which religion the stream belonged to. In an editorial about
the arson titled 'Jewish antisemitism,' The Jerusalem Post said of Lau's remarks:
'This type of refusal to recognize other legitimate streams of Judaism creates an
atmosphere that may have led to the attack.' The fire, which got within a few yards
of the Torah ark, was the second arson in three weeks at the synagogue located in
Ramat, a sprawling, increasingly haredi (rigorously Orthodox) area of Jerusalem ...
While Jerusalem Mayor Ehud Olmert, who visited the synagogue two days after the
arson, declined to point a finger in any direction, a senior municipal offical said, 'Of
course this was done by Jews ... In the past, arson and attacks of vandalism against
Reform and Conservative synagogues have gone unpunished. No one has ever been
arrested for the 1997 burning of a Reform nurse school in Mevasseret Zion, a
suburb of Jerusalem, even though local Shah (Sepharid rigorously Orthodox)
Party supporters had threated the lives of Reform Jews in town only months
before. Likewise, no arrests were ever made in the 1997 attacks on the Har-El
(Reform) synagogue in Jerusalem, which included pouring acid on the synagogue
garden, smearing excrement on the front door, painting swastikas and religious
curses. The Eshel Avraham (Conservative) synagogue in Beer Sheva, which has
woman rabbi, Gila Dror, can 'expect to have its windows broken every couple of
weeks,' said Masorti (Israeli Conservative) movement spokesman Yonatan
Liebowitz. The above, of course, is only a partial list."
[DERFNER, L., 6-30-00, p. 10-]
"As for the political and religious establishment's refusal to accuse anybody of the crime -- even when the enemies of the Conservative and Reform are only too well-known," remarked Israeli rabbi David Rosen in response to these arsons and the fact that no one was ever charged with crimes for them, "This is an unfortunate reflection of the political intimidation carried out by the religious extremists." [DERFNER, L., 6-30-01, p. 10-]
In the early years of the 20th century, German Jews ostracized Jews from Eastern Europe. For example, "[In a small midwestern town] a student rabbi," says Rabbi Roland Gittelsohn,
"there for the Holydays, was interested in discovering why the women of his Reform
congregation seemed to be antagonistic to Hadassah, the women's Zionist
organization. After questioning several women and receiving answers which he knew
were merely excuses, he finally found a young woman, new to the community,
who explained the situation honestly. 'Our women stay away from Hadassah,'
she said, 'because the present members of the organization are mostly Russian
and Polish Jews. Most of them are rather poor, and some of them haven't
completely lost their foreign accents. Because these women were the organizers
of Hadassah here, our women, who are mostly German Jews, wealthier and more
Americanized than they, rarely join Hadassah." 'GITTLELSOHN, R., 1964, p. 34]
Incredibly, intolerant ultra-Orthodox Jews of Israel are themselves guilty of what one Israeli newspaper called "Jewish antisemitism." While a graffiti-laden Jewish tombstone in, say, Bulgaria is international news, the following kind of story never gets beyond in-house Jewish ethnic news circles. As part of inter-religious conflicts between Orthodox and Reform/Conservative Judaism movements in Israel, the Cleveland Jewish News noted the following in 2000:
"The Israeli political and religious establishment condemned Saturday night's
arson at a Jerusalem Conservative synagogue, but something was missing from
their statements -- any hint that the fire might have been started by Jewish
extremists, or Jews at all ... Chief Rabbi Yisrael Meir Lau, who in the past
compared Reform Jewry (the term Israelis use for all non-Orthodox Jewry) to
Hezbollah terrorists, condemned the arson, but couldn't bring himself to use the
term 'synagogue.' Instead he called it a 'building specified for prayer by a stream,'
without specifying which religion the stream belonged to. In an editorial about
the arson titled 'Jewish antisemitism,' The Jerusalem Post said of Lau's remarks:
'This type of refusal to recognize other legitimate streams of Judaism creates an
atmosphere that may have led to the attack.' The fire, which got within a few yards
of the Torah ark, was the second arson in three weeks at the synagogue located in
Ramat, a sprawling, increasingly haredi (rigorously Orthodox) area of Jerusalem ...
While Jerusalem Mayor Ehud Olmert, who visited the synagogue two days after the
arson, declined to point a finger in any direction, a senior municipal offical said, 'Of
course this was done by Jews ... In the past, arson and attacks of vandalism against
Reform and Conservative synagogues have gone unpunished. No one has ever been
arrested for the 1997 burning of a Reform nurse school in Mevasseret Zion, a
suburb of Jerusalem, even though local Shah (Sepharid rigorously Orthodox)
Party supporters had threated the lives of Reform Jews in town only months
before. Likewise, no arrests were ever made in the 1997 attacks on the Har-El
(Reform) synagogue in Jerusalem, which included pouring acid on the synagogue
garden, smearing excrement on the front door, painting swastikas and religious
curses. The Eshel Avraham (Conservative) synagogue in Beer Sheva, which has
woman rabbi, Gila Dror, can 'expect to have its windows broken every couple of
weeks,' said Masorti (Israeli Conservative) movement spokesman Yonatan
Liebowitz. The above, of course, is only a partial list."
[DERFNER, L., 6-30-00, p. 10-]
"As for the political and religious establishment's refusal to accuse anybody of the crime -- even when the enemies of the Conservative and Reform are only too well-known," remarked Israeli rabbi David Rosen in response to these arsons and the fact that no one was ever charged with crimes for them, "This is an unfortunate reflection of the political intimidation carried out by the religious extremists." [DERFNER, L., 6-30-01, p. 10-]
But let's return to the easier, less complicated target of the Gentile version of "anti-Semitism."
In the American literature world, more peculiar as a literary anti-Semitic source for Jewish outrage are E. L. Dachslager's selected examples from the work of T.S. Eliot. Dachslager writes:
In the American literature world, more peculiar as a literary anti-Semitic source for Jewish outrage are E. L. Dachslager's selected examples from the work of T.S. Eliot. Dachslager writes:
"Let us say, for example, we are teaching the poetry of T.S. Eliot
and discussing specifically "Gerontion" and "Burbank with a
Baedeker: Blestein with a cigar." What do we say about the
references to the "Jew" who "squats on the window sill" or to
Bleistein "with palms out / Chicago Semite Viennese?" Or to
Eliot's intention by such references and our reaction to them,
to Eliot's and to the poem?" [DACHSLAGER, p. 317]
These relatively innocuous lines are the most forceful that this Jewish scholar chooses from Eliot as evidence for endemic literary persecution of Jews?
Many Jews hold T. S. Eliot in special opprobrium. Norma Rosen argues that although anti-Semitic references in Eliot's voluminous work "are not many, they are prime." [ROSEN, p. 10] Among the most widely highlighted by Jewish critics are these three lines from an Eliot poem:
The rats are underneath the piles
The Jew is underneath the lot.
Money in furs ...
Let's put this into some perspective. A lot of Eliot's poetry was lamenting the materialist decadence and emptiness of modern society. Jews played -- and play -- their strong part in this. And unless the Thought Police are to seize complete control, artists have been generally afforded the latitude to criticize all and everything they so please; the best ones are expected to be controversial. Modern art, by its very nature, steps on toes. Even sacred ones. If not, shall all peasants, Poles, and non-Jews generally light their torches and assail the equally sinister stereotypical defamations of them in the distinctly Jewish Holies of literature? Take, for example, the great Jewish-Zionist poet Bialik, who wrote that "while Jacob [Jews] spends his time praising the Lord, Esau [Gentiles] spends his time drinking and beating his wife." [GONEN, p. 135] Or Isaac Bashevis Singer, who wrote, "The peasants are extremely sound sleepers but the devil does not permit their young women to rest but leads them down back paths to barns where the [Jewish] peddlers wait in the day." [SINGER, The Spinoza, p. 195]
Many American Jews charge Polish society with anti-Semitism. In 1980, their opinions were seemingly, to their eyes, confirmed when Isaac Bashevis Singer won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1980. Singer, born in Poland, moved later to the United States. The gripe was that he was not widely recognized, nor highly regarded, in his homeland and his works were difficult to find there. But, as a young Jew living in Poland told Jewish American author Laurence Weschler, Singer's work has nothing to do with Poland or the Polish people. It is completely Judeo-centric: "Singer didn't concern himself with the Poles. Read those stories, as I have -- I read them in English. Poles hardly appear in them and when they do they are portrayed as shadowy, alien figures. In a fundamental sense, Singer is not a Polish writer." [WESCHLER, p. 35]
In another of Singer's short stories, a non-Jewish doctor, Yaretzsky, seduces his deaf-mute maid, teaches obscenities to a parrot, and treats his female patients "outrageously ... Before they could say what was wrong, he made them disrobe." [SINGER,The Spinoza, p. 7] Do we let such recurrent slurs of violence and lechery against non-Jews pass in the name of Art, despite the fact that there is a recurring, institutionalized pattern of such defamation in Jewish literature?
Arnold Eisen observes the same themes of defamation against Gentiles among other Jewish authors:
"When the Jewish protagonist in [Saul] Bellow's The Victim accuses the
gentile protagonist of being a drunkard, and the latter responds that all
Jews see gentiles in this way, or when the honest Jew of Malamud's The
Victim is the victim of a sexually driven gentile who despite himself
cannot master his own cruel urges -- then, as Philip Roth has noted,
we confront head-on the imagery of the [Jewish] folk imagination. Here
one finds the rabbinic voice of the chosen people re-emergent. The
moral Jew must separate himself from the licentious ways of the
pagans, accepting responsibilities for the world (as in The Victim)
against gentiles, who would lay the blame on powers beyond our
control." [EISEN, p. 142]
Here too Eisen, as a Jewish scholar, frames for us his own (and his community's) typical double-standard: the Jewish anti-Gentile equivalent (at least) of stereotypical anti-Semitism is mildly described as the Jewish "folk imagination."
This "folk imagination" is poignantly demonstrated in yet another Singer (Bellow too is a Nobel Prize winner for literature) short story, where Gentiles are (per long-standing Jewish tradition) portrayed as generically/genetically violence prone:
"A Jew should have a beard," Haim replied. "You have to be
different from the Gentiles in some way."
"The way you have lived, you're a Gentile too," Genia said.
"As long as I have never beaten or killed anybody, I can call
myself a Jew." [SINGER, The Spinoza, p. 284]
Looking elsewhere, the New York Times called Michael Gold's 1930s-era fictionalized autobiography about life in the Jewish section of Manhattan, Jews Without Money, a "masterpiece." Here's how he treats the non-Jewish Other:
"My mother sighed with relief ... Christians did not seem like people
to her. They were abstractions. They were the great enemy, to be
hated, feared and cursed ... We children heard endless tales of the
pogroms. Joey Cohen, who was born in Russia, could himself
remember one. The Christians had hammered a nail into his uncle's
head, and killed him. When we passed a Christian church we were
careful to spit three times; otherwise bad luck was sure to befall us.
We were obsessed with wild stories about how the Christians loved
to kidnap Jewish children, to burn a cross on each cheek with a red-hot
poker. They also cut off children's ear, and made a kind of soup. Nigger
[a Jewish friend] had once seen Jewish ears for sale in the window of
of a Christian butcher shop.
'In the old days,' my mother said, 'the Christians hunted the Jews like
rabbits. They would gather thousands in a big marketplace, and stuff
pork down their throats with swords, and ask the Jews to be baptized.
The Jews refused, of course. So they were burned in great fires, and the
Christians laughed, danced and made merry when they saw the poor
Jews burning up like candles. Such are the Christians... I would spend
long daylight hours wondering why the Christians hated us so, and form
noble plans of how I would lead valiant Jewish armies when I grew up,
in defense of the Jews." [GOLD, M., p. 164-165]
In Jewish circles, of course, this kind of "folk imagination" is not considered absurdly exaggerated prejudicial stereotypes, nor nakedly stereotypical racism, stemming from their religiously-based victimology mythos, but history. In the late 1970s a Russian Jewish émigré to America, summarizing Jewish life in Russia, told the American Jewish Congress that "to understand the problem of the average Jew in Russia, you had to understand a rabbit surrounded by wolves, trying somehow to live with them in the same forest." [ROTHCHILD, 1985, p. 48] (Popular Jewish convention holds that the Soviet Union has long been a bastion of anti-Semitism and Russian Jewry a disadvantaged people. Reviewing 1989 Russian census data, and the profound representation of Jews in the upper occupational strata in that country, Jewish scholar Michal Paul Sacks conceded in 1998 that "the occupational data do not show discrimination against Jews in high-level positions." Indeed, Sacks' 1998 article about the subject even noted the Jews of Russia to be, occupationally, a "privileged" group.) [SACKS, M., 1998, p. 260]
And the fleeing "rabbit" motif is actually part of ancient Jewish folk/religious legend. "That rabbit is called the YaKNHaZ," notes David Gilner,
"That word is an acronym to remind Jews of the order of blessings in Passover
rituals. But in German it sounds like 'jag den Has' or 'Hunt the hare,'
and so it became a familiar image in Haggadahs to represent the persecution
of the Jews." [SULKES, S., 4-21-97]
Of course Eastern Europans, in the Jewish "collective memory," were/are rapists. Based upon the ages-old Jewish martyrological tradition, left-wing Jewish author Earl Shorris noted his racial hatred of Russians as he toured the country in the 1970s:
"We had no common ancestors [with Russians]. Tony [Shorris's son], I said
softly careful not to wake him, you will discover one day that you are not
descended from Russians but from Jews who happened to live in Russia.
And if you do have Russian blood, it entered the line when a Cossack fell on
a Jewish woman and raped her. It's either history or racial memory, but I know
it's true. This is not home. And where is home? On his mother's side Tony is
descended from Sheikh Sason ben Saleh, who is descended from Abraham
Sason, the Venetian mystic who claimed to be a direct descendant of Shephatiah,
the fifth son of King David. I laughed aloud at the thought of traveling with royalty,
and a Marxist-Leninist king at that!") [SHORRIS, E., 1982, p. 149]
And the fleeing "rabbit" motif is actually part of ancient Jewish folk/religious legend. "That rabbit is called the YaKNHaZ," notes David Gilner,
"That word is an acronym to remind Jews of the order of blessings in Passover
rituals. But in German it sounds like 'jag den Has' or 'Hunt the hare,'
and so it became a familiar image in Haggadahs to represent the persecution
of the Jews." [SULKES, S., 4-21-97]
"We had no common ancestors [with Russians]. Tony [Shorris's son], I said
softly careful not to wake him, you will discover one day that you are not
descended from Russians but from Jews who happened to live in Russia.
And if you do have Russian blood, it entered the line when a Cossack fell on
a Jewish woman and raped her. It's either history or racial memory, but I know
it's true. This is not home. And where is home? On his mother's side Tony is
descended from Sheikh Sason ben Saleh, who is descended from Abraham
Sason, the Venetian mystic who claimed to be a direct descendant of Shephatiah,
the fifth son of King David. I laughed aloud at the thought of traveling with royalty,
and a Marxist-Leninist king at that!") [SHORRIS, E., 1982, p. 149]
Howard Jacobson, in 1993, noted the "invidious" captions defaming non-Jews that he found beneath photographs at an exhibition at the University of Judaism in Los Angeles. The photographs and accompanying texts romanticized Jewish Eastern Europe, but, typically, as one caption proclaimed:
"The peasants around were so uneducated that you could not speak
with them about anything. Their interest was just vodka, only
alcohol to drink. But a Jewish peasant -- he was a wise man who knew
about life, without having a radio or a newspaper or any information,
nothing but his own thoughts and understanding." [JACOBSON, H.,
1995, p. 193-194]
"Sound like any Jew you know?" writes Jacobson, sarcastically,
"Sound like anyone you know? But even if there were such a paragon
of [Jewish] peasant wisdom, gleaning understanding from the closed
university of his own thoughts, is it necessary to rub the vodka-peasant's
nose in the disparity? Must the rest of humanity be humbled because a
Jew is bright? Hasn't a Carpatho-Ukrainian-gentile eyes? If you prick
him does he not bleed? What a mix and what a mess it is, this dreaming
nostalgic hotchpotch of misery and pride, arrogance and schmaltz.
Who can wonder that it leads at last to the moral confusion of being
proud of your misery, of being half in love with the cruelties that have
been visited on you." [JACOBSON, H., 1995, p. 194]
And what about celebrated Jewish Holocaust survivor Jerzy Kosinski, whose book "The Painted Bird" zoomed to fame in the 1960s? He has long since been exposed as fraud and chronic liar, committing suicide in 1991. The Painted Bird was understood by most readers and admirers as an autobiography of Kosinski's escape from Nazi-occupied Poland. It was commonly referred to as an "account," "confession," or "testimony." Fiction or not, the book was an indictment of Poland and the Polish people. As James Park Sloan notes:
"In stark, uninflected prose, 'The Painted Bird' describes the
disasters that befall a six-year old boy who is separated from
his parents and wanders through the primitive Polish-Soviet
borderlands during the war. The peasants whom the boy encounters
demonstrate an extraordinary predilection for incest, sodomy,
and meaningless violence. A miller plucks out the eyeballs of
his wife's would-be lover. A gang of toughs pushes the boy, a
presumed Gypsy or Jew, below the ice of a frozen pond. A
farmer forces him to hang by his hands from a rafter, just out
of reach of a vicious dog. In the culminating incident of the
book, the boy drops a missal while he's helping serve Mass and
is flung by angry parishioners into a pit of manure. Emerging
from the pit, he realizes that he has lost the power of speech."
[SLOAN, JP, 1994, p. 46]
The Painted Bird is merely a vicious caricature reflecting traditional Jewish folklore about the (omnipresently anti-Semitic) Other. It is as racistly "anti-Other" as any literature can possibly be. The Other is always a subhuman beast, meandering about in their animal instincts. (Kosinski, darling of the New York Jewish intelligentsia, was rewarded with a National Book Award for his next novel!) Early in the volume, The Painted Bird's lead character, hiding among Christian peasants (with their help!) from the Nazis, is self-described as being from an elite class -- he "spoke a language of the educated class, barely intelligible to the peasants of the east." [KOSINSKI, p. 2] All and every peasant the boy meets in the book is a caricature of bestiality and brutality while the innocent boy himself is even afraid of farm animals. [KOSINSKI, p. 4] Nonetheless, he first finds refuge with an old Gentile lady who "looks like a green-gray puffball," [p. 3] he watches brutal non-Jewish boys set squirrels on fire, [p. 6] he accidentally (?) burns the old lady's house down with her in it, [p. 10] and he passes one of the many Christian shrines in the area which is described as "a rotting crucifix." [p. 13] At the next village, the boy is attacked by a crowd, dragged by the hair, knocked unconscious, and carried home in a sack by a peasant to where "small children crawl out like cockroaches." The peasant turns to whip the boy so "I would hop like a frog." [p. 14-15]
The Jewish character is then purchased by a superstitious local folk healer (p. 16). The boy eventually ends up in a loft watching a miller below "lashing his naked wife with a horsewhip." When these two sit for dinner, the boy equates them with two copulating cats that mate near them as they eat. [p. 36] The miller soon gouges a young man's eyes out with a spoon [p. 37] Later the innocent Jewish child runs across a beastly, hyper-sexual woman called "Stupid Ludmilla:"
"It was said that Stupid Ludmilla lived with this huge dog as with a
man. Others predicted that someday she would give birth to children
whose bodies would be covered with canine hair [subtle reference to
the classical Gentile character, Esau, in Jewish tradition who was the
beastly hairy one?] and who would have lupine ears and four paws." [p.
