"Surely Jews understand that in identifying an anti-Semite one
must use a sum-of-all-its-parts test. If it is yellow, has a four-foot neck, spots,
and little horns, it is a giraffe."

-- Jewish comedian Jackie Mason and Jewish lawyer Raul
Felder, 9-2000, p. 57


"If you want to understand anti-Semitism, read the Old
Testament." -- George Orwell


"So long as there is a single anti-Semite in the world, I shall
declare with pride that I am a Jew." -- Ilya Ehrenburg, Jewish
Russian author, (in DERSHOWITZ, p. 14]


"Fighting anti-Semitism seems to be for some Jews more
important than any other expression of Jewishness ... The
danger appears when one becomes dependent upon them for
one's identity, so that one begins to need anti-Semitism."
Stanislaw Krajewski,
(Polish Jew)


"For some Jews and perhaps some of the Jewish leadership, the
fear is that if anti-Semitism completely disappears then the
Jewish community might erode or dissolve." Stanley Rothman,
(in STALLSWORTH, p. 67)


"And if real peace does come to Israel, the question will be
asked: Can we, and how do we, survive without an external
enemy?" Avraham Burg, head of the Jewish Agency,
[HARTUNG, J., 1995]



"The assumption of an eternal anti-Semitism ... has been adapted
by a great many unbiased historians and by even a greater
number of Jews. It is this odd coincidence which makes the
theory so very dangerous and confusing. Its escapist basis is
in both instances the same; just as anti-Semites understandably
desire to escape responsibility for their deeds, so Jews, attacked
and on the defensive, even more understandably, do not wish to
under any circumstances discuss their share of responsibility."
Hannah Arendt, Origins, p. 7
(Jewish historian)

"The discounting of anti-Semitism is itself anti-Semitic."
Evelyn Torton Beck, 1982, p. xxii


"[Jewish psychologist Jules] Nydes argues that such individuals
[representing the "paranoid masochistic character"] tend to see
themselves and groups within which they identify as victims who are
being persecuted. This sense of persecution derives partly from
unconscious feelings of guilt. The paranoid masochistic person
engages in aggression against others because he or she expects
to be attacked. His aggression, which is accompanied by feelings
of self-righteousness, is rarely satisfying. Indeed, he can often
achieve gratification only when he is punished, and the punishment
is interpreted as confirming his preconceived sense of
persecution ... The typology is suggestive. [Jewish psychoanalyst]
Theodore Reik, who was Nyde's teacher, suggested that a 'paranoid
masochistic' personality structure is modal among Jews."
-- Stanley Rothman and S. Robert Lichter, Jewish authors,
1982, p. 133



"I felt that the bigotry always blamed on those who said anything
negative about Jews was equally visible on the other [Jewish]
side of the fence." Evelyn Kaye, (Jewish author, p. 114)



"Privilege does not relieve the vulnerability to prejudice."
Michael Paul Sacks, concluding his article
about the "privileged" Jewish occupational
elite in modern Russia, and non-Jewish hostility to it,
1998, p. 266


"For all my life, I have never felt any substantial anti-Semitism, and
was rather indifferent to the Jewish community. Then something clicked,
and I thought, Well, I am over 40, I have made a successful career,
I have made a fortune. But what will tell my children when I am 70?"
-- millionaire Leonard Nevzlin, upon becoming president of the
Russian Jewish Congress [GORODETSKY, L, 5-23-01]



"We should be able to discuss Jews and their Jewishness, their
virtues or their vices, as one can any other identifiable group
without being called an anti-Semite. Frankness does not feed
anti-Semitism; secrecy, however, does." Kevin Meyers,
(British journalist), p. 26

"Telling the truth is not anti-Semitic. Am I right?"
Joe Wood, (African-American)
p. 112

"It seems that [poet Allen] Ginsberg had traced an obscenity in
the dust of a dormitory window; the words were too shocking
for the Dean of Students to speak, so he had written them on a
piece of paper which he had pushed across the desk to my
husband: 'Fuck the Jews.' ... 'He's a Jew himself,' said the Dean.
'Can you understand his writing a thing like that?' Yes, Lionel
could understand; but he couldn't explain it to the Dean."
Dianna Trilling, (Jewish author) in BLOOM, p. 302




The foundation of modern Jewish identity is an ideological subscription to a presumed irrevocable omnipresence of irrational "anti-Semitism." Jewish defense to this threat is the common denominator that creates cohesion among even the most disparate peoples of worldwide Jewry. "Being Jewish" -- above all else, as archaic religious convictions have fallen to the wayside -- is still conceived to be the noble bearing of special, continuous persecution at the hands of the rest of the world. This conviction -- traditionally understood by Jews to be borne as punishment by God for transgressions against covenantal law -- has been the core of Jewish religious belief in their diaspora. Non-Jews are an important part of this world view. To the traditional Jewish perspective, says Mark Zborowski and Elizabeth Herzog:

"the goyim represent, quite literally, an act of God. When they are
persecutors they are also instruments of justice, punishing the Jews
for transgressing the Law, and in any case they do not know better."
[ZBOROWSKI, p. 154]

The Jew, noted Israel Zangwill in 1893, "looks upon the persecutor merely as the stupid instrument of an all-wise Providence." [ZANGWILL, I.,1998, p. 62]

The notion that Jews, scattered throughout the world, are collectively victims at the hands of all others [i.e., today categorized as "anti-Semitism"), is a conceptual framework, originally religiously based, that actually precedes authentic history and is self-fulfilling. The foundation to understand the Jewish victim complex can be found in their Torah (the Old Testament), for example in Deuteronomy 28. What is today called anti-Semitism was originally conceived as God's punishment of the Jewish people:

"And the Lord shall scatter thee among all people from one end of
the earth unto the other ... And among these nations shalt thou find
no ease, neither shall the sole of they foot have rest: But the Lord
shall give thee there a trembling heart, and failing of eyes, and sorrow
of mind. And they life shall hang in doubt before thee; and thou shalt
fear day and night and have none assurance of thy life ... and thou
shalt be only oppressed and crushed always."

It is clear that the Jewish conception of being continuously "persecuted" originates in religious conviction. As Jewish psycholanalyst Theodore Reik notes:

"The masochistic attitude of ancient Israel was recognized at least in their
in their relationship with God, whose punishment they took as deserved
without complaint. They considered also the cruelty with which they were
treated by their powerful neighbors as punishment for their sins, especially for
deserting their God. The paranoid attitude in the form of an idea of grandeur
is obvious in the Jewish claim of being the 'chosen people.' There is even
even a subterranean tie between the masochistic and the paranoid attitude in
the idea that God chastises those whom He loves. Such an exceptional
position has been claimed by the Jewish people since ancient time."
[REIK, T., 1962, p. 230-231]

When emptied of purely religious content in modern times, the grand idea of "Jewish punishment by God" is reduced to its areligious backbone: "Jewish persecution by non-Jews." The deep belief of the omnipresence of this is held by even secular Jews with as much conviction as any religion. And for most modern Jews this secular worldview still subliminally clings to the original Judaic paradigm: among other things, Jewish insistence upon a moral superiority above others. Throughout history, hostility for Jews, noted Charles Liebman and Steven Cohen, reinforced "their ethnocentric image as a 'chosen people' -- the special animus of non-Jews towards Jews demonstrate [d] the truth of the Jewish claim that they were different, privy to a special status in divine creation -- in short, superior to Gentiles." [LIEBMAN/COHEN, p., 36] In Jewish eyes, the evidence for such a self-congratulatory perch is (aside from Old Testament referral) to be found most recently in the Holocaust -- the terrible fruition of traditional canon, the proclaimed "most unique" of human-inflicted atrocities for which all non-Jews are held to be, in abstract, guilty. And all Jews, innocent.

The combined post-Holocaust Jewish emotions of shame, guilt, fear, and anger have reconstituted a renewed and roiled Jewish identity that reaffirms and pledges its conceptual distance from the rest of the world. Yet Jewish canon, both religious and secular, now militantly demands the pseudo-religious interpretation of the Jewish Holocaust to be sacred, for everyone; the Jews who were murdered in the context of World War II (and not non-Jews) are likewise hallowed. The sheer gravity and allegedly incomparable scope of the mass killings of Jews is also proclaimed to render today's Jews -- genetic inheritors of the Tragedy of tragedies -- beyond moral reproach. Jews are held blameless, irresponsible. Then, now, and across history.

The framework for this Jewish moral dialectic against the non-Jewish Other rests upon "anti-Semitism," the age-old vehicle for Jewish punishment by God, still conceived as a metaphysical residue of hatred attested to by even secular Jews (post-Holocaust) in the ruins of an otherwise rejected Jewish religion. Underscoring the idea that it is the concept of Gentile hostility that most effectively binds Jews so tightly together, "When there is no anti-Semitism," candidly admits Menachem Revivi, director general of an Israeli support office, "it's much harder to maintain your Judaism." [HYMAN, M., 1998, p. 85] "[Jewish mythology declares that] anti-Semitism is a mystifying disease," note Charles Liebman and Steven Cohen, "one with perhaps many permutations and with diverse origins, but at root one that is fundamentally irrational. This irrationalism only compounds the innocence of the Jewish victim." These two authors, both Jewish, then feel obliged to add: "It is not our intention to challenge the truth of these myths, we subscribe in good part to most of them." [LIEBMAN/COHEN p. 33] "And who are the anti-Semites?" asked Milton Steinberg, "The mentally sick, the embittered, the frustrated, the sadists. And if they are not sick, then they are worse, they are unprincipled and conscienceless." [STEINBERG, M., 1951, p. 122]

In the political context of the modern nation of Israel, even its a-religious state ideology -- Zionism -- includes Orthodox Judaism's old conviction of an omnipresent 'anti-Semitism" in all non-Jews to be central to its identity dogma. "Like the Nazi ideologues," wrote Jewish anti-Zionist William Zukerman in 1960, "the Zionists take it for granted the Jews are a foreign and inassimilable element in the body of all non-Jewish people ... [and] that hatred for the Jews is something instinctive and mystical, forever engrained in the subconscious of every non-Jew, which can never be eradicated or cured." [ZUKERMAN, p. 63]

"It is impossible to comprehend the largely irrational nature of [anti-Semitism], says popular Jewish polemicist Alan Dershowitz, "...The important point is that Jews are not to blame for anti-Semitism. Anti-Semitism is the problem of the bigots who feel, express, and practice it. Nothing we do can profoundly affect the twisted minds of the anti-Semites." [DERSHOWITZ, p. 102, 101] In a 1995 book about anti-Semitism in Japan, scholar David Goodman noted that "since anti-Semitism as we are defining it has nothing to do with Jews, much less 'Semites,' we will neither hyphenate nor capitalize the term." [GOODMAN, p. 11] Another Jewish scholar, Daniel Pipes, in a book dismissing as nonsense a variety of conspiracy theories, outlined his own personal lens to understand the world, saying, "I spell [antisemitism] in lower case, without a hyphen (not anti-Semitism), to signal that it refers to an ideology and to imply that the phenomenon has almost nothing to do with the actions of Jews." [PIPES, D., 1997, p. 27]

"The term Jew has been used as a term of abuse, a curse and an accusation for centuries," says Irene Bloomfield, a Jewish psychotherapist, "It expresses the anti-Semite’s virulent and unreasoning hatred and contempt and has so often been the preliminary of attacks, pogroms, persecution, and death ... The Jews had thus been an archetypical bad object and universal enemy from time immemorial." [BLOOMFIELD, p. 26] "Among most anti-Semites," adds another Jewish psychotherapist, Mortimer Ostrow, "we found that their irrational hatred was the expression of primary process thinking, that is, thought that is driven by feeling and not subjected to the discipline of reason, logic, and reality testing." [OSTROW, p. 176] Early, and prominent, Zionist Max Nordau declared that "the anti-Semitic accusations are valueless, because they are not based on a criticism of real facts, but are merely due to the psychological law according to which children, savages, and malevolent fools make persons and things against which they have an aversion responsible for their sufferings. Pretexts change, but the hatred remains. The Jews are not hated because they have evil qualities; evil qualities are sought for in them because they are hated." [HERTZ, J., 1954]

"Anti-Semitism," says prominent (Jewish) historian Barbara Tuchman, "is independent of its object. What Jews do or fail to do is not the determinant. The impetus comes out of the needs of the persecutors." [CUDDIHY, p. 24] "We all know that anti-Semitism really has nothing to do with Jews," says scholar Susannah Herschel, "It can flourish even in places where no Jews live." "The psychic needs of the Christians -- and not the actual characteristics of Jewish life," asserts Todd Endelman, "give anti-Semitism its power and appeal." "Jewish hatred is one-sided," adds Ruth Wisse, "... and functions independent of its object." "Anti-Semitism is oblivious to Jewish conduct," declared the Jerusalem Post in 1990, "it is independent of the very presence of Jews." [all: LINDEMANN, 1997, p. xvii]

"The existence of anti-Semitism and the content of anti-Semitic charges...," wrote Daniel Goldhagen in his best-selling 1996 book about Germany and the Jews, "are fundamentally not a response to any objective evaluation of Jewish actions ... anti-Semitism draws on cultural sources that are independent of the Jews' nature and actions." [Goldhagen's emphases; FINKELSTEIN, N., 1998, p. 11] "Let's face it," wrote Harry Golden, ""anti-Semitism can't possibly be explained; it can merely be recounted." "Understand and explain the problem [of anti-Semitism] as much as you may," said Lewis Naimier, "there remains a hard, insoluble core, incomprehensible and inexplicable." [LINDEMANN, p. 11]

In Jewish folklore, even intra-community jokes reflect the same theme of Jewish categorical innocence as the cause of anti-Semitism. In the following case, it is a Jewish-created defamation of Poles and Poland: a "Pollock" joke:

"A few months after the end of World War I, the premier of Poland
had a meeting with President Woodrow Wilson. 'If you don't meet
our nation's demands at the peace conference,' warned the premier,
'I foresee great troubles ahead. The Polish people will be very
angry, and they'll go out and massacre the Jews.'
'And if your demands are met?' asked Wilson.
'In that case,' responded the premier, 'my people will be delighted.
They'll go out in the streets and get drunk -- and then they'll massacre
the Jews.'" [NOVAK/WALDOKS, 1981, p. 60]

"When it comes to the millions of Jews who faced liquidation in Hitler's Europe," says Jewish author Michael Medved,

"historians make little effort to figure out what, precisely, the victims had done
to make Der Fuehrer so terribly angry. With racial and religious antagonisms,
we understand that rage can flourish with no basis in reality." [MEDVED, M.
11-12-01]

"Jews don't cause anti-Semitism," declares Jewish novelist Ann Roiphe, "nothing provokes it, it's always there ... The object of gentile racists and nationalist hate, chameleon-like, takes on the shape of that moment's Jew." [ROIPHE, A., 1992, p. 40] "The notion that anti-Semitism can be, in the slightest degree, the fault of the Jews," proclaims well-known Jewish author Cynthia Ozick, "is in itself -- even when it crops up, as it frequently does among Jews -- a species of anti-Semitism." [CUDDIHY, p. 24]
Eventual New York Times Executive Editor A. M. Rosenthal and reporter Arthur Gelb put the standard Jewish theme this way:

"The circumstantial evidence is that anti-Semitism is a mental disorder, because
the anti-Semite sees certain human beings not as human beings but as objects. They
are reflections of his own needs and passions and his inability to recognize them for
what they are is such a severe form of irrationalism as to be a symptom of
mental malfunction. The anti-Semite suffers from a fear of demons, but since he
is not aware of his fear is convinced of the reality of demons -- a clinical example
of paranoia." [ROSENTHAL/ GELB, 1967, p. 65]

"Not only does anything Jews do or refrain from doing have nothing to do with anti-Semitism," notes a non-Jewish scholar, John Michael Cuddihy, with incredulity and exasperation, "but any attempt to explain anti-Semitism by referring to the Jewish contribution to anti-Semitism is itself an instance of anti-Semitism!" [CUDDIHY, p. 24]

Such widespread Jewish Orwellian doublethink loops of logic to fend off blame and responsibility for their historical deeds stems from the old Chosen People syndrome itself, popularly secularized as an impenetrable fortress of denial against all non-Jewish (or Jewish) critical attack, an intellectual ghetto with locked gates: by self-edict declared separate, blameless, unaccountable, and completely untouchable. "This reductio ad absurdum," observes Cuddihy, "has stunning implications. It means that Jews have not been causal agents in their own history ... They did not act and interact causally and historically with other groups in history. Morally blameless, the Jews ... were outside of history, aspiring to ... 'angelism.'" [CUDDIHY, p. 24]

This outrageously a-historical perspective is reflected in a comment by Elie Wiesel about the defining Jewish event of the 20th century: "The Holocaust is beyond politics and beyond analogies." [ELLIS, M., 1990, p. 76]

In the modern Jewish community post-World War II, notes Jewish critic William Zukerman, "criticism and self-criticism which were the basis of inspiration of the Enlightenment period, have been discredited as almost the equivalent of treason. By a kind of perverted chauvinistic reasoning, criticism of anything pertaining to Jews, whether it is of Israel, of the dominant nationalist party [of Israel], its institutions, or of its ideology, has been defined as anti-Semitism." [ZUKERMAN, p. 68] Irving Kristol calls it his peoples' "propensity to gloss over their own shortcomings and blame the always available anti-Semite for their misfortunes." [KRISTOL, p. 278] Milton Steinberg notes that:

"Unfortunately Jews, like other human beings, are so constituted as
to be reluctant to pass adverse judgment on themselves. Hence,
whether with justice or not they will hold their Jewishness at fault
for whatever goes wrong in their lives." [NEUSNER, J., 1972, p. 78]

"The Cult of Victimhood," observes David Klinghoffer, "performs two valuable services for us Jews with guilty consciences. First, as it does for everyone else, it assures us that, whatever we know we are doing wrong, we are really angels ... But it does something else for us, which it may not do for other groups. We believe that any hostility we can detect on the part of non-Jews is entirely unmerited. We have done nothing to deserve it ... We American Jews are not as ignorant as we seem. We know, in our souls, that we have gone astray; but, to borrow a hackneyed phrase of psychological jargon, we are in denial." [KLINGHOFFER, p. 10-13]

Facing this suffocating shield, once defined as an anti-Semite for the crime of criticizing Jews, the offending individual is completely marginalized in modern America. "During the late 1950s and 1960s," says Benjamin Ginsberg, "anti-Semitism has been successfully defined by Jews as a form of extremism in which only politicians on the lunatic fringe engaged. As a result, any effort to make political cause of anti-Semitism seemed fraught with risk." [GINSBERG, B., 1993, p. 187] Once labeled an "anti-Semite," the stigmatized individual is even subject to the most preposterous of slanders, a virtual canon in much of the Jewish community. Criticizing Jews is anti-Semitism, and therefore equivalent to sending Jews to death camps. Says Konstanty Gebert, editor of a Jewish journal in Poland, :

"The reality of [the Nazi death camp] Treblinka exists, irremovably, and
contemporary anti-Semites do not have the option of stating that it is not
their goal." [GEBERT]

Albert Lindemann notes such accusations with amazement: "Some writers go so far as to condemn the distinction ["between 'irritation' with Jews and calling for their systematic murder"] as morally dubious, thus making any irritation with Jews or criticism of them 'anti-Semitic,' a conclusion that takes on extraordinary dimensions when linked to such assertions as 'all anti-Semitism is essentially the same' or 'a little bit of anti-Semitism is a little bit of cancer.'" [LINDEMANN, 1997, p. xiv]

(Professor Lindemann wrote an extraordinarily unusual work, Esau's Tears: Modern Anti-Semitism and the Rise of the Jews (Cambridge University Press, 1997), a volume that seeks to "understand" anti-Semitism largely in terms of Jewish belief and action that elicits it. Not unexpectedly, the reviewer for the American Jewish Committee's influential Commentary magazine decried the work in an article entitled "Blaming the Victim" as "deeply pernicious" and Lindemann's "knowledge of Jewish history ... [is] little better than that of the anti-Semites whose arguments he echoes." [WISTRICH, 1998, p. 60-63] Likewise, John Landau reviewed Esau's Tears in the Zionist journal Midstream, linking Lindemann's reciting of the truths of history to Hitler fascism, warning readers that "It appears that anti-Semitism remains a respectable intellectual position on American and British college campuses, including history department, provided that it is expressed with a degree of good manners and restraint. We must not forget that the assault on Jews by German academics and intellectuals preceded, and helped to lay the groundwork for, the physical destruction of European Jewry." [LANDAU, J., FEB/MAR 99, p. 44-45]

Central to the modern Jewish world view is the so-called "Holocaust." "The Holocaust," says Joseph Amato,

"serves as the point from which Jews can morally survey the entire past
and classify all present society ... Some Jewish thinkers consider the
Holocaust [as] providing a singular point of wrong innocence against
which they can judge everyone else. It has consciously been chosen by
Jews to be their crucifixion: the great sorrow they must mediate. Non-
Jews are tried by two questions: What did they do (collectively or
individually, directly or indirectly, by commission or omission) to further
anti-Semitism? What did they do to stop the Holocaust? The most
severe judges find everyone guilty who did not risk his family's lives
to save Jews in the Holocaust." [AMATO, p. 181]

Reflecting again the old Chosen People theme, Jewish convention also insists that anti-Semitism is a "unique" form of prejudice. Non-Jewish historian John Higham, who had written about anti-Semitism in the 1950s, defended himself against Jewish attack, saying:

"[It is accused] that I have violated the uniqueness of anti-Semitism
by comparing it with other exclusionary movements -- illustrating
the unwillingness of some Jews to measure their own experience
on a general human scale, unless anti-Semitism is presented ... as
the very archetype of all prejudices and anti-democratic attitudes.
For me the uniqueness of anti-Semitism was not a foregone
conclusion but a question." [HIGHAM, J., 1986, p. 225]

(It is interesting to wonder what Higham might have said more freely about the subject if he was not so beholding to the Jewish community -- his basic studies in this subject had been "generously" supported by the American Jewish Committee -- [HIMMELFARB, M., 1986, p. 197])

Despite the long historical list of very legitimate complaints against Jews by people all over the world through history, the institutionalized self-celebration of the Nazis as a polar German "chosen people," Hitler's heralding of the ruthlessness of war as a noble enterprise, the Nazi determination to rid Germany of Jews via the clinically brutal scientism of mass murder, Eli Weisel echoes many Jews in completely mystifying the Holocaust in his introduction to The Encyclopedia of the Shoah: "Unlike other tragedies, there was no logical reason underlying the tragedy of the Holocaust, and all attempts to discover rational reasons have failed." [March of the Living, p. 5]

Jewish blameless innocence throughout history, framing itself as an eternal scapegoats for the old religious nemesis of Christianity, is elaborately and imaginatively expounded upon by Jewish critic George Steiner. Hyam Maccoby notes that Steiner's

"theory of anti-Semitism [is that it] is caused by the atavistic pagan
element in western religion by which Jews are regarded as a collective
Executioner of a central human sacrifice. We have to do here with a
shifting moral responsibility, by which the individual lays his moral
burden firstly on Jesus himself, who dies to save him; and secondly,
on the Jews who bring about the necessary death of Jesus ... In any
event, the Jews have been elected, 'chosen' if you will, to the position
of scapegoat so that all others can escape guilt into the innocence of
childhood and recover the joy of Eden." [MACCOBY, p. 34]

Roger Kamenetz notes his discomfort as a Jew when the beliefs he had been emphatically taught about the Holocaust were challenged by the Buddhist world view, that humans must take responsibility for their actions that effect their fate:

"I had been shocked, a little outraged, by what I'd heard about
the Buddhist view of the Holocaust. I could not accept that the
suffering of the Jews was somehow a result of their previous
actions. Wasn't the knowledge of shared victimization the source
of Jewish identification with the Tibetans? Weren't we fellow
victims, fellow innocent victims? ... In Buddhism, the whole
notion of an innocent victim carried little weight in assessing
how one responded to tragic circumstances." [KAMENETZ, R.,
1994, p. 185]

Note the American Jewish Congress fury at Israeli rabbi and Shas party leader Ovadia Yosef ("who plays a critical role in coalition politics in Israel") when he dared to challenge modern Jewish convention about the Holocaust. In 2000, he suggested that it seemed to him that "Holocaust victims were punished for sins in an earlier life." However one might interpret this view, it is something considerably less than innocence. The AJC's reaction was outrage, and formally, that

"Rabbi Yosef must be charged with knowing that his statements can
be used as an excuse for Nazi barbarisms, as a kind of Nazi apologetics
... He acknowledges the Holocaust but then claims God's justification
for its horrors. If that is not blasphemy, then nothing is." [PR
NEWSWIRE, 2-6-98]

Berel Lang looks upon the widespread Jewish effort to elude their own honest history and attendant moral responsibility for it with concern. In modern Jewish historical revisionism, "the reasonable ... concern to understand anti-Semitism has ... nothing to do with Jews. This view ... has served as a premise in the most serious historical attempts to analyze the phenomenon of anti-Semitism ... This resistance to the possibility of a connection between anti-Semitism and Jewish history is ... pernicious." [CUDDIHY, p. 23-24] "Jews," notes Robert Segal, "fear that a historical explanation [of anti-Semitism] will make Jews responsible for anti-Semitism, and will thereby excuse it." [CUDDIHY, p. 34] "It seems clear that Jews exhibit an all-too common human failing," says Albert Lindemann, "They actually do not want to understand their past -- or at least those aspects of their past that have to do with the hatred directed at them, since understanding may threaten other elements of their complex and often contradictory identities." [LINDEMANN, 1997, p. 535] "Jews come honorably to their paranoia," adds Cuddihy, "Nevertheless, when it comes to their own behavior, they go on a moral holiday." [CUDDIHY, p. 35]

This widespread Jewish "moral holiday," however secularly guised, is nonetheless rooted in the old rabbinical ghettos; as we have seen, many centuries passed with Jewish history self-understood to begin and end with itself, the sacred history of a "people apart" unrelated to the history of others around them.

There is also -- more importantly in a largely areligious age -- an entire "science" (albeit a newly-created, and distinctly Jewish, one, even built in some ways upon a rabbinical model; some have called it a "surrogate religion") [GAY, p. 19-20] to use in service to prove the modern Jewish theses of identity, an identity largely based upon an oppositional antithesis: lofty Jewish moral worth versus an omnipresent, generic, and irrational anti-Semitism. This controversial "science" to prove the major premises of Jewish self-conception is psychoanalytic theory, the invention of a Viennese Jew, Sigmund Freud, itself a field of endeavor and allegiance overwhelmingly populated, predominated, and propagandized by Jews to our own day.

Let us start with the fact that all 17 original members of Freud's Psychological Wednesday Society were Jewish and most of his patients, by which Freud developed his theories of human neurosis, were women from "eminent Austrian Jewish families." The original Society members, notes Dennis Klein, "were aware of their Jewishness and frequently maintained a sense of Jewish purpose and solidarity ... [Their] feeling of positive Jewish pride formed the matrix of the movement in the psychoanalytic circle ... it tightened the bond among members and powered their self-image of a redemptive elite." [KLEIN, p. vii] (Absorbed with notions of elitism and clandestine intrigues, by 1912, six die-hard loyalists to Freud were joined in a behind-the-scenes "committee," described by Freud as a "secret council composed of the best and most trustworthy among our men." This group, said The Master, "would have to be strictly secret [Freud's emphasis] in its existence and its actions." [MASSON, 1990, p. 113])

"Freud," says another Jewish author, Earl Grollman,

"may also have experienced the 'essence of Judaism' through his
community activities with other Jews. Many of his important
theories were delivered before the Fraternity of Jewish Students
and the B'nai B'rith organization. Most of the colleagues in his
movement were Jewish ... But whatever the reasons -- historical,
sociological, psychological -- group bonds did provide a warm
shelter with other Jews, informality and familiarity formed a kind
of inner security, a 'we-feeling,' illustrated even by the selection
of jokes and stories recounted in the group. It is what Freud called
'the clear awareness of an inner identity, the secret of the same
inner construction.'" [GROLLMAN, E., 1965, p. 41]

"All over the world," says Jewish psychoanalyst Earl Hopper, "Jews are drawn to the profession of psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic psychotherapy. The 1990 roster of the International Psychoanalytical Association reads like the membership list of a synagogue." [HOPPER, p. 18] "That vast apparatus of putative concern, psychiatry," wrote Roger Kahn in 1968, "is largely a Jewish monopoly." [KAHN, R., p. 53] "An area of medicine which Jews have made almost their own is psychiatry." [BERMANT, C., 1977, p. 119] "Jews," says Ann Roiphe, also Jewish, "have rushed to psychoanalysis as lemmings to the sea." [ROIPHE, 1981, p. 76] Psychotherapy is also in all respects so overwhelmingly a Jewish consumer domain that in a 1996 survey (in which nearly half of 17 psychoanalysts in a research project were expressly solicited as non-Jews), 75% of the patients for all of them (both Jewish and non-Jewish therapists) were found to be Jewish. [OSTROW, p. 27]

As James Yaffe observed in 1968:

"There is little question that a comparatively large proportion of the
patients undergoing psychoanalysis in America are Jewish. It
also seems to be true that Jewish parents are more likely than
equally affluent non-Jewish parents to send their children for
psychiatric treatment. Those who can't afford analysis are just
as enthusiastic about the blessings of less expensive psychiatry.
According to one leader in the field, 'If you open a mental health
clinic and don't advertise, Jews will be the only people who
flock to it.' In some sections of the Jewish community, in fact,
psychiatry has become a way of life, almost a substitute religion.
In southern California it's hard to find a Jewish family that hasn't
got at least one member in analysis." [YAFFE, J., 1968, p. 293]

With advancement out of the Jewish ghetto in the 18th century, and increased secular questioning about the religiously-based myths about themselves and how they fit into mainstream societies, over the last couple of centuries "the behavior pattern of assimilated Jews," says Hannah Arendt, "determined by this continuous concentrated effort to distinguish themselves ... created a Jewish type that is recognizable everywhere ... Judaism became a psychological quality and the Jewish question became an involved problem for every individual Jew." [ARENDT, p. 67] The Jewish novelist Franz Kafka, for instance, once remarked that poet Heinrich Heine's "conflict with Jewry" was "exactly what made him so typically Jewish," [SILBERMAN, p. 63] i.e., being Jewish, post-Enlightenment, was a war within the psyche about being Jewish.

