19 (pt. 2)
THE ACCUSATION OF
ANTI-SEMITISM
THE ACCUSATION OF
ANTI-SEMITISM
"A Jewish couple is traveling across the country and get to a small picture-postcard
town. They stop for a bite. In the diner, the waitress makes small talk and finds out
that they're Jewish. She says, 'You know something? We've never had one person
arrested in this town.' The Jewish wife says, 'Really? Is the jail restricted?'"
-- Jewish comedian Milton Berle,
[BERLE, M., 1996, p. 309]
Jewish historical revisionism, demands, and distortion spreads in all directions with self-righteous Jewish activists stepping forward in their respective occupational fields and disciplines to educate their non-Jewish peers against the omnipresent evils of irrational anti-Semitism and to present a favorable Jewish image.
On a smaller, grass roots scale, Jewish efforts to reform history and reality are everywhere. Steven Soifer, for example, in the field of social work, wants to "infuse content about Jews and anti-Semitism" into college social work programs as part of the educational mandate to "educate students about the differences among ethnic, racial, and cultural groups." Soifer's forum for complaint is the Journal of Social Work Education (1991) and here is a sampling of how he "educates" his fellow social workers:
"Jews are an oppressed group in U.S. society." [p. 161]
This assertion, as we shall soon see evidenced in future chapters if anyone needs proof to refute the obvious, by all social, economic, and political measures, is ridiculous. Unless Soifer means that Jews in America are oppressed here by other Jews. In fact, he says as much later: "It is not uncommon for some Jews to perceive themselves as ugly, weak, complaining, pushy, caring too much about money, or being smarter than others. They may also exhibit feelings of powerlessness or attack other Jews for exhibiting supposed stereotypical behavior." [p. 161]
"Falasha or Ethiopian Jews are often the targets of racism and classism as well as anti-Semitism." [p. 162]
Soifer is right. But what he doesn't mention is that the Falasha [Black Jews from Africa] face such discrimination and abuse -- well documented -- at the hands, again, of other (non-Black) Jews -- in Israel, where almost all Falasha are currently living. [See later chapter about Israel.]
"Some ... literature [that has "attempted to address the effects of anti-Semitism on therapy clients"] even appears anti-Semitic in nature ... [arguing] that Jews themselves contributed to the problem of anti-Semitism, thereby blaming the victims of the problem." [p. 157]
Soifer doesn't detail the argument, nor does he mention that the article he cites to illustrate this charge was written by a Jewish author, C.G. Schoenfeld, in The Psychoanalytic Review which itself reflects a field and discourse, as we have already seen, that is predominately Jewish, including the Review's editor, Theodore Reik, who selected the article in question for print. Schoenfeld suggests possible reasons for anti-Semitism that include self-enforced Jewish separatism from non-Jews through history, arrogant Jewish conceits of superiority, and Jewish preoccupation with money. [SCHOENFELD]
"It is important to realize that no one is 'born' Jewish; rather, it is a culturally and religiously acquired identity." [p. 163]
Not only does Orthodox Judaism dictate that one is 'born' a Jew, but the possessor of such an identity -- by traditional religious teachings -- can never leave it (except in extraordinary excommunication occasions). "A Jew's religion is not only his own business," notes Michael Asheri, in explaining traditional Jewish dictate, "up to a certain point it is every Jew's business and he has no more right to abandon it than a soldier has the right to abandon his comrades in the middle of a battle because of a 'sincere' conviction that the enemy is right. Such a man is considered a traitor and treated like one ... In all laws concerning marriage, the rule is 'once a Jew, always a Jew.' This means that if a woman becomes an apostate, any children born to her will still be Jewish, even if they are born after her apostasy." [ASHERI, M., 1983, p. 319-320] "There is the constitutive idea of Judaism itself," says Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, one of the pre-eminent rabbis in Great Britain, "that the Jews are born into obligations ... A Jew is a Jew by virtue of birth. This fact carries with it certain duties and obligations. Membership in the Jewish community is thus simultaneously a biological and ethical proposition." [SACKS, J., p. 156-157]
"Because of the historical oppression and attempts at genocide against the Jewish people, most, if not all Jews, have learned to function and survive despite oppression, terror, and other abusive conditions. Thus, although many Jews appear to be doing well, often they are living in fear. Some Jews try to assimilate and pass as non-Jews. By being 'invisible,' they hope to escape another Holocaust." [p. 163]
Jews are the wealthiest, most comfortable, ethnic group in America and there has never been anything remotely like "oppression, terror or other abusive conditions" for them in this country. With Israel and its nuclear bombs and Jewish hypersensitivity to the slightest criticism, and worldwide awareness to the Nazi barbarism in Europe in an endless Jewish publicity campaign, the notion of "another Holocaust" directed expressly towards Jews anywhere on earth is preposterous. Nor are Jews in hiding in America, trying to "pass as non-Jews"; they publicly celebrate their identity everywhere. Teaching social workers such nonsense is insidious.
But, of course, even to criticize Jewish perceptions and arguments here, by Jewish dictate, is rationally and morally impossible. It is, to Jewish dogma, naked anti-Semitism. And "anti-Semitism,” says Cynthia Ozick, a well known Jewish writer, at a conference held by the Partisan Review in 1994, " ... has no need or real Jews. It can thrive where no Jews have lived, or where all the Jews are already dead. Anti-Semitism has nothing to do with Jews; it's not about Jews. It is, and always has been, it always will be, about the body and soul of the anti-Semite."[PR, p. 388]
Any argument that there may indeed be social, behavioral, and economic issues throughout history that are legitimate grounds for critical discussion and complaint about Jews are routinely rejected as automatically anti-Semitic in nature. And, hence, irrational. In fact, however, when Jews get too engrossed in detailed accusations against perceived "anti-Semites," their assertions can become completely self-contradictory. Consider Moshem Leshem's comment in his book, Israel Alone, about "Johann Gottleib Fichte, the eighteenth century philosopher ...[who] first sounded many of the themes that later became the staple fare of the modern anti-Semite: Jewish exclusiveness, their belief in their inherent superiority, their predilection for trade, their disdain for gentiles. " [LESHEM, p. 54] Yet Leshem, in this same book, earlier wrote of his own volition: " ... In their [own] eyes, the Jews were a very different and superior people. To preserve that sense of spiritual uniqueness, isolation from the outside world was essential. Jews therefore limited their contact with gentiles to the strictly necessary. They might do business with the goyim, but they would not break bread with them ... " [p. 18] A little exclusive, a little superior, and a little disdaining of Gentiles, no?
Or how about Leshem's fond quotation of an Isaac Singer novel in which a character says: "I've long been convinced that there is a hidden Messiah in every Jew. The Jew himself is one big miracle." There's at least a wee bit of "superiority" in considering oneself a miracle, extraordinary vehicle for a Messiah, no? And how about Leshem's observation about Theodore Herzl, the playwright and founder of Zionism and modern Israel: "His plays clearly show his preoccupation with the ills afflicting his own class, the Jewish bourgeoisie, especially the worship of money. He castigated the shameful self-serving falsity that permeated the overstuffed drawing rooms of equally overstuffed Jewish businessmen and stockbrokers ... [p. 79-80] A little "predilection for trade" here, no?
So how is it that Leshem can nakedly state as fact (repeatedly throughout his own volume) the very same unflattering portrayals of Jewish behavior that Fichte used, yet call them "the staple of modern anti-Semitism" and dismiss Fichte as an evil anti-Semite for mentioning them? There are two possible answers. One is that a large portion of the Jewish noise about anti-Semitism is nonsense: merely part of Jewish political illusions and smokescreens. It is the "sustained noise" that Herzl encouraged to diffuse rational discourse and criticism towards distracting attention from the horrible policies of the modern Israeli state and a less than stellar Jewish past that has historically led to such hatred of them. Or, following a long Jewish tradition on such matters, unbeknownst to Mr. Leshem is the apparent fact that he, himself, in speaking negatively about Jews, has been somehow unconsciously wrestled and subsumed by Jew-hate and is, of course, the ten millionth (or so) Jewish anti-Semite.
Hannah Arendt, a Jew, flushes out this great maze of Jewish nonsense for exactly what it is worth:
"Jews concerned with the survival of their people ... in a curious
desperate misinterpretation hit on the consoling idea that anti-Semitism
... might be an excellent means for keeping the people together, so
that the assumption of eternal anti-Semitism would ever imply an eternal
guarantee of Jewish existence. This superstition [is] a secularized
travesty of the idea of eternity inherent in a faith in chosenness and a
Messianic hope..." [ARENDT, p. ]
Ultimately, there is really no escape for Gentiles from the endemic, omnipresent Jewish accusation of anti-Semitism. Jewish identity needs an antithetical and hostile Other to conceptually exist. Even if one defends Jews, and writes an entire volume attacking anti-Semitism -- as did the well-known existentialist Jean Paul Sartre -- there are Jews who are able to dredge up accusations of anti-Semitism in the very Gentile act of writing against it. Donald Kuspit notes the case of the Jewish art critic Harold Rosenberg who "finds that Sartre, despite his conscious intention to the contrary, is unconsciously an anti-Semite." Reviewing Sartre's work, Rosenberg argued that:
"From the image of the man limited to abstract ideas [Jews], it is but
a step to that of the man dedicated to cash, since the chief abstraction
in the modern world is, of course, money. The explanation that [Jews]
are devoted to money fits together and provides a description of a kind
of unlikable people." [KUSPIT, p. 32]
Chaim Bermant notes another (what he calls "bizarre") Jewish attack on Sartre by Susan Rubin Suleiman:
"Sartre has many things to answer for, but about the one thing he
was not was an anti-Semite, and his Reflexions Sur Le Question Juive
[Reflections on the Jewish Question], published in 1946, became a
classic defense of the Jew. Suleiman, however, sees something sinister
in the very name: 'Sarte chose a title [... the Jewish Question] that
provoked tens and hundreds of anti-Semitic pamphlets and articles.'"
[BERMANT, p. 7]
Hence, no matter what a Gentile says about Jews -- good, bad, or indifferent, there is probably a Jew somewhere ready to condemn him. Richard L. Rubenstein even attacks non-Jews with a pro-Jewish bias; he asserts that even this is an equivalent of anti-Semitism: "Philo-Semitism is as unrealistic and pernicious as anti-Semitism, for it destroys our most precious attribute, our simple humanity." [RUBENSTEIN, R., p. 21]
Jewish determination to include any- and everyone into the accusative net of "anti-Semite" knows no bounds. Even the self-critical Jew, wracked with doubt, and shame, about his or her identity and/or critical of Jewish heritage, strangely, is also considered among Jews to be a veritable institution. This parallel tradition to the burdens of Jewish wonderfulness is Jewish anti-Semitism, popularly called the "self-hating Jew." "Self hatred, in fact," declared James Yaffe in 1968,
"is a word often used to describe a common phenomena -- Jewish
anti-Semitism ... The Jew believes all the epithets that the anti-Semite
throws at him, even the ones that contradict each other. He believes
that Jews are clannish and pushy, miserly and ostentatious, vulgar and
excessively intellectual ... [YAFFE, J., 1968, p. 70] ... In his attitudes
toward anti-Semitism, the self-hating Jew is especially confused. The
subject is on his mind constantly. He is far more sensitive to so-called
'Jewish traits' than most gentiles are."[YAFFE, J., 1968, p. 72] ... So
why not recognize the truth? Hardly any Jews are entirely free from the
effects of this disease [of Jewish self-hatred]. In AJC's Baltimore survey
[the American Jewish Committee’s study of the Jews of Baltimore in 1962],
two-thirds of the respondents admitted to believing that other Jews are
pushy, hostile, vulgar, materialistic, and the cause of anti-Semitism. And
those were only the ones who were willing to admit it." [YAFFE, J., 1968,
p. 73]
"To this disease of the psyche [anti-Semitism/Jewish self-hatred]," wrote Milton Steinberg,
"some American Jews have fallen victim. How many, no one knows;
but there are at least thousands who 'think ill of themselves,' who
suffer from shame, who are plagued by a sense of inferiority -- all
because they are Jews. And occasionally one meets a Jew in whom
the malady is virulent, a Jew who literally hates Judaism, and other
Jews and himself." [NEUSNER, J., 1972, p. 76]
Jewish self-doubt, since the Enlightenment, created such widespread "anti-Semitic" feelings among Jews themselves that Max Nordeau (who became one of Herzl's faithful Zionist organization men) estimated "that by the middle of the nineteenth century two-thirds of all the prominent personalities of Jewish origin no longer identified with Judaism in any form." [LESHEM, p. 33] In 1848 a prominent European rabbi complained (however hyperbolically) that nine-tenths of the young Jews of his era "were ashamed of their faith." [LAQUER, p. 9]
The pejorative word "kike" for Jews was coined by upper class New York City Jews to refer to the masses of Eastern European Jewish immigrants flooding into their city in the late 1800s. [GROSE, p. 32] Indigenous Jewish Americans' sentiment about the new arrivals was little different than that of the average "anti-Semite." "Prominent Jews in America," notes Albert Lindemann, "seemed to corroborate precisely what Russian officials maintained about Russia's Jewish population: it was clannish, religiously fanatical, and bent on domination." [LINDEMANN, p. 219] "It is next to an impossibility to associate or identify oneself," proclaimed influential Reform rabbi Isaac Meyer Wise, "with that half-civilized Orthodoxy which constitutes the bulk of the [Jewish] population in those cities ... We are Americans and they are not. We are Israelites of the 19th century and a free country, and they gnaw the dead bones of past centuries ... The good reputation of Judaism must naturally suffer materially, which must without fail lower our social status." [GROSE, p. 32-33] A Jewish journal in 1893 complained that, for the American Jew, "on the one hand, here are his true relatives who are dear to him and whom he wants to help; on the other hand, what a blemish!" [GROSE, p. 32]
"Not only were most [of New York's millions of Eastern European immigrant] Jews uncultivated," says sociologist John Higham,
"but there is considerable evidence that they were loud, ostentatious,
and pushing. Both Jews and friendly non-Jewish observers confessed
something of this kind ... In cartoons and in a good deal of middle
class opinion, the Jew became identified as the quintessential parvenu
-- glittering with conspicuous and vulgar jewelry, lacking table manners,
attracting attention by clamorous behavior, and always forcing his way
into society that was above him ... Before the 1930s, sober an humane
observers took note of the core of reality behind the stereotype ... The
Jews symbolized the pecuniary vice and entered more prominently than
any other ethnic group into the struggle for status." [HIGHAM, p. 145-
146]
"Between 1881 and World War I," notes Joseph Bendersky,
"those Jews seen as the very physical embodiment of Old World
stereotypes were immigrating to America by the millions. These despised
Eastern Jews, so different in appearance, speech, and behavior, not
only confirmed but augmented negative perceptions already evident
in the era. So distinct and offensive were these immigrants that
certain German-American Jews worried about being identified
with them or wondered whether the very presence of such vulgar
masses might engender the European variety of vocal, political,
and violent anti-Semitism from which America had generally been
spared." [BENDERSKY, J., 2000, p. 34]
"Between 1881 and World War I," notes Joseph Bendersky,
"those Jews seen as the very physical embodiment of Old World
stereotypes were immigrating to America by the millions. These despised
Eastern Jews, so different in appearance, speech, and behavior, not
only confirmed but augmented negative perceptions already evident
in the era. So distinct and offensive were these immigrants that
certain German-American Jews worried about being identified
with them or wondered whether the very presence of such vulgar
masses might engender the European variety of vocal, political,
and violent anti-Semitism from which America had generally been
spared." [BENDERSKY, J., 2000, p. 34]
Emma Lazarus, a member of a prominent Jewish New York family and author of the famous "welcome huddled masses" quote on the Statue of Liberty, suggested that Eastern European Jewry should stop pouring into America: "For the mass of semi-Orientals, kabbalists, and Hassidim, some more practical measure of reforms must be devised than their transportation to a state of society [the United States] utterly at variance with their time-honored customs and sacred beliefs." [GROSE, p. 32] "Not content merely to reject identification with Jews," notes Howard Sachar, "[Jewish author] Simone Weil went so far as to identify the spirit of Nazism with the spirit of Judaism; Hitler, she insisted, was seeking only to revive under another name and for his own benefit the God of Israel, 'earthly, cruel, and exclusive.' It was devotion to such a God, she argued, that transformed the Jews into 'a nation of fugitive slaves ... No wonder such a people was able to give scarcely anything good to the world.'" [SACHAR, p. 488]
Jewish "anti-Semitism" was also evidenced against Eastern European Jews in pre-Nazi Germany where "many assimilated Jews ... considered themselves culturally superior to the Eastern Jews ... [Jewish men of letters like] Theodor Wolff, for instance, the editor of the Berliner Tagleblatt newspaper, Georg Hermann, the author of the best-selling novel Jettchen Gebert and others exploded in tirades of hatred against the foreign undesirables." [GIDAL, N., p. 399] Walter Ratheneau, a Jewish high-ranking German official in pre-Nazi Germany, noted under a pseudonym that Jews were an "Asiatic horde" and a "population of foreign stock." "Look in the mirror," he wrote, "This is the first step towards self-criticism." [TRAVERSO, p. 94] "The hostility of German Jews toward the eastern European Jewish immigrants (Ostjuden)," says Adam Weisberger, "represented a form of redirected self-hate." [WEISBEGER, A., 1997, p. 48]
Jewish American novelist Kathy Acker (author of ten volumes) notes traditional German Jewish elitism, even towards other Jews:
"My parents were high German Jews, and I was trained to run away
from Polish Jews. And I have that childhood in me. It's kind of a knee-
jerk reaction ... I was raised as a JAP [Jewish American Princess]; I
just got ousted. I think I still have little JAP elements. People who know
me really see it. I'm really good when I have a dinner party or when
I have someone clean my place. I was trained to be good with servants.
I've got a real elitist streak in me; I just don't take it seriously."
[BRESSLER/KAUFMAN, 2000]
In the late 19th century, Meyer Carl Rothschild (one of the heirs to the Rothschild fortune in Germany) wrote: "As for anti-Semitic feeling, the Jews themselves are to blame, and the present agitation must be ascribed to their arrogance, vanity, and unspeakable insolence." [LINDEMANN, p. 103] A western European Jew, Chaim Kaplan, himself an eventual victim of Nazi terror, cited in his memoirs that in his personal experience living in Eastern Europe he had finally found one man that broke his negative stereotype of Polish Jews:
"Sometimes it bothered me that he was a superior person among
the millions of lesser people, for as a type he contradicted my opinion
about Polish Jewry. That is, the existence of Jakub Zajac clashed with
my opinion about the Jews of Poland, which are not too positive. For
years I settled among the Jews of Poland and I am known to them. I
deal with them and I am well acquainted with their way of life and their
cultural level as human beings and as Jews. To my great sorrow, I have
not always spoken well of them. My opinions are based upon concrete
examples, and from year to year the instances proving the validity of my
opinions multiplied." [KAPLAN, C., p. 76]
(Karl Marx, grandson of rabbis, once weighed in with a collective defamation of Poland's Jews, saying "The Jews of Poland are the smeariest of all races.") [MARX, K., 1959, p. vii]
German Jews shared non-Jewish German attitudes about the Jews in Eastern Europe. They were even important in the forming of such "anti-Semitic" views. As Steven Aschheim notes,
as immoral, culturally backward creatures of ugly and anachronistic ghettoes. In
large part this was a view formulated and propagated by West European and
especially German Jews ... [This] antipathy went hand in hand with the attempt to
to modernize Jewish life and thinking ... Nineteenth-century German Jews, then,
shared the genreal distaste for the ghetto and what it symbolized, but
because they themselves were products of the ghetto they internalized the distaste in a
particularly intense and urgent way." [ASCHHEIM, S., 1982, p. 3, 4, 11]
Secular Jew Stephen Bloom notes (in his study of an ultra-Orthodox Jewish community in Postville, Iowa) how Gentile outrage about obnoxious Jewish behavior towards non-Jews is automatically, still today, twisted into accusations of non-Jewish "anti-Semitism":
"The Hasidim [ultra-Orthodox] were waging a cultural holy war, in Postville,
Jerusalem, New York, Los Angeles, Paris -- everywhere. The world was Jew
vs. non-Jew, and the dichotomy existed in everything they did. Hasidic children
went to separate schools, their parents arduously stayed among themselves. If
the city of Postville tried to enforce an ordinance the Jews disagreed with, the
immediate cry was anti-Semitism. If a local complained about noise from the
shul [religious center], if anyone disagreed about annexation [into the town of
a local Jewish-owned slaughterhouse], he or she was quickly branded an
anti-Semite. Ultimately, I discovered, carrying on a conversation with any
of the Postville Hasidim was virtually impossible. If you didn't agree, you
were at fault, part of the problem. You were paving the way for the ultimate
destruction of the Jews, the world's Chosen People. There was no room
for compromise, no room for negotiation, no room for anything but total
and complete submission." [BLOOM, S., 2001, p. 197]
Bloom's honest conclusion about the tensions between the Jewish and non-Jewish communities in Postville are poignant:
"Many of the Hasidim I had encountered in Postville pretended to be holy,
but their actions displayed bigotry and racism of the worst degree. The book
[Bloom wrote called Postville] explored taboo topics such as bargaining, poor
hygiene, atrocious manners, disrepair of homes, Jewish elitism, sexism,
crime and prejudice directed at gentiles. In response, I've received dozens
of hate letters, all from Orthodox Jewish readers, who essentially pose the
same question as my fathe'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." [BLOOM, S., 2001, p. 355]
German Jews shared non-Jewish German attitudes about the Jews in Eastern Europe. They were even important in the forming of such "anti-Semitic" views. As Steven Aschheim notes,
as immoral, culturally backward creatures of ugly and anachronistic ghettoes. In
large part this was a view formulated and propagated by West European and
especially German Jews ... [This] antipathy went hand in hand with the attempt to
to modernize Jewish life and thinking ... Nineteenth-century German Jews, then,
shared the genreal distaste for the ghetto and what it symbolized, but
because they themselves were products of the ghetto they internalized the distaste in a
particularly intense and urgent way." [ASCHHEIM, S., 1982, p. 3, 4, 11]
Secular Jew Stephen Bloom notes (in his study of an ultra-Orthodox Jewish community in Postville, Iowa) how Gentile outrage about obnoxious Jewish behavior towards non-Jews is automatically, still today, twisted into accusations of non-Jewish "anti-Semitism":
"The Hasidim [ultra-Orthodox] were waging a cultural holy war, in Postville,
Jerusalem, New York, Los Angeles, Paris -- everywhere. The world was Jew
vs. non-Jew, and the dichotomy existed in everything they did. Hasidic children
went to separate schools, their parents arduously stayed among themselves. If
the city of Postville tried to enforce an ordinance the Jews disagreed with, the
immediate cry was anti-Semitism. If a local complained about noise from the
shul [religious center], if anyone disagreed about annexation [into the town of
a local Jewish-owned slaughterhouse], he or she was quickly branded an
anti-Semite. Ultimately, I discovered, carrying on a conversation with any
of the Postville Hasidim was virtually impossible. If you didn't agree, you
were at fault, part of the problem. You were paving the way for the ultimate
destruction of the Jews, the world's Chosen People. There was no room
for compromise, no room for negotiation, no room for anything but total
and complete submission." [BLOOM, S., 2001, p. 197]
Bloom's honest conclusion about the tensions between the Jewish and non-Jewish communities in Postville are poignant:
"Many of the Hasidim I had encountered in Postville pretended to be holy,
but their actions displayed bigotry and racism of the worst degree. The book
[Bloom wrote called Postville] explored taboo topics such as bargaining, poor
hygiene, atrocious manners, disrepair of homes, Jewish elitism, sexism,
crime and prejudice directed at gentiles. In response, I've received dozens
of hate letters, all from Orthodox Jewish readers, who essentially pose the
same question as my fathe'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." [BLOOM, S., 2001, p. 355]
In 1950 prominent art critic Clement Greenberg announced that "it is only reluctantly that I have become persuaded that self-hatred in one form or another is almost universal among Jews -- or at least much more prevalent than is commonly thought or admitted." [GREENBERG, p. 426] "I've experienced anti-Jewish feelings I'd be ashamed to admit," wrote Jewish author Philip Weiss in 1996, "I also sense that I'm not alone. One Jewish friend prays that her son won't marry a Jew. A Jewish editor at the New Republic ... once said to me over the phone, 'I'll have to Jew you down' on a fee." [WEISS, p. 24]
Important propagators of anti-Semitic stereotypes in the entertainment world, a field largely populated by Jews, were also Jewish. As Nathan Belth notes, "Many of the most objectionable anti-Semitic vaudeville acts were performed by Jewish comedians, and Jewish movie producers were responsible for some of the films most damaging to the Jewish image." [BELTH, p. 46] "It is a startling fact of American stage (and film) history," adds Ellen Schiff, "that Jews have had a hand in creating vitually all the prevailing contemporary Jewish stereotypes." [SCHIFF, E., 1986, p. 93]
"It is impossible," wrote Jewish commentator Ralph Boas in 1917,
"for a Jew to live apart from his race for several years without looking
upon his people in a new light. For one thing, distance has enabled him
to focus. He has learned to sympathize more with those hotel-keepers
whose ban upon Jews is a terrible thorn in the flesh of the man whose
money ought to take him anywhere. He has come to see that the
clannishness of Jews serves only to intensify what social discrimination
may exist ... And finally he has perceived that there is an arrogance of
persecution, and that for a man to be continually assuming that people
are taking the trouble to despise him for his birth is to postulate an
importance that does not exist." [BOAS, p. 149]
Another Jewish author, Joel Blau, wrote in 1930 that
"The Jew seems to be the cause of the irritation and unease everywhere.
It is the mark of the gentleman, not only that he possesses ease, but,
chiefly, that he knows how to put others at ease. This is an inimitable
faculty and to its absence must be attributed most of the social
discrimination the Jew complains of ... The loudness and vulgarity he
is often charged with are but extreme manifestation of this unease."