47]
An "entire herd of drunken peasants" soon raped Ludmilla "until she lost consciousness." [p. 47] Another peasant, Lekh, delights in catching birds, painting them different colors, and releasing them so that they are pecked to death by their own kind. [p. 50] Sexually attracted to Ludmilla the beast-woman, two shepherds soon contribute their own savagery upon her, raping and beating her. Then comes peasant village women who "sat on her hands and legs and began beating her with rakes, tearing out her hair, spitting into her face ... One of the women now approached, holding a corked bottle of brownish-black manure. To the accompaniment of raucous laughter and loud encouragements from others, she kneeled between Ludmilla's legs and rammed the entire bottle inside her abused, assaulted slit, while she began to moan and howl like a beast." [p. 52-54]
The boy is soon beaten by a carpenter who "threw me down on a pile of manure. He delivered one more blow to my head and I fainted." [p. 62] The carpenter intends to drown the boy in a sack, but the man falls into a vat, devoured by rats. [p. 64] Then there is the barbaric blacksmith's wife who rolls lice into a medicinal dough with horse and human urine, as well as cat excrement. [p. 67-68] The boy is soon attacked and "lashed" by partisans, who cruelly murder dogs, horses, and cats. A peasant is stabbed in the back at a Christian wedding; and "in the dusk, village lads were grabbing girls and pushing them into the barn ... Drunks stumbled across the threshing yard, cursing to each other and vomiting, harassing the lovers and waking the snorers." [p. 87] Also, "while the adults usually left me alone, I had to watch out for the village boys. They were great hunters; I was their game." [p. 90]
Soon peasants are pulling the clothes off dead Jews [p. 102] and lusting over family photographs of young Jewish women found on dead bodies. [p. 105] A Jewish woman, found alive, is raped. During the rape, the offending peasant "appealed loudly to the Virgin Mary for help" to attain a satisfying violation. Then he beat his victim. [p. 106-107]
Yet another peasant, Garbos, regularly beats Kosinski's protagonist "for no reason." [p. 123] The boy is also tossed into a manure vat by angry churchgoers (where he listens to Christian organ music from the excrement, [p. 146] and is seduced by a farmer's daughter.) [p. 151-152] Kosinski eventually voices the recurrent Jewish revenge motif: "I myself hated many people. How many times had I dreamed of the time when I would be strong enough to return, to set their settlements on fire, poison their children and cattle, lure them into deadly swamps. In the sense I had already been recruited by the powers of Evil and made a pact with them. What I needed now was their assistance for spreading Evil." [p. 160]
This despicable defamation of the Polish people has been challenged in recent years to be complete fabrication, the product of Kosinski's sick mind. As early as 1982, an article in the Village Voice alleged that Kosinski needed help to write his own books and that some of his accounts of his past were contradictory. (Kosinski, widely beloved in the New York literary world, and rewarded for the vicious racism in The Painted Bird; he was twice the president of the writers' organization, PEN. He won the National Book Award for another novel in 1968. And, as biographer Sloan notes, this pervert's "celebrated nightly forays to Plato's Retreat and S&M clubs the New York piers helped make those establishments fashionable.") [SLOAN, 1991, p. 47] Edwin Diamond also notes the influential behind-the-scenes pro-Kosinski politics of the New York Times: "[C]ritics also trashed [Times chief editor A. M.] Rosenthal for his role in the Kosinski affair, a bizarre episode that roiled the New York literary-social-media world in the early 1980s ... Rosenthal and ["his chief deputy Arthur] Gelb [both Jewish] were both friends of Kosinski ... Barbar Gelb [Arthur's wife] wrote a glowing literary appreciation of Kosinski in the Times Magazine four months before the Village Voice attack appeared." Rosenthal also encouraged smears of the Village Voice article.) [DIAMOND, E, 1993, p. 178-180]
Sloan, in the course of writing his volume about Kosinski, even journeyed to the Jewish author's Polish hometown. There he found that Kosinski's stories about his life in Poland were completely fraudulent. And that Kosinski was a betrayer of the good people who had saved him from the Nazis. Local villagers who knew him were even united today in stating that, after the war, Kosinski's father had turned local people over to the Soviet secret police. The maniacal defamations in The Painted Bird, a major betrayal to Kosninski's real-life protectors, also hurt people. As Sloan notes about his interviews with those in the village,
"The Painted Bird ... came as a shock. 'We saved their lives,' [one
old peasant] said, brushing away tears with the back of his hand.
'And he turned us into monsters' ... Kosinski was never separated
from his parents for any significant period. The local peasants,
living in a culture suffused with anti-Semitism, were scarcely free of
its grip, but by all accounts these particular peasants did something
brave and good for the Kosinski family during the war. 'The Painted
Bird' is fiction. Kosinski borrowed the atrocities from other accounts,
or made them up." [SLOAN, 1991]
Sloan concludes his investigation thusly, echoing a theme that is extremely familiar:
"If the novelist trimmed his experiences to accord with a personal myth,
the narrative that resulted fell on receptive ears. Certainly it was a myth
that the world, demanding purity and innocence of its victims, was all
too ready to appropriate. Now all must profess to be shocked -- that
a practitioner of the liar's profession, a man who survived the war by
living a lie, told lies." [SLOAN, JP, 1991, p. 53]
Kosinski is not an anomaly in the Jewish world; his accounts of the beastly Gentile Other is rooted in the norms of the Jewish folk tradition. "Jewish belief in Catholic anti-Semitism," wrote Jewish author James Yaffe in 1968,
"has something irrational about it. Jews cling to it in spite of
evidence to the contrary ... Many Jews have an emotional reaction
against Catholics which goes deeper than logic. I. B. Singer writes
about the twinge of uneasiness he used to feel as a boy whenever he
passed a nun on the street. Few Jews are unfamiliar with this twinge.
And Bruce Jay Friedman, American-born and much younger than Singer,
says that the Catholic school across the street from him, when he was a
boy, seemed like 'the battlefield -- a scary mysterious place." Yet he
admits that he never got into fights with the Catholic boys -- in fact,
nothing ever actually happened." [YAFFE, J., 1968, p. 50]
In a similar vein, in one of Philip Roth's novels, the main Jewish character, Alexander Portnoy, fantasizes a conversation with his father about striking his mother, "Deck her, Jake. Surely that's what a goy would do, would he not?" [BRODKIN, p. 161] And what conclusions might we make about the bizarrely racist Jewish world view in the collection of legends about Baal Shem Tov, the revered 18th century founder of Hasidism? :
"I heard once that they put a turnip on Besht's [the holy man's]
table, but he refused to eat it. They asked him why, and he
said, 'This turnip grew in a gentile cemetery.' [BEN-AMOS, p. 197]
"When the Besht came to the inn they offered him an
upholstered bed. When the Besht came and saw the bed
he cried: 'Vey! There has been sexual intercourse with a
gentile woman on this bed. How is it possible for me to
sleep on it?" [BEN-AMOS, p. 223]
In a religious story about the Baal Shem Tov, by Menachem Gerlitz, the generic Gentile is, typically, rendered to be dull, stupid, robotic, barbaric, unfeeling, and a veritable animal -- in fact, even less than one.In a chapter actually entitled The Gentile Peasant, the Jewish hero -- the Baal Shem Tov as a young boy named Yisraelnyu -- watches with fascination as an old peasant, "uncombed, sloppy, only half awake," enters his barn yard. The boy is stunned when the old peasant drinks from a pail of water intended for his horse: "He slurped the water down noisily, his wild, long hair falling into the pail, the water dripping and slopping over the sides onto his clothing. He paid no attention, just continued to drink." The peasant then pulled out
"a hunk of old, moldy black bread" and "crammed it into his mouth ... The
farmer was absorbed only in his food and didn't even give a thought to thanking
the One Who had given him a mouth and food to eat [God] ... Even the fowl --
Yisraelnyu was thinking -- hopped about, cackling happily as if singing their thanks
to the Creator of the world ... Even the horse neighed happily ... Only the farmer,
queer creature, gave no thanks, made no bracha, said no prayer, did not even lift
up his eyes to the heavens. Yisraelnyu lowered his eyes. He was ashamed to speak
to this man. He turned around and went back into the forest where he loudly
exclaimed: "Baruch ata ... Blessed are you, Hashem [God] ... for not having made me a
goy."
Yisraelnyu thanked Hashem with his whole heart, understanding the meaning of
that blessing and being grateful for it for the first time in his life. Thank G-d
that he was not like that rough, coarse farmer who did not even know how to say
a word of thanks to Hashem, who was even worse than his own animals and
fowl!
The horse greeted the morning joyfully, so did the rooster. Even the birds in
the forest sang their thanks. The entire world offered praise and song while that
lowly farmer seemed to have been hitched up to a wagon. All he knew was how
to run.
That goy -- thought Yisraelnyu -- is his own slave, whose only reward is a pail
of water and a hard lump of bread. As this thought crossed his mind, he
suddenly remembered the next wonderful morning blessing: 'Baruch ata ...
Blessed are You, Hashem ... for not having made me a slave.'
A wonderful feeling enveloped his whole body. 'I am not a goy! I am not
a slave! Baruch Hashem!
Yisraelnyu felt like jumping and dancing, like running, to express his thanks
to Hashem, the Creator of the world, for all the kindness. He had shown him
by not making him a goy or a slave." [GERLITZ, M., 1983, p. 50-58]
In a religious story about the Baal Shem Tov, by Menachem Gerlitz, the generic Gentile is, typically, rendered to be dull, stupid, robotic, barbaric, unfeeling, and a veritable animal -- in fact, even less than one.
"a hunk of old, moldy black bread" and "crammed it into his mouth ... The
farmer was absorbed only in his food and didn't even give a thought to thanking
the One Who had given him a mouth and food to eat [God] ... Even the fowl --
Yisraelnyu was thinking -- hopped about, cackling happily as if singing their thanks
to the Creator of the world ... Even the horse neighed happily ... Only the farmer,
queer creature, gave no thanks, made no bracha, said no prayer, did not even lift
up his eyes to the heavens. Yisraelnyu lowered his eyes. He was ashamed to speak
to this man. He turned around and went back into the forest where he loudly
exclaimed: "Baruch ata ... Blessed are you, Hashem [God] ... for not having made me a
goy."
Yisraelnyu thanked Hashem with his whole heart, understanding the meaning of
that blessing and being grateful for it for the first time in his life. Thank G-d
that he was not like that rough, coarse farmer who did not even know how to say
a word of thanks to Hashem, who was even worse than his own animals and
fowl!
The horse greeted the morning joyfully, so did the rooster. Even the birds in
the forest sang their thanks. The entire world offered praise and song while that
lowly farmer seemed to have been hitched up to a wagon. All he knew was how
to run.
That goy -- thought Yisraelnyu -- is his own slave, whose only reward is a pail
of water and a hard lump of bread. As this thought crossed his mind, he
suddenly remembered the next wonderful morning blessing: 'Baruch ata ...
Blessed are You, Hashem ... for not having made me a slave.'
A wonderful feeling enveloped his whole body. 'I am not a goy! I am not
a slave! Baruch Hashem!
Yisraelnyu felt like jumping and dancing, like running, to express his thanks
to Hashem, the Creator of the world, for all the kindness. He had shown him
by not making him a goy or a slave." [GERLITZ, M., 1983, p. 50-58]
Traditional Jewish views of the hated Christian is also reflected in a story by Sholem Asch, one of the most famous Yiddish novelists. In a tale about Jewish martyrology in the face of attacking Cossacks, painted as Nazi-like exterminators, Asch also writes:
"Shlomele opened the church for the priest and ran away swiftly so
as to not touch the walls of the church. He stopped at a distance so
as not to become 'unclean' from hearing the singing in the church.
And when the priest's bass voice reached him none the less, he
covered his ears with his hands in order not to hear the sounds, which
would stupefy his mind against the study of the Torah." [ASCH, S.,
1959, p. 48]
"Many folk songs ... used to be sung in the shtetl [the Eastern European Jewish village]," notes James Yaffe,
"songs which declared that all the goyim are drunkards and lechers,
and thick-headed muzhiks. By implication, of course, this made the
Jews a finer breed; the element of contempt in the song was
accompanied by an element of self-congratulation ... Though the shtetl
is far behind American Jews, it's extraordinary how much of those old
folk songs are still part of their consciousness ... It will be objected that
the ... inhabitants of the shtetl were unsophisticated people with little
experience of the gentile world. I can only say that in the course of my
interviews [with fellow Jews], I found the same opinions held by people
with wide experience of the gentile world." [YAFFE, J., 1968, p. 66]
Here's one of famous Nazi-hunter Simon Wiesenthal's contributions to Jewish (folk) history:
"[Wiesenthal's] own father used to tell him how a [Ukrainian] village priest, who
loved his schnapps, but couldn't always pay for his drinks, left his church key as
security with a Jewish tavern-owner one Saturday night, promising to settle his
debt out of Sunday's collection. Next morning, when his Ukrainian parishioners
couldn't get in to attend mass, he told them: 'The dirty Jew at the pub has locked
you out. Go get the key from him!' They did -- by beating the Jewish pub-keeper
within an inch of his life, smashing or drinking everything in his tavern, celebrating
mass, and then extending the celebration with a little local pogrom, amen!"
[LEVY, A., 1993, p. 24]
Here's one of famous Nazi-hunter Simon Wiesenthal's contributions to Jewish (folk) history:
"[Wiesenthal's] own father used to tell him how a [Ukrainian] village priest, who
loved his schnapps, but couldn't always pay for his drinks, left his church key as
security with a Jewish tavern-owner one Saturday night, promising to settle his
debt out of Sunday's collection. Next morning, when his Ukrainian parishioners
couldn't get in to attend mass, he told them: 'The dirty Jew at the pub has locked
you out. Go get the key from him!' They did -- by beating the Jewish pub-keeper
within an inch of his life, smashing or drinking everything in his tavern, celebrating
mass, and then extending the celebration with a little local pogrom, amen!"
[LEVY, A., 1993, p. 24]
In Yiddish/Hebrew "folk tradition," Romanians are called "amolek" (an analogue to the despised Biblical "Ameleks"), the Irish called "beytzimer" (a pun on the word testes), the Germans the pejorative "deitshuk," the Italians "loksh" (noodle), the Moldevians "moldevan" ("a boor or lout, yokel"), and the Prussians "preissn" (cockroaches). Armenians were called "timkhe." "This Hebrew word in the Bible," noted Jewish scholar A. A. Roback, "with reference to Amalek, the hereditary foe of the Israelites, curiously enough, is employed by Jews in Galicia [Poland], as a nickname for the Armenians, whom, for some reason, they look upon as descendants of that eternally despised people." [ROBACK, p. 141] "Goy" (the categorical term for non-Jews), of course, means "an illiterate, coarse or lowbrow person." A "goyische kop," continues Roback, is a "Gentile head. A dunce, bonehead. It may be noted that the Gentiles referred to here were peasants, but the Jewish folk mind denies far-sighted, sensitive intelligence, understanding, and brilliance even to highly trained and distinguished non-Jews." [ROBACK, p. 139-140] (Traditional Jewish defamations of those of African descent will be discussed more extensively elsewhere).(Emanuel Levy notes the following about the family of famous Jewish Hollywood film director George Cukor: "Although the Cukors did not speak Yiddish, the common tongue of Eastern European Jews, later in his life he learned some phrases from his friends actors Paul Lukas and Fanny Brice. The vulgar and suggestive phrases in Yiddish intrigued him.") [LEVY, E., 1994, p. 22]
Here's a Jewish joke about their Italian neighbors (in Brooklyn, New York):
"Why do Italian men leave their fly open? To help them count to eleven."
[REIDER, J., 1985, p. 44]
Here's a Jewish joke about their Italian neighbors (in Brooklyn, New York):
"Why do Italian men leave their fly open? To help them count to eleven."
[REIDER, J., 1985, p. 44]
A joke from Jewish circles (published in 1981) celebrating Jewish intelligence, Gentile stupidity, and Jewish fraud, runs like this:
"On a train in czarist Russia, a Jew is eating a whitefish,
wrapped in paper. A Gentile, sitting across the aisle, begins to
taunt him with various anti-Semitic epithets. Finally, he asks the
Jew, 'What makes you Jews so smart?'
'All right,' replies the Jew, 'I guess I'll have to tell you. It's
because we eat the head of the whitefish.'
'Well, if that's the secret,' says the Gentile, 'then I can be as
smart as you are.'
'That's right,' says the Jew, 'And in fact, I happen to have an
extra whitefish head with me. You can have it for five kopecks.'
The Gentile pays for the fish head and begins to eat. An hour
later the train stops at a station for a few minutes. The Gentile
leaves the train and comes back. 'Listen, Jew,' he says, 'You sold
me that whitefish head for five kopecks. But I just saw a whole
whitefish at the market for three kopecks.'
'See,' replies the Jew, 'You're getting smarter already.'"
[NOVAK/WALDOKS, 1981, p. 91]
"Not surprisingly," note William Novak and Moshe Waldoks about the above joke, "anti-goyism is rarely stressed in public discussions of Judaism ... But centuries of hostility between Gentiles and Jews have led to a large body of aggressive and unpleasant feelings on both sides." [NOVAK/WALDOKS, p. 91] Another extremely disturbing joke circulated in Jewish circles (one directly paralleling the vicious "Too bad Hitler didn't get all the Jews" tone) is noted by Jewish authors Stanley Rothman and S. Robert Lichter, who cite the work of Jewish psychoanalyst Theodore Reik:
"Reik explains Jewish wit as a safety valve that transforms perceived hostility
toward non-Jews in a manner designed to reduce the danger of retaliation.
Sometimes, however, Jewish jokes (told, of course, among Jews only) reveal
the anger quite directly:
'Little Moritz sees an historical film showing the early persecutions
of the Christians. During a Roman circus scene in which many
Christians are thrown to the lions, Moritz breaks out in sobs and
says to his mother: 'Look at that poor lion there, it has not got
any Goy to eat!' Under the guise of duty for the neglected beast
is an old hatred and repressed cruelty towards Gentiles. It breaks
through here, surprisingly, and reaches the emotional surface.'"
[ROTHMAN/LICHTER, 1982, p. 122]
"Reik explains Jewish wit as a safety valve that transforms perceived hostility
toward non-Jews in a manner designed to reduce the danger of retaliation.
Sometimes, however, Jewish jokes (told, of course, among Jews only) reveal
the anger quite directly:
'Little Moritz sees an historical film showing the early persecutions
of the Christians. During a Roman circus scene in which many
Christians are thrown to the lions, Moritz breaks out in sobs and
says to his mother: 'Look at that poor lion there, it has not got
any Goy to eat!' Under the guise of duty for the neglected beast
is an old hatred and repressed cruelty towards Gentiles. It breaks
through here, surprisingly, and reaches the emotional surface.'"
[ROTHMAN/LICHTER, 1982, p. 122]
While such Jewish defamations of the non-Jew, as part of the Jewish world view, identity, and folk history, are never foregrounded for popular analysis and discussion, Jewish attacks upon Gentile writings about Jews is omnipresent. Another Jewish attacker of T.S. Eliot, Anthony Julius, has recently published an entire volume assailing the non-Jewish author: T.S. Eliot, Anti-Semitism, and Literary Form. Among the most hated Eliot lines, again, by Jews, are from the pre-World War I poem, "Gerontion":
My house is a decayed house
And the jew squats on the window
sill, the owner
Spawned in some estaminet of Antwerp
Blistered in Brussels, patched and
peeled in London.