"Whatever the reasons for their philosophical disarray and mental anguish," observes Gerald Krefetz, "Jews were among the first groups to seek relief from psychologists, psychiatrists, psychoanalysts, and psychotherapists ... perhaps psychiatry is today's secular rabbinate." [KREFETZ, p. 180] This theme is inverted from a negative to a positive and romanticized by Harriet Fromkin: "If we had no further illustration than the character of Freud, we should have a basis for suspecting some connection between the Jew and psychological genius." [KAHN, R., p. 72]

Freud eventually directed his projective obsessions towards his Old Testament Jewish heritage, asserting -- among other things -- that the revered patriarch, Moses, may not have even been Jewish. And that Jews killed him. "Biblical religion, according to Freud," said Joseph Campbell, "had the character of a neurosis, where a screen of mythic figures hides a repressed conviction of guilt which, it is felt, must be atoned, and yet cannot be consciously faced." [CAMPBELL, MASKS, p. 126] Freud believed that Jews had a continuous anxiety and resentment about breaking the many laws of their Father God. Freud wrote that

"In the religion of Moses itself there was no direct expression for the
murderer's father-hate. Only a powerful reaction to it could make
its appearance: the consciousness of guilt because of that hostility,
the bad conscience because one had sinned against God and
continued to sin. This feeling of guiltiness, which the Prophets kept
incessantly alive ... cleverly veiled the true origin of the feeling. The
people met with hard times... it became not easy to adhere to the
illusion ... they did not observe the laws. The need for satisfying
this feeling of guilt ... was insatiable, more exacting, but also more
petty ... It [the feeling of neurosis] bears the characteristic of being
never concluded ... with which we are familiar in the reaction-
formation of obsessional neurosis." [KREFETZ, p. 181-182]

In the Freudian worldview, Richard Rubenstein explains that the blueprint to understand the troubled anti-Semitic mind (and everyone's, for that matter) starts here:

"According to Freud, civilization and religion began with a 'primal
crime' in which the father of the original human horde was
cannibalistically murdered by his sons to gain sexual possession
of his females. The unconscious memory of the deed continues
to agonize the sons and their progeny, thereby causing the
murdered father to be imagined as the ever-lasting Heavenly Father.
For Freud, the supreme object of human worship [the Father God]
is none other than the first object of human criminality." [RUBENSTEIN,
p. 36]

From this bizarrely fictional speculation, a Judeo-centric argument can be, and is, often created that explains anti-Semitism in western tradition as Christianity's (psychoanalytically-based) conflict with Judaism. This includes Christian envy of God's favoritism of Jewry, traditional Christian belief that Jews were the killers of Christ (an echo of the "murder God" theme), Judaism itself as a "father" religion to Christianity, and on and on. In this scenario, Jews are scapegoated by Christians for the very death of God. Not surprisingly, the Freudian paradigm for the relationship between Christianity and Judaism is a violent one. "The Jews had a father religion," said Freud, "and the Christians a son religion, and the subconscious is to kill the father from time to time." [PERLMUTTER, p. 141] Hence, in this view too, Nazi fascism was not really (as declared and practiced by them) an anti-Christian creed, but -- however incongruous -- an expression of it. "In a sense," declares Rubenstein, "the death camps [for Jews] were the terminal expression of Christian anti-Semitism ... [RUBENSTEIN, R., p. 43] ... since the sins and guilts that beset the anti-Semites existence demands the death of the Jews." [RUBENSTEIN, p. 41]

Elsewhere in the psychoanalytic world, John Murray Cuddihy has even argued that the essence of Freud's unconscious "id" theory was really the Jewish "ordeal of civility," the struggle to "civilize," to acculturate into the interpersonal norms of Gentile culture. (Freud's name for frustrated human desire can even been seen as a pun on the Yiddish word for Jew: Yid). In this vein, Maurice Samuels reflected widespread social issues of the day when he suggested in 1932, however facetiously, that anti-Semitism was probably rooted in "a lack of niceness in the Jews. If the Jews would only temper their voices, their table manners and their ties, if they would be discreet and tidy in their enthusiasms, unobtrusive in their comings and goings, and above all reticent about their Jewishness, they would get along very well." [SILBERMAN, p. 30] Albert Lindemann notes also the undercurrent of agitated Jewishness (antithetical to non-Jewish Others) in three major Jewish-dominated ideologies in the last 150 years: "Such modern ideologies as socialism, (both Marxist and anarchist), Zionism, and various forms of the psychiatric worldview (Freudian psychoanalysis and related schools) all emphasize the tainted or sick qualities of Gentile existence, be it in exploitive capitalism, aggressive nationalism, or repressive Victorian prudery." [LINDEMANN, Esau's, p. 14]

On one hand deconstructing their traditional religious faith in terms of collective neurosis, the Jewish nature of the psychoanalytic community yet echoes the exclusivist tribal ethic -- the "chosenness" and "apartness" from others -- of classical Judaism. "Psychoanalysis from its origins," notes Kevin MacDonald, "has been a "science apart' from the rest of psychology and psychiatry, resulting in two separate and incompatible discourses about human behavior. Psychoanalysis was and remains a highly authoritarian movement in which group boundaries are rigidly maintained and in which heretics are expelled." [MACDONALD, p. 237] This ethos of a psychoanalytic chosen people was criticized by a Swiss psychiatrist, Eugen Bleuler, who was courted by Freud to join the early psychoanalytic movement. Bleuler resisted the absolutism of the Freudians, telling Freud that "this 'who is not for us is against us,' this 'all or nothing,' is necessary for religious and political parties ... for science I consider it harmful." [GAY, p. 145]

In 1990, a (Jewish) psychoanalyst, Jeffrey Mouisaieff Masson, former Projects Director of the Sigmund Freud Archives in London and thereby a member of the international psychoanalytic "inner circle," wrote a volume exposing the secretive behind-the-scenes foundations of the psychoanalytic community:

"No book has yet told what it is like to undergo training as an orthodox
Freudian psychoanalyst. Nor does any book tell what it is like to leave
that profitable and prestigious profession -- those who have been part of
the inner circle of psychoanalysis either do not leave, or have left in
discrete silence. Thus, until now it has been almost impossible to get
an internal view of the workings of this 'men's club' with its initiation
rites; expectations of membership loyalty over truth; pressures to accept
concepts handed down from the leader, no matter how irrational;
xenophobic banding together against outsiders; and the punishment
of anyone who poses questions or finally wants out. It is worth asking
why no book like this has appeared before, since people have written
accounts of leaving almost every other cult." [MASSON, J. M., 1990, p.
1-2]

Many Jewish scholars these days are trying to more openly claim Freud as one of their own and find in psychoanalysis its distinctly Jewish foundation. (An important impetus in Freud's construction of his theories of psychoanalysis is anti-Semitism. See Eric Grollman's Judaism in Sigmund Freud's World, for example, for a dose of this perspective). [GROLLMAN, E., 1965] While Freud always presented himself as an atheist and a completely "assimilated" Jew in mainstream Viennese society, there is evidence and argument that Freud was hiding his traditionally Jewish background and conflict with his (now believed to be) religious parents. Freud was even, beginning in 1897, a member of the Vienna chapter of the Jewish fraternal order, B'nai B'rith. Concerning their roots in traditional Judaism, Emmanuel Rice believes that Freud and his family were -- to the public -- deceptive at the least. "The fact," says Emmanuel Rice, "that these people were lying either did not occur to or seem to bother them." [RICE, p. 254] "It appears," continues Rice, "the family environment of Sigmund Freud's formative years was far more involved with Judaic scholarship, theological beliefs, and ritual practices than has been traditionally thought to be the case." [RICE, p. 257] This has significant implications -- by the very dictates of psychoanalytic theory which demands an exploration of childhood experiences for the roots of adult psychological behavior-- to understand what were Freud's own "internal conflicts." And it inevitably leads more deeply to a Jewish specificity in the very foundations of psychoanalytic theory, something that Freud emphatically resisted through most of his life, publicly conceding. Rice even asserts that Freud's last major work, Moses and Monotheism, which scandalized traditional Judaism, must be understood not as scientific theory, but "as a novel with autobiographical elements." [RICE, p. 235]

Freud was even married to a woman, Martha Bernaya, whose grandfather was the chief rabbi of Hamburg. Raised in an Orthodox household, after Freud's death she resumed traditionalist customs. [GROLLMAN, E., 1965, p. 70-71]

As Jewish scholar Samuel Klausner notes:

"Freud himself was a Jew, and most of the members of his immediate
Vienna circle were Jews. Admittance to the psychoanalytic
movement required analysis by a previous initiate, a sort of
'apostolic succession.' The original Jewish group tended to analyze
Jews. Unwittingly, psychoanalytic ideology may be couched in a
Jewish ethic strange to individuals socialized in the Protestant ethic."
[GROLLMAN, E., 1965, p. 43]

Karl Abraham, a close disciple of Freud, took issue with the Master's reluctance to concede that his completely rationalist view of human psyche -- putting the human mind into square pegs -- was particularly Jewish. "After all," said Abraham, "the Talmudic way of thinking cannot suddenly have disappeared from us." [GAY, p. 131] Freud's technique, in its exegetical method, he suggested, was "essentially Talmudic." [OSTROW, p. 25] Aaron Rabinowitz has even written a recent article that "enumerates and discusses some halachic [Jewish religious law] principles and values which are exerting influence on the practice of psychotherapy." [RABINOWITZ, A., 2000, p. 193]

Here's a bizarre excerpt from the Jewish Chronicle revolving around the relationship between Freudianism/psychoanalysis and Orthodox Judaism, the origin of Jewish identity:

"Alan Dundes, a leading academic folklorist, presents an avowedly Freudian account of the Orthodox propensity for 'circumventing halachic restrictions' as evidenced by the Shabbat elevator (one that stops automatically to allow Orthodox Jews to allow it on Shabbat). The argument is that Jews exhibit traits of an anal erotic nature -- that basically, pride in order and self-control, obsessions with cleanliness or purity, and even feelings of superiority (Jewish chosenness) can all be traced back to our potty training. There follows an extended discussion of such avowedly repressive anal components in halachah [Jewish religious law]; and an argument that circumventions are ingenious attempts to break out of the repressive restrictions while continuing to comply with them, attempts in which we delight like naughty children ... [I]f one is impressed by ideas like 'writing is an act of defecation' (as the book went on, I became more and more convinced) then this volume [is] the book for you." [RYNOLD, D, 11-22-02, p. 28]

(Speaking of "potty training," here's what Marsha Richman and Katie O'Donnell [in their satirical look at "The Jewish Man in the Bathroom"] have to say about it: "The door to his bathroom is always closed, even when he's not in there. He will lock the door when he is in there. If you should burst in, he will valiantly try to look like he's doing something else. He folds, never crumples, the paper. In his medicine chest you will find prescriptions to cover everything from hives to a slipped disc. The Jewish art of toilet training is accomplished with a lot of guilt; if he doesn't do the right thing in the right place, his mother might kill him, or herself or both. When he comes out of the bathroom you will see a great feeling of satisfaction on his face. You might be mistaken, but it often looks like he expects you to praise him for what he's done.") [RICHMAN/O'DONNELL, 1979, p. 39-40]

Later in life, Freud admitted in a private letter that "in some place of my soul, in a very hidden corner, I am a fanatical Jew. I am very much astonished to discover myself as such in spite of all my efforts to be unprejudiced and impartial." [HES, p. 232] In 1977, Freud's daughter, Anna, guest speaking at a psychoanalytic convention in Jerusalem, created a furor when she announced that the notion of psychoanalysis as a 'Jewish science' "can serve as a title of honor." [GAY, p. 118]

"Although Freud openly questioned all religion," says M. H. Goldberg,

"including Judaism, he always thought of himself as a Jew and raised
his six children as Jews. In a letter to his fiancé written in 1882, Freud
concluded that 'something of the core, of the essence of this
meaningful and life-affirming Judaism will not be absent from our
home." [GOLDBERG, M. H., 1976, p. 30]

"Freud's Jewishness [was] ever present in his mind," suggests Benno Weiser Varon, "This mind, by the way, was a Talmudic mind, searching and speculative." [VARON, p. 9] Karl Krauss, a prominent Viennese leftist, journalist and baptized Jew, knew Freud and even declared psychoanalysis to be "the conquest of the confessional by the Jews of Vienna." [VARON, p. 9] He also asserted that "they have the press, they have the stock exchange, they also have the subconscious!" and that "psychoanalysis is the mental illness it purports to cure." [WINOKUR, J., 1992, p. 151-152]

Freud himself wrote a special preface to the Hebrew edition of his volume, Totem and Taboo, speaking of himself in the third person:

"[He] has never repudiated his people, who feels in essential nature a
Jew, and who has no desire to alter this nature. If the question were put
to him: 'Since you have abandoned all the common characteristics of
your countrymen, what is there left that is Jewish?' he would reply: 'A
very good deal and probably its very essence,' though he could not
express that essence clearly in words." [VARON, p. 9]

Freud once wrote to a Jewish friend that "racial relationship brings you closer to my intellectual constitution." [ARON, W., 1956-57, p. 290] Willy Aron adds that "in his famous address, 'On Being of the Sons of the Covenant,' delivered on May 6, 1926, on his 70th birthday, Freud spoke of 'the irresistible attraction of Judaism and Jews' and 'of the clear consciousness of an inner identity, the intimacy that comes from the same psychic structure.'" [ARON, W., 1956-57, p. 293] Freud further noted his link to the "racial" dimension of Jewishness, that "I can say that I am as little an adherent of the Jewish religion as of any other religion, i.e., I consider them all important as objects of scientific interest, but I do not share the emotional attitudes that goes with them. On the other hand, I have always felt a strong feeling of kinship with my race and have fostered it in my children." [ARON, p. 294]

Nathan Ackerman cites the following quotes by Freud about his Jewish identity: "A Jew must create a compensating culture or take the gamble of going stark crazy." ... "What bound me to Judaism ... was not belief, and not national pride ... There were other considerations which made the attractiveness of Judiams and Jews irresistible ... many obscure forces and emotions, all the more powerful the less they were defined in words: ... Only to my Jewish nature did I owed the two qualities which had become indispensable to me on my hard road. Because I was a Jew, I found myself free of many prejudices and being a Jew, I was prepared to enter opposition and to renounce agreement with the compact majority." [ACKERMAN, N., 1965, p. xii] "However abused," adds Ackerman, paraphrasing Freud, "the Jew must remain true to his people; there is no other way: 'It always seemed to me [said Freud] not only shameful but downright senseless to deny it." [ACKERMAN, N., 1965, p. xiii]

"Psychoanalysis is widely thought of as a 'Jewish science,'" says Arnold Jacob Wolf,

"Indeed, Freud took pains to avert just such a notion, though he himself was,
the chief reason for it. The enemies of depth psychology still dismiss it as
peculiarly relevant to Jews; its friends note with gratification the biblical roots of
the new wisdom. Not only are many practitioners of the art, like the very first
analyst, Jews by descent if not conviction, but there is a widespread conviction
that the method, the spirit, and even the conclusions of psychoanalysis are
para-Judaic ... [Freud's] ancestry and the impact of his ancestry upon his deepest
feelings are clearly and profoundly Jewish. His affinity for the Jewish style
both mystical and rationalist is unmistakable. His newly emphasized prudishness
together with his pioneering honesty in sexual matters is Talmudic."
[WOLF, A. J., 1965, p. 133]


Earl Hopper, who acknowledges that "my identity as a Jew is inseparable from my identify as a psychoanalyst," understands psychoanalysis to be of course a "Jewish science," but ascribes its roots to Freud's view that psychoanalysis represents the revolutionary insights of a "marginalized" people, i.e., Jews had been in the past conceptually lumped by gentiles together with thieves, lepers, and misfits of all kinds. [HOPPER, p. 19] The insightful Jewish world view, this argument insists, has therefore keener "outsider" perceptions of the norms of mainstream cultures of the Jewish diaspora. And Jewish genius is to criticize and deconstruct them. (It is interesting that this "marginalized victim people" concept emerges from the minds of rich, elitist Jewish psychoanalysts who imprint their paradigms of victimhood upon usually affluent patient-sponges, Jewish or not).

Arnold Meadow and Harold Vetter even argue that Freudian theory is based on the "Judaic value system" including Judaism's "this life" (not afterlife) orientation, a "rationalist control over ... sexual urges," the "hidden meaning of words," and the presence of the "Oedipus complex ... in Jewish culture, perhaps in peculiarly intense form." [MEADOW, p. 164] This includes Freud's notion, claim the authors, that a woman tries to make her husband her child to "act the part of a mother to him." Furthermore, the authoritarian nature of psychoanalysis emphasizes "rationality as a basis for authority [which] closely parallels the authority relationship found in Jewish culture." [MEADOW, p. 163] The patient's resistance to the psychoanalyst's insights into the patient's troubles "is diminished by the analyst's rational interpretation, or by the patient's positive transference toward the analyst." [MEADOW, p. 162] To follow the logic of psychoanalysis as an intrinsically Jewish revelation and world view, the patient's "transference" is ultimately -- whatever else it is claimed to be -- a sensitization to "being Jewish."

Economist Peter F. Drucker -- whose parents knew Freud -- has argued that one of the major reasons for the early resistance to Freud was not only his strange theories, but his elitist and exploitive ethics:

"Freud did not accept charity patients, but taught instead that the
psychoanalyst must not treat a patient for free, and that the patient will
benefit from treatment only if made to pay handsomely ... Medical
Vienna did not ignore or neglect Freud, it rejected him. It rejected him
as a person because it held him to be in gross violation of the
ethics of healer." [TORREY, p. ]

Freud, notes Sylvia Rothchild, had an

"inability to take any experience at face value. He treated his pupils as
patients, urged them to 'absorb things, not argue back.' Freud had no
wish to serve suffering humanity. He saw in that wish only sadism,
'the apparent desire to help the sick a device to conceal from oneself
the wish to do the opposite' ... He feared death, chased after money,
position and reputation." [ROTHCHILD, S., 11-26-98, p. 24]

(Yet, in allegiance to his Jewish identity, "whenever any of his works were translated into Hebrew or Yiddish, Freud refused to accept royalties.") [ARON, W., 1956-57, p. 294]

In 1988, Jeffrey Moussaieff, the former Projects Director of the Sigmund Freud Archives and also Jewish, wrote one of his volumes attacking the psychoanalytic community, this book entitled Against Therapy, which outlines his enormous disillusionment with the principles and Thought Police practices of psychoanalysis. This includes Masson's outrage over the field's innately authoritarian manner, its manipulative control of patients, abridgement of ethical norms, and the systematic exploitation for personal profit of the emotionally vulnerable. Masson's observations of the psychoanalytic community include many general themes from Jewish history we have often seen before. "It is the world of therapy," he charges,

"it is therapy itself that is at the core of the corruption I have described
in this book. Every therapist, no matter how kindly and benign in
appearance and behavior, is sooner or later drawn into that corruption,
because the profession itself is corrupt. A profession that depends
for its existence on other people's misery is at special risk. The very
mainspring of psychotherapy is profit from another person's
suffering ... [MASSON, p. 251] ... Abuse of one form or another
is built into the very fabric of psychotherapy -- that power corrupts,
that psychiatric power corrupts just as political power does and that
the greater the power [over patients], the greater the propensity for
corruption ... The psychotherapeutic relationship is a self-policing
profession. The psychotherapeutic relationship is a privileged one,
protected by a tradition of secrecy." [MASSON, 1988, p. 168]

In another volume, Masson observes that Freud's teachings became a "profitable profession with all the trappings of a jealously protected guild. The price for joining this fraternity is silence about its membership policy. Corruption is incorporated, not exposed; prejudice and bias have been accepted, even embraced." [MASSON, 1990, p. 4] In this volume, Final Analysis, Masson exposes the Orwellian, irrational, and totalitarian world of the psychoanalytic community. As part of his training to become a psychoanalyst, Masson was forced to undergo five years of psychoanalysis himself (at a 1971 cost of $75 an hour, five days a week). [MASSON, 1990, p. 21] Masson discovered soon that the psychoanalyst, Irvine Schiffer (also Jewish), for his sessions was a manipulative, unethical, maniacally sexist, two-faced and exploitive dictator/liar who eventually sought to exploit Masson to further his own career, insisting that a paper Masson planned on writing should be partially credited to his therapist. [MASSON, 1990, p. 69-70, 75, 82-83] This therapist was also the president of the Toronto Psychoanalytic Institute. [MASSON, 1990, p. 21] In telling one's most intimate and embarrassing secrets to another (with no parallel exchange), the confessor becomes profoundly vulnerable and beholding to the Listener. As in all of psychoanalytic terrain, the therapist ultimately holds the revelations of the Confessor as a potential weapon against him. Masson was also outraged when the therapist inanely decided that Mr. Masson's fundamental psychological problem was that he wanted to be a beautiful woman! [MASSON, 1990, p. 104] In his training to become a therapist in the secretive and authoritarian world of psychoanalysis, Masson was also told by a professor that copies of some psychoanalytic journals could not be exposed to the "lay public." [MASSON, p. 111] Another taught that spies should sometimes investigate patients' lives. [MASSON, p. 110]

In the early days of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud was actually relieved to count Carl Gustav Jung -- a non-Jew -- as an adherent to the psychoanalysis bandwagon and was careful to keep him in the fold. "Gentile proselytes," notes John Murray Cuddihy, "could shore up [Freud's] self-doubt that psychoanalysis might not be, as its adherents claimed, a "science" at all ... but a social-cultural movement of Diaspora Jews." [CUDDIHY, p. 77] Without non-Jews in the psychoanalytic fold, Freud and his Jewish associates ran the profound risk -- with the emphasis on the likes of penis envy, the Oedipal Complex, strange sexual obsessions, the Death Wish, the focus on neurosis and anxiety, and all the rest of it -- of being mercilessly ridiculed and humiliated as merely participants in a bizarre Jewish cult, evidence, for anti-Jewish critics, of Jewish degradation.

Freud, in a letter to fellow Jewish psychoanalyst, Karl Abraham, wrote: "You are closer to my intellectual constitution because of racial kinship while he [Jung] as a Christian and pastor's son finds his way to me only against great inner resistances. His association with us is very valuable for that. I nearly said that it was only by his appearance on the scene that psychoanalysis escaped the danger of becoming a Jewish national affair." [CUDDIHY p. 77] Later, in another letter to Abraham, Freud added: "Our Aryan comrades are really completely indispensable to us, otherwise psychoanalysis would succumb to anti-Semitism." [CUDDIHY, p. 82] There are those who even suggest that Sabina Spielrin, a Jewish woman (and, as one journalist put it, "a compulsive masturbator") who was Jung's patient and lover, was a "'honey trap' offered by Freud ... to keep Jung in the analytic movement." [KELLAWAY, K., p. 10]

Freud was a contemporary in Vienna of Theodore Herzl, the acknowledged "founder" of Zionism and modern state of Israel. "Freud had a high regard for Theodore Herzl and was closely acquainted with him." [MEITLIS, J., p. 21] Herzl, remarks Cuddihy, believed that non-Jews are found "in two and only two varieties, namely ... overt and covert anti-Semites. Any wide reading in Freud puts it beyond doubt that he shared this conviction." [CUDDIHY, p. 78] "Freud "always gave a generous contribution" to the Zionist youth organization Hechaluz [the Pioneers] and in 1936 finally "openly aligned himself with the Zionist cause." [BERKELEY, p. 235, p. 191] "Zionism," Freud wrote in a private letter in 1930, "awakened my strongest sympathies, which are still faithfully attached to it today." [GAY, p. 123] "We are all of the same blood," Freud once told Jewish friend Jacob Meitlis. "Basically, all are anti-Semites. They are everywhere. Frequently it is latent and hidden, but it is there." [MEITLIS, p. 20]

Dr. Leo Goldhammar, a friend of Freud, noted an arresting dream Freud had in the early 1900s. Goldhammar

"recorded a dream of Freud about Theodore Herzl. In this dream, as
told by Freud, Herzl conveyed to Freud the idea of immediate action
regarding Palestine if the Jewish people is to be saved. Freud remarked
in his lecture on the dream that never before had he been interested
in Herzl's ideas. Some time later he met the real person of his
dream on a bus and was struck by the great resemblance of the
real Herzl to the image beheld in his dream." [ARON, W., 1956-57,
p. 294]

Freudianism proved useful in arguing Zionist theory. "The Zionist critique of assimilation ... [i.e., that Jews are perpetually destined to be a 'nation apart' as an inassimilable people in non-Jewish lands]," notes Donald Niewyk, "... rested on a certain conviction that all efforts to blend with non-Jews must lead unswervingly to deformed Jewish lives. The new discipline of psychoanalysis was mustered to demonstrate the neurotic effects of divided consciousness. Rootlessness and inferiority complexes were shown to generate everything from revolutionary activity to Jewish anti-Semitism, extreme German nationalism, and suicide." [NIEWYK, D., p. 126]

"Freud's Jewish identity," says Sander Gilman, "echoes throughout the history of psychoanalysis as part of its rhetoric." [GILMAN, p. 93] As such, it was -- and is -- a warped and constrictive system for a non-Jew. "When one rebels within or against psychoanalysis," adds Gilman, "one seemingly natural rhetoric in which this rebellion takes place in articulation is an opposition to the 'Jewish' nature of the field."

What non-Jew would respond positively, favorably, to the inevitable manifestations of Freud's core belief about himself and his people, (an undercurrent of psychoanalysis), and how Jews traditionally treat those outside their own community? Freud wrote it this way:

"We may start from a character of the Jews which
dominates their relationship to others. There is no doubt that
they have a particularly high opinion of themselves, that they
regard themselves as more distinguished, of higher standing,
as superior to other peoples. " [FREUD, p. 105-106]

This is the very paradigm of the foundations of psychoanalysis itself. As Freud wrote, the doctor-patient relationship is a "situation in which there is a superior and a subordinate." [MASSON, p. 3] That subordinate, of course, is the patient who, by virtue of the very principle of psychotherapy, does not negotiate understanding with an overseer, but must entirely bend to the analyst's dictatorial will. And this dictatorial will, by conceptual origin, rationalist method, and omnipresent propagation, is Jewish-centered.

Freud's sense of Jewish superiority was documented a number of times, once expressed in the context of the death of a Jewish colleague. "We were both Jews," said Freud, "and knew of each other that we carried that miraculous thing in common which -- inaccessible to any analysis so far -- makes the Jews." [GAY, p. 133] One scholar notes that "Freud's undefined sense of Jewishness represents a special case of his obstinate belief in the inheritance of acquired characteristics," as manifest in their "harsh, obsessive, self-punishing religion." [GAY, p. 133] Among Freud's later disciples, A. A. Roback, a Jew and Russian-American psychologist, sought "the actual causes of the Jewish birth and nursing of psychoanalysis in the peculiar makeup of the Jew." [GAY, Moment, p. 48]

Understandably, eventually Freud and Jung began having serious disagreements. Jung, attributing many of the Jews' psychological problems to their own particular sense of rootlessness, decided that Freud's special Jewish hang-ups couldn't be generalized and universalized onto everybody else’s' psyche too. Said Jung:

"The Jewish problem is a regular complex, a festering wound...
Are we really to believe that a tribe which has wandered
throughout history for several thousand years as 'God's
Chosen People' was not put up to such an idea by some
quite special psychological peculiarity? If no difference exists,
how do we recognize Jews at all? ... All branches of humanity
unite in one stem -- yes, but what is a stem without separate
branches? Why this ridiculous touchiness when anybody
dares to say anything about the psychological differences
between Jews and Christians?" [HANNAH, p. 224-225]

Among Jung's earliest rebellions against his mentor was to challenge Freud's theory that children have incestuous desires for their opposite gender parents. And what, one wonders, of traditional Jewish obsessive concern with the prestige and pedigrees of their respective genealogical lineages (called "yicchus") in association with Freud's claim that all people reject their parents (Freud's were not well off) and imagine them to be "members of an aristocratic and/or royal family"? [RICE, p. 239] Jewish author Frederic Grunfeld dismisses Jung's disenchantment with the Jewish base of Freudianism thusly: "Freud was accused, not only by fools but even by C. G. Jung, of purveying 'Jewish psychology.'" [GRUNFELD, F., 1996, p. 21]

Jung eventually defected from Freud and his Jewish circle, and became influential in the field of psychology in his own right. And what did this defection signify to Freud? "By the time Jung withdrew from Freud and others in the psychoanalytic community," says Stephen Martin, "the accusation [against Jung] of anti-Semitism spread with alarming rapidity." [MAIDENBAUM, p. 5] Even in 1991, a Jewish student applying for a postdoctoral grant from Hebrew University to train in Zurich as a Jungian psychoanalyst was told "that Jung was an anti-Semite at best and was in fact quite possibly a Nazi sympathizer if not an active party member." [MAIDENBAUM, Introduction]

Early Freud follower Ernest Jones noted his sense of the nature of the Jewish psychoanalytic field:

"I became, of course, aware somewhat to my astonishment of how
extraordinarily suspicious Jews could be of the faintest sign of
anti-Semitism and of how many remarks or actions could be
interpreted in that sense ... Freud himself was pretty sensitive in
this respect." [GROLLMAN, E., 1965, p. 105]


One of the Freudian explanations for this anti-Semitism, "the deepest source of anti-Semitism," says Judy Cooper, is "the Jewish practice of circumcision ... [Freud] considered this to be a primeval custom used as a symbolic substitute for castration and an expression of subjugation to the father's will." [COOPER, p. 7]

Freud, like most Jews in our own day, saw in any resistance to his will the latent pulse of anti-Semitism. When "the first foreign [Swiss] recruits to psychoanalysis rejected Freud's 'theory of anal-eroticism,'" says Cooper, he saw it as an anti-Semitic attack on the Jews of Vienna. Freud complained that

"There [in Switzerland] one hears just the argument I tried to avoid by
making Zurich the centre [of psychoanalysis]. [They say that] Viennese
sensuality is not to be found anywhere else! Between the lines you can
read further that we Viennese are not only swine but also Jews."
[COOPER, p. 6]

Freud, says Cooper, argued that Jews were "free from prejudice which restricted others in the use of their intellect," whereas "the Swiss [i.e., non-Jews] had to rid themselves of deep cultural attitudes, beliefs and prejudices to which they were profoundly attached, even though they considered themselves to be fully emancipated. "[COOPER, p. 6] Other anti-Semites in Freud's eventual sphere, claims Cooper, included Virginia Woolf, one of Freud's publishers; Ernest Jones, one of his biographers; and much of the early French Psychoanalytic Society of the 1920's. [COOPER, p. 9]

A rare Pakistani psychotherapist, Masud Khan, who lived and worked in Britain, is afforded special attention by Judy Cooper (a Jewish psychotherapist who spent six years in therapy under him) as an anti-Semite. Khan complained that "the strength of the Jews is that they have no sensitivity about the contempt in which others hold them," "what makes Jews insufferable is that in order to love themselves they have to be hated by others first," and "the impact of the Judaic-Yiddish-Jewish bias of psychoanalysis was neither small nor slight to me." [COOPER, p. 11] None of these Khan comments of course have any verifiable basis in reality for Cooper except as evidence for his irrational anti-Semitism.