[BLAU, p. 170]
Selig Adler and Thomas Connolly, in their history of the Jews of Buffalo, New York, note the comments in 1922 of an unidentified Jewish businessman in that city:
"I am a Jew, of course. I never deny it. But I rarely have occasion to admit
it. I don't look much like a Jew and so few people know it ... In fact, I
learn more every day why Gentiles hate Jews! And, in fact, you know,
I really don't blame them in most cases." [ADLER/CONNOLLY, 1960, p. 335]
Selig Adler and Thomas Connolly, in their history of the Jews of Buffalo, New York, note the comments in 1922 of an unidentified Jewish businessman in that city:
"I am a Jew, of course. I never deny it. But I rarely have occasion to admit
it. I don't look much like a Jew and so few people know it ... In fact, I
learn more every day why Gentiles hate Jews! And, in fact, you know,
I really don't blame them in most cases." [ADLER/CONNOLLY, 1960, p. 335]
In today's "A Jew is Categorically Beautiful" mode, few Jewish observers take such historical comments seriously this day and age, except as a manifestations of their authors' twisted misperceptions about being Jewish. Such is also the interpretation of Adam Hochschild, co-founder of Mother Jones magazine and son of wealthy Jewish mining mogul. Hochschild notes the papers he found in his father's study after his death:
"A major, astounding point of Father's memo [in 1940] is that if a
wave of anti-Semitism sweeps over the United States, it will be
the 'shortcomings' of the Jews themselves which are partly
responsible. He talks about Jews who are too 'loud,' about low
ethical standards in Jewish-dominated trades. He declares: 'It is
an unhappy fact, acknowledged by members of what may be
termed the Jewish intelligentsia to each other but not to Gentiles,
that a large proportion of the Jews in America are not properly
educated to American business and social standards ... Young
Jews should be told frankly that certain Jewish tendencies are
regarded by Gentiles as anti-social; they would be made to
realize the advantages of unobtrusiveness.'" [HOCHSCHILD,
p. 184-185]
For some Jewish lesbians, the states of being Jewish and being lesbian link at the same sources: victimhood, outsiders to the Norm, perceived character flaws, and so on. As Nomy Lamm suggests, "Not only was I missing a leg. I was fat, I was Jewish and I liked girls ... I had physical characteristics that felt distressingly Jewish to me, even if other people didn't recognize them. My Jewish characteristics were the things that made me feel gross and unwomanly. I was fat and hairy, loud and bossy, coarse and unrefined." [LAMM, 11-98]
"Attempts to escape from Jewishness," says the Polish Jew Stanislaw Krajewski, "have been frequent at least since [Heinrich] Heine [a prominent German Jewish writer of the nineteenth century] who declared that Jewishness is a misfortune. Interestingly, I heard this dictum repeated recently by a distinguished Polish writer who had been raised in a shtetl [Jewish community] and had written about Jews throughout his life. The approach of equating Judaism with having a hump can easily lead to the famous, or rather notorious, Jewish self-hatred." [KRAJEWSKI, p. 21] Heine once wrote that "those who would say that Judaism is a religion would say that being a hunchback is a religion." [LINDEMANN, p. 15] Famous art patron Peggy Guggenheim noted her feelings during her visit to Israel: "The only thing that really impressed us was the Wailing Wall. It mortified me to belong to my people. The nauseating sight of my compatriots publicly groaning and moaning and going into physical contortions was more than I could bear, and I was glad to leave the Jews again." [GUGGENHEIM, p. 47]
"I really dislike Judaism," said prominent Jewish science fiction writer Isaac Asimov, "It's a form of particularly pernicious nationalism ... Every once a while when I'm not careful, I think that the reason Jews have been persecuted as much as they have been has been to punish them for having invented this pernicious doctrine." [RUBIN, B. p. 134] "I do not even love my people," says the Jewish author Arthur Koestler. "I rather dislike them. Self-hatred is the Jewish patriotism." [GILMAN, p. 333] Such "patriotism" has waved some pretty strange flags.
Certainly some of the most unusual cases of Jewish "self-hatred" have been in recent times. In 1978 a group of Nazis led by a man named Frank Collin made national headlines with their plans to march through Skokie, Illinois, a Chicago suburb populated with many Jews. Collin's father (originally named Cohen) was a Jewish survivor of Dachau, a German concentration camp in World War II. In 1965, Daniel Burros, the King Kleagle of the New York Ku Klux Klan committed suicide when the New York Times exposed the fact that he was Jewish. [PERLMUTTER p. 64] Strangely, Burros knew another Burros, this one Robert, an activist in the far-right American Renaissance Party. Robert's father was Jewish. Both men hid their Jewish backgrounds from each other. [ROSENTHAL/GELB, 1967, p. 171] (American Civil Liberties Union activist David Hamlin, in his personal account of the Skokie case, even notes another alleged Jewish [CASH, K., 1975] anti-Semite in New Hampshire -- newspaper mogul "William Loeb [who] once headlined a front-page editorial about the the [Jewish] secretary of state 'Kissinger the Kike.'") [HAMLIN, D., 1980, p. 41] Another Jew, Benjamin Freedman, according to an investigation by the Anti-Defamation League, was active in "the right-wing anti-Semitic Christian nationalist crusade" of the 1940s and Harold Von Braunhut was a supporter of the neo-Nazi Aryan Nations in the 1980s. [ROSENBERG, H, May 6, 1988, p. 15]
In 1966, Richard Wishnetsky grabbed a microphone from a rabbi at a bar mitzvah ceremony in Detroit, shouted that "This congregation is a travesty and abomination. It has made a mockery by its phoniness and hypocrisy the beauty and spirit of Judaism. It is composed of people who on the whole make me ashamed to say I am a Jew." Wishnetsky then pulled out a gun and killed the rabbi and himself. [YAFFE, J., 1968, p. 273]
In England, a British Jewish novelist, Gilbert Frankeau, wrote an article in 1933 entitled, "As a Jew I Am Not Against Hitler." [ROSEN, p. 214] In Russia, by the mid-1990s, the head of the right-wing nationalist Liberal Democrat Party, Vladimir Zhirinovsky, was being wrote about as a potential "dictator." His "ideas and behavior," write Vladimir Solovpov and Elena Klepikova, "are often reminiscent of Hitler ... [His] anti-Semitism is not like Hitler's, but more like that of Karl Marx; that is, it is not visceral but theoretical." [SOLOVPOV/KLEPIKOVA, p. viii, p. 37] Zhirinovsky's father, Volf Isaakovich Eidelstein, was Jewish.
Some of the most sickening cases of "self-hatred," if we are to believe Hannah Arendt, by deeply disturbed people, were in Nazi Germany. Nazi Field Marshall Erhard Milch was "generally known," according to Arendt, to have been "half-Jewish," as was Reinhard Heydrich, whose "Office of Jewish Emigration" organized the extermination of four million people, mostly Jews. Even Hans Frank, the merciless Nazi Governor General of Poland, in which the Holocaust largely occurred, says Arendt again, was "probably even a full Jew." [ARENDT, ET, p. 118] "The forty-two volume journal [Frank] kept of his life and works ... was one of the most terrifying documents to come out of the dark Nazi world." [SHIRER, p. 662]
Some Jews even seek to find Jewish self-hatred in Adolf Hitler. Hitler, claims M. H. Goldberg, "had reason to fear that his father's father was a Jew." Goldberg even says that a Pope elected in 1130, Anacletus II, was Jewish, "but to find his Jewish connection we must go back a few generations." [GOLDBERG, M. H., 1976, p. 114]
The shocking bottom of Jewish self-hatred is manifest in an infamous, and often referred to, excerpt by an unnamed Jewish intellectual in pre-Nazi Germany:
"It is there all the time, it is within me: this knowledge about my
descent. Just as a leper or a person sick with cancer carries his
repulsive disease under his dress and yet knows it himself every
moment, so I carry the shame and disgrace, the metaphysical guilt
of being a Jew ... Germany, your walls must remain secure against
penetration. Remain hard! Remain hard! Have no mercy! Not even
with me." [SILBERMAN, p. 37]
Even the German, Wilhelm Marr, the self-proclaimed "Father of anti-Semitism," the man who is credited with the creation of the word "anti-Semitism" in the 1870's, and who wrote a book called The Victory of Judaism Over Germany, is often described as being at least partially Jewish. (The respected Jewish historian Simon Dubnow calls him so, and The Universal Jewish Encyclopedia lists his father, Heinrich, as a Jew of considerable theatrical accomplishment. [UJE, v. 7, p. 366] True or not, (a biographer, Moshe Zimmerman, doubts the claim) there were definitely "self-hating" Jews in Marr's close proximity. He married four times in his life -- two of his wives were "half-Jewesses" and a third a "full Jewess," whose mother's maiden name was Israel. [ZIMMERMAN, p. 36, 70]
Among prominent nineteenth century anti-Semites, says Albert Lindemann, "an astonishing number of them had at some point in their lives not only extensive contact with Jews but also remarkably positive experiences with them -- close friends, respected teachers, even lovers and spouses!" [LINDEMANN, Antisem, p. 188] "A major facet of the new anti-Semitism [in the late 1800s]," notes Jay Pilzer, "was that many of its spokesmen were very well-respected intellectuals." [PILZER, J., 1981, p. 10]
"To us [Jews]," wrote W. E. Rubinstein in 2000,
"European antisemitism appears to be a weapon of the strong against the weak, a
kind of ideological sadism. To European right-wing nationalists of the post
1870 period, however, antisemitism appeared to be a weapon of the weak
against the strong, and attempt (as they saw it) by a downtrodden nation
to regain control over its resources from a separate, distinctive minority
which appeared to dominate its economy -- an aim not unlike that of
anti-colonial movements in the Third World vis-a-vis the Europeans and
foreign entrepreneurial minorities (like the Chinese throughout South-East
Asia). The Zionist movement understood this perfectly well, however
disturbing such a perspective may seem to us viewed with post-Holocaust
eyes.
Moreover, research is most likely to demonstrate very considerable
actual Jewish over-representation in many other social and political
areas which figured largely in the litany of continental antisemitism
of the post 1870-period, especially Jewish participation in the radical
left, the liberal professions, in journalism, and in the media." [RUBINSTEIN,
WD, 2000, p. 18-19]
"To us [Jews]," wrote W. E. Rubinstein in 2000,
"European antisemitism appears to be a weapon of the strong against the weak, a
kind of ideological sadism. To European right-wing nationalists of the post
1870 period, however, antisemitism appeared to be a weapon of the weak
against the strong, and attempt (as they saw it) by a downtrodden nation
to regain control over its resources from a separate, distinctive minority
which appeared to dominate its economy -- an aim not unlike that of
anti-colonial movements in the Third World vis-a-vis the Europeans and
foreign entrepreneurial minorities (like the Chinese throughout South-East
Asia). The Zionist movement understood this perfectly well, however
disturbing such a perspective may seem to us viewed with post-Holocaust
eyes.
Moreover, research is most likely to demonstrate very considerable
actual Jewish over-representation in many other social and political
areas which figured largely in the litany of continental antisemitism
of the post 1870-period, especially Jewish participation in the radical
left, the liberal professions, in journalism, and in the media." [RUBINSTEIN,
WD, 2000, p. 18-19]
Self-hater, who can say, but certainly one of the most sensationally bizarre Jewish apostates was Sabbatai Zevi, who lived in the seventeenth century. Zevi announced himself to be the long-awaited Messiah; he eventually could count on over a million Jewish followers throughout the world. He immigrated from Turkey to Egypt, raised eyebrows by marrying a prostitute, then moved to the Jewish community in Palestine to continued ecstatic adulation. The Turkish sultan, however, took wary notice of Zevi's activities and demanded that the Jewish Messiah convert to Islam or he would be executed. To the profound shock and disillusionment of his believers, Zevi thereupon publicly proclaimed himself to be a Muslim.
The renowned Jewish metaphysical philosopher, Baruch (Benedict) Spinoza, disciple of Descartes, was warned and then excommunicated from the Amsterdam Jewish community for his controversial writings. These included an indictment of his own "hating" Jewish people:
"The love of the Hebrews for their own country was not only
patriotism, but also piety, and was cherished and nurtured
by daily rites til, like the hatred of other nations, it must have
passed into their nature. Their daily worship was not only
different from that of other nations (as it might well be,
considering the way they were a peculiar people and
entirely apart from the rest), it was absolutely contrary.
Such daily reprobation naturally gave rise to a lasting
hatred deeply implanted in the heart: for all hatreds none
is more deep and tenacious than that which springs from
extreme devoutness or piety, and is itself cherished as
pious." [SPINOZA, p. 229]
Spinoza's work includes a rationalist critique that impugned the Biblical claims of Jewish history. His writings, say Norman Cantor, "constitute a fundamental threat to traditional Judaism, ultimately more perilous than the conventional Christian anti-Semitism." [CANTOR, p. 194-95]
A nineteenth century Jewish socialist (and later Zionist), in France, Bernard Lazare, said that
"Everywhere up to the present time, the Jew has been an unsociable
being ... The Jewish nation is small and miserable ... demoralized
and corrupted by an unjustifiable pride." [LINDEMANN, p. 61]
The Jewish-born journalist Walter Lippman wrote to Harvard University's President in 1922 in support of limiting Jewish enrollment: "I do not regard the Jews as innocent victims; They hand on unconsciously and uncritically from one generation to another many distressing personal and social habits ... My sympathies are with the non-Jew. His personal manners and physical habits are, I believe, distinctly superior to the prevailing manner and habits of the Jews." [LIPPMANN, p. 149]
Stanley Kubrick, the famed (Jewish) filmmaker of 2001: A Space Odyssey, Dr. Strangelove, and A Clockwork Orange, was christened a self-hater by some after he had died. The New York Post announced that
"the late Stanley Kubrick once remarked that 'Hitler was right about
almost everything,' and insisted that any trace of Jewishness be
expunged from the 'Eyes Wide Shut' script that author Frederic
Raphael was writing for him ... And Kubrick was downright acidic
on the subject of [Stephen Spielberg's film] Schindler's List. 'That
was about success, wasn't it?' he reportedly said. 'The Holocaust is
about six million people who get killed. Schindlers List was about
six hundred people who don't.'" [DREHER, R., 6-16-99]
Yet another, particularly tragic, Jewish "self-hater" was Otto Weininger, whose strange depreciative ideas about Jews and women have afforded him a kinky cult status amongst some intellectuals, a Diane Arbus of philosophy. Weininger, a convert to Protestantism, floating around the edge of the Freud group in Vienna, committed suicide at age 23 in 1904, not long after his controversial book Sex and Character was published, a misogynist work that managed to also offend with the strange claim that Jewish males were intrinsically effeminate.
Prominent nineteenth century French Jewish socialist Ferdinand Lasalle? "There are two classes of men whom I hate, journalists and Jews," he once wrote. "Unfortunately, I belong to both." [WEISBERGER, A., 1997, p. 47] Prominent turn-of-the century European Jewish socialist Rosa Luxemberg noted the complexion of the audience at a 1902 political meeting: "Half the hall, and comme de raison the best places in front, were naturally taken by Russians or rather by Jewboys, from Russia -- they were sickening to look at." [WEISBERG, A., 1997, p. 97] "The eternal truth," said Arnold Schnitzler, a Jewish doctor and contemporary of Sigmund Freud in Vienna, "is that no Jew has any real respect for his fellow Jews, ever." [CLARKE, R., 8-2-99, p. 5]
And, of course, let's not forget Jesus Christ, a Jew, (who, Messiah or not, rebelled against Jewish conventions of his time) and many of his early followers who were Jews, all apostates, and the long lineage of trouble that they have effectively caused upon those who never left the fold. "The founder [of Christianity]," notes R.J. Zwi Werblowsky in the Oxford Dictionary of the Jewish Religion, "and its early adherents were all Jews." [WERBLOWSKY, p. 158] "Like Jesus," says M. H. Goldberg, "all the apostles were Jews, as was the first Pope. Jews wrote all of the books of the New Testament except for those written by Luke." [GOLDBERG, M. H., 1976, p. 67] It would seem that "anti-Semitism," in the religious context, as it is presently conceived, was in its origins an in-house Jewish dialogue.
The psychologically-charged term "self-hating Jew" is a harsh one. It was created and is commonly used by the Jewish community as a pejorative term for member critics of communal Jewish selves. The stigma of "self-hating" linguistically atomizes the offender and distances him from the rest of the community as a "self" in a remote negative orbit. No person accused of being a "self-hating Jew" is likely to see it that way. But to admit that such a person (short of Jewish Nazis and other truly unbalanced types) has possibly legitimate grievances and complaints against Jewish tradition, behavior, or heritage is too threatening, especially since there has been so many "self-haters" running around. If termed, distanced, and understood as self-haters, the community rides the waves of criticism, safely above them. Self-haters are then easily dismissed -- no matter how many there are -- as unfortunate mental cases infected with disillusions and delusions from Gentile culture. Self-haters internalize Gentile criticism (and accept it as true) about Jewishness. Of course, there is a psychoanalytic invention to explain how this all works, a theory which supports popular Jewish conventions about anti-Semitism and Jewish self-hatred: this is the notion of psychological transference and any victim's "identification with the aggressor." [GRUNFELD, F., 1996, p. 83]
Smothered by the Tidal Waves of Jewish self-glorification, rebellious Jews like Alain Finkelkraut must occasionally come up for air:
"There's no other way to say it -- I was sick and tired of being Jewish.
Disgusted ... saturated ... stuffed to the gills with it ... I'd had enough,
been worn out from repetitions, was numbed by the hackneyed clichés
about our peoples' peerless destiny, bludgeoned with the constant
refrain about a people who no one loved. The prize goose was asking
for mercy -- not God's, or the systems', but from those feeders, my
parents and their perpetual Jewish obsession." [FINKELKRAUT, p.
102]
Philip Roth expressed similar feelings in his famous novel, Portnoy's Complaint, renowned in Jewish circles as a very self-consciously Jewish piece of fiction:
"And that goes for the goyim, too ! We all haven't been lucky enough
to have been born Jews, okay? Because I am sick and tired of goyische
[the Yiddish term for non-Jews; it is pejorative] this and goyische that!
It it's bad it's the goyim, if it's good it's the Jew! Can't you see, my dear
parents, from whose loins I somehow leaped, that such thinking is a
trifle barbaric? That all you are expressing is your fear? The very first distinction
I learned from you, I'm sure, was not night and day, or hot and cold, but
goyishe and Jewish! ... Oh, how I hate you for your narrow-minded minds!"
[ROTH, P., 1969, p. 74]
Philip Roth expressed similar feelings in his famous novel, Portnoy's Complaint, renowned in Jewish circles as a very self-consciously Jewish piece of fiction:
"And that goes for the goyim, too ! We all haven't been lucky enough
to have been born Jews, okay? Because I am sick and tired of goyische
[the Yiddish term for non-Jews; it is pejorative] this and goyische that!
It it's bad it's the goyim, if it's good it's the Jew! Can't you see, my dear
parents, from whose loins I somehow leaped, that such thinking is a
trifle barbaric? That all you are expressing is your fear? The very first distinction
I learned from you, I'm sure, was not night and day, or hot and cold, but
goyishe and Jewish! ... Oh, how I hate you for your narrow-minded minds!"
[ROTH, P., 1969, p. 74]
"Having reasserted connection to the [Jewish] tribe in grand terms," said Ann Roiphe, about her renewed dedication to Jewish identity,"I immediately felt claustrophobic and this claustrophobia cannot be hidden or denied." [ROIPHE, 1981, p. 183] "Perhaps to be Jewish is to be trapped always with other Jews," wondered Daphne Merkin, "even with those other Jews one doesn't like. There is a stifling quality to enforced tribalism, a negative air space, like being in a gas chamber. It is difficult, for instance, to conceive of having the luxury of disliking the person standing next to you in a gas chamber." [MERKIN, p. 17]
Yet another recent Jewish "self-hater" of some renown, forcing his way out of Merkin's Jewish "gas chamber," is Bruno Kreisky, Chancellor of Austria in the 1970s. His Jewish pedigree is substantial: he lost both his parents to the Holocaust. But Kreisky was a freethinker in office who chose mainstream Austrian society as his complete identity orientation; he felt no ties whatsoever to Jewish or Zionist mythologies. A prominent Jewish scholar of anti-Semitism, Robert Wistrich, noted "the neurotic features" of Kreisky's "Jewish complex." [WISTRICH, p. 78] And the Jerusalem Post complained that (in Kreisky) "a depravity of mind is clearly indicated." Chancellor Kreisky's "depravity" and offense to Jews and their secular religion of Israel included zingers like these:
"The fact of being a Jew is for me without meaning."
"If Jews are a people, they are a wretched people."
"[Simon Wiesenthal, the famed fugitive Nazi hunter] is a Jewish
fascist -- happily one finds reactionaries among Jews. .. I am the
only one who can stand up to him because of my Jewish origins,
anybody else trying to stand up to him would immediately be
accused of being anti-Semitic and against the Jews."
"I don't submit to Zionism. I reject it ... There is nothing that binds
me to Israel or what is called the Jewish "people" or to Zionism."
[WISTRICH, p. 78-95]
"Kreisky," once declared famed Jewish activist and post-war Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal, "has severed himself from the Jewish community of destiny. And, in my eyes, anyone who does that is a deserter." [WIESENTHAL, p. 6] To the Jewish community at large, such a "deserter" -- one who completely rejects allegiance to the principals of Jewish tribalism --epitimizes Jewish self-hatred.
Strong currents of "self-hatred" have been part of Jewish communal identity at least since the Enlightenment when Jewish religious-inspired traditions of "apartness," insularity, parochialism, "specialness," et al were devalued by the broader European intellectual movement towards human universalism. In this context, notes Talcott Parsons,
"it is not surprising ... that the Jews have often displayed a rather
extreme sensitiveness in matters touching self-respect and status.
So long as their emotional attachments were limited exclusively to
the Jewish community and all that mattered to them was the honor
in which they had been held in their own community, they remained
relatively free of conflicts. As soon, however, as they were permitted,
through emancipation, to participate as members of the larger
community, the balance was largely lost and they found themselves
torn between two worlds and victims of serious emotional difficulties."
[PARSONS, p. 109]
"If we look for pathological cases of Jewish self-hatred among North American Jewry," wrote Jacob Neusner in 1981, "we should easily find them. But on the whole, self-hatred takes a different form here. It is merely neurotic, but it is not limited to individuals. It characterizes the community as a whole, and is reflected in the Jewish community's commitment to nonsectarianism, and in its niggardly support for the cultural, scholarly, and religious programs and institutions that makes Jews Jewish." [NEUSNER, Stranger, p. 56]
In 1964, the Union of American Hebrew Congregations published a book (Modern Jewish Problems) for Jewish high school students. Rabbi Roland Gittelsohn addressed Jewish self-hatred/anti-Semitism:
"Is there anti-Semitism among Jews themselves? Would it surprise you to hear that
there is anti-Semitism even among Jews themselves? Strange though this sounds, it
it is true. We call this Jewish self-hate. Very often Christians who are criticized
for discriminating aginst Jews justify themselves by pointing to this Jewish
anti-Semitism. Indeed, this strange hatred has at times been so widespread that
a great German Jewish scholar [Theodore Lessing] once wrote a book called
Der Judische Selbsthass, or Jewish Self-Hate. Jewish anti-Semitism manifests
itself in many ways. One of the most obvious is the instance of the Jew who
refuses to have any association with Jews, the Jewish community, or Judaism.
The following are some of the reasons given by such people. 1) Jews are
are too clannish. 2) Jews are loud and chauvinistic. 3) Jews are too concerned
with themselves and their own survival." [GITTELSOHN, R., 1964, p. 135-136]
In 1964, the Union of American Hebrew Congregations published a book (Modern Jewish Problems) for Jewish high school students. Rabbi Roland Gittelsohn addressed Jewish self-hatred/anti-Semitism:
"Is there anti-Semitism among Jews themselves? Would it surprise you to hear that
there is anti-Semitism even among Jews themselves? Strange though this sounds, it
it is true. We call this Jewish self-hate. Very often Christians who are criticized
for discriminating aginst Jews justify themselves by pointing to this Jewish
anti-Semitism. Indeed, this strange hatred has at times been so widespread that
a great German Jewish scholar [Theodore Lessing] once wrote a book called
Der Judische Selbsthass, or Jewish Self-Hate. Jewish anti-Semitism manifests
itself in many ways. One of the most obvious is the instance of the Jew who
refuses to have any association with Jews, the Jewish community, or Judaism.
The following are some of the reasons given by such people. 1) Jews are
are too clannish. 2) Jews are loud and chauvinistic. 3) Jews are too concerned
with themselves and their own survival." [GITTELSOHN, R., 1964, p. 135-136]
This famous book about Jewish self-hatred was that, in the 1930's, of a Jewish German physician, Theodore Lessing -- a man who had converted to Christianity and then back to Judaism again. Der Judische Selbsthass was a classic on the widespread phenomena of Jewish self-hatred. Jules Carlebach summarizes Lessing's basic thesis like this:
"There is a fundamental principle in the Old Testament that the fate
of the Jewish people is always a consequence of their own behavior.
Suffering therefore implies sin and guilt. Logically, the greater the
suffering, the greater the guilt. Here, for Lessing, is the root of self-
hatred. Other people have interpreted their misfortunes by pointing
to those who brought misfortune to them, whereas the Jews
enmeshed in their conviction that they have brought misfortune
on themselves, can see their tormentors only as instruments of God.
The tormentor in turn can use the Jews' own view of his guilt to
explain why he ill-treats Jews. Hence anti-Semitism is not a product
of ill will, national egoism or hate and jealousy in international
competition. It is the Jewish conception of meaning in history."
[CARLEBACH, p. 334]
The notion that Jewish self-hatred (and its parallel in others -- anti-Semitism) is (religiously) divinely instilled and/or (secularly) has origins in Jewish action, and that it stems from Jews' own psycho-religious views of themselves, has -- in the post-Holocaust era -- fallen into extreme disfavor among most secular Jews. Lessing's view that in Jewish tradition blame for Jewish misfortune falls inevitably upon Jews themselves -- in the wake of the likes of Auschwitz and the birth of an aggressive nationalist spirit, per Israel -- became way to much to bear. Accordingly, Jewish theorists -- seeking to escape the religious burdens of cosmic blame and now united in a new "psycho-politic," began creating new conceptual models for understanding self-hate that refocused upon complete Jewish innocence and victimization by others through history, totally repositioning blame, responsibility, and God's wrath away from them.
Among such proponents was Kurt Lewin, who decided that Jewish self-hate stemmed from Jewish inability to live up to mainstream, non-Jewish standards of perception, behavior, and even physical appearance. (Who, one wonders, Jew or non-Jew, can live up to today's myths of popular American culture, from Ozzie and Harriet to Marilyn Monroe and this month's airbrushed figure on the cover of Vogue magazine?) It is true, however, that throughout history, Gentiles, with their own standards of behavior, have always looked askance at their Jewish counterparts. In 1942, for example, a non-Jewish Harvard professor, Talcott Parsons, "the most influential sociologist of our time," argued that reasons for anti-Semitism included Jewish "oversensitiveness to criticism" and "abnormal aggressiveness and self-assertion ... The 'chosen people' idea held by the Jews is another source of friction ... [SILBERMAN, p. 56] ... Since many Jews are typical 'intellectuals' they are unaware of the extent to which they offend the nonrational sentiments of others." [PARSONS, p. 116]
The logic of the turn-of-the-century work, Anti-Semitism and Modern Science, by Jewish Italian Cesare Lombroso, is likewise dismissed by Nancy Harrowitz:
"He turns his attention to the Jews themselves and their role in instigating
anti-Semitism, what we would view today as a classic example of
'blame the victim.' Most of the book is devoted to derisive accounts
of Jewish cultural and religious practices." [HARROWITZ, p. 115]
The classical notions that Jews are pushy, loud, and obnoxious have been -- until more recent times of defiance and assertions of "Jewish is Beautiful" themes -- subjects on which many Jews felt deep need to brood upon. "[The Jew, in identifying with mainstream, non-Jewish culture]," explains Gordon Allport, "sees his own group through [non-Jewish] eyes ... since he cannot escape his own group, he thus in a real sense hates himself -- or at least the part of himself that is Jewish. To make matters worse, he may hate himself for feeling this way. He is badly torn. His divided mind may make for furtive and self-conscious behavior, for 'nervousness' and a lasting sense of insecurity. Since these are unpleasant traits, they augment his hatred for his own Jewishness and then aggravate the conflict. The circle is vicious and never-ending." [ALLPORT, p. 151]
Ultimately, these days non-Jewish society is commonly held responsible by Jews for their own cycles of neurosis, an attitude expressed by Sander Gilman who, in 1986, wrote an entire volume on the subject of Jewish self-hate. Gilman loyally followed the standard "Jew as victim" motif and locates the origin of Jewish self-hatred not even partially in Jews themselves, nor their community, but in non-Jews and their culture which are both perceived, as always, to be eternally victimizing them. (An interesting expression of this displacement, transnationally, came from Jewish communist ideologue Roman Werfel, under critical fire for his role in the post-World War II brutal oppression of Polish nationalism: "I'm against self-criticism. It's a disgusting Stalinist custom which derives from the [Russian] Orthodox Church.") [TORANSKA, p. 113])
When a Jew criticizes his own community so severely that he disavows it, or simply allows this identity to fade, by Jewish standards, it is never part of reasonable discourse to presume that the defector might have even the grain of a legitimate cause. Rather, as modern institutionalized canon in Jewish commentary, responsibility is automatically deflected, i.e., there cannot be a cause in the Jewish community itself for "self-hatred." Jews are superior to others, especially morally, after all. Of course the cause must therefore stem from the evil non-Jew and their standards that omnipotently oppresses Jews.