"[This] passage," declares Julius, "breathes hate ... The words (squat, sill, spawned, estaminet, blistered, etc.) intimate is 'spit' ... spitting at the Jew in this opening stanza is one of the few moments of passion in a poem that is animated by despair and exasperation ... " [RUBENSTEIN, A., p. 332]
For Julius, Eliot's image of a Jew who "squats at the window" is not only an image of being spit at, but also equated in Julius' mind with defecation. "'Going to write to the Jews,'" explains Julius, "was slang in France for announcing a trip to the lavatory." [KATZ, D. p. 11] Elsewhere, says the Jewish critic, Eliot evinced "indifference to Jewish pain" and edited a journal that had an unsigned review of a book about claims about the murder of Jews in Dachau. Among other things, the questionable review wondered why Jews, "among all unfortunates of the world, have a first claim on our compassion and help." "Here," says reviewer David Katz (himself Jewish), "Julius makes his most serious charge, suggesting that Eliot promoted the Holocaust by disputing the claims made by the victims." [KATZ, D, p. 11]
Ultimately, notes Katz, "Eliot's is a talent Julius cannot fully grasp outside of anti-Semitism. Julius has little patience for our appreciation of the supple ways of Modernism, linking its conscious fragmentation to an irrationality that courts anti-Semitism ... He finds Browning's 'Rabbi Ben Ezra' a superior poetic monologue to [Eliot's] 'Gerontion' solely because the former evinces a more favorable attitude toward Jews." [KATZ, D, p. 11]
Another of the recent articles defaming Eliot, by Norma Rosen, reflects the same dictatorial idea, i.e., whoever criticizes Jews is by definition an anti-Semite and, hence, by this sole criteria, a bad artist. "It falls to those," says Rosen, "who are willing to risk it (not only Jews, one hopes) to protest to the world that a writer cannot be great so long as anti-Semitism mars the work." [ROSEN, p. 14] (This kind of censorship -- if the author has ever in his/her life criticized Jews, all artwork from, or regarding, the artist is deemed qualitatively marred -- was echoed in 2002 at the Academy Awards. Jewish online journalist Matt Drudge featured a report about a film nominated for a number of Oscars. The movie, A Beautiful Mind, is based upon the life of mathematical genius John Nash, who, according to the book upon which the film is based, was extremely critical of Jews. "The root of all evil, as far as my personal life is concerned (life history) are Jews," Nash is quoted as writing. The prospect of an Oscar for the film now seemed doomed. "Three Academy members have come forward to reveal how they've switched their votes," reported Drudge. "Why am I voting for this Jew hater?' a veteran Acadmy Award member said earlier this week before voting. 'I am a Jew! I fell sick to my stomach.") [DRUDGE, 3-5-02; DRUDGE 3-9-02]
Jewish fanaticism in defaming non-Jewish literary traditions in a fine-toothed combing for anti-Semitism is noted by H. M. Daleski in his review of S. S. Prawer's volume about (non-Jewish) British author William Thackeray:
"In Israel at Vanity Fair, S. S. Prawer deals exhaustively -- and
exhaustingly -- with the representation of Jews in Thackeray's writings.
This includes all the writings, not only the author's many published
books but also his manifold work as a journalist and his private letters.
In addition, since Thackeray was a considerable illustrator and
illustrated many of his own writings -- not to mention the sketches that
he included in many of his letters -- Prawer provides numerous
reproductions of his drawings of Jews ... [Prawer] quotes copiously
and leaves us feeling reasonably certain that there is no mention of a
Jew or an allusion to anything Jewish, no matter how recondite, that has
escaped his capacious net ... The amount of material accumulated is so
overwhelming that one might be led to suppose that Thackeray was
obsessed with Jews; in fact most of the references, especially in the
novels, are incidental, and when one comes across them in context,
they do not draw quite the same attention to themselves." [DALESKI,
p. 223-224]
How about the great Russian novelist, Doestoevsky (of Crime and Punishment fame)? A French Jew, David Goldstein, denounced him as an anti-Semite in a book called Doestoevsky and the Jews. American Jewish scholar Gary Morson also expressed concern, saying that "it disturbed me that almost no one talked about [Doestoevsky's] anti-Semitism." Yet Morson also criticized Goldstein, saying,
"I was struck by how Goldstein handled the fact that earlier in his life
Doestoevsky wrote in defense of the Jews. For me, such a turn of
events raised the question of what made Doestoevsky change his mind,
but for Goldstein, who began with the assumption that anti-Semitism is
innate and that Doestoevsky was an anti-Semite 'a-priori,' the articles on
behalf of Jews were dismissed as hypocritical, a devious attempt to
appeal to liberals. Goldstein's model of anti-Semitism as a sort of
congenital disease ... itself seemed perilously close to prejudice."
[MORSON, p. 82]
More recently, Russian novelist and famous Soviet prisoner and refugee (to America) from communism, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, also is branded by some as an anti-Semite. Under particular scrutiny is Solzhenitsyn's Red Wheels, a novel based on historical fact, that described a Jewish assassin and financial sponsor of V.I. Lenin in less than flattering terms. "The facts are true," says Israeli scholar Abram Ben Yakov, in reviewing the book, " but the glue between them is anti-Semitic." [i.e., descriptions of the characters] [SINGER, N., p. 2] Solzhenitsyn had come under Jewish investigation for "anti-Semitism" as early as 1972, when the Zionist journal, Midstream, published an article by Mark Perakh. Perakh, said the New York Times, felt that "a disproportionately large number of unattractive Jews appear in his work." Among those defending Solzhenitsyn against attack was his wife, Natalia, who is half-Jewish. [GRENIER, R., 11-13-85, p. C21]
French playwright and novelist Jean Genet? "Whether or not Genet is an anti-Semite," says Edith Wyschogrod, "... comes to the fore in the content of the Arab-Israeli conflict in [his] Prisoner of Love. In teaching Genet, it will not do simply to cordon off bigotry and condemn it; rather, one must show how it seeps into his aesthetic." [Wyschogrod, p. 256]
The work of German philosopher Martin Heidegger is also dismissed by many Jews as, ultimately, the expressions of a closet Nazi. "Jewish philosophy," says Robert Gibbs, "... disavows Heidegger, seeing him a Nazi, even if a somewhat idiosyncratic one. It suspects that his philosophy was comfortable to Nazism, if not actually inclined to it." [GIBBS, p. 157] The Jewish philosopher Wittgenstein? There are some who think he too had an "anti-Semitic" streak. [SZABADOS, B., 3-99, p. 1-27]
In 2002, lobbyists succeeded in banning the Muslim holy book, the Koran (Quran), from the Los Angeles school system. As the Los Angeles Times reported:
"Los Angeles city school officials have pulled nearly 300 translations of the
Koran from school libraries after learning that commentary in the books was
derogatory towards Jews. Copies of 'The Meaning of the Holy Quran' were
donated in December to the Los Angeles Unified School District by a local
Muslim foundation ... On Monday, [Jim] Konantz [director of information
technology for the district] received a complaint from a history teacher who
concluded some of the book's footnotes were anti-Semitic."
[SMITH, D., 2-7-02]
In 2002, lobbyists succeeded in banning the Muslim holy book, the Koran (Quran), from the Los Angeles school system. As the Los Angeles Times reported:
"Los Angeles city school officials have pulled nearly 300 translations of the
Koran from school libraries after learning that commentary in the books was
derogatory towards Jews. Copies of 'The Meaning of the Holy Quran' were
donated in December to the Los Angeles Unified School District by a local
Muslim foundation ... On Monday, [Jim] Konantz [director of information
technology for the district] received a complaint from a history teacher who
concluded some of the book's footnotes were anti-Semitic."
[SMITH, D., 2-7-02]
With the modern world so hypersensitive to Jewish themes, in 1999, an eighth grader in Pennsylvania was even suspended from school for a week for turning in a fantasy paper about another planet entitled "Jewpiter," described by teachers as a "racist essay." The student denied that the paper was intended to be anti-Semitic and his outraged family launched a lawsuit against the school. [DUFFY, 4-27-99] In January 2000, a high school basketball coach at Seminole Presbyterian High School was fined $150 by the Florida High School Activities Association for violating a rule against the "use of profanity or other such gutter language by a coach." Coach Jan Bennett's reputed offense to officials was to say, "You can't line people up like Hitler did to the Jews during the Holocaust." [PURKS, S., 1-27-2000, p. 10C]
How about the world of visual art? Jewish art historian Eunice Lipton, in reviewing Degas' painting entitled "At the Stock Exchange," says
"If this picture doesn't equate secretive, clever, and vulgar financial
scheming with 'Jew,' I've never seen a picture that does." [LIPTON, p.
289]
Even a Jewish author in England, Chaim Bermant, was taken aback by a fellow Jew's search for anti-Semitism in some paintings by John Singer Sergeant, saying,
"Kathleen Adler, for example, in an essay on John Singer Sergeant,
would have us believe that he was an anti-Semite because of his
portraits of a Jewish art dealer, Asher Wertheimer, and family were less
than flattering: Wertheimer is represented as looking slightly off to
the side, in a manner which hints at furtiveness. This portrait could be
and, indeed, often was, regarded as the very image of the stereotype
of the rich Jew, excessively flashy and, since art dealing was viewed
only slightly above money-lending, probably of somewhat dubious
honesty. She points to the cigar in his hand and believes that it
'indicates not only wealth but also vulgarity and sexuality,' and has
similar misgivings about the portraits of his wife and daughters. The
fact that they were a true likeness seems to be an irrelevance."
[BERMANT, p. 7]
In 2001, Jewish lobbying groups expressed outrage that Swedish cartoonist Lars Hillersberg had received a governmental lifetime stipend. Nominated for the honor by the Swedish National Board of Artists, Hillersberg was declared by "Jewish community leaders" to be an anti-Semite. "I hate Jews," Hillersberg had once remarked, "but not only Jews -- I hate everybody."[JEWISH CHRONICLE, 2-16-01, p. 7]
Classical music? Wagner is a given. How about Johann Sebastian Bach, particularly his masterpiece St. John Passion. As the Philadelphia Inquirer Magazine noted in 2001:
The idea that [Bach] and his St. John Passion may be anti-Judaic (against the
religion, as opposed to the race) surfaced five years ago at Swarthmore
College, and now seems clearly verified five years later by the academic
community, as spelled out in a Temple University Jewish Studies-sponsored
panel ... Even if the piece is only momentarily offensive -- the general
opinion, and one with which I agree -- some in the financially fragile
early-music world may not want to present it, for fear of protests
already seen in some cities." [STEARNS, D., 2-27-01]
The witch hunt bandwagon to find anti-Semites, and the search to smear the dead, are so great that in 2000 a Chicago-based librarian sent the following query to a Jewish-led discussion about anti-Semitism on the Internet:
"I am a reference librarian at a public library. My patron is an artist and
amateur researcher who has been studying the work of French artist
Marcel Duchamp. She believes she's discovered anti-Semitic references
and images in his work, and she wants to know if anyone else has ever
commented on this. Is there any evidence indicating that Duchamp was
anti-Semitic or a Nazi sympathizer? I've looked through our holdings on
Duchamp and checked a few article databases to no avail." [SLOANE, P.,
10-27-00]
Alas, none of the scholars on the subject could help her (yet).
In 2001, Jewish lobbying groups expressed outrage that Swedish cartoonist Lars Hillersberg had received a governmental lifetime stipend. Nominated for the honor by the Swedish National Board of Artists, Hillersberg was declared by "Jewish community leaders" to be an anti-Semite. "I hate Jews," Hillersberg had once remarked, "but not only Jews -- I hate everybody."
Classical music? Wagner is a given. How about Johann Sebastian Bach, particularly his masterpiece St. John Passion. As the Philadelphia Inquirer Magazine noted in 2001:
The idea that [Bach] and his St. John Passion may be anti-Judaic (against the
religion, as opposed to the race) surfaced five years ago at Swarthmore
College, and now seems clearly verified five years later by the academic
community, as spelled out in a Temple University Jewish Studies-sponsored
panel ... Even if the piece is only momentarily offensive -- the general
opinion, and one with which I agree -- some in the financially fragile
early-music world may not want to present it, for fear of protests
already seen in some cities." [STEARNS, D., 2-27-01]
The witch hunt bandwagon to find anti-Semites, and the search to smear the dead, are so great that in 2000 a Chicago-based librarian sent the following query to a Jewish-led discussion about anti-Semitism on the Internet:
"I am a reference librarian at a public library. My patron is an artist and
amateur researcher who has been studying the work of French artist
Marcel Duchamp. She believes she's discovered anti-Semitic references
and images in his work, and she wants to know if anyone else has ever
commented on this. Is there any evidence indicating that Duchamp was
anti-Semitic or a Nazi sympathizer? I've looked through our holdings on
Duchamp and checked a few article databases to no avail." [SLOANE, P.,
10-27-00]
Alas, none of the scholars on the subject could help her (yet).
"The dilemma of appreciating the art of an anti-Semite," says Bernard Raskas, "is a matter that confronts every thinking Jew. Chopin, Degas, Kant, Rodin, Joseph Campbell, Ronald Dahl, etc., displayed forms of anti-Semitism." [RASKAS, p. 6] And what of Jewish betrayers and works of art that celebrate Christian themes? "Should we play and listen to the works of Mendelsohn and Mahler, both of whom converted to Christianity? Should we conduct and play Handel's [Christian] Messiah? Should Shakespeare not be read because Shylock has entered the English vocabulary as an anti-Semitic word? Should Israelis stop using [German-made] Mercedes cars as taxis and American Jews refrain from driving Volkswagens? Ambiguities abound." [RASKAS, p. 11]
Ultimately, if aforementioned Jewish critics like E. L. Dachslager really want to censor all literature that criticizes Jewry, and others like Rosen want to at least demote them from greatness to unread obscurity, entire libraries will have to be burned down and/or trucked to inaccessible warehouses. Not only literature but American and world history will have to be totally reshaped (as is happening) to accommodate an image entirely flattering to Jews. The problem is that some of the greatest and most respected authors in American (let alone worldwide) writing, associated with the best of the American democratic tradition and progressive values, as well as some of the foremost political strugglers for American liberty, published sometimes bitter condemnations about the facts of self-absorbed Jewish particularism and behavior.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, for example, the great American essayist of self-reliance, transcendence of the material world, and the sacredness of individual expression and self-reliance (all anathema to traditional Jewish materialist collectivism) wrote that
"the sufferance which is the badge of the Jew has made him, in these
days, the ruler of the rulers of the earth." [EMERSON, p. 39]As Jewish scholar Robert Michael complains,"[Emerson] saw Judaism, the Jewish idea, as a stumbling block to authentic human liberation. The Jewish God was cruel; the Jewish Law stifling. What was bad about Christianity was its Jewish substance. At the less ideological level, his work is also peppered with anti-Jewish sentiments ... In his journal entry for 3 July 1839, he wrote: In the Allston Gallery the Polish Jews are an offense to me; they degrade and animalize." [MICHAEL, R., 9-7-98]
The great British poet, Lord Byron, wrote "Tis gold, not steel, that rears the conqueror's arch ... Jews ... direct the world with all the spirit of their sect." [FELDMAN, p. 638]
Mark Twain, whose novel Huckleberry Finn is usually regarded as a pioneering classic of interracial compassion, was solicited by the American Hebrew magazine in 1890 for his views on anti-Semitism. Twain wrote a short reply, for the most part expounding the requisite platitudes for the Jewish journal. [TWAIN, FABLES, p. 445-448] Twain elaborated more openly upon the antisemitic theme nine years later in Harper's magazine:
"In the cotton states, after the [Civil] war, the simple and ignorant Negroes
made the crops for the white planter on shares. The Jew came down in
force, set up shop on the plantation, supplied all the Negroes on credit,
and at the end of the season was proprietor of the Negro’s share of the
present crop and of part of his share of the next one ... The Jew is being
legislated out of Russia. The reason is not concealed. The movement
was instituted because the Christian peasant and villager stood no chance
against his commercial abilities. He was always ready to lend money on
a crop, and sell vodka and other necessities of life on credit while the
crop was growing. When settlement day came he owned the crop; the
next year or year after he owned the farm ...."
"In the dull and ignorant England of John's time everybody got into debt
to the Jew. He gathered all lucrative enterprise into his hands; He was the
king of commerce; he was ready to be helpful in a profitable way; he
even financed the crusades for the rescue of [Christianity's Holy]
sepulcher [from the Muslims of Jerusalem] . . ... He had to be banished
from the realm... For the like reasons, Spain had to banish him four
hundred years ago, and Austria about a couple of centuries later. In all
ages Christian Europe has been obliged to curtail his activities. If he
entered upon a mechanical trade, the Christian had to retire from it. If
he set up as a doctor, he was the best one, and he took the business. If
he exploited agriculture, the other farmer had to get at something else.
Since there was no way to successfully compete with him in any
vocation, the law had to step in to save the Christian from the
poorhouse, even ways to get rich. This history has a very, very
commercial look, a most sordid and practical commercial look ... I
am convinced that the persecution of the Jew is due not in any large
degree to religious practice. No, the Jew is a money-getter ... With
precocious wisdom [the Jew] found out in the moving of time
that some men worship rank, some worship heroes, some worship
power, some worship God, and that over these ideals, they dispute
and cannot unite -- but they all worship money; so [the Jew] made
it the end and aim of his life to get it. He was at it in Egypt thirty six
centuries ago; he was at it in Rome when the Christian got persecuted
by mistake for him; he has been at it ever since. The cost to him has
been heavy; his success has made the whole human race his enemy."
[TWAIN, Conc. p. 360-363]
Curiously, a Jewish scholar bends the essay from which this excerpt comes, Concerning the Jews, to his own needs for Jewish confirmation. He sees in Twain's piece "remarkable praise for Jewish characteristics and virtue while at the same time striving for balance ... What is really noteworthy about Concerning the Jews ... is its effect to make judgments based upon reliable facts rather than perceived myths." [SARNA, p. 69]
In the mood of the Jewish martyr-hero tradition enforced upon modern America, in 1998 the Baltimore Sun decided that its readers would be interested not only in Twain's 1898 article, but specifically an examination of whether it was anti-Semitic or not. Kenneth Lasson quotes this excerpt from Twain to conclude his own piece: "All other forces pass, but the Jews remain. What is the secret of their immortality?" [LASSON, p. 18]
H.G. Wells, the great British novelist and social critic, commented that
"A careful study of anti-Semitism prejudice and accusations might
be of great value to many Jews who do not realize the irritation they
inflict."
The novelist D. H. Lawrence wrote:
"Why humanity has hated the Jews, I have come to the conclusion, is
that the Jews have always taken religion -- since the great days, that is
-- and used it for their own personal and private gratification, as if it
were a thing administered to their own importance and well-being and
conceit ... The material world dominates them with a base kind of
fetish domination. Yet they know the truth all the while. Yet they
cringe their buttocks to the fetish of Mammon [money] ...."
[GOULD, p. 225]
Novelist Theodore Dreiser:
"He [the Jew] has been in America all of two hundred years, and he
has not faded into a pure America by any means, and he will not.