Even Jeffrey Moussieff Masson, a Jewish critic of the "corrupt" foundations of psychoanalysis, blamed a Gentile (in training to become a psychoanalyst) for the death of a Jewish patient. Why? Because the non-Jew would not/could not bend to see the patient's very particular Jewish world, one which is singularly welded to the lens of an omnipresent anti-Semitism. This (and a non-Jewish irritation with Freud's compulsion for Jewish "themes"), decides Masson, is itself an act of anti-Semitism. To both the patient and Masson, the non-Jew learning to be a psychoanalyst is an anti-Semite. Masson's comments reflect the implicit Jewish/Gentile divisive undercurrent about anti-Semitism within the psychoanalytic, and any other, field. "One of my fellow candidates was Catholic," decides Masson,

"and was preoccupied with a Catholic theology. He had the misfortune
to have as a patient a Jewish survivor of the concentration camps. During
one of the case seminars [at a Toronto university] he explained to the
class that this patient suspected him of anti-Semitism. Since he had
once complained to me that Freud was too preoccupied with 'Jewish'
themes, I was sympathetic to her concerns. 'I am asking for help,' he
said, looking miserable. I thought this only fair. No doubt he wanted
to ask somebody else, somebody more sensitive to these issues, to
take over the case. 'How can I get her to understand that this is merely
a projection, and a paranoid one at that? She is being chased all right,
but her tormentors, her persecutors, are inside her own head. She
can't see that, and she thinks the worst problem is that she has fallen
on a bad analyst.' She was right, I thought. The class and the
supervisor all urged him to redouble his efforts to provide this woman
with 'insight.' But from class to class, things got worse. 'She is
convinced that she is locked into a life-and-death struggle with me,
and if she cannot get me to change, she is going to kill herself. How
do I get her to see that the change must be in her, not me?' I could
not see how this attitude could possibly help her. One day he came
to class and was crying, 'She killed herself.'" [MASSON, J. M., 1990,
p. 106]

At root in this story here, Holocaust victim or not, there is indeed a profound therapist-patient struggle. It centers upon the Jewish demand that non-Jews sensitize themselves to the peculiar particulars of "being Jewish," especially an insistence that non-Jews are, virtually by nature, irrationally anti-Semitic and that to deny this alleged "fact" is itself an expression of the irrational "disease."
A clear example of this psychotherapy-induced Gentile sensitization to being Jewish is the case of non-Jewish journalist Ross Wetzsteon ("I was immediately drawn to the Jews because they seemed so attractive and because the WASPs seemed so repellent.") Wetzsteon, after asserting the truths of Jewish "pushiness" and "vulgarity" as verifiable social traits ("Jewish vulgarity, in short, became a kind of intellectual and moral critique of the WASP mentality"), as well has his alienation from his own family and WASP culture, turns to explain how psychotherapy has liberated him from the "deceitful facade" of WASP identity. "I'll never forget," he writes,

"how much my therapy had to do with my pleasure. For me, therapy was
primarily a means of liberating my inner vulgarity, of releasing a kind of
pushiness and ostentation in my psychic life -- it was a way of discovering
that the things I valued most were radically opposed to the WASP ideals I'd
internalized ... The important point is that it was quite clear to me that the Jew
and the psychotherapist joined forces in the abolition of WASP hypocrisy,
WASP decorum, and WASP censorship. I even came to see a parallel --
while obviously aware of the disparities -- between Jewish social liberation
and my own psychological liberation. My ghetto was my head, my
assimilation was through therapy ... So when I say that psychotherapy
revealed to me the authenticity of feeling, I'm saying that the experience was
a way of becoming a mensch [Yiddish for 'good man']. Thus, to me,
psychotherapy became what Freud most feared -- a Jewish science ...
I regard myself as an 'honorary' Jew."
[WEZSTEON, R., SEPT 6-12, 1998]


Freud's broad version of psychoanalysis as a respected "science" to this day has a constrictive ideological foundation. And what is the essential spirit of it? "The negative character of psycho dynamic theory," suggests Martin Gross, "with its emphasis on abnormalities ... is a magnificent legacy of Freud's own neuroses." Freud's official biographer, wrote that for nearly a decade up to 1900 the founder of psychoanalysis had his own "considerable psycho neurosis, characterized by swings of mood from extreme exhilaration to profound depression and twilight states of consciousness." [EYSENCK, p. 38] Freud was also addicted to cocaine, and he prescribed it to others. [GROSS, p. 234-235; ROTHCHILD, S., 11-26-98, p. 24]

And, if one resists Freudian dictates? For the psychoanalytic Thought Police, it is evidence, of course, of anti-Semitism. "Even the 'normal' mind," notes Frederick Crews, "in a Freudian view, is thought to consist of encrusted reaction formations against hideously aggressive impulses that remain capable of eruption; and what target of philistine malice could be more suitable than Freud and Freudians themselves, the bearers of the frightening news about those subterranean forces? To such a mindset, irreverence toward the official though mythical account of Freud's triumphs takes on the appearance not just of a private neurotic ailment but of a pogrom in the making." [CREWS, F., 1998, p. xxi] Whether one addresses the Jewish dimensions of the field, psychoanalysis is so overwhelmingly Jewish that in some quarters critics of Freudian theory are considered instant anti-Semites, "not just allies of the Christian far right but as latter-day Nazis hunting down 'Freudian Jews'." [CREWS, F., 1998, p. xxi]


In recent years a firestorm of material has been published that attacks Freudian theory and "it's malignant affect ... on American thought and culture." [TORREY, Title Page] Freud, writes H. J. Eysenck, "was, without doubt, a genius, not of science, but of propaganda, not of rigorous proof, but of persuasion ... His place is not, as he claimed, with Copernicus and Darwin, but with Hans Christian Anderson and the Brothers Grimm, tellers of fairy tales." [EYSENCK, p. 208] "Freudians are finding themselves on the defensive," noted Frederick Crews in 1998, "and the strategies of special pleading that they adopt are themselves symptomatic of intellectual bankruptcy ... Thus it was Freud's closest friend Fliess who pointed out in 1901 that Freud was ascribing his own thoughts to the minds of his patients." [CREWS, F., 1998, p. xxviii]

Not unexpectedly, even Orthodox Jews have attacked Freudian theory and its perceived corrosive effect on traditional values. "The priesthood of Freud's cult," wrote Martin Kushner, "as a vested interest, tries to strengthen and perpetuate itself, not unlike any other vested interest." [GAY, p. 97]

Freud's influence in Western culture to this day remains incredible; it has permeated all facets of modern life, from literature to toilet training. Psychoanalysts head over half of the departments of psychiatry at American medical schools. "I am bewildered," said Dr. William Sargent, a former head of St. Thomas Hospital in England, "at the way direction and control of American psychiatry has been taken over since World War II by psychoanalysis." [GROSS, p. 145] And as Kate Millet has noted, "The prestige of Freud's sexual theories did not arrive at, still less maintain, such complete ascendancy [in Europe] as they achieved in the United States. In America, the influence of Freud is almost incalculable." [MILLET, p. 178]

So where does this all lead us, per the subject at hand: Jews, non-Jews, and the subject of anti-Semitism? This is what Freud had to say about the reasons for anti-Semitism:

"With regard to antisemitism, I don't really want to search for explanations; I feel
strong inclination to surrender to my affects in this matter and find myself confirmed
in my wholly non-scientific belief that mankind ... by and large are a wretched lot." [ZUKIER, H., 1999, p. 118]

With the rigid conviction that anti-Semitism is an irrational, baseless animosity towards Jews, immediately after World War II and in the stormy months before the founding of Israel, American Jewish organizations began, quite literally, to plan their propaganda strategies. The revelation of Hitler's atrocities against Jews publicly elevated Jews to widespread sympathy and an uncontested "higher moral ground," disarming to our own day any public criticism of Jewry and only rarely the rising Jewish state of Israel. The practical question for Jewish organizations (particularly, but not only, the Zionist ones) was: how do Jews best ride this wave of popular sympathy for their plight under Hitler into the far future? To deflect any argument from the historical record scathing of Jews, it was deemed extremely important to implant in American public opinion the notion that any criticism of Jews had no rational causal basis and was, by definition, originated in mental illness. And an entire "science," albeit a disguised Jewish one, was at their command to "prove" it.

As Jewish psychoanalyst Rudolf Lowenstein declared in 1951:

"Inaccessibility to reason is also one of the most typical characteristics
of the anti-Semite, who is unable to re-evaluate his opinions and
prejudices in the light of factual evidence that refutes them. The
passions and the unconscious motives and mechanisms involved
in his anti-Semitic feelings are too powerful to yield to reason or
experience. We find therefore that although anti-Semitism cannot
be placed in any one of the well-known clinical categories it is
nevertheless frequently an indication of some sort of mental
disturbance that could be classified among the social mental
diseases." [LOEWENSTEIN, R., 1951, p. 18-19]

Among the powerful Jewish lobbying organizations seeking to disseminate such notions was the American Jewish Committee, one of the many Jewish groups that actively support the state of Israel. (AJC's efforts to effect social change in America include "the elimination of expression of religion in the public schools with special reference to the observation of Christmas," opposition to quota-oriented affirmative action legislation (because it hurts Jews), and "continued campaigns ... to make people aware of Arab funding over American educational institutions." [DOBKOWSKI, p. 39] The AJC also was actively involved in the successful lobby of the Vatican to formally change traditional Catholic teachings that Jews killed Christ. [DOMBKOWSKI, p. 37]

Jewish communal organizations have long been active in socially engineering non-Jewish perceptions of the Jewish community against any instinct towards criticism (i.e., "anti-Semitism.") As Eli Ginzberg noted in 1949, "Today at least among large numbers of American Jews, the 'defense activities' have usurped a position of priority. This was more or less inevitable since many of these Jews have lost all interest in positive Jewish values; their entire adjustment is externally oriented. Finally, we are confronted with the amazing belief among American Jews ... that the basic attitudes of the Gentiles toward the Jews can be significantly altered, if only the right 'techniques' are discovered and employed." [HERTZBERG, A., 1989, p. 331]

A good example of this is the American Jewish Committee's efforts to use Freudian theory to explain, and diffuse, the anti-Semitic threat. "A recent conference called by the most outstanding Jewish defense agency [AJC] in this country," wrote Max Horkheimer (head of an AJC committee) in 1946, "... was attended by experts from all over America. Many questions were presented: In setting up a defense program against anti-Semitism, what type of propaganda should be used? What should be said? ... Should there simply be an appeal for fair play, to a sense of justice in the individual, to the ideals of democracy? The psychoanalytic answer would be in the negative. A mere appeal to the conscious mind does not suffice, because anti-Semitism and the susceptibility to anti-Semitic propaganda spring from the unconscious." [HORKHEIMER, p. 2]

Here Horkheimer asserts that a rational appeal to democratic principles of fairness, justice, equality, and humanitarianism in an open and civilized forum to "clear the air" of anti-Jewish complaint will never work because the source of such complaint is -- by the psychoanalytic definition -- purely emotional and irrational. Jews, in this scenario, are always scapegoats for non-Jewish problems. A critique of Jewish identity and behavior is not, to the "normal" mind, even on the map. It is, by psychoanalytic definition, rationally impossible. Criticism of the Jewish community is thereby merely a manifestation of human psychological sickness. The only option for Jews, as Horkheimer and his psychoanalytic colleagues see it, is a "propaganda" that entirely denies "anti-Semites" (generally broadly considered to be anyone who criticizes Jews or Israel) a forum for their grievances. Hence, no credence or attention is afforded whatsoever to the very materially concrete and well-documented socio-economic roles of Jews that oppressed others through history; the centrality of money-making and exploitation of others in the Jewish world view and the traditional Jewish double moral standard towards this task; public animosity towards Jews throughout history as financiers, economic middlemen, and money dealers; legal sanctions for unethical conduct towards Gentiles in the Talmud; religiously sanctioned Jewish separatism, racism, and contempt for non-Jews; and the implications of all this to international Jewry, Israel, and modern times. (Horkheimer, by the way, was a refugee from Nazi Germany where he had been the Director of the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt, a school noted for its Marxist and Freudian foundations. "Most of the roughly 50 members of the institution's staff," notes Nachum Gidal, "were of Jewish origin)." [GIDAL, p. 354] "Germans of Jewish background," note Stanley Rothman and S. Robert Lichter, "dominated another important group of intellectuals during the Weimar period, the Frankfurt-based Institut fur Sozialforschung, whose leading members became collectively known as the 'Frankfurt School.' This roster included some extraordinarily distinguished and inflential figures, including T. W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Erich Fromm, Herbert Marcuse, and Walter Benjamin. With the exception of Karl Wittfogel, who left the Institute rather early to become an anti-Marxist conservative, all the inital members were of Jewish background (Adorno was half-Jewish). Most of the Frankfurt School were the sons of successful businessmen." " [ROTHMAN/LICHTER, 1982, p. 86]

"In 1943," notes Stuart Svonkin, when the Institute for Social Research set up shop at Columbia University in New York City,

"the American Jewish Committee entered into a contract with the ISR under
which the institute was to investigate contemporary American anti-Semitism."
[SVONKIN, S., 1997, p. 33]


The fortification of the Jewish people and their influence over American public opinion by legions of committed Jewish psychoanalysts and their "science” in the hunt for the omnipresent anti-Semite and to eradicate its attendant irrational "prejudice" was begun in earnest. "In the first week, and months, after the end of the second World War," notes J. J. Goldberg, "the organized Jewish community launched a broad ranging campaign to end prejudice and discrimination in America ... It was a huge, coordinated campaign, waged in the courts and the legislature, in the media and in the streets." [GOLDBERG, J.J. p. 119] The result of this profoundly powerful lobbying effort is a ruthless political weapon, a one-way dictatorship of accusation against any kind of critic of Jews. As Rabbi Daniel Lapin notes the situation today, even "the unfounded charge of 'anti-Semite' brands the victim and leaves the accuser absolved." [LAPIN, D., 1999, p. 285]

Jewish author Stuart Svonkin notes that in the late 1930s

"the AJC and the ADL each launched ambitious programs aimed at unmasking
rabble-rousers and 'immunizing' Americans against anti-Semitism ... Using the radio,
the press, and other mass media, the AJC and ADL embarked on a joint
campaign of public education that portrayed anti-Semitism as the opening
gambit in a Nazi scheme to 'divide and conquer' the United States. Both
agencies spent large sums of money producing and distributing leaflets,
pamphlets, and books that provided a positive image of Jews while
depicting Nazism as atheistic, antidemocratic, and un-American -- not
simply anti-Semitic ... The Jewish agencies' propaganda campaign reflected
the assumption that anti-Semitism was rooted in ignorance about Jews and
Judaism ... Like their counterparts at the AJC, ADL staff members formed
working relationships with reporters, publishers, newspaper columnists, radio
station managers, and moviemakers, through which they were able to counteract
anti-Semitic stereotypes and emphasize the importance of inter-religious unity.
The ADL and the AJC both obscured the Jewish origins of their efforts
by unobtrusively subsidizing newspapers, church groups, labor unions,
professional organizations, and German American organizations that spread
anti-Nazi, pro-democratic propaganda." [SVONKIN, S., 1997, p. 15-16]

Glen Jean Sonne describes one of the successful American Jewish prototypes to silence a critic of Jewry, this one a preacher and right-winger, Gerald K. Smith, in the 1940s:

"Indeed there was a Jewish plan ('plot' is too strong a word); and it was more
effective than many of Smith's opponents anticipated. The strategy devised was
to deny Smith any publicity. This plan evolved after several years of spirited
debate within the Jewish community; it required a herculean effort to convince
and coordinate the press as well as fellow Jews. Although never completely
effective, the strategy reduced Smith from a highly publicized public figure
in the 1930s to a pariah in the postwar period ..." [SONNE, J., 1986, p. 153]

Popular Jewish convention also held --as one 1950s study of Jewish American colleges students found -- organized Jewish efforts to thwart anti-Jewish hostility should be accomplished "secretly." "The desire to please and appease the powerful Gentile," noted Joseph Adelson in discussing the results of his survey of Jews, "is reflected in the belief that organizational response to anti-Semitism, when it is necessary, should be of a quiet, secret, conspiratorial nature. Organizations such as the Anti-Defamation League should avoid stirring up public attention." [ADELSON, J., 1960, p. 478]


By 1950, the "Department of Scientific Research" (headed by Horkheimer) of the AJC sponsored an influential study, led by Dr. Nathan Ackerman of Columbia University, designed to equate mental illness and anti-Semitism. The resultant volume, Anti-Semitism and Emotional Disorder (co-authored with Marie Jahoda), became an authoritative source and is cited in the bibliographies of many later books about anti-Semitism. Ackerman's research was not exploratory investigation per se. Cloaked beneath the robes of psychoanalytic scientism, it was closer in spirit to a McCarthy-inspired witch hunt, which entered American political life a few years later. Information was merely solicited from American psychoanalysts by open invitation in this study to prove the thesis that anyone who complains about any aspect of Jewish behavior is crazy. (In 1996, Jewish psychoanalyst Mortimer Ostrow reported upon his own 9-year research project sponsored by the "Psychoanalysis Research and Development Fund" on the same topic: "We anticipated that the psychoanalytic method could be usefully applied to the phenomenon of anti-Semitism, since anti-Semitism seems to be largely irrational. Its ubiquity and presence cannot be explained by any realistic considerations.") [OSTROW, p. 3]

The bedrock for such a study originates here: "[Freud's] historic neurotic personality," says Martin Gross," has had a profound effect on our culture. It has thrust Freud's worst indispositions into our language, our mental habits, and our psychology ... one trait was his bad-tempered insistence that secret hostility was paramount in the human psyche." [GROSS, p. 243] (Might this be a clue, one wonders, to distinctly Jewish "secret hostility.")

In the introductory statements to his study of anti-Semitism, Ackerman notes that he and his colleagues are Jews. He then bluntly confesses his emotional bias on the subject of anti-Semitism, dismisses objectivity and "detachment from the issue" as being "logically and psychologically untenable," declares that "value judgments enter into every step of social research," and then begins -- paradoxically and hypocritically -- a discussion of the evils of "prejudice" and "prejudgment" (as expressed by anti-Semites) on the very next pages! [ACKERMAN, p. 1-4] "Inherent," he boldly pronounces, " in the process of prejudgments is the danger of stereotypical thinking." Lost in his zealous dedication to diagnose his preconceived world of endemic Jew-haters Ackerman somehow misses -- from the very start -- that his own "value judgments" are quintessential prejudgments.

Ackerman conjures up a broad definition of anti-Semitism, wide enough to catch virtually anyone in his "prejudicial" net (including plenty of Jews, as we shall see): "Anti-Semitism is any expression of hostility, verbal or behavioral, mild or violent, against Jews as a group, or against an individual Jew because of his belonging to that group." [ACKERMAN, p. 19] That's the entire definition. This net that even includes "any-mild-verbal-hostility" catches a lot of minnows, and anyone short of a saint. In fact, it catches -- as intended -- everyone. Lest anyone dare to think that they are not themselves fertile grounds for the disease of anti-Semitism, Ackerman notes that "the difference between the 'sick' and the 'healthy' personality is one of degree and quantity rather than one of quality." [ACKERMAN, p. 18]

This professor, in consort with the American Jewish Committee, contacted a number of "accredited" New York city psychiatrists -- some were Jews, some were not. He doesn't provide exact numbers or proportions. Ackerman only says that " a small number of psychiatrists were first approached." [ACKERMAN, p.11] Later he says "the cooperation of psychoanalysts was then enlisted on a large scale," [ACKERMAN, p.15] and he leaves it at that, except to add that some case histories were further solicited from two social-welfare agencies. [ACKERMAN, p.16] Suspiciously, he does not ever note, other than in these vague terms, the number of psychiatrists who participated in his project, let alone how many were Jewish and how many Gentile. Whoever they were, he asked them to submit case histories of patients who exhibited "signs of anti-Semitism" (the psychiatrists were to determine the "signs" as they wished -- "The psychoanalyst was completely at liberty to include any fact that seemed relevant to the patient's anti-Semitism)." [ACKERMAN, p. 11] Ackerman doesn't note if the patients gave consent to use their personal traumas, fears, and pains for this study, or even if they were informed of its existence.

Ackerman then decided that it was "essential" that those under his employ (who interviewed the New York psychiatrists about anti-Semitism) had to be themselves psychoanalyzed. "This," he says, "helped to establish quickly an atmosphere of confidence between the psychoanalyst and research personnel." [ACKERMAN, p.15] It would also, of course, be an invasive and authoritarian way to weed out anyone who might have questions about the direction, or methodology, of his project.

The conclusions reached by Ackerman and his colleagues from the collection of random case histories volunteered to them are self-fulfilling, and sometimes outright bizarre. Whose "prejudices and prejudgments" are we hearing about when Ackerman states that "some of the psychoanalysts said that they had not encountered a single case of anti-Semitism in all their practice, others declared that every patient they had ever treated, whether Gentile or Jew, showed some traces of it"? [ACKERMAN, p. 20] (Ackerman discreetly avoids telling us how Jewish and Gentile psychiatrists line up behind these opposite experiences).

A few highlights from his research conclusions are as follows:

* "Anti-Semitic reactions are found in psycho neurotics in
various types; in character disorders, perhaps more
particularly of the sado-masochistic type."

* "All individuals ... suffer from anxiety.... In most cases
it was of a special nature: it was diffuse, pervasive,
relatively unorganized, and not adequately channeled
through specific symptom-formation."

* "Plagued by a vague apprehension of the world at-large,
these patients seem to derive little, if any, strength from
their own identity."

* "It is extremely difficult for these anti-Semitic personalities
to achieve satisfactory personal relationships."

* "The very existence of the Jews ... is a constant and
painful reminder of the anti-Semites own emotional
deficiencies."

* "The emotional deficiencies of these patients, extending
beyond the sphere of human relations, seem also to have
impaired their capacity to establish a satisfactory
relationship with external objects."

* "At the psychic level, anti-Semitic hostility can be viewed
as a profound though irrational and futile defensive effort
to restore a crippled self."

* "In a pathetic and futile attempt at genuine acceptance
by other human beings, these persons are often driven
into a slavish imitation of habits and ideologies by those
who represent cohesive power in their community." [p.
69]

This is, of course, an entire volume of such material. But one of Ackerman's more summary insights into the generic, stereotypical enemy is this: "The tendency to blame the outside world rather than oneself accompanies all the reactions of the anti-Semite." This rebellious trait against the "outside world" and the refusal to blame oneself for the social, economic and political failings of the world would have to be considered endemic to the world's greatest social thinkers and revolutionaries, humanitarians, artists and intellectuals of all kinds (including Ralph Waldo Emerson who wrote that "Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members ... The base doctrine of the majority of voices usurps the place of the doctrine of the soul." Ironically, conversely, the tendency to "blame the outside world rather than oneself" has also always been a Jewish defense mechanism in denying Jewish responsibility for anti-Semitism.

Among the most extraordinary findings in Ackerman's research was the ethnicity of the "anti-Semites" he and his cohorts discovered. Of the 40 case studies cited in the book, 8 individuals were themselves born Jews, another 3 were "half-Jews," one more was "part Jewish," another was married to a Jew, and yet another was "half-Jewish" and adopted by a Jewish couple. Only one of the non-Jewish anti-Semites, as Ackerman tells us, was "colored." [ACKERMAN, p. 95-129] (Ackerman, of course, decides that the Black woman's dislike of Jews was displaced. Didn't she know that she really hated Whites? "But," says the professor, "to admit hostility against all whites was realistically too dangerous, particularly since she was being advised by a white psychiatrist worker. She, therefore, displaced her hostility to the Jews.")

Does this tell us, as these kinds of researchers would propagandize, that evidence of such great Jewish self-disdain merely evidences that the scourge of anti-Semitism is so prominent in American society that even large numbers of Jews blindly absorb it like mindless sponges? Or might it indicate that being Jewish is not sacrosanct, and that some parts of the Jewish experience -- like any other people on earth -- warrant reasonable criticism? And, further, might it not be psychologically healthy for those troubled with their Jewish identities to give free vent to their complaints and concerns in an open forum towards resolution, rather than stifle and deny some of the uncertainties of Jewish identity in the real world.

The function of Ackerman's study was Orwellian in nature: its intent was to obfuscate real social, political, and economic realities regarding Jews and replace them with the world of Sigmund Freud: implanted illusions of personal inadequacies and mental illnesses. Such a "study" never once even remotely considered that the slightest "hostility" towards a single Jew, or Jews in general, was in any way legitimate. Rather, anyone who dares to question anything whatsoever about Jewry is categorized as a veritable species -- an "anti-Semite," this term itself a quintessential stereotype.

Ackerman even psychoanalyzed (by remote control) professional colleagues who refused to work with him on this study. For those principled psychoanalysts who declined to participate in Ackerman's biased undertaking "for fear [that it] might detract from the more fundamental social and economic causes of anti-Semitism ... [Ackerman decided that] it appeared to us, in a few cases, as rationalizations for the wish not to be concerned with anti-Semitism at too close range, as an attempt to keep away from its horror and to avoid identification with its victims -- in short, it seemed to be an expression of self-preservation." [ACKERMAN, p.20]

The entire construct of this dubious scientific study would not merit the slightest attention 50 years later, except that its theses and conclusions remain the foundation of Jewish public opinion today. In this "study" we find one of the monster embryos for the vast Jewish propaganda machinery against what is generically known today as "anti-Semitism." Ackerman and co-author, noted the volume, "both are convinced that decisive social action should and can be taken to prevent the spread of anti-Semitism ... Indeed, one of the motives for undertaking this study was the concern for its potential pragmatic value." [ACKERMAN, p.2]

There are precedents for such psychoanalytically-based manipulation which stretches to preposterous lengths in a socio-political context. Sigmund Freud himself turned into a naked political hack in using psychoanalysis in a book -- finally published 28 years after his own death -- to defame a U.S. President, Woodrow Wilson. It was, according to Martin Gross, "a classic of historical distortion" that was "greeted with an embarrassed apology from the psychological community." [GROSS, p. 72-73] Even Jewish historian Barbara Tuchman wrote that [Freud and his co-author] "have allowed emotional bias to direct their inquiry, which has led to undisciplined reasoning, wild overstatement, and false conclusions." [GROSS, p. 73]

It must be admitted, however, that widespread Jewish faith in psychoanalysis to explain the world for them, and sometimes impugn historical figures who are long dead, is not discriminatory. In 1993 a Jewish psychoanalyst, Avner Falk, turned his probe for neurosis onto Theodore Herzl, the Jewish Zionist hero. Falk's book, subtitled "a Psychoanalytical Biography," declares, according to one Jewish reviewer, that Herzl was "inwardly dependent on his parents, stunted emotionally, extremely arrogant and supercilious, completely self-obsessed, and [was] ... never really able to sustain close personal relationships." [ADLER, p. 44] Herzl had a miserable personal life. He had three children. Pauline died of drug addiction, Hans converted to Catholicism and later committed suicide, and Trude spent a "lifetime of mental illness." Of these Herzl children, only Trude had a child, Stephan, who also committed suicide. [STEWART, D., Genealogical chart, 1974]

Another Jewish psychoanalyst, Jay Gonen, even takes Freudianism so far as to explain the core of collective Jewish neurosis like this:

"Because of their covenant with God, because of their obedience to Him,
the sons of Israel end up with shorter penises. Having yielded to
circumcision, they will never be endowed with the same phallic prowess
as the Gentiles, and will never have as good and big a penis as their
mighty father. Thus, they have to be careful that Jewish women do not
learn that Gentiles are more satisfying and they have to continue to love
the God-Father whom they also unconsciously hate." [GONEN, p. 14]

Prominent Jewish author Erica Jong underscores in the Jewish psyche a Freudian fear of castration as an important effect of circumcision -- the defining rite of Jewish maleness: "After all, what does the ritual of circumcision say to a Jewish son? 'Watch out. Next time I'll cut off the whole thing.' So Jewish boys are horny, but also full of fear about whether their cocks will survive their horniness." [JONG, E., 1994, p. 60]

And what does the greatest symbol of anti-Semitism -- the Nazi swastika -- mean to a Freudian? Bizarrely enough, copulation! As Frederic Grunfeld describes it:

"Since the swastika is a schematic yet recognizable representation of two
human figures in coitus, it acts as a powerful stimulus in deep layers
of the psyche, according to the [also Jewish] psychoanalyst Wilhelm
Reich --- 'a stimulus that proves to be much more powerful the more
dissatisfied, the more burning with sexual desire, a person is.'" [GRUNFELD,
F., 1996, p. 71]

In 1981, a feminist, Susan Griffin (not Jewish?), wrote a book about pornography. Using a broad arsenal of Freudian frameworks, she linked pornography and anti-Semitism to the same sources of the sick mind, even dragging Holocaust heroine Ann Frank into the recipe. Adolf Hitler is of course the epitome of the Jew-hater. "In his book on the history of anti-Semitism," Griffin tells us,

"Vamberto Morais records Hitler's repeated mention of 'Jews in caftans' and the
'filth' and 'stench' of those caftan-wearers. He tells us 'this becomes all the more ironical when one learns 'that according to companions of Hitler who knew him
when he was a younger man, and an artist, he himself 'wore a long, shabby overcoat very much like a caftan, which had been given him by a Hungarian Jewish dealer in
old clothes.' And from Hitler's fellow artist Ganisch we learn that he 'had a dirty, unkempt aspect.' But of course, we have known all along who 'the Jew' really was.
We have known all along that this 'Jew' was Hitler himself." [GRIFFIN, S., 1981, p. 197-198]

(Where might such a world view for Ms. Griffin have come from, that, on Freudian terms, Adolf Hitler -- the consummate "anti-Semite" -- sought to destroy himself through a scapegoat of innocent Jewry? In her dedication page to her work, Griffin notes that "I discussed the ideas in this book from the beginning with [Jewish feminist] Kim Chernin and we read one another's manuscripts. She led me toward essentially psychological insights ... Tillie Olsen's Silences and Adrienne Rich's Of Woman Born deeply affected my thought as did Hannah Arendt's Origins of Totalitarianism. [All these authors are Jewish] ... Although I take issue with certain of [Jewish author] Susan Sontag's idea on pornography, her work On Photography entered my thinking continually. I feel especially indebted to the scholarship and insights of Lucy Dawidowicz regarding the Holocaust ... ... In addition to reading the manuscript and giving me invaluable support, Lind Levitsky shared with me a collection of racist images which she compiled for a study of racist stereotypes ... My daughter, Becky Levy, shared her school research into images of women on television." [Did Mr. Levy dump her? No mention of him in the credits/dedication.] ) [GRIFFIN, S., 1981, p. vii, viii]


With Adolf Hitler and the Nazis ever seen in the grim horizon, and with the dubious moral position of the state of Israel to prop up, the psychological breakdown of the sick "anti-Semite" has been, for decades now, a booming industry for Jewish psychiatrists and the Jewish community at-large. As always, an anti-Semite is defined extremely loosely for it is believed that anyone with even a seed of disenchantment towards Jews, left unchecked, could turn into an unwieldy monster.

Over the years, the Department of Scientific Research of the American Jewish Committee has in fact funded not only Anti-Semitism and Emotional Disorder, but a series of academic studies and volumes about the subject, including Dynamics of Prejudice, Prophets of Deceit, and the most referenced, The Authoritarian Personality (1950). Such studies had their conceptual origin during World War II. The motivation for them, and their sweeping judgments, must be understood in the context of their root, fear and paranoia. In the 1940's Jewish organizations were extremely apprehensive of the possibility of a spreading Nazism.

The Authoritarian Personality is a thousand page tome stuffed with largely impenetrable statistical evaluations of American sample categories from interviews the authors conducted: college students, psychiatric patients, merchant marine officers, prison inmates, Unitarians, members of the United Electrical Workers Union, the PTA, the Kiwanis Club, and others. The volume elaborates similar premises and findings as Anti-Semitism and Emotional Disorder; criticism of Jews is equated with "the superstitious belief in witchcraft" which was eradicated thanks to "the results of modern science." [p. ix] The authors likewise "hold the belief that anti-Semitism [which they never define] is based more largely upon factors in the subject and his total situation than upon actual characteristics of Jews ... " [p. 3] And, of course, "For theory as to the structure of personality, we have leaned most heavily on Freud..." There are even chapters on the "ethnocentric ideology" of the generic anti-Semite, most peculiar since the Jewish tradition of the Chosen People has, throughout history, refined ethnocentrism as tightly as any people can to perfection. Essentially, notes sociologist John Higham, "the Authoritarian Personality "assigned to anti-Semitism an extraordinary importance by arguing that critical attitudes toward Jews reveal a basic personality type that threatens the survival of democratic society." [HIGHAM, p. 174]

Gordon Allport, a Jewish psychologist and author of the influential The Nature of Prejudice (1954) remarked in 1981 that The Authoritarian Personality "stirred up the social sciences, particularly social psychology, perhaps more than any book published in this century ... There are some 500 studies based on this work ... The very fact that they called the authoritarian person "F," measured by the F-scale which stood for Fascist, reflects the historical times ... everyone was anti-Hitler and everything he stood for, and it was to some extent a cultural product ... " [EVANS, p. 63, 64]

In 1958, based upon the dubious Freudian premises of The Authoritarian Personality, another Jewish academic, Joseph Adelson, published the results of a survey of 242 Jewish American college students. The study examined Jewish acceptance of the reality of negative Jewish social traits or, as Adelson phrased it in political academes of the era, it was "a study of minority group authoritarianism." What Adelson was interested in was to what degree "anti-Semitic" attitudes were reflected in Jews themselves. (This is popularly known as "self-hatred" in the Jewish community and will be discussed a little later). The Jewish college students were asked to response to a variety of sentences. They were given the choice of six numbered responses to each question. A "7" represented complete agreement and a "0" complete disagreement with the statement. Here are the Jewish scores for acceptance of some of the most "anti-Semitic" questions: (the "Mean for Total Group" follows each statement):

"There are many Jews to whom anti-Semitic statements do apply." (4.49)
"I feel personally ashamed when I see Jews making themselves conspicuous." (4.31)
"The Jewish group in this country would get along better if many Jews were not so clannish." (4.12)
"I have often been embarrassed by the anti-social conduct of certain Jews in public life." (4.05)
"Too many Jews try to intrude themselves into circles where they're not wanted. (3.33)
"Most Jews who meet a great deal of anti-Semitism bring it about by their own obnoxious behavior." (3.20)
"A lot of anti-Semitism is caused by the number of Jewish radicals." (3.19)
[ADELSON, J., 1960, p. 481, 484]

In other words, a lot of Jews put some stock in "anti-Semitic" beliefs as part of verifiable reality. So how does Adelson (and his kindred apologists) explain this away? (-- which was the ultimate purpose for this study). By ascribing JEWISH criticism of Jewish behavior -- in psychoanalytic terms -- as identification with a hostile, more powerful, Gentile society. "Prejudice [against the genre of Jew who is criticized by other Jews]," says Adelson,

'is viewed as 'rational'; its cause is the deviant behavior of the 'bad kind of Jew.'
Still further, the definition of the self as a 'good' Jew permits a kind of identification with the aggressor, a sense of affiliation with the Gentile ... Perhaps it is unnecessary
to note that the authoritarian image of the out-group [Jews in Gentile society] incorporates the essential elements of the anti-Semitic stereotype; even the contradictions are retained, as in the attribution of both seclusive and intrusive motives. One important component of Gentile anti-Semitism is omitted; the Jews is never
seen as a sinister or dangerous force. The theme of Jewish power, when it does appear, is greeted not with hostility, but with pride and admiration." [ADELSON, J., 1960, p. 477] (In other words, Jewish "power," a staple of the anti-Semitic charge which is publicly denied always, is secretly celebrated]

In essence, Adelson's study attempts to explain widespread Jewish admission to truths about popular stereotypes about Jews as merely Jewish distancing efforts to gain acceptance to the world of the prejudicial, irrational, "authoritarian" Gentile majority culture.