Hence, per Gilman and modern Jewish interpretation, Jewish self-hatred occurs when Jews internalize Gentiles' malicious ideas about them. Gilman doesn't say it that simply; he spends an entire chapter trying to blind the reader with academese, like this:
"Self-hatred results from outsiders' acceptance of the mirage of
themselves generated by their reference group -- that group in
society which they see as defining them -- as a reality. This
acceptance provides the criteria for the myth making that is
the basis of communal identity. This illusionary definition
of the self, the identification with the reference group's
mirage of the Other, is contaminated by protean variables
existing within what seems to the outsider to be the
homogeneous group in power." [GILMAN]
This leads inexorably to the conclusion that Jews need accept no blame for anything, even their own concepts of themselves. This "Alien Gentile in Jewish Brain" is stock-in-trade in Jewish circles. Michael Lerner, editor of the leftist Jewish journal,Tikkun, claims that "Jews have been victims of 'internalized oppression,' taking the viewpoint of those who disdain them and making it their own." [LERNER, p. 5] Based on a foundation of Freudian psycho-babble, Barbara Breitman blames non-Jews for endemic Jewish neurosis, outrageously lifting blame from Jews for even their own thinking. The following is a classic example of twisted Jewish "Victimspeak," a system of complete irresponsibility by which all blame for individual thought and action is surrendered to exterior forces:
"For Jews, the masculine and feminine archetypes in the collective unconscious
have been reversed by the anti-Semitism of the dominant, white, male
Christian culture. Jewish men may well experience themselves, and be
experienced by Jewish women as somehow less masculine than men
of the dominant culture; Jewish women may well experience themselves
and be experienced by Jewish men as somehow less feminine than
women of the dominant culture. Although Jewish men and women may
blame each other for this phenomenon, the insidious process has its
roots in anti-Semitism." [BREITMAN, B., 1988, p. 112-113]
Bretiman even blames non-Jewish culture for "interfer[ing] in relationships between Jewish fathers and sons, preventing a criticially important identification between the generations of men." [BREITMAN, B., 1988, p. 104]
In this kind of "everything's your fault/we don't control our own private lives" context, Norman Cantor can thereby excuse Jews en masse and blame Muslim mind control (while slurring Islamic society) for Jewish immorality in southwestern Europe in medieval times:
"For Jews, the masculine and feminine archetypes in the collective unconscious
have been reversed by the anti-Semitism of the dominant, white, male
Christian culture. Jewish men may well experience themselves, and be
experienced by Jewish women as somehow less masculine than men
of the dominant culture; Jewish women may well experience themselves
and be experienced by Jewish men as somehow less feminine than
women of the dominant culture. Although Jewish men and women may
blame each other for this phenomenon, the insidious process has its
roots in anti-Semitism." [BREITMAN, B., 1988, p. 112-113]
Bretiman even blames non-Jewish culture for "interfer[ing] in relationships between Jewish fathers and sons, preventing a criticially important identification between the generations of men." [BREITMAN, B., 1988, p. 104]
In this kind of "everything's your fault/we don't control our own private lives" context, Norman Cantor can thereby excuse Jews en masse and blame Muslim mind control (while slurring Islamic society) for Jewish immorality in southwestern Europe in medieval times:
"Rabbinical court records of the fourteenth century show a Jewish
propensity to adapt to the lifestyle of Muslim society. Among the
Sephardim [Jews of Spain and Portugal], polygamy, concubinage,
adultery, and wife-beating were common." [CANTOR, p. 186]
Sander Gilman never admits the obvious, that an important reason for Jewish apostasy and disenchantment ("self-hatred") over history has been the inevitable rejection by some Jews of the elitist and seclusionist tenets of the "Chosen People" mythos, or even to escape Jewish self-hate itself as an indigenously oppressive outcrop of traditional Jewish religious belief. It is irrefutable that some people just don't like where they came from, whether it's Judaism or Christianity, Kansas or New York. Centuries ago Christianity and its idealized teachings of Christ offered (however unfulfilled) anyone a step closer to the dream of human universalism, a concept intrinsically foreign to seminal Jewish beliefs. The people who led this movement were also Jewish, and, hence, to Jews, betrayers. In the wake of the Enlightenment, more and more Jews sought to assimilate into the purely secular non-Jewish community. And in the last century and a half, "self-hating," utopian-minded Jews have played important roles in the development of socialism and communism, ideologies that espoused human universalism and egalitarian principles devoid of religious argument. These new ideologies (at least in theory) rejected traditional religious, social, and economic elitism, as well as the growing network of capitalism, an antithetical economic system that created and expanded new kinds of economic elites, a system which Jews had been instrumental in creating.
It is also intriguing to note that so many post-Holocaust Gilman-like Jewish scholars claim that the reason for traditional Jewish insularity and clannishness was caused by ostracization by non-Jews, and anti-Semitism. This perspective entirely ignores the deeply entrenched "people apart" syndrome and attendant psychology ("assimilated" Jew or not) of Jewish identity that has been religiously and secularly maintained across history. It also ignores the typical Jewish emphasis upon chronic class-climbing (ostentatious "yicchus," et al) and vigorous Jewish attempts to plug their Jewish identities into the world of the non-Jewish economic, cultural, and political aristocratic and upper class model. The overwhelming mass of non-Jewish commoners around them through history could equally -- or even more than Jews -- claim a demeaning rejection by the upper class standards of any era. Nor could a non-Jewish commoner self-image pitted against an upper class standard ever be considered anything but sorely lacking.
Gilman stretches all the way back to the early Middle Ages to pull out some of the seminal self-hating Jews. He turns up a whole chapter-full who, in the medieval religious contest between Judaism and Christianity, chose not only to voluntarily convert to Christianity, but to critically expose their former community as well. Gilman's list of tattletale apostates -- some former rabbis -- is long. Jewish apostate writers who took Christian names include Flavius Mithridates, Immanuel Tremellius, the German monk Hermann, Nicholas Donin, Johannes Pfefferkorn, Antonius Margaritha, Samuel Maroccanus, Paulus Staffelsteiner, Paul of Prague, Franco de Piacenza, Christian Gerson, Johann Gottleib, Johann Mentes, Christoph Christian, Paul Kirchner, Moritz Christian, Adam Librecht, Gottleib Hamburger, and on and on. These are the kinds of people, born Jews, who were instrumental, with their caustic pens, in enflaming Christian hostility towards medieval Judaism. As William Popper notes, "The Dominican [friars] showed themselves the most consistent enemies of Hebrew literature; and the sternest among the Dominicans were the converted Jews." [POPPER, p. 8] By the year 1500, "the history of all such troubles (concerning Christian hostility to Jewish religious texts) becomes now almost entirely a history of apostates." [POPPER, p. 22] (Jewish apostasy as a source of Jewish misery is as much a part of Jewish history as anything else. Even in 1868 a Jewish convert to Christianity, Jacob Bronfman, charged that a Jewish community organization, a "kahillot," banned by the Russian czar, Nicholas I, existed and was interrelating with international Jewish organizations. [LINDEMANN, p. 130]
Gilman admits that "the complex self-definition of these converts ... [played] a role in shaping the attitudes of the Christian world towards the Jew." But he argues, "since the initial model chosen by the convert is a model of the Jew through the eyes of the Christian world, it is of little wonder that the Christian community formed their attitude toward the Jew substantially by the convert's testimony." [GILMAN, p. 17]
But if Jewish converts to Christianity were raised as Jews, how could their "initial model" of Judaism be the distorted Christian one? Gilman's chauvinistic polemic assumes that scores of converted Jews completely severed all links to verifiable reality once they became brainwashed as Christians -- despite decades of life and intimacy as Jews in the Jewish community -- their sole purpose became, however, to propagandize Christian fictions about Jews, fictions which came from detailed criticisms of Jewry that only Jews in such eras could have known so intimately in the first place.
And where does Gilman go with his arguments? What is his modern polemical core? :
"Thus one of the most recent forms of Jewish self-hatred is the
virulent Jewish opposition to the existence of the state of Israel."
[GILMAN]
Jewish scholar Jay Gertzman follows this typical Gilman scenario with his analysis of the sensational self-hating Jew, Samuel Roth. Roth, once a committed Zionist [GERTZMAN, J., 2000, p. 259, 261] was a famous New York smut dealer, who was imprisoned twice on obscenity charges. He was cheated by fellow Jews in the 1930s and published in 1934 his own work entitled Jews Must Live, one of the most "anti-Semitic" tracts in history. As Gertzman explains Roth's deconstruction of Jewish identity, all criticism of their heritage is assailed:
"The vulnerability of his situation inspired a neurotic identification with the aggressor,
with those who had been prosecuting him: the Christian moral authorities who
spoke for decency. He internalized their contempt, and to exorcise it wrote
an anti-Semitic tract demonizing the ethnic middlemen with whom he had worked
and lived. Jews Must Live is an ultimate consequence of pariah capitalism, of
vulnerability and ambivalence about personal identity that accompany it, and
of the strange symbiosis with authority that lives at its heart ... [The book]
reiterated Jewish stereotypical traits such as hatred for gentiles and desire to
remain isolated from them, prioritizing of wealth over patriotism, total lack
of compassion for those with whom they deal, sexual neuroses, fear of
physical labor, shyster lawyering, heartless real estate swindling, and control
of prostitution." [GERTZMAN, J., 2000, p. 258]
"Jewish history," wrote Roth,
"has been tragic to the Jews and no less tragic to neighboring nations. Our
major vice is parasitism. We are a people of vultures, living on the labor
and the good nature of the rest of the world ... The first of all Jewish
creeds is that Jews must live. It does not matter how, by what, or to
what end. Jews must live. So a return was made to the ancient policy
of conquest by the more peaceful and deliberate means of cheating,
lying, and pimping ... The young Jew learns that before anything else
he is a Jew, and that before anything else, comes his allegiance to the
Jewish people." [http://www.hiddenmysteries.com/cartwebtv/item139.html]
Jewish scholar Jay Gertzman follows this typical Gilman scenario with his analysis of the sensational self-hating Jew, Samuel Roth. Roth, once a committed Zionist [GERTZMAN, J., 2000, p. 259, 261] was a famous New York smut dealer, who was imprisoned twice on obscenity charges. He was cheated by fellow Jews in the 1930s and published in 1934 his own work entitled Jews Must Live, one of the most "anti-Semitic" tracts in history. As Gertzman explains Roth's deconstruction of Jewish identity, all criticism of their heritage is assailed:
"The vulnerability of his situation inspired a neurotic identification with the aggressor,
with those who had been prosecuting him: the Christian moral authorities who
spoke for decency. He internalized their contempt, and to exorcise it wrote
an anti-Semitic tract demonizing the ethnic middlemen with whom he had worked
and lived. Jews Must Live is an ultimate consequence of pariah capitalism, of
vulnerability and ambivalence about personal identity that accompany it, and
of the strange symbiosis with authority that lives at its heart ... [The book]
reiterated Jewish stereotypical traits such as hatred for gentiles and desire to
remain isolated from them, prioritizing of wealth over patriotism, total lack
of compassion for those with whom they deal, sexual neuroses, fear of
physical labor, shyster lawyering, heartless real estate swindling, and control
of prostitution." [GERTZMAN, J., 2000, p. 258]
"Jewish history," wrote Roth,
"has been tragic to the Jews and no less tragic to neighboring nations. Our
major vice is parasitism. We are a people of vultures, living on the labor
and the good nature of the rest of the world ... The first of all Jewish
creeds is that Jews must live. It does not matter how, by what, or to
what end. Jews must live. So a return was made to the ancient policy
of conquest by the more peaceful and deliberate means of cheating,
lying, and pimping ... The young Jew learns that before anything else
he is a Jew, and that before anything else, comes his allegiance to the
Jewish people." [http://www.hiddenmysteries.com/cartwebtv/item139.html]
In an influential volume on prejudice in the 1950's, The Nature of Prejudice, the author Gordon Allport, a Jewish psychologist, asserted that "there is some evidence that the psychoneurotic rate is relatively high among Jews." [p. 158] (Norman Kiell suggests a rate of Jewish neurosis that is two and a half times higher than Catholic and Protestant communities. [KIELL, p. 130]) Allport did not in the least consider that at least some of the reasons for this "psychoneurosis" might be found in the tenets of Judaism itself, endless webs of restrictive rules and regulations, relentless pressures to achieve as a Jew, a Persecution Complex instilled in children at an early age, and the psychological implications of a community that has been obsessed for thousands of years with a self-definition that frames them all as God's "others," and, hence, everywhere they went in the world, implicit "outsiders." Allport's reasons for the high rate of neurosis among Jews is, as always seen by them, entirelydisplaced. The origin of their psychological problems is never in themselves and their own belief systems, but, rather, that Jews were -- and are -- "victims of discrimination." [ALLPORT, p. 158]
Following form, Henry Gold decides that classical Jewish neurosis is entirely rooted in Gentile oppression. "About twenty centuries of intermittent persecution," he says, "and the ever readiness to escape it would tend to produce an infectious state of insecurity." [GOLD, p. 134] Putting aside the fact that any people can equally claim "twenty centuries" of stress and "insecurity" (that's called "life" and "history") too, Gold adds other causes of Jewish neuroses including "unexpressed resentment" towards non-Jews, inferiority feelings and a resultant "success compulsion," isolation and insularity, and "centuries of depravation of ownership and cultivation of land." [GOLD, p. 134-135]
Yet Jewish scholarship ignores the obvious. Might not a large part of Jewish neurosis stem from the traditional religious demands upon Jewish identity? In most contexts, might the suffocating avalanche of religious rules and regulations be reasonably understood to be a creation -- and enforcement -- of neurotically compulsive behavior? For starters, upon rising from bed, for example, "one is not allowed to walk four cubits (six feet)," states the Code of Jewish Law, "without having one's hands washed, except in cases of extreme necessity." [GANZFRIED, S., p. 3] The first piece of clothing to be put on must be the tallit katan. Before the morning ritual washing, "one should not touch either the mouth, the nose, the eyes, the ears, the lower orifice or any kind of food." [GANZFRIED, S., p. 4] After negotiating a list of other specific morning rules, once outside, "a man should be careful not to pass between two women, two dogs, or two swine. Nor should two men permit a woman, a dog, or a swine to pass between them." [GANZFRIED, S., p. 7] Life is regimented in all respects. While praying, "if one had let wind, one is forbidden to utter anything holy until the bad odor had ceased; the same applies to a case where the bad odor had issued from his neighbor. But if one is engaged in the study of the Torah, one need not interrupt his study on account of a bad odor that had issued from his neighbor." [GANZFRIED, S. p. 10] "One who suffers pain from overeating may stick his finger in his throat in order to vomit." [GANZFRIED, S., p. 131]
As part of "work" prohibited on the Sabbath (Saturday), Orthodox Jews are expressly forbidden to open a door or window close to a candle, pour boiling gravy on pieces of bread, put fruit on a hot stove, prepare horseradish, touch fruit under a tree, get honey from a beehive, remove dry peas from pods, crush pepper in a mortar, "wipe anything with a sponge that has no handle," spit where the wind could spray the saliva, shake water off clothing, put saffron into soup, pull off dead skin from the fingernail area, "suck blood from the gums," tie an animal to a tree, draw a picture "in liquid spilled on the table," "make a musical sound" ("unmusical sounds" are acceptable), and so forth. If a particular kind of knot in clothing causes pain, "it may be loosened by a non-Jew." [GANZFRIED, p. 89-103]
Who would not be driven crazy by an entire volume (such a dictatorial volume exists), an entire life, of this? How many Jews, once exposed to other options, might feel inclined to want to escape it?
This very fertile field for at least some of the origins of Jewish self-hatred -- completely ignored by the legions of "Jewish victims of anti-Semites" propagandists like Gilman and Allport -- is simply the tyrannical regimentation of religious dictate, as well as attendant expressions of Jewish culture, lifestyle, and worldview itself; its classical obsession with status, money, and achievement; its chronic oppression of women; and its celebration of guilt. This celebration is deeply embedded and enforced as the Jewish persecution complex, so much evidenced by professor Gilman himself.
"This sense of persecution," writes Fredda Herz and Elliot Rosen, "is part of [Jewish] cultural heritage and is usually assumed with pride. Suffering is even a form of sharing with one's fellow Jews." [HERZ, p. 367] Suffering for being Jewish is one of the very pillars of Jewish self-conception and is loyally understood to confirm, not detract from, traditional notions of Jewish superiority. The psychological burdens radiating out from the demands of being a member of the Chosen People, and the ethical conflicts it engenders in a democratic society, instills -- in the view of Arnold Eisen -- "a profound guilt and ambivalence generated by the inability to bear the weight which the demands of [Jewish tradition] impose." [EISEN, p. 22]
The Jewish "chain of tradition," notes Yosef Yerushalmi, engenders "enormous weight, the gravitational pull of the Jewish past, whether it be felt as an anchor or a burden ... [There is a] powerful feeling that one cannot really cease being Jewish ... [ROITH, p. 30]
Meanwhile, says Evelyn Kaye, "the basic duty of the Orthodox parent [the root of Jewish tradition and heritage] is to create a permanent sense of guilt in their children. Perhaps they find a coin in the pocket of the coat they are wearing on the Sabbath, and agonize over whether it is worse to take the coin out and thus touch money on the Sabbath, or leave it there and have to carry it around all day [both options forbidden in Orthodox Judaism]. Perhaps they read the wrong prayer from the prayer book during the service and miss the special prayer for the New Moon." [KAYE, p. 57]
"Guilt," says psychological researcher Rebecca Adler, "is just one trait in a mass of neuroses that Jews regularly attribute to themselves. The laundry list is long: Jews are hypochondriacs, Jews whine, Jews are worrywarts, Jews are anal-compulsive, Jews are orally fixated." [HALBERSTAM, p. 152] "Guilt is just one example," observes Joshua Halberstam, "of this tendency of American Jews to see themselves as neurotically driven or 'psychologically overwrought.'" [HALBERSTAM, p. 153] As Jewish author Marcelle Clements notes about having relationships with Jewish men:
"Study ulcers, shingles, and perpetual back problems. Bone up on asthma.
Learn to use words like prostate and epididymis conversationally. If you're
looking for a specialty, concentrate on the alimentary canal, starting with
impacted molars and ending with spastic colons. Don't forget lethal
dyspepsia. Sleep disorders is a required course. Learn first aid: a small
cut on the finger can always lead to tetanus. Be prepared for mysterious
ailments: I know a Jewish man whose tongue hurt for two years. Be sure
to take an interest in every orifice. Understand from the start, however, that
you don't have the tiniest, tiniest chance of ever beginning to match a
Jewish man's interest in his own symptoms." [LEVINE, J., 1992, p. 72]
"Study ulcers, shingles, and perpetual back problems. Bone up on asthma.
Learn to use words like prostate and epididymis conversationally. If you're
looking for a specialty, concentrate on the alimentary canal, starting with
impacted molars and ending with spastic colons. Don't forget lethal
dyspepsia. Sleep disorders is a required course. Learn first aid: a small
cut on the finger can always lead to tetanus. Be prepared for mysterious
ailments: I know a Jewish man whose tongue hurt for two years. Be sure
to take an interest in every orifice. Understand from the start, however, that
you don't have the tiniest, tiniest chance of ever beginning to match a
Jewish man's interest in his own symptoms." [LEVINE, J., 1992, p. 72]
"Clements took a beating from Anti-Defamation types," notes Judith Levine, "for the perceived anti-Semitism of her attack (a Jew herself, she apologized in advance)." [LEVINE, J., 1992, p. 72-73]
This neurosis/guilt/hypochondria has a basis, not in the surrounding Gentile society, but in traditional Jewish identity itself. "According to most psychiatrists," says James Yaffe,
"the difference [between "the fundamentalist" and others] lies in
his highly developed sense of guilt. This is the motivating force in
people who blindly and unquestioningly perform religious rituals; it
is, I think, the key to the personality of the Orthodox Jew ... If you
believe that God has laid down over six hundred rules and regulations
for you to obey, and that your credit in His eyes depends on how well
you obey them, how can you help but feel guilty? ... But the Orthodox
Jews' sense of guilt has consequences that go far beyond his religious
practice. It cuts through his whole life. It affects his tastes, his opinions,
almost every aspect of his daily contact. It does this primarily by
instilling in him a feeling of separation from other people." [YAFFE, J.,
1968, p. 117-118]
"The fact is undeniable," said American Zionist Ben Frommer in 1935, "that the Jews are collectively unhealthy and neurotic. Those professional Jews who, wounded to the quick, indignantly deny this truth are the greatest enemies of their race, for they thereby lead them to search for false solutions, or at most, palliatives." [BRENNER, p. 23]
In such contexts, is it any wonder that so many Jews "hate" the demands of where they came from? Is it any wonder that in the Jewish therapy groups of a San Francisco therapist, Judith Klein, a question that commonly surfaces during her practice is the worry amongst patients that Jews have "survived as a people at the cost of being crazed?" [KLEIN, p. 38] And what of the rest of Jewish tradition? Exploring problems in Jewish families (in a social work context), Herz and Rosen cut through defensive smokescreens to note that:
"Success is so vitally important to the Jewish family ethos that we can
hardly overemphasize it." [p. 368]
"Jews may have trouble allowing themselves to have a good time without
'accomplishing anything.' " [p. 367]
"Today, in most Jewish families and communities, it is obligatory that
all children go to college; graduate and professional studies are often
expected as well. When this is not achieved parents frequently perceive
it as a failure requiring therapy." [p. 368-369]
"Financial success is also highly valued in the Jewish family. While
Jewish attitudes toward money are often stereotypically portrayed, it
would be an error of omission to pretend that money has not been an
extremely important status symbol for the Jewish family." [p. 368-369]
"Given the idealistic demands of the Jewish family system for success
and achievement, it is hard not to feel a failure no matter how much one
accomplishes ... A vicious cycle may develop in which family members
devalue each other in order to bolster individual self esteem ... This
attitude is extended to the outside world as well, when Goyim [non-
Jews] are viewed critically and often condescendingly...." [p. 370-371]
Jewish popular mythology for public consumption proclaims exceptionally loving and well-adjusted nuclear family bonding. "Mythmaking about the Jewish family, and particularly about the role of women in that family, has become virtually a preoccupation of the contemporary Jewish community." [HYMAN, p. 19] "Jews living in the Diaspora," says Mimi Scarf, "have frequently spread much propaganda about themselves in order to keep a low profile and as a consequence have tended to downplay social problems of their own. Thus, Jews are not alcoholics. Jewish fathers do not desert their children. Jewish mothers do not batter their children, Jewish men do not beat their wives ... " [SCARF, p. 51] "Although it is
"For too long," said Rabbi Arthur Schwartzin in 1999, "the Jewish community has been in collective denial about drug and alcohol among our own. Our grandparents passed on a comforting myth, a self-aggrandizing belief in Jewish immunity and moral superiority, with this saying, 'Shiker is a goy,' which means, only gentiles drink. This is not the case." [SERVISS, 6-13-99, p. 3]
In 1988, attorney Joel Steinberg made New York headlines for putting his wife in the hospital with "severe internal and external injuries" and beating to death his adopted six-year-old daughter. [JACOBY, p. 8-9] In the [New York area] Orthodox community where I grew up," says Jeanette Friedman, "there was plenty of domestic abuse and violence -- all ignored as a matter of course. Now, because this condition is getting worse, not better, in all denominations of Judaism, I decided to speak out ... The results of domestic violence were everywhere: my friend's sister ran away from home; a pregnant classmate was kicked in the stomach; another classmate divorced a few weeks after her wedding; and a married woman jumped off a bridge. I was 19 when I married and I knew I was in trouble." [FRIEDMAN, J, p. 1-2] In 1989 the Jewish Week reported that "wife-battering and other forms of domestic violence are 'surprising frequent' within the Jewish community, according to a legal expert in the field. In fact, said Dr. Samuel Klagsbrun, domestic violence 'exists at an extremely disturbing level,' more so within segments of the Orthodox than among more assimilated sectors of the Jewish community." [GILMAN, S., Dom, 3-17-89] "The domestic violence-free Jewish community is a myth," says Jewish social worker Bob Gluck, "It is a dangerous myth, for it is its perpetuation which provides a cloak for abuse to continue unabated." [GLUCK, B., 1988, p. 163] [The Minnesota Center Against Violence and Abuse has an online bibliography -- 25 paper pages long -- entitled Bibliography of Sources on Sexual and Domestic Violence in the Jewish Community: SPIEGEL, M., updated on 4-11-2000]
"A significant reason why male emotional pain sometimes gives way to [male] domestic
violence is the underlying sexism and negative attitudes toward women in Jewish
tradition and broader society. Jewish abusive men tend to deny negative feelings
about self and externalize them onto others. Female partners are convenient targets
because of the legion of negative images all Jews learn about Jewish women. Abusive
men attempt to muzzle difficult emotions by controlling others and by lashing out in
violence." [GLUCK, B., 1988, p. 166]
Elsewhere, Gluck notes that "a Los Angeles study found that 50 percent of the Jews interviewed reported instances of violence -- and a hospital emergency room worker was quoted as reporting that 20 percent of Jewish married women were battered, as are all married women. In Israel, it is estimated that 30 percent of Israeli children grow up in homes where their mother was abused." [GLUCK, B., 1988, p. 169]
"A significant reason why male emotional pain sometimes gives way to [male] domestic
violence is the underlying sexism and negative attitudes toward women in Jewish
tradition and broader society. Jewish abusive men tend to deny negative feelings
about self and externalize them onto others. Female partners are convenient targets
because of the legion of negative images all Jews learn about Jewish women. Abusive
men attempt to muzzle difficult emotions by controlling others and by lashing out in
violence." [GLUCK, B., 1988, p. 166]
Elsewhere, Gluck notes that "a Los Angeles study found that 50 percent of the Jews interviewed reported instances of violence -- and a hospital emergency room worker was quoted as reporting that 20 percent of Jewish married women were battered, as are all married women. In Israel, it is estimated that 30 percent of Israeli children grow up in homes where their mother was abused." [GLUCK, B., 1988, p. 169]
In 1980, a study of Jewish family violence (conducted by Hebrew Union College and the University of Southern California) surveyed the presumably most religiously and morally attentive Jews: active members of Los Angeles area synagogues. "The findings," says Betsy Giller, one of the investigators, "are alarming." From a sampling of 209 respondents, 22 spousal abuse cases and 118 child abuse cases (as well as 4 sexual abuses) were reported. Going against traditional wisdom, those with higher incomes were found to be more likely to be abusive. And who gets blamed for all this Jewish family violence? Jews who make moral decisions in the privacy of their own homes? Of course not. The 'blame stretching' goes in the usual direction, borrowing heavily from the Jewish Persecution Tradition. It's the non-Jews' fault, as usual. "Violent oppression of Jews," decides Giller, "such as the experience of pogroms in Europe, the immigrant experience in the early 1900's in America, and, most powerfully, the experience of survivors of the Holocaust and their families serve to generate rage and model violent means of interaction which find expression within the family." [GILLER, p. 105]
This apologetic crutch (blaming Gentiles for everything) is undermined by a New York rabbi, Philip Skolnick, who finds a steady stream of abused Jewish wives coming to his door for help. "Coming to terms with domestic violence in the Jewish community," says Skolnick, "means coming to terms with the myths that inform our Jewish lives, and accepting them for what they are: myths. To give up some of these myths implies ceding our claim to being special, and giving up our specialness makes us just that much more ordinary, vulnerable." [SKOLNICK, p. 3]
In the early years of the twentieth century, famed Jewish anarchist Emma Goldman was one of the foremost pioneers of what came to be known much later as the feminist/women's liberation movement. As Alix Shulman notes
"From the very beginning, her father, whose fury and beatings she
remembered as 'the nightmare of my childhood,' continually complained
that she, his firstborn, had been born a girl. Her mother supervised her
sex training with traditional rigor. Not only did she threaten to whip
Emma for 'touching' herself, but when she discovered Emma had
started menstruating at age eleven, she gave her a stinging whack across
the face, explaining, 'This is necessary for a girl when she becomes a
woman, as a protection against disgrace.' This gesture made a lasting
impression on the child." [SHULMAN, A., 1970, p. 7]
Goldman was born in Russia in 1869. And why did she emigrate to America? Pogroms? Gentile anti-Jewish hatred? "Terrified of her father's plans for her," says Shulman, "Emma fled to America..., settling in Rochester, New York, with a sister." [SHULMAN, A., 1970, p. 8]
How about Jewish sexual relations? In the group therapy of Judith Klein, "a consistent finding in all [Jewish] groups is that stereotypes almost never include positive valuation of the sexuality [of Jews] of the opposite sex. [Jewish] men and women both end up feeling de-sexualized by the opposite sex members ... Messages [are] inherited from Jewish parents about open sexual appreciation of each other ... Inevitably Jewish families were seen as non-sexual environments. Many men were given the message to 'have sex with Gentile girls but find a Jewish girl to marry.'" [KLEIN, p. 40] This tendency for Jewish men to want to bed non-Jewish women David Desser and Lester Friedman call "the cult of the shiksa," [p. 28] i.e., "Jewish men pursuing Gentile love-goddesses (shiksas)." [p. 23] (The pejorative Yiddish word "shiksa," so commonly used by Jews in referral to non-Jewish women, as we have seen, is rooted in the Hebrew word for "abomination.") [SIEGEL, R., p. 397] Philip Roth addressed this desire for non-Jewish women in his novel Portnoy's Complaint, saying:
"I am so awed that I am in a state of desire beyond a hard-on. My
circumcised little dong is simply shriveled up with veneration. Maybe
it's dread. How do they get so gorgeous, so healthy, so blond? My
contempt for what they believe is more than neutralized by my adoration
of the way they look ...O America! America! It may have been gold in
the streets to my grandparents, it may have been chicken in every pot to
my father and mother, but to me ... America is a shikse nestling under
your arm whispering love love love love love!" [NOVAK/WALDOKS,
1981, p. 100-101]
Among such cases of Jewish men obsessionally chasing Gentile women is the disturbing case of famed Jewish author Arthur Koestler, who spent a lifetime doing it. But as David Cesarani adds,
"There is evidence that as well as his consistent violence against
women, Koestler was a serial rapist. The fact that he was the author
of textbooks on sexual practice and interpersonal relations that
were progressive for their time, and are enlightened by even today's
standards, is just another indication of the massive contradictions
in his personality." [CESARANI, p. 562]
Elsewhere, Cesarani such "contradictions" to be rooted in Jewish identity turmoil: "Yet Jewishness was always there, expressed through anxieties and neurotic behavior patterns in the classic symptoms of displacement and repression." [CESARANI, p. 567] Koestler even violently raped Jill Craigie, the wife of a friend.