As I said before, he maintains his religious dogmas and his racial
sympathies, race characteristics, and race cohesion as against all
types of nationalities surrounding him whatsoever." [GOULD, p. 298]
George Sand, the French author who skirted gender prejudice by having a male pseudonym, noted that
"I saw in the 'Wandering Jew' the personification of the Jewish people,
exiled in the Middle Ages. Nevertheless, they are once again extremely
rich, owing to their unfailing rude greediness and their indefatigable
activity. With their hard-heartedness that they extend towards people of
other faiths and races, they are at the point of making themselves kings
of the world. This people can thank its obstinacy that France will be
Judaized within fifty years. Already some wise Jews prophesy this
frankly." [1857]
James Fenimore Cooper? "His 1831 novel The Bravo: A Tale depicts Jews as usurers whose shrewdness has enabled them to survive under oppression, but he hardly makes them likeable or sympathetic characters." Other passages critical of Jews, and subject to "anti-Semitic" investigation by Jewish researchers, may be found in the work of the "phenomenally popular Mrs. E. D.E.N. Southworth" (1959) and Julia Ward Howe, mid-19th century the activist reformer. Francis M. Crawford, "one of the most successful novelists of the late nineteenth century," also describes Jewish characters in unflattering terms and merits listing in a book about anti-Semitism. [DOBKOWSKI, M., 1979, p. 82-83, 88-89]
James Fenimore Cooper
In 1932, in response to a request by the American Hebrew and Jewish Tribune for sympathetic commentary about Jews on the occasion of their new year, the Irish writer George Bernard Shaw lashed out, saying
"The Jews are worse than my own people... Those Jews who still want
to be the chosen race -- chosen by the late Lord Balfour -- can go to
Palestine and stew in their own juice. The rest had better stop being
Jews and start being human beings. The day of races and nations are
over. The future belongs to the citizens of the world who know
they are not better than other people." [SHAW, B., 1932]
After the death of the eminent folklorist Joseph Campbell in 1987 (widely popularized in a series of interviews with Bill Moyer for PBS TV) "at least five people" came out on record to assail him as an anti-Semite. A former Jewish student, Eve Feldman, for example, claimed that in a meeting with her in 1968 Campbell "was sweating and pacing and running his fingers through his hair. He began spewing out this garbage, about how the college was going Jewish ... He said that the Jews had ruined 20th century culture and went through a list of Jewish artists ... It was horrifying. It was like watching someone have a fit or having them vomit uncontrollably all over you." [GOULD, p. 357]
The great Indian pacifist, Mahatma Gandhi (1869-1948) said in 1938
The cry for a national home for the Jews does not make much appeal
to me ...Why should they not, like other people of the earth, make that
country their home where they are born and where they earn their
livelihood? ... The Palestine of Biblical conception is not a geographical
tract. It is in their hearts ... As it is, they are co-sharers with the British
in despoiling a people who have done no wrong to them. [GOULD, p.
397] (Indian leader Nehru and Chinese communist hero Mao Tse Tung
also criticized the Jewish state). [MARX, K. /RUNES, 1959, p. viii]
Even some of the most celebrated heroes of American patriotism were critical -- even caustic -- about Jews, their clannish lifestyle, and their exploitive economic practices in America. No less a patriotic political figure than the first President of the United States, George Washington, singled out Jews for contempt when they, in their speculations in American currency, undermined the fragile early economy. In one account, Washington referred to the traditionally known "tribe" of Israel, dressed in the their uniformly black Orthodox clothing, as the "tribe of black gentry." In a second criticism, he made reference to their traditional hanging of an effigy of Haman (an arch enemy of the Jews in ancient Persia), a yearly tradition everywhere for Jews at Purim.
"The tribe of black gentry work more effectually against us than the
enemy’s' arms. They are a hundred times more dangerous to our liberties
and the great cause we are engaged in." (1779)
"It is much to be lamented, that each State, long ere this, has not
hunted them down, as pests to society, and the greatest enemies we have
to the happiness of America. I would to God, that some of the most
atrocious in each state, was hung upon a gallows, five times as high
as the one prepared by Haman. No punishment, in my opinion, is too
great for the man who can build his greatness upon his country's ruin."
(1778) [SCHROEDER, p. 125-126]
It is astonishing that Jews, as an entity, were so noticeable for such criticism when at this time in early American history they numbered only 2500-3000 people, about one-tenth of one per cent of the population. [DANZGER, p. 19] Washington, in later years, formally passed along the expected political expediencies to the American Jewish community; some of those texts are still cited by Jewish scholars to this day as evidence that Washington appreciated Jewish contributions to early America. (A 1790 letter Washington wrote to the Jews of Rhode Island is "still studied today in Jewish religious schools as a sort of founding charter of American Jewish freedom.") [GOLDBERG, p. 83]
Washington's exasperations with Jews as unscrupulous profiteers, detrimental to national interests, was similarly echoed by General Ulysses S. Grant (another future President) during the Civil War. Frustrated and enraged by incessant Jewish black market economic activity in the South, particularly in cotton, Grant tried to expel Jews as a group from Tennessee in 1862, stating that "Jews as a class violate every regulation of trade established in the Treasury Department, and also department orders." [WERTHEIMER] This attempt by Grant, to single out Jews as an entity, during the pressures of the Civil War, is today considered by Jewish scholars to be one of the most profound acts of anti-Semitism in American history. Others who made similar charges about Jews were well-known Union army generals William T. Sherman and Benjamin Butler, as well as Senator Henry Wilson of Massachusetts. As Jewish author Michael Dobkowksi frames it:
"It was alleged by Senator Henry Wilson of Massachusets and Generals
Benjamin Butler, William T. Sherman, and Ulysses S. Grant, as well as
others, that Jews were engaged in passing counterfeit money; that they
fed the inflation by charging outrageous prices; that they were driving
well-established Christian firms out of business by using unfair competitive
methods and generally were parasites who thrived on the misery of
others." [DOBKOWSKI, M., 1979, p. 83]
"It was alleged by Senator Henry Wilson of Massachusets and Generals
Benjamin Butler, William T. Sherman, and Ulysses S. Grant, as well as
others, that Jews were engaged in passing counterfeit money; that they
fed the inflation by charging outrageous prices; that they were driving
well-established Christian firms out of business by using unfair competitive
methods and generally were parasites who thrived on the misery of
others." [DOBKOWSKI, M., 1979, p. 83]
As we have more than amply seen already, an exploitive Jewish history during war conditions is not uncommon. Another testament, in the aftermath of the Nazi invasion of Poland, is that of Chaim Kaplan who noted the reputation of immigrant Jews in the Soviet-Polish border areas: "The bad behavior of some of our people in the border towns which were annexed to Russia has made us all hated and unwanted ... Until the storm [war conditions] should subside, they occupied themselves with all kinds of ugly speculation, which has since become their livelihood and life's work. The émigrés created an atmosphere of profiteering." [KAPLAN, C., p. 90]
Another historical icon of American democracy, Thomas Jefferson, in a private letter, cited the works of others as his own opinion about Jewish ethics:
"Ethics were so little studied among the Jews, that, in their whole
compilation called the Talmud, there is only one treatise on moral
subjects. Their books of morals chiefly consisted in a minute
enumeration of duties ... What a wretched depravity of sentiment
and manners must have prevailed before such corrupt maxims could
have attained credit. It is impossible to collect from these writings a
consistent series of moral Doctrine." [CAPPON, p. 383]
"Moses," said Jefferson elsewhere, ".... instilled into his people the most anti-social spirit towards other nations; the other [Jesus/the Christian] preaches philanthropy and universal charity and benevolence." [GOULD, p. 75]
John Quincy Adams, another early American president, visited a synagogue in Amsterdam and bitterly remarked in his diary:
"I am sure [the Jews in Amsterdam] are all wretched creatures for I think
I never saw in my life such a set of miserable looking people, and they
would steal your eyes out of your head if they could." [ADAMS, p. 59]
Commenting on Jewish religious identity, Thomas Paine (1737-1789), author of the famous American patriotic pamphlet Common Sense, wrote that
"The character of Moses as stated in the Bible is the most horrid that
can be imagined. If those accounts are true, he was the wretch that first
began and carried on wars on the score or on the pretense of religion;
and under the mask, or the infatuation, committed the most unexampled
atrocities that are to be found in the history of any nation." [GOULD, p.
76]
Henry Feingold suggest that Jewish dual allegiance (to both Jewish and American identities) can be "especially vexing for the Jewish-conscious historians" who are especially numerous these days. Feingold cites traditional American folk heroes like Henry Ford, Charles Lindbergh, and Ulysses S. Grant as being first and foremost, to Jewish scholars, anti-Semites, as is rendered the entire American Populist movement at the turn of the twentieth century. [FEINGOLD, p. 36-37] Famed World War II General George S. Patton? Rabbi Marvin Hier's Holocaust documentary, The Long Way Home, says the Baltimore Jewish Times, "revealed that U.S. Army Gen. George S. Patton believed Holocaust survivors should be interned in Displaced Person camps. 'People did not know that Patton wrote in his diary that Jews are the lowest of the low and have to be kept behind barbed wire,' [Hier] said.'" [HIRSCH, R., 4-24-98, p. 38]
Throw Thomas Edison into the list. Although author Neil Baldwin's "editor thought Baldwin dwelled on Edison's relationship with Jews too much" in his book about the great American inventor, all of the Jewish-related material remained. Edison, says Baldwin, had a "Shylock complex" about Jews. "I wish," wrote Edison, "they would all quit making money." [EZOR, p. 46]
Modern Jewish anti-"anti-Semitic" discourse insists that all such historical and critical commentary should never be put to the test of open evidential debate but, rather, that such criticism is merely part of baseless, groundless, and irrational prejudice. It should therefore, the argument goes, not be seen in the first place; it is best, in fact, forbidden.
This attitude of free speech suppression is exemplified these days, in an institutional sense, by one of the best known and most powerful Jewish lobbying organizations, the Simon Wiesenthal Center for Holocaust Studies, which, in the words of the American Civil Liberties Union, waged "a campaign pressuring Internet Service providers to censor the Web page of right wing hate groups housed on their servers." [ACLU, Internet ONLINE, 1996] What exactly, one wonders, is a "right wing hate group?" Who decides its definition to bar their contribution to critical exchange? Would the former criticisms of Jews by Mark Twain, George Washington, and George Bernard Shaw rate as "right wing hate" material? If so, would we have to conclude that everything else they had to say was no doubt subtly contaminated by "hate" too? Does the Wiesenthal Center "hate" anybody? Would its director, an Orthodox rabbi named Marvin Hier, censor the great Jewish philosopher, Baruch Spinoza, when he called traditional Jewry "a hating people?" What would Rabbi Hier say when publicly confronted with some of the most vile material in the Talmud? Should that be kept off the Internet? Should it be banned? Don't people have the right to explore all facts and opinions available to decide their own? Isn't that the most intelligent way to come to an opinion in the first place? Isn't it the beauty of the Internet that, by its very unedited nature, it has the potential to be a democratic forum of profound proportions?
One of the Wiesenthal Center's stock-in-trades is a kind of Inquisition against whatever it defines as anti-Semitism. High priority (by the Wiesenthal Center and virtually all other Jewish "watchdog" groups) are the so-called "Holocaust Deniers" espousing "Holocaust revisionism." Often (but not always) right-wingers, Holocaust deniers argue that the Jewish Holocaust is a conspiratorial myth and never (or in minor form) happened. Whatever the merits of their arguments, one would presume that they would have, in a free society, the right to state their case and then be thoroughly discredited in the open exchange of contesting evidence. Not so. The Wiesenthal Center, and other Jewish lobbying organizations, and sometimes non-Jewish sympathizers, have largely succeeded in internationally censoring them. (The Wiesenthal Center even had the audacity in 2001 to "initiate an international campaign to have YMCAs around the world stop funding the world center." Why does this Jewish lobbying group seek to fulfill anti-Jewish conspiracy theories and economically break a Christian organization? Because the YMCA's world center in Geneva dared to indict the state of Israel in a report for its "oppression" of Palestinians.) [WOHLGELERNTER, E., 2-16-01, p. 1A]
"Holocaust denial is not a serious scholarly debate," Antony Polansky, a Jewish professor and Holocaust survivor told a campus audience, "This is a new form of hate propaganda. This is not a form of first amendment issue." [RESPONSE, SPRING, 1994, p. 7] Jewish critic Mary Lefkokwitz noted the case of a Northwestern University engineering professor, Earl Butz (author of a volume on the Holocaust entitled The Hoax of the Twentieth Century), in 1996: "It is entirely appropriate that a professor's use of university property, even of something as tangential as a website, should come under scrutiny, if that professor uses it for the purpose of disseminating nonhistorical information as is claimed in the current controversy about a professor's placing of Holocaust denial propaganda on the Northwestern University website." [LEFKOWITZ, p. 186]
In 1994, Yale, Brown, and Harvard University were among those universities that refused to print an ad in the campus paper by "The Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust." A few colleges did run the ad. Portland's major daily, The Oregonian, published the ad and ended up under Jewish assault, eventually apologizing for its decision. [RESPONSE, SPRING, 1994, p. 7] In 1996 David Irving, an alleged "holocaust denier," had a manuscript, Goebbels: Mastermind of the Third Reich, accepted for publication at St. Martin's Press. Described by one reviewer as "soft pedaling ... German blame for the treatment of Jews," under massive Jewish pressure the publisher reversed its decision to produce the volume. [RESPONSE, SPRING, p. 1996, p. 12]
In Canada, "Jewish pressure" sought, via trials in 1985 and 1988, to send Ernst Zundel to prison for publishing a pamphlet that claimed the Holocaust never happened. [DERSHOWITZ, p. 171] "Zundel was convicted in Toronto in 1988," notes the Toronto Star, "of spreading false news but the conviction was declared unconstitutional in 1992 by the Supreme Court of Canada." [TORONTO STAR, 4-18-95, p. A3] "Zundel -- producer of a British-based writing called Did the Six Million Really Die? -- was actually tried twice "on the charge of publishing views he knew to be false." [BAIN, p. 45] The first trial was well covered by the Canadian news media and afforded Zundel widespread publicity. "Media coverage," noted Sherri Aikenhead in MacLean's magazine, "was so intense that it provoked fierce arguments -- particularly among Jewish activists -- about whose interests the reports served." [AIKENHEAD, p. 44] For the second Zundel trial, none of the Canadian national news agency's 100 member newspapers covered the story. "What is curious," wrote George Bain in a MacClean's editorial, "is the quickness and near unanimity with which the media managers insist that no representations to them, no feeling of pressure, affected their editorial decisions on how to play -- or play down -- the second Zundel trial. Curiously, only Ian Urquhart of the [Toronto] Star, the newspaper that (though 'judiciously,' as he puts it) covered the second trial throughout, acknowledged that he received representatives from the Jewish community about publicizing Zundel's hateful views." [BAIN, p. 45] Because of Jewish lobbying efforts, an El Paso, Texas, radio station cancelled its contract Zundel, and dropped his program there, "Voice of Freedom," [RESPONSE, Spring 1994] as did cable station in California. (Haters of Zundel succeeded in burning his house down).
This particular Jewish tact of intensive lobbying for censorship is not new. We have seen the exact same thing as far back as 1700 when powerful Jewish lobbyists in Germany successfully censored Johann Eisenmenger's scholarly critique about Jews. In 2001, the Board of Deputies of British Jews, attempted to sell at auction Sir Richard Burton's anti-Jewish manuscript entitled "Human Sacrifice Among the Sephardine or Eastern Jews." (Burton is best known as a 19th century world explorer and translator of Tales of the Arabian Nights and the Kama Sutra). This work about Jews was never published. As the Jewish Telegraphic Agency explains it:
"[Burton] was British consul in Damascus in 1870-71, but was recalled after
disputes with his superiors, the Ottoman government of Syria, local Christian
missionaires -- and even a small clique of powerful Jewish moneylenders in
Damascus ... W. H. Wilkins [tried to publish it in 1896 but] the Board of
Deputies was on its guard and threatened to sue for libel. The book was
withdrawn. The manuscript passed through several more hands before the
Board managed to obtain it through court action in 1909." [GREENE, R., 6-6-01]
The Board of Deputies of British Jews, notes JTA, "sought to sell the document after suppressing it for nearly 100 years." Lord Janner, a former president of the Board, expressed outrage that the Board sought to sell the work. In failing to find a buyer (for over $200,000) the manuscript for sale brought attention attracting attention to the work: it was "the worst of both worlds -- the contents of this disgraceful document have been publicized, and the Board has not raised the resources it needs." [GREENE, R., 6-6-01]
In efforts to boycott a prominent right-wing critic of Jews in the 1940s and 1950s, Gerald K. Smith, "working together," says Benjamin Ginsberg, "officials of the American Jewish Committee, American Jewish Congress, and the Anti-Defamation League would approach the publishers of major newspapers and owners of radio stations in cities where Smith had scheduled appearances, to ask that Smith be given no coverage whatsoever. If newspapers failed to cooperate on a voluntary basis, Jewish organizations were usually able to secure their compliance by threatening boycotts of Jewish advertisers. The strategy of dynamic silence was extremely effective." [GINBSBERG, B., 1993, p. 124] The victim of this particular censorship was decried as a right-wing extremist. But this methodology in the suppression of free speech reflects Jewish tactics over history, to our own day, in suppressing any and all criticism about them.
"[Burton] was British consul in Damascus in 1870-71, but was recalled after
disputes with his superiors, the Ottoman government of Syria, local Christian
missionaires -- and even a small clique of powerful Jewish moneylenders in
Damascus ... W. H. Wilkins [tried to publish it in 1896 but] the Board of
Deputies was on its guard and threatened to sue for libel. The book was
withdrawn. The manuscript passed through several more hands before the
Board managed to obtain it through court action in 1909." [GREENE, R., 6-6-01]
The Board of Deputies of British Jews, notes JTA, "sought to sell the document after suppressing it for nearly 100 years." Lord Janner, a former president of the Board, expressed outrage that the Board sought to sell the work. In failing to find a buyer (for over $200,000) the manuscript for sale brought attention attracting attention to the work: it was "the worst of both worlds -- the contents of this disgraceful document have been publicized, and the Board has not raised the resources it needs." [GREENE, R., 6-6-01]
In efforts to boycott a prominent right-wing critic of Jews in the 1940s and 1950s, Gerald K. Smith, "working together," says Benjamin Ginsberg, "officials of the American Jewish Committee, American Jewish Congress, and the Anti-Defamation League would approach the publishers of major newspapers and owners of radio stations in cities where Smith had scheduled appearances, to ask that Smith be given no coverage whatsoever. If newspapers failed to cooperate on a voluntary basis, Jewish organizations were usually able to secure their compliance by threatening boycotts of Jewish advertisers. The strategy of dynamic silence was extremely effective." [GINBSBERG, B., 1993, p. 124] The victim of this particular censorship was decried as a right-wing extremist. But this methodology in the suppression of free speech reflects Jewish tactics over history, to our own day, in suppressing any and all criticism about them.
"Some European governments," wrote David Stannard in 1996, "have forcibly prohibited anti-Zionists from speaking in public. A California court has awarded $100,000 to a survivor of Auschwitz for the pain and suffering he endured in an effort to prove untrue the claims of an antisemitic organization that the Nazis did not kill Jews in gas chambers. In Austria the publishers of magazines attempting to minimize Jewish deaths in the Holocaust have been indicted and convicted for their efforts. A professional anti-Semite who publicly denied the reality of the Holocaust has been sent to prison in Canada. German law states that 'denial of the Holocaust' is punishable by up to five years in jail. And the United States has prohibited people who have expressed similar beliefs from entering the country. Other examples abound." [STANNARD, p. 164]
In 1995 a young German was sent to prison for three and a half years for saying to tourists at Auschwitz that the Holocaust "is a giant farce." [STANNARD, p. 200] In France, under "a new law [that] makes it a crime to publicly deny the Nazi murder of six million Jews" [RESPONSE, SUMMER 1991, p. 12] Jean Moulin University professor Bernard Notin was fined $2500 in 1990 and suspended from teaching. His crime was "an article that denied the existence of gas chambers at Hitler's death camps." [RESPONSE, SPRING, 1993, p. 11] Another Frenchman, Robert Faurisson, was find over $21,000 for a similar crime. The magazine that published his denial of gas chambers was fined $55,000 [RESPONSE, SUMMER, 1991, p. 12] Faurisson, a teacher at the Sorbonne, even had his classes suspended. "The scale of attacks on Faurisson," wrote Jewish author Noam Chomsky, "contrasts strikingly with the reach of his own writings. How many readers have come across a line he has written, or heard his name, apart from these attacks?" [BRENNER, p. 347] Faurisson was physically assaulted on numerous occasions, and once was sent to the hospital for surgery to repair his face. A group called "The Sons of the Memory of the Jewish Children" claimed responsibility for the most brutal attack. "His jaw was smashed," said a French fireman who gave the 68-year old man first aid, "They destroyed his face." [GREISAMER, L., 10-1-89, p. 14]
In 1984 David McCalden, described by one Jewish magazine as a 'professional anti-Semite," was invited to speak at a yearly California Librarian Association conference in a program called "Free Speech and the Holocaust." Although the CLA Executive Director, Stephan Moses, was himself a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany, he supported on principle McCalden's right as a publisher to participate in the library convention. "Both McCalden's right to free speech and the pressures applied to the CLA," note Mark Elliot and Michael McClintock, "became hotly debated issues." [ELLIOT, p. 36] Under intense and widespread Jewish pressure, McCalden's invitation to speak was eventually cancelled. (In contrast, here's what American Library Association officials say about the subject of such censorship, as noted in its booklet entitled "Intellectual Freedom:" "As a personal liberty, intellectual freedom forms the foundation of our democracy. It is an essential part of government by the people. The right to vote is not enough -- we also must be able to take part in forming public opinion by engaging in open and vigorous debate on controversial matters." [ALA, p. 1])
In 1996, in Switzerland, Reinard Peters was fined $4,000 by a Swiss court and ordered to pay $6,800 in legal costs "after being found guilty of breaking a law that makes it a crime to discriminate against ethnic groups or incite racial hatred ..." He was found guilty of publishing a brochure that "claimed Jewish greed was responsible for causing World War II." [LEVY, T, 9-18-96]
In Poland, in 1998, Michael Chajn, a member of the Polish-Jewish Student Association at Warsaw University, managed (with the help of a Jewish magazine) to have removed from one bookseller's shelves all books he personally declared to be "anti-Semitic." Volumes included a book about "Jewish ritual murders," "cooperation of Jews and Masons," and another that states that "Jews were the majority in all [Solidarity -- the anti-communist organization] ministerial positions since 1989." In essence, Chajn and his Jewish supporters flexed their power to effectively censor anything in the bookstore they didn't like. Who (other than the Jewish Thought Police) can confirm that such books are preposterous, insidious lies without being allowed to read them? Once such power to stifle free thought about themselves begins, where -- and how -- does it end?