Along with this, and many AJC-sponsored titles about anti-Semitism, we can find on the library shelves other such titles as Anti-Semitism: A Social Disease, Anti-Judaism: A Psychohistory, and still flowing, in 1990, Anti-Semitism: A Disease of the Mind, and, in 1996, Myth and Madness. The Psychodynamics of Anti-Semitism (i.e., the "anti-Semite's" myths are expressed by "madness"). At one major Midwestern state university library a computer subject search of "anti-Semitism" coughed up 719 titles. By comparison, the generic word "flowers" only had 632 listings and "anatomy" 1110. The word "Polish" (including anything whatsoever about Polish people anywhere, as well as the word's other potential meanings, including car wax) had 1361. Even the generic word "racism" (any kind, anywhere, at any time in history, of everyone else on earth) had 802 listings, only about 80 more than those texts that focused solely on injustices to Jews, a minuscule part of the world's population. In our American society that has, even by many scholarly Jewish accounts, anti-Semitism "under control," The Index of Jewish Periodicals listed 196 new articles on the subject in 1996 alone.

While a pair of Jewish psychiatrists write that "the higher the income of the father, the greater the proportion of anti-Semite," (Else Frenkel-Brunswik and R. Nevitt Sanford, p. 103] in the same book a colleague writes that anti-Semitism is found "in those places where ... the pariahs of society meet. By this I refer to the cheap locales where chronic alcoholics, addicts, and psychopathic criminals gather. These are the psychological slums ... [that are used] as strategic positions in which to spread anti-Semitism.; they need mental sanitation..." [SIMMEL, p. 75]


"At some point in the course of analytic treatment," says Rudolf Loewenstein, "almost all non-Jewish patients will manifest varying degrees of anti-Semitism." [PERLMUTTER, p. 64] Moshe Leshem, joins in to note that "Freud attributed Christian resentment of the Jews to the son-father tension in the superego." Maurice Samuel out-Freuds Freud in suggesting that anti-Semitism is an outlet for the yearning of Christians to free themselves from the inhibitive yoke of Jewish morality inherited in their faith and to open wide the gates to the pagan, orgiastic "id." [LESHEM, p. 62-63]

Freud himself said, about his own invention: "Nor is it perhaps entirely a matter of chance that the first advocate of psychoanalysis was a Jew." [THE JEWISH MYSTIQUE, p. 55] "Freud believed," says Richard Bank, "in the inheritance of acquired characteristics and that in some unknown fashion, his Jewishness became part of his phylogenetic heritage. Thus, Freud identifies certain Jewish traits in himself and his adherents which provided a predisposition towards psychoanalysis." [BANK, p. 21]

Some studies have even suggested that Jews are "prone" to "have fast and frequent mood swings ... alternative periods of elation and depression ... manic depressive psychosis, neurotic symptoms, and somatic complaints (nervousness, feeling uneasy, shortness of breath)." [MACDONALD, p. 211] In the 1970s a University of California study of 421 therapists "revealed that they feel irrepressibly superior [to others] ... [yet] one concern among professionals, whispered within the establishment, is that [the psychoanalytic/psychiatric field] attracts people who are particularly anxious about their emotional stability ... Psychiatrists appear at the top of the [occupational] list [of suicides]." [GROSS, p. 45]

Even one of Freud's earliest disciples, Isidor Sadger, once ventured that "the disposition of the Jews to obsessive neurosis is perhaps connected with the addiction to brooding ... characteristic of them for thousands of years." [GAY, p. 135] Molly Katz jokes that

"Natural-born Jews leave the womb with a worry reservoir that is
filled early and replenished constantly. We worry about everything.
Worrying is as essential to our well-being as a balanced breakfast.
It is our duty, our birthright, and our most profound satisfaction.
There are no exceptions to this rule. All Jews worry all the time. If
there is nothing handy to worry about, we are breath-stoppingly
creative at finding something." [KATZ, M., 1991, p. 47]

James Yaffe blames Jewish neurosis largely on the Jewish family: "Psychoanalysts ... see a great many Jewish neurotics. The conditions of family life, both its virtues and its weaknesses, go a long way toward accounting for this." [YAFFE, J., 1968, p. 294] In an article on Jewish family life, Fredda Herz and Elliot Rosen also observed that "hypochondriasis is a common Jewish syndrome." [HERZ/ROSEN, p. 367] Rudolph Loewenstein also makes note that it "occurs frequently in Jews." [LOEWENSTEIN, R., p. 131-132] Other "possible" common "neurotic" Jewish traits he also cites are extremes of miserliness and ostentation -- "[Some Jews] are spendthrift to the point of extravagance, driven in their spending by a compulsion to efface their sense of inferiority, an exaggerated terror of anti-Semitism," and a "feeling of terror at being Jewish." [LOEWENSTEIN, R., p. 132-133]

Indeed, more often evident than the proposed mental unbalance of the generic anti-Semite Everyman in the many volumes about the generic mental illness of anti-Semitism are hints of their Jewish authors' own peculiar neuroses:

"The anti-Semite is often both envious and suspicious
of Jewish talking." -- Theodore Rubin, p. 75

"Reference is often made to the opinion once expressed
by Freud that anti-Semitism is connected with the Jewish
custom of circumcision ... Even today, we find deep in the
unconscious of man the fear that his penis may be cut off
if he sins ... " -- Otto Fenischel, p. 27

"We have come to know that in certain cases the basic
complex at the bottom of the individual obsessional
idea of the anti-Semite is the latent homosexual complex,
that complex which produces hate as a defense against
the dangers of homosexual love ... "
-- Ernest Simmel, p. 35

"In the mind of [some anti-Semitic] patients ... the Jewish analyst
is conceived as alternately as a Mephistophelean personage
or as an effeminate, emasculated man. The fact that
Jews are circumcised and so in a sense mutilated stirs
up in them superstitious horror, thereby revealing their
unconscious fear of being mutilated or castrated as a
punishment for forbidden desires. In some patients the
analyst can observe at first hand the sadistic satisfaction
derived consciously or unconsciously from the idea of
Jews being tortured and massacred. Neurotics who
suffer from an intense sense of guilt and who live in
anticipation of punishment protect themselves by projecting
their faults onto the Jewish analyst or onto Jews in general."
-- Rudolf Loewenstein, 1951, p. 34]

"The anti-Semite sees in the Jew everything which brings
him misery -- not only his social oppressor but also his
own unconscious instincts which have gained a bloody,
dirty, dreadful character from their socially induced
repression." -- Otto Fenichel, p. 29

"The anti-Semites most buried and unconscious secret
-- from himself and others -- is to be a Jew ... He believes
that to be a Jew is to be able to transcend everything
material, religious, and racial; to be a Jew is to be free;
to be a Jew is to be the ultimate individual ... "
-- Theodore Rubin p. 79

(This bizarrely narcissistic conviction is not unusual
in Jewish psychoanalytic circles. Another therapist,
Herbert Strean, suggests that this secret desire to be a Jew
is "an envy which lies buried deep behind all
anti-Semitic attacks." [COOPER, p. 14]

"Norman Cohn ... stresses the role of the Jews as
the castrating father in the paranoid fantasies of the
anti-Semite. There is merit to Cohn's hypothesis...
For a balanced evaluation of the attempt to understand
anti-Semitism primarily in terms of castration anxiety,
see Erickson, Childhood and Society."
-- Richard L. Rubenstein, p. 313

"The historical facts are that the anti-Jew trying to free
himself from the pangs of anxiety, turns the tree of life
into the tree of death, the cross, nailed his Christ onto it,
and transformed his anxiety to this product of his perverse
sado-masochistic imagination."
-- Ernest Rappaport, p. 282

"It is a strange thing that the Jews have always been
attacked -- even before the rise of Christianity. The
attacks have been so stereotyped, they have always
followed the same pattern so closely that one is tempted
to say that though the Jews, who have changed much
in the course of history, are certainly no race, the anti-
Semite in a way ARE a race, because they always use
the same slogans, displaying the same attitudes, indeed
almost look alike." -- Max Horkheimer, [in Simmel,
p. 6]

Here Horkheimer declares the most preposterous of stereotypes, that "anti-Semites" across history, language, and culture are "in a way" racially linked. John Murray Cuddihy is on the right track when he raises up the obvious mirror to all the Jewish "analysts" who entirely obfuscate Jewish history, identity, religion, and deeds in their bizarre inventions of the roots of anti-Semitism: "The ideology of the Jewish intellectual is frequently a projection onto the general Gentile culture of a forbidden ethnic self-criticism. Shame for 'one's own kind' is universalized into anger at the ancestral enemy." [CUDDIHY, p. 5]

In 1951, Milton Steinbeg put Jewish "shame for one's own kind" (very common in the Jewish community and called "self-hatred" -- to be discussed a little later in this chapter) like this:

"[A Jew's] association with the Jewish group is likely to touch him more
intimately, at the very core of his being. For, as a Jew he is subject to certain
psychic influences, of which he may be unaware but which may affect his
personality adversely nonetheless. Thus, he tends to regard himself as not
altogether wanted by the majority society of which he wishes to be a part,
the approval and acceptance of which he desires earnestly. Again, he is inclined
to feel that his Jewishness exposes him to a special set of insecurities beyond
those which are the lot of all men of his station ... The anti-Semite when he talks
about Jews rarely addresses himself to them, but Jews overhear and may quite
readily be convinced that the criticisms are quite justified by the facts, and applicable, not to them, of course, but to their fellows. The upshot of all this is that many an American Jew is in mortal peril of losing his sense of worth, his self-respect, his
dignity in his own eyes. He may feel secretly ashamed of his Jewishness ... He may
be haunted by the misgiving that, by the very virtue of the fact that he is Jewish,
he is somehow a human being inferior to the Gentile." [STEINBERG, M., 1951, p.
87-88]


There are, of course, other angles on the "all non-Jews are automatically anti-Semites" theme. Reflecting millennia-old Jewish hostility, special targets for odium are those who define themselves, or were raised, as Christians. There are no protective multi-million dollar Christian lobbying organizations and no generic word, like "anti-Semitism," to brand Jewish hatred of, and prejudice against, Christianity into a defensive slogan that can be thrown in the face of critics. So Jews have a completely open field.

Some Jews go so far as to believe that, according to David Novak, "hatred and murder of Jews is something particularly Christian. Those that assert this position claim that the Nazi program for the extermination of the Jews is the direct historical consequence of Christian contempt for Jews. They thus hold that all Christians -- whether actual perpetrators of atrocities against Jews or not -- are considered to be eo ipso incorrigible anti-Semites. Dialogue with such incorrigible enemies can hardly be regarded as anything other than group masochism." [NOVAK, DIA. p. 5]

There are many innovative angles reflecting Jewry's contempt for Christianity. Maurice Samuel, for instance, decided that "the basic factor in intense anti-Semitism is hatred of Christianity -- a hatred that cannot be openly acknowledged and is therefore projected onto Jews. When this factor enters, according to Samuel, an essentially unique phenomenon, not just another prejudice, is created." [SIMPSON/YINGER, p. 330]

In the emphatic context of the Holocaust, Christians and Christianity itself are bitterly condemned today by many Jewish thinkers. Those Christians in good stead are considered to be only those who revise traditional Christian texts towards support of Jewish "particularism" and its modern political expression: Zionism. Any "Christian dialogue with Jews," demands Emil Fackenheim, is predicated upon "the 'destructive recovery' of the whole Christian tradition." [p. 282] Among Christian obligations to Jews, he declares that "Christians after the Holocaust ... must be Zionist on behalf not only of Jews but also of Christianity itself." [p. 303]

Mark Gelber echoes this common Jewish blanket condemnation of Christianity in the Jewish Journal of Social Studies: "The widespread acceptance of anti-Semitic legislation and the nearly ubiquitous complicity of Gentile populations in the attempted Nazi destruction of the Jewish people is totally incomprehensible without the extensive background of the centuries-old phenomena of Christian anti-Semitism." [GELBER, p. 4]

There are a number of Christian activists for Jewish/Zionist causes who have subsequently absorbed a guilt-laden notion about the Holocaust, accepting the presumption that Christianity and an innate anti-Semitism within it were a major part of the Holocaust's cause. Among the most important to this movement of Christian Zionism were two authors of German heritage, Paul Tillich and Reinhold Niebuhr, whose apparent shame of their German link was reconfigured along Christian lines. An ideological descendent, Robert Everett, a pastor in the United Church of Christ, goes so far as to say

"I see the Christian response to Israel and her survival as a sign of
whether or not Christians care about Jews. The forces of Ultimate
Evil seem again ready to strike against Jews ... Only those voices
that speak of solidarity with Israel and her right to exist are able to
call themselves servants of Life." [p. 11]

There are a number of books that have appeared over the years that argue Christian culpability in the Holocaust. Christian Zionist writers have sometimes served as honorary Jews to more diplomatically deliver the hatchet blows of condemnation to other Christians. "As a Methodist minister," says Richard Libowitz, "[Franklin Littell] maintains a credibility of Christian witness which make his charges far more difficult for Christian audiences to refute." [LIBOWTIZ, p. 73]

Franklin Littell, founder and chairman of the Zionist-oriented Christians Concerned for Israel, focuses on indicting themes in his book, The Crucifixion of the Jews. His central thesis is that Nazi fascism was the natural expression of Christianity which, he argues, has always been "contemptuous or demeaning" of Jews. He argues this despite the fact that German Nazism was expressly anti-Christian and murdered masses of clergy in its extermination programs. (In Poland alone the Nazis murdered 1,932 priests, including six bishops, 850 monks, as well as 289 nuns. [BART, Convert, p. 150] Littell then goes for maximum slander against the rival faith by claiming that "Christendom ... led directly to genocide." [p. 1] If that's not contemptuous and demeaning enough of Christians, he stuffs his whole volume full of this venomous, libelous hysteria, including "Before the Holocaust, the spirit of murder ... was well advanced in Christian circles." [LITTELL, p. 49] and "Adolf Hitler ... and the death camps ... were legitimate offspring of a 'Christian civilization ... [which] was formless and heathen at heart." Littlell's questionable conclusions were published by a major publisher, Harper and Row in 1975, and his "research" was funded by a faculty research grant at Temple University and the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture.

Another non-Jewish writer, Alan Davies, in Anti-Semitism and the Christian Mind: The Crisis of Conscience, demands "that every Christian owes to every Jew [an apology] for the part which historic Christendom has played in the shaping of modern anti-Semitism." Others of this ilk include a Jewish convert to Christianity, John Oesterreicher, Director of the Institute for Judeo-Christian Studies at Seton Hall University. As Alfred Lilenthal noted in 1983:

"Oesterreicher makes support for Israel 'a test for every Christian,'
advocates arms aid for the Zionist state; rejects as 'absolutely ridiculous'
the proposition that Palestinian self-determinism is essential to
peace; and has publicly rhapsodized that 'we must shout from the
housetops that this state [Israel] has a right to live.'" [LILIENTHAL, A.,
1983, p. 494]

The continuous trashing of Christianity for crimes against Jews is a veritable cottage industry these days. Rosemary Ruether, described as a "female theologian,” worked with the Jewish lobbying group, the Anti-Defamation League, and one of its rabbis on her book Faith and Fratricide. Reuther is so Judeo-centric (as a guilt-ridden Christian) in her appraisal of Christianity that she claims that her faith would virtually collapse without its alleged basis of anti-Semitism: "Possibly anti-Judaism is too deeply embedded in the foundations of Christianity to be rooted out entirely without destroying the whole structure." [RUETHER, p. 27] (Curiously, this is a counter-echo to the notion [often raised in scholarly circles] that modern Jewish self-identity needs the threat of omnipresent anti-Semitism to ensure its very survival against assimilation).

Widely heralded by the Jewish community as a splendid blow against Christian anti-Semitism, ironically, Faith and Fratricide didn't protect Reuther's later writings from the charge of anti-Semitism. Reuther was publicly word-whipped by a fellow feminist (Jewish of course) for making the sinful inference that the undeniably wrathful, dictatorial, and patriarchal Jewish Old Testament God was considerably more harmful to women than the Christian's Jesus, patient champion of the dispossessed and downtrodden. [PLASKOW, p. 102] The publishing of the fact that the ancient male-centered Israelites exterminated people (including the Canaanites) whose religion included the worship of goddesses is also not appreciated. Reuther's (and others') allusion to the ideology of male domination enforced by the Jewish God was deemed by many Jews to be "anti-Jewish." One guilt-ridden feminist of German-Christian heritage noted that [the criticism of Reuther] made clear to me once more how very necessary constant external [i.e., Jewish] correction is to us and how wrong it is to think we can finally rest at the present level of awareness.") [WACKER, p. 113]

Not only was Reuther harangued for attacking Jewish male-centeredness, she reversed field since Faith and Fratricide and dared to attack in another book -- with her husband -- the holiest of Jewish holies, Israel. Denounced as a "liberal," she came under attack from the aforementioned Christian Zionist, Franklin Littell, for her book, The Wrath of Jonah, which Littell calls "one of the most viciously partisan tracts to appear in the 'Palestinian' cause in the English language." [LITTLE, Judaism, p. 518]

Reuther's fall from Jewish grace is sharp. Her book about Israel, wrote David Biale, "is an anti-Zionist diatribe cloaked in the sweet light of Christian universalism; as such it stands as a singular warning of how a Christian critique can slide unwittingly into the swamp of anti-Semitism. [BIALE, p. 406] ... [The Reuthers'] wild and unsubstantiated conspiracy theories, which inflate Zionist power beyond recognition, smell suspiciously like the older myths of a world Jewish conspiracy." [BIALE, p. 409] Reuther, it seems, successfully confirmed the Jewish myth that all non-Jews -- no matter what they say or do to defend Jews -- are, inevitably at root, sooner or later, revealed to be vile anti-Semites.

Traditional Jewish martyrological canon insists that the most hated anti-Semites by Jews must be generic Christians because of their reputed persecution through the ages and the fact that the Holocaust happened in Christian Europe. "The crime against the Jewish people," declares Rabbi Eliezer Berkovitz, "is the cancer at the very heart of Christianity... [HALBERSTAM, p. 232] ... In order to pacify the Christian conscience it is said that the Nazis were not Christians. But they were all the children of Christians ... [p. 226] ... Without Christianity's New Testament, Hitler's Mein Kampf could never have been written." [HALBERSTAM, p. 238] "Let's not shy away from the hard truth," says Joshua Halberstam, "For many Jews, the unspoken lesson of the Shoah is that they cannot trust Christians with their children. Tens of thousands of Christians with crosses around their necks sent millions of innocent Jews and millions of other innocent men, women, and children to their horrid deaths while many of their fellow Christians cheered." [HALBERSTAM, p. 226]

Stanislaw Krajenski, a Polish citizen and a Jew, writing from a land of firsthand experience, has argued that the common "Christian anti-Semitism is central to the Holocaust" theme is ridiculous. Krajewski writes that

"[Polish Christians] perceived their bond of common suffering [during
the Holocaust] with Jews to be stronger than the bond of common
Christianity with Germans. This is one reason why arguments to the
effect that in Auschwitz Christians were murdering Jews sounds very
strange in Poland, and to me as well. There are also other more
objective reasons. For one thing, Christians were killed in Auschwitz
too, and moreover there were anti-Semites among the victims. For
another, Nazis attempted to revive paganism, not to express
Christianity. Priests imprisoned in Auschwitz were treated with extra
cruelty. Finally, as Jews were killed because they were Jews,
homosexuals were persecuted and imprisoned because they were
homosexuals. Yet to say that homosexuals were victims of
heterosexuals in Auschwitz seems most inappropriate. The
moral is that looking for the answer to the question who was killing
whom in Auschwitz, we should take facts at face value. Nazis were
the perpetrators and it was of supreme importance for them that they
were Germans. That is why Germans have to share the responsibility.
Not Christians: most of the Nazis at least neglected their nominal
Christianity." [KRAJEWSKI, p. 40]

"To put excessive emphasis upon anti-Judaic strictures of Christianity," says Oliver Cox, "is to obscure the critical tribal form and meaning of Judaism ... Judaism has remained essentially a tribal religion..." [COX p. 185] In other words, Christian chauvinism has always been a reaction to the seminal Jewish version of the same thing. And if one is to make the leap that blames the tenets of Christianity for the Holocaust, then one might better leap to a more evidential source for championing genocide, that explicitly evidenced in the Jewish Old Testament [See Holocaust chapter].

One of the pillars of Jewish belief that Christianity has served as a foundation for modern anti-Semitism is the "blood libel" tradition: in the Middle Ages a widespread belief circulated amongst Christians that Jews needed Christian blood -- particularly from children -- for their rituals. In 1993 an Israeli scholar, Yisrael Yuval, published an article in the Israel Historical Society's journal that undermined Jewish interpretive convention about the blood libel tradition. Among other things, Yuval suggested that medieval Christian notions that Jews killed Christian children for their blood might have origins, however misconstrued, in authentic Jewish practice. Jews in Europe had been known to commit suicide en masse, with parents killing their children "as an act of piety," when under forcible threat to convert to Christianity in the Middle Ages. Yuval also wondered if Jewish circumcision rites could have been mistakenly perceived and distorted by Christian observers as a quest for blood.

Yuval doesn't mention this, but would not, to medieval peasant eyes, the sight of a Jewish mohel (circumcision specialist) cutting an infant's penis, and then sucking its blood at the wound, as part of the traditional circumcision ritual, be a strong factual basis for sensational rumors? And how might the ancient Sephardic Jewish "folk practice" of eating parts of ancient human bodies be construed by local peasants in understanding Jewish tradition? As Raphael Patai noted in 1971:

"One of the most popular remedies among the Sephardi Jews was the
mumia (i.e., mummy). This consisted of a piece of mummified human
body which was pulverized and taken internally (often with honey-
water, as a cure against all kinds of complaints. Its origin goes back
to antiquity ... By the twelfth century, in response to growing demand,
the Jews of Alexandria had developed a lively mummy trade. Among
the Sephardi Jews mumia continued to be taken internally down to the
present time, even among the Sephardim living in Seattle, Washington."
[PATAI, R., 1971, p. 149] [Patai says that this medicinal practice became
"popular" in the non-Jewish European community in the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries. One would imagine that to be inevitable,
especially given the fact that Jews have been so numerous as
physicians throughout the centuries: "The Jews as physicians have
always played an important part in the life of the human race ... In
Spain and Italy their only competitors were the Moors."] [OSBORNE,
S., 1939, p. 22]

"The suggestion [by Yuval] that the Jews themselves," remarks David Biale, "might have been responsible, even if indirectly, for the blood libel fell like a clap of thunder on the Israeli academic community ... Yuval's opponents accused him of anti-Semitism and attempted to block his university promotion ... These intellectuals could not accept Yuval's implicit assumption that Jewish practice might have some influence, no matter how indirectly, on the formations of anti-Semitism. According to this view, anti-Semitism is a set of irrational paranoid fantasies that is utterly disconnected from the Jews." [BIALE, p. 39-40, 45]

So numerous are the Jewish academic ideologues who research and reiterate real and imagined victimization of Jews at the hands of non-Jews through history that Norman Davies, a British scholar with expertise about Poland, has sardonically labeled them not to be professors of history, but professors of anti-Semitism. [DAVIES, N.]

Jews who spend entire careers, entire lives, dreaming up new angles of anti-Semitism have broken it down into a multitude of possibilities. There is "religious anti-Semitism, Christian anti-Semitism, anti-Christian anti-Semitism, pagan anti-Semitism, economic anti-Semitism, social anti-Semitism, racial anti-Semitism, black anti-Semitism, pathological anti-Semitism, eternal anti-Semitism, political anti-Semitism, Jewish anti-Semitism, and literary anti-Semitism, to name some of the most common types." [GELBER, p. 13] Rudolf Loewenstein includes three of the above in his own demarcations, adding "xenophobic anti-Semitism." [LOEWENSTEIN, R., 1951, p. 64] Sylvia Rothchild says that "zoological anti-Semitism" is the "irrational behavior of the [Russian] government." [ROTHCHILD, 1985, p. 20] Leon Poliakov "characterizes the anti-Semitism of late antiquity as social or political; the anti-Semitism of the Middle Ages as theological; and the anti-Semitism of the modern world as racial. The dominance of one form does not mean that the others are not present, but only that they serve a subsidiary function to the dominant expression." [STROM/PARSONS, 1982, p. 46]


Letty Pogrebin, a founding editor at Ms magazine, defines anti-Semitism in the women's movement into three types: "invisible" anti-Semitism, "insult" anti-Semitism, and "internalized oppression" anti-Semitism. The "invisible" genre is when non-Jews resist the Jewish propensity to incessantly rail about the Holocaust, as well as Gentile reluctance to accept "Jewish paranoia" and "Jewish self-centeredness." "Insult" anti-Semitism is the demeaning of Jews in commentary, often disguised. "Internalized oppression" anti-Semitism is Jewish self-hatred [KESTENBAUM, p. 30] (i.e., when Jews realize that non-Jewish criticisms about Jews have truth to them). "Every culture," Daniel Pipes informs us, "has its own brand of anti-Semitism." [GRENIER, R., 11-13-85, p. C21]

Ernest Volkman's own categorization of the "three major types of anti-Semitism" are "realistic anti-Semitism," "Xenophobic anti-Semitism," and "Chimerical anti-Semitism." [VOLKMAN, p. 53-54] At the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, there is a department called the Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Anti-Semitism which publishes studies on "anti-Semitism, ancient or modern, from a broad range of perspectives: historical, religious, political, cultural, social, psychological, and economic." [MODRAS, TITLE PAGE]


A sure sign of anti-Semitism in Madison, Wisconsin, noted Evelyn Tornton Beck, was that "I heard someone say that Jews were 'taking over' the local chapter of the national lesbian feminist organization in Madison." [KESTENBAUM, p. 30] "I believe that Jewish lesbian feminists have internalized much of the subtle anti-Semitism of this society," declared Irene Klepfisz, "They have been old that Jews are too pushy, too aggressive; and so they have been silent about their Jewishness, have not protested against what threatens them." [KLEPFISZ, I., 1982, p. 46] Recent anti-Semitism in the Australian lesbian movement? There was a 1999 article written to keep us informed of the subject by Hinde Burstin. [BURSTIN, 1999]

At every turn Jews find offense and insult. For instance, notes Kayla Weiner, "For many Jews, to be wished 'Merry Christmas' is to deny their personal reality and uniqueness." [WEINER, p. 121] And, "any lack of sympathy for Israel and its survival on the part of Christians," says Peter Medding, " is, for many Jews, indistinguishable from anti-Semitic prejudice." [MEDDING, p. 110]


It is unfathomable for such Jews that Gentiles are largely disinterested in undying Jewish crusades of self-pity and victimization as central themes in their own (non-Jewish) lives. For Ruth Wisse, Gentile silence is not just silence, it "may be [because non-Jews are] reluctant to confront the subject of Jew-hatred because they are worried about stirring up latent anti-Semitism in themselves or others." [WISSE, p. 48]

Complaining about the lack of sufficient homage by Gentile writers to "Jewish suffering," Guy Stern's obsession with Jewishness is probably the most audacious in blatantly encompassing the passively innocent as anti-Semites. It is what Stern calls "the anti-Semitism of silence. It is difficult to define ... Silent literary anti-Semitism is ... definitely an omission of a declaration of sympathy for Jewish suffering." [STERN, p. 304] In this genre of accusers who essentially demand everyone to be activists for Jewish causes (and those who do not are anti-Semites), is Ernest Volkman, who labels this the "anti-Semitism of indifference." In this view, there are those non-Jews who do not "attack Jews directly, but ...[they] assume that Jews do not even exist, that their concerns and survival are not even relevant questions." [VOLKMAN, p. 12] Even when Jews aren't even around to be anti-Semitic towards, the fact that they aren't present may, of course, be evidence of anti-Semitism. Indeed, the lack of Jews everywhere, always, for some, may evidence latent anti-Semitism. Jewish Exponent reporter Michael Elkin, for example, was concerned that there were no Jews in the first "Survivor" TV episode. Was this because Jews don't have enough of a macho reputation? "So 'Survivor' may be stereotyping Jews by having none?" he reasoned. [ELKIN, M., 7-13-00] (In a later Survivor episode, a Jewish man won the contest).

Jewish lesbian Irene Klepfisz also declares that "the anti-Semitism with which I am immediately concerned, and which I find most threatening, does not take the form of the overt, undeniably inexcusable painted swastika on a Jewish gravestone or on a synagogue wall. Instead, it is elusive and difficult to pinpoint, for it is the anti-Semitism either of omission or one which trivializes the Jewish experience and Jewish oppression." [KLEPFISZ, I., 1982, p. 46] "The accusation of anti-Semitism against the [political ] Left," adds Arthur Liebman, "has not been limited solely to its critical or anti-Zionist position on Israel. Jewish liberals and Leftists have charged the Left with being anti-Semitic stemming from insensitivity to Jews and their problems, particularly anti-Semitism." [LIEBMAN, A., 1986, p. 353]

On the other hand, Alvin Rosenfeld turns with outrage to Gentile writers who dare to pay sympathetic attention to Jews and the Holocaust in an unacceptable manner, i.e., using poetic license to appropriate Holocaust imagery and Jewish victimhood to address (non-Jewish) personal suffering in their poems. Rosenfeld attacks the poet Sylvia Plath (ultimately a suicide) for this crime. He quotes this excerpt from one of her poems:

An engine, an engine
Chuffing me off like a Jew.
A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen.
I begin to talk like a Jew.
I think I may well be a Jew.

The snows of the Tyrol, the clear beer of Vienna
Are not very pure or true.
With my gypsy ancestress and my weird luck
And my Tarok pack and my Tarok pack
I may be a bit of a Jew.

This literary evidence moves Rosenfeld to proclaim that Plath's lament of personal suffering, is at "its deepest level a poem about ... 'what-I-do-to-you, you-Jew." [ROSENFELD, p. 180]

In the silent -- and, hence, unsympathetic and, hence, anti-Semitic -- vein, George Steiner expresses outrage that T. S. Eliot's Notes Towards a Definition of Culture failed "to face the issue [of the Holocaust and Nazi anti-Semitism], indeed to allude to it in anything but an oddly condescending footnote ... It is acutely disturbing. How, only three years after the event ... was it possible to write a book on culture and say nothing?" [STERN, p. 304] Probably, one suspects, in the same way Eliot neglected to mention Hiroshima, the Japanese "rape of Nanking," the sack of Rome, the Irish Potato Famine, or non-Jewish concentration camp victims in the same volume. Not only that. As Peter Novick notes in his critical book The Holocaust in American Life, about how the Holocaust has evolved into a strong social and political tool (and obsession) for the Jewish community,

"Between the end of the war and the 1960s, as anyone who has lived through
those years can testify, the Holocaust made scarcely any appearance in
American public discourse, and hardly more in Jewish public discourse --
especially directed to gentiles ... The memories and autobiographies of many
highly committed Jews bear out the contemporary evidence that suggests the
Holocaust wasn't much talked about [until the late 1960s]. Alan Dershowitz,
growing up in an intensely Jewish neighborhood in Brooklyn in the forties and
the fifties, recalls no discussion of the Holocaust either with his schoolmates or
at home." [NOVICK, P., 1999, p. 102-103]


This demand by Jewish critics for gentiles to pay requisite homage to Jewish victimhood mythologies (the neglect of which, to such complainers, is a symptom itself of anti-Semitism) is reflected also in Norma Rosen's disdain for Eliot's essay, The Idea of Christian Culture. "Though this book," says Rosen, "... no where slanders Jews, it nowhere mentions them, either as contributors to, or victims of, ... modern society." [ROSEN, p. 10] Would Rosen argue that books and essays about "The Idea of Jewish Culture" would be similarly lacking without references to Christian accomplishment and Jewish anti-Christian sentiment?

"There is no consensus," adds Anthony Julius, "on the number of references to Jews in Eliot's work. Sometimes in the absence of any reference to Jews in an essay, or the refusal to acknowledge the anti-Semitism of a favored writer, [this] may be anti-Semitic." [JULIUS, p. 6]

Jewish outrage for the lack of non-Jewish support towards Jewish self-absorption and their obsession with victimhood is manifest in other ways. During Israel's 1973 Yom Kippur War against the Arabs, Adolphe Steg, a "leader of French Jewry," complained that French Jews' "anxiety" over Israel's battles "found only a faint echo in their [French] environment, and the silence of their [non-Jewish] colleagues during those terrible days was painful. Not only did their colleagues remain silent, but when appealed to they could not help sharing irritation with the problems of the Jews, which they defined as an obsession ... By uncovering the extent of the lack of comprehension shown by these circles to [the Jews'] deepest concerns, the Yom Kippur War may have slowed the rush towards [Jewish] assimilation in France." [HERMAN, p. 41-42]

Steg is clearly stating, hardly veiled, that a lack of French sympathy to transnational Jewish war aims was grounds for withdrawing French Jewry's full commitment to their own (French) country, which accentuates the recurring cycle of accusation: Jews in the Diaspora are accused of holding dual national loyalties -- one for Israel (possibly the foremost loyalty), and another for the Diaspora nation. Jews, in turn, as always, accuse their accusers of anti-Semitism.