The ugly root of Freudianism in traditional Judaism (or vice versa) is noted by Estelle Roth who notes that
"Freud's attitude to sexuality reflects anxiety and hostility towards
women and their sexual proclivities and his emphasis on restraint and
moderation appear very similar to the Jewish ethical code, 'regarding
sexual impulses and equating them with 'the Yezer Ha Ra,' the evil
impulse which has to be overcome.'"
[ROTH, p. 33]
"Traditional Jewish life," notes Martha Wolfenstein, "involved strong defenses against sexual impulses. The preponderance of rituals, and avoidances hedging every act, strongly suggests a compulsive character ... It seems likely the sexual relations were ... carried out as quickly as possible, to get the thing done and out of the way, that sex was brief and isolated from the rest of life. It was shameful, for instance, for a man and wife to see each other naked." [WOLFENSTEIN, p. 525] In traditional Orthodox Judaism, notes James Yaffe, "a married woman is supposed to shave her head, according to the law, and then wear a wig (a shietel) for the rest of her life." [YAFFE, J., 1968, p. 100]
And what of the mother in Jewish family life? "The concept of the Jewish mother," says Jewish therapist Kayla Weiner, "as being overbearing, dominating, and 'enmeshed,' to use the term of system therapists, is demeaning and racist in that it fails to understand the gender structure in the Jewish family." Weiner explains the source of the "problem" of intermarriage with non-Jews. "In some cases," says Weiner, "a Jewish man may marry a non-Jewish woman as a rejection of the 'Jewish mother' whom he has learned to disparage as much as the rest of the society, and then urges his wife to convert to Judaism so that his children can be raised Jewish. His desire to belong to the dominant culture and still retain a part of his heritage often results in a conflict when his wife converts and he ends up with exactly what he was attempting to reject. The attitude of many Jewish men towards their mothers has negatively affected the relationship between Jewish men and Jewish women." [WEINER, p. 123]
The important point that Weiner entirely overlooks of course is that Gentile society -- blamed for "disparaging Jewish mothers" -- hardly knows anything at all about them, (nor cares to know anything), except for those images that Jewish comedians, and the like, incessantly harp upon. Who on earth knows the intimate nuances of "Jewish mothers" but Jews?
How about this indictment of Jewish mothers by Jewish psychotherapist, Earl Hopper?
"The aspirations and appetites of Jewish women are higher than their
achievements, and, therefore, they live vicariously through their
children, especially their sons. Without Jewish mothers many of us
[therapists] would be without patients." [HOPPER, p.22]
In interviews with Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, before illusory American stereotypes could even take hold, Ruth Landes and Mark Zborowski note that Jewish mothers in the old country were "known for nagging, quarreling, worrying, and hypochondria." [LANDES, p. 33] "One time a Jewish mother was on jury duty," says Jewish comedian Milton Berle, "They sent her home. She insisted she was guilty." [BERLE, M., 1996, p. 311]
Rachel Josefowitz confirms the same general premise:
"In the American context the Jewish mother is reduced to a clinging
figure, hopelessly holding onto her earlier folkways, living through
her husband, her sons and daughters, preventing them from achieving
the American male-defined goals of autonomy and independence, and
causing them guilt, neurosis, and other discomfort. [JOSEFOWITZ,
p. 253]
Josefowitz fails to recognize the striking similarities between "American-defined goals" and traditional Jewish goals of material success and achievement.
And what about Jewish women's "self-hatred"? Resisting the thought of being Jewish can certainly make sense to a woman who considers that in traditional Jewish culture:
"Woman is by nature sinful." [ZBOROWSKI, p. 133]
"Woman is dangerous, not only because she herself lacks virtue but
still more because she arouses in man a desire stronger than his will
and judgment." [ZBOROWSKI, p. 134]
"[Jewish culture] is set up as a man's culture, with women officially
subordinate and officially inferior. The man greets each day by
offering thanks to God 'that Thou hast not made me a woman.'
Each day the woman in her early morning prayers offers a praise
to God 'who has made me according to thy will.' [ZBOROWSKI, p.
135]
This prayer, notes Rachel Adler, really addresses "the hated [female] body which men every morning thank God is not theirs." [ADLER, p. 15] The Jewish Bulletin featured a story about an Orthodox woman who was devastated by this prayer:
"Some years ago, Rivkah Lubitch's daughter Re'ut asked a question
that would change her mother's life. 'Mommy, why does God hate girls?'
the 6-year old asked. Lubitch, who considered herself a feminist, asked
her daugher why she thought so. 'Because the boys say the prayer
thanking God for not making them women,' Re'ut replied."
WALL, A., 11-23-01]
"Some years ago, Rivkah Lubitch's daughter Re'ut asked a question
that would change her mother's life. 'Mommy, why does God hate girls?'
the 6-year old asked. Lubitch, who considered herself a feminist, asked
her daugher why she thought so. 'Because the boys say the prayer
thanking God for not making them women,' Re'ut replied."
WALL, A., 11-23-01]
"Rabbi after rabbi," says Rabbi Gerald Skolnick, "reluctant to change the traditional formulation of the blessing [for men], has split hairs by trying to explain how the blessing is not sexist, or demeaning, to women. I know all the explanations because I was brought up on them. But the reality is that the blessing says what it says ... There are in halakhic [Jewish religious law] literature repeated groupings of women in categories with slaves, minors, fools, deaf mutes, and the like which are so offensive as to take one's breath away ... The issue is an attitude which was deeply and systematically imbued into Judaism." [SKOLNICK, p. 3-4] (Meanwhile, in a later issue of the same Jewish periodical in which Skolnick's comments appeared, Claire Kinsberg wrote: "Lines from [Muriel] Rukeyser's poetry, 'to be a Jew in the twentieth century / is to be offered a gift,' have been used as an epigraph on more than one contemporary Jewish feminist story.") [KINBERG, SHMA]
The large Conservative Judaism movement has tried to mask the demeaning implications to women in such prayers by resorting to a semantic change:
"Instead of thanking God for 'not having created me a woman,' the new
blessing seeks to avoid invidious comparison and thanks God for
'having created me a man.'" [DANZGER, p. 291]
In a study of depression in middle-aged women in Los Angeles county, sociologist Pauline Bart found that "Jewish women are roughly twice as likely to be diagnosed depressed as non-Jewish women ... None mentioned any accomplishment of their own, except being a good mother." According to Bart, they demonstrated a classic pre-illness "of martyrdom with no payoff ... to make up for the years of sacrifice ... " [KAYE, p. 165] Among younger generations, "A high percentage of anorexics," says Schnecter, "are Jewish women." [SCHNECTER, p. 246]
Leslie Hazelton notes traditional Jewish values that hideously oppress women as applied in today's Israel:
"By giving secular legal status to religious law, Israel has raised an
insuperable barrier to equality for women. To call the laws of Orthodox
Judaism (the only Judaism accepted in Israel) sexist is an understatement:
they do not recognize woman's existence as a full human being. To say
that they promote a double standard avoids the issue: they promote
only one standard, the male one.
Women are not allowed to give evidence in Rabbinical courts,
the courts that control marriage and divorce, since they are considered
emotionally unreliable ... Women are classed with children, the mentally
deficient, the insane and criminals, none of whom can testify in Rabbinical
courts. Women cannot be judges in these courts either. They have no
place in the public life of Judaism, whose attitude to women in public
is succinctly expressed by Joseph Caro, author of the fifteenth-century
code of Jewish law, the Shulhan Aruch: 'A man shall not walk between
two women, two dogs or two pigs, and two men shall not allow a
woman, a dog or a pig to walk between them.'" [HAZELTON, p. 41]
Evelyn Kaye, who was raised as an Orthodox Jew, wrote an entire volume, The Hole in the Sheet, documenting the miserable life women face under traditional Judaism. Women are not only forbidden from testimony in court, they cannot even sign a document as a legal witness. [KAYE, p. 18] "Orthodox and Hasidic men ... ," she says, "believe women are wicked, unreliable, sexual temptresses ... When I walk past the Hasidic Jews on the streets of New York, I feel them avoid me as I pass. It's rather like being a leper." [KAYE, p. 19]
Menstruating women face rules "about what they may touch (not their husbands...), where they may go (nowhere alone), and with whom they may speak (only Jews.) [KAYE, p. 20] "Masturbation is forbidden. And during sexual intercourse, there are strict rules about what you may wear, what you must think and how you must behave ... The entire event must be carried out in pitch darkness, and at no time must a man look at his naked wife ... Women are expected to be completely modest and withdrawn, and at no time are they supposed to show themselves without covering ... In order to protect the modesty of the wife during intercourse, a sheet is kept between her and her husband, with a hole at the appropriate place for the correct connection to be made." [KAYE, p. 20-21] [See also Samuel Heilman's chapter about the institutionalization of repressed sexuality in today's ultra-Orthodox communities: HEILMAN, S., 1992, p. 313-350]
The man and woman should not talk "at copulation or immediately before, excepting about matters directly needed for the act." [KAYE, p. 124] "When having intercourse ... [the man's] intention should be not to satisfy his personal desire, but to perform his marital duty, like paying a debt ... " [KAYE, p. 125] And the dangers of criticizing all this? "It is difficult to speak out," says Kaye, "The immediate reaction is the passionate cry of anti-Semitism." [KAYE, p. 175] It should not be surprising that so many Jewish women were in the vanguard of the women's liberation movement, including Betty Friedan, Susan Brownmiller, Robin Morgan, Gloria Steinhem, Erica Jung, Shulamith Firestone, Andrea Dworkin, and many others.
While Susan Schneider perceives anti-Semitism in the "Jewish American Princess (JAP)" stereotype (that depicts Jewish women as vain, materialist, cold, ostentatious, manipulative, and demanding), she concedes its origin to Jewish novelists like Philip Roth and Herman Wouk, and Jewish standup comedians. "The verbal hostility between Jewish men and women goes back far," says Susan Schneider, "... The jokes Jewish men tell about Jewish women have no parallel in other cultures; there's no comparable oeuvre of jokes about Greek or Baptist or Irish women." [SCHNEIDER, p. 290] "Who has done the most to inject anti-Semitic images into the popular culture?" asks Rabbi Daniel Lapin, "Just think of mean stereotypes such as the notorious JAP, or Jewish American Princess. Is it the work of Jesse Helms, Pat Buchanan or Newt Gingrich? No, it is the work of Jewish artists like Woody Allen, Roseanne Barr, Philip Roth and Howard Stern that portrays Jewish women as unresponsive, selfish, and materialistic." [LAPIN, D., 1999, p. 292] "What's the difference between a chess player and a Jewish wife in bed?" asks Jewish comedian Milton Berle, "Every once and a while, the chess player moves." [BERLE, M., 1996, p. 311]
"When Jews themselves participate in an environment hostile to Jewish women," complains Evelyn Torton-Beck, reframing intra-Jewish assault as Gentile attack, "the dominant culture is quick to follow suit." [TORTON-BECK, p. 20-21] "Jokes about the greed of Jewish women," says Ann Roiphe, "began to spread and they contained the message of Jewish materialism. But by directing antisemitic whisperings against females, bigotry was slipped past the general public, and Jewish males became vehicles for antisemitic propaganda as they happily repeated slurs aimed against their wives and sisters." [ROIPHE, p. 455] Melanie Kaye-Kantrowitz even blames the "persecution [of Jews] by Gentiles" for, as she says, "the nosiness characteristic" of Jewish culture. "If you constantly monitor information," she explains, harkening to the eternal Jewish persecution complex of the millennia, "you may be able to ward off disaster." [KAYE, p. 1]
Jewish author Bob Gluck even places problems within Jewish male/female relationships at the feet of Gentiles:
"The Jewish community succeeds in denying abuse in our midst because
we project negative aspects of the male experience upon women. Recall
that it is the Jewish woman who is stereotyped as bossy, tough and aggressive.
She is considered able to handle any challenge, and she (especially when single)
is often seen as a dangerous provocateur. Jewish men are the ones traditionally
and popularly perceived as the victims in gender relations. Meanwhile, in the
morass of these stereotypes, the Jewish home is supposed to be a protected
island of peace. Our difficulty acknowledging Jewish domestic violence is
compounded by our great fear of anti-Semitism; conditioned, we may naively
believe, by how the wider world perceives our character and actions ... In our
communities, information perceived as negative travels rapidly. There is a
way in which our experience of anti-Semitism has caused us to internalize
fault for our national experience into internalized negative self-image." [GLUCK,
B., 1988, p. 168]
Jewish author Bob Gluck even places problems within Jewish male/female relationships at the feet of Gentiles:
"The Jewish community succeeds in denying abuse in our midst because
we project negative aspects of the male experience upon women. Recall
that it is the Jewish woman who is stereotyped as bossy, tough and aggressive.
She is considered able to handle any challenge, and she (especially when single)
is often seen as a dangerous provocateur. Jewish men are the ones traditionally
and popularly perceived as the victims in gender relations. Meanwhile, in the
morass of these stereotypes, the Jewish home is supposed to be a protected
island of peace. Our difficulty acknowledging Jewish domestic violence is
compounded by our great fear of anti-Semitism; conditioned, we may naively
believe, by how the wider world perceives our character and actions ... In our
communities, information perceived as negative travels rapidly. There is a
way in which our experience of anti-Semitism has caused us to internalize
fault for our national experience into internalized negative self-image." [GLUCK,
B., 1988, p. 168]
The stereotype of the JAP may well be based in reality if one accepts the 1967 perspective of Jewish psychiatrist Alexander Grinstein about the preponderance of Jewish women "between the ages of 30 and 35 [who were] very well-dressed in the height of fashion. [Their] grooming is impeccable and [their] hair is styled in the latest vogue. [Their] jewelry, of which there is a good deal, is likely to be heavy and noisy. [They] tend to be overdressed for the 'ordinary' occasion." [GRINSTEIN, p. 79] There were so many of these women as a distinct "type" that it was hard for him and a colleague to "distinguish one woman from another." [GRINSTEIN, p. 79]
Such women, said the psychiatrist, "live in rather large houses in the better middle class neighborhoods and have two or three children. There is at least one maid, with additional help for 'heavy cleaning.' the maids are usually colored; the women themselves, Jewish." [GRINSTEIN, p. 79-89]
These women, says Grinstein, "identify themselves with [their mothers]. The same shallowness, the same emphasis on money values, the same competitiveness that their mothers have." [GRINSTEIN, p. 93] "Have you been doing some upscale shopping lately?" Sherry Etrog, a Jewish school psychologist, asked author Joshua Halberstam in 1997, "the JAP isn't some bigot's fantasy. Jewish suburban women, though of course not only Jews and not only suburbanites, are ravenous consumers. Young Jewish girls too ... the GAP JAP." [HALBERSTAM, p. 111] Meanwhile, Etrog's own sister, also a school psychologist, chose indignant denial about the subject: "Don't fool yourself. We certainly are dealing with bigotry here ... It's called classic anti-Semitism ... It galls me that Jews themselves, even Jewish women, even my otherwise intelligent sister, buy into this slander." [HALBERSTAM, p. 112]
There are numerous joke books about the "JAP" by Jewish authors. Nor are they all by men. Anna Sequoia (nee Schneider), for exampple, has one called The Official J.A.P. Handbook. Here one can learn the prima-donna foundations of this world, which few non-Jews know in detail:
"Where to be born (not Staten Island) and what to be named.
Education: Can you wear your mink to college?
The single years: Daddy buys the co-op; Mommy hires the cleaning lady.
The first marriage: God forbid, a second.
The Mercedes years.
Charge plates: you buy and Daddy pays.
Breaking the engagement and keeping the ring.
Schools: Radcliffe Scmadcliffe.
Employment: for others, of course."
[SEQUOIA, A., 1982, p. COVER]
There are numerous joke books about the "JAP" by Jewish authors. Nor are they all by men. Anna Sequoia (nee Schneider), for exampple, has one called The Official J.A.P. Handbook. Here one can learn the prima-donna foundations of this world, which few non-Jews know in detail:
"Where to be born (not Staten Island) and what to be named.
Education: Can you wear your mink to college?
The single years: Daddy buys the co-op; Mommy hires the cleaning lady.
The first marriage: God forbid, a second.
The Mercedes years.
Charge plates: you buy and Daddy pays.
Breaking the engagement and keeping the ring.
Schools: Radcliffe Scmadcliffe.
Employment: for others, of course."
[SEQUOIA, A., 1982, p. COVER]
Jeffry Mallow, in critiquing the JAP stereotypes, concedes the influence of Jewish novelists and other Jewish commentators in sealing the image in American popular consciousness. But he then totally ignores the long tradition of Jewish social-climbing, ostentation, "appreciation of money" (to use George Mosse's phrase), and Talmudic-sanctioned materialism to claim his allegiance to Jewish victimhood at the hands of Gentiles: i.e., the JAP stereotype has no Jewish basis of origin. All the negative qualities of the JAP stereotype, Mallow insists, are expressly Gentile traits:
"The Jewish writers have described a woman who, with the arrival
of the Jews into the American middle class, has come to adopt some
of the unsavory characteristics of the Gentile Princesses who preceded
her. But, in a classic anti-Semitic reversal, these characteristics now
have become defined as Jewish." [MALLOW, p. 13]
(This is the same ploy Jewish scholar Jay Gertzman uses to nobly reinvent the Jewish immigrant-created smut industry in New York City as an echo of non-Jewish America: "They recognized the values and espoused the tactics of fellow citizens, explored the erotic fascinations of the latter, and manipulated and accepted the manipulation of those with whom they dealt ... What erotica dealers wanted was not bald power to impose their wills but fulfillment of the American Dream: protection from material wants, the deference that financial security yields, and a secure identity as a citizen enjoying the privileges of democratic society ... In their actions they were not subversives -- political, moral, or sexual. Those who were Jewish immigrants or the sons and daughters of immigrants were especially interested in assimilating into American culture ... The minority middlemen gave people what they wanted, publishing sexually explicit books, magazines, and photographs. Sometimes, they justified their business as a contribution to society." [GERTZMAN, J., 2000, p. 47] In other words, such Jews assimilated into American society by being pornographers, giving the non-Jewish public what it wants. Dirty magazines become, for these people, the Jewish gateway to America. Pornographic activism allowed them to just blend into their new land).
(This is the same ploy Jewish scholar Jay Gertzman uses to nobly reinvent the Jewish immigrant-created smut industry in New York City as an echo of non-Jewish America: "They recognized the values and espoused the tactics of fellow citizens, explored the erotic fascinations of the latter, and manipulated and accepted the manipulation of those with whom they dealt ... What erotica dealers wanted was not bald power to impose their wills but fulfillment of the American Dream: protection from material wants, the deference that financial security yields, and a secure identity as a citizen enjoying the privileges of democratic society ... In their actions they were not subversives -- political, moral, or sexual. Those who were Jewish immigrants or the sons and daughters of immigrants were especially interested in assimilating into American culture ... The minority middlemen gave people what they wanted, publishing sexually explicit books, magazines, and photographs. Sometimes, they justified their business as a contribution to society." [GERTZMAN, J., 2000, p. 47] In other words, such Jews assimilated into American society by being pornographers, giving the non-Jewish public what it wants. Dirty magazines become, for these people, the Jewish gateway to America. Pornographic activism allowed them to just blend into their new land).
While "in 1988, the American Jewish Committee formalized the proliferation of the JAP stereotype as a form of anti-Semitism," [FORWARD, 10-23-98, p. 1] Claudia Setzer, a Catholic convert to Judaism, certainly spoke for most non-Jews when she told a Jewish interviewer that she had never heard a JAP joke told by a Gentile, her family wouldn't have understood them, and "the only people I ever heard tell JAP jokes were Jews." [HALBERSTAM, p. 113]
Rachel Josefowitz Siegel on the other hand, distances the Jewish community from blame or responsibility for their own selves and public image:
"These negative images of Jewish women [the materialist-oriented JAP
and guilt-ridden mother] are typical of the internalized oppression and
devaluation experienced by members of minority groups, when they
absorb the values of the dominant culture. When Jews lived
in ghettos their only contact with the dominant culture was through
brutal victimization ... We must remember that the terms are still set
by the dominant culture." [SIEGEL, p. 254]
In Siegel's article, she rejects Grinstein's condemnations of what he sees as expressly Jewish qualities in second generation American Jewish women. "Their own crudeness," wrote Grinstein, "and inappropriateness in their dress, the excrescence of harshness in their behavior toward their children, loudness in their manners, the lack of accepted [non-Jewish] values -- all speak for an identification with some of their mothers' striking primitive characteristics." [GRINSTEIN, p. 252] "Contemporary Jewish men," notes Bob Gluck, "-- abusive or not -- seem to often harbor modern negative stereotypes of Jewish women. Their assertiveness is often considered threatening, the sign of a 'castrating bitch.' The Jewish woman is, in appearance and character, contrary to the American Jewish male image of the ideal mate for a man who is succesfful in American society (blond and quiet). It is interesting to see how many non-Jewish men find these same characteristics appealing. Might it be that the abusive man lashes out at his Jewish partner in part because she is an ever-present reminder that he himself is Jewish?" [GLUCK, B., 19788, p. 166]
Even in feminist circles, complains Melanie Kaye-Kantrowitz, "[Gentile women] see Jewish women as aggressive, bossy, tense, driven, difficult, not to mention loud and pushy." [KAYE-KANTROWITZ p. 8] (Yet, in another context, she writes that " I hate to admit it, when [my half-Jewish daughter] Lisa calls a person so Jewish I know what she means. Sleeve-grabbing urgency. Demanding.") [KAYE-KANTROWITZ, 1990, p. 191] For some, Jewish Congresswoman Bella Abzug fulfilled all stereotypes -- she once noted that "there are those who say I'm impatient, impertuous, uppity, rude, profane, brash and overberaring." [ABZUG, B., 1972, p. 3] In Judith Klein's Jewish therapy groups, participants are encouraged to pose questions about the public image they maintain:
"Do I fit the stereotype of the over-intellectual, arrogant, yet
dependent, non-physical Jewish male?" "Am I the smothering,
achievement-oriented, demanding, nerve-wracked Jewish woman?"
[KLEIN, p. 38]
How real is the JAP? Apparently so bizarrely verifiable that another Steinberg who attacked his wife, this one Steve in 1981, who stabbed her 26 times, was acquitted by a jury after listening to "a progression of witnesses testif[y] to Elana's incessant shopping, her habitual whining and complaining ... and ... unending demands for clothing and furniture." [HALBERSTAM, p. 110]
These controversial "Jewish characteristics" have been reformulated by Jewish deniers, apologists, and polemicists as complete antisemitic falsehoods or, at the very least, merely qualities that have been incongruously copied from surrounding Gentile culture. Those Jews who concede such behavior as having some factual basis tend to attribute it not to Jewish choices of behavior in their own lives, but to the results of historical non-Jewish oppression of the Jewish community.