Also in Poland, in 1999 professor Dariusz Ratajczak of Opole University fell under attack for writing that 'there never existed ... a plan of systematic extermination of the Jews." [GOLIK, p. 7] "According to the recent law of the National Remembrance Institute," noted the Warsaw Voice, "such public sentiments are subject to a fine or a sentence of up to three years in prison ... The maximum punishment the university committee can inflict is a ban on work as an instructor." [GOLIK, p. 7]
In March 1998, an 84-year old French convert to Islam, Roger Garaudy, was fined 150,000 francs (about $30,000) by the Paris Court of Justice for writing a book, "The Founding Myths of Israeli Politics," which, among other things, argues that the Holocaust was exaggerated to help create the modern state of Israel. The book was published by La Vielle Taupe, described by the Jewish Chronicle as "an extreme left wing publishing house." Garaudy was the vice-president of the French National Assembly from 1956-58 and a communist party official until 1970. On the day of the guilty verdict, Jews from the right-wing Betar (Zionist) organization violently attacked a group of Garaudy's supporters inside the court building. Two Arab journalists were also beaten outside. "Crif" -- "the largest umbrella organization of French Jewry" -- condemned Garaudy's volume as "a revolting ideological and political maneuver aimed at delegitimizing the very existence of Israel." At an earlier press conference in Cairo, the book's author noted that "in France you can attack the Pope or President Jacques Chirac. The important thing is not to criticize Israel or else you are lost. The media is 95 per cent in the hands of the Zionists." [ZLOTOWSKI, p. 2]
Other leftist-oriented "Holocaust-deniers" in recent years have included Paul Rassinier (a former communist who was incarcerated in the Nazi's Buchenwald concentration camp), the aforementioned Robert Faurisson (a French professor suspended by his university for his writings on the subject) sociologist Serge Thion, Gabor T. Rittersporn, and Jean-Gabriel Cohn-Bendt. [MENDES, p. 108-111] (Even the writings of the pioneer of communism, Karl Marx, grandson of rabbis [he was also reported to have descended from the famous French Talmudic scholar Rashi on his father's side, and the famous rabbi Maharal, Rabbi Low of Prague, on his mother's] [RAPOPORT, L., 1990, p. 235] have fallen beneath the censor's pen. As Dagobert Runes notes about Marx's most anti-Jewish texts: "It is interesting to note that most of Marx's anti-Semitic references, in his correspondence, his journalist writings, and his books, were entirely eliminated by his various editors.") [MARX, K., 1959, p. xii]
Jewish enforcement of its Holocaust dogmas has a transnational reach. In 1998, the New York Times noted that "the European Parliament voted to lift the legal immunity of Jean-Marie Le Pen, one of its members, so that a German prosecutor can begin a criminal investigation of remarks Mr. Le Pen made belittling the Holocaust ... [Le Pen] dismissed the extermination of the European Jews as a 'detail of history.' Since 'Holocaust denial' or 'minimizing the crimes of the Third Reich' is against the law in Germany, he can now be prosecuted there. Conviction could bring a fine and a prison sentence of up to five years." [WHEATCROFT, p. A19] Le Pen, a well-known right-wing French politician, made the "belittling' comments in Munich, Germany.
It is indeed mind-boggling that anyone in our day and age can publicly deny with absolutely impunity the very existence of God with no care or repercussion whatsoever, and freely impugn virtually anything else imaginable, yet to deny the Jewish Holocaust is grounds for persecution, censorship, and in many places -- even in western democracies -- fines and imprisonment. Denying the Holocaust is the new Blasphemy, powerfully punished with gags upon all and everyone through much of the world by a Jewish Inquisition that frames itself and its legends beyond reproach and question. And the latent issue here is not, of course, the reality of the Holocaust, (which surely did exist insofar as huge numbers of Jews were murdered, as well as others) but one group's power to internationally control -- and ultimately close -- free discourse. That the Holocaust deniers are in grave error should be easy to argue and prove in open discourse. If any of the deniers are malevolently minded then open controversy would expose that too. But the denial of free expression -- in this, as any, case -- inevitably nurtures that which the New Inquisition seeks to stifle: the conviction among counter-believers that something indeed is being hidden by those who suppress and suffocate oppositional voices. And the denial of free expression sets the precedent for, and contagion into, any and all realms.
It is among the oldest of axioms of moral faith that a free public exchange of ideas leads inevitably to the truth. That the Nazis stepped in and killed this premise has relevance here. The Anti-Defamation League's rationale (per Director Abraham Foxman) for the banning of all paid advertisements that argue that the Holocaust didn't happen runs like this: "The intent of such advertisements attacking the facts of the Holocaust, and by framing this attack merely an unorthodox viewpoint or a challenge to 'open debate,' subtly encode traditional antisemitic images of Jews as controllers of academia and the media, and Jews as exploiters of non-Jewish guilt. These beliefs, of course, bear comparison to the preaching which brought Hitler to power in prewar Germany." [FOXMAN, p. 322] Here Foxman turns reality completely upside down. Whoever argues for freedom of speech on philosophical grounds, and objects to unified Jewish attempts towards complete censorship of this -- or any -- issue, is bizarrely accused by Foxman of "the preachings which brought Hitler to power."
In 1995 an 18-year old woman checked out The Hoax of the Century by the aforementioned Northwestern engineering professor, A. R. Butz, from the library of the small Canadian town of Didbury. The woman then "called Canada Customs and discovered the book is on a list of works denied entry into Canada but she was told that possessing the book was not illegal. [The woman] decided to turn it over to the Mounties [Canadian police] anyway, informing the public librarian, Tim Elliot, after the fact." Informed of the status of the book, the librarian told the police he didn't want the book back and they destroyed it. This story made the local news as a controversial issue, and Bernie Farber, a spokesman for the Canadian Jewish Congress, publicly complimented the library patron for taking the book to the authorities. [CANADIAN BUS AND CURRENT AFFAIRS 2-13-95, p. 25]
Popular Jewish hatred of "Holocaust revisionism" is so great that even Yehuda Bauer, a Holocaust historian at Hebrew University, was attacked for revising the number of Jews who were murdered in the Auschwitz concentration camp down to 1.35 million. "So sacred had the 4 million number become by repetition in the press," says Michale Bernbaum, "that Bauer's articles aroused immediate controversy. Survivors were upset that he was seeming to join the revisionists in diminishing the numbers of victims." [BERENBAUM, The Struggle, p. 90] Among the most radical Jewish responses to "Holocaust revisionism" was the bombing of Holocaust doubter George Ashley's home in Northridge, California, in 1986. [GEWERTZ] And, in the counter-anti-Holocaust propaganda wars, in 1998, the Zionist Organization of America countered with a publication, Deir Yassin: A Lie, that argues that a widely known, and much documented, Jewish-Israeli massacre of Arab villagers in 1948 never happened. [MAHLER, J., 3-20-98, p. 7]
Concerted Jewish efforts at censorship take many forms and guises, attacking the full spectrum of political thought, from right to left-wing, encompassing virtually any subject at all, as long as it addresses Jews. On June 19, 1977, for example, the respected news team of the London Sunday Times presented an article documenting systematic torture of Arabs in Israel and the occupied territories. In the United States, this major news story was covered by only one major media outlet, the Boston Globe. Why? "Any adverse publicity [of Israel]," noted Nicholas Von Hoffman in the Anaheim Bulletin, "is likely to win an editor vociferous abuse from the nation's best organized lobby." [SAID, p. 42] In 1990 the Foreign Press Association protested Israel's banning of news about Soviet immigration to the Jewish state; the censorship was enforced, reported the Boston Globe, because of "a growing trend of negative coverage. [ROSENBERG, C2] In 1996, "in response to protests from Jewish groups,” Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf -- an obviously necessary staple of reference in American college history classes -- was banned in Hungary. An English version, published in Great Britain, was also banned at European University in Budapest. Permission had been requested to shelve the book at the college, noted the Jewish Week, "a university which is supported by [Jewish American] financier George Soros." [PERLEZ, 1, 23]
In 1999, the great Jewish lobbying center, the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, successfully pressured the giant German Bertelsmann company from advertising Mein Kampf on its online bookstore. "We are aware that we are operating on the thin line between a publisher's responsibility and the accusation of censorship," noted a spokesman for Bertelsmann, upon taking the book's availability off the computer system. Online bookstores Amazon.com and Barnes and Noble continued to refuse "to back down [to Wiesenthal demand], citing their First Amendment rights to promote free speech." [LIEBERMAN, A., 9-21-99, p. 16]
In 1984 a play (Garbage, the City, and Death) by one of the world's most heralded filmmakers, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, was shut down in Frankfort, Germany, by concerted Jewish pressure. The play was based upon a story of real-life local corruption in real estate dealings, battled on grass roots fronts by the left-wing Green Party. Jews were among the most prominent real estate wheelers and dealers, particularly a speculator named Ignatz Bubis, eventual chairman of the Central Council of Jews in Germany. A Fassbinder character in the play, allegorically named Rich Jew, was based on Bubis. "There was much official corruption, bending of laws, and absence of codes or disregard for them where they exist," noted Lothar Kahn about the real life story upon which the play was based, "... self-interest, greed, politics and poor management combined to create a situation that was widely deplored. Bubis does not appear unduly perturbed over the allegation that he served as prototype for Fassbinder's Rich Jew, the character that gave rise to the charge of the play being anti-Jewish both in nature and effect." [LOTHAR, p. 51]
In the face of Jewish protest, the producer of the play offered to rename Rich Jew as "A" and make other changes in the stage story. "By then, however," notes Kahn, "the fact that changes were made at the insistence of 'our Jewish friends' would have become as much a source of resentment as being prevented from producing the play in the first place." [KAHN, p. 52]
Ultimately, Jewish activists seized the stage for three hours to prevent the play from being performed. The producer finally capitulated to censorship, "citing the intensity of Jewish pressure." While local Jewish spokesman, Michael Friedman, declared the incident over, with no hard feelings, Lothar Kahn suggested otherwise: "There are angry German critics who feel the Jews overplayed their hand and should not dictate what should be thought about anything." [KAHN, p. 52] Fassbinder himself said that "the subject of Jews has been a taboo subject in Germany since 1945; in the end this must be counter-productive, for taboos inevitably lead to the tabooed subject creating dark and secret fears and mak[ing] enemies." [KAHN, p. 51]
In the Netherlands, in 1987 the Rotterdam city council resisted Jewish demands and refused to censor the Fassbinder play in their own locality, spokeswoman announcing that
"The Rotterdam city council has decided the municipality has no
jurisdiction to ban the play. It is a matter of free speech." [REUTERS,
11-17-87]
Reuters noted that "Jewish leaders say they will demonstrate against the play" and "the Rotterdam Foundation for the Fight Against Anti-Semitism said it was considering taking the producers to court because they were violating Dutch laws against the discrimination of ethnic and religious communities. The producers say the play is constructive because it has stirred debate on the causes and results of anti-Semitism." [REUTERS, 11-17-87]
In 1993, the American Jewish Committee closed down their nationally traveling exhibition about the history of Black-Jewish relations (as the AJC saw it) when Boston's Black community allowed the local Nation of Islam chapter to contribute their own critical perspective to the show. [HOHLER, p. 21] The Jewish organization declared that the Nation's point of view was anti-Semitic and cancelled the rest of its tour.
In 1999, the city of Toronto apologized to the Canadian Jewish Congress for allowing a photographic exhibition of Palestinian history under Israeli rule to be shown in a city venue. Howard Brief of the CJC called the photo exhibition "obscene," the Jewish mayor of Toronto, Mel Lastman (originally from New York) declared that "We're not looking for people to bring their fights here. This is the magic of Toronto -- you don't bring your arguments or beefs here." [DE MARA, 9-17-99] Local Jews also complained about some of the photos' captions and that the time slot for the exhibition between the Jewish holidays of Rosh Hoshanah and Yom Kippur was "insensitive."
The producer of the Palestinian show was an Anglican church organization. Reverend Robert Assaly responded to Jewish outrage, noting that
"Once again, even the very articulation of Palestinian history and
culture is subjugated to the dominant political whims of another
people or organization. Once again, Palestinian existence is not
allowed to be understood on its own, but, in the mind of the CJC,
must only be articulated in reference to the filters of Jewish history
and faith. Thankfully, we no longer subject aboriginal history or
Jewish Holocaust exhibits to the demands of their oppressors. The
CJC's attempt to silence truth belies its stated motives." [ASSALY]
Toronto Star columnist Thomas Walkom followed up the story, discovering that the man who called the show "obscene" (Harold Brief, chairman of the Israeli Affairs Committee of the CJC) had never even seen the exhibition, let alone the "captions the Jewish community complains about all the time." [WALKOM, T., 9-28-99]
In 1992, a Chicago librarian, David Williams, noted to an American Library Association annual conference that since 1967 the state of Israel has censored nearly 4,000 books in the occupied Arab territories of Gaza and the West Bank. Banned volumes include the plays of Sophocles, the novels of Egyptian Nobel Laureate Naguib Mahfouz, and The Battle for Peace by Ezer Weizmann, Israel's President. Jewish overseers also censored all published texts by local Palestinians. Even a poet, Muhammad Albatrawi, a resident of the West Bank, noted that
"Every word of mine goes through the censorship office ... It goes
without saying that this affects the work's literary value ... I can never
know in advance how the censor will react: sometimes I write something
risky and he approves it without comment, and sometimes I write
something totally innocent and it is banned completely. It can drive you
crazy, because there is no logic to it." [GROSSMAN, D., 1988, p. 158-
159]
A resolution condemning Israeli censorship was passed by the ALA. At the next convention, notes Village Voice journalist Robert Friedman, "the fight to rescind the year-old resolution condemning Israeli censorship policies in the occupied territories drew more than 1500 librarians -- three to four times more than usual." [FRIEDMAN, p. 36] The Anti-Defamation League, Hadassah (the Zionist Women's organization), and other sympathetic Jews joined forces in a massive campaign to denounce the ALA resolution, retract it, and slander the resolution's original sponsor, David Williams, as an anti-Semite.
The resultant ALA rejection of its resolution against censorship, says Friedman, "was due to the large numbers of pro-Israel activists who came down [to the conference] at the behest of Hadassah [a women's Zionist organization], the fear of many ALA members that the controversy was tearing the organization apart, and a backlash against William's overbearing and self-righteous personality ... The same week ... ALA officials announced that they had set up a task force -- reportedly at ADL urging -- to investigate Williams." [FRIEDMAN, p. 39]
They would find that Williams was not new to controversy in Jewish quarters. In 1989, as head of the Middle East acquisitions department at the Chicago Public Library, he put together a bibliography of 147 books for the study of the Israel-Palestine conflict, including a mix of political views. Within a short time, Chicago's chief librarian, Samuel F. Morrison, was fielding a call from a prominent Jewish patron who complained about some of the books on the list. Then followed a unified a campaign by two Jewish lobbying organizations -- the Anti-Defamation League and the Jewish Community Relation Council -- which included targeting for attention the Jewish President of the Chicago Library Board, Cindy Pritzker, one of the heirs of -- among other things -- the Hyatt Hotel chain.
After reviewing William's bibliographic list, head librarian Morrisson remained firm in support of it, noting that "libraries should provide materials and information presenting all points of view in current and historical issues." [FRIEDMAN, p. 35] The ADL and other Jewish lobbying efforts persisted, however, even labeling David Shipler's Pulitzer-prize winning book in the bibliography, Arab and Jew: Wounded Spirits in the Promised Land, as an "attempt at evenhandedness [that] results in distorted equivalences between Arab and Israeli actions." [FRIEDMAN, p. 35] The ADL mobilized more local Jewish support to complain en masse to local governmental officials and eventually the Chicago library capitulated, adding more than 30 books selected by ADL and pulling David Williams, the librarian who made the bibliography, off the project.
Unrelenting Jewish pressure to force the library to emphasize Jewish-Israeli perspectives on the Middle East made the local news. A Chicago Sun-Times columnist, James Byrne, worried that the ADL's eventual investigations into William's past was reminiscent of McCarthy-era witch hunt. Summing up the whole story, Village Voice commentator Robert Friedman declared that "here was unequivocal proof that the ADL was attempting to censor a public library."
In 1986, because of concerted Jewish complaint, the Toronto-area Waterloo County Board of Education in Canada "banned" William Shakespeare's play, The Merchant of Venice, pending further input from the Ontario Human Rights Commission and Ministry of Education. The school board's decision, noted the Toronto Star, "following an intense lobby that included testimonials from nine Jewish students, has again raised concerns about censorship of school books due to pressure from vocal minorities." [FERRI, J., p. A18]
A few years later the Canadian Jewish Congress intervened in a planned performance of the Shakespeare play by the Stratford Festival. The play was finally performed but only, notes Sol Littman, after it was agreed that "care would be taken to make sure that the representation of Shylock steered clear of crude stereotyping and -- best of all -- the festival would arrange seminars for young theatre-goers to explain the historical context of the play and the social prejudices of the period." [LITTMAN, S., p. A17]
By 1994, the Ottawa Citizen ran an editorial entitled "Beware of the Censor," noting that "Ottawa's public high schools have quietly revised how and when they teach Shakespeare’s classic play, The Merchant of Venice ... Several Ontario school boards have either banned the work or restricted its teaching to senior grades ... The department heads [of Ottawa public schools] decreed that if The Merchant of Venice is taught, it must be presented in the light of an opinion paper written by members of the Jewish community ... The Merchant of Venice problem was not put to public debate by the elected [Ottawa Board of Education] trustees ... The result is literature chosen by stealth, in a climate of pressure and self-censorship." [OTTAWA CITIZEN, p. A10]
The Jewish Thought Police is far reaching, and even within the Jewish community itself it invokes powerful pressures to silence those of moral conscience, particularly regarding the policies of modern Israel. Jewish scholar Marla Brettschneider notes that
"During the research for my dissertation I heard countless [Jewish]
individuals and group representatives from around the country relate
stories about the censorious pro-Israel politics of the mainstream Jewish
community. These people requested various levels of confidentiality,
depending on how current or painful the story was, or on the stature
of the individual or group in the community. There were often jobs on
the line and the reputations of mainstream machers to guide ...