Under such a world view, based on the infectious and omnipresent nature of anti-Semitism, Jews must be wary, to this day, of non-Jews everywhere. Covering all flanks in the political sphere, Abe Perlmutter warns that it's not only the right wing gentiles who are anti-Semitic: "Accustomed to the rumblings of anti-Semitism from the far right, (our social scientists) are alert in one direction ... Violence from the right, it would seem, is extremism. From the left it is social protest. To Jews, scapegoated by both, the difference is without distinction." [PERLMUTTER, p. 101] "Take, for example, "says Arthur Liebman, "the following which appeared in the U.S. Communist party's Daily World on June 5, 1979: 'Has nationalism wrapped in money turned all the 'leaders' of the Jewish people into stone?' This type of language, the Left's critics contend, either is anti-Semitic itself and/or contributes to anti-Semitism through reinforcement of traditional anti-Semitic stereotypes." [LIEBMAN, A., 1986, p. 350]

Michael Lerner, editor of the left-wing Jewish journal Tikkun, confirms this fear of leftist non-Jews in his book, The Socialism of Fools: Anti-Semitism on the Left, which was advertised in his own publication with a drawing that connotes crowds entering the gas chambers of the Holocaust. The "Socialism of Fools" phrase is credited to August Bebel as a description of anti-Semitism in the leftist community. It refers to traditional socialist animosity towards prominent Jewish European bankers, capitalists, and war profiteers -- major symbols of class oppression since the development of Marxist theory in the nineteenth century. Many socialists were also hostile to transnational Jewish "nationalism" and its attendant chauvinism. Even "Bebel, the socialist leader who stood in the vanguard of the fight against anti-Semitism in Wilhelmian Germany, called Jewish socialists brilliant but pushy, difficult to subject to party discipline." [MOSSE, G., 1985, p. 67] "Long barred by anti-Semitic laws and customs from agriculture, guild occupations, and the professions," says apologetic Jewish scholar Arthur Liebman, "in the nineteenth century Jews were largely to be found in middlemen occupations: merchants, hucksters, estate managers, loan and mortage collectors, and money lenders. These were popularly considered (and by segments of the Jewish community like the labor Zionists as well), to be non-productive or 'parasitic' occupations ... Many late nineteenth- and twentieth century Leftists obviously shared this economically rooted hatred of Jews as well as the long-engrained religious prejudice against them." [LIEBMAN, A., 1986, p. 331]

Illustrating the all-encompassing latitude of the charge of "anti-Semitism," a term that is applied by Jews -- as the need for it suits them -- in any direction, an influential Russian Jewish Zionist and socialist of the early twentieth century, Ber Borochov, even proclaimed that "we must strike at the anti-Semitism of the Jewish capitalist." [BOROCHOV, p. 82]

And what of this specifically Jewish socialist tradition, of which there was so much, with its origins in Eastern Europe? Says Israel Shahak,

"[Many] East-European Jewish socialists ... were themselves tainted with
a ferocious anti-peasant attitude inherited from classical Judaism ...
A typical example is their opposition to the formation of peasant
cooperatives promoted by the Catholic clergy, on the grounds that
this was an act of anti-Semitism." [SHAHAK]

Jewish obsession with anti-Semitism in all directions has even afforded them their own share of draconian book burners. E. L. Dachslager argues for a ban of all books in American public schools that "defame, vilify, or otherwise promote a negative image of Jews." [GELBER, p. 8] A lot of book shelves for classical Western literature would have to go empty. "Anti-Semitic" works cited here to be banned or censored could include books by William Shakespeare, Geoffrey Chaucer, Christopher Marlowe, Charles Dickens, Frank Norris, Theodore Dreiser, Ernest Hemingway (especially The Sun Also Rises), Celine, Henry Adams, Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, E.E. Cummings, Henry Miller, Byron Scott, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Henry James, Dostoyevsky, Trollope, Thomas Wolfe, and Ezra Pound. [GELBER, p. 8, 12] "I cannot resist the opportunity," wrote Jewish author Richard Lewontin in the New York Review of Books in 1990, "... of making a remark about the anti-Semitism of American intellectuals during the early decades of this century. It was pervasive, if in a somewhat genteel form." [LEWONTIN, R., 10-25-90]

Poet and literature critic Ezra Pound is among the most emphatic anti-Semites in the literature field. Sympathetic to Mussolini, Ezra Pound had regular radio broadcasts from Italy that "urged America to stay of of the war [World War II] and concentrated on anti-Semitism as his chief message: 'Clever Kikes,' he said, were 'runnin' ALL our communications system.'" After the war, Pound, an American citizen, was indicted for treason. Psychiatrists deemed him certifiably crazy and he was sent to the St. Elizabeth Federal Hospital for the Insane. There, in 1948, "he was awarded the prestigious $10,000 Bollingen Prize for Poetry. Congress then ordered the prize's sponsor, the Library of Congress, to give no more awards." [KNAPPMAN, E., 1995, p. 197, 198]

"The Jew is a persistent figure in [Henry] James' fiction," notes Jewish author Michael Dobkowski, "He appears in ten of twenty novels, in eight short stories, one critical essay, and several travel essays. The Hebrew symbolizes basically the same areas of human experience that James explored in other literary themes -- internationalism, bourgeois corruption, social stratification, genteel decline, the conflict between money and manners, and the exploitation of one human being by another for gain." [DOBKOWSKI, M., 1979, p. 85]

Dobkowski sites other Jewish critics to add Anthony Trollope, Emile Zola, Guy de Maupassant, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, among others, as those who wrote anti-Semitic text about "the parasitic and usurious nature of the Jew." Still others writing objectionable passages about Jews include major 19th century American authors William Cullen Bryant (Jews' "unquenchable lust for lucre") and Oliver Wendell Holmes ("the principal use of the Jews seemed to be to lend money ..."). [DOBKOWSKI, M., 1979, p. 79, 105]

William Faulkner? Dobkowski notes that:

"In the beginning of Faulkner's first novel, Soldier's Pay, (1926), we meet a salesman
named Schluss who says to some returning soldiers of World War I: 'I would
have liked to fought by your side, see. But someone got to look out for the
business while the boys are gone.' In his second book, Mosquitoes (1927)
another sad-eyed Jewish salesman is said to remark: "You can't ignore money ...
It took my people to teach the world that ...' Faulkner does not use this major
character's name, calling him 'the Semitic man' and 'fat Jew.' It is as if
this anonymous entity -- the Jew -- represents something mysterious and
pernicious that has infiltrated into American society." [DOBKOWSKI, M.,
1979, p. 103]

Another Jewish critic, Daniel Walden, "would have [all of T.S.] Elliot's poetry placed under general suspicion." [GELBER, p. 10] Doris Grumbach adds H. L. Mencken, Edith Warton, and Willa Cather onto the list of prominent literary anti-Semites. [GRUMBACH, p. A23] More current writers cited by Jewish critics who might qualify for censorial action include Imamu Amiri Baraka (Leroi Jones), Katherine Ann Porter, Gore Vidal, Truman Capote, Richard Kostelanetz, and John Cheever. Alvin Rosenfeld sees in all authors writing critically of Jews "the dangerous possibility, gruesomely actualized in Europe between 1933 and 1945, of proceeding from literary Jew-hatred to literal murder of whole communities." [GELBER, p. 11] "[There is a] prevailing opinion," wrote Mark Gelber, a professor at Yale, in 1979, "that there is a 'risk inherent for world Jewry,' and by implication mankind, by 'exposing works like The Merchant of Venice, Oliver Twist, and certain poems by T. S. Eliot to high school and college students." [GELBER, Teaching, p. 1] "One could easily read [Chaucer's] 'The Prioress' Tale," noted the Jewish Bulletin in 1997, "as a virulent anti-Jewish tract." [STERLING, G., p. 30] )


Ann Roiphe turns (almost with hysteria) the Accusation upon William Styron's novel Sophie's Choice:

"The book tells the story of a Polish woman who survived the
[Nazi concentration] camp only to die at the hands of a Jewish madman
in Brooklyn. I try to explain [to my non-Jewish friend] why I feel the book
is so subtly anti-Semitic, why it offends me. The animus of the work
seems directed at the Jewish literary establishment that Styron fears
may steal his limelight or not allow him a piece of the pie ... As I talk
I find I am trembling; my hand is shaking. My kind friend is looking
at me, puzzled. 'You certainly feel strongly about it, don't you?'"
[ROIPHE, 1981, p. 176]

British poet James Russell Lowell? He once wrote, says Stanley Weintraub "an anti-Semitic diatribe against [Jewish prime minister Benjamin] Disraeli in the guise of a novel critique for the North American Review." [WEINTRAUB, S., 1993, p. 601] Poet Baudelaire? By the year 2000, another scholar was writing an entire article about "Charles Baudelaire's anti-Semitism." [BOWLES, B., 2000, p. 195] And Sander Gilman, in a scholarly article about alleged Gentile interest in Jewish sibling incest declares that "[Edgar Allan] Poe's description of Roderick Usher, in 'The Fall of the House of the Usher' (1839), the last offspring of a highly inbred family, was visualized as degenerate and, therefore, as Jewish. Gilman cites as evidence Poe's description of Usher's "nose of a delicate Hebrew model." "In complex ways," decides Gilman, "the siblings [in the story] were Jews for no other reason than their incest." [GILMAN, 1-31-98]

Thomas Mann? "What is striking," says Gilman, "about Mann's text [in The Blood of the Walsungs, 1905] is that it is as much a critique of the Jew as parvenu in the (mocked) world of German high culture as it is a critique of the Jews as incestuous sibling." [GILMAN, 1-31-98] Aubrey Beardsley? "Beardsley in England," notes Jewish scholar George Mosse, "had satirized the fascination which the newest in art and literature held for rich German Jews through an opulent and corpulent Jewish audience in his black-and-white sketch of 'Male and Female Wagnerians at a Performance of Tristan and Isolde." [MOSSE, G., 1985, p. 23]

The great poet William Blake? Jewish professor Karen Shabetai looks with concern as she scans his work for anti-Semitism, foregrounding the usual categorical, angelic Jewish innocence as the lens before her:

"Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno stressed the
'blindness and lack of purpose of anti-Semitism' for often its targets
'are interchangeable according to circumstances.' This underlying of
anti-Semitism comes close to what occurs in Blake. Blake's shifting
attitude, marked by shrill moments of intense hostility [against Jews],
bespeaks at the very least classic symptoms of anti-Semitism ranging
from demonological superstitions inherited from the Middle Ages to
resentment and anxiety about the Jews as the chosen people. More
importantly, Blake's anti-Semitism, while greatly at odds with his
largely humanitarian program, casts a shadow -- a haunting specter,
perhaps -- upon this received wisdom." [SHABETAI, p. 149]
What about other titans of American literature? How about the great novelist Herman Melville (best known for Moby Dick)? Some of his "gallery of Jewish or judaised characters," says David Meier, "[are] disturbing." [MEIER, D., 9-2-99] Novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne, of Scarlet Letter fame? "In The Marble Fawn," says another Jewish scholar, Robert Michael, "Hawthorne refers to the Jews as the ugliest, most evil-minded people, resembling ... maggots when they over-populate a decaying cheese. Hawthorne's essay in his English Notebooks provides the clearest exprression of his hatred of Jews ... [He writes about the brother of the Jewish Lord Mayor of London, that] 'for the sight of him justified me in the repugnance I have always felt for his race.'" [MICHALE, R., 9-4-99]

Social critic Frank Norris, author of the classic The Octopus? His McTeague, says one Jewish critic, has "one of the most anti-Semitic portrayals in American fiction." This is Norris' description of a Polish Jew, Zerkow:

"He had the thin, eager catlike lips of the covetous; eyes that had grown keen as
those of a lynx from long searching amid muck and debris; and claw-like,
prehensile fingers -- the fingers of a man who accumulates, but never disburses.
It was impossible to look at Zerkow and not know instantly that greed -- inordinate,
insatiable greed -- was the dominant passion of the man. He was the Man with the
Rake, groping hourly in the muck heap of the city for gold, for gold, for gold. It
was his dream, his passion; at every instant he seemed to feel the generous
solid weight of the crude fat metal in his palms." [DOBKOWSKI, M., 1979,
p. 91]

What about George Orwell, creator of the great novel 1984 -- the indictment of totalitarian thinking? "No doubt many Jews who read his first, autobiographical book, down and Out in Paris and London (1933) which, like Homage to Catalonia, did not sell, suspected he was anti-Semitic," says Milton Goldin. "This was not a far-fetched assumption, given three Jewish characters in the book, the first of whom owns a second-hand clothing shop and swindles his customers." [GOLDIN, M., 9-4-99]

J. R. Tolkien (The Hobbit, Lord of the Rings) and James Joyce (Ulysses) have also come under Jewish scrutiny for signs of anti-Semitism. Both, barely, at least in the following Jewish magazines, evade the smear. But the Cleveland Jewish News asks:

"Was J. R. Tolkien antisemitic? ... Most troubling for many is Tolkien's love for
and use of the Norse pagan myth -- the same ones the Nazis (and many present-day White Supremacists) turned to for inspiration. Also the Roman Catholic Church of
his era (he was born in 1892), which he loved so fiercely, was known to harbor
many with anti-Jewish sentiments ... Tolkien once said: 'The Dwarves [in my fiction],
of course, are quite obvious -- wouldn't you say that in many ways they remind you
of the Jews? Their words are semitic obviously, constructed to be semitic. The
Hobbits are just a rustic English people.' That well may be his only recorded
comment linking Jews with the Lord of the Rings. The stereotype is there if one
wants to use it. The dwarves' primary weakness, as revealed in the saga -- to their
own detriment as well as harm to the quest of the Fellowship -- is a lust for gaining, protecting and hoarding jewels, gold and silver."

The author of this article ultimately spares Tolkien the indictment of antisemitism, especially since the author is also on record as having rejected Aryan Nazism and praising Jewry. [BIRD, C., 12-14-2001, p. 56-]

The Jewish ethnic magazine Shofar, in the case of James Joyce, says:

"Joyce was both praised and condemned by critics for creating so prominent
a figure in literature [Leopold Bloom, a Jewish character in Ulysses] either for
putting Jews once more on the literary map or for venting his own inherited antisemitism." [BOWEN, Z., 4-3-2001, p. 171-]

Even influential writings in the lesbian and feminist worlds have come under attack from Jewish lesbians as being anti-Semitic. When Z. Budapest, in her The Holy Book of Women's Mysteries, Part II, blames Judaism for destroying a goddess cult and instituting patriarchy, Jewish lesbian Evelyn Torton Beck can't stand it. Budapest's offending passage is this:

"The Jews carried a deep burden of guilt about what they had done to Lilith,
the Great Goddess, and to cherubs in general. Lilith cursed them as a result,
and in effect told them that nothing would go right for Jews again until her
worship had been reinstated. Could this be the final solution to the Middle
East crisis?" [BECK, E., 1982, p. xx]

"This passage," says Beck,

"which is blatantly anti-Semitic, not only blames the Jewish people for
bringing Jew-hating upon themselves, but it also suggests that they
deserve it. Even worse, Budapest seems to support Hitler's 'final
solution' to the Jewish question -- the annihilation of all Jews. The
fact that several of Budapest's coven sisters and supporters are
themselves Jewish in no way mitigates the anti-Semitism of the passage;
in fact, it serves to highlight the ways in which some Jewish women
have internalized anti-Semitism." [BECK, E., 1982, p. xx]

"Leading" lesbian fiction writer Rita Mae Brown is also accused of anti-Semitism for this passage about a Jewish character in her novel Rubyfruit Jungle:

"[Barbara Spangenthau] always had her hand in her pants playing with
herself, and worse, she stank. Until I was fifteen I thought that being Jewish
meant you walked around with your hand in your pants." [BECK, E., 1982, p. xxiv]

Lesbian author Bertha Harris? Her "novel lover," continued Evelyn Torton Beck, "shocked me by its reliance on Jewish stereotypes, associating Jews with violence, sex and money." [BECK, E., 1982, p. xxiv] What about Norta Koertge's Who Was That Masked Woman? "This is a book," says Beck, "in which most of the Jewish characters are ostentatiously rich, superficial, and sexually promiscuous." Koertge also dares to write the following "anti-Semitic" passage:

"Take the Jews -- they aren't very well liked but they do okay -- get into Who's Who
and all that stuff while the Poles stay down in Chicago and work in the steel mills
-- and the blacks -- they're even worse off. What makes the difference? Is it a
case of native intelligence or cultural heritage or what?" [BECK, E., 1982, p. xxiv]

Even Black feminist Judy Simmons is singled out for attack for this part of one of her poems:

"Mine is not a People of the Book/taxed
but acknowledged; their distinction is
not yet a dignity; their Holocaust is lower case. " [BECK, E., 1982, p. xxvii]

For those Jews who might be squeamish with the ominous implications of outright book banning of authors who write critically of Jews, advises Mark Gelber, "sensitive teachers should consistently exclude 'anti-Semitic literature' from syllabi in the hope that this literature will be practically eliminated from the canon." [GELBER, p. 12] As a last resort, we are advised, teachers could always present the offensive text with addenda materials flattering to Jews, thereby turning a literature class into an advertisement for pro-Jewish ideas about Jewish history.

Bizarrely, in the relentless Jewish search for "anti-Semitic" books and authors that -- by the above standards -- literally merit censorship and vilification, sinister culprits are to be found in the most astonishing of quarters: Jews themselves. This genre of literary anti-Semitism must be somehow excused by the Jewish Thought police, however, or their very logic of oppression implodes. Modern Jewish authors like Philip Roth, for example, whose unflattering stories about his people make his "Jewishness suspect," [GELBER, p. 11] pose special problems to Jewish critics; as a Jew, however, he is generally afforded more anti-Semitic slack. The "anti-Semitic" genre in American literature includes a significant number of Jewish writers in the early and mid-twentieth century. In-house Jewish self-critical commentary is one thing, but when it leaks into the non-Jewish world it can be an embarrassing problem. Charles Angoff and Meyer Levin note that such authors

"began to produce 'realistic' portraits that, in a closed ghetto world,
might have been accepted as self-critical, ironic, and satirical, but
that in an open English-reading world had the unhappy effect of
confirming from Jewish sources the most strident anti-Semitic
summations of 'Jewish character.' Thus, Ben Hecht's A Jew in
Love was about a name-changed Jewish publisher who put all his
energy into seducing young women, usually Gentile. This bestseller
was followed by Jerome Weidman's I Can Get It for You Wholesale
and Budd Schulberg's What Makes Sammy Run?, two skillfully
written novels about Jewish business cheats ... A host of lesser
works pictured Jews as gangsters and exploiters, to the point
where the Jewish community began to ask, "Is there anything
decent to write about?" [ANGOFF/LEVIN, p. 10]

Across the world, Jewish literature contributing to anti-Semitism by today’s' Jewish standards even includes Theodore Herzl, the revered "father" of Zionism and the modern state of Israel, who was also a playwright. Bernard Avishai notes that "in 1894, Herzl wrote what he thought was his best play, The New Ghetto, which was full of anti-Jewish stereotypes -- lives revolving around social climbing, marriage made for profit, stock-market manipulations." [AVASHAI, p. 36] Herzl also loved the music of 19th century German nationalist and vehement anti-Semite Richard Wagner. So inspired was Herzl by Wagner's music, he wrote: "Only on those nights when no Wagner was performed did I have any doubts about the correctness of my [Zionist] idea." [RASKAS, p. 11] Likewise, in the literature tradition of Israel, there is the traditional Zionist condemnation of the European "ghetto Jew," condemnations that closely parallel classical anti-Semitic attacks. [See chapter on Israel] In Shalmo Golan's novel, The Death of Uri Peled, for example, an indigenous Israeli tells a Diaspora Jew who has moved to Israel that "the fighters of our War of Independence died for you, so that this land could absorb the likes of you -- refugees who arrive from many exiles. We spilled our blood for this country, and you, I'm telling you, don't you turn it into a pigsty with your swinish galut [exilic/diaspora] wheeling and dealing." [RUBINSTEIN, A, p. 135]

In Germany, prominent Jewish author Kurt Tucholsky had "created a character called Herr Wendriner as the protoype of the Jewish German businessman. Wendriner was interested only in money. He was egocentric, petty, cruel, and stupid. As Harold Poor, Tucholsky's biographer, notes, these sketches were extremely popular in Germany during the [pre-Hitler] Weimar period." [ROTHMAN/LICHTER, 1982, p. 124]

Books about the Holocaust are especially delicate for the Jewish Thought Police. "The fact of the Holocaust and the anguish of its victims are not items for conjecture or debate," demands professor Richard Libowitz, "To legitimate these materials [controversial books about the Holocaust, most which argue that the Nazi mass murder of Jews was not as large as popularly claimed], and to suffer their continuing presence within our libraries is to provide passive support for anti-Semitism in its latest guise. Individuals should check the periodical contents of their own institutions and should these items appear, initiate the procedure for their removal." [LIBOWITZ, ASKING, p. 72]

David Gershom Myers, a Jewish associate professor of English at Texas A&M University, was also busy banning books within his reach in 1996. There were ten that drew his attention and ire. As the Austin American-Statesman editorialized about this censor in academe,

"[Myers] is on a crusade to remove from the college library books
that deny the Jewish Holocaust under Nazi Germany ... Once works
denying the Holocaust are prohibited, what's next? Many, many
books are offensive to someone, and banning any of them is a slippery
slope indeed." [AUSTIN AMERICAN-STATESMAN, 4-12-96, p. A14]

Myers successfully lobbied the university library to add new subheadings ("Errors and Inventions") to the books' listing under "Holocaust, Jewish History." Some volumes were even cross-listed to his satisfaction under "anti-Semitism."

Some of the early violence-threatening poems of the African-American poet Imamu Baraka -- which in later years he publicly repudiated -- expressed extreme hostility towards the Jews and were, by anyone's standards, malicious. Rooted in a Black man's perceptions of Jewish exploitation of his community, such poems are direct attacks of Jews; a resultant discussion, not of Jews per se, but of Jewish-Black relations are not only necessary but inevitable. Such poems are expressly about that subject. The still broader context of such work is the common 1960's rise of "Black rage," rooted in African-American frustration and disillusionment, and reckless expressions of hopelessness and anger. Baraka's ravings against Jews were no more severe than his (and many other Black writers’) bitter writings against "white society" in general. (Interestingly, Baraka, formerly Leroi Jones, was once married to a Jew, Hettie Cohen).

There are various means to thrust the Jewish Thought Police's self-obsession of their alleged mis-portrayals across history onto center stage of classical works of English literature. In an introduction to a reissue of Charles Dickens' classic novel, Oliver Twist, for example, published by Bantam Books in 1981, Jewish author Irving Howe was afforded space to force the reader's attention (for nearly four pages) to modern Jewish polemics surrounding Dickens' character 'Fagin,' an "archetypical Jewish villain." As preface to the novel, readers are served a mini-history of Jewish objection to the Fagin persona -- a Jewish woman, it seems, had even written a complaint to Dickens that the character was too negatively stereotypical. Dickens actually wrote back to her, saying, "Fagin is a Jew because it is unfortunately true, of the time to which the story refers, that that class of criminal almost invariably was Jewish." [HOWE, p. 369-373] (A real life model for Dickens may have been Ikey Solomon who had undergone a much publicized trial in England a few years before the book was written). The disturbing precedent Howe's framing of the novel sets, of course (for those who have the power to enforce such things), is that any literature must be subject to polemical rebuttal in a kind of aggrieved "class action" to begin (and essentially merge with, and reframe) the original writing itself. Hence, a novel becomes -- first and foremost -- a polemical course on Jewish history and identity.

In 1962, Oliver Twist was recreated as a British musical comedy. Reflecting the revisionist times, the actor who played Fagin expressed the character, as one reviewer observed, "as the dottiest old dear imaginable." [BELTH, p. 56]

This strategy of revisionism has become common. In 1997, for example, bowing to Jewish pressure, the Marin Center Showcase Theatre in San Rafael, California, agreed to a Jewish Community Relations Council question-and-answer discussion after each performance of Geoffey Chaucer's "Prioress' Tale," from his famous Canterbury Tales. "Hotly debated," noted the Jewish Bulletin, "is whether the 'Prioress' Tale' is indeed a satire of ... violently anti-Semitic attitudes or merely an expression of them." [STERLING, 1997, p. 30]

One of the most famous negative portrayals of Jews in English literature is the character Shylock in Shakespeare's play, Merchant of Venice. Written in 16th and 17th century England, Shylock reflects the Christian perceptions of the era; he is depicted as usurious, villainous, fraudulent, exploitive, and cruel. "The most effective way of making the play acceptable to post-Holocaust sensibilities," notes Jewish critic John Gross, "in the view of many directors, is to underscore the prejudices of the Christian characters, and generally show them in an ugly light." [GROSS, p. 329] In some productions of the play, Shylock is even completely reconstituted, as in Arnold Wesker's version, where Shylock became "scholarly, impetuous, and warm-hearted." [GROSS, p. 335] One French critic, Pierre Spriet, has even went so far as to dismiss the play entirely, suggesting that the work is so anti-Semitic, "it must be abandoned." [GROSS, p. 345] In 1999, an actor on tour from South Africa, Percy Sieff, was portraying Shylock as "a worldly, successful businessman who has become embittered by discrimination and compensated by focusing on money." [BLOCH, F., 9/10-16/99]

In 1994 Rabbi Richard Litvak spearheaded a protest of a performance of the Merchant of Venice by a Shakespeare theatre group in Santa Cruz, California. Jewish lobbying resulted in a plan for "discussion groups" and "program notes" about Jewish concerns about the Shylock character. Rabbi Litvak noted the effect of Jewish protest, turning the performance of a Shakespeare play into quite something else: "The director and the festival have expressed a commitment to try to make the play a vehicle for raising awareness of anti-Semitism." [ROSENBERG, N., 5-27-94, p. 35]

"It was with great trepidation that I agreed to undertake the responsibility of commenting on yet another production of William Shakespeare's 'The Merchant of Venice,'" wrote censorial Jewish professor Racelle Weinman in 2001,

"In this instance the venue is the PBS Masterpiece Theatre series ... I have come
to the conclusion that the Holocaust negates the untenable premise of 'The
Merchant of Venice.' It should not be produced ... [T]he bottom line is that the
text remains the text ... [Director Trevor] Nunn tries to make the character of the
Jewish usurer, Shylock, more palatable by casting a Jew, Henry Goodman, in the role."

[WEINMAN, R., 10-4-01, p. 23-]


As early as 1912 Jewish American organizations were successfully lobbying the College Entrance Examination Board to remove the Merchant of Venice as a required reading for its tests. "School superintendents in all cities of 10,000 population or more" were then lobbied by the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith to remove the text from study. "Between 1917 and 1920 many school systems discontinued study of the play." [BELTH, p. 51-52]

Mother Goose was censored of its Jewish contents by the late 1930s:

"Jack sold his egg
to a rogue of a Jew
Who cheated him out
of half his due.
The Jew got his goose,
Which he vowed he would kill
Resolving at once
His pockets to fill. [DOBKOWSKI, M., 1979, p. 104]


A curious angle to all this, in view of the fact that the Shylock stereotype of the Middle Ages -- a figure that symbolizes classically Orthodox Jewish separatism from non-Jews, exploitation and manipulation of Gentiles, communal resistance to defense obligations to the country in which they live, double moral standards for Jews and non-Jews, cheats, liars, ghetto-loving, et al -- is held to be totally groundless today, yet it is a fact that the closest parallels in our own time to the Orthodox Jews of Elizabethan England are the black-dressed, self-cloistered Orthodox Hasidim of which there are today hundreds of thousands in Israel and America. (Eventually, the ultra-Orthodox Hasidic movement, which was created in the 1700s and represents a particular back-to-basics strand of Judaism, numbered about half of the Eastern European Jewish population. [LEVIN, M., 1966, p. xi] David Berger notes that "with the dawn of the 19th century, Hasidism .. became the dominant form of Judaism in much of Eastern Europe, the heartland of 19th-century Jewry." [BERGER, D., 2001, p. 24] Jewish scholar Solomon Poll even notes, for example, that, according to a Hungarian government report in 1914, Orthodox Judaism dominated the Jewish community in that country. And the attitude of Hungarian Jews not part of this traditional community? "Among the less observant and nonobservant Jews," says Poll, "... they considered the observant Jews "old-fashioned," "bigoted," and "unreasonable.") [POLL, S., 1969, p 14-15]

Not surprisingly, the perception by many secular Jews today -- most particularly in Israel -- of the self-segregated Hassidim (also called Haredi) communities is extremely similar to the classical non-Jewish Shakespearean-era perception of Shylock. An Israeli professor, Menachem Friedman, notes the characterization of these Ultra-Orthodox talmudists by secular fellow Jews in Israel: "The alienation and isolation of the Haredim, their eagerness to claim exemption from service in the Israeli army, their demands for increasing allocations for their society of scholars and sometimes unrestrained use of political power arouses resentment and even hatred among large sections of the Israeli public." [FRIEDMAN, M, p. 190] [See also former, and later, chapters].