In any case, this ongoing argument has for decades centered upon the notion of a Gentile "civility" that is pitted against a traditional Eastern European Jewish culture that champions "pushing forward" at all costs as its "uncivil" hallmark of intercommunication. Siegel calls this pushiness a "nurturing," and in the context of mainstream non-Jewish society a "devalued ... self-assertion." [SIEGEL, p. 253]
In the midst of all this, lies the Jewish community's continuous struggle with its own collective face in the mirror and the incessant echoes of "Jewish self-hatred." Ironically, in an editorial crusading against "Jewish anti-Semitism," the Jewish Radicalnewsletter seemed to break ranks in arguing that anti-Jewish sentiment is endemic to Jewish belief itself:
"Yom Kippur is a veritable festival of self-criticism and Jewish
prophetic and rabbinic literature is filled with admonitions for Jews
to look inward and become aware of their alleged faults and limitations.
All of the great disasters of Jewish history were traditionally explained
by the prophets and rabbis not as a result of the power of anti-Semites,
but as a result of the sins of the Jews. Carried to extremes, this tradition
of Jewish self-criticism is easily transformed into a tradition of Jewish
anti-Semitism." [JEWISH RAD, p. 8]
The "paradox ... of this singular people," notes Abraham Millgram, "[is that] we discover that Israel is alternately blessed and cursed, exalted and denounced by its own spokesmen." [MILLGRAM, p. 4] "Both explicitly and implicitly," says Monford Harris, "the Bible is extremely critical of the Jews. The Jews are not pictured as ethically and morally superior to all other nations; they are pictured as failures ... No national literature contemporary with the Bible is so severely critical of its people as the Bible is." [HARRIS, M., 1965, p. 89, 92] As Chaim Bermant observes:
"The Jew does not believe in original sin, but, especially where tradition has
has entered into his upbringing, he has a pronounced sense of guilt, instilled
in him by endless generations of prophets and preachers. There are, after all,
few denunciations more sweeping than those of Jerimiah: 'For among my
people are found wicked men: they lay wait as he that seteth a snare; they
set a trap to catch men. As a cage is full of birds, so are their houses full
of deceit; therefore they become great, and waxen rich. They are waxen
fat, they shine: yea they overpass the deeds of the wicked ...'" [BERMANT, C.,
1977, p. 34]
Here's part of what religious Jews ritually confess on the yearly Day of Atonement:
"We have trespassed, we have been treacherous, we have robbed, slandered,
acted perversely. We have been wicked, presumptuous, violent, deceitful.
We have counselled evil and spoken falsely. We have rebelled, provoked,
committed iniquity. We have transgressed. We have oppressed. We have
been stiff-necked. We have acted wickedly. We have corrupted. We have
committed abominations. We have erred and have caused others to err ...
[BERMANT, C., 1977, p. 15]
"The Jew does not believe in original sin, but, especially where tradition has
has entered into his upbringing, he has a pronounced sense of guilt, instilled
in him by endless generations of prophets and preachers. There are, after all,
few denunciations more sweeping than those of Jerimiah: 'For among my
people are found wicked men: they lay wait as he that seteth a snare; they
set a trap to catch men. As a cage is full of birds, so are their houses full
of deceit; therefore they become great, and waxen rich. They are waxen
fat, they shine: yea they overpass the deeds of the wicked ...'" [BERMANT, C.,
1977, p. 34]
Here's part of what religious Jews ritually confess on the yearly Day of Atonement:
"We have trespassed, we have been treacherous, we have robbed, slandered,
acted perversely. We have been wicked, presumptuous, violent, deceitful.
We have counselled evil and spoken falsely. We have rebelled, provoked,
committed iniquity. We have transgressed. We have oppressed. We have
been stiff-necked. We have acted wickedly. We have corrupted. We have
committed abominations. We have erred and have caused others to err ...
[BERMANT, C., 1977, p. 15]
Sometimes even well-meaning non-Jews, caught up in the post-Holocaust fervor of Judeo-centrism, can take swipes at "self-hating" Jews. The existentialist king, Jean-Paul Sartre, (beloved by many Judeo-centrists for his book about anti-Semitism) asked friends to "psychoanalyze" the French Jewish scholar, Maxime Rodinson, who was a fervent anti-Zionist, a harsh critic of Israel, and critic of Jewish ethnocentrism. "Judeo-centrism," wrote Rodinson in reply, "is now characteristic of Jews and non-Jews alike ... I ... remain convinced that such attitudes ... are extremely harmful, as pernicious, for the comprehension of facts and situations, as they are for one's ability to influence the facts... I neither hate nor despise myself. I have never denied my Jewish origin. But nor have I regarded it as a mark of glory that automatically makes me superior to others, that suffices to protect me from intellectual or moral error..." [RODINSON, p. 9]
Among the many Jewish apostates of all political persuasions was Karl Marx, the famed founder of communism. Marx was of Jewish heritage. His father converted to Christianity and young Karl was raised in a Christian household. He eventually grew to reject all religious creeds as being "opiates for the masses," psychological tools of oppression to keep the masses in their meager places, futilely planning on better times in a supposed afterlife. Marx rejected the Jewish conviction that Jews were the consummate victims of human history. In his broader humanitarian view, it was the poor masses of ALL humanity --the proletariat -- exploited by economic oppressors who were the greatest (and continuous) sufferers in the world. Too many Jews, in Marx's view, were part of the economic matrix that suffocated them.
Marx was part of a "radical" German intellectual community -- many of them Jews -- in the early and mid-1800's that sought to articulate possibilities for new social, economic, and political systems -- universalistic and egalitarian in scope -- that transcended then current religious dogma. Marx's ideas echoed and elaborated upon other social critics of the era. Other free-thinking Jews were attacking the social values and mores around them too, including as targets fellow Jews and Judaism. David Strauss (1808-74), for example, summarizes Jules Carlebach, "explained the contrast between the open hostility of peasants [to Jews] and the favorable attitude of human theorists towards Jews by claiming that only the peasants knew 'the real actual Jew' who would deprive them of their last cow if they could not meet their debts." [CARLEBACH, p. 102] Strauss underscored the German problem with Jews to be "Jewish dishonesty in business" and the "persistent particularism of the Jews who deliberately separated themselves from their German fellow citizens by their rituals and ceremonial laws." [CARLEBACH, p. 102]
Ludwig Feuerbach (1804-72), another Jewish "radical" of the times, understood Judaism to be "Jewish ethnocentrism enslaved by law." [CARLEBACH, p. 109] He remarked that "the Jews have maintained their special peculiarities down to the present day. Their principle, their God, is the practical principle of the world -- egoism in the form of religion. Egoism centres and concentrates man upon himself, but at the same time it limits his theoretical outlook because he is indifferent to everything which is not directly related to his own welfare." [MEHRING, F., p. 97] Yet another Jewish social philosopher, Moses Hess (1812-75) may have been especially influential to Marx's view of European Jewry. Hess, who was a pioneer thinker in the founding of Zionism, when addressing Jewish influence in the monetary and financial worlds, wrote that "the Jews, in the natural history of the social animal world had the world-historic mission to bring out the predator in mankind. They have finally completed the task." [CARLEBACH, p. 123]
Among his many volumes of socioeconomic theory, Marx had fiercely unkind words for the people of his own origins -- Jews, and their relation to capitalism. Marx's best known commentary about them was in response to an article in 1843 by Bruno Bauer, another controversial theorist of the times. Bauer argued that once Jews and Christians gave up their respective religious faiths, they would become mutually "emancipated" from their factionalism and discriminations.
But Marx's criticisms of Jews went beyond religion. He bitterly wrote:
"What is the Jews' foundation in our world? Material
necessity, private advantage. What is the object of the
Jews' worship in this world? Usury. What is his worldly
God? Money. Very well then; emancipation from usury
and money, that is, from practical, real Judaism, would
constitute the emancipation of our times." [MARX, K.,
1959, p. 37]
Marx also argues that
"Thus we recognize in Judaism generally an anti-social element which
has reached its present strength through a historical development in
which the Jews eagerly collaborated. Jewish emancipation means,
ultimately, the emancipation of humanity from Judaism. He has already
emancipated himself in the Jewish way: the Jew, who is, for example,
merely tolerated in Vienna, determines by his money power the fate
of entire German Empire. The Jew, who is without rights in the smallest
German state, decides the fate of Europe ... This is no isolated fact.
The Jew has emancipated himself in the Jewish fashion not only by
acquiring money power but through money's having become (with
him or without him) the world power and the Jewish spirit having
become the practical spirit of the Christian peoples. The Jews have
emancipated themselves to the extent that Christians have become
Jews." [MARX, K., 1959, p. 38]
Marx bemoans the fact that, as he sees it, even the newly founded nation of America was emulating Jewish materialism, where the American considered "the world to be no more than a stock exchange, and he has no other destiny here below than to become richer than his neighbor. Trade has seized upon all his thoughts, and he has no other recreation than to exchange objects." [MARX, p. 32-36]
"The law of the Jew," wrote Marx, "lacking all solid foundation, is only a religious caricature of morality and of law in general ... The social emancipation of Jewry is the emancipation of society from Jewry." [MARX, K., 1959, p. 42, 45]
These are strong -- and in the celebratory pro-Jewish political climate of 1990s, even dangerous -- accusations. Is there any truth to them, or are they merely the twisted ravings of an irrational nineteenth century Jewish anti-Semite? It is profoundly ironic that such charges by Marx later found currency in the most astonishing of places: Theodore Herzl, the "father" of modern Israel, and the Zionist movement itself. In fact, Herzl's writings and political theories reflect a lifelong embarrassment and disdain with both shallow, wealthy Jews in Western Europe and the unsophisticated blinder-based ghetto dwellers in Poland and Russia. Zionism, after all, was founded upon some socialist principles, the changing of objectionable Jewish "types," and its own myths emphasized the reforming of a Jewish national character based on hard, honest, physical labor in the farm fields of the Holy Land.
A number of other "Zionist philosophers," like Theodore Lessing, were also harsh on their own people. According to Daniel Niewyk, Lessing understood Jews to be "the victims of historical developments that had deprived them of intimate contact with nature and the soil, they had grown overly intellectualized and morally and physically decadent under the Western world's implacable pursuit of Mammon [the God of money]. Their resulting preoccupations with security and material wealth had brought them a half deserved reputation as exploiters." [NIEWYK, p. 137]
"Zionism," says Moshe Leshem, "wanted to efface the image of the 'trading Jew,' grubbing for profit in undignified, unhealthy Galut [exile] occupations. This was one area in which the picture of the Jews as drawn by the anti-Semites and that limned by the Zionists came agonizingly close to being identical." [LESHEM, p. 84]
Some of Herzl's written observations in his diaries about his own people qualify by today's standards as strongly anti-Semitic:
"We Jews are a vain people. We supply the biggest
quota of snobs of 'good society.'" [p. 97]
"I looked at the Paris Jews and saw a family likeness
in their faces: bold, misshapen noses; furtive and
cunning eyes." [p. 11]
"We cling to money because [the rulers] flung us
onto money." [p. 9]
"I wanted to write a Jewish novel ... I wanted in
particular to contest the suffering, despised, and
decent mass of poor Jews with the rich ones. The
latter experience nothing of anti-Semitism which
they are actually and mainly responsible for." [p. 5]
"All Jews who are well off are my opponents. So
I am beginning to have the right to be the biggest
of anti-Semites." [p. 481-482]
It is extremely troubling for Jews today that Karl Marx, one of the most influential social thinkers and humanists in history, was both a born Jew and, as evidenced by his writings, a "Jew-hater." And to all the scholars (many Jewish) who still pour over his secular humanist texts as analytic masterpieces to this day, Marx's nasty remarks about Jews (from a man who was consumed with exposing and explaining social injustice) are deeply troubling, and must be explained away. And how do they do this? By character assassination and psychoanalyzing him, of course. "Psychic structures may be more significant determinants than social forces," says Jules Carlebach. "and we must therefore look at an attempt to explain Marx's self-hatred from a psychoanalytic perspective." [CARLEBACH, p. 337]
The scholars shake their wise heads in unison. How could the champion of all the world's underdogs, so brilliantly insightful in the realms of social and political theory, have so terribly faltered in his understanding of his own origins? 150 years after Marx's words about Jews in his own society, modern apologists insert themselves into his boots to proclaim that Marx really didn't see what he saw. When it came to Jews -- of which by traditional Jewish definition, Marx was still a member -- he didn't know what he was talking about.
One critic claims that Marx's "anti-Semitism” merely "reflected the norms of society." (The man most associated in world history with the threatened destruction of the "norms" of such a society?) Another (a typical Jewish chauvinist) says "It was a tragic misunderstanding of the Hebrew roots of his humanism;" yet another sees his severe criticism of his own disavowed people "as an attempt to disassociate himself from a despised race and proclaim himself a non-Jew." Perhaps, suggests one scholar, his comments about Jews were "the natural reaction of baptized Jew" who had "little or no knowledge of Judaism." Maybe Marx's animosity towards Jews, voices another, stems from his "difficult relationship with his mother and [her] narrow minded egoism in money matters." Robert Misrahi suggests that Marx "wishes unconsciously to expiate his father's guilt and complicity with the Prusso-Christian monarchy for having baptized his family to pursue his legal career." One observer even turns the greedy tables to suggest that Marx's criticism of Jews was really "a projection of his [own] obsession with money, his frustration at finding himself without an inheritance, and the desire to wreck vengeance on the ethnic group from which he descended." [ALL QUOTES: WISTRICH, p. 14] "The sheer violence of Marx's anti-Semitism," adds David Auerbach, "-- together with other distorted aspects of his personality -- indicates a pathological element. [AUERBACH, p. 47] This author suggests that a full understanding of Marx's animosity towards Jews should include a range of psychological variables, including feelings emanating from the fact that the hero of communism had a bad case of boils. [AUERBACH, p. 46]
The implications of a voluntary "Exodus" OUT of the Jewish community, in varying degrees, over the past few hundred years is a matter of great concern to those who hold tightly to their 4,000 year old identity. For those Jews who cling to an elitist sense of themselves, any kind of apostate -- religious, cultural, or otherwise -- is a source of embarrassment and threatens to destabilize the entire surviving system. The apostate impugns the beliefs of those left behind. Nazi enemies a Jew can dialectically understand, at least to the point of Nazi inhumanity, although even this can be stretched to fit traditional Jewish theology of special punishment from God. But how does one explain it to oneself when bonafide members of the Chosen People choose not to be chosen anymore?
"M'shumad, or apostate," notes Michael Asheri, in describing traditional Jewish thinking, "is an ugly word in Jewish speech ... A m'shumad is not buried in a Jewish cemetery nor is he mourned by his family. On the contrary, his brothers are supposed to celebrate his death as the demise of an enemy of Israel." [ASHERI, M., 1983, p. 319-320]
To the communal Jewish psyche, the most horrible concept imaginable is not the threat of extermination of Jewry in the Holocaust. There is something far more sinister, a much more dangerous threat. It is assimilation. When Jews choose to surrender ancient claims to specialness -- whether religious, racial, or cultural -- and completely blend into the surrounding non-Jewish society, it is a slap in the face to those who remain in the perpetual ideological "ghetto." The free selection by Jewish individuals to surrender the ancient burdens of superiority and elitism (and its undercurrents of guilt and inferiority) that has been passed down through the centuries is difficult for the defenders of the perpetual fort to comprehend. What can be more horrible than when legitimate members of the Chosen People consciously abandon all the Jewish myths and CHOOSE extinction? In highlighting Nazi savageries against Jews there is powerful affirmation for the surviving tribe that has weathered another terrible obstacle. Whether Jews chose to be martyrs or not, they were gruesomely sacrificed, and this reinforces --against horror -- the remaining community. But when a Jew just waves goodbye and walks out the door beneath the menuza forever, of his own free will, those behind are left to brood upon threats to Jewish identity that are not -- almost comfortably, in comparison -- external. "If leaving the Jewish people," explains Rabbi Jonathan Sacks about traditional Jewish thinking, "regardless of transgression, is itself a fundamental sin, a determination not to leave the Jewish people is itself a fundamental virtue." [SACKS, J., p. 130]
Among the most horrible Jewish apostates are those that do not blend into mainstream secularism, but who, according to one 1982 study, make up in America 6% of the Reverend Moon's Unification Church, 12 per cent of the Hare Krsna movement, and 25 per cent of Zen Buddhists. [DANZGER, p. 77] Joseph Goldstein, Jack Kornfield, Jacqueline Schwartz, and Sharon Salzberg studied Buddhism in India and Thailand and returned to the U.S. to found the Insight Meditation Society in Massachusetts, "one of the most successful Buddhist teaching institutions in America." [KAMENETZ, R., 1994, p. 8] The well-known Naropa Institute was founded by Tibetan Chogyam Trungpa, but he "used to joke that his students formed the Oy Vay school of Buddhism." David Rome, also Jewish, was Trungpa's personal secretary; Robin Kornman was a member of his "inner circle." Ram Dass (Richard Alpert) is also a well known writer/master on Hinduism. His father was chairman of the (Jewish) Joint Distribution Committee during World War II. [KAMENETZ, R., 1994, p. 9, 266]
9% of Church of Scientology members are also reputed to be of Jewish heritage. [SELENGUT, p. 95] Even America's best-known "practicing witch," publicly known as Starhawk (Miriam Simhof) adjusts Jewish Holocaust-type victimology to her new identity, proclaiming that "to be a witch is to identify with 9 million victims [witches] of bigotry and hatred." [DRESNER, p. 14] "Anyone who cultivates the power of his or her will," proclaims Margot Adler, an elder with the Covenant of the Goddess and granddaughter of prominent Jewish psychoanalyst Alfred Adler, "can become a witch." [DRESNER, p. 15] Other newsworthy Jewish "witches” include Lexa Rosean (originally: Ora Leiba) and Emunah D'vorah. [MARK, J., 1999, p. 1](Even Anton LeVay -- born Howard Stanton Levey -- was Jewish. Founder of the Church of Satan, he was "a self-loathing man of Jewish descent who embraced fascism toward the end of his life." [CHURCH OF SATAN/1]
One of the reasons so many (mostly young) Jews join such religious organizations, says Charles Selengut, is "the professed (though by no means realized) universalism of cult movements; they are disenchanted with what they perceive as the parochialism of Judaism." [SELENGUT, p. 104] One convert out of Judaism even told Selengut that "Judaism was so ethnic and nationalistic it wasn't a religion." [SELENGUT, p. 103]
Common Jewish chauvinistic inability to fathom that some of such organizations' members might leave the ideological fold of "God's Great Victims" for simply positive reasons in the extra-Jewish universe is reflected by a Jewish scholar who decides that "the experience of persecution and fear of the Holocaust is probably related to the disproportionate numbers of American Jews who join various cults." [DANZER p. 289] "Other Jewish critics,' says Charles Selengut, "assert that it is the psychologically maladjusted who join new religious movements and describe Jewish converts as people who are 'selling their souls for the security of slavery.'" [SELENGUT, p. 95]
Margaret Brearly goes so far as to proclaim that "New Age" movements in general "could pose as serious a medium- and long-term threat to Jewish identity as Nazism did in the 1920s and 1930s "[and] it ... could eventually lead to the destruction of many Jews and all Jewish identity." [BREARLY, p. 269] Ms. Brearly's brush is broad for New Age Nazis. Innately antisemitic New Age movements listed included the Unification Church (moonies), Scientologists, Zen Buddhists, New Age "travelers," modern pagans, Wiccan witches, "post-Christian" feminists, occultists, the Transcendental Meditation (TM) movement, and EST followers. [BREARLY, p. 258-259] "At a deep, esoteric level," worries Brearly, "New Age ideology is Aryan and racist..." [BREARLY, p. 260] although, oddly enough, "a significant number of New Age leaders and their followers are themselves Jewish in origin." [BREARLY, p. 259] (In 1987 the Israeli government even published a 500-page report "on the threat posed by mystic sects to Israeli society." [JW, 3-13-87] According to the document, 5,000 Israelis were members of groups like Scientology, Transcendental Mediation, Bhagwan Rajneesh, EST, and others.) When Jewish American Phillip Gordon decided to join the Hare Krishnas and become Kurma Dasa, his parents sent him to a psychiatrist. [COLLINS, E., 2000, p. 31]Hannah Newman's online web site (originally posted by the Jewish Student Union at the University of Colorado) highlights "camoflauged anti-Semitism in an enlightened global society." Her article, The Rainbow Swastika, indicts the entire "New Age" movement as anti-Semitic, a world view that seeks to destroy Jews and Judaism. Alleged antiSemitic individuals and organizations include Buckminster Fuller, Maharishi Yogi and his Transcendental Meditation organization, Greenpeace, Planned Parenthood, Bread for the World, Bahais and Sufis, Unesco, Scientology, the Theosophical Society, "pop singers John Denver and Judy Collins," the Hunger Project, "most health food stores,"and many, many more. Newman's list of such people who espouse such anti-Semitic currents even includes Jews like Erich Fromm, science fiction author Isaac Isamov, Alvin Toffler, and Theodore Rozak. [NEWMAN, H., 2001]
How about vegetarianism as an expression of anti-Semitism? Hitler, and other anti-Semites, have toyed with it, after all. In 2001, Pat Sloane became confused at the online discussion of mostly fellow Jewish scholars at the discussion group H-Antisemitism:
"Contrary to what you [Simon Weil] say, it's not unusual for vegetarians to
feel compassion for animals, or to disapprove of cruelty to animals. An
example is Leonardo da Vinci, who not only was a vegetarian but also
purchased cage birds in the marketplace in order to set them free. I
regard these as admirable attitudes that can be defended on either a
religious or ethical level, and I'm a bit surprised to find you slamming them
as 'antisemitic." Without resorting to who said what, could you please
explain in simple language why you find an objection to cruelty to be 'antisemitic?'
What has compassion for animals even got to do with Jews?" [SLOANE, P.,
5-10-01]
How about vegetarianism as an expression of anti-Semitism? Hitler, and other anti-Semites, have toyed with it, after all. In 2001, Pat Sloane became confused at the online discussion of mostly fellow Jewish scholars at the discussion group H-Antisemitism:
"Contrary to what you [Simon Weil] say, it's not unusual for vegetarians to
feel compassion for animals, or to disapprove of cruelty to animals. An
example is Leonardo da Vinci, who not only was a vegetarian but also
purchased cage birds in the marketplace in order to set them free. I
regard these as admirable attitudes that can be defended on either a
religious or ethical level, and I'm a bit surprised to find you slamming them
as 'antisemitic." Without resorting to who said what, could you please
explain in simple language why you find an objection to cruelty to be 'antisemitic?'
What has compassion for animals even got to do with Jews?" [SLOANE, P.,
5-10-01]
Although many Jews are activists (and leaders) in such New Age movements, the most threatening of all Jewish apostates, though, is the one that forsakes the Jewish identity for that of the centuries-old religious rival, Christianity. "Many Jews feel a horror for those who convert to Christianity," observes James Yaffe, "To some extent this is a hangover from the ancient belief that converts are, by definition, traitors." [YAFFE, J., 1968, p. 67] All apostates, however, surrender the same thing. Karl Stern, a Jewish psychiatrist who converted to Catholicism after the Holocaust, noted what he had to give up as a Jew: "No matter what dangerous straits my people were [in], I knew that, as far as the ultimate truth was concerned, I could not make resentiment the basis of my future life... Intermingled with resentiment there is a good deal of pride, not only of wounded pride, but of pride pure and simple, of a feeling of national superiority." [STERN, p. 183]
Compare this passive, apostatic attitude with those of Jews who vigorously maintain their "superior" nationalist resentiment all the more, renewed, in the face of the Holocaust. "The attitude of the non-Jewish world," observed well-known art critic Clement Greenberg in 1950, "the chief cause of our self-hatred, provides a strong practical as well as psychological argument for the uses of a Jewish national selfishness ... Most nationalist Jews want above all else power for their people, or at least a share of power ... The self-hatred of the nationalist Jew has been greatly aggravated by the scale and mode in which Hitler slaughtered us." [GREENBERG, p. 429]
Ze'ev Chafets -- an immigrant to Israel -- remembered seeing with some non-Jewish friends, as a fifteen year old boy, a brief documentary in Pontiac, Michigan, that depicted some Holocaust victims. In joking banter about the film later, Chafets notes that
"In the midst of the laughter, I felt a sharp sense of shame. It suddenly
struck me that those people in the movie were connected to me. It was
a horrifying realization, and I remember looking at the other guys, kids
I had grown up and known all my life, and thinking, 'Why, these are
goyim’.... A seed had been planted. Looking back, I realize that that
night marked the end of my Jewish innocence, that it was the moment
I made the connection between myself and the fate of the Jews."
[CHAFETS, p. 91-92]
This is Rich Cohen's own version of the compression of Jewish embarrassment about the Holocaust, Jewish rage, Jewish separateness, and the need to project all this upon whoever is symbolically available:
"For people like me, who were born long after Germany was defeated,
the worst part of the Holocaust was never the dead bodies; it was the
way Jewish victims were portrayed. In history class at my junior high
school in Illinois, we were forced to sit through films, spooled by some
A/V geek, that showed images of the Holocaust: all those Jews waiting
to be shot, looking ahead with already dead eyes, trees in the background,
hands covering their genitals ... There was only a silent, wide-eyed mass,
the shame of being marched naked, being seen by women, by men. If, in
just one of those photos, a condemned man had his arms stretched wide,
a big circumcised prick swinging free, his eyes alive, then all the deaths
would have been one degree easier to take. For forty minutes I would sit
there, surrounded by non-Jewish classmates, my eyes burning, my neck
starting to itch. At recess I would walk up to Clay Mellon, biggest kid
in our school, the bully who ran everything, and say, "You stupid
asshole." [COHEN, R., 1999]
Saul Bellow, the Jewish novelist, recounts the story of a Jewish woman in 1946 who, upon watching films depicting Jewish corpses and concentration camp survivors, remarked: "I don't think the Jews can ever get over the disgrace of this." Bellow adds: "The disgrace ... hovers over us. It must be dealt with. It is not merely "something," in history, but a spiritual ordeal for all of us." [PARTISAN REVIEW, p. 374]
"Disgrace" seems a peculiar word choice. And a perplexing, disturbing one. One can readily understand shock, horror, anger, rage, and even the instinctual desire for revenge upon, specifically, the perpetrators. But disgrace? How is disgrace linked, as it is to Bellow, to the "spiritual?" Are we talking about a loss of status here? A loss of prestige? Is there a foot race here somewhere? A degradation of communal honor? Apparently falling into a horrible abyss from the commonality of man is not as great a fall as the drop from "grace," from chosenness. The label of disgrace is supposed to originate in the subject's own action or inaction, isn't it? Did Bellow think the victims were guilty of something? Who is ever disgraced by innocence?