[BRETTSCHNEIDER, p. 90].... Unfortunately, students were
not even willing to talk to me for background material ... I continued
to find this a painful example of the fear progressive Jewish students
feel about their activism. They feel they will suffer the wrath of the
[Jewish] community as punishment for such work.
[BRETTSCHNEIDER, p. 90] ... [By the 1980s] Jewish students were
more afraid to question, explore, critique, and speak out, especially when
it came to Israel ... [In 1989] speaking as a progressive, I criticized Israeli
politics and our role as North American Zionist/Jewish activists. Many of
the students in the audience were upset by the fact that I was speaking
critically on these issues. The reason they gave me for their feelings was
that by airing our dirty laundry in public we help the anti-Semites who
want to divide and conquer us ... But what most distressed me was this:
If honest and critical self-evaluation cannot even take place in a closed
room among highly active Jewish students at a Jewish conference, then
it is hard to imagine where such desperately needed exploration can take
place." [BRETTSCHNEIDER, p. 89-90]
Earlier, in 1979, an American Jewish organization called Breira was hounded out of existence by mainstream Jewry. Breira -- never numbering more than 1500 members -- sought, in its own words, to "break the 'taboo' on public criticism of Israel within the American Jewish community." [WERTHEIMER, p. 399] "Breira activists," notes Jack Wertheimer, "consistently interpreted the public controversy [in Jewish circles] as an orchestrated smear campaign.... [WERTHEIMER, p. 405] ... Breira was cast as a group of subversives to Israel. Its harsh critique of the organized American Jewish community, its program to democratize and rechannel Jewish life in the United States, and its denigration of established leaders were barely noted." [WERTHEIMER, p. 406]
In 1990 a Reform rabbi, Adi Assabi, in South Africa received 23 death threats from Jewish callers for allowing anti-apartheid Black leader Nelson Mandela a forum to speak at the rabbi's synagogue. Mandela, the international hero of the human rights movement in South Africa who spent 28 years in prison, "outraged most South African Jews by his expressions of solidarity with Palestinian Liberation Organization leader Yasir Arafat and by photographs in the press of Mandela embracing Arafat." [RAPHAELY, p. 10]
In 1998, Norman Rosenberg, the Executive Director of the New Jewish Agenda, a "progressive" organization, wrote an article in the (Washington) Jewish Week complaining about the dangerous censorship powers within the Jewish community; the Smithsonian Museum --rather than hold a planned lecture series in connection with Israel's fiftieth birthday celebration -- succumbed to censorial and harassment efforts by some American Jewish groups against "controversial" speakers. Those lobbied against were fellow Jews, including members of Israel's Knesset, journalism, and universities. Rosenberg notes that
"In canceling the program ... the Smithsonian was bullied by a
disinformation campaign led by a group of far-right Jewish
ultranationalists. Rather than staying the course and presenting what
was to be both a celebration of Israel's democratic triumphs and an
honest, fair, and intellectually rigorous examination of the unresolved
issues which that democracy is wrestling with, the Smithsonian chose
to fold at the first hint of controversy ... What we have here is nothing
less than nascent Jewish McCarthyism ... Believers in free speech and
free inquiry can only be appalled by this debacle." [ROSENBERG, p.
20]
Four months later, Smithsonian magazine published the permissible image of Israel: a full page ad by the History Channel announcing the premiere of Israel: Birth of a Nation. "After 3,000 years of persecution," proclaims the ad, "an Inquisition, and a Holocaust, you're finally allowed to go home ... Join host Martin Gilbert as we take an intimate look at a nation born of resolve, courage, sacrifice and, ultimately, destiny." [SMITHSONIAN, MAY 1998, p. 29]
Even in leftist Jewish circles, support for the noble principles of free speech and the hallowed Constitution can disintegrate when clouded by Jewish emotionalism. A good case in point involved the American Civil Liberties Union and a 1977 neo-Nazi march planned for Skokie, Illinois, a suburb with a large Jewish population. The town banned the march. Simply based upon the most elemental principle of the First Amendment, the ACLU argued an appeal on behalf of the neo-Nazis right to hold their event in Skokie. (The ACLU won the case, a Federal district court ruled that Skokie's ban was unconstitutional, but the right-wing group never marched). In the wake of the ACLU's involvement in the case, an estimated 15% of the ACLU's national membership (presumably constituting the most liberal, "open-minded," and principled lawyers and others in America) resigned. Most were Jews. In hindsight, Albert Foer, the Vice-Chairman of the Washington D.C.-area ACLU, still felt the need to argue the issues of the case in a Jewish forum in 1998:
"The ACLU's legal victory in Skokie was in fact a victory for Jews ...
The First Amendment stands as a protector of minority rights and
the situation in Skokie, where Jews happened not to be a minority,
was unique." [FOER, p. 20]
Ever ready to brand any critic of Jewry or Israel an anti-Semite, organized Jewish efforts in patrolling knowledge, and in controlling and suppressing information are widespread and varied, focusing upon a range of subjects and issues, but always Jewish and/or Israeli-based. In Canada, for example, R. T. Naylor wrote an article entitled Israel and the Cocaine Barons. For Israeli Mercenaries, It's All In a Day's Work that was published in Toronto's Now magazine in December 1989. "When the article was first published," says Naylor, "Israel's propaganda arm in Canada began frothing at the mouth in indignation. The reaction included the usual smear stories planted by the Israel lobby in the Canadian Jewish News and the [ADL's parent organization] B'nai B'rith Monitor. The point of the campaign was not to 'correct' the record, since the facts as stated were incontestably true, but to terrorize critics of Israel into keeping quiet." [NAYLOR, p. 139]
In 1987, claiming that an NBC documentary called "Six Days Plus 20 Years: A Dream is Dying" was "biased," the Israeli government forbid Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, Foreign Minister Shimon Peres and Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin from appearing on NBC News programs. [BOXER, 6-31-87, p. 3] The next year ABC faced Jewish demonstrations against "one-sided anti-Israel press coverage being given the current unrest in Israel's administered territories." [JW, 1-29-88, p. 8] The Anti-Defamation League attacked ABC coverage as "a mockery of journalistic responsibility," and particularly singled out ABC news anchorman Peter Jennings. "Apparently," said the ADL's 'Israel director,' Harry Wall, "Israel's actions have given license for the expression of anti-Semitism among certain representatives of the media." [JW, 1-29-88]
Censorship of those seeking to document on film Israel's many injustices, and crimes, against Palestinian Arabs is an institutionalized norm in America. In the 1980s, an American Jewish filmmaker, Joan Mandel, joined with others in producing a documentary film (Gaza Ghetto) about Arab conditions as veritable prisoners in the Israeli-occupied Gaza Strip. "I began," she says, "to learn the intricacies of how forms of censorship were used against films about Palestinian. When I returned to the United States in 1984, over the course of the next two years ... I learned that I was involved in a war in this country -- to redefine the limits of censorship ... [MANDEL, p. 187-188] ... [There is] censorship at all stages [in making a film about Israel] -- production, post-production, funding, programming, and distribution." [MANDEL, p. 190] Among the most ardent, and overt, censorial organizations are the Anti-Defamation League, the American-Israel Public Affairs Council (AIPAC), and CAMERA.
For his part, filmmaker Tom Hayes notes the endless censorial difficulties he had with PBS, and its grant-giving arm ITVS, over his film about Arabs under Israeli rule, "People of the Land":
"For me, work on Palestine was a test of the relevance of independent
filmmaking. If you couldn't get funding and dissemination for work
about [Israel's] super-power culpability in cultural genocide, then what
exactly was the point of independent filmmaking? Entertainment? Media
titillation?" [HAYES, p. 6]
In 1990 the Israeli government succeeded in briefly getting a New York State Supreme Court Justice, Michael Dontzin, to ban a book in America; an Appellate Court later overruled the censorship. The banned book, By Way of Perception: The Making and Unmaking of a Mossad Officer, described author Victor Ostrovsky's life as an Israeli Mossad (CIA-like organization) agent and his moral disenchantment with the organization's policies. The judge's ban of the book disturbed First Amendment experts, especially that a foreign government could assert such influence in America. Attorney Richard Winfield called Judge Dontzin's censorship "without precedent and egregious." Attorney Floyd Abrams described it as "an aberration." Critics said, noted the Jewish Week, that "it apparently marked the first time a foreign nation sought to stop publication of a book in the United States." [JW, 9-21-90, p. 20] [See further Jewish-inspired censorial actions in the mass media section]
Under threat from a lawsuit from Israel, in 1991 the Huntington Library in San Marino, California, announced that it was still opening its complete set of photographs of the famous Dead Sea Scrolls to all qualified scholars interested in studying them. The original scrolls have been housed in a Jerusalem museum since 1947 and controlled by a "tight academic cartel" in Israel, particularly the Israel Antiquities Authority who limited access to scroll study to about 40 people over four decades. "Israeli officials," noted the Jewish Week, "contend that open access to the uncompleted texts could prevent a 'definitive interpretation' of the scrolls." [TUGEND, T, DEAD, p. 15]
In 1989 a radio talk show host, Jim Bleilkamp, was fired by his Albany station manager, Dennis Israel, after a campaign against him by a local Jewish lobbying group, the Shield of David, with support from the ADL, Americans for a Safe Israel, and the [Jewish-based] Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting. Among Bielkamp's crimes, says the Jewish Week, was an "accusation that Israeli soldiers are committing 'genocide' against Arabs ... [Bleikamp] acknowledged mentioning the word 'genocide' on the air, but says he did not mean to imply comparison between the Palestinian uprising and the Holocaust." [WEISS, Y, p. 18]
In 1991 Linda Rios Brook, the head of Channel 11 in Minneapolis, lost her job because of her "outspoken religious views," specifically for giving speeches as a devout Christian in which she said "that the Jews pressured Pilate into killing Jesus." For this, Brook was accused of being an anti-Semite, although what she said has been a foundation of Christian belief (and Jewish belief) for centuries. The law firm of Milaretz and Associates headed a group of advertisers who withdrew their advertising contract with the TV station to "send a message" to Channel 11's parent company, and force Brook out. [KATZ-STONE, p. 2]
In 2001, Michael Lopez-Calderon, a non-Jewish social studies teacher at Hebrew Academy's Rabbi Alexander S. Gross High School in Miami, made the news when he was fired for posting anti-Israel comments at a pro-Palestinian web site, Palestine Media Watch. "Lopez-Calderon, a non-Catholic Cuban-American who believes Israel is oppressing the Palestinians, said the trouble began when he heard other teachers make what he felt were callous comments on the fatal shooting of a Palestinian teenager. 'It broke me,' he said." [TALLAHASSEE DEMOCRAT, 3-10-01]
Also in 2001, the publisher of the Oneida Daily Dispatch (New York) fired its two top editors (Jean Ryan and Dale Seth) for an editorial that local Jewish lawyer, Randy Schaal, didn't like. Alerting the local Jewish Community Federation of Mohawk Valley, the Jewish lobby began to pressure the newspaper. The editorial (its key excerpt linked here) was charged with being "anti-Semitic." [SUNG, E., 11-02-01]
In 2001, Michael Lopez-Calderon, a non-Jewish social studies teacher at Hebrew Academy's Rabbi Alexander S. Gross High School in Miami, made the news when he was fired for posting anti-Israel comments at a pro-Palestinian web site, Palestine Media Watch. "Lopez-Calderon, a non-Catholic Cuban-American who believes Israel is oppressing the Palestinians, said the trouble began when he heard other teachers make what he felt were callous comments on the fatal shooting of a Palestinian teenager. 'It broke me,' he said." [TALLAHASSEE DEMOCRAT, 3-10-01]
Also in 2001, the publisher of the Oneida Daily Dispatch (New York) fired its two top editors (Jean Ryan and Dale Seth) for an editorial that local Jewish lawyer, Randy Schaal, didn't like. Alerting the local Jewish Community Federation of Mohawk Valley, the Jewish lobby began to pressure the newspaper. The editorial (its key excerpt linked here) was charged with being "anti-Semitic." [SUNG, E., 11-02-01]
In 1990, the New York Times noted that "a Harvard divinity professor's verbal attacks on Jews, Judaism and Israel led to his dismissal as chief editor of the Dead Sea Scrolls." Dr. John Strugnell was quoted by an Israeli journalist as declaring that Judaism was "originally racist," it was "not a higher religion," and that modern Israel "is founded on a lie, or at least a premise that cannot be sustained." Most of these observations, as this volume meticulously evidences, are undeniably true. The crime is to speak them freely. Strugnell was dismissed by the Times as having a rumored "drinking problem" and a "mental condition." Laurence Schiffman, a professor of Hebrew and Judaic Studies at New York University, told the newspaper that "Here comes a custodian of these materials and [he] drenches the scrolls in the blood of the victims of anti-Semitism. How can we have confidence in the fairness and scholarship of a man who comes to the material with such deeply ingrained prejudices, prejudices which are repugnant to most of his colleagues, both Christians and Jews." [WILFORD, J.N., 12-12-90, p. A14]
In 2001, a scientific journal published an article that assailed both Jewish (the "Chosen People") and Zionist dogma. The journal was pressured so heavily by Jews that it quickly sought to rip out the article in its already published volume. As London'sGuardian noted:
"A keynote research paper showing that Middle Eastern Jews and Palestinians
are genetically almost identical has been pulled from a leading journal. Academics
who have already received copies of Human Immunology have been urged to
rip out the offending pages and throw them away. Such a drastic act of
self-censorship is unprecedented in research publishing and has created widespread
disquiet, generating fears that it may involve the suppression of scientific work
that questions Biblical dogma. 'I have authored several hundred scientific papers,
some for Nature and Science, and this has nver happened to me before,' said
the article's lead author, Spanish geneticist Professor Antonio Arnaiz-Villena,
of Complutense University in Madrid. 'I am stunned' ... In common with
earlier studies, the team found no data to support the idea that Jewish people
were genetically different from other people in the region. In doing so, the
team's research challenges claims that Jews are a special, chosen people
and that Judaism can only be inherited ... [Human Immunology's] editor
told the journal Nature last week that she was threatened by mass resignations
from members if she did not retract the article." [McKie, R., 11-25-01]
In 2001, a scientific journal published an article that assailed both Jewish (the "Chosen People") and Zionist dogma. The journal was pressured so heavily by Jews that it quickly sought to rip out the article in its already published volume. As London'sGuardian noted:
"A keynote research paper showing that Middle Eastern Jews and Palestinians
are genetically almost identical has been pulled from a leading journal. Academics
who have already received copies of Human Immunology have been urged to
rip out the offending pages and throw them away. Such a drastic act of
self-censorship is unprecedented in research publishing and has created widespread
disquiet, generating fears that it may involve the suppression of scientific work
that questions Biblical dogma. 'I have authored several hundred scientific papers,
some for Nature and Science, and this has nver happened to me before,' said
the article's lead author, Spanish geneticist Professor Antonio Arnaiz-Villena,
of Complutense University in Madrid. 'I am stunned' ... In common with
earlier studies, the team found no data to support the idea that Jewish people
were genetically different from other people in the region. In doing so, the
team's research challenges claims that Jews are a special, chosen people
and that Judaism can only be inherited ... [Human Immunology's] editor
told the journal Nature last week that she was threatened by mass resignations
from members if she did not retract the article." [McKie, R., 11-25-01]
In England, in 1991, the Board of Deputies of British Jews announced that they "may take legal action against Bob Beckman, the financial adviser, if he repeats 'anti-Jewish' comments in his weekly business bulletin. Mr. Beckman, who once advised LBC radio listeners on shares, was cautioned by the financial watchdog Fimbra after the Board of Deputies of British Jews complained about his inflammatory anti-Zionist comments in his financial newsletter." According to a BDBJ complainer, a whole issue of Beckman's publication was devoted to "Jewish conspiracy theory in the financial sphere." The BDBJ said that Beckman's writings constitute "incitement to racial hatred" and thereby subject to action via the Race Relations Act." [THE TIMES (OF LONDON), 4-21-91]
In 1990, someone at the Dartmouth Review -- an ideologically conservative newspaper at Dartmouth College -- secretly inserted an anti-Jewish quote by Adolf Hitler into the paper's masthead as an act of sabotage. The resultant furor drew a letter of complaint to the paper from a Jewish Congressman from California, Mel Levine, signed by 83 other Congressmen. The Review's President and two staff members were forced to resign. Dartmouth trustee Dinah D'Souza ultimately attacked the President of Dartmouth College, James Freedman, who is Jewish, for his handling of the matter. Freedman, complained D'Souza, was a "bully ... who had contributed to a lynch mob mentality on campus." [BAKER, p. 6]
In 1990 Jewish journalists, editors, and publishers from around the world gathered in Jerusalem for the Third International Conference of Jewish Media to address worldwide issues and concerns in their community. Among the concerns were these: "To what extent can [Jewish journalists] be critical of Israel? How should they play articles that reflect poorly on Israel?" Gary Rosenblatt, an editor of Jewish newspapers in Baltimore, Detroit, and Atlanta remarked that "I once heard an editor say that [the totalitarian Russian communist newspaper] Pravda has more independence than Jewish newspapers ... In some [United Jewish Appeal-sponsored] federation newspapers, you would be hard pressed to find a critical letter [to the editor] about the federation or about Israel." [KEINOW, p. 22] A Jewish freelance journalist from Santiago, Chile -- Patricia Politzer -- complained that
"I lived 16 years under a dictatorship in Chile and I am amazed to hear
things [at this conference] that I heard in Chile under [dictator]
Pinochet." [KEINON, p. 22]
Politzer was referring to the likes of Michelin Ratzerdorfer, the editor of Amit magazine. Ratzerdorfer, noted the Jewish Week, asserted "that journalistic integrity must be redefined for Jewish journalists. Before putting pen to paper, Jewish newspaper editors and writers must ask themselves whether what they write will harm Israel, and whether they have the 'moral right' to write critical editorials." [KEINON, p. 22] A good example of the censorial basis of the conference occurred in Jerusalem the same year as the journalistic gathering; efforts to stifle free speech were evidenced in the case of the Jerusalem Post, the only English language newspaper in Israel (and crucially important for that reason), which was purchased by Hollinger, a Canadian media group that installed publisher Yehuda Levy. The managing editor, David Landau, and 29 other Post staff members soon demanded that Levy be fired for his editorial premise of "a special responsibility to protect Israel's image." Instead, all 30 protesting staffers were fired with a half-hour notice, and Levy was retained.