"Hatred of the ultra-Orthodox has deep roots [in Israel]," noted Israeli critic Laor Yitzhak in 1998,

"There is no offense so great that one cannot tag it on the Haredim --
especially the guy with the black hat, frock coat, and side curls beloved
of modern anti-Semites ... 'Death to the black hatters' is scribbled on
toilet doors at the Tel Aviv School of Humanities; if fliers showing
Haredi children and screaming 'Kill them while they're young!' are being
distributed in Kfar Saba, then it is those who participate in fomenting
hatred against the Haredi minority who must prove there is not something
behind their behavior frighteningly like anti-Semitism." [LAOR]

Israeli scholar Yeshayahu Leibowitz notes the conflicts between secular Jews and the Ultra-Orthodox, and that "Perhaps we will reluctantly arrive at a separation into two nations [in Israel], with a differentiation not only from the aspect of marriage, but also with each going his historic way imbued by intense hatred [of the other]." [HUPPERT, U., 1988, p. 40]

In 1986 the Jerusalem Post reported an Israeli poll that found one-fourth of its secular Jewish respondents called the Ultra-Orthodox -- who like their ancestral counterparts have retreated into self-created ghettos, even in Israel -- "opportunists, liars, and charlatans." [LINDEMANN, Esau's, p. 24] "There is much hostility to the Orthodox rabbinate among the majority (about 70% of the Jewish population) of secular Israeli Jews," says Adam Garfinkel, "They see the rabbis as coercive and intolerant ... excessively political and unspiritual ... seeming never to have a word to say about kindness, humility, and God's love for humanity ... To be blunt, some secular Israelis see the haredim as fanatical atavistic freeloaders who have yet to discover modern hygiene." [GARFINKEL, p. 140]

In 2000, the results of study by Jerusalem's Hebrew University about "hate" in 168 secular Israeli schools indicated that "47% of the Jewish students hate haredim." [PRINCE-GIBSON, E., 9-17-2000] A Jewish religious organization, Ahavat Israel, has even posted an entire section at its Internet site about what it calls "anti-Semitism in Israel":

"Today, the attack upon the religious Jewish population is most heavily felt
in the Israeli media, including newspapers, radio and TV ... In a recent 9 (Dec
98) column, Israel Eichler charges that many of the stereotypes used by the
Nazis against Jews have been translated into Hebrew and employed to
de-legitimize the haredi (religious) public ... [Meretz political party founder]
Shulamit Aloni described the haredi population as 'suck[ing] from the
same sinister passions which nurtured the Nazis' ... 'We have to storm Mea
She'arim [a famous Jerusalem ultra-Orthodox enclave] with machine guns
and mow them down,' recommends left-wing darling Uri Avneri. 'I would
take all those weird people from Shas, Aguda, and Degel Hatorah and tie
all their beards together and light a match,' says Popolitika's Amnon
Danker. Yonaten Gefen announces his willingness to cast the first stone
in the intifada [uprising] against haredim, and Prof. Uri Arnon tells a
Kol Ha'ir interviewer, 'Haredim should be suspended on an electricity
pole' ... Today 'bloodsucker' is a favored term for haredim ... 'Parasite'
has become used so frequently in connection with haredim that the
two have become virtually synonymous ... 'When I see the haredim
surrounded by their large families, I understand the Nazis,' wrote
sculptor Yigal Tumarkin -- a statement which did not prevent him
from being honored by Yad Vashem [Israel's Holocaust memorial
center]. And Tommy Lapid sees the haredim as having usurped
the traditional Jewish role of 'taking advantage of the gentile,
trading in his blood, and laughing at him,' only this time with
the secular [Jewish] public in the role of the gentile."
[AHAVAT ISRAEL, 2001]

At another site, the Freeman Center for Strategic Studies, a Jewish author sites a list of anti-chasid charges compiled by the editor of the Israeli magazine NATIV:

"'Black ants.' 'Dogs tied up in the back yard, barking psalms all nights.' 'Humming
locusts.' 'Forces of darkness and kidnappers of Souls.' 'Vulgar baboons.'
'Barbarians, the Black Front ... representing the magical, bewitched and
most primitive ... whose schools are colleges of darkness.' 'The darkest and
and most horrible phenomena (sic) of our age,' (by a senior Israeli diplomat
in the United States). From two different members of the Knesset: 'Leeches,
snakes, suckled on the same evil urges as Nazism, greedy and domineering,
evil and primitive, corrupt, parasites, ambitious.' 'A horrible evil, a black
devil.' Finally, Arie Stav quotes one of Israel's best known writers: 'A
band of armed gangsters committing crimes against humanity, sadists,
pogromchiks and murderers." [WINSTON, E., 10-98]

"Stav [the editor of NATIV]," says Emmanuel Winston, "quotes even worse examples of statements and caricatures that are actually blood libel by the self-styled 'intellectual elite of the Israeli Left. They are authors, members of the Knesset, senior journalists, diplomats and professors." [WINSTON, E., 10-98]

In 2000, the Cleveland Jewish News reported that, in Israel, "there have been many instances of anti-haredi graffiti on haredi synagogues, and even, in 1998, the torching of two haredi classrooms in Pardess Hanna, where local secular [Jewish] residents tried to keep haredim from moving into their neighborhood." [DERFNER, L., 6-30-2000, p. 10-]

Robert Eisenberg, whose parents are Yiddish-speaking Jews from Eastern Europe, even notes what a Holocaust survivor had to say about the ultra-Orthodox. Here Eisenberg speaks to an older Jewish couple in New Jersey:

"My [husband] Morris was in Auschwitz. Ask him what he thinks of the Hasidim.
Morris, come here,'' she orders. He shuffles in like a Foghorn Leghorn auditioning
for a part, cigar clenched firmly between his teeth. 'What do you think of the
Hasidism?' Without missing a beat in he begins to intone,
Huset Ganef
Geh Ka' Chrzanow
Koif a fayert
Lieg in drayert.
(Hasid, you crook
Travel to Chrzanow, for a look
Buy a horse
Then drop dead, of course.)
It's a child nursery rhyme my grandmother used to chant on
those rare occasions when she saw a Hasid in Nebraska."
[EISENBERGER, R., 1995, p. 158]

In a 1982 book Jewish American author Earl Shorris noted the Hasids in a chapter about Jewish shame ("anti-Semitism?" "Self-hatred?") for the behavior of other Jews. Here Shorris is troubled by an encounter with Hasidic salesmen at a photo shop in New York City:

"As we neared [the sale counter], now sweating like everyone else in the
salesroom, I saw that the salesmen were all young Hasidic Jews. A fat boy
in his twenties -- his white shirt smudged; his fly partly unzipped below
his bulging belly; his spotty, untrimmed beard curling with sweat --waited
on the customer next to me. When my turn came, he said, Well?
I want an AM-FM portable radio, one that sounds reasonably good.
You want ten dollars? A hundred dollars? what?
Somewhere in the middle. Fifty.
He thrust a catalogue in front of me, opened it to the pages devoted to portable
radios, and said, When you know, you'll tell me.
The Hasidim have given up ritual bathing, I thought, for I could smell him
from across the counter. He stank of the gruel of seat and detritus that collects
in the creases of the body and sours. His clothes stank. He eyeglasses were
smudged. His hands were pale and dirty ... He went to another customer. I
could not think of the radio, only of him, of this Jew who had presented himself
to me. I chose a radio ... [A second Hasidic salesman comes over to help him]
... We stared at each other for a moment, as if to compare our lives. I , too,
wear a bear, a curly Jewish beard, once black, now turning gray. He knew what
I was thinking. Well, what? he said. He did not hide his irritation at my
examination of him ... Hostility grew between us. He saw in my eyes what the Ostjuden [Eastern European Jews] had seen in the eyes of the German Jews. He
could dance, he could fly, he could tell stories of the Baal Shem Tov that even
Martin Buber did not know. How dare I look at him with scathing eyes! ... [As
he left, he paid a female cashier for his purchase] ... I gave her the money. She
gave me the package. We did not speak. She told me that she knew what I was thinking and that she had known similar thoughts. She smiled. It was not a real
smile. It seemed to belong to a prisoner ... It's difficult to be in a place like that
... I'm so put off by them. I have to keep reminding myself that we're brothers." [SHORRIS, E., 1982, p. 67, 68] ... Is it possible that Jews could rise completely
above the pain of disapproval that we call shame?" [SHORRIS, E., 1982, p. 72]

In the 1990s, secular Jewish professor Stephen Bloom tried to connect to his Jewish heritage via a Chabad Lubavitcher (ultra-Orthodox/Hassidic) community in the little town of Postville, Iowa. He went there with the legends of Jewish historic identity and was stunned with what he found. "Many of the Hasidim I had encountered in Postville pretended to be holy," he wrote,

"but their actions displayed bigotry and racism of the worst degree. The book
[Bloom wrote, entitled Postville] explored taboo topics such as bargaining, poor
hygiene, atrocious manners, disrepair of homes, Jewish elitism, sexism, crime
and prejudice directed a gentiles. In response, I've received dozens of hate letters,
all from Orthodox Jewish readers, who essentially pose the same question as my
father's. To these readers, to criticize any aspect of Judaism is patently unacceptable.
To them, I wasn't a journalist doing my job. I was a self-loathing Jew, the worst
kind of anti-Semite. I was embarrassing the family ... When journalists parachuted
into Postville, if the locals said anything bad -- or even neutral -- about the Hasidic Jews, the response was swift and to the point. Mayor John Hyman was labeled an
anti-Semite when he told a reporter for the Minneapolis Star-Tribune that the
Jews in Postville don't pay their bills on time [which Bloom found to be a true
assessment]." [BLOOM, S., 2000, p. 355, p. 340]


What does all this mean? The foundation of animosity (defined as "anti-Semitism") towards "traditional" Jewish behavior, as best manifest today by the cloistered, seclusionist, Jewish haredim/hasidic communities -- a behavior that was a mainstay for centuries by all Jews in Europe and throughout the world, is so great that even other (secularized) Jews today express vehement disdain and outrage towards their obsessively "particularist" -- and exploitive -- fellows. And this is crucial: today's haredim merely reflect meticulous attention to the ages-old religious laws of Jewish orthodoxy. As Michael Govrin notes, living under the Halacha -- Jewish religious law -- "until two hundred years ago was the only way a Jew could define him or herself." [GOVRIN, M., 2001]

As Israeli Amos Elon notes, more mildly, about the tensions within the secular Jewish psyche when they visit Mea Shearim (the hasidic ghetto in Jerusalem):

"Modern Israelis ...are attracted to the notion of encountering their
own roots and at the same time they are repelled ... When they gaze
now at these bearded men, with their alarmingly pallid faces, at their
ringlets and strange clothes, so unsuited to the climate, and at their tired
looking wives, modern Jews are torn by conflicted feelings ... They see
their own grandfathers and grandmothers, who went up as smoke
through the chimneys of Auschwitz and Treblinka. 'Because of Hitler
you have no right to oppose this kind of Judaism,' the [Israeli] novelist
wrote in 1982." [ALON, 1991, p. 189]

Melford Spiro, in a study of the Israeli kibbutz system (known for his socialist system), has the following commentary:

"Religious Jews -- or more accurately, orthodox Jews whose 'visibility'
is pronounced -- are the objects of similar attitudes [among residents of
the kibbutz]. A fourth-grade girl, asking her father if he had ever prayed,
proceeded to describe with much laughter how the 'Jews in Europe' had
prayed. Her description, accompanied by grotesque gestures, was in
the tradition of anti-Semitic caricature. And from the other end of the
age scale came this comment from an adult sabra [native born Israeli]:
'I hate them (the orthodox Jews), and when I see them I can understand
why people are anti-Semitic." [SPIRO, p. 388]

Yet another angle on all this is Israeli Ashkenazim (Jews from Europe) views of their Sephardic (Jews from Arab countries, Iran, et al) fellow citizens. As Raphael Patai notes: "In addition to instability, emotionalism, impulsiveness, unreliability, and incompetence, the Oriental [Sephardic] Jew is accused [by other Israeli Jews] of habitual lying and cheating, laziness, uncontrolled temper, superstitiousness, childishness, lack of cleanliness and in general 'primitivity' and 'lack of culture.'" [PATAI, in Selzer, p. 58] (This, of course, probably also reflects racist Jewish views of Arab culture, by which the Sephardic were inevitably tainted). In former centuries, "in some countries and places Ashkenazim and Sephardim refused to intermarry. At one time in the eighteenth century the Sephardic Jews in the town of Bordeaux in France tried to persuade the Christian authorities to forbid Ashkenazic Jews to live there. Here was the unbelievable spectacle of one group of Jews urging the government to banish another group of Jews!" [GITTELSOHN, R., 1964, p. 32]

In the early years of the 20th century, German Jews ostracized Jews from Eastern Europe. For example, "[In a small midwestern town] a student rabbi," says Rabbi Roland Gittelsohn,

"there for the Holydays, was interested in discovering why the women of his Reform
congregation seemed to be antagonistic to Hadassah, the women's Zionist
organization. After questioning several women and receiving answers which he knew
were merely excuses, he finally found a young woman, new to the community,
who explained the situation honestly. 'Our women stay away from Hadassah,'
she said, 'because the present members of the organization are mostly Russian
and Polish Jews. Most of them are rather poor, and some of them haven't
completely lost their foreign accents. Because these women were the organizers
of Hadassah here, our women, who are mostly German Jews, wealthier and more
Americanized than they, rarely join Hadassah." 'GITTLELSOHN, R., 1964, p. 34]

Incredibly, intolerant ultra-Orthodox Jews of Israel are themselves guilty of what one Israeli newspaper called "Jewish antisemitism." While a graffiti-laden Jewish tombstone in, say, Bulgaria is international news, the following kind of story never gets beyond in-house Jewish ethnic news circles. As part of inter-religious conflicts between Orthodox and Reform/Conservative Judaism movements in Israel, the Cleveland Jewish News noted the following in 2000:

"The Israeli political and religious establishment condemned Saturday night's
arson at a Jerusalem Conservative synagogue, but something was missing from
their statements -- any hint that the fire might have been started by Jewish
extremists, or Jews at all ... Chief Rabbi Yisrael Meir Lau, who in the past
compared Reform Jewry (the term Israelis use for all non-Orthodox Jewry) to
Hezbollah terrorists, condemned the arson, but couldn't bring himself to use the
term 'synagogue.' Instead he called it a 'building specified for prayer by a stream,' without specifying which religion the stream belonged to. In an editorial about
the arson titled 'Jewish antisemitism,' The Jerusalem Post said of Lau's remarks:
'This type of refusal to recognize other legitimate streams of Judaism creates an atmosphere that may have led to the attack.' The fire, which got within a few yards
of the Torah ark, was the second arson in three weeks at the synagogue located in Ramat, a sprawling, increasingly haredi (rigorously Orthodox) area of Jerusalem ...
While Jerusalem Mayor Ehud Olmert, who visited the synagogue two days after the arson, declined to point a finger in any direction, a senior municipal official said, 'Of course this was done by Jews ... In the past, arson and attacks of vandalism against Reform and Conservative synagogues have gone unpunished. No one has ever been arrested for the 1997 burning of a Reform nurse school in Mevasseret Zion, a
suburb of Jerusalem, even though local Shah (Sepharid rigorously Orthodox)
Party supporters had threatened the lives of Reform Jews in town only months
before. Likewise, no arrests were ever made in the 1997 attacks on the Har-El
(Reform) synagogue in Jerusalem, which included pouring acid on the synagogue garden, smearing excrement on the front door, painting swastikas and religious
curses. The Eshel Avraham (Conservative) synagogue in Beer Sheva, which has
woman rabbi, Gila Dror, can 'expect to have its windows broken every couple of weeks,' said Masorti (Israeli Conservative) movement spokesman Yonatan
Liebowitz. The above, of course, is only a partial list." [DERFNER, L., 6-30-00, p. 10-]

"As for the political and religious establishment's refusal to accuse anybody of the crime -- even when the enemies of the Conservative and Reform are only too well-known," remarked Israeli rabbi David Rosen in response to these arsons and the fact that no one was ever charged with crimes for them, "This is an unfortunate reflection of the political intimidation carried out by the religious extremists." [DERFNER, L., 6-30-01, p. 10-]


But let's return to the easier, less complicated target of the Gentile version of "anti-Semitism."

In the American literature world, more peculiar as a literary anti-Semitic source for Jewish outrage are E. L. Dachslager's selected examples from the work of T.S. Eliot. Dachslager writes:

"Let us say, for example, we are teaching the poetry of T.S. Eliot
and discussing specifically "Gerontion" and "Burbank with a
Baedeker: Blestein with a cigar." What do we say about the
references to the "Jew" who "squats on the window sill" or to
Bleistein "with palms out / Chicago Semite Viennese?" Or to
Eliot's intention by such references and our reaction to them,
to Eliot's and to the poem?" [DACHSLAGER, p. 317]

These relatively innocuous lines are the most forceful that this Jewish scholar chooses from Eliot as evidence for endemic literary persecution of Jews?

Many Jews hold T. S. Eliot in special opprobrium. Norma Rosen argues that although anti-Semitic references in Eliot's voluminous work "are not many, they are prime." [ROSEN, p. 10] Among the most widely highlighted by Jewish critics are these three lines from an Eliot poem:

The rats are underneath the piles
The Jew is underneath the lot.
Money in furs ...

Let's put this into some perspective. A lot of Eliot's poetry was lamenting the materialist decadence and emptiness of modern society. Jews played -- and play -- their strong part in this. And unless the Thought Police are to seize complete control, artists have been generally afforded the latitude to criticize all and everything they so please; the best ones are expected to be controversial. Modern art, by its very nature, steps on toes. Even sacred ones. If not, shall all peasants, Poles, and non-Jews generally light their torches and assail the equally sinister stereotypical defamations of them in the distinctly Jewish Holies of literature? Take, for example, the great Jewish-Zionist poet Bialik, who wrote that "while Jacob [Jews] spends his time praising the Lord, Esau [Gentiles] spends his time drinking and beating his wife." [GONEN, p. 135] Or Isaac Bashevis Singer, who wrote, "The peasants are extremely sound sleepers but the devil does not permit their young women to rest but leads them down back paths to barns where the [Jewish] peddlers wait in the day." [SINGER, The Spinoza, p. 195]

Many American Jews charge Polish society with anti-Semitism. In 1980, their opinions were seemingly, to their eyes, confirmed when Isaac Bashevis Singer won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1980. Singer, born in Poland, moved later to the United States. The gripe was that he was not widely recognized, nor highly regarded, in his homeland and his works were difficult to find there. But, as a young Jew living in Poland told Jewish American author Laurence Weschler, Singer's work has nothing to do with Poland or the Polish people. It is completely Judeo-centric: "Singer didn't concern himself with the Poles. Read those stories, as I have -- I read them in English. Poles hardly appear in them and when they do they are portrayed as shadowy, alien figures. In a fundamental sense, Singer is not a Polish writer." [WESCHLER, p. 35]

In another of Singer's short stories, a non-Jewish doctor, Yaretzsky, seduces his deaf-mute maid, teaches obscenities to a parrot, and treats his female patients "outrageously ... Before they could say what was wrong, he made them disrobe." [SINGER, The Spinoza, p. 7] Do we let such recurrent slurs of violence and lechery against non-Jews pass in the name of Art, despite the fact that there is a recurring, institutionalized pattern of such defamation in Jewish literature?

Arnold Eisen observes the same themes of defamation against Gentiles among other Jewish authors:

"When the Jewish protagonist in [Saul] Bellow's The Victim accuses the
gentile protagonist of being a drunkard, and the latter responds that all
Jews see gentiles in this way, or when the honest Jew of Malamud's The
Victim is the victim of a sexually driven gentile who despite himself
cannot master his own cruel urges -- then, as Philip Roth has noted,
we confront head-on the imagery of the [Jewish] folk imagination. Here
one finds the rabbinic voice of the chosen people re-emergent. The
moral Jew must separate himself from the licentious ways of the
pagans, accepting responsibilities for the world (as in The Victim)
against gentiles, who would lay the blame on powers beyond our
control." [EISEN, p. 142]

Here too Eisen, as a Jewish scholar, frames for us his own (and his community's) typical double-standard: the Jewish anti-Gentile equivalent (at least) of stereotypical anti-Semitism is mildly described as the Jewish "folk imagination."

This "folk imagination" is poignantly demonstrated in yet another Singer (Bellow too is a Nobel Prize winner for literature) short story, where Gentiles are (per long-standing Jewish tradition) portrayed as generically/genetically violence prone:

"A Jew should have a beard," Haim replied. "You have to be
different from the Gentiles in some way."
"The way you have lived, you're a Gentile too," Genia said.
"As long as I have never beaten or killed anybody, I can call
myself a Jew." [SINGER, The Spinoza, p. 284]

Looking elsewhere, the New York Times called Michael Gold's 1930s-era fictionalized autobiography about life in the Jewish section of Manhattan, Jews Without Money, a "masterpiece." Here's how he treats the non-Jewish Other:

"My mother sighed with relief ... Christians did not seem like people
to her. They were abstractions. They were the great enemy, to be
hated, feared and cursed ... We children heard endless tales of the
pogroms. Joey Cohen, who was born in Russia, could himself
remember one. The Christians had hammered a nail into his uncle's
head, and killed him. When we passed a Christian church we were
careful to spit three times; otherwise bad luck was sure to befall us.
We were obsessed with wild stories about how the Christians loved
to kidnap Jewish children, to burn a cross on each cheek with a red-hot
poker. They also cut off children's ear, and made a kind of soup. Nigger
[a Jewish friend] had once seen Jewish ears for sale in the window of
of a Christian butcher shop.
'In the old days,' my mother said, 'the Christians hunted the Jews like
rabbits. They would gather thousands in a big marketplace, and stuff
pork down their throats with swords, and ask the Jews to be baptized.
The Jews refused, of course. So they were burned in great fires, and the
Christians laughed, danced and made merry when they saw the poor
Jews burning up like candles. Such are the Christians... I would spend
long daylight hours wondering why the Christians hated us so, and form
noble plans of how I would lead valiant Jewish armies when I grew up,
in defense of the Jews." [GOLD, M., p. 164-165]

In Jewish circles, of course, this kind of "folk imagination" is not considered absurdly exaggerated prejudicial stereotypes, nor nakedly stereotypical racism, stemming from their religiously-based victimology mythos, but history. In the late 1970s a Russian Jewish émigré to America, summarizing Jewish life in Russia, told the American Jewish Congress that "to understand the problem of the average Jew in Russia, you had to understand a rabbit surrounded by wolves, trying somehow to live with them in the same forest." [ROTHCHILD, 1985, p. 48] (Popular Jewish convention holds that the Soviet Union has long been a bastion of anti-Semitism and Russian Jewry a disadvantaged people. Reviewing 1989 Russian census data, and the profound representation of Jews in the upper occupational strata in that country, Jewish scholar Michal Paul Sacks conceded in 1998 that "the occupational data do not show discrimination against Jews in high-level positions." Indeed, Sacks' 1998 article about the subject even noted the Jews of Russia to be, occupationally, a "privileged" group.) [SACKS, M., 1998, p. 260]

And the fleeing "rabbit" motif is actually part of ancient Jewish folk/religious legend. "That rabbit is called the YaKNHaZ," notes David Gilner,

"That word is an acronym to remind Jews of the order of blessings in Passover
rituals. But in German it sounds like 'jag den Has' or 'Hunt the hare,'
and so it became a familiar image in Haggadahs to represent the persecution
of the Jews." [SULKES, S., 4-21-97]

Of course Eastern Europeans, in the Jewish "collective memory," were/are rapists. Based upon the ages-old Jewish martyrological tradition, left-wing Jewish author Earl Shorris noted his racial hatred of Russians as he toured the country in the 1970s:

"We had no common ancestors [with Russians]. Tony [Shorris's son], I said
softly careful not to wake him, you will discover one day that you are not
descended from Russians but from Jews who happened to live in Russia.
And if you do have Russian blood, it entered the line when a Cossack fell on
a Jewish woman and raped her. It's either history or racial memory, but I know
it's true. This is not home. And where is home? On his mother's side Tony is descended from Sheikh Sason ben Saleh, who is descended from Abraham
Sason, the Venetian mystic who claimed to be a direct descendant of Shephatiah,
the fifth son of King David. I laughed aloud at the thought of traveling with royalty,
and a Marxist-Leninist king at that!") [SHORRIS, E., 1982, p. 149]


Howard Jacobson, in 1993, noted the "invidious" captions defaming non-Jews that he found beneath photographs at an exhibition at the University of Judaism in Los Angeles. The photographs and accompanying texts romanticized Jewish Eastern Europe, but, typically, as one caption proclaimed:

"The peasants around were so uneducated that you could not speak
with them about anything. Their interest was just vodka, only
alcohol to drink. But a Jewish peasant -- he was a wise man who knew
about life, without having a radio or a newspaper or any information,
nothing but his own thoughts and understanding." [JACOBSON, H.,
1995, p. 193-194]

"Sound like any Jew you know?" writes Jacobson, sarcastically,

"Sound like anyone you know? But even if there were such a paragon
of [Jewish] peasant wisdom, gleaning understanding from the closed
university of his own thoughts, is it necessary to rub the vodka-peasant's
nose in the disparity? Must the rest of humanity be humbled because a
Jew is bright? Hasn't a Carpatho-Ukrainian-gentile eyes? If you prick
him does he not bleed? What a mix and what a mess it is, this dreaming
nostalgic hotchpotch of misery and pride, arrogance and schmaltz.
Who can wonder that it leads at last to the moral confusion of being
proud of your misery, of being half in love with the cruelties that have
been visited on you." [JACOBSON, H., 1995, p. 194]

And what about celebrated Jewish Holocaust survivor Jerzy Kosinski, whose book "The Painted Bird" zoomed to fame in the 1960s? He has long since been exposed as fraud and chronic liar, committing suicide in 1991. The Painted Bird was understood by most readers and admirers as an autobiography of Kosinski's escape from Nazi-occupied Poland. It was commonly referred to as an "account," "confession," or "testimony." Fiction or not, the book was an indictment of Poland and the Polish people. As James Park Sloan notes:

"In stark, uninflected prose, 'The Painted Bird' describes the
disasters that befall a six-year old boy who is separated from
his parents and wanders through the primitive Polish-Soviet
borderlands during the war. The peasants whom the boy encounters
demonstrate an extraordinary predilection for incest, sodomy,
and meaningless violence. A miller plucks out the eyeballs of
his wife's would-be lover. A gang of toughs pushes the boy, a
presumed Gypsy or Jew, below the ice of a frozen pond. A
farmer forces him to hang by his hands from a rafter, just out
of reach of a vicious dog. In the culminating incident of the
book, the boy drops a missal while he's helping serve Mass and
is flung by angry parishioners into a pit of manure. Emerging
from the pit, he realizes that he has lost the power of speech."
[SLOAN, JP, 1994, p. 46]

The Painted Bird is merely a vicious caricature reflecting traditional Jewish folklore about the (omnipresently anti-Semitic) Other. It is as racistly "anti-Other" as any literature can possibly be. The Other is always a subhuman beast, meandering about in their animal instincts. (Kosinski, darling of the New York Jewish intelligentsia, was rewarded with a National Book Award for his next novel!) Early in the volume, The Painted Bird's lead character, hiding among Christian peasants (with their help!) from the Nazis, is self-described as being from an elite class -- he "spoke a language of the educated class, barely intelligible to the peasants of the east." [KOSINSKI, p. 2] All and every peasant the boy meets in the book is a caricature of bestiality and brutality while the innocent boy himself is even afraid of farm animals. [KOSINSKI, p. 4] Nonetheless, he first finds refuge with an old Gentile lady who "looks like a green-gray puffball," [p. 3] he watches brutal non-Jewish boys set squirrels on fire, [p. 6] he accidentally (?) burns the old lady's house down with her in it, [p. 10] and he passes one of the many Christian shrines in the area which is described as "a rotting crucifix." [p. 13] At the next village, the boy is attacked by a crowd, dragged by the hair, knocked unconscious, and carried home in a sack by a peasant to where "small children crawl out like cockroaches." The peasant turns to whip the boy so "I would hop like a frog." [p. 14-15]

The Jewish character is then purchased by a superstitious local folk healer (p. 16). The boy eventually ends up in a loft watching a miller below "lashing his naked wife with a horsewhip." When these two sit for dinner, the boy equates them with two copulating cats that mate near them as they eat. [p. 36] The miller soon gouges a young man's eyes out with a spoon [p. 37] Later the innocent Jewish child runs across a beastly, hyper-sexual woman called "Stupid Ludmilla:"

"It was said that Stupid Ludmilla lived with this huge dog as with a
man. Others predicted that someday she would give birth to children
whose bodies would be covered with canine hair [subtle reference to
the classical Gentile character, Esau, in Jewish tradition who was the
beastly hairy one?] and who would have lupine ears and four paws." [p.
47]

An "entire herd of drunken peasants" soon raped Ludmilla "until she lost consciousness." [p. 47] Another peasant, Lekh, delights in catching birds, painting them different colors, and releasing them so that they are pecked to death by their own kind. [p. 50] Sexually attracted to Ludmilla the beast-woman, two shepherds soon contribute their own savagery upon her, raping and beating her. Then comes peasant village women who "sat on her hands and legs and began beating her with rakes, tearing out her hair, spitting into her face ... One of the women now approached, holding a corked bottle of brownish-black manure. To the accompaniment of raucous laughter and loud encouragements from others, she kneeled between Ludmilla's legs and rammed the entire bottle inside her abused, assaulted slit, while she began to moan and howl like a beast." [p. 52-54]

The boy is soon beaten by a carpenter who "threw me down on a pile of manure. He delivered one more blow to my head and I fainted." [p. 62] The carpenter intends to drown the boy in a sack, but the man falls into a vat, devoured by rats. [p. 64] Then there is the barbaric blacksmith's wife who rolls lice into a medicinal dough with horse and human urine, as well as cat excrement. [p. 67-68] The boy is soon attacked and "lashed" by partisans, who cruelly murder dogs, horses, and cats. A peasant is stabbed in the back at a Christian wedding; and "in the dusk, village lads were grabbing girls and pushing them into the barn ... Drunks stumbled across the threshing yard, cursing to each other and vomiting, harassing the lovers and waking the snorers." [p. 87] Also, "while the adults usually left me alone, I had to watch out for the village boys. They were great hunters; I was their game." [p. 90]

Soon peasants are pulling the clothes off dead Jews [p. 102] and lusting over family photographs of young Jewish women found on dead bodies. [p. 105] A Jewish woman, found alive, is raped. During the rape, the offending peasant "appealed loudly to the Virgin Mary for help" to attain a satisfying violation. Then he beat his victim. [p. 106-107]

Yet another peasant, Garbos, regularly beats Kosinski's protagonist "for no reason." [p. 123] The boy is also tossed into a manure vat by angry churchgoers (where he listens to Christian organ music from the excrement, [p. 146] and is seduced by a farmer's daughter.) [p. 151-152] Kosinski eventually voices the recurrent Jewish revenge motif: "I myself hated many people. How many times had I dreamed of the time when I would be strong enough to return, to set their settlements on fire, poison their children and cattle, lure them into deadly swamps. In the sense I had already been recruited by the powers of Evil and made a pact with them. What I needed now was their assistance for spreading Evil." [p. 160]

This despicable defamation of the Polish people has been challenged in recent years to be complete fabrication, the product of Kosinski's sick mind. As early as 1982, an article in the Village Voice alleged that Kosinski needed help to write his own books and that some of his accounts of his past were contradictory. (Kosinski, widely beloved in the New York literary world, and rewarded for the vicious racism in The Painted Bird; he was twice the president of the writers' organization, PEN. He won the National Book Award for another novel in 1968. And, as biographer Sloan notes, this pervert's "celebrated nightly forays to Plato's Retreat and S&M clubs the New York piers helped make those establishments fashionable.") [SLOAN, 1991, p. 47] Edwin Diamond also notes the influential behind-the-scenes pro-Kosinski politics of the New York Times: "[C]ritics also trashed [Times chief editor A. M.] Rosenthal for his role in the Kosinski affair, a bizarre episode that roiled the New York literary-social-media world in the early 1980s ... Rosenthal and ["his chief deputy Arthur] Gelb [both Jewish] were both friends of Kosinski ... Barbar Gelb [Arthur's wife] wrote a glowing literary appreciation of Kosinski in the Times Magazine four months before the Village Voice attack appeared." Rosenthal also encouraged smears of the Village Voice article.) [DIAMOND, E, 1993, p. 178-180]

Sloan, in the course of writing his volume about Kosinski, even journeyed to the Jewish author's Polish hometown. There he found that Kosinski's stories about his life in Poland were completely fraudulent. And that Kosinski was a betrayer of the good people who had saved him from the Nazis. Local villagers who knew him were even united today in stating that, after the war, Kosinski's father had turned local people over to the Soviet secret police. The maniacal defamations in The Painted Bird, a major betrayal to Kosninski's real-life protectors, also hurt people. As Sloan notes about his interviews with those in the village,

"The Painted Bird ... came as a shock. 'We saved their lives,' [one
old peasant] said, brushing away tears with the back of his hand.
'And he turned us into monsters' ... Kosinski was never separated
from his parents for any significant period. The local peasants,
living in a culture suffused with anti-Semitism, were scarcely free of
its grip, but by all accounts these particular peasants did something
brave and good for the Kosinski family during the war. 'The Painted
Bird' is fiction. Kosinski borrowed the atrocities from other accounts,
or made them up." [SLOAN, 1991]

Sloan concludes his investigation thusly, echoing a theme that is extremely familiar:

"If the novelist trimmed his experiences to accord with a personal myth,
the narrative that resulted fell on receptive ears. Certainly it was a myth
that the world, demanding purity and innocence of its victims, was all
too ready to appropriate. Now all must profess to be shocked -- that
a practitioner of the liar's profession, a man who survived the war by
living a lie, told lies." [SLOAN, JP, 1991, p. 53]

Kosinski is not an anomaly in the Jewish world; his accounts of the beastly Gentile Other is rooted in the norms of the Jewish folk tradition. "Jewish belief in Catholic anti-Semitism," wrote Jewish author James Yaffe in 1968,

"has something irrational about it. Jews cling to it in spite of
evidence to the contrary ... Many Jews have an emotional reaction
against Catholics which goes deeper than logic. I. B. Singer writes
about the twinge of uneasiness he used to feel as a boy whenever he
passed a nun on the street. Few Jews are unfamiliar with this twinge.
And Bruce Jay Friedman, American-born and much younger than Singer,
says that the Catholic school across the street from him, when he was a
boy, seemed like 'the battlefield -- a scary mysterious place." Yet he
admits that he never got into fights with the Catholic boys -- in fact,
nothing ever actually happened." [YAFFE, J., 1968, p. 50]

In a similar vein, in one of Philip Roth's novels, the main Jewish character, Alexander Portnoy, fantasizes a conversation with his father about striking his mother, "Deck her, Jake. Surely that's what a goy would do, would he not?" [BRODKIN, p. 161] And what conclusions might we make about the bizarrely racist Jewish world view in the collection of legends about Baal Shem Tov, the revered 18th century founder of Hasidism? :

"I heard once that they put a turnip on Besht's [the holy man's]
table, but he refused to eat it. They asked him why, and he
said, 'This turnip grew in a gentile cemetery.' [BEN-AMOS, p. 197]

"When the Besht came to the inn they offered him an
upholstered bed. When the Besht came and saw the bed
he cried: 'Vey! There has been sexual intercourse with a
gentile woman on this bed. How is it possible for me to
sleep on it?" [BEN-AMOS, p. 223]

In a religious story about the Baal Shem Tov, by Menachem Gerlitz, the generic Gentile is, typically, rendered to be dull, stupid, robotic, barbaric, unfeeling, and a veritable animal -- in fact, even less than one. The story is actually intended as an illustration of the some of the reasons for the traditional Orthodox daily prayer that thanks God for not having been born a goy. In a chapter actually entitled The Gentile Peasant, the Jewish hero -- the Baal Shem Tov as a young boy named Yisraelnyu -- watches with fascination as an old peasant, "uncombed, sloppy, only half awake," enters his barn yard. The boy is stunned when the old peasant drinks from a pail of water intended for his horse: "He slurped the water down noisily, his wild, long hair falling into the pail, the water dripping and slopping over the sides onto his clothing. He paid no attention, just continued to drink." The peasant then pulled out