Or is it, as apostate Stern alluded to, just plain old pride, that Jews are haunted by the "disgraceful" spectacle of a world audience of non-Jews watching what could be perceived as a group of people, profoundly vulnerable, rendered quite average like all others, but "chosen" for a concentrated horror, being literally bulldozed away by violent, powerful, merciless, and sadistic cretins? This sobering image has given rise to its antithesis in our own time: the Jewish bully who, understanding himself threatened in all the world, lashes perpetually out, in all directions, with guns and propaganda, obsessed with the notion that continuous, relentless attack is the best defense. This strategy is used militarily against Arabs in and around Israel, and in throughout Diaspora, in a preemptive war of words. Something sacred that had been lost, has at last been retained. Forget the Holy Ark and the self-defined Jewish struggle back towards God and redemption. As Bellow calls it, the modern state of Israel has given Jews back, of all things, their "manliness." [BELLOW, PR, p. 374]
The best-selling novel Exodus, by Jewish author Leon Uris, in creating a web of mythic Jewish/Israeli super-heroes, apparently fulfills the same Jewish need. As Melvin Urofsky notes, "What American Jews sought was not propaganda (although no one objected to the adoption of a more positive view of the Jewish character), but reassurance that at long last a Jew need not be ashamed of his alleged cowardice." [UROFSKY, M., 1978, p. 242] The lack of Jewish defensive response to Nazi violence has long weighed heavily on the Jewish community, as typified in the comments of a promnent German-Jewish refguee from Hitler, Karl Tucholsky:
"Jewry has suffered defeat, a defeat which it deserves. It is not true
that it has fought for thousands of years. It did not fight. And now
they [Jews] crawl out, sad, beaten, up their ears in shit, broke, robbed
of their money -- and without honor -- Heroism would have been the
better businesss here. Why did they not choose that way? Because
they are not able to be heroic; because they have no idea what it is."
[ROTHMAN/LICHTER, 1982, p. 124]
Hence, this lost Jewish "manliness" is an old theme in Jewish scholarship. Reviewing the psychoanalytic therapies of nearly 50 Jewish American communists, Jewish authors Stanley Rothman and S. Robert Lichter explain the struggle for maleness in this sector of the Jewish world:
"In many cases, [therapist Herbert] Krugman notes, joining the Communist
party allowed both male and female members to express hostility against
nonparty authority figures without feeling guilty. Thus it enabled the male
members, who tended to emphasize toughness and hardness, to convince
themselves that they were 'real' men. The women, who were unable to
identify with their fathers as successful male figures, instead used the
party to try to 'become' men." [ROTHMAN/LICHTER, 1982, p. 131]
"The theme of seeking compensation for masculine inadequacy," add Rothman and Lichter, "can be found in the writings of many Jewish radicals and some nonradicals." [ROTHMAN/LICHTER, 1982, p. 137] As Jewish social worker Bob Gluck observes more generally about the male Jewish community:
"Social stereotypes in Jewish men contain a component of denigration of their
masculinity ('wimp,' 'momma's boy,' 'sissy Jew-boy'). Such emotional (and
and physical) assaults are not only received from outsiders, but are passed
down from generation to generation from fathers who were similarly
denigrated in their own youth, and who yet struggle to overcome their
own identity confusion and self-hate. The result is a heritage of rage which
which can rarely be acknowledged or directly expressed. Popular myth
states: 'Jewish men aren't angry people. They are warm, calm and patient.'
The experience of many raised in at least the Eastern European Ashkenazi
heritage, with which I am most familiar, suggests a more complex reality.
Anger and bitterness are part of this reality. Jewish men may even be
more emotionally expressive in their anger than those in the societal
mainstream." [GLUCK, B., 1988, p. 165]
(Not surprisingly, Gluck blames Jewish male self-conception and "the history of assaults on [Jewish] gender identity in adolescence" on "anti-Semitism.") [GLUCK, B., 1988, p. 165]
Jewish American Paul Cowan recalls what motivated him to go and live on a kibbutz in Israel:
"Passive Jews. Jews who don't fight back. Womanly men who can't make love as
well as Gentiles. Who are paralyzed with self-doubt and fear. Who got to the gas
chambers passively. Passive. That was the word that defined me. I had to change
somehow. I realized that year, that I could only change myself -- and my image
of myself -- among the bravest of my own people: the Jews who lived in Israel.
Within weeks of my arrival there, an explosion had taken place in my
consciousness. I could never have imagined the new ways, woven into
details that most Israelis take for granted, that I learned to obtain the sense
of identity, the sense of pride, that I had sought through my adolescence."
[COWAN, P., 1982, p. 104]
"Jewry has suffered defeat, a defeat which it deserves. It is not true
that it has fought for thousands of years. It did not fight. And now
they [Jews] crawl out, sad, beaten, up their ears in shit, broke, robbed
of their money -- and without honor -- Heroism would have been the
better businesss here. Why did they not choose that way? Because
they are not able to be heroic; because they have no idea what it is."
[ROTHMAN/LICHTER, 1982, p. 124]
Hence, this lost Jewish "manliness" is an old theme in Jewish scholarship. Reviewing the psychoanalytic therapies of nearly 50 Jewish American communists, Jewish authors Stanley Rothman and S. Robert Lichter explain the struggle for maleness in this sector of the Jewish world:
"In many cases, [therapist Herbert] Krugman notes, joining the Communist
party allowed both male and female members to express hostility against
nonparty authority figures without feeling guilty. Thus it enabled the male
members, who tended to emphasize toughness and hardness, to convince
themselves that they were 'real' men. The women, who were unable to
identify with their fathers as successful male figures, instead used the
party to try to 'become' men." [ROTHMAN/LICHTER, 1982, p. 131]
"The theme of seeking compensation for masculine inadequacy," add Rothman and Lichter, "can be found in the writings of many Jewish radicals and some nonradicals." [ROTHMAN/LICHTER, 1982, p. 137] As Jewish social worker Bob Gluck observes more generally about the male Jewish community:
"Social stereotypes in Jewish men contain a component of denigration of their
masculinity ('wimp,' 'momma's boy,' 'sissy Jew-boy'). Such emotional (and
and physical) assaults are not only received from outsiders, but are passed
down from generation to generation from fathers who were similarly
denigrated in their own youth, and who yet struggle to overcome their
own identity confusion and self-hate. The result is a heritage of rage which
which can rarely be acknowledged or directly expressed. Popular myth
states: 'Jewish men aren't angry people. They are warm, calm and patient.'
The experience of many raised in at least the Eastern European Ashkenazi
heritage, with which I am most familiar, suggests a more complex reality.
Anger and bitterness are part of this reality. Jewish men may even be
more emotionally expressive in their anger than those in the societal
mainstream." [GLUCK, B., 1988, p. 165]
(Not surprisingly, Gluck blames Jewish male self-conception and "the history of assaults on [Jewish] gender identity in adolescence" on "anti-Semitism.") [GLUCK, B., 1988, p. 165]
Jewish American Paul Cowan recalls what motivated him to go and live on a kibbutz in Israel:
"Passive Jews. Jews who don't fight back. Womanly men who can't make love as
well as Gentiles. Who are paralyzed with self-doubt and fear. Who got to the gas
chambers passively. Passive. That was the word that defined me. I had to change
somehow. I realized that year, that I could only change myself -- and my image
of myself -- among the bravest of my own people: the Jews who lived in Israel.
Within weeks of my arrival there, an explosion had taken place in my
consciousness. I could never have imagined the new ways, woven into
details that most Israelis take for granted, that I learned to obtain the sense
of identity, the sense of pride, that I had sought through my adolescence."
[COWAN, P., 1982, p. 104]
In any case, the restoration of Jewish "manliness" is THE most defining post-Holocaust Jewish experience on the planet. And at the end of the twentieth century this attitude best defines Jewry as manifest in Israel, and the international communal Jewish defense of it. Where religion, culture, and race had failed as a unifying force in the world of Jews, secular or religious, Ashkenazi or Sephardim, the desire to swagger around with swords and machine guns and multi-million dollar propaganda factories to scare off Nazis (and Arabs, and anybody else) has come to define Jewry in our age, stockpiling Uzis and atom bombs, sworn to protect Jews -- and Jews only -- everywhere, and to revenge history's alleged injustices upon them. "If ... the muscular Jew complex," says Shalom Carmy, "driving Kahanist types [followers of militant rabbi Meir Kahane] to violent interaction with Gentiles, is largely absent from the halls of Ponivezh and Lakewood [an American Jewish suburb], the lamentable tendency to dehumanize the goy is not." [CARMY, Rel, p. 21]
Take Paul Breines, self-described as "an educated, nonreligious, non-Zionist, middle-aged, middle-class, male American Jew on the political left [who] ... cherishes ... ideals of gentleness and nonviolence." He was "unsettled" to find in himself a deep attraction to a Mossad (Israel's CIA) character in a Ken Follett novel.
"I was seduced, " says Breines, "by Nat Dickstein. I delighted in his killings and warmed in ways I was neither prepared for nor pleased with to the great and, in my eyes, altogether un-Jewish exploits of this remarkably lethal Jew. The achievements of Dickstein's Jewish body brought on adrenalin rushes and raised goose bumps of excitement. This arousal -- it amounted to that -- was as lively as my understanding of its intensely ideological, even racist, source. I was aware that the other bodies in the novel, those of the largely incidental Russian and the more central Egyptian characters, were the stock figures of Anglo-American cold war ideology and Arab-fearing bigotry and were thus nonpersons even before Dickstein did them in. Yet as Dickstein finished them off, I experienced a visceral pleasure." [BREINES, p. 10]
Part of Breines' liberal concern is the increasing support world Jewry -- and especially in America -- has for violent vengeful sentiments, originating in their transnational mythos of persecution and their own sense of physical weakness as small minorities in host countries over the centuries. The 1967 Israeli victory over the Arabs was for world Jewry, as always noted in Jewish literature, was profoundly exhilarating -- a milestone towards regaining a lost dignity. For world Jewry, after centuries of allegedly puttering around with quill pens in the synagogue libraries and added up profits in leather-bound ledgers, it proved that they had finally rejoined the mythos of physical power, as daring, ruthless, and victorious warriors. More ominously, notes J.J. Goldberg, "Jews were responding to Israel's great victory by retreating into a politics of fear and suspicion." [GOLDBERG, p. 138]
Paul Breines' book about increased popular Jewish interest in themselves as brutal warriors and powerful killers is called Tough Jews. Reflecting increasing Jewish fascination in such a theme, this is the same title that a few years later Rich Cohen chose for his own volume about the many Jewish American gangsters in the early years of the twentieth century. Cohen's theme, similar to Breines' (who is more concerned about it), is to romanticize, idealize, and identify with Jewish thugs and murderers. These books celebrate an abstract vengeance against the omnipresent evil Gentile/anti-Semite. "My father's friends cling to the romantic image of the Jewish gangster in their formative years," Cohen writes,
"those following the Holocaust, as they were faced with the image
of dead, degraded Jews being bulldozed into mass graves, here was
another image, closer to home -- Jews with guns, tough, fearless Jews.
Don't let the yarmulke fool ya. These Jews will kill you before you go
around killing them ... [COHEN, R., 1999, p. 20] ... The Jewish gangster
has been forgotten because no one wants to remember him, because my
grandmother won't talk about him, because he is something to be
ashamed of. Well, to me, remembering Jewish gangsters is a good way
to deal with being born after 1945, with being someone who has always
had the Holocaust at his back, the distant tom-tom" six million, six
million, six million." [COHEN, R. 1999, p. 31]
Elsewhere, Cohen even lovingly equates Jewish mobster assassins with Israeli hero/soldiers: "To me, these killers seem about as skillful as the Israeli commandos who slipped into Entebbe, freeing Jews held hostage at the airport in Uganda. These were men hand-picked by Lansky for their cool." Red Levine (who never killed on the Sabbath) stabbed one victim six times. Another victim, notes Cohen, "wild-eyed and dying, lunged at the killers, [and was] shot four times. The killers then ran through the office and into the hall. I like to think of them out there, the sound their shoes made on floor, sliding around corners, wheels spinning." [COHEN, R., p. 66]
While Israeli novelist Amos Oz writes a novel (A Late Love) about an "elderly hero [who] daydreams about an Israeli armored column marching through Europe avenging the blood of innocents," [RUBENSTEIN, A., p. 89] the site of the Holocaust is too far away for the Jewish reader for pragmatic attack. Meanwhile though, the vicarious appeal of beating up a scapegoat for the endlessly heralded Jewish victimization through European centuries runs deep. Amnon Rubenstein notes that when Israeli invaded Lebanon in the 1980s, then-prime minister Menachem Begin "justified the war and the cruelty inflicted upon the [Arab] civilian population by invoking repeatedly images and memories of World War II and the Holocaust ... The PLO [Palestinian Liberation Organization] were equated with Nazis." [RUBENSTEIN, A., p. x]
"How splendidly 'we' had fought, I told myself," says American Jewish journalist Robert Silverberg, after Israel's 1967 war, "how fine it was that 'we' had once again foiled the Arabs. We: I, no Zionist, hardly even a Jew except by birth, was amused by an audacity in identifying myself with the Israeli warriors." [SILVERBERG, p. 18] "The creation of the state of Israel," remarked Peter Schrag, "made it possible for every Jewish kid in the Bronx to imagine himself a gunfighter mowing down Arabs in the Negev." [SCHRAG, p. 109] "The glorious fighters of Israel," gushed a Denver Jewish newspaper, "have mad an automatic hero of every Jew in America, yea in the world." [UROFSKY, M., 1978, p. 358] "The Israeli victory in the Six-Day War in 1967," said Sol Linowitz, the founder of Xerox, "was the end of the image of the Jew as a loser." [SILBIGER, S., 2000, p. 21-22] "The establishment of the state of Israel," noted Joseph Adelson, in reviewing a survey of American Jewish attitudes in the 1950s, "is considered important not because of humanitarian or political considerations but for the show of strength involved." [ADELSON, J., 1960, p. 479]
The primordial, and tribal, satisfaction Paul Breines finds in the murder of stereotypical Arabs and Russians has, of course, its disturbing parallel in the German population of the 1920's and 1930's. During and after World War I, they too had their own suffering, identity crisis, national weakness, and all the rest. And they too had a sense of communal bond and grievous mistreatment at the hands of others. They too increasingly perceived foes as dehumanized stick figures and proceeded on a brutal course through the 1940's to vanquish them. As the Nazis saw it, one of their primary -- but not only -- enemies were Jews.
Later, in another context, Breines quotes Sigmund Freud who told Hans Herzl (son of the symbolic "founder" of Zionism, Theodore Herzl) that "Your father is one of those people who have turned dreams into reality. This is a very rare and dangerous breed ... [BREINES, p. 31]
Breines points this Freud quote towards "anti-Semitic mass political movements of the turn of the century," but doesn't address the obvious resonation here with his own violent and vengeful "dream" feelings as a Jew and their potential expression through the state of Israel. He entertains this notion, later, obliquely; one is left to presume that for any Jew to make direct parallels of any sort between the state of Israel and Nazi Germany is sacrilegious.
Breines goes further, however, becoming rhapsodic in his vicariously experienced killings: "I capitulated, thrilling to the brutal melody of Dickstein's executions ... My imaginations, guided by moral conscience, changed the novel's Egyptian and Soviet agents into the embodiment of every anti-Semite that ever lived and Dickstein's killings into acceptable, even admirable, examples of retributive justice ... As embodiments of every anti-Semite who ever lived, they simply must be killed..." [BREINES, p. 15]
If this kind of indiscriminating psychic energy, coming from a self-described "gentle, nonviolent non-Zionist leftist," "guided by moral conscience," was ever unleashed in tandem with a national objective (probably towards the generic "anti-Semitic" everyman), we will find unmasked the consummate Nazi. And if this is the "gentle" Jew speaking, what might lurk in those vengeful Jews who see at every turn in history a tormenter, and who have no illusions of themselves as being "gentle, nonviolent, and non-Zionist?"
Take the 1995 case of Leon Bor (Borshevsky), an Israeli who, apparently, obsessed with private demons, hijacked a bus in Cologne, Germany. As the Jewish Telegraphic Agency tells it:
"Bor walked down the aisle of the bus and asked the blindfolded and
bound passengers their nationality. When a 64-year old woman said
she was German, Bor shot and killed her, then took a Polaroid picture
of the body. Bor then had a passenger take a picture of him in his
combat uniform." [SEDAN, G., p. 3]
Jews at-large have an enduring "desire for revenge" against the Germans, noted James Yaffe in 1968,
"It almost as if some symbiotic relationship now exists between the
Jews and Germans. We can never break loose from them; we're
doomed to go through the ages together, tied to them by our hatred....
[YAFFE, J., 1968, p. 58] ... Jewish feeling about Germany, however,
must be seen in perspective. It is a special and extreme case of a feeling
which Jews have had about gentiles for a long time, long before Hitler
came along. It is expressed in an old folk saying which Jewish mothers
have been passing on to their children for centuries: 'Scratch a goy and
you'll find an anti-Semite." [YAFFE, J., 1968, p. 59]
Jewish need for some kind of "revenge," deeply born by many American Jews whose very essence of identity is rooted in the idea that they have been passive bearers of persecution for centuries, is graphically reflected in this sickening account by a Jewish concentration camp survivor, Sonja Milner:
"[Upon liberation from Auschwitz] one day we experienced a sense of
deep satisfaction. As we were walking about in the city [Danzig] we
saw some Germans lying in a field ... A battalion of Russian soldiers
passed by. The soldiers fell upon the Germans and began to rape the
young girls, the women and children. Some ten or twenty of them fell
upon a little girl and raped her. We watched and beamed with satisfaction.
We were finally being avenged ... At that scene of rape and violence,
another picture superimposed itself. It was my own niece and nephews
that I saw being ripped apart by the Germans. My nieces and nephews
were seven, five, and three years old. Still our revenge was vicarious."
[ROIPHE, p. 18]
The Jewish survivor's indiscriminate revenge (in this particular case, wishfully unfulfilled in support of Russian savagery, even against an innocent child so long as she is German) is indeed vicarious, as is most of modern American Jewry's communal identification with the gruesome tales of the Holocaust itself. This kind of horrible tale has become the foundation of a Jewish world view, both angry and fearful, finally expressed via the creation of the state of Israel (exemplified in Menachem Begin's comment: "No one has the right to tell us what is or is not moral.") Jews now have in their hands the capacity to exact violent retribution upon enemies or -- as is so common to Israeli military history -- pre-emptive strikes against those who aresuspected of being enemies.
"Let me put it this way," says Jewish American author Jane Delynne, who frames the undercurrents of all this clearly, "I am not interested in justice for anyone, unless there is justice -- first -- for the Jews. Poland has yet to enact a memorial to its three million murdered Jews. I was glad when Solidarity was crushed, and Poland was placed in a state of martial law." [DELYNN, p. 76]
As Michael Milan (a pseudonym for a former Jewish American member of an alleged secret FBI murder squad) has written:
"All I heard about when I was growing up was that the Jews all over
Europe were getting beaten up and killed. Why didn't they fight back,
we asked ourselves? Kill a few of them. Kill all of them. Even as a
kid you get to thinking it's me against them, and the only way to stay
alive is to be meaner, tougher, and faster than everybody else. I
never lost that attitude." [MILAN, M., 1989, p. 8]
This is the attitude, not of someone who witnessed atrocities against Jews first hand, but heard about it happening across the world. Who is Milan's "them," in such a context?
"If ... modern [Jewish] nationalism is born from a sense of resentment," says Shalom Carmy, "then we must honestly confront and evaluate that component of our Jewish national feeling." [CARMY, Red Zion, p. 21] "How does a Jew continue to exist in a world in which the Holocaust occurred?" asks Jane Delynn, "To my mind, there is only one possible genuine response: rage." [DELYNN, p. 78] Such an American Jew, like so many obsessed with a communal persecution complex, have, notes Israeli scholar Boas Evron,
"a burning urge to pay the goyim back in kind. Thus, through the Israeli
army, they want to square accounts with the goyim for all the
humiliations and persecutions they have suffered personally or in their
historical memory -- even if that score is not settled with the Christian
gentiles who, as a rule, were the actual persecutors, but with their Arab
neighbors and more particularly the hapless Palestinians subject to Israeli
rule (conveniently defined as 'partners of the Nazis.') This kind of Jew
still suffers from the inclination of the caste-community member to view
all non-Jews as goyim, all of whom are anti-Semitic, all blacks, whites,
reds, and yellows -- falling into a single, undifferentiated stereotype of a
hostile, menacing foreignness." [EVRON, p. 111]
Jewish interest in "revenge" goes deep back into traditional Jewish identity and history. "In no other religion in the world," noted sociologist Max Weber, "do we find a universal deity possessing the unparalleled desire for vengeance manifested by Yahweh [the Israelite God]." "According to Weber," says Amy Newman, "the Jewish religion is a 'religion of retribution' through and through, not only in distant past but in contemporary society." [NEWMAN, A., 1998, p. 163]
A self-perceived history of physical weakness through Jewish history in their Diaspora is a profound sore spot for modern Jewry. Over and over again, Jewish scholars cite a famous recollection by Sigmund Freud about his father who refused to challenge a Gentile thug who knocked his hat into the mud. The young Freud was deeply scarred, ashamed of his father's reluctance to stand up to the bully. This tale -- one of dehabilitating physical weakness -- has become one of the quintessential symbols used to explain modern Jewish militancy, that fervently aggressive posture that atones -- through the armies of the state of Israel -- for past, collective, humiliations.
In this light, Barbara Breitman discusses a dream Freud once discussed in his Interpretations of Dreams, where psychoanalytic theory and Jewish perceptions of "anti-Semitism" (especially the Jewish version of it, called "self-hate") become intricately entwined:
"Here, Freud acknowledges his unconscious choice to identify with the aggressor
to preserve an experience of himself as powerful. What he does not fully grasp is
that he has become the perpetrator of anti-Semitism in his own psyche, turning with a
vengenance not on His Excellency, but on his own Jewish self who he 'mishandles' as
if harming someone else because 'they are Jews.' To maintain an inner experience of
the self as powerful, to avoid the pain of experiencing the self as helpless victim, the
unconscious choice is made to identify the self with the non-Jewish aggressor, and to
disassociate the self from fellow Jews, the victims." [BREITMAN, B., 1988, p. 104]
Breitman thereupon recounts the Freud/Father "hat in the mud" incident too as being a psychic key to Jewry's collective sense of itself. Freud was ashamed of his father after this incident, and began to feel emotional alignment with the famous warrior/leader Hannibal, who made his own son, as Freud noted, "swear before the household altar to take vengeance on the Romans. Ever since that time, Hannibal had a place in my fantasies." [BREITIMAN, B., 1988, p. 105]
As Breitman notes:
"The core of the conflict is revealed. To identify with his Jewish father is to
identify with the victim, to feel humiliated and emasculated at the hands of
non-Jewish men who present an everpresent threat to one's own prowess.
To be a hero, to be a 'man,' the son feels he must model himself after a
non-Jew, albeit a Semitic general, forsaking not only his Jewish identification
but his own identification with his own father. In Freud's mind there are only two
untenable choices: to feel like a man and not identify with his father and with
other Jewish men, or to identify with Jewish men and not feel like a man ... Freud
has not only become a perpetrator of anti-Semitism in his own psyche, he suffers
the guilt of denying his flesh and blood."
[BREITMAN, B., 1988, p. 105]
In this light, Barbara Breitman discusses a dream Freud once discussed in his Interpretations of Dreams, where psychoanalytic theory and Jewish perceptions of "anti-Semitism" (especially the Jewish version of it, called "self-hate") become intricately entwined:
"Here, Freud acknowledges his unconscious choice to identify with the aggressor
to preserve an experience of himself as powerful. What he does not fully grasp is
that he has become the perpetrator of anti-Semitism in his own psyche, turning with a
vengenance not on His Excellency, but on his own Jewish self who he 'mishandles' as
if harming someone else because 'they are Jews.' To maintain an inner experience of
the self as powerful, to avoid the pain of experiencing the self as helpless victim, the
unconscious choice is made to identify the self with the non-Jewish aggressor, and to
disassociate the self from fellow Jews, the victims." [BREITMAN, B., 1988, p. 104]
Breitman thereupon recounts the Freud/Father "hat in the mud" incident too as being a psychic key to Jewry's collective sense of itself. Freud was ashamed of his father after this incident, and began to feel emotional alignment with the famous warrior/leader Hannibal, who made his own son, as Freud noted, "swear before the household altar to take vengeance on the Romans. Ever since that time, Hannibal had a place in my fantasies." [BREITIMAN, B., 1988, p. 105]
As Breitman notes:
"The core of the conflict is revealed. To identify with his Jewish father is to
identify with the victim, to feel humiliated and emasculated at the hands of
non-Jewish men who present an everpresent threat to one's own prowess.
To be a hero, to be a 'man,' the son feels he must model himself after a
non-Jew, albeit a Semitic general, forsaking not only his Jewish identification
but his own identification with his own father. In Freud's mind there are only two
untenable choices: to feel like a man and not identify with his father and with
other Jewish men, or to identify with Jewish men and not feel like a man ... Freud
has not only become a perpetrator of anti-Semitism in his own psyche, he suffers
the guilt of denying his flesh and blood."
[BREITMAN, B., 1988, p. 105]
How is such wounded Jewish psychic undercurrent concretely manifest today? "The American Jews [visiting in Israel] get a big thrill from guns," says Jewish novelist Philip Roth, "they see Jews walking around with guns and they think they're in Paradise. Reasonable people with a civilized repugnance for violence and blood, they come on tour from America, and they see guns and they see beards, and they take leave of their senses." [ROTH, quoted in BREINES, p. 22]
The obsession with the "otherness" of being Jewish and an automatic, however unjustified, preoccupation of "anti-Semitism” is illustrated in a tale by Breines: ... "[When I was] seven or eight ... my father strode from our house to challenge an infamous neighborhood crank who had been intimidating my playmates and me. To the best of my recollection, anti-Semitism played no role in the episode, but I nevertheless perceived it as having Jewish significance..." [BREINES, p.19] "I scrutinized my own experiences," also says Ze'ev Chafets, "Had Harry Kelly, the basketball coach benched me because I was Jewish? Were my lousy grades in Algebra the result of prejudice? Even in my heavy [Jewish] conscious state, I couldn't believe it. The fact was that I had almost no personal experience of anti-Semitism beyond a little ethnic hazing in which I gave as good as I got. I had no rational reason for identifying with Jewish suffering -- but I couldn't help it ... I felt myself becoming more and more Jewish. It was an involuntary, even unwelcome development; sometimes I felt like a victim of the Invasion of the Body Snatchers. But I couldn't deny that it was happening." [CHAFETS, p. 92]
The paranoiac Jewish obsession with their myths of omnipresent persecution is one of the foremost foundations in the Jewish community; the belief in a cosmic dialectical anti-Semitism and discrimination against Jews has become integral to modern Jewish identity and is (as it has always been) one of the defining features of Jewishness. As some have suggested, it seems as though Jews cannot forge a modern identity without a counter-balance of omnipresent persecution: either illusorily or by Jewish actions to attract it. The grip it has on the Jewish psyche, too often blinding them to all else but their own sense of eternal victimization, can reach flabbergasting proportions. It is exposed in one of its most publicly neurotic forms in this illustration by Seymour Lipset:
"San Francisco provides an example of how some Jews can totally
ignore reality. Polls taken among contributors to the San Francisco
Jewish Community Federation have found that one-third believe
that a Jew cannot be elected to Congress from San Francisco. A
poll reported such results in 1985 when all three members of
Congress from contiguous districts in or adjacent to the city were
Jewish, as were two state senators, the mayor and a considerable
part of the city council." [LIPSET, p. 156]
If modern San Francisco is so wonderful for Jews, where does Jewish anti-Semitic paranoia there come from, San Francisco's anti-Semitic past? Hardly. Earl Raab, an assistant director of the San Francisco Jewish Relations Council wrote in 1950 that
"The Jewish community in San Francisco has been called, with reason,
the wealthiest, per capita, in the country. There is, at the same time,
a startling poverty of anti-Semitic tradition. San Francisco, for cities of
its size, is the nation's 'white spot' of anti-Jewish prejudice ... At times
Jewish citizens have concurrently held the presidencies of the Chamber
of Commerce, the Community Chest, the Board of Education, Art, Fire,
and Harbor Commissions, and many other appointive and elective
posts; it is a situation that cannot be duplicated in any other city with
a six percent Jewish concentration." [p. 230]
Earlier? "In early San Francisco Jewish mayors, judges, financiers, and
merchants helped to construct the basic institutions of the city. " [HIGHAM, J., 1957, p. 26]
Earlier? "In early San Francisco Jewish mayors, judges, financiers, and
merchants helped to construct the basic institutions of the city. " [HIGHAM, J., 1957, p. 26]
Regardless of this extraordinarily open climate, in San Francisco, in the 1990s a Jewish psychotherapist, Judith Klein, who runs "ethnotherapy" sessions in San Francisco to cure Jewish patients of self-hatred. One of her exercises is to have each patient stand before a group and say, "I'm a Jew," and then whatever else comes to mind. One patient, a veterinarian, relates that:
"When I did it, to my utter shock, from God knows where, I ended up
crouched behind a chair, with my hand making like a gun, saying, 'I
am a Jew and if you try to hurt me because of that I'll kill you.'"