"Journalism is an act of the spirit and that spirit has to be free," said departing Managing Editor Landau, "This seems to have been lost on Mr. Levy, and our hope was that in the course of time Mr. Levy would come to understand the special nature of a newspaper in a free society. But those hopes have not been realized -- quite the contrary." [JEWISH WEEK, 1-26-90, p. 20]
In 2001, Jews gathered for a "special program for student journalists sponsored by the Jewish Agency for Israel and the World Zionist Organization at the General Assembly of the United Jewish Communities." "Do Jewish journalists have more obligations than others?," asked the Jewish Bulletin of Northern California,"Are they responsible first to their communities, and do they need to represent Israel in their newspapers?" [RAGOLSKY, H., 11-23-01] "On campus there is already so much anti-Israel sentiment that we have to be careful about any additional criticism against Israel," Marita Gringaus told a reporter,
"This is our responsibility as Jews, which obviously contradicts our responsibilities
as journalists." [RAGOLSKY, H., 11-23-01]
"I'm a Jew before I'm a journalist," added Uzi Safanov, a reporter for Long Island University's school newspaper,
"before someone pays me to write. If I find a negative thing about Israel, I
will not print it and I will sink into why did it happen and what can I do to
change it." ("If he eventually wrote about negative incidents that happen to
Israel," added the Jewish Bulletin, "he would try to find the way 'to shift the
blame.'" [RAGOLSKY, H., 11-23-01]
In 2001, Debbie Ducrocq, the managing editor of the Kansas City Jewish Chronicle, was fired for printing a letter to the editor that was critical of Israel. Also, her "Conservative rabbi denounced her at shul and she had had to remove her children from a Chabad Sunday school." [ELLIS, C., 3-16-01, p. 8] That same year, Jewish poets Chana Bloch and Chana Kronfeld were assailed by fellow Jews for briefly criticizing Israel at a poetry reading at the bastion of the "free speech" movement in America: Berkeley, California. "As an Israeli," remarked Chana Kronfeld after ten angry people walked out on her, "I'm used to hearing people argue, but this was really extraordinary. I was really shocked and offended by the reaction. I really couldn't believe that in a place like Berkeley or wherever there is a Jewish community that values open speech, that a five-minute statement could cause that kind of rude, vocal interruption." [ESKENAZI, J., 5-18-01]
In 2001, Jews gathered for a "special program for student journalists sponsored by the Jewish Agency for Israel and the World Zionist Organization at the General Assembly of the United Jewish Communities." "Do Jewish journalists have more obligations than others?," asked the Jewish Bulletin of Northern California,"Are they responsible first to their communities, and do they need to represent Israel in their newspapers?" [RAGOLSKY, H., 11-23-01] "On campus there is already so much anti-Israel sentiment that we have to be careful about any additional criticism against Israel," Marita Gringaus told a reporter,
"This is our responsibility as Jews, which obviously contradicts our responsibilities
as journalists." [RAGOLSKY, H., 11-23-01]
"I'm a Jew before I'm a journalist," added Uzi Safanov, a reporter for Long Island University's school newspaper,
"before someone pays me to write. If I find a negative thing about Israel, I
will not print it and I will sink into why did it happen and what can I do to
change it." ("If he eventually wrote about negative incidents that happen to
Israel," added the Jewish Bulletin, "he would try to find the way 'to shift the
blame.'" [RAGOLSKY, H., 11-23-01]
In 2001, Debbie Ducrocq, the managing editor of the Kansas City Jewish Chronicle, was fired for printing a letter to the editor that was critical of Israel. Also, her "Conservative rabbi denounced her at shul and she had had to remove her children from a Chabad Sunday school." [ELLIS, C., 3-16-01, p. 8] That same year, Jewish poets Chana Bloch and Chana Kronfeld were assailed by fellow Jews for briefly criticizing Israel at a poetry reading at the bastion of the "free speech" movement in America: Berkeley, California. "As an Israeli," remarked Chana Kronfeld after ten angry people walked out on her, "I'm used to hearing people argue, but this was really extraordinary. I was really shocked and offended by the reaction. I really couldn't believe that in a place like Berkeley or wherever there is a Jewish community that values open speech, that a five-minute statement could cause that kind of rude, vocal interruption." [ESKENAZI, J., 5-18-01]
As evidenced here, efforts by many in the Jewish community to censor free speech and revise (and/or control) history are varied, well-funded and widespread. In America, a central organizational player in efforts to limit intellectual discourse (with its $50 million a year budget), particularly regarding Jews and Israel, is the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith. "It is," says Robert Friedman, "the most powerful Jewish organization in America. [It attempts] to determine what should be taught in our nation's schools, what should be read in our nation's libraries, and what should be publicly discussed about Israel at public forums. Through its 31 offices across the country, the ADL monitors school curricula, library acquisition lists, and public conferences and symposiums, working behind the scenes to stifle intellectual freedom." [FRIEDMAN, p. 34] (Jewish author Paul Krassner even writes that "When I originally met [Jewish publisher] Lyle [Stuart] in 1953, he had published an article in The Independent about how the Anti-Defamation League was secretly subsidizing anti-Semitic publications and then using them to scare contributions out of wealthy Jews.") [KRASSNER, P., 1993, p. 225]
Joan Mandel, a Jewish filmmaker, notes the stratagems of censorship used by the ADL when it comes to documentary films about Israel:
"[The ADL] equate[s] criticism of Israel and support for Palestinian
rights with anti-Semitism. ADL tactics feature: warnings to institutions
to ban screenings of 'anti-Semitic' films, and the preparation of 'fact
sheets' distributed to members of local Jewish organizations to condemn
films and filmmakers at public screening, and to use in protesting TV
programs. ADL 'vigilance' campaigns include targeting Jews and Israelis
who oppose the Israeli occupation or who actively support Palestinian
rights. The ADL has set up a model of censorship that other mainstream
Jewish organizations -- the Council for Jewish Federations, the American
Jewish Committee, and the Jewish Community Relations Councils --
follow." [MANDELL, p. 191]
The ADL has even regularly tried to defame and censor fellow Jew Noam Chomsky, an outspoken critic of Israel and Jewish chauvinism. Chomsky complained that
"When I give a talk at a university or elsewhere, it is common for a group
to distribute literature, invariably unsigned, containing a collection of
attacks on me spiced with 'quotes' (generally fabricated) from what I
am alleged to have said here and there. I have no doubt that the source
is the Anti-Defamation League and often the people distributing the
unsigned literature acknowledge the fact. These practices are vicious
and serve to intimidate many people. They are of course not illegal. If
the ADL chooses to behave in this fashion, it has a right to do so; but
this should also be exposed." [CURTISS, p. 31]
Ostensibly a "civil rights organization," and massively integrated into the American socio-cultural fabric as such, the ADL's central purpose is to combat "anti-Semitism" (as it widely defines it) and protect Israel and Jewish mythologies from critical attack. Founded in 1913, "the ADL," notes Friedman, "has successfully masqueraded as a civil rights organization concerned with the civil rights of all Americans." [FRIEDMAN, p. 37] For decades it has functioned as a kind of private FBI, commissioning "independent contractors" as spies to infiltrate large numbers of American organizations throughout the political spectrum. "In many instances," wrote eventual ADL Director Abraham Foxman (who is reported to keep a portrait of seminal right-wing Zionist Vladimir Jabotinsky in his office), [FRIEDMAN, p. 38] "our agents were employed by an outside investigation agency operating as an independent contractor." [FRIEDMAN, p. 37] As noted by the Washington Post, a former ADL General Counsel, Arnold Forster, had earlier admitted "that he was often a 'source' for the Mossad -- Israel's CIA." [MCGEE, p. 12] "Foreign minister Yitzhak Shamir [has disclosed]," wrote Ignacio Klich in 1986, "that the ADL coordinates its activities with Jerusalem diplomats more than any other United States-based organization." [KLICH, p. 38] In 1948, says Robert Friedman,"the ADL set up a joint intelligence-gathering operation with the government of Israel, an activity that seems to raise questions about its charitable, tax-exempt status." [FRIEDMAN, p. 38] With the founding of the state of Israel in 1948, says former national ADL director Benjamin Epstein, "we have maintained an information-gathering operation since 1948 relating to activities emanating from the Arab Consular offices, Arab United Nations Delegations, Arab Information Center, Arab Refugee Offices, and the Organization of Arab Students." [FRIEDMAN, p. 38]
For decades the ADL's spying tended to be upon right-wing groups, but in recent decades it has equally monitored others across the political spectrum, any group or individual that expresses what the ADL perceives to be anti-Israel, or of course anti-Jewish, opinion, both generically deemed "anti-Semitic." "During the spring of 1971," notes Jack Porter, "the ADL mounted a campaign against a number of groups -- Physicians for Social Responsibility, the Medical Committee for Human Rights, and the Student Health Organizations which called for better medical service in the ghettos and the restructuring of the 'health industry.' The ADL implied that these groups were anti-Semitic. The Jewish Left responded that rather than combating anti-Semitism, the ADL was creating it where there was none." [PORTER, p. xxxix] The ADL has also over the years shared information with the FBI and the Commerce Department "which reviews the files of applicants for government jobs, searching for 'subversives.'" [FRIEDMAN, p. 37] According to Henry Schwarzchild, an ADL official from 1962-64, the ADL even spied on Martin Luther King, Jr. and passed surveillance information about him to the FBI. [FRIEDMAN, p. 38]
In 1983 the ADL published the names of fellow Jews (and 27 non-Jews) Rabbi Elmer Berger, Edmund Hanauer, Mark Lane, Alfred Lilienthal, Haviv Shieber, Israel Shahak, and Grace Halsell for disseminating "pro-Arab propaganda" in America. "Since I have earned my living as a writer since my high school days," wrote Halsell, "it came as a surprise to learn that a Jewish organization chose, unilaterally and arbitrarily, to classify me not as a reporter, journalist, or writer, but rather as a propagandist." [HALSELL, p. 20]
In 1994 the ADL mounted a major public relations attack on the "Christian Right" in America with a document called The Assault on Tolerance and Pluralism in America. The attack was so extreme and misguided that it engendered an extraordinary response from Jewish conservatives: 75 "neo-conservative" Jews, in a paid newspaper ad, accused the ADL of assailing others "whose only crime seems to be the seriousness with which they act on their Christian convictions." [SILK, p. 298]
In April 1993 the ADL found itself embroiled in a much-publicized scandal that threatened to completely destroy its public image as a righteous civil rights organization. An FBI investigation into the activities of an "art dealer," Roy Bullock, and Tom Gerard, a San Francisco police officer and former CIA employee, particularly regarding the selling of information to the South African government about American anti-apartheid activists, led a police investigation to the Anti-Defamation League. The same anti-apartheid activist information was being sold to both the South African government and the ADL. It was then discovered that Bullock had for years been on the payroll of the ADL as a spy, carefully distanced as an "independent contractor." Bullock testified to the San Francisco police that the main client for his "information business" was the ADL, and the he worked full-time for them, working under "fact-finding" director Irwin Suall. Bullock's task "was to amass information -- heaps of it, from physical descriptions to birth dates to press clippings, anything that might one day become handy -- about 'potential' anti-Semites." [KALMANOFSKY, p. 42] The ADL directed him to infiltrate about thirty Arab-American and other organizations described as right or left wing. Bullock also sifted through garbage cans for phone numbers, mailing lists, bank balances, and group correspondence. Automobile license numbers were recorded at organization meetings and passed along to Tom Gerard who provided Bullock -- and thereby the ADL -- with the names, addresses, and driver's license information of their owners.
Bullock was paid $29,150 by the ADL in 1992 alone, and $169,375 between July 1985 and February 1993. To distance him as far as possible from the ADL, his salary was channeled through a Los Angeles attorney, Bruce Hochman, a former President of the Los Angeles Jewish Federation and a former member ADL board member. KALMANOFSKY, p. 43 When facing legal problems for his "monitoring" activities, the ADL spent over $100,000 to help him in his defense. [KALMANOFSKY, p. 64]
Police investigators discovered that Bullock had 1,363 computer files with the names of 12,000 individuals categorized as "Arabs," "Pinkos," "Rights," and "Skins." Files were maintained for the Earth Institute environmental organization, the American Civil Liberties Union, the Arab Democratic Club, New Jewish Agenda, the Asian Law Caucus, among many others. Upon raiding ADL offices, San Francisco police found there -- among other mountains of material -- copies of confidential law enforcement reports, fingerprint cards, driver's license photographs, and individual crime records from classified police sources. [MCGEE, p. A1]
The kinds of material confiscated by police from the ADL office, and the publicized results of Bullock's and Gerard's conversations with police, wrote Jeremy Kalmanofsky in the Jewish Moment magazine, "gives the appearance that the ADL spies on everyone with whom it disagrees, including left- and right-wing Jewish groups. America for Peace Now, the New Jewish Agenda, and Israelis Against Occupation appeared in Bullock's files, as did the Jewish Defense League. Bullock also kept information about Greenpeace; KQED, the [San Francisco] Bay Area's public television station; and the anti-nuclear group SANE-FREEZE. Bullock's list also includes under the category "pinkos" many groups that are critical of Israel or that favor a Palestinian state but are not overtly antisemitic." [KALMANOFSKY, p. 43]
In an editorial about the ADL scandal, the Los Angeles Times expressed shock at the breadth of ADL "monitoring" activities:
"It is no surprise that the ADL has kept close tabs on individuals and
groups of all stripes in hate and violence, such as the KKK and the
White Aryan Resistance. But why has the ADL collected information
the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People,
Greenpeace, Mills College of Oakland, the board of directors of San
Francisco public television station KQED, the United Farm Workers,
Los Angeles Times correspondent Scott Kraft and several members of
Congress?" [LA TIMES, 4-14-93]
"The ethics of the whole ADL fact finding operation grows more ambiguous," noted Jeremy Kalmanofsky, "when you consider the League's monitoring of critics of Israel ... when an organization claims, as the ADL does, that it is dedicated to civil rights for all minorities, and yet monitors Arab-Americans for their opposition to Israel, it raises questions of how its various missions can be compatible." [KALMANOFSKY, p. 63] "A long time ago," explained Kenneth Bialkin, an ADL director from 1982-86, "we came to view that many anti-Israel people use that as a shield for anti-Semitism. Not to say that everyone does, but anti-Israel bias is something we expose whether or not it's anti-Semitic." [KALMANOFSKY, p. 63]
"The ADL's strategy to defend itself [against all charges]," says Kalmonfsky, "was a siege mentality, describing the crisis as an 'antisemitic Big Lie,' referring reporters to 80 years of ADL history and rarely discussing the details of the Bullock case." [KALMANOFSKY, p. 64] The ADL General Counsel, Abraham Foxman, reported the Washington Post, "called such questions about ADL's conduct 'anti-Semitism.'" "I'm sorry if it offends people," declared Foxman, "This is far reaching. We see a conspiracy. I see a conspiracy. It's out there ... It's proved every day." [MCGEE] Afforded space in an Op-Ed article in the New York Times entitled "It's a Big Lie, Hailed By Anti-Semites," Foxman insisted that the scandal surrounding his organization was "on one level ... simply a question of media irresponsibility. But there is likely something else going on in some circles, something more sinister -- something requiring more analysis. In a recent ADL public opinion poll on anti-Semitism, one of the most disturbing findings was that more than 30% believe Jews have too much power." [FOXMAN]
The Jewish community at-large rallied to the ADL's defense against criminal charges. "With virtual unanimity -- from the Orthodox Union to Americans for Peace Now," reported Jeremy Kalmanofsky, "the Jewish world has circled the wagons around ADL, defending its past work and urging it to stay its course." [KALMANOFSKY, p. 62]
Meanwhile, former United States Congressman Pete McCloskey led a law suit against the ADL by 19 monitored individuals, including peace activist Yigal Arens, son of a former Israeli defense minister, Moshe Arens. [FELDMAN, p. A3] A coalition of Arab-Americans listed in ADL surveillance files also filed suit, charging that the Jewish organization invaded their privacy and passed along information about them to the governments of Israel and South Africa. "The ADL wanted information on the ADC [Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee],"reported the Washington Post, a group that challenges defamatory Arab stereotypes, because it considered the organization 'a highly active pro-Palestinian propaganda group." [MCGEE, p. A12] Another lawsuit against the ADL by individuals and groups included former California Lieutenant Governor Mervyn Dymally, former Los Angeles City Councilman Robert Farrell, the National Conference of Black Lawyers, the Bay Area Anti-Apartheid Network, the American Indian Movement, the National Lawyer's Guild, the Coalition Against Police Abuse, and the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador." [REICH]
A huge break for the ADL legal defense occurred when a San Francisco civil court ruled that the Jewish organization was somehow entitled to the "journalists' shield law," protecting them from contempt of court for refusing to release requested information. Not long after, the San Francisco District Attorney completely dropped its investigation into the ADL's illegal spying activities. In a "negotiated settlement," the ADL's punishment was to pay up to $50,000 in reward money to solve hate crimes, and another $25,000 "to train [San Francisco chief prosecutor Arlo] Smith's prosecutors how to teach schoolchildren about the evils of bigotry." [PADDOCK, p. A32]
Those who had been subject to ADL spying were outraged with a legal resolvement that rendered a "punishment" to be merely a reaffirmation of the ADL's own prior activities and myth of itself. "Members of political groups who said they were spied upon," noted the New York Times, "expressed outrage at the settlement." [NYT, 11-17-93] "Individuals who had been targeted by the ADL," reported the Los Angeles Times, "accused the District Attorney of caving in to political pressure and letting the group off too lightly. Often, ADL critics have said, people were spied upon simply because they took public positions at odds with the state of Israel." [PADDOCK, p. A32] "Not only is there no admission of guilt," complained Riva Enteen, a spokeswoman for a coalition of groups trailed by the ADL, "but it is 'portrayed as good Samaritans waving the flag against bigotry." [NYT, 11-17-93] "This demonstrates once again the enormous clout of the Israeli lobby in America," said former Congressman Pete McCloskey, himself one of those targeting for surveillance by the ADL, "It's an unusual result for what appeared to be an ironclad case. One wonders whether all defendants are treated the same under the law." [PADDOCK, p. A32]
In 2000, however, in a separate case, the ADL lost for the first time a lawsuit brought against it. In Denver, Colorado, the regional ADL was forced by jury trial to pay a non-Jewish couple, William and Dorothy Quigley, $10.5 million. Why? Because the Anti-Defamation League had defamed the couple. The case began when the Quigleys and their Jewish neighbors, the Aronsons, began squabbling. The Jewish couple eventually began regularly taping the Quigleys' private cordless telephone messages: an illegal act. Comments to friends by Dorothy Quigley were deemed by the monitoring Aronsons to be antisemitic, they went to the ADL for help, and the Jewish organization publicly declared the Quigleys to be "anti-Semites." The Quigleys sued the ADL, the Aronsons, and the local District Attorney office that had joined the ADL's presumed anti-bigotry efforts. (The Aronsons and the District Attorney settled out of court). As Jewish journalist J. J. Goldberg noted about the profoundly disturbing Thought Police dimensions to this case, where George Orwell's (Jewish) "Big Brother" is everywhere listening:
"The ADL attacked private citizens for opinions voiced at home among
friends. That's chilling." [KARFELD, M., 5-19-2000, p. 24]
(In the private sphere, in 1989 Arthur Green was ordered to pay $5.5 million by a Miami court for driving Denis Rety out of business. Green, a former vice-president of Temple Israel of Greater Miami and an activist in the Greater Miami Jewish Federation, became involved in an argument over whether "a veal chop was too tough" at Rety's restaurant. Green "then wrote a letter accusing Mr. Rety of anti-Semitism threatening to put him out of business, according to court records ... [Green] distributed it to several prominent Jews in the community, including the Mayor and Vice Mayor of Bay Island and the president of a 1,000 member condominium association that has many Jewish members." The court ruled that Green's accusation of anti-Semitic statements from Rety were "completely fabricated.") [ASSOCIATED PRESS, 2-19-99]
(In the private sphere, in 1989 Arthur Green was ordered to pay $5.5 million by a Miami court for driving Denis Rety out of business. Green, a former vice-president of Temple Israel of Greater Miami and an activist in the Greater Miami Jewish Federation, became involved in an argument over whether "a veal chop was too tough" at Rety's restaurant. Green "then wrote a letter accusing Mr. Rety of anti-Semitism threatening to put him out of business, according to court records ... [Green] distributed it to several prominent Jews in the community, including the Mayor and Vice Mayor of Bay Island and the president of a 1,000 member condominium association that has many Jewish members." The court ruled that Green's accusation of anti-Semitic statements from Rety were "completely fabricated.") [ASSOCIATED PRESS, 2-19-99]
Meanwhile, on go the widespread ADL socialization activities against "intolerance." Even as ADL spying was brought to light in the early months of 1993, the Los Angeles Times noted that "more than 100 southern California public school teachers attended the ADL's free 'World of Difference' human relations clinic." [FELDMAN, A32] This program to socialize people to multicultural tolerance in a framework most advantageous to Jews and the state of Israel has "trained" over 110,000 public school teachers, over 70,000 employees from 100 different companies, and staff and students at over 400 colleges. "Literally millions of people around the world have been reached by the program," said Abraham Foxman," and educated in the values it fosters." [FOXMAN, p. 321] At an April fund-raising luncheon, even as the scandal was about to become publicized, at the Century Plaza Hotel in Los Angeles, former United States Defense Secretary and later vice-presidential candidate Dick Cheney received the ADL's "Distinguished Public Service Award." (The ADL's omnipresence, influence, and/or dominance, in molding public opinion to its own perspectives about "prejudice" may be noted in the case of Richard Lobenthal, for 32 years the head of the Michigan Chapter of the ADL, who was appointed in 1997 to be the interim executive director of Michigan's American Civil Liberties Union. [SHEPARDSON, p. C5]
In 2001, an ADL Board Member, Carl Pearlston noted the destructive influence of the propaganda organization upon the American community. Pearlstein parted company with the Jewish group after 25 years of activism. "The program for changing hearts and minds," he wrote,
"A World of Difference, was created in 1985 to change prejudiced feelings
'sensitivity training.' It is reportedly very successful, highly commended, and
widely used by governmental agencies and many companies. Unfortunately,
my exposure to the program at a leadership conference indicated that
teaching the values of diversity, multiculturalism, and cultural relativism
resulted in denigrating the values of diversity, multiculturalism, and cultural
relativism resulted in the denigrating the values and achievements of Western
civilization and the desireability of a common American identity. There is
now a nationwide industry of multicultural activists teaching various 'sensitivity'
programs which increase awareness of racial identity, and result in racial
separation and racial hostility." [PEARLSTEIN, C., 6-4-00]
In 2001, the national Anti-Defamation League director, Abraham Foxman, was caught up in a major scandal when he wrote a letter to President Clinton requesting a pardon for fugitive Jewish American criminal Marc Rich. Rich, an ardent supporter of Israel, had given ADL $100,000 shortly before Foxman decided to appeal to the president in Rich's behalf. [BLOMQUIST, B., 3-24-01] Even Jewish New York Times columnist William Safire suggested that Foxman resign over his ethical blunder.