"a hunk of old, moldy black bread" and "crammed it into his mouth ... The
farmer was absorbed only in his food and didn't even give a thought to thanking
the One Who had given him a mouth and food to eat [God] ... Even the fowl --
Yisraelnyu was thinking -- hopped about, cackling happily as if singing their thanks
to the Creator of the world ... Even the horse neighed happily ... Only the farmer,
queer creature, gave no thanks, made no bracha, said no prayer, did not even lift
up his eyes to the heavens. Yisraelnyu lowered his eyes. He was ashamed to speak
to this man. He turned around and went back into the forest where he loudly
exclaimed: "Baruch ata ... Blessed are you, Hashem [God] ... for not having made me a goy."
Yisraelnyu thanked Hashem with his whole heart, understanding the meaning of
that blessing and being grateful for it for the first time in his life. Thank G-d
that he was not like that rough, coarse farmer who did not even know how to say
a word of thanks to Hashem, who was even worse than his own animals and
fowl!
The horse greeted the morning joyfully, so did the rooster. Even the birds in
the forest sang their thanks. The entire world offered praise and song while that
lowly farmer seemed to have been hitched up to a wagon. All he knew was how
to run.
That goy -- thought Yisraelnyu -- is his own slave, whose only reward is a pail
of water and a hard lump of bread. As this thought crossed his mind, he
suddenly remembered the next wonderful morning blessing: 'Baruch ata ...
Blessed are You, Hashem ... for not having made me a slave.'
A wonderful feeling enveloped his whole body. 'I am not a goy! I am not
a slave! Baruch Hashem!
Yisraelnyu felt like jumping and dancing, like running, to express his thanks
to Hashem, the Creator of the world, for all the kindness. He had shown him
by not making him a goy or a slave." [GERLITZ, M., 1983, p. 50-58]


Traditional Jewish views of the hated Christian is also reflected in a story by Sholem Asch, one of the most famous Yiddish novelists. In a tale about Jewish martyrology in the face of attacking Cossacks, painted as Nazi-like exterminators, Asch also writes:

"Shlomele opened the church for the priest and ran away swiftly so
as to not touch the walls of the church. He stopped at a distance so
as not to become 'unclean' from hearing the singing in the church.
And when the priest's bass voice reached him none the less, he
covered his ears with his hands in order not to hear the sounds, which
would stupefy his mind against the study of the Torah." [ASCH, S.,
1959, p. 48]

"Many folk songs ... used to be sung in the shtetl [the Eastern European Jewish village]," notes James Yaffe,

"songs which declared that all the goyim are drunkards and lechers,
and thick-headed muzhiks. By implication, of course, this made the
Jews a finer breed; the element of contempt in the song was
accompanied by an element of self-congratulation ... Though the shtetl
is far behind American Jews, it's extraordinary how much of those old
folk songs are still part of their consciousness ... It will be objected that
the ... inhabitants of the shtetl were unsophisticated people with little
experience of the gentile world. I can only say that in the course of my
interviews [with fellow Jews], I found the same opinions held by people
with wide experience of the gentile world." [YAFFE, J., 1968, p. 66]

Here's one of famous Nazi-hunter Simon Wiesenthal's contributions to Jewish (folk) history:

"[Wiesenthal's] own father used to tell him how a [Ukrainian] village priest, who
loved his schnapps, but couldn't always pay for his drinks, left his church key as security with a Jewish tavern-owner one Saturday night, promising to settle his
debt out of Sunday's collection. Next morning, when his Ukrainian parishioners couldn't get in to attend mass, he told them: 'The dirty Jew at the pub has locked
you out. Go get the key from him!' They did -- by beating the Jewish pub-keeper within an inch of his life, smashing or drinking everything in his tavern, celebrating mass, and then extending the celebration with a little local pogrom, amen!"
[LEVY, A., 1993, p. 24]


In Yiddish/Hebrew "folk tradition," Romanians are called "amolek" (an analogue to the despised Biblical "Ameleks"), the Irish called "beytzimer" (a pun on the word testes), the Germans the pejorative "deitshuk," the Italians "loksh" (noodle), the Moldevians "moldevan" ("a boor or lout, yokel"), and the Prussians "preissn" (cockroaches). Armenians were called "timkhe." "This Hebrew word in the Bible," noted Jewish scholar A. A. Roback, "with reference to Amalek, the hereditary foe of the Israelites, curiously enough, is employed by Jews in Galicia [Poland], as a nickname for the Armenians, whom, for some reason, they look upon as descendants of that eternally despised people." [ROBACK, p. 141] "Goy" (the categorical term for non-Jews), of course, means "an illiterate, coarse or lowbrow person." A "goyische kop," continues Roback, is a "Gentile head. A dunce, bonehead. It may be noted that the Gentiles referred to here were peasants, but the Jewish folk mind denies far-sighted, sensitive intelligence, understanding, and brilliance even to highly trained and distinguished non-Jews." [ROBACK, p. 139-140] (Traditional Jewish defamations of those of African descent will be discussed more extensively elsewhere). (Emanuel Levy notes the following about the family of famous Jewish Hollywood film director George Cukor: "Although the Cukors did not speak Yiddish, the common tongue of Eastern European Jews, later in his life he learned some phrases from his friends actors Paul Lukas and Fanny Brice. The vulgar and suggestive phrases in Yiddish intrigued him.") [LEVY, E., 1994, p. 22]

Here's a Jewish joke about their Italian neighbors (in Brooklyn, New York):

"Why do Italian men leave their fly open? To help them count to eleven."
[REIDER, J., 1985, p. 44]


A joke from Jewish circles (published in 1981) celebrating Jewish intelligence, Gentile stupidity, and Jewish fraud, runs like this:

"On a train in czarist Russia, a Jew is eating a whitefish,
wrapped in paper. A Gentile, sitting across the aisle, begins to
taunt him with various anti-Semitic epithets. Finally, he asks the
Jew, 'What makes you Jews so smart?'
'All right,' replies the Jew, 'I guess I'll have to tell you. It's
because we eat the head of the whitefish.'
'Well, if that's the secret,' says the Gentile, 'then I can be as
smart as you are.'
'That's right,' says the Jew, 'And in fact, I happen to have an
extra whitefish head with me. You can have it for five kopecks.'
The Gentile pays for the fish head and begins to eat. An hour
later the train stops at a station for a few minutes. The Gentile
leaves the train and comes back. 'Listen, Jew,' he says, 'You sold
me that whitefish head for five kopecks. But I just saw a whole
whitefish at the market for three kopecks.'
'See,' replies the Jew, 'You're getting smarter already.'"
[NOVAK/WALDOKS, 1981, p. 91]

"Not surprisingly," note William Novak and Moshe Waldoks about the above joke, "anti-goyism is rarely stressed in public discussions of Judaism ... But centuries of hostility between Gentiles and Jews have led to a large body of aggressive and unpleasant feelings on both sides." [NOVAK/WALDOKS, p. 91] Another extremely disturbing joke circulated in Jewish circles (one directly paralleling the vicious "Too bad Hitler didn't get all the Jews" tone) is noted by Jewish authors Stanley Rothman and S. Robert Lichter, who cite the work of Jewish psychoanalyst Theodore Reik:

"Reik explains Jewish wit as a safety valve that transforms perceived hostility
toward non-Jews in a manner designed to reduce the danger of retaliation.
Sometimes, however, Jewish jokes (told, of course, among Jews only) reveal
the anger quite directly:
'Little Moritz sees an historical film showing the early persecutions
of the Christians. During a Roman circus scene in which many
Christians are thrown to the lions, Moritz breaks out in sobs and
says to his mother: 'Look at that poor lion there, it has not got
any Goy to eat!' Under the guise of duty for the neglected beast
is an old hatred and repressed cruelty towards Gentiles. It breaks
through here, surprisingly, and reaches the emotional surface.'"
[ROTHMAN/LICHTER, 1982, p. 122]


While such Jewish defamations of the non-Jew, as part of the Jewish world view, identity, and folk history, are never foregrounded for popular analysis and discussion, Jewish attacks upon Gentile writings about Jews is omnipresent. Another Jewish attacker of T.S. Eliot, Anthony Julius, has recently published an entire volume assailing the non-Jewish author: T.S. Eliot, Anti-Semitism, and Literary Form. Among the most hated Eliot lines, again, by Jews, are from the pre-World War I poem, "Gerontion":

My house is a decayed house
And the jew squats on the window
sill, the owner
Spawned in some estaminet of Antwerp
Blistered in Brussels, patched and
peeled in London.

"[This] passage," declares Julius, "breathes hate ... The words (squat, sill, spawned, estaminet, blistered, etc.) intimate is 'spit' ... spitting at the Jew in this opening stanza is one of the few moments of passion in a poem that is animated by despair and exasperation ... " [RUBENSTEIN, A., p. 332]

For Julius, Eliot's image of a Jew who "squats at the window" is not only an image of being spit at, but also equated in Julius' mind with defecation. "'Going to write to the Jews,'" explains Julius, "was slang in France for announcing a trip to the lavatory." [KATZ, D. p. 11] Elsewhere, says the Jewish critic, Eliot evinced "indifference to Jewish pain" and edited a journal that had an unsigned review of a book about claims about the murder of Jews in Dachau. Among other things, the questionable review wondered why Jews, "among all unfortunates of the world, have a first claim on our compassion and help." "Here," says reviewer David Katz (himself Jewish), "Julius makes his most serious charge, suggesting that Eliot promoted the Holocaust by disputing the claims made by the victims." [KATZ, D, p. 11]

Ultimately, notes Katz, "Eliot's is a talent Julius cannot fully grasp outside of anti-Semitism. Julius has little patience for our appreciation of the supple ways of Modernism, linking its conscious fragmentation to an irrationality that courts anti-Semitism ... He finds Browning's 'Rabbi Ben Ezra' a superior poetic monologue to [Eliot's] 'Gerontion' solely because the former evinces a more favorable attitude toward Jews." [KATZ, D, p. 11]

Another of the recent articles defaming Eliot, by Norma Rosen, reflects the same dictatorial idea, i.e., whoever criticizes Jews is by definition an anti-Semite and, hence, by this sole criteria, a bad artist. "It falls to those," says Rosen, "who are willing to risk it (not only Jews, one hopes) to protest to the world that a writer cannot be great so long as anti-Semitism mars the work." [ROSEN, p. 14] (This kind of censorship -- if the author has ever in his/her life criticized Jews, all artwork from, or regarding, the artist is deemed qualitatively marred -- was echoed in 2002 at the Academy Awards. Jewish online journalist Matt Drudge featured a report about a film nominated for a number of Oscars. The movie, A Beautiful Mind, is based upon the life of mathematical genius John Nash, who, according to the book upon which the film is based, was extremely critical of Jews. "The root of all evil, as far as my personal life is concerned (life history) are Jews," Nash is quoted as writing. The prospect of an Oscar for the film now seemed doomed. "Three Academy members have come forward to reveal how they've switched their votes," reported Drudge. "Why am I voting for this Jew hater?' a veteran Acadmy Award member said earlier this week before voting. 'I am a Jew! I fell sick to my stomach.") [DRUDGE, 3-5-02; DRUDGE 3-9-02]

Jewish fanaticism in defaming non-Jewish literary traditions in a fine-toothed combing for anti-Semitism is noted by H. M. Daleski in his review of S. S. Prawer's volume about (non-Jewish) British author William Thackeray:

"In Israel at Vanity Fair, S. S. Prawer deals exhaustively -- and
exhaustingly -- with the representation of Jews in Thackeray's writings.
This includes all the writings, not only the author's many published
books but also his manifold work as a journalist and his private letters.
In addition, since Thackeray was a considerable illustrator and
illustrated many of his own writings -- not to mention the sketches that
he included in many of his letters -- Prawer provides numerous
reproductions of his drawings of Jews ... [Prawer] quotes copiously
and leaves us feeling reasonably certain that there is no mention of a
Jew or an allusion to anything Jewish, no matter how recondite, that has
escaped his capacious net ... The amount of material accumulated is so
overwhelming that one might be led to suppose that Thackeray was
obsessed with Jews; in fact most of the references, especially in the
novels, are incidental, and when one comes across them in context,
they do not draw quite the same attention to themselves." [DALESKI,
p. 223-224]

How about the great Russian novelist, Dostoevsky (of Crime and Punishment fame)? A French Jew, David Goldstein, denounced him as an anti-Semite in a book called Dostoevsky and the Jews. American Jewish scholar Gary Morson also expressed concern, saying that "it disturbed me that almost no one talked about [Dostoevsky's] anti-Semitism." Yet Morson also criticized Goldstein, saying,

"I was struck by how Goldstein handled the fact that earlier in his life
Dostoevsky wrote in defense of the Jews. For me, such a turn of
events raised the question of what made Dostoevsky change his mind,
but for Goldstein, who began with the assumption that anti-Semitism is
innate and that Dostoevsky was an anti-Semite 'a-priori,' the articles on
behalf of Jews were dismissed as hypocritical, a devious attempt to
appeal to liberals. Goldstein's model of anti-Semitism as a sort of
congenital disease ... itself seemed perilously close to prejudice."
[MORSON, p. 82]

More recently, Russian novelist and famous Soviet prisoner and refugee (to America) from communism, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, also is branded by some as an anti-Semite. Under particular scrutiny is Solzhenitsyn's Red Wheels, a novel based on historical fact, that described a Jewish assassin and financial sponsor of V.I. Lenin in less than flattering terms. "The facts are true," says Israeli scholar Abram Ben Yakov, in reviewing the book, " but the glue between them is anti-Semitic." [i.e., descriptions of the characters] [SINGER, N., p. 2] Solzhenitsyn had come under Jewish investigation for "anti-Semitism" as early as 1972, when the Zionist journal, Midstream, published an article by Mark Perakh. Perakh, said the New York Times, felt that "a disproportionately large number of unattractive Jews appear in his work." Among those defending Solzhenitsyn against attack was his wife, Natalia, who is half-Jewish. [GRENIER, R., 11-13-85, p. C21]

French playwright and novelist Jean Genet? "Whether or not Genet is an anti-Semite," says Edith Wyschogrod, "... comes to the fore in the content of the Arab-Israeli conflict in [his] Prisoner of Love. In teaching Genet, it will not do simply to cordon off bigotry and condemn it; rather, one must show how it seeps into his aesthetic." [Wyschogrod, p. 256]

The work of German philosopher Martin Heidegger is also dismissed by many Jews as, ultimately, the expressions of a closet Nazi. "Jewish philosophy," says Robert Gibbs, "... disavows Heidegger, seeing him a Nazi, even if a somewhat idiosyncratic one. It suspects that his philosophy was comfortable to Nazism, if not actually inclined to it." [GIBBS, p. 157] The Jewish philosopher Wittgenstein? There are some who think he too had an "anti-Semitic" streak. [SZABADOS, B., 3-99, p. 1-27]

In 2002, lobbyists succeeded in banning the Muslim holy book, the Koran (Quran), from the Los Angeles school system. As the Los Angeles Times reported:

"Los Angeles city school officials have pulled nearly 300 translations of the
Koran from school libraries after learning that commentary in the books was
derogatory towards Jews. Copies of 'The Meaning of the Holy Quran' were
donated in December to the Los Angeles Unified School District by a local
Muslim foundation ... On Monday, [Jim] Konantz [director of information
technology for the district] received a complaint from a history teacher who
concluded some of the book's footnotes were anti-Semitic."
[SMITH, D., 2-7-02]


With the modern world so hypersensitive to Jewish themes, in 1999, an eighth grader in Pennsylvania was even suspended from school for a week for turning in a fantasy paper about another planet entitled "Jewpiter," described by teachers as a "racist essay." The student denied that the paper was intended to be anti-Semitic and his outraged family launched a lawsuit against the school. [DUFFY, 4-27-99] In January 2000, a high school basketball coach at Seminole Presbyterian High School was fined $150 by the Florida High School Activities Association for violating a rule against the "use of profanity or other such gutter language by a coach." Coach Jan Bennett's reputed offense to officials was to say, "You can't line people up like Hitler did to the Jews during the Holocaust." [PURKS, S., 1-27-2000, p. 10C]

How about the world of visual art? Jewish art historian Eunice Lipton, in reviewing Degas' painting entitled "At the Stock Exchange," says

"If this picture doesn't equate secretive, clever, and vulgar financial
scheming with 'Jew,' I've never seen a picture that does." [LIPTON, p.
289]

Even a Jewish author in England, Chaim Bermant, was taken aback by a fellow Jew's search for anti-Semitism in some paintings by John Singer Sergeant, saying,

"Kathleen Adler, for example, in an essay on John Singer Sergeant,
would have us believe that he was an anti-Semite because of his
portraits of a Jewish art dealer, Asher Wertheimer, and family were less
than flattering: Wertheimer is represented as looking slightly off to
the side, in a manner which hints at furtiveness. This portrait could be
and, indeed, often was, regarded as the very image of the stereotype
of the rich Jew, excessively flashy and, since art dealing was viewed
only slightly above money-lending, probably of somewhat dubious
honesty. She points to the cigar in his hand and believes that it
'indicates not only wealth but also vulgarity and sexuality,' and has
similar misgivings about the portraits of his wife and daughters. The
fact that they were a true likeness seems to be an irrelevance."
[BERMANT, p. 7]

In 2001, Jewish lobbying groups expressed outrage that Swedish cartoonist Lars Hillersberg had received a governmental lifetime stipend. Nominated for the honor by the Swedish National Board of Artists, Hillersberg was declared by "Jewish community leaders" to be an anti-Semite. "I hate Jews," Hillersberg had once remarked, "but not only Jews -- I hate everybody." [JEWISH CHRONICLE, 2-16-01, p. 7]

Classical music? Wagner is a given. How about Johann Sebastian Bach, particularly his masterpiece St. John Passion. As the Philadelphia Inquirer Magazine noted in 2001:

The idea that [Bach] and his St. John Passion may be anti-Judaic (against the
religion, as opposed to the race) surfaced five years ago at Swarthmore
College, and now seems clearly verified five years later by the academic
community, as spelled out in a Temple University Jewish Studies-sponsored
panel ... Even if the piece is only momentarily offensive -- the general
opinion, and one with which I agree -- some in the financially fragile
early-music world may not want to present it, for fear of protests
already seen in some cities." [STEARNS, D., 2-27-01]

The witch hunt bandwagon to find anti-Semites, and the search to smear the dead, are so great that in 2000 a Chicago-based librarian sent the following query to a Jewish-led discussion about anti-Semitism on the Internet:

"I am a reference librarian at a public library. My patron is an artist and
amateur researcher who has been studying the work of French artist
Marcel Duchamp. She believes she's discovered anti-Semitic references
and images in his work, and she wants to know if anyone else has ever
commented on this. Is there any evidence indicating that Duchamp was
anti-Semitic or a Nazi sympathizer? I've looked through our holdings on
Duchamp and checked a few article databases to no avail." [SLOANE, P.,
10-27-00]

Alas, none of the scholars on the subject could help her (yet).


"The dilemma of appreciating the art of an anti-Semite," says Bernard Raskas, "is a matter that confronts every thinking Jew. Chopin, Degas, Kant, Rodin, Joseph Campbell, Ronald Dahl, etc., displayed forms of anti-Semitism." [RASKAS, p. 6] And what of Jewish betrayers and works of art that celebrate Christian themes? "Should we play and listen to the works of Mendelssohn and Mahler, both of whom converted to Christianity? Should we conduct and play Handel's [Christian] Messiah? Should Shakespeare not be read because Shylock has entered the English vocabulary as an anti-Semitic word? Should Israelis stop using [German-made] Mercedes cars as taxis and American Jews refrain from driving Volkswagens? Ambiguities abound." [RASKAS, p. 11]

Ultimately, if aforementioned Jewish critics like E. L. Dachslager really want to censor all literature that criticizes Jewry, and others like Rosen want to at least demote them from greatness to unread obscurity, entire libraries will have to be burned down and/or trucked to inaccessible warehouses. Not only literature but American and world history will have to be totally reshaped (as is happening) to accommodate an image entirely flattering to Jews. The problem is that some of the greatest and most respected authors in American (let alone worldwide) writing, associated with the best of the American democratic tradition and progressive values, as well as some of the foremost political strugglers for American liberty, published sometimes bitter condemnations about the facts of self-absorbed Jewish particularism and behavior.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, for example, the great American essayist of self-reliance, transcendence of the material world, and the sacredness of individual expression and self-reliance (all anathema to traditional Jewish materialist collectivism) wrote that

"the sufferance which is the badge of the Jew has made him, in these
days, the ruler of the rulers of the earth." [EMERSON, p. 39]
As Jewish scholar Robert Michael complains," [Emerson] saw Judaism, the Jewish idea, as a stumbling block to authentic human liberation. The Jewish God was cruel; the Jewish Law stifling. What was bad about Christianity was its Jewish substance. At the less ideological level, his work is also peppered with anti-Jewish sentiments ... In his journal entry for 3 July 1839, he wrote: In the Allston Gallery the Polish Jews are an offense to me; they degrade and animalize." [MICHAEL, R., 9-7-98]

The great British poet, Lord Byron, wrote "Tis gold, not steel, that rears the conqueror's arch ... Jews ... direct the world with all the spirit of their sect." [FELDMAN, p. 638]

Mark Twain, whose novel Huckleberry Finn is usually regarded as a pioneering classic of interracial compassion, was solicited by the American Hebrew magazine in 1890 for his views on anti-Semitism. Twain wrote a short reply, for the most part expounding the requisite platitudes for the Jewish journal. [TWAIN, FABLES, p. 445-448] Twain elaborated more openly upon the antisemitic theme nine years later in Harper's magazine:

"In the cotton states, after the [Civil] war, the simple and ignorant Negroes
made the crops for the white planter on shares. The Jew came down in
force, set up shop on the plantation, supplied all the Negroes on credit,
and at the end of the season was proprietor of the Negro’s share of the
present crop and of part of his share of the next one ... The Jew is being
legislated out of Russia. The reason is not concealed. The movement
was instituted because the Christian peasant and villager stood no chance
against his commercial abilities. He was always ready to lend money on
a crop, and sell vodka and other necessities of life on credit while the
crop was growing. When settlement day came he owned the crop; the
next year or year after he owned the farm ...."

"In the dull and ignorant England of John's time everybody got into debt
to the Jew. He gathered all lucrative enterprise into his hands; He was the
king of commerce; he was ready to be helpful in a profitable way; he
even financed the crusades for the rescue of [Christianity's Holy]
sepulcher [from the Muslims of Jerusalem] . . ... He had to be banished
from the realm... For the like reasons, Spain had to banish him four
hundred years ago, and Austria about a couple of centuries later. In all
ages Christian Europe has been obliged to curtail his activities. If he
entered upon a mechanical trade, the Christian had to retire from it. If
he set up as a doctor, he was the best one, and he took the business. If
he exploited agriculture, the other farmer had to get at something else.
Since there was no way to successfully compete with him in any
vocation, the law had to step in to save the Christian from the
poorhouse, even ways to get rich. This history has a very, very
commercial look, a most sordid and practical commercial look ... I
am convinced that the persecution of the Jew is due not in any large
degree to religious practice. No, the Jew is a money-getter ... With
precocious wisdom [the Jew] found out in the moving of time
that some men worship rank, some worship heroes, some worship
power, some worship God, and that over these ideals, they dispute
and cannot unite -- but they all worship money; so [the Jew] made
it the end and aim of his life to get it. He was at it in Egypt thirty six
centuries ago; he was at it in Rome when the Christian got persecuted
by mistake for him; he has been at it ever since. The cost to him has
been heavy; his success has made the whole human race his enemy."
[TWAIN, Conc. p. 360-363]

Curiously, a Jewish scholar bends the essay from which this excerpt comes, Concerning the Jews, to his own needs for Jewish confirmation. He sees in Twain's piece "remarkable praise for Jewish characteristics and virtue while at the same time striving for balance ... What is really noteworthy about Concerning the Jews ... is its effect to make judgments based upon reliable facts rather than perceived myths." [SARNA, p. 69]

In the mood of the Jewish martyr-hero tradition enforced upon modern America, in 1998 the Baltimore Sun decided that its readers would be interested not only in Twain's 1898 article, but specifically an examination of whether it was anti-Semitic or not. Kenneth Lasson quotes this excerpt from Twain to conclude his own piece: "All other forces pass, but the Jews remain. What is the secret of their immortality?" [LASSON, p. 18]

H.G. Wells, the great British novelist and social critic, commented that

"A careful study of anti-Semitism prejudice and accusations might
be of great value to many Jews who do not realize the irritation they
inflict."

The novelist D. H. Lawrence wrote:

"Why humanity has hated the Jews, I have come to the conclusion, is
that the Jews have always taken religion -- since the great days, that is
-- and used it for their own personal and private gratification, as if it
were a thing administered to their own importance and well-being and
conceit ... The material world dominates them with a base kind of
fetish domination. Yet they know the truth all the while. Yet they
cringe their buttocks to the fetish of Mammon [money] ...."
[GOULD, p. 225]

Novelist Theodore Dreiser:

"He [the Jew] has been in America all of two hundred years, and he
has not faded into a pure America by any means, and he will not.
As I said before, he maintains his religious dogmas and his racial
sympathies, race characteristics, and race cohesion as against all
types of nationalities surrounding him whatsoever." [GOULD, p. 298]

George Sand, the French author who skirted gender prejudice by having a male pseudonym, noted that

"I saw in the 'Wandering Jew' the personification of the Jewish people,
exiled in the Middle Ages. Nevertheless, they are once again extremely
rich, owing to their unfailing rude greediness and their indefatigable
activity. With their hard-heartedness that they extend towards people of
other faiths and races, they are at the point of making themselves kings
of the world. This people can thank its obstinacy that France will be
Judaized within fifty years. Already some wise Jews prophesy this
frankly." [1857]

James Fenimore Cooper (Last of the Mohicans) ? "His 1831 novel The Bravo: A Tale depicts Jews as usurers whose shrewdness has enabled them to survive under oppression, but he hardly makes them likeable or sympathetic characters." Other passages critical of Jews, and subject to "anti-Semitic" investigation by Jewish researchers, may be found in the work of the "phenomenally popular Mrs. E. D.E.N. Southworth" (1959) and Julia Ward Howe, mid-19th century the activist reformer. Francis M. Crawford, "one of the most successful novelists of the late nineteenth century," also describes Jewish characters in unflattering terms and merits listing in a book about anti-Semitism. [DOBKOWSKI, M., 1979, p. 82-83, 88-89]


In 1932, in response to a request by the American Hebrew and Jewish Tribune for sympathetic commentary about Jews on the occasion of their new year, the Irish writer George Bernard Shaw lashed out, saying

"The Jews are worse than my own people... Those Jews who still want
to be the chosen race -- chosen by the late Lord Balfour -- can go to
Palestine and stew in their own juice. The rest had better stop being
Jews and start being human beings. The day of races and nations are
over. The future belongs to the citizens of the world who know
they are not better than other people." [SHAW, B., 1932]

After the death of the eminent folklorist Joseph Campbell in 1987 (widely popularized in a series of interviews with Bill Moyer for PBS TV) "at least five people" came out on record to assail him as an anti-Semite. A former Jewish student, Eve Feldman, for example, claimed that in a meeting with her in 1968 Campbell "was sweating and pacing and running his fingers through his hair. He began spewing out this garbage, about how the college was going Jewish ... He said that the Jews had ruined 20th century culture and went through a list of Jewish artists ... It was horrifying. It was like watching someone have a fit or having them vomit uncontrollably all over you." [GOULD, p. 357]

The great Indian pacifist, Mahatma Gandhi (1869-1948) said in 1938

The cry for a national home for the Jews does not make much appeal
to me ...Why should they not, like other people of the earth, make that
country their home where they are born and where they earn their
livelihood? ... The Palestine of Biblical conception is not a geographical
tract. It is in their hearts ... As it is, they are co-sharers with the British
in despoiling a people who have done no wrong to them. [GOULD, p.
397] (Indian leader Nehru and Chinese communist hero Mao Tse Tung
also criticized the Jewish state). [MARX, K. /RUNES, 1959, p. viii]

Even some of the most celebrated heroes of American patriotism were critical -- even caustic -- about Jews, their clannish lifestyle, and their exploitive economic practices in America. No less a patriotic political figure than the first President of the United States, George Washington, singled out Jews for contempt when they, in their speculations in American currency, undermined the fragile early economy. In one account, Washington referred to the traditionally known "tribe" of Israel, dressed in the their uniformly black Orthodox clothing, as the "tribe of black gentry." In a second criticism, he made reference to their traditional hanging of an effigy of Haman (an arch enemy of the Jews in ancient Persia), a yearly tradition everywhere for Jews at Purim.

"The tribe of black gentry work more effectually against us than the
enemy’s' arms. They are a hundred times more dangerous to our liberties
and the great cause we are engaged in." (1779)

"It is much to be lamented, that each State, long ere this, has not
hunted them down, as pests to society, and the greatest enemies we have
to the happiness of America. I would to God, that some of the most
atrocious in each state, was hung upon a gallows, five times as high
as the one prepared by Haman. No punishment, in my opinion, is too
great for the man who can build his greatness upon his country's ruin."
(1778) [SCHROEDER, p. 125-126]

It is astonishing that Jews, as an entity, were so noticeable for such criticism when at this time in early American history they numbered only 2500-3000 people, about one-tenth of one per cent of the population. [DANZGER, p. 19] Washington, in later years, formally passed along the expected political expediencies to the American Jewish community; some of those texts are still cited by Jewish scholars to this day as evidence that Washington appreciated Jewish contributions to early America. (A 1790 letter Washington wrote to the Jews of Rhode Island is "still studied today in Jewish religious schools as a sort of founding charter of American Jewish freedom.") [GOLDBERG, p. 83]

Washington's exasperations with Jews as unscrupulous profiteers, detrimental to national interests, was similarly echoed by General Ulysses S. Grant (another future President) during the Civil War. Frustrated and enraged by incessant Jewish black market economic activity in the South, particularly in cotton, Grant tried to expel Jews as a group from Tennessee in 1862, stating that "Jews as a class violate every regulation of trade established in the Treasury Department, and also department orders." [WERTHEIMER] This attempt by Grant, to single out Jews as an entity, during the pressures of the Civil War, is today considered by Jewish scholars to be one of the most profound acts of anti-Semitism in American history. Others who made similar charges about Jews were well-known Union army generals William T. Sherman and Benjamin Butler, as well as Senator Henry Wilson of Massachusetts. As Jewish author Michael Dobkowksi frames it:

"It was alleged by Senator Henry Wilson of Massachusetts and Generals
Benjamin Butler, William T. Sherman, and Ulysses S. Grant, as well as
others, that Jews were engaged in passing counterfeit money; that they
fed the inflation by charging outrageous prices; that they were driving
well-established Christian firms out of business by using unfair competitive
methods and generally were parasites who thrived on the misery of
others." [DOBKOWSKI, M., 1979, p. 83]

As we have more than amply seen already, an exploitive Jewish history during war conditions is not uncommon. Another testament, in the aftermath of the Nazi invasion of Poland, is that of Chaim Kaplan who noted the reputation of immigrant Jews in the Soviet-Polish border areas: "The bad behavior of some of our people in the border towns which were annexed to Russia has made us all hated and unwanted ... Until the storm [war conditions] should subside, they occupied themselves with all kinds of ugly speculation, which has since become their livelihood and life's work. The émigrés created an atmosphere of profiteering." [KAPLAN, C., p. 90]

Another historical icon of American democracy, Thomas Jefferson, in a private letter, cited the works of others as his own opinion about Jewish ethics:

"Ethics were so little studied among the Jews, that, in their whole
compilation called the Talmud, there is only one treatise on moral
subjects. Their books of morals chiefly consisted in a minute
enumeration of duties ... What a wretched depravity of sentiment
and manners must have prevailed before such corrupt maxims could
have attained credit. It is impossible to collect from these writings a
consistent series of moral Doctrine." [CAPPON, p. 383]

"Moses," said Jefferson elsewhere, ".... instilled into his people the most anti-social spirit towards other nations; the other [Jesus/the Christian] preaches philanthropy and universal charity and benevolence." [GOULD, p. 75]

John Quincy Adams, another early American president, visited a synagogue in Amsterdam and bitterly remarked in his diary:

"I am sure [the Jews in Amsterdam] are all wretched creatures for I think
I never saw in my life such a set of miserable looking people, and they
would steal your eyes out of your head if they could." [ADAMS, p. 59]

Commenting on Jewish religious identity, Thomas Paine (1737-1789), author of the famous American patriotic pamphlet Common Sense, wrote that

"The character of Moses as stated in the Bible is the most horrid that
can be imagined. If those accounts are true, he was the wretch that first
began and carried on wars on the score or on the pretense of religion;
and under the mask, or the infatuation, committed the most unexampled
atrocities that are to be found in the history of any nation." [GOULD, p.
76]

Henry Feingold suggest that Jewish dual allegiance (to both Jewish and American identities) can be "especially vexing for the Jewish-conscious historians" who are especially numerous these days. Feingold cites traditional American folk heroes like Henry Ford, Charles Lindbergh, and Ulysses S. Grant as being first and foremost, to Jewish scholars, anti-Semites, as is rendered the entire American Populist movement at the turn of the twentieth century. [FEINGOLD, p. 36-37] Famed World War II General George S. Patton? Rabbi Marvin Hier's Holocaust documentary, The Long Way Home, says the Baltimore Jewish Times, "revealed that U.S. Army Gen. George S. Patton believed Holocaust survivors should be interned in Displaced Person camps. 'People did not know that Patton wrote in his diary that Jews are the lowest of the low and have to be kept behind barbed wire,' [Hier] said.'" [HIRSCH, R., 4-24-98, p. 38]

Throw Thomas Edison into the list. Although author Neil Baldwin's "editor thought Baldwin dwelled on Edison's relationship with Jews too much" in his book about the great American inventor, all of the Jewish-related material remained. Edison, says Baldwin, had a "Shylock complex" about Jews. "I wish," wrote Edison, "they would all quit making money." [EZOR, p. 46]


Modern Jewish anti-"anti-Semitic" discourse insists that all such historical and critical commentary should never be put to the test of open evidential debate but, rather, that such criticism is merely part of baseless, groundless, and irrational prejudice. It should therefore, the argument goes, not be seen in the first place; it is best, in fact, forbidden.