[BERSHTEL, p. 50]
"Most Jews," says Evelyn Torton-Beck, "even the most assimilated, walk around with a subliminal fear of anti-Semitism the way most women walk around with a subliminal fear of rape." [TORTON-BECK, p. 22] Indeed, in a 1970s survey by the National Institute of Mental Health, "Jews almost leaped off the chart in terms of their intrinsic distrust of others." [ISAACS, p. 148] A +4 rating in the study indicated the "most trusting" group; a -4 the "least trusting":
Irish Catholic + 2.506
Scandinavian Protestant 1.583
Slavic Catholic 1.481
German Protestant 0.767
German Catholic 0.757
Italian Catholic 0.502
White Anglo-Saxon Protestant 0.242
Jewish - 3.106 [UROFSKY, M., 1978, p. 217]
Leon Hader, a reporter for an Israeli newspaper, notes the case of this defensive (at any costs) world view applied to the state of Israel:
"Three years ago at the height of the Intifada [Arab uprising against
Israeli rule], I appeared before an American Jewish group to discuss
American media coverage of Israeli actions in the West Bank. I
circulated among the audience unlabeled translations from articles
on the Palestinian uprising from Haaretz, Yediot Aharonot and
Ma'ariv, all written by mainstream Israeli journalists and columnists.
I asked my American audience to guess where these reports had
been published. About half of the audience guessed that they
were from a PLO [Palestinian Liberation Organization] organ, and
the other half attributed them to some 'anti-Semitic' magazine." [HADER,
p. 27]
In England, Irene Bloomfield, a Jewish therapist, relates the story of a non-Jewish therapist who suggested ("quite perceptively," says Bloomfield) that a well-to-do Jewish patient's obsession with having "everything in his house ... [ready] for imminent departure might have something to do with being Jewish. The patient "reacted furiously, accusing the counselor of anti-Semitism, and during the following week he talked to numerous friends about this, and they all said, 'The man is obviously an anti-Semite. Don't go back to him.' [Jews] thus project our own hostility onto anyone who is not one of us." [BLOOMFIELD, p. 27]
In 1994, the Slavic Review entertained a spirited debate between scholars James L. Gibson and (Jewish scholar) Robert J. Brym. It was about a familiar theme. Gibson took to task an earlier article co-written by Brym about an alleged increase in anti-Semitism in Moscow. "My main point of criticism," wrote Gibson, "of the Brym and Degtyarev article are:
* their measurement of 'anti-Semitism' is highly suspect, with low face validity
to their indicators.
* the criterion they impose for assessing the levels of anti-Semitism -- the number
of 'hard-core' anti-Semites in the United States -- is unreasonable, and even
if that criterion were reasonable, the data they employ for the US are misleading.
* most importantly, Brym and Degtyrev draw conclusions about the political
implications of their findings that are not warranted by their limited data and
analysis ... A proper analysis of available data suggests that their conclusions
about the seriousness of the anti-Semitism problem in Russia are exaggerated
and unnecessarily pessimistic ... Those who refuse to acknowledge
discrimination against Jews or who believe in a Zionist plot against Russia
are deemed to hold anti-Jewish attitudes." [GIBSON, J. FALL 1994, p. 830]
In 1994, the Slavic Review entertained a spirited debate between scholars James L. Gibson and (Jewish scholar) Robert J. Brym. It was about a familiar theme. Gibson took to task an earlier article co-written by Brym about an alleged increase in anti-Semitism in Moscow. "My main point of criticism," wrote Gibson, "of the Brym and Degtyarev article are:
* their measurement of 'anti-Semitism' is highly suspect, with low face validity
to their indicators.
* the criterion they impose for assessing the levels of anti-Semitism -- the number
of 'hard-core' anti-Semites in the United States -- is unreasonable, and even
if that criterion were reasonable, the data they employ for the US are misleading.
* most importantly, Brym and Degtyrev draw conclusions about the political
implications of their findings that are not warranted by their limited data and
analysis ... A proper analysis of available data suggests that their conclusions
about the seriousness of the anti-Semitism problem in Russia are exaggerated
and unnecessarily pessimistic ... Those who refuse to acknowledge
discrimination against Jews or who believe in a Zionist plot against Russia
are deemed to hold anti-Jewish attitudes." [GIBSON, J. FALL 1994, p. 830]
"Hostility towards Jews," wrote J. J. Goldberg in 1996, "as measured by opinion polls [of non-Jews], has dropped to what some social scientists consider the zero point ... Anti-Semitism virtually has vanished from American public life. By contrast, the percentage of Jews who tell pollsters that anti-Semitism is a 'serious problem' in America today doubled during the 1980's, from 45 percent in 1983 to almost 85 percent in 1996." [GOLDBERG, p. 7] "In 1997," notes Rabbi Daniel Lapin, "the American Jewish Congress's Annual Survey of American Jewish Opinion found that 95 percent of American Jews believe anti-Semitism in the United States is a 'very serious problem' or 'somewhat of a problem.'" [LAPIN, D., 1999, p. 295] "There is much anti-Semitism in America," a Jewish businessman told researcher Jonathan Reider in 1985, "But it's hidden, so you can't measure it. If it's brought to the surface, it only generates more anti-Semitism. If 40,000 people march down the street shouting 'Kill the Jews,' my neighbors might join them." [REIDER, J., 1985, p. 47-48]
In 1992, Michael Lerner was still painting a picture of absolute Jewish paranoia about omnipresent anti-Semitic boogeymen:
"Many Jewish organizations rarely fight the more deeply ingrained
anti-Semitism that is part of the collective unconscious of Western
society. Their deep pessimism about non-Jews expressed inside
the Jewish world as "goyim-bashing' discouraged them from ever
beginning a full-scale assault on anti-Semitism ... One reason
the public consciousness has never fully addressed anti-Semitism
is the real and surplus powerlessness of Jews." [LERNER,
SOCIALISM, p. 62]
Such hallucinatory assertions about Jewish powerlessness [see later chapters] by the editor to Tikkun magazine, so far removed from any semblance of reality where tens -- if not hundreds -- of millions of dollars are poured into a continual war against "anti-Semitism," are absolutely mind-boggling. What planet, one wonders, are people like Lerner living on?
"For Jews today," says Rabbi Howard Singer, "feeling safe is almost a form of disloyalty to Jewishness. We view safety almost with a survivor's mentality -- with guilt. How dare we be safe? We do not have a right to safety. Quite aside from the objective situation, there [is] very definitely an identification of fear with a kind of loyalty to the essence of the historic Jewish predicament. Who are we to be different?" [SINGER, p. 74, in STALLSWORTH]
"The [Jewish] outer coating," says Stephen Isaacs, "may be resplendent with the rhetoric of universalism and equality, but inside, most Jews maintain a sophisticated, subterranean scanning system. This radar performs at peak efficiency around non-Jews, ever alert to the slightest nuance, swiftly sensing intimations of anti-Semitism." [ISAACS, p. 24] Isaacs even suggests that for a non-Jew to use the word "Jew" could have anti-Semitic implications:
"[The word Jew] is clipped and harsh and, when used by a non-Jew, is
considered as almost pejorative in itself, as if in other surroundings, it
might be followed by, say, bastard. Its use by a non-Jew almost
automatically makes him suspect of being an anti-Semite, for anti-Semites
often use Jew as a verb, as in to jew someone down in price."
[ISAACS, p. 24]
"Negroes," complained Jacob Cohen in 1967, "have never learned that it is impolite to call a Jew a Jew in public, perhaps because they are called Negro so irrelevantly, so often." [COHEN, J., 1967, p. 13]
"It is very understandable," says Irene Bloomfield, "that we suspect Gentiles of being anti-Semitic when they refer to our Jewishness; it can become a pathological, rather paranoid knee-jerk reaction of seeing even the most innocuous reference to our Jewishness as a criticism or attack which means to a number of us that we therefore do not have to examine what is said to us, and that our past sufferings justify us in behaving badly toward any non-Jew since he/she could be a potential anti-Semite." [BLOOMFIELD, p. 27]
The accusation of anti-Semitism has thus taken the form of a collective Jewish neurosis and phobia based upon a mythic martyrological past, a fabrication serving as a contrived tool for Jewish solidarity and identity against the real threats to modern Jewry: increasingly assimilation by Jews into mainstream American culture and intermarriage to non-Jews. (Meanwhile, while Jews point fingers at phantom oppressors when negative views of Jews in popular opinion are at record lows, Jewish scholars found in 1990 "that more than half of all American Jews continue to hold traditional negative stereotypes of non-Jews." [CHANES, p. 21]
Jack Ruby, the killer of Lee Harvey Oswald, "was always extremely sensitive to anti-Semitism." "There was nothing that would get him angrier faster," remarked his brother, Earl. "Jack was real touchy about anything said bad about Jews, and he would fight with anyone who said it." [POSNER, p. 353] Upon arrest, the phobic undercurrent of Jewish identity finally imploded in Ruby's mind. His Holocaust-mania fueled his ultimate descent into madness. Jailed for the murder of President Kennedy's assassin, Ruby's sister Eva noted that
"'he thinks they are going to kill out all the Jews and he has made
remarks that 25 million Jews have been slaughtered, on the floor below,
in the jail. Sometimes it's planes going over and they are dropping
bombs on Jews.' He told Eva [his sister] that he could hear and see
Jews boiled in oil and that he had recurrent visions of his brother Earl
and his children being dismembered. The police guards used to watch
him put his ear to the jail wall and say, 'Shhh! Do you hear the screams?
They are torturing the Jews again down in the basement." [POSNER,
1993, p. 401]
A. M. Rosenthal, eventually Executive Editor of the New York Times, and Times reporter Arthur Gelb wax poetic (and hyperbolic) about the Jewish blameless innocense of it all:
"What is a Jew? A Jew, among other things, is a prisoner caged in the ugliest
of cages, the mind of his own enemy. The enemy is the anti-Semite and over
and over Jews ask, 'What is an anti-Semite and why is he?' They struggle for
the answer because there is almost nothing more important in their lives to
understand, but most often they cannot comprehend, any more than the
guppy in the tank comprehends the approaching piranha -- the guppy sees
the piranha, knows him, knows the fate approaching, the teeth, but
comprehension of the killer born is beyond the comprehension of the
victim born, the victim the killer so desperately needs." [ROSENTHAL/GELB,
1967, p. 61]
A. M. Rosenthal, eventually Executive Editor of the New York Times, and Times reporter Arthur Gelb wax poetic (and hyperbolic) about the Jewish blameless innocense of it all:
"What is a Jew? A Jew, among other things, is a prisoner caged in the ugliest
of cages, the mind of his own enemy. The enemy is the anti-Semite and over
and over Jews ask, 'What is an anti-Semite and why is he?' They struggle for
the answer because there is almost nothing more important in their lives to
understand, but most often they cannot comprehend, any more than the
guppy in the tank comprehends the approaching piranha -- the guppy sees
the piranha, knows him, knows the fate approaching, the teeth, but
comprehension of the killer born is beyond the comprehension of the
victim born, the victim the killer so desperately needs." [ROSENTHAL/GELB,
1967, p. 61]
How strange does this all get? In 1993 an Orthodox Jewish woman sued her former employer, the Detroit Jewish News, for anti-Semitism. [FIZGERALD, p. 19] And Jewish author Janice Booker, in a volume about Jewish stereotypes, pushed a reviewer, fellow Jew Lori Ginzburg, out the door, over the edge, and into the twilight zone when Booker found Jewish self-hate integral among those "in the process of railing against anti-Semitism." [GINZBURG, p. 35]
In 1996, disappointed Jewish psychoanalyst Mortimer Ostrow bemoaned the fact that studies of Gentile patients under Gentile therapists failed to turn up much anti-Semitism. "We had hoped," he says,
"that the non-Jews would be able to prove more plentiful case
material than the Jews, who, we knew, seldom encountered
pronounced anti-Semitism in [therapy] sessions. In fact, we were
surprised to find that the non-Jewish analysts too encountered
little explicit anti-Semitism in their practice." [OSTROW, p. 27]
At root here, there is indeed an illness. But it is a profound collective neurosis in a large group of people whose very identity must be bolted to martyrological legends of the past. "For Jews wallowing in victimhood," notes Edward Shapiro, "a decline in anti-Semitism is unwelcome since it requires that they rethink the content of their own Jewish identity. This is why Jews in America continue to believe they are a beleaguered people, despite all evidence to the contrary, and why they inflate the importance of minor antisemitic incidents." [SHAPIRO, 1998] The core of Jewish identity may have become, worries Arthur Hertzberg, merely "a society of anti-anti-Semites." [HERTZBERG, 1989, p. 331]
As one old joke goes, circulated in Jewish circles:
"Two Jews meet on the street.
'Dave how have you been?'
'N-n-not so good. I was just turned down for a j-j-job.'
'Where?'
'At a r-r-radio s-s-station. D-d-damn anti-S-S-Semites!'"
[NOVAK/WALDOKS, 1981, p. 85]
Lesley Hazeleton suggests that, with the same undercurrent, hostility to Israel is crucial to Jewish identity in binding them together:
"I think it was Mussolini who once said that he welcomed more
enemies, because the more he had, the greater his status. And
sometimes I wonder if we are not caught in that same self-defeating
bind." [HAZELETON, L., 1984, p. 61]
Fellow Jewish author Earl Shorris even suggests that the "dangers" of Jewish identity -- so rooted in victimhood and the antithetical threat "anti-Semitism" -- is actually an attractive thrill:
"It has not often been admitted, but some Jews are pleased by the very
difficulty of being a Jew. They find the relentless discomfort a spur, a
heightening of the awareness of being alive. Mountain climbers and racing-car
drivers calim a similar pleasure in putting themselves at risk. All daredevils
know the thrill of danger. A Jew can find it at a cocktail party or a business
lunch when an anti-Semitic remark suddenly comes into the conversation. His
nerves sing with tension, a chill comes into his gut, he fears himself, the chance
that he will fail this test of his courage, of his sense of himself. The moment
does not endagner his physical life; but he feels the threat to his humanness,
to his dignity; and he knows that without dignity he turns into a thing that
can be bought and sold, he returns to the time before his exodus from Egypt."
[SHORRIS, E., 1982, p. 47]
In 1996, a Jewish college student, Jacob Faturechi, wrote an extremely unusual (and honest) article about the fact that the word "anti-Semite" is grossly overused:
"Pat Buchanon is an anti-Semite. Rush Limbaugh is an anti-Semite. Richard
Nixon was an anti-Semite. Pat Robertson is an anti-Semite. Jerry Falwell
is an anti-Semite. Jesse Jackson is an anti-Semite. Louis Farrakhan is an
anti-Semite. Every third person whose name I have ever heard is an
anti-Semite. It is absolutely shocking how much I hear this person or that
person is some kind of racist or other. If all of it were true, I would not be
surprised to see David Duke elected president in 1996. There are allegedly
enough anti-Semites out there to repopulate the SS. I guess my ears might
especially perk to the word anti-Semite because I am Jewish and I hear such
accusations every day. What I barely ever hear is the reasons for these
things ... The news media has cried wolf one too many times. The word
anti-Semite is thrown around like a racial epithet for all gentiles."
[FATURECHI, J., 2-23-96]
Fellow Jewish author Earl Shorris even suggests that the "dangers" of Jewish identity -- so rooted in victimhood and the antithetical threat "anti-Semitism" -- is actually an attractive thrill:
"It has not often been admitted, but some Jews are pleased by the very
difficulty of being a Jew. They find the relentless discomfort a spur, a
heightening of the awareness of being alive. Mountain climbers and racing-car
drivers calim a similar pleasure in putting themselves at risk. All daredevils
know the thrill of danger. A Jew can find it at a cocktail party or a business
lunch when an anti-Semitic remark suddenly comes into the conversation. His
nerves sing with tension, a chill comes into his gut, he fears himself, the chance
that he will fail this test of his courage, of his sense of himself. The moment
does not endagner his physical life; but he feels the threat to his humanness,
to his dignity; and he knows that without dignity he turns into a thing that
can be bought and sold, he returns to the time before his exodus from Egypt."
[SHORRIS, E., 1982, p. 47]
In 1996, a Jewish college student, Jacob Faturechi, wrote an extremely unusual (and honest) article about the fact that the word "anti-Semite" is grossly overused:
"Pat Buchanon is an anti-Semite. Rush Limbaugh is an anti-Semite. Richard
Nixon was an anti-Semite. Pat Robertson is an anti-Semite. Jerry Falwell
is an anti-Semite. Jesse Jackson is an anti-Semite. Louis Farrakhan is an
anti-Semite. Every third person whose name I have ever heard is an
anti-Semite. It is absolutely shocking how much I hear this person or that
person is some kind of racist or other. If all of it were true, I would not be
surprised to see David Duke elected president in 1996. There are allegedly
enough anti-Semites out there to repopulate the SS. I guess my ears might
especially perk to the word anti-Semite because I am Jewish and I hear such
accusations every day. What I barely ever hear is the reasons for these
things ... The news media has cried wolf one too many times. The word
anti-Semite is thrown around like a racial epithet for all gentiles."
[FATURECHI, J., 2-23-96]
David Klinghoffer notes, in an unusually honest and insightful appraisal, the completely illusory nature of the American Jewish accusation of anti-Semitism in the 1990s:
"For many of us Jews lately, everything and anything is 'remindful
of the Holocaust.' The truth is that anti-Semitism has become an
obsession with us ... In the American Jewish community we've got
anti-Semitism without anti-Semites ... [The biblical Jews] understood
Gentile hostility to us to be an expression of God's displeasure with
us as a community. We [Jews today] understand it to be essentially
meaningless ... They believed in collective responsibility ... We modern
Jews have completely lost the consciousness of collective responsibility
... Our fear of Gentiles who don't like us, our made-up, manufactured
fear, is the greatest comfort we can give ourselves. The impulse to see
anti-Semitism where it isn't is so powerful it infects Jewish culture at
every level, among religious and secular Jews alike ... If God, the true
God, were to put us on the couch, I think that.. he would tell us there
is no such thing as anti-Semitism, at least not the way we understand
it. We American Jews aren't suffering at all right now. For us, life
couldn't be better ... In the book of Leviticus, God explains to the Jews
the ways he will reward us if we guard His commandments, and punish
us if we do not. All of us together. Among the punishments there is an
interesting line that describes the condition of modern Jews perfectly:
'the sound of a driven leaf shall chase them; and they shall flee, as one
flees from the sword; and they shall flee when none pursues."
[KLINGHOFFER, p. 10-13]But let us conclude this chapter section with a mind-boggling summation of the all-encompassing irrationality in the knee-jerk charges of anti-Semitism that radiate in all directions towards bizarre affirmation of the Jewish essence. As Louis Jacobs notes, with little sense of the grandiose, innate absurdity of it all:
of their own people. To quote [important turn-of-the-century Jewish
author Israel] Zangwill again: 'the Bible is an anti-Semitic book.'"
[JACOBS, L., 1995, p. 77]
In the strange, surreal world of Jewish convictions about anti-Jewish hostility, every innocent, let's allow Jewish author Richard Perloff to neatly wrap things up for us:
"To paraphrase Leon Trotsky, we [Jews] may not be interested in antisemitism,
but antisemitism remains interested in us." [PERLOFF, R., 8/21/98, p. 7]
of their own people. To quote [important turn-of-the-century Jewish
author Israel] Zangwill again: 'the Bible is an anti-Semitic book.'"
[JACOBS, L., 1995, p. 77]
In the strange, surreal world of Jewish convictions about anti-Jewish hostility, every innocent, let's allow Jewish author Richard Perloff to neatly wrap things up for us:
"To paraphrase Leon Trotsky, we [Jews] may not be interested in antisemitism,
but antisemitism remains interested in us." [PERLOFF, R., 8/21/98, p. 7]
**********************************************************
By the 1960's, wealthy Jewish "defense" and propaganda organizations -- intent upon keeping the idea of anti-Semitism as a kind of Public Enemy Number 1 in the public eye -- expanded their patrols of the subject via "scientific" surveys. But their emphases had expanded. Such researchers backed down from the many absolutes implicit in the psychoanalytic theory of the origin of anti-Semitism (called here "the emotive" theory). After all, if such a purely negative psychological construct was accepted, it would be impossible to recommend any remedy for something that entirely emanated from the deepest roots off human personality. As at least some Jewish observers recognized, there's really no sense in sponsoring research into a problem if there's no possible cure. Researchers' concerns were thus broadened into the practical, worldly realm, into the so-called "cognitive" field, an approach that allowed the delicately qualified concession that there could be causal reasons for hostility towards Jews. At a cost of $500,000 the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith (ADL) embarked upon a fifteen-year program-- via a variety of survey studies -- to explore what, if anything, bugs the American public about Jews. And how to control it.
Cloaked as a champion for human rights, as noted earlier, the ADL has been for decades a well-known and extremely well-financed Judeo-centric propaganda organization, an organizational expert in social engineering. It has notably parted company with other minority advocacies when they are perceived to adversely effect Jewish interests. The ADL has fought affirmative action quota-oriented legislation, for instance, since it would hurt the disproportionate number of Jews in middle and upper-class employment. And it "originally favored censorship laws as a means of combating defamatory portraits of Jews." [DUBKOWSKI, p. 73] The ADL is a massive propaganda machine. It's "offices in New York's United Nations Plaza house its full time national officials and its trained staff who have the assistance of hundreds of volunteers." Over 100 individuals make up its national committee and it has 26 regional offices. [DUBKOWSI, p. 73] "No other ethnic group in America by 1975," says Norman Cantor, "could come close to matching the way in which the ADL protected Jewish reputations and negotiated Jewish access to place and power. Eventually the ADL's bold policy in the 1980's of identifying anti-Zionism or even severe criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism gained a large degree of public acceptance." [CANTOR, p. 409]
Maximum scientific credibility for the ADL's efforts to afford Jews broader "place and power" was afforded by commissioning in the 1960s the Survey Research Center of the University of California and the National Opinion Research Center to carry out the investigations on the American public. This project, conceived by the Program Director of the ADL, Oscar Cohen, and paid for by that organization, literally bought the University's credibility and funneled their fundamentally Judeo-centric concerns within a grandiose humanitarian title, now called: "The University of California Research Program on Patterns of American Prejudice."
In one of these resultant ADL studies, published in 1969 as The Tenacity of Prejudice, by Gertrude Selznick and Stephen Steinberg, surveys were conducted upon a wide variety of Americans and were tabulated into a statistical analysis of results, complete with an authoritative-sounding configuration called the "Index of Anti-Semitic Belief," by which investigators decided whether someone was an anti-Semite or not. Among the many pages of placebo questions asked of the American public, there were a core of eleven (constituting the "Index") that the surveyors were most interested in. Respondents to these questions were classified as being anti-Semitic if they gave what was defined as "anti-Semitic responses to at least five of the eleven items that make up the Index." [TENACITY] By this method, in the late 1960, over a third of the respondents in America were ultimately considered to rank "high" in anti-Semitism.
Probably sensing what the survey questions were after, some interviewees automatically responded with the platitudes of modern politically-correct culture. A hint at some of the mindless, dissimulating, or intimidated people that today's propagandists (Jewish or otherwise) are successfully creating is evidenced by those in this study who absolutely insisted that Jews are not different from anyone else whatsoever:
"Some respondents refuse to accept even quasi-factual statements
about Jews ... they consistently go out of their way to deny that
Jews and non-Jews are in any way different." [TENACITY]
Incredibly, as evidenced here, years of "sensitivity to others" socialization in modern western society have created the extremist condition whereby the simple perception of obvious identity differences between ethnic groups can itself be weighed as "prejudicial." Daring to discern virtually any commonality in an ethnic group is routinely dismissed as a "stereotype." Yet, meanwhile, like many, if a given generality is conceived positively, Jewish author Eric Kahler felt free to declare in 1967 that "Wherever we place its origins, there exists a distinct Jewish character ... There exists a quality that distinguishes us as a group that in some way sets us apart from all other groups. This is demonstrated by evidence." [KAHLER, E., 1967, p. 5]
The problem in such an ADL study of prejudice, too, is that some of the traits attributed to the general Jewish populace by those deemed to be anti-Semites are --even to the investigators' eyes, as well as the Jewish community itself -- true. Among standard "anti-Semitic" perceptions, for example, as noted in the Tenacity volume, is that Jews are "clannish." Of course this statement is, by any historical or current measure, true. [See later scholarship on the subject] In the same year this ADL study was published, a Jewish sociologist, Herbert Gans, even noted in his own research that "calling [Jews] clannish is close to the truth -- and a truth that is celebrated by Jews themselves when the word cohesive is substituted." [GANS, p. 11] Jewish journalist Philip Weiss' perception of this hypocritical double standard by Jewish organizations-- i.e., non-Jews are anti-Semites for pointing out Jewish clannishness while Jews in fact celebrate their allegiance to each other -- was stated this way:
"When the Anti-Defamation League surveys the goyim, one of the
questions it asks is whether they think Jews stick together. If they say
yes, that's evidence of anti-Semitic attitudes. [The ADL's] urging Jews to
stick together on one hand while at the same time blasting the world for
believing that we stick together: I don't think you can really have it both
ways, but that's the outsider box Jews have helped construct for
themselves." [WEISS, p. 29]
In 1957, sociologist John Higham noted in an American Jewish Historical Society publication that Jewish immigrants to America had been "more or less uncultivated, but also there is considerable evidence that many were loud, ostentatious, and pushing. Both Jews and friendly non-Jewish observers confessed something of the kind." [HIGHAM, J., 1957, p. 9] As Higham further notes about Jewish "stereotypes" after the Civil War: "In cartoons and a good deal of middle class opinion, the Jew became identified as the quintessential parvenu -- glittering with conspicuous and vulgar jewelry, lacking table manners, attracting attention by clamorous behavior, and always forcing his way into society that is above him. To treat this stereotype entirely as a scapegoat for somebody elses' psychological frustration is to over-emphasize the irrational sources of 'prejudice' and to clothe the Jews in defensive innocense ... Until twenty-five years ago sober and humane observers repeatedly took note of the core of reality behind the stereotype." [HIGHAM, J., 1957, p. 10] "In answer to a question posed in 1938, 'What kinds of people do you object to?', Jews were mentioned by 35 percent of [American] respondents; the next-highest category, at 27 percent, were 'noisy, cheap, boisterious and loud people,' followed by 'uncultured, unrefined, dumb people' at 14 percent and then all other other types." The following year, another Roper poll found that 53 percent of the Americans asked believed Jews were different from everyone else and that these differences should lead to restrictions in business and social life." [GOODWIN, D.K., 1995, p. 102]
In 1957, sociologist John Higham noted in an American Jewish Historical Society publication that Jewish immigrants to America had been "more or less uncultivated, but also there is considerable evidence that many were loud, ostentatious, and pushing. Both Jews and friendly non-Jewish observers confessed something of the kind." [HIGHAM, J., 1957, p. 9] As Higham further notes about Jewish "stereotypes" after the Civil War: "In cartoons and a good deal of middle class opinion, the Jew became identified as the quintessential parvenu -- glittering with conspicuous and vulgar jewelry, lacking table manners, attracting attention by clamorous behavior, and always forcing his way into society that is above him. To treat this stereotype entirely as a scapegoat for somebody elses' psychological frustration is to over-emphasize the irrational sources of 'prejudice' and to clothe the Jews in defensive innocense ... Until twenty-five years ago sober and humane observers repeatedly took note of the core of reality behind the stereotype." [HIGHAM, J., 1957, p. 10] "In answer to a question posed in 1938, 'What kinds of people do you object to?', Jews were mentioned by 35 percent of [American] respondents; the next-highest category, at 27 percent, were 'noisy, cheap, boisterious and loud people,' followed by 'uncultured, unrefined, dumb people' at 14 percent and then all other other types." The following year, another Roper poll found that 53 percent of the Americans asked believed Jews were different from everyone else and that these differences should lead to restrictions in business and social life." [GOODWIN, D.K., 1995, p. 102]
In 1968, Jewish author James Yaffe noted the results of an American Jewish Committee study conducted six years earlier in the Jewish community in Baltimore. Yaffe's subject was a criticism of Jewish "self-hatred," i.e., widespread belief in the Jewish community that many "anti-Semitic" criticisms were true. As Yaffe observes,
"So why not recognize the truth? Hardly any Jews are entirely free
from the effects of this disease [Jewish self-hatred]. In AJC's Baltimore
survey, two-thirds of the respondents admitted to believing that other
Jews are pushy, hostile, vulgar, materialistic, and the cause of anti-
Semitism. And those were only the ones who were willing to admit it."