(In Australia, newspaper columnist Heather Brown expressed alarm about the new "Racewatch" organization created in 1998. Instituted by Community Aid Abroad and B'nai B'rith --the ADL's parent organization -- it sought to enlist volunteersto report instances of "racist" comments made by anyone. Such comments would then be reviewed and enter a database to smear the alleged speakers at a later date. "Racewatch," worried Brown, "lays the groundwork for the creation of blacklists and outright character assassination." In a politically-correct world where virtually anything can offend someone else, and where some consider "assimilationist policy" itself to be "racist," what exactly, wondered Brown, is a "racist" comment anyway? "It would seem," added Brown, "that Racewatch is a dangerous invention, the beast that can consume the very lamb it was to protect. Have we really reached the level of the Brownshirts, of private armies of secret, appointed pimps ready to snoop and spy? ... The thought of a secret army being specifically created to spy on its fellow citizens underlines one frightening truth: Australia, 1998, is no longer the kind of place I thought I was living in.") [BROWN, H., 8-15-98]
In 2001, an ADL Board Member, Carl Pearlston noted the destructive influence of the propaganda organization upon the American community. Pearlstein parted company with the Jewish group after 25 years of activism. "The program for changing hearts and minds," he wrote,
"A World of Difference, was created in 1985 to change prejudiced feelings
'sensitivity training.' It is reportedly very successful, highly commended, and
widely used by governmental agencies and many companies. Unfortunately,
my exposure to the program at a leadership conference indicated that
teaching the values of diversity, multiculturalism, and cultural relativism
resulted in denigrating the values of diversity, multiculturalism, and cultural
relativism resulted in the denigrating the values and achievements of Western
civilization and the desireability of a common American identity. There is
now a nationwide industry of multicultural activists teaching various 'sensitivity'
programs which increase awareness of racial identity, and result in racial
separation and racial hostility." [PEARLSTEIN, C., 6-4-00]
In 2001, the national Anti-Defamation League director, Abraham Foxman, was caught up in a major scandal when he wrote a letter to President Clinton requesting a pardon for fugitive Jewish American criminal Marc Rich. Rich, an ardent supporter of Israel, had given ADL $100,000 shortly before Foxman decided to appeal to the president in Rich's behalf. [BLOMQUIST, B., 3-24-01] Even Jewish New York Times columnist William Safire suggested that Foxman resign over his ethical blunder.
(In Australia, newspaper columnist Heather Brown expressed alarm about the new "Racewatch" organization created in 1998. Instituted by Community Aid Abroad and B'nai B'rith --the ADL's parent organization -- it sought to enlist volunteers
In the current celebrity field, everyone from media mogul Ted Turner to author Gore Vidal to actor Marlon Brando to South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu have been subjected to the accusation of anti-Semitism by Jewish lobbying organizations. (In 1984 Lucy Dawidowicz told the World Jewish Congress that Tutu was an anti-Semite and that Jews should not back his efforts to end apartheid in South Africa. [ROIPHE, p. 20] Tutu's "crime" was to have accused Israel of complicity in South Africa's suffocation of its Black populace.) Jewish singer Eddie Fisher declares in his autobiography that Arthur Godfrey, once "the host of radio's most important amateur talent contest," was also anti-Semitic. [FISHER, E., 1999, p. 10]
In 1997, Marlon Brando was attacked by the ADL for remarks he made about Jews controlling Hollywood during an interview on Larry King's TV show. The (Jewish) Forward noted that "Brando made his tearful apology for uttering anti-Jewish canards on the Larry King show at Rabbi Hier's Museum of Tolerance." [FORWARD, 11-14-97, p. 14] "The surprise," says Washington Post reporter Megan Rosenfeld, "is that Brando is not the only entertainer to have revealed his hidden depth of ignorance regarding Jews." [ROSENFELD, p. G1] She adds pop star Michael Jackson, country singer Dolly Parton, TV personality Kathy Lee Gifford, and Whoopi Goldberg to the anti-Semitic list. In 1998, singer Shirley Bassey ("Goldfinger," etc.) had to "appear in court to answer allegations that she slapped an employee [Hilard Levy] and called her a 'Jewish bitch.'" [URQUHART, p. 3] The alleged incident happened five years earlier on the occasion of Levy being fired. For controversial former chess champion, Bobby Fischer (whose mother was Jewish), in 1992 there were media "reports characterizing him as anti-Semitic." [ASSOCIATED PRESS, 9-1-92] In 1999, in Hungary, says the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Fischer
"launched into an anti-Semitic rant during a rare live interview ...
Fischer also claimed that Jews had invented the Holocaust to make
money ... When the interview was later repeated, Fischer's anti-Semitic
comments were omitted." [BOHM, A., 2-2099, p. 12]
In the religious sphere, Father Paul Marx (of Jewish heritage?), the head of the anti-abortion organization Human Life International, found himself in trouble when, as Rabbi Daniel Lapin notes, he "cited a factually correct detail about the Jewish community. He noted the prominence of Jews in the pro-abortion movement. For this he was accused of anti-Semitism; he is now regularly picketed by Jewish groups wherever he speaks." (Even Jewish Boston Herald columnist Don Feder notes that a third of the organizations listed on the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice letterhead are Jewish). [LAPIN, D., 1999, p. 304] In 1999, the founder of the Moral Majority, Jerry Falwell, was publicly assailed for suggesting that the anti-Christ ("a full-grown counterfeit of Christ") will probably be Jewish. [WEISS, J., 1-24-99, p. 16A]
In 1998, hockey legend Bobby Hull found himself in hot water for comments he supposedly made to the Moscow Times in defense of Adolf Hitler. Hull, who was interviewed by a Russian reporter with the aid of a translator, reportedly praised Hitler in the context of remarks he made about cattle breeding. Hull claimed that what he said was completely twisted out of context and misrepresented, and another Russian translator present during the interview, Svetlana Murashkina, supported Hull's version of the incident. To repair his career as a public figure, Hull inevitably had to make the familiar Pilgrimage to the usual place in search of Forgiveness. "Bobby Hull," noted a Minneapolis newspaper, "has asked for, and been granted, a meeting with the Canadian Jewish leaders to explain pro-Hitler remarks attributed to him by the Moscow Times." [STAR-TRIBUNE, 8-29-98, p. 26]
In 2001, Joaquim Agut, chairman of the Terra Lycos Internet company, was accused of making anti-Semitic statements at a business meeting. According to a financial journalist, Augut asserted that Jews "have always tried to cheat me" and that he had Mafia acquaintances who could "take care of them." Agut denied the allegations. An unidentified "Wall Street analyst" told a reporter that "If Jewish organizations come down hard on this incident, the leadership structure at Terra Lycos will again be up in the air." [HELFT, D., 3-9-01 The same year, Ariel Musicant, president of Austria's Jewish community and owner of a giant real estate investment company, announced that he planned "to sue [Joerg] Haider for what he terms the politician's anti-Semitic attacks. Musicant told [Israeli newspaper] Ha'aretz that Haider is conducting an "'anti-Semitic strategy' -- a crime for which, under Austrian law, the maximum penalty is 10 years in prison ... The immediate cause of Musikant's suit is a statement Haider made at a Freedom Party rally two weeks ago. 'I don't understand how a man with the name of Ariel can be encrusted with so much dirt,' Haider told the 2,000 people present, playing on the fact that Ariel is also the name of a well-known Austrian cleaning supply company." [EITTINGER, Y., 3-11-01] Among Haider's defenders was a Jewish member, Peter Sichrovsky, of Haider's Freedom Party. Two of Sichrovsky's grandparents were killed at Auschwitz. "If Jews say [Haider is] a Nazi, which is ridiculous," Sichrovsky told the New York Times, "he can retort with cynical jokes about the Jews." [COHEN, R., 3-25-01]
In 2001, Joaquim Agut, chairman of the Terra Lycos Internet company, was accused of making anti-Semitic statements at a business meeting. According to a financial journalist, Augut asserted that Jews "have always tried to cheat me" and that he had Mafia acquaintances who could "take care of them." Agut denied the allegations. An unidentified "Wall Street analyst" told a reporter that "If Jewish organizations come down hard on this incident, the leadership structure at Terra Lycos will again be up in the air." [HELFT, D., 3-9-01
In 1986 Gore Vidal wrote an article in the Nation that impugned Norman Podhoretz and his wife Midge Decter as examples of prominent Jews whose loyalty -- to Vidal's sensibilities -- leaned clearly towards Israel over America. Podhoretz used his editorship of the periodical Commentary, published by the American Jewish Committee, to brand Vidal's article as a classic example of anti-Semitism, "the most blatantly anti-Semitic outburst to have appeared in a respectable American periodical since World War II." [PODHORETZ] Podhortetz then wrote letters to thirty "liberal friends of the Nation," seeking unified protest against Vidal's piece. Twenty-one of Podhoretz's targets ignored his appeal entirely. Of the nine who responded, "six disapproved of [Vidal's] article; three resented Podhoretz's letter ... two saw no anti-Semitism in the piece." [BUCKLEY, NR, JE 6, 86; EDITORS, 1986]
In 1996 Ted Turner was publicly reprimanded by the ADL on two occasions for calling fellow media mogul, Rupert Murdoch, a "Nazi" and "like the late Fuhrer." The ADL's formal complaint had nothing to do with the insult to Murdoch (neither Turner nor Murdoch are Jewish). The ADL demanded that the word "Nazi" had a special meaning to Jews and should not be so trivialized. To ward off Jewish harassment, Turner apologized to the ADL on both occasions. [ADL ONLINE, 10-24-96, 10-2-96] In 1999, in a similar incident, the publisher of a professional football magazine, the Official Dallas Cowboys Weekly formally apologized (after a complaint by the Zionist Organization of America) for an article that called Washington Redskin owner Daniel Snyder "Hitler" and a "dictator." [ASSOCIATED PRESS, 9-28-99] Snyder was also Jewish.
In this regard, Jews jealously guard not only the term but the concept of "Nazi" as exclusive Jewish political capital. In 1997, there were objections to an anti-union poster using Nazi-like cartoon characters by the Santa Monica (California) Miramar Hotel. "Several Jewish and Santa Monica leaders," noted a local Jewish newspaper, "... angrily marched into the hotel ... [and] demanded to speak to someone in charge." [PFEFFERSON] In 2000, Michael Weinstein, president of the AIDS Healthcare Foundation, also charged that anonymously created posters appearing throughout West Hollywood, California, were anti-Semitic because they called him a "condom Nazi." Weinstein was advocating "mandatory distribution of condoms at bars and restaurants" in largely homosexual West Hollywood. [POOL, B., 1-25-2000, p. B3] In 2000, in England, London mayoral candidate Ken Livingstone
"came under ttack from Britain's Jewish community yesterday after he suggested
that global capitalism had caused more deaths than Hitler. The Board of
Deputies of British Jews described the remarks as 'offensive' while Labour
and Tory opponents said they proved Mr. Livingston was unfit to become
mayor of London. Mr. Livingstone said economists had estimated that in
in any year since 1981, up to 20 million people had died because governments
cut back on health schemes to pay debts. 'Every year the international
finance system kills more people than World War Two. But at least Hitler
was mad, you know?' The comparison provoked an angry reaction from
the Board of Deputies of British Jews." [WAUGH, P., 4-12-00]
"came under ttack from Britain's Jewish community yesterday after he suggested
that global capitalism had caused more deaths than Hitler. The Board of
Deputies of British Jews described the remarks as 'offensive' while Labour
and Tory opponents said they proved Mr. Livingston was unfit to become
mayor of London. Mr. Livingstone said economists had estimated that in
in any year since 1981, up to 20 million people had died because governments
cut back on health schemes to pay debts. 'Every year the international
finance system kills more people than World War Two. But at least Hitler
was mad, you know?' The comparison provoked an angry reaction from
the Board of Deputies of British Jews." [WAUGH, P., 4-12-00]
The Jewish Thought Police has also followed up in publicly policing the use of words in the English language. In 1997 the ADL began pressuring the publisher Random House against adding a new meaning for the world "Nazi" into its upcoming Webster's College Dictionary. The offensive new meaning? Nazi: "A person who is fanatically dedicated to or seeks to control a specific activity, practice, etc." This definition, so offensive to ADL sensibilities, was perhaps recognized to fit too uncomfortably the Jewish lobbying institution itself.
It cannot be denied that the word "Nazi" is used colloquially these days in such a manner and merits inclusion in any dictionary. But for the Jewish Thought Police so intent upon controlling even the meanings of words, anything having to do with the so-called Holocaust is sacred and anything short of a Hitler-style Nazi, frozen in time, is viewed as a trivialization of Jewish Holocaust dogma. According to an ADL press release to explain the group's complaint, Abraham Foxman, the ADL national director, argued that "the role of editor [at Random House is] to inform the public that there should not be a 'jocular' usage of the word Nazi." [ADL ONLINE, 1-13-97] (In an earlier attempt to censor history and language, in 1973 publishers of theOxford English Dictionary were sued for refusal to delete the verb "jew" from the English language -- colloquially widespread to mean "cheat").
By 1989, under regular Jewish lobbying pressure, the Concise Oxford Dictionary's second definition of "Jew" (after "person of Hebrew descent") was sanitized over the years as "person who drives hard bargains, usurer." Some Jews found even this objectionable, despite the dictionary's qualifier noting that the definition was "derogatory" and "racially offensive." The next edition was planned to be changed to accommodate Jewish revisionism even further, to explain that the "deeply offensive" definition "arose from historical associations of Jews as moneylenders in medieval England." Under continued pressure to excise the second definition entirely, S. K. Tulloch, the dictionary's senior assistant editor, noted that the purpose of dictionaries are to "try to record the language as it is used, not as we (or someone else) would like it to be used." [JW, 1-13-89, p. 2] Earlier, in 1982, pressure from the World Jewish Congress in Italy forced the publisher of the Dictionary of the Italian Language to recall all copies of the volume because of definitions of "Jew" and "Judaism" that were "insulting to Jews." [JW, 5-30-82, p. 13] In 1984, Eve Kaplan, founder of the "International Committee of Cross Cultural Relations," lobbied to change a Japanese dictionary's unsatisfactory definition of the word "Jew." [GOODMAN/MASANORI, p.29]
In 1995, after concerted Jewish pressure over a period of months, the publisher of a bible (The Christian Community Bible) in France, described by Jews as having "numerous passages with strong anti-Jewish connotations," announced that it was "withdrawing the book from distribution." [SINGER/SELDIN, 1997, p. 299] After Jewish complaints, in 2001, the verb "jew" was completely excised from the World Book Dictionary. "This was a definition left over from the 60s which we overlooked," said Michael Ross, World Book's publisher. "It's a slangy term, and it doesn't add anything to the body of human knowledge." [LEVINE, S., JUNE/JULY 2001] Then there is Irwin Borowsky. Borowsky, "though not a particularly observant Jew, ... created the American Interfaith Institute, dedicated to 'rethinking relationships among Protestants, Catholics and Jews ... Through books, international symposiums, and a scholarly newsletter, the insitute based at [Borowsky's] Liberty Museum, proposes that hoi Ioudaioi [the original Greek for "Jews" used in the New Testament] be translated not as 'the Jews' but with the equivalents drawn from the scriptural context, such as 'the people' or 'the religious leaders' or 'some Jews.' But most New Testament publishers are resistant. They say they have no right to modigy the word of God ... [O]ne major publisher that shares Borosky's views is the 183-year old American Bible Society, based in New York. Its 1995 Contemporary English Version, pitched to new English-readers, conspicuously avoids 'the Jews' in the problematic passages and substitues alternative terms like 'the leaders of the people.'" [O'REILLY, D., 8-17-01]
In an odd way to prevent the spread of anti-Semitism, in 2000 the Anti-Defamation League bought six potential anti-Semitic World Wide Web domain names, including "kike.com," and "kike.net," so that anti-Semites couldn't have them. [LUM, R., 1-14-2000, p. 1A]
In 1990, Michael Slomich, New England Director of the Jewish Defense League, drew considerable media attention in leading protests against the Hull, Massachusetts, community because of a series of old swastika designs in the tile floor of the Hull Town Hall. The building was built in 1923, years before the Nazis came to power with their appropriation across the world of the ancient symbol for good luck and fertility. The swastika was a popular symbol on picture postcards in America at the turn of the century. The design was even discovered during an archeological dig in the ruins of an ancient synagogue in Israel. "Today tourists looking at these preserved ruins," says M. Hirsch Goldberg, "can also see a swastika -- another demonstration of how symbols change, since the swastika was once a sign of peace." [GOLDBERG, M., 1976, p. 29]
Slomich led a group of complainers through Hull to demand the removal of the tiles, successfully forcing such unwelcome publicity upon the borough that the town council spent over $1500 to have the swastika motif extracted. Some critics felt the Jewish attack was misplaced and even ridiculous. A Native American professor at the nearby University of Massachusetts noted that the swastika was a positive symbol in his own culture; he objected to Jewish demands to excise them. "For many thousands of years, we have known and used that sign [the swastika]...," professor Fox Tree wrote, "We do not have a national people's defense league or access to our own media, television, radio and newspapers to tell our own side of the story." [NEUMAN, E, p. 4-5]
"By destroying the swastikas in the town hall because a minority -- most from out of town -- does not like them, aren't you doing the same as Hitler?" read one anti-JDL petition to leave the swastikas alone. "I've never seen so many anti-Semites come out of the woodwork," declared the JDL's Slomich, in evaluation of the controversy, "It was a victory for us, but I'm upset about the amount of opposition." [NEUMAN, E, p. 4-5]
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