[YAFFE, J., 1968, p. 73]
So what are we to make of this profound contradiction? Is Jewish self-criticism at root, as Yaffe suggests, a "disease?" So on one hand, entire institutions embark on crusades to weigh and eliminate irrational prejudices against Jews, while, on the other, even many Jews themselves testify that such beliefs are not always prejudices, but often based on facts indeed. It is clear here that the ADL's accusation of prejudice is manipulated as a device to deflect criticism of genuine, verifiable collectivist behavior. Jewish "clannishness," for example, as perceived by Jews from within the community, is in fact a cherished ideal. As institutionalized in modern America, however, if this very same quality is noted by non-Jews, it is held to be an unfounded, stereotypical misperception. Furthermore, popular convention holds that the "prejudiced" individual cannot discern the respective qualities of Jewish individuals from those ascribed to the Jewish collective body. To the degree that this is true, the Jewish collectivity, rooted in Judaic tradition, defines this perception in quite the same manner and is precedentially responsible for it. Likewise, the celebration of common Jewish traits and a collective character, world view, communal destiny, et al, as we shall soon see, is the foundation of a growing body of modern Jewish literature. The issue is not in Jewish circles whether the collective character does or does not exists, but what exactly it is.
Of course there are other "prejudicial" perceptions about the Jewish community that have basis in fact. The Jewish authors of the Tenacity of Prejudice study conceded, for example, "some basis in reality" for the following "anti-Semitic" statements from their own Index of Anti-Semitic Belief. The following sentences were provided to those surveyed who were to decide whether they were true or false:
The movie and television industries are pretty much controlled by
Jews.
Jewish employers go out of their way to hire other Jews.
Jews stick together too much.
Jews like to be at the head of things. [TENACITY]
It is credit to Jewish propaganda organizations, such as the one that funded this study, that they are effectively doing their job when only 47, 49, 52, and 54 per cent, respectively, of American interviewees believed these four statements to be true, when even those who created these statements concede that they all "have some basis in reality." [See evidence throughout this volume that underscores the essential reality of each of these four statements.]
This admission of "some basis in reality" in key anti-Semitic prejudices, of course, is a serious problem for researchers who know that their ADL sponsors did not spend $500,000 to hear the likes of such concessions. So how do the researchers explain these four acknowledged "realities" away, statements that are supposed to be among the core of an anti-Semitic repertoire? Like this:
"It is frequently contended, often by Jews themselves, that
beliefs such as these should not be regarded as anti-Semitic
since they have at least some basis in reality. This argument
assumes a basic distinction between "true" beliefs and
"false" beliefs about Jews. Undoubtedly some
generalizations about Jews are more warranted
than others. But the distinction between "true" and "false"
beliefs is misleading if it implies that people typically acquire
their "true" beliefs about Jews in one way and their "false"
beliefs in another." [TENACITY]
Incredibly, these four aforementioned statements of "reality" about Jews are already four of the five needed (of the eleven statements of the "Index of Anti-Semitic Belief") for an individual to be considered -- per the ADL study -- an anti-Semite. In other words, within a large number of survey questions that disguised the ADL's specific Jewish interest, if a respondent accepted at least five of the eleven statements researchers considered to be anti-Jewish, the person formally qualified as an "anti-Semite." The other seven anti-Semitic statements from the Index about Jews presented to interviewees were:
* Not as honest as other businessmen.
* Too much power in the business world.
* More loyal to Israel than America.
* Control international banking.
* Shrewd and tricky in business.
* Have a lot of irritating faults.
* Use shady business practices to get ahead.
[See past and future chapters that explore kernels of truth in each
of these realms]
As even the Tenacity authors point out, "Have a lot of irritating faults" is a vague enough statement that it may be reasonably applied to virtually any people. If any reader accepts this about Jews, and is inclined to accept the earlier four statements that had "some basis in reality" even to the researchers, that's anti-Semitic statement number five and the reader is, by the formal terms of the study, a certified anti-Semite.
One item not formally on the Anti-Semite Index List, but an interesting aside nonetheless, is that the authors noted that 60 per cent of their nationwide respondents believed Jews had "more money" than other people. [As we shall soon see, the Jews today are clearly, and demonstrably, the wealthiest ethnic community -- per capita -- in America]. For their part, the ADL researchers diplomatically conceded that Jews "exhibit at least their fair share of concern for achievement and success. At the same time the connection between Jews and money is one of the oldest elements of anti-Semitic ideology." The "connection between Jews and money" is also, as we have amply seen through history to the present day, true. The ADL-sponsored researchers wrote this even as part of the $500,000 dangled out of their own pockets. What other ethnic group in America could afford so spectacular a sum in the 1960s to simply try to determine what other people think of them?
From the money angle, Tenacity of Prejudice explains the broad-based anti-Semitic perception this way, where the verifiable Jewish-money connection is linked to other alleged Jewish attributes:
"A sizeable majority of respondents believe that Jews are wealthier
than other Americans. Why shouldn't they? The middle-class
status of Jews is a firmly established fact. But the anti-Semite
tends to hold all his beliefs about Jews with the same con-
viction: Jews ARE shrewd and tricky. Jews DO have too
much power in the business world. Jews ARE more loyal
to Israel than America. These beliefs can and often do
provoke feelings of hostility in the person who holds them.
[TENACITY]
In other words, in overview, if an individual only believes "with conviction" in one or two of the posited criticisms about Jews from the Index of anti-Semitism statement list provided by researchers, the respondent is not categorized as an anti-Semite. This is because, as even the researchers concede, there is a "basis in reality" in at least SOME of the criticisms. But if the critic becomes more than casually focused on any one or two of these negative statements about Jews in general, and is consistent in believing a range (at least five) of such characteristics as credible, the casual critic is suddenly a threat to Jewish self-defensive orthodoxy because he has recognized a logical relationship between a number critical comments. He then qualifies for castigation by Jewish-funded dictate as being maliciously intended, an irrational anti-Semite.
In Jewish defensive orthodoxy, then, being an anti-Semite is not merely the conviction that any of the above mentioned characteristics of Jews is in any way true, because they may well be true. Rather, anti-Semitism is understood as a package of belief, the systematic understanding that a variety of statements (as few as five from the "Anti-Semite Index") have "some basis in reality." Being an anti-Semite in this view is the recognition of a web of alleged Jewish collective characteristics: an exceptionally strong attachment to money, prominence in Hollywood, disproportionate power, adept in "tricky business dealings," and so on. The recognition of these relationships, note the researchers, tends to cause hostility against Jews. And here is where a presumed threat to Jewry lies.
In 1979, another book, Anti-Semitism in America, appeared as a "wrap-up" volume to the ADL's fifteen year investigative program. This book, by Harold Quinley and Charles Glock, summarized the results of a number of earlier academically conducted ADL-funded surveys and studies about anti-Semitism, including Tenacity of Prejudice. This newer book also highlighted survey results about perceptions of Jews within the American Black community, church groups, schools, and -- another of the "educational powers" -- the mass media.
Quinley and Glock essentially pick up where the other volume left off ten years earlier, still bending facts about the Jewish general community into anti-Semitic misperceptions. As always, however, unless these authors wish to be regarded as completely blind, they must make the cautious concessions:
"Another common stereotype of Jews is that they are clannish...
The perception of Jews as clannish has some basis in fact and
can thus be accepted without necessarily being a symptom
of prejudice."
"In an allusion to Jewish pride, Jews are often referred to
scornfully in anti-Semitic propaganda as the Chosen People...
Since this is a part of traditional Jewish religion, it can hardly
be taken as an indicator of anti-Semitism."
"The view that Jews are money-oriented is an old and central part
of anti-Semitic ideology. In the United States, a majority of Jews
are in fact monied in the sense of having above average
income." [QUINLEY, p. 3-4]
Thus stated, the authors then note only pages later that "the results cited so far reveal anti-Semitic belief to be fairly common among non-Jewish Americans. Such traditional images of Jews as dishonest, clannish, prideful, and pushy continue to be widely subscribed to in America." [QUINLEY, p. 5] How can these authors equate perceiving Jews to be "clannishness and prideful" with anti-Semitic belief when they just stated, in the same chapter, that these very same qualities had factual basis and were not anti-Semitic? Again, it is the propagandists' need to fit their preconceived formulas. And one of the formulas is simply this: the difference between an anti-Semite (or Jewish "self-hater," for that matter) and anyone else is that that the anti-Semite observes a series of facts about the self-defined "Jewish community," reflects upon them as a whole, and views the entirety critically.
And here we find the researchers' ideological foundation: again not necessarily that the so-called anti-Semite's views are erroneously based, but that his belief system is colored by sweeping judgmental "prejudice." And prejudice is unfair, unfactual, irrational, and even un-American. To be "prejudiced" against anybody or anything in late 20th century America is, by popular socialization, tantamount to harboring the thoughts of a criminal. The danger, as the argument goes, is that the prejudicial patching together of a series of "partial truths" results in distortion of the whole. As Quinley and Glock stated it in 1979:
"Jews in America are in fact more well-to-do than the average
American, and it is also true that Jews 'overwhelmingly reject
Christ as the savior.' There is a grain of truth in the popular
stereotypes concerning Jewish influence in the media, motion
picture, and banking industries. Jews do not "control" these
industries, but they are disproportionately active in them.
There can also be particular contexts in which Jews do act
in ways predicted in the stereotype. Under some conditions,
Jews have sought to "stick together" to a greater extent than
non-Jews.
Anti-Semites are unable to distinguish between the
partial truths contained in these tendencies and the
stereotyping involved in prejudice." [QUINLEY, p. 197]
It would seem that an argument based upon "partial truths" versus, presumably, full ones, is largely an exercise in semantics. What exactly are the "complete truths" that the authors of these studies have in the wings that all intelligent and reasonable people can unanimously agree upon? Of course all Jews are not wealthy. Of course all Jews aren't working in the mass media. Of course not all Jews -- every single one of them -- "stick together." Of course all those born Jews don't even call themselves Jews anymore. Of course any assertion about anything whatsoever is probably going to be a "partial truth."
The researchers' own tact is to completely ignore Jewish history and its separatist identity, its Talmudic foundations and collectivist ideology, taking "partial truths" and explaining them to their liking:
"[Anti-Semites] conceive of Jewish wealth not resulting from the
occupational and educational characteristics of Jews, but as
evidence Jews are money-oriented and materialistic. Likewise,
they explain the presence of Jews in the motion picture or media
industries not in terms of career choice, and as a consequence
of the historic exclusion of Jews from other industries, but as an
indication of a Jewish attempt to control the communications
media in America. [QUINLEY, p. 197]
[An entire chapter will discuss Jewish dominance in the mass media later]
Will Jewish media stars Ted Koppel or Barbara Walters, Stephen Spielberg, and the Jewish founders of ABC, CBS, and NBC tell us that they fell into their fields because they were "historically excluded from other industries?" And isn't it the inherent tendency for any large business concern -- Jewish or otherwise -- to strive towards vanquishing its competition and establishing a comfortable monopoly, based upon ruthless, purely self-aggrandizing and nepotistic attitudes? Doesn't any serious large business enterprise-- existing solely for the profit of its owners -- at least attempt, if it is in any way feasible, to "control the industry?"
Curiously, the ADL researchers found that the anti-Semite is not merely a single-minded stick figure as some might imagine. Researchers were somewhat surprised to have their own stereotypes challenged when they discovered that those they termed "anti-Semites" even recognized a variety of good qualities in Jews:
"It is not entirely clear what should be made of such findings. They
would seem to indicate that Jews are widely admired and that a
reservoir of good will exists towards them. At the same time, it is
apparent that many of the positive responses were given by
respondents scoring high in anti-Semitism. Indeed, it seems to
to be a characteristic of prejudice that certain "positive"
stereotypes exist alongside negative ones." [QUINLEY, p. 11]
There were other ADL studies exploring the roots of anti-Jewish animus. Most Jews don't like Christmas carols sung in public schools, for example, and it was discovered that "most Americans clearly support the singing of Christmas carols in the schools and are unsympathetic to charges that this constitutes discrimination against Jews." [QUINLEY, p. 16] Other survey results revealed that, when it comes to the Holocaust, as early as the 1970s, "43 percent [of American respondents] agreed with the statement that Jews should stop complaining about what happened to them in Nazi Germany." [QUINLEY, p. 18] And the researchers' concluding comment on this? :
... Lack of special sympathy for Jews is often but not always grounded
in anti-Semitism." [QUINLEY, p. 19]
When turning to surveys for anti-Semitism in the African-American community, Blacks are disproportionately poor, as Jews are disproportionately well off, and that's how Blacks know them. For decades Jews have been close contact with the Black community as slumlords, merchants, and agents of various kinds. It's impossible to ignore this relationship. Largely based upon their economic relationships with Jews [see later chapter], "blacks are more disposed than whites to be prejudiced against Jews." [QUINLEY, p. 55] As Jonathan Kaufman notes:
"A poll in 1983 showed blacks the most hostile to Israel of fifteen
groups surveyed. They were also among the groups holding the
highest percentage of anti-Semitic attitudes. Anti-Semitic attitudes
increased among more educated blacks ... This was the only form
of bigotry that increased with education." [KAUFMAN, J., 1988,
p. 229]
"Contrary to popular opinion," noted researcher Ronald Tskukashima in 1979,
"Black anti-Semites tend to come from less ghettoized areas of Los Angeles
and higher socio-economic backgrounds ... Those selectively hostile toward
Jews feel that they have too much economic power in the Black community
and indicate they would like to see them leave." [TSKUKASHIMA, R., 1979,
p. 63]
"Contrary to popular opinion," noted researcher Ronald Tskukashima in 1979,
"Black anti-Semites tend to come from less ghettoized areas of Los Angeles
and higher socio-economic backgrounds ... Those selectively hostile toward
Jews feel that they have too much economic power in the Black community
and indicate they would like to see them leave." [TSKUKASHIMA, R., 1979,
p. 63]
The Black writer, James Baldwin, put it this way:
"Jews in Harlem are small tradesmen, rent collectors, real estate
agents, and pawnbrokers; they operate in accordance with the
American business tradition of exploiting Negroes, and they
are therefore identified with oppression and are hated for it.
I remember meeting no Negro in the years of my growing up,
in my family or out of it, who would really ever trust a Jew,
and few who did not, indeed, exhibit for them the blackest
contempt. [QUINLEY, p. 54]
Another eminent African-American author, Richard Wright, wrote that "All of us black people who lived in my [Arkansas] neighborhood hated Jews." [WHITFIELD, p. 350] Alan Vorspan, an official of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations and Central Conference of Rabbis, wrote in 1969 that
"The existential human contacts between Jews and Negroes in the inner
city are merchant-customer, landlord-tenant, social worker-client. These
are inherently tense, unequal relations. They are fraught with conflict
and resentment." [COX, p. 195]
"The Negro job in the small, Jewish community business," added Oliver Cox, "may appear particularly to be exploitive. Other relationships, such as teacher-pupil, conform to the pattern of subordination." [COX, p. 195]
Malcom X explained common Black animosity towards Jews, saying:
"The Jew is hypersensitive. I mean, you can't even say 'Jew' without
him accusing you of anti-Semitism ... In every black ghetto, Jews own
the major businesses. Every night the owners of the businesses go
home with the black community's money which helps the black
community stay poor. But I doubt I have ever uttered this absolute
truth before an audience without being hotly challenged and accused
by a Jew of anti-Semitism. Why? I will bet that I have told five hundred
such challengers that Jews as a group would never watch some
minority systematically siphoning out their community's resources
without doing something about it. I have told them that if I tell the
simple truth, it doesn't mean I am anti-Semitic; it means I am simply
anti-exploitation. [GOULD, p. 565, in the Auto of Malc, p. 286-
287]
"[There] is a double standard," said NAACP leader Ray Innis in 1968, "that characterizes much of the dialogue on black anti-Semitism ... Jews can and have criticized black leaders, especially those considered to be militant or nationalistic, with impunity. If a Jewish organization issues a statement tomorrow harshly criticizing a black leader, it will not be accused of anti-black sentiment. But let a black leader criticize Israel or a Jewish group, and he automatically becomes anti-Semitic." [GANS, p. 11]
"Nobody talks to Jews the way they should be talked to," remarked controversial Black leader Lewis Farrakhan, "When somebody says something that might upset the Jews, they say, 'Don't say that because it's anti-Semitic.' So you run up a tree and shut your mouth. But Farrakhan ain't running nowhere." [MAGIDA, p. 153]
The ADL researchers' conclusions about one of their studies on the mass media is most revealing about the ultimate motivations behind all of these ADL-financed studies of anti-Semitism. In 1961, Adolf Eichmann, an important Nazi leader and murderer of Jews, was kidnapped by Israeli agents and brought to trial for his life in Israel. After a much-publicized show trial, he was found guilty and executed. The ADL funded research into how the American public responded to the trial, which was covered by most of America's important news organizations.
Not surprisingly, the bottom line -- as deemed by ADL and its academic researchers -- to the investigation of the mass media, and certainly to all the ADL's survey research over 15 years, (i.e., the reason ADL saw fit to spend a fortune for them) was this:
"The final criterion on which the net impact of the trial was
judged [for this study] was its success in winning increased
sympathy for the Jewish people and for Israel." [QUINLEY, p. 126]
The then-President of the State of Israel, Ben Gurion, stated Israel's intentions in the trial clearly, equating all anti-Jewish feeling throughout history with Nazi gas chambers:
"It is not an individual that is in the dock at this historic trial,
and not the Nazi regime alone, but anti-Semitism throughout
history." [BELL, The Alphabet, p. 306]
Of even more important note in the research about the Eichmann trial was its implications for future use; how, exactly, might American public opinion might be influenced in favor of Jews and Israel? An important discovery was that most Americans are not very aware of world events; many are entirely apathetic. Nine percent of the respondents to the ADL's survey, apparently paying partial attention to news reports, even though the German Nazi Eichmann on trial was a Jew. Presumably, in order to fully propagandize, an audience would have to be paying attention to the details of the propaganda. Not so. Somewhat to the researchers' surprise, although the American public really didn't really care to digest much of what was going on with Eichmann, the fact that the media's presentation of the trial was, itself, sympathetic did "win the sympathy of the apathetic majority," and many "were moved to feel a greater sympathy for Israel and the Jewish people." [QUINLEY, p. 128]
The researchers were taken somewhat aback by an apparent contradiction: while most Americans absorbed little information about the trial, and were realistically not in any position to have an informed opinion about the matter, they were moved en masse to personal sympathy by the media's empathy for the Jewish propaganda event. The authors note that:
"Their favorable response appears largely to have been a
reflection of their desire to conform to the favorable
attitudes they discerned in the mass media... That the
mass media were the instrument through which this
generally positive response was elicited is thus of
importance. It suggests that the mass media may have
a powerful cumulative effect on issues that remain of
low salience for extended periods of time. On such
issues, the majority do not take the trouble to become
even minimally informed so they can arrive at an
independent judgment. Rather, when it becomes
appropriate for them to have an opinion, they search
for clues as to what the proper opinion is. [QUINLEY,
p. 129]
Here we have the real fruit of the ADL's $500,000 into anti-Semitism: the very real prospects for social engineering. What the Jewish researchers and sponsors discovered back in 1961 has had profound implications for their sophisticated propaganda campaigns in the future. Americans knew, and still know, little about Jews and Israel. It was -- and continues to be -- an opportune climate for Jewish lobbyists, apologists and propagandists to lead the media towards educating the ignorant masses. *
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* Preying upon public ignorance in America is not difficult. A Gallup poll in 1975 discovered that 30% of the American populace didn't know what important event happened in 1776. In 1981, only 13% knew the Reagan administration favored the "Contras" in Nicaragua.
** The German-Jewish historian/philosopher, Hannah Arendt, covered the Eichmann trial for the New Yorker and had some intriguing insights for the relatively few readers who read that magazine. Among them, she pointed out the disturbing similarities between Nazi race laws (that forbade Germans from marrying or having sex with Jews) and Israel's own legal counterpart, whereby Jews were likewise forbidden -- by ancient religious codes embedded in rabbinical law -- from marrying or having sexual relations with non-Jews. By Jewish law, children of Jews marrying non-Jews in other countries were considered bastards, she noted, while, in Israel, "children of Jewish parentage born out of wedlock are legitimate."
"Israeli citizens, religious or nonreligious," she added, "seem agreed upon the desirability of having a law that prohibits intermarriage [with non-Jews] ... they are also agreed upon the underdesirability of a written constitution in which such a law would embarrassingly have to be spelled out." In this context, at the Eichmann trial itself, Arendt wrote that "there was something breathtaking in the naiveté" of the Israeli prosecutors condemnation of Nazi Nuremberg [race] laws of 1935, when parallels could actually be found in such Nazi laws and those of the Israeli state. "The better informed among the [press] correspondents were well aware of this irony, but they didn't mention it in their reports." [ARENDT, p. 7]
*** The use of the word "anti-Semite" is used so broadly by Jews that even Arabs are routinely called anti-Semitic. This is a particularly odd misnomer, since Arabs -- like Jews -- are themselves linguistically (and "racially") Semitic. Facing no Diaspora over the millennium, Arabs are even more purely Semitic, however one defines it, than Jews are. No matter. To chauvinist Jewish popular opinion that continuously misuses the term to mean "anti-Jew," only Jews are Semites of consequence.
Traditional belief in both Arab and Jewish lore is that both Semitic groups are familially related right up to Abraham, the seminal patriarch for both. The Jewish ancestral lineage is considered to have followed through Abraham's son, Isaac. Another boy sired by Abraham -- Ishmael, born illegitimately to Abraham's "maidservant", Hagar -- is understood to have begun the Arab racial line. Hagar and her infant son, according to Old Testament and Quranic sources -- fled into the perilous desert at the angry instigation of Abraham's (considered today "Jewish") wife, Sarah, who had followed up on Abraham's permission to treat Hagar as Sarah wished. Sarah was at the time still barren and wrought with jealously over Hagar's child; she did not conceive Isaac, the first Jewish progeny -- so the Old Testament says -- until she was 100 years old. [GEN 20.16]
In the religious view, only God's miraculous intervention saved Hagar and her infant from perishing in the desert. In Islamic tradition, the reputed water source that saved them -- the well of Zamzam -- is part of Muslim worship today at Mecca, in Saudi Arabia.
In any case, the origin of the Jewish Semitic clan of elite self, distinct from those who are not as legitimately pure, cuts this ruthlessly. A religious foundation for Jewish anti-Semitism (or whatever you call it) against Arabs can be found in the Old Testament [GEN 20.16]: "Thou [Hagar]... shalt bear a son ... Ismael ... He will be a wild man; his hand will be against every man, and every man's hand against him..." In this vein, other respected Jewish religious texts can be found "likening [Ishmael] to an ass or a dog." [MARX, p. 44] Rabbi Tzvi Marx even encountered a "prestigious scholar" in Israel who argued that Ishmael was technically referred to in the Torah as a "manlike wilderness," not really a wild man, thus completely dehumanizing him and all Arabs. [MARX, p. 95]
***************************************
Rabbi Roland Gittelsohn's listed his "Pyramid of Hate" (the most "frequently heard" of alleged "anti-Semitic" beliefs) in a textbook for Jewish high school students, in 1964:
1. All Jews are secretly united to overthrow governments and establish Jewish rule over the entire world.
2. The first step in this plan is to control the finances of the country by dominating the banking system and stock markets of the country.
3. Jews dominate the industry and big businesses in America, and are therefore the wealthiest group in the country.
4. Jews try to avoid such occupations as farming and physical labor, and crowd into occupations and professions that are easier.
5. Jews completely control the newspapers and press of this country.
6. Jews influence the public opinion of America unduly through their control of the movies and the radio.
7. Jews are responsible for Communism.
8. Most Jews are criminals.
[GITTELSOHN, R., 1964, p. 122]
***************************************
Rabbi Roland Gittelsohn's listed his "Pyramid of Hate" (the most "frequently heard" of alleged "anti-Semitic" beliefs) in a textbook for Jewish high school students, in 1964:
1. All Jews are secretly united to overthrow governments and establish Jewish rule over the entire world.
2. The first step in this plan is to control the finances of the country by dominating the banking system and stock markets of the country.
3. Jews dominate the industry and big businesses in America, and are therefore the wealthiest group in the country.
4. Jews try to avoid such occupations as farming and physical labor, and crowd into occupations and professions that are easier.
5. Jews completely control the newspapers and press of this country.
6. Jews influence the public opinion of America unduly through their control of the movies and the radio.
7. Jews are responsible for Communism.
8. Most Jews are criminals.
[GITTELSOHN, R., 1964, p. 122]
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