This attitude of free speech suppression is exemplified these days, in an institutional sense, by one of the best known and most powerful Jewish lobbying organizations, the Simon Wiesenthal Center for Holocaust Studies, which, in the words of the American Civil Liberties Union, waged "a campaign pressuring Internet Service providers to censor the Web page of right wing hate groups housed on their servers." [ACLU, Internet ONLINE, 1996] What exactly, one wonders, is a "right wing hate group?" Who decides its definition to bar their contribution to critical exchange? Would the former criticisms of Jews by Mark Twain, George Washington, and George Bernard Shaw rate as "right wing hate" material? If so, would we have to conclude that everything else they had to say was no doubt subtly contaminated by "hate" too? Does the Wiesenthal Center "hate" anybody? Would its director, an Orthodox rabbi named Marvin Hier, censor the great Jewish philosopher, Baruch Spinoza, when he called traditional Jewry "a hating people?" What would Rabbi Hier say when publicly confronted with some of the most vile material in the Talmud? Should that be kept off the Internet? Should it be banned? Don't people have the right to explore all facts and opinions available to decide their own? Isn't that the most intelligent way to come to an opinion in the first place? Isn't it the beauty of the Internet that, by its very unedited nature, it has the potential to be a democratic forum of profound proportions?

One of the Wiesenthal Center's stock-in-trades is a kind of Inquisition against whatever it defines as anti-Semitism. High priority (by the Wiesenthal Center and virtually all other Jewish "watchdog" groups) are the so-called "Holocaust Deniers" espousing "Holocaust revisionism." Often (but not always) right-wingers, Holocaust deniers argue that the Jewish Holocaust is a conspiratorial myth and never (or in minor form) happened. Whatever the merits of their arguments, one would presume that they would have, in a free society, the right to state their case and then be thoroughly discredited in the open exchange of contesting evidence. Not so. The Wiesenthal Center, and other Jewish lobbying organizations, and sometimes non-Jewish sympathizers, have largely succeeded in internationally censoring them. (The Wiesenthal Center even had the audacity in 2001 to "initiate an international campaign to have YMCAs around the world stop funding the world center." Why does this Jewish lobbying group seek to fulfill anti-Jewish conspiracy theories and economically break a Christian organization? Because the YMCA's world center in Geneva dared to indict the state of Israel in a report for its "oppression" of Palestinians.) [WOHLGELERNTER, E., 2-16-01, p. 1A]

"Holocaust denial is not a serious scholarly debate," Antony Polansky, a Jewish professor and Holocaust survivor told a campus audience, "This is a new form of hate propaganda. This is not a form of first amendment issue." [RESPONSE, SPRING, 1994, p. 7] Jewish critic Mary Lefkokwitz noted the case of a Northwestern University engineering professor, Earl Butz (author of a volume on the Holocaust entitled The Hoax of the Twentieth Century), in 1996: "It is entirely appropriate that a professor's use of university property, even of something as tangential as a website, should come under scrutiny, if that professor uses it for the purpose of disseminating non-historical information as is claimed in the current controversy about a professor's placing of Holocaust denial propaganda on the Northwestern University website." [LEFKOWITZ, p. 186]

In 1994, Yale, Brown, and Harvard University were among those universities that refused to print an ad in the campus paper by "The Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust." A few colleges did run the ad. Portland's major daily, The Oregonian, published the ad and ended up under Jewish assault, eventually apologizing for its decision. [RESPONSE, SPRING, 1994, p. 7] In 1996 David Irving, an alleged "holocaust denier," had a manuscript, Goebbels: Mastermind of the Third Reich, accepted for publication at St. Martin's Press. Described by one reviewer as "soft pedaling ... German blame for the treatment of Jews," under massive Jewish pressure the publisher reversed its decision to produce the volume. [RESPONSE, SPRING, p. 1996, p. 12]

In Canada, "Jewish pressure" sought, via trials in 1985 and 1988, to send Ernst Zundel to prison for publishing a pamphlet that claimed the Holocaust never happened. [DERSHOWITZ, p. 171] "Zundel was convicted in Toronto in 1988," notes the Toronto Star, "of spreading false news but the conviction was declared unconstitutional in 1992 by the Supreme Court of Canada." [TORONTO STAR, 4-18-95, p. A3] "Zundel -- producer of a British-based writing called Did the Six Million Really Die? -- was actually tried twice "on the charge of publishing views he knew to be false." [BAIN, p. 45] The first trial was well covered by the Canadian news media and afforded Zundel widespread publicity. "Media coverage," noted Sherri Aikenhead in MacLean's magazine, "was so intense that it provoked fierce arguments -- particularly among Jewish activists -- about whose interests the reports served." [AIKENHEAD, p. 44] For the second Zundel trial, none of the Canadian national news agency's 100 member newspapers covered the story. "What is curious," wrote George Bain in a MacClean's editorial, "is the quickness and near unanimity with which the media managers insist that no representations to them, no feeling of pressure, affected their editorial decisions on how to play -- or play down -- the second Zundel trial. Curiously, only Ian Urquhart of the [Toronto] Star, the newspaper that (though 'judiciously,' as he puts it) covered the second trial throughout, acknowledged that he received representatives from the Jewish community about publicizing Zundel's hateful views." [BAIN, p. 45] Because of Jewish lobbying efforts, an El Paso, Texas, radio station cancelled its contract Zundel, and dropped his program there, "Voice of Freedom," [RESPONSE, Spring 1994] as did cable station in California. (Haters of Zundel succeeded in burning his house down).

This particular Jewish tact of intensive lobbying for censorship is not new. We have seen the exact same thing as far back as 1700 when powerful Jewish lobbyists in Germany successfully censored Johann Eisenmenger's scholarly critique about Jews. In 2001, the Board of Deputies of British Jews, attempted to sell at auction Sir Richard Burton's anti-Jewish manuscript entitled "Human Sacrifice Among the Sephardine or Eastern Jews." (Burton is best known as a 19th century world explorer and translator of Tales of the Arabian Nights and the Kama Sutra). This work about Jews was never published. As the Jewish Telegraphic Agency explains it:

"[Burton] was British consul in Damascus in 1870-71, but was recalled after
disputes with his superiors, the Ottoman government of Syria, local Christian
missionaries -- and even a small clique of powerful Jewish moneylenders in
Damascus ... W. H. Wilkins [tried to publish it in 1896 but] the Board of
Deputies was on its guard and threatened to sue for libel. The book was
withdrawn. The manuscript passed through several more hands before the
Board managed to obtain it through court action in 1909." [GREENE, R., 6-6-01]

The Board of Deputies of British Jews, notes JTA, "sought to sell the document after suppressing it for nearly 100 years." Lord Janner, a former president of the Board, expressed outrage that the Board sought to sell the work. In failing to find a buyer (for over $200,000) the manuscript for sale brought attention attracting attention to the work: it was "the worst of both worlds -- the contents of this disgraceful document have been publicized, and the Board has not raised the resources it needs." [GREENE, R., 6-6-01]

In efforts to boycott a prominent right-wing critic of Jews in the 1940s and 1950s, Gerald K. Smith, "working together," says Benjamin Ginsberg, "officials of the American Jewish Committee, American Jewish Congress, and the Anti-Defamation League would approach the publishers of major newspapers and owners of radio stations in cities where Smith had scheduled appearances, to ask that Smith be given no coverage whatsoever. If newspapers failed to cooperate on a voluntary basis, Jewish organizations were usually able to secure their compliance by threatening boycotts of Jewish advertisers. The strategy of dynamic silence was extremely effective." [GINBSBERG, B., 1993, p. 124] The victim of this particular censorship was decried as a right-wing extremist. But this methodology in the suppression of free speech reflects Jewish tactics over history, to our own day, in suppressing any and all criticism about them.

"Some European governments," wrote David Stannard in 1996, "have forcibly prohibited anti-Zionists from speaking in public. A California court has awarded $100,000 to a survivor of Auschwitz for the pain and suffering he endured in an effort to prove untrue the claims of an antisemitic organization that the Nazis did not kill Jews in gas chambers. In Austria the publishers of magazines attempting to minimize Jewish deaths in the Holocaust have been indicted and convicted for their efforts. A professional anti-Semite who publicly denied the reality of the Holocaust has been sent to prison in Canada. German law states that 'denial of the Holocaust' is punishable by up to five years in jail. And the United States has prohibited people who have expressed similar beliefs from entering the country. Other examples abound." [STANNARD, p. 164]

In 1995 a young German was sent to prison for three and a half years for saying to tourists at Auschwitz that the Holocaust "is a giant farce." [STANNARD, p. 200] In France, under "a new law [that] makes it a crime to publicly deny the Nazi murder of six million Jews" [RESPONSE, SUMMER 1991, p. 12] Jean Moulin University professor Bernard Notin was fined $2500 in 1990 and suspended from teaching. His crime was "an article that denied the existence of gas chambers at Hitler's death camps." [RESPONSE, SPRING, 1993, p. 11] Another Frenchman, Robert Faurisson, was find over $21,000 for a similar crime. The magazine that published his denial of gas chambers was fined $55,000 [RESPONSE, SUMMER, 1991, p. 12] Faurisson, a teacher at the Sorbonne, even had his classes suspended. "The scale of attacks on Faurisson," wrote Jewish author Noam Chomsky, "contrasts strikingly with the reach of his own writings. How many readers have come across a line he has written, or heard his name, apart from these attacks?" [BRENNER, p. 347] Faurisson was physically assaulted on numerous occasions, and once was sent to the hospital for surgery to repair his face. A group called "The Sons of the Memory of the Jewish Children" claimed responsibility for the most brutal attack. "His jaw was smashed," said a French fireman who gave the 68-year old man first aid, "They destroyed his face." [GREISAMER, L., 10-1-89, p. 14]

In 1984 David McCalden, described by one Jewish magazine as a 'professional anti-Semite," was invited to speak at a yearly California Librarian Association conference in a program called "Free Speech and the Holocaust." Although the CLA Executive Director, Stephan Moses, was himself a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany, he supported on principle McCalden's right as a publisher to participate in the library convention. "Both McCalden's right to free speech and the pressures applied to the CLA," note Mark Elliot and Michael McClintock, "became hotly debated issues." [ELLIOT, p. 36] Under intense and widespread Jewish pressure, McCalden's invitation to speak was eventually cancelled. (In contrast, here's what American Library Association officials say about the subject of such censorship, as noted in its booklet entitled "Intellectual Freedom:" "As a personal liberty, intellectual freedom forms the foundation of our democracy. It is an essential part of government by the people. The right to vote is not enough -- we also must be able to take part in forming public opinion by engaging in open and vigorous debate on controversial matters." [ALA, p. 1])

In 1996, in Switzerland, Reinard Peters was fined $4,000 by a Swiss court and ordered to pay $6,800 in legal costs "after being found guilty of breaking a law that makes it a crime to discriminate against ethnic groups or incite racial hatred ..." He was found guilty of publishing a brochure that "claimed Jewish greed was responsible for causing World War II." [LEVY, T, 9-18-96]

In Poland, in 1998, Michael Chajn, a member of the Polish-Jewish Student Association at Warsaw University, managed (with the help of a Jewish magazine) to have removed from one bookseller's shelves all books he personally declared to be "anti-Semitic." Volumes included a book about "Jewish ritual murders," "cooperation of Jews and Masons," and another that states that "Jews were the majority in all [Solidarity -- the anti-communist organization] ministerial positions since 1989." In essence, Chajn and his Jewish supporters flexed their power to effectively censor anything in the bookstore they didn't like. Who (other than the Jewish Thought Police) can confirm that such books are preposterous, insidious lies without being allowed to read them? Once such power to stifle free thought about themselves begins, where -- and how -- does it end?

Also in Poland, in 1999 professor Dariusz Ratajczak of Opole University fell under attack for writing that 'there never existed ... a plan of systematic extermination of the Jews." [GOLIK, p. 7] "According to the recent law of the National Remembrance Institute," noted the Warsaw Voice, "such public sentiments are subject to a fine or a sentence of up to three years in prison ... The maximum punishment the university committee can inflict is a ban on work as an instructor." [GOLIK, p. 7]

In March 1998, an 84-year old French convert to Islam, Roger Garaudy, was fined 150,000 francs (about $30,000) by the Paris Court of Justice for writing a book, "The Founding Myths of Israeli Politics," which, among other things, argues that the Holocaust was exaggerated to help create the modern state of Israel. The book was published by La Vielle Taupe, described by the Jewish Chronicle as "an extreme left wing publishing house." Garaudy was the vice-president of the French National Assembly from 1956-58 and a communist party official until 1970. On the day of the guilty verdict, Jews from the right-wing Betar (Zionist) organization violently attacked a group of Garaudy's supporters inside the court building. Two Arab journalists were also beaten outside. "Crif" -- "the largest umbrella organization of French Jewry" -- condemned Garaudy's volume as "a revolting ideological and political maneuver aimed at delegitimizing the very existence of Israel." At an earlier press conference in Cairo, the book's author noted that "in France you can attack the Pope or President Jacques Chirac. The important thing is not to criticize Israel or else you are lost. The media is 95 per cent in the hands of the Zionists." [ZLOTOWSKI, p. 2] Curiously, before Garaudy took such a strong stand against Zionism, in 1978 World Zionist Organization president Nahum Goldmann called Garaudy "a good friend of mine, whose courage and free-ranging opinions I much admire." [GOLDMANN, N., 1978, p. 204]

Other leftist-oriented "Holocaust-deniers" in recent years have included Paul Rassinier (a former communist who was incarcerated in the Nazi's Buchenwald concentration camp), the aforementioned Robert Faurisson (a French professor suspended by his university for his writings on the subject) sociologist Serge Thion, Gabor T. Rittersporn, and Jean-Gabriel Cohn-Bendt. [MENDES, p. 108-111] (Even the writings of the pioneer of communism, Karl Marx, grandson of rabbis [he was also reported to have descended from the famous French Talmudic scholar Rashi on his father's side, and the famous rabbi Maharal, Rabbi Low of Prague, on his mother's] [RAPOPORT, L., 1990, p. 235] have fallen beneath the censor's pen. As Dagobert Runes notes about Marx's most anti-Jewish texts: "It is interesting to note that most of Marx's anti-Semitic references, in his correspondence, his journalist writings, and his books, were entirely eliminated by his various editors.") [MARX, K., 1959, p. xii]

Jewish enforcement of its Holocaust dogmas has a transnational reach. In 1998, the New York Times noted that "the European Parliament voted to lift the legal immunity of Jean-Marie Le Pen, one of its members, so that a German prosecutor can begin a criminal investigation of remarks Mr. Le Pen made belittling the Holocaust ... [Le Pen] dismissed the extermination of the European Jews as a 'detail of history.' Since 'Holocaust denial' or 'minimizing the crimes of the Third Reich' is against the law in Germany, he can now be prosecuted there. Conviction could bring a fine and a prison sentence of up to five years." [WHEATCROFT, p. A19] Le Pen, a well-known right-wing French politician, made the "belittling' comments in Munich, Germany.

It is indeed mind-boggling that anyone in our day and age can publicly deny with absolutely impunity the very existence of God with no care or repercussion whatsoever, and freely impugn virtually anything else imaginable, yet to deny the Jewish Holocaust is grounds for persecution, censorship, and in many places -- even in western democracies -- fines and imprisonment. Denying the Holocaust is the new Blasphemy, powerfully punished with gags upon all and everyone through much of the world by a Jewish Inquisition that frames itself and its legends beyond reproach and question. And the latent issue here is not, of course, the reality of the Holocaust, (which surely did exist insofar as huge numbers of Jews were murdered, as well as others) but one group's power to internationally control -- and ultimately close -- free discourse. That the Holocaust deniers are in grave error should be easy to argue and prove in open discourse. If any of the deniers are malevolently minded then open controversy would expose that too. But the denial of free expression -- in this, as any, case -- inevitably nurtures that which the New Inquisition seeks to stifle: the conviction among counter-believers that something indeed is being hidden by those who suppress and suffocate oppositional voices. And the denial of free expression sets the precedent for, and contagion into, any and all realms.

It is among the oldest of axioms of moral faith that a free public exchange of ideas leads inevitably to the truth. That the Nazis stepped in and killed this premise has relevance here. The Anti-Defamation League's rationale (per Director Abraham Foxman) for the banning of all paid advertisements that argue that the Holocaust didn't happen runs like this: "The intent of such advertisements attacking the facts of the Holocaust, and by framing this attack merely an unorthodox viewpoint or a challenge to 'open debate,' subtly encode traditional antisemitic images of Jews as controllers of academia and the media, and Jews as exploiters of non-Jewish guilt. These beliefs, of course, bear comparison to the preaching which brought Hitler to power in prewar Germany." [FOXMAN, p. 322] Here Foxman turns reality completely upside down. Whoever argues for freedom of speech on philosophical grounds, and objects to unified Jewish attempts towards complete censorship of this -- or any -- issue, is bizarrely accused by Foxman of "the preachings which brought Hitler to power."

In 1995 an 18-year old woman checked out The Hoax of the Century by the aforementioned Northwestern engineering professor, A. R. Butz, from the library of the small Canadian town of Didbury. The woman then "called Canada Customs and discovered the book is on a list of works denied entry into Canada but she was told that possessing the book was not illegal. [The woman] decided to turn it over to the Mounties [Canadian police] anyway, informing the public librarian, Tim Elliot, after the fact." Informed of the status of the book, the librarian told the police he didn't want the book back and they destroyed it. This story made the local news as a controversial issue, and Bernie Farber, a spokesman for the Canadian Jewish Congress, publicly complimented the library patron for taking the book to the authorities. [CANADIAN BUS AND CURRENT AFFAIRS 2-13-95, p. 25]

Popular Jewish hatred of "Holocaust revisionism" is so great that even Yehuda Bauer, a Holocaust historian at Hebrew University, was attacked for revising the number of Jews who were murdered in the Auschwitz concentration camp down to 1.35 million. "So sacred had the 4 million number become by repetition in the press," says Michale Bernbaum, "that Bauer's articles aroused immediate controversy. Survivors were upset that he was seeming to join the revisionists in diminishing the numbers of victims." [BERENBAUM, The Struggle, p. 90] Among the most radical Jewish responses to "Holocaust revisionism" was the bombing of Holocaust doubter George Ashley's home in Northridge, California, in 1986. [GEWERTZ] And, in the counter-anti-Holocaust propaganda wars, in 1998, the Zionist Organization of America countered with a publication, Deir Yassin: A Lie, that argues that a widely known, and much documented, Jewish-Israeli massacre of Arab villagers in 1948 never happened. [MAHLER, J., 3-20-98, p. 7]

Concerted Jewish efforts at censorship take many forms and guises, attacking the full spectrum of political thought, from right to left-wing, encompassing virtually any subject at all, as long as it addresses Jews. On June 19, 1977, for example, the respected news team of the London Sunday Times presented an article documenting systematic torture of Arabs in Israel and the occupied territories. In the United States, this major news story was covered by only one major media outlet, the Boston Globe. Why? "Any adverse publicity [of Israel]," noted Nicholas Von Hoffman in the Anaheim Bulletin, "is likely to win an editor vociferous abuse from the nation's best organized lobby." [SAID, p. 42] In 1990 the Foreign Press Association protested Israel's banning of news about Soviet immigration to the Jewish state; the censorship was enforced, reported the Boston Globe, because of "a growing trend of negative coverage. [ROSENBERG, C2] In 1996, "in response to protests from Jewish groups,” Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf -- an obviously necessary staple of reference in American college history classes -- was banned in Hungary. An English version, published in Great Britain, was also banned at European University in Budapest. Permission had been requested to shelve the book at the college, noted the Jewish Week, "a university which is supported by [Jewish American] financier George Soros." [PERLEZ, 1, 23]

In 1999, the great Jewish lobbying center, the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, successfully pressured the giant German Bertelsmann company from advertising Mein Kampf on its online bookstore. "We are aware that we are operating on the thin line between a publisher's responsibility and the accusation of censorship," noted a spokesman for Bertelsmann, upon taking the book's availability off the computer system. Online bookstores Amazon.com and Barnes and Noble continued to refuse "to back down [to Wiesenthal demand], citing their First Amendment rights to promote free speech." [LIEBERMAN, A., 9-21-99, p. 16]

In 1984 a play (Garbage, the City, and Death) by one of the world's most heralded filmmakers, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, was shut down in Frankfort, Germany, by concerted Jewish pressure. The play was based upon a story of real-life local corruption in real estate dealings, battled on grass roots fronts by the left-wing Green Party. Jews were among the most prominent real estate wheelers and dealers, particularly a speculator named Ignatz Bubis, eventual chairman of the Central Council of Jews in Germany. A Fassbinder character in the play, allegorically named Rich Jew, was based on Bubis. "There was much official corruption, bending of laws, and absence of codes or disregard for them where they exist," noted Lothar Kahn about the real life story upon which the play was based, "... self-interest, greed, politics and poor management combined to create a situation that was widely deplored. Bubis does not appear unduly perturbed over the allegation that he served as prototype for Fassbinder's Rich Jew, the character that gave rise to the charge of the play being anti-Jewish both in nature and effect." [LOTHAR, p. 51]

In the face of Jewish protest, the producer of the play offered to rename Rich Jew as "A" and make other changes in the stage story. "By then, however," notes Kahn, "the fact that changes were made at the insistence of 'our Jewish friends' would have become as much a source of resentment as being prevented from producing the play in the first place." [KAHN, p. 52]

Ultimately, Jewish activists seized the stage for three hours to prevent the play from being performed. The producer finally capitulated to censorship, "citing the intensity of Jewish pressure." While local Jewish spokesman, Michael Friedman, declared the incident over, with no hard feelings, Lothar Kahn suggested otherwise: "There are angry German critics who feel the Jews overplayed their hand and should not dictate what should be thought about anything." [KAHN, p. 52] Fassbinder himself said that "the subject of Jews has been a taboo subject in Germany since 1945; in the end this must be counter-productive, for taboos inevitably lead to the tabooed subject creating dark and secret fears and mak[ing] enemies." [KAHN, p. 51]

In the Netherlands, in 1987 the Rotterdam city council resisted Jewish demands and refused to censor the Fassbinder play in their own locality, spokeswoman announcing that

"The Rotterdam city council has decided the municipality has no
jurisdiction to ban the play. It is a matter of free speech." [REUTERS,
11-17-87]

Reuters noted that "Jewish leaders say they will demonstrate against the play" and "the Rotterdam Foundation for the Fight Against Anti-Semitism said it was considering taking the producers to court because they were violating Dutch laws against the discrimination of ethnic and religious communities. The producers say the play is constructive because it has stirred debate on the causes and results of anti-Semitism." [REUTERS, 11-17-87]

In 1993, the American Jewish Committee closed down their nationally traveling exhibition about the history of Black-Jewish relations (as the AJC saw it) when Boston's Black community allowed the local Nation of Islam chapter to contribute their own critical perspective to the show. [HOHLER, p. 21] The Jewish organization declared that the Nation's point of view was anti-Semitic and cancelled the rest of its tour.

In 1999, the city of Toronto apologized to the Canadian Jewish Congress for allowing a photographic exhibition of Palestinian history under Israeli rule to be shown in a city venue. Howard Brief of the CJC called the photo exhibition "obscene," the Jewish mayor of Toronto, Mel Lastman (originally from New York) declared that "We're not looking for people to bring their fights here. This is the magic of Toronto -- you don't bring your arguments or beefs here." [DE MARA, 9-17-99] Local Jews also complained about some of the photos' captions and that the time slot for the exhibition between the Jewish holidays of Rosh Hoshanah and Yom Kippur was "insensitive."

The producer of the Palestinian show was an Anglican church organization. Reverend Robert Assaly responded to Jewish outrage, noting that

"Once again, even the very articulation of Palestinian history and
culture is subjugated to the dominant political whims of another
people or organization. Once again, Palestinian existence is not
allowed to be understood on its own, but, in the mind of the CJC,
must only be articulated in reference to the filters of Jewish history
and faith. Thankfully, we no longer subject aboriginal history or
Jewish Holocaust exhibits to the demands of their oppressors. The
CJC's attempt to silence truth belies its stated motives." [ASSALY]

Toronto Star columnist Thomas Walkom followed up the story, discovering that the man who called the show "obscene" (Harold Brief, chairman of the Israeli Affairs Committee of the CJC) had never even seen the exhibition, let alone the "captions the Jewish community complains about all the time." [WALKOM, T., 9-28-99]

In 1992, a Chicago librarian, David Williams, noted to an American Library Association annual conference that since 1967 the state of Israel has censored nearly 4,000 books in the occupied Arab territories of Gaza and the West Bank. Banned volumes include the plays of Sophocles, the novels of Egyptian Nobel Laureate Naguib Mahfouz, and The Battle for Peace by Ezer Weizmann, Israel's President. Jewish overseers also censored all published texts by local Palestinians. Even a poet, Muhammad Albatrawi, a resident of the West Bank, noted that

"Every word of mine goes through the censorship office ... It goes
without saying that this affects the work's literary value ... I can never
know in advance how the censor will react: sometimes I write something
risky and he approves it without comment, and sometimes I write
something totally innocent and it is banned completely. It can drive you
crazy, because there is no logic to it." [GROSSMAN, D., 1988, p. 158-
159]

A resolution condemning Israeli censorship was passed by the ALA. At the next convention, notes Village Voice journalist Robert Friedman, "the fight to rescind the year-old resolution condemning Israeli censorship policies in the occupied territories drew more than 1500 librarians -- three to four times more than usual." [FRIEDMAN, p. 36] The Anti-Defamation League, Hadassah (the Zionist Women's organization), and other sympathetic Jews joined forces in a massive campaign to denounce the ALA resolution, retract it, and slander the resolution's original sponsor, David Williams, as an anti-Semite.

The resultant ALA rejection of its resolution against censorship, says Friedman, "was due to the large numbers of pro-Israel activists who came down [to the conference] at the behest of Hadassah [a women's Zionist organization], the fear of many ALA members that the controversy was tearing the organization apart, and a backlash against William's overbearing and self-righteous personality ... The same week ... ALA officials announced that they had set up a task force -- reportedly at ADL urging -- to investigate Williams." [FRIEDMAN, p. 39]

They would find that Williams was not new to controversy in Jewish quarters. In 1989, as head of the Middle East acquisitions department at the Chicago Public Library, he put together a bibliography of 147 books for the study of the Israel-Palestine conflict, including a mix of political views. Within a short time, Chicago's chief librarian, Samuel F. Morrison, was fielding a call from a prominent Jewish patron who complained about some of the books on the list. Then followed a unified a campaign by two Jewish lobbying organizations -- the Anti-Defamation League and the Jewish Community Relation Council -- which included targeting for attention the Jewish President of the Chicago Library Board, Cindy Pritzker, one of the heirs of -- among other things -- the Hyatt Hotel chain.

After reviewing William's bibliographic list, head librarian Morrisson remained firm in support of it, noting that "libraries should provide materials and information presenting all points of view in current and historical issues." [FRIEDMAN, p. 35] The ADL and other Jewish lobbying efforts persisted, however, even labeling David Shipler's Pulitzer-prize winning book in the bibliography, Arab and Jew: Wounded Spirits in the Promised Land, as an "attempt at evenhandedness [that] results in distorted equivalences between Arab and Israeli actions." [FRIEDMAN, p. 35] The ADL mobilized more local Jewish support to complain en masse to local governmental officials and eventually the Chicago library capitulated, adding more than 30 books selected by ADL and pulling David Williams, the librarian who made the bibliography, off the project.

Unrelenting Jewish pressure to force the library to emphasize Jewish-Israeli perspectives on the Middle East made the local news. A Chicago Sun-Times columnist, James Byrne, worried that the ADL's eventual investigations into William's past was reminiscent of McCarthy-era witch hunt. Summing up the whole story, Village Voice commentator Robert Friedman declared that "here was unequivocal proof that the ADL was attempting to censor a public library."

In 1986, because of concerted Jewish complaint, the Toronto-area Waterloo County Board of Education in Canada "banned" William Shakespeare's play, The Merchant of Venice, pending further input from the Ontario Human Rights Commission and Ministry of Education. The school board's decision, noted the Toronto Star, "following an intense lobby that included testimonials from nine Jewish students, has again raised concerns about censorship of school books due to pressure from vocal minorities." [FERRI, J., p. A18]

A few years later the Canadian Jewish Congress intervened in a planned performance of the Shakespeare play by the Stratford Festival. The play was finally performed but only, notes Sol Littman, after it was agreed that "care would be taken to make sure that the representation of Shylock steered clear of crude stereotyping and -- best of all -- the festival would arrange seminars for young theatre-goers to explain the historical context of the play and the social prejudices of the period." [LITTMAN, S., p. A17]

By 1994, the Ottawa Citizen ran an editorial entitled "Beware of the Censor," noting that "Ottawa's public high schools have quietly revised how and when they teach Shakespeare’s classic play, The Merchant of Venice ... Several Ontario school boards have either banned the work or restricted its teaching to senior grades ... The department heads [of Ottawa public schools] decreed that if The Merchant of Venice is taught, it must be presented in the light of an opinion paper written by members of the Jewish community ... The Merchant of Venice problem was not put to public debate by the elected [Ottawa Board of Education] trustees ... The result is literature chosen by stealth, in a climate of pressure and self-censorship." [OTTAWA CITIZEN, p. A10]

The Jewish Thought Police is far reaching, and even within the Jewish community itself it invokes powerful pressures to silence those of moral conscience, particularly regarding the policies of modern Israel. Jewish scholar Marla Brettschneider notes that

"During the research for my dissertation I heard countless [Jewish]
individuals and group representatives from around the country relate
stories about the censorious pro-Israel politics of the mainstream Jewish
community. These people requested various levels of confidentiality,
depending on how current or painful the story was, or on the stature
of the individual or group in the community. There were often jobs on
the line and the reputations of mainstream machers to guide ...
[BRETTSCHNEIDER, p. 90].... Unfortunately, students were
not even willing to talk to me for background material ... I continued
to find this a painful example of the fear progressive Jewish students
feel about their activism. They feel they will suffer the wrath of the
[Jewish] community as punishment for such work.
[BRETTSCHNEIDER, p. 90] ... [By the 1980s] Jewish students were
more afraid to question, explore, critique, and speak out, especially when
it came to Israel ... [In 1989] speaking as a progressive, I criticized Israeli
politics and our role as North American Zionist/Jewish activists. Many of
the students in the audience were upset by the fact that I was speaking
critically on these issues. The reason they gave me for their feelings was
that by airing our dirty laundry in public we help the anti-Semites who
want to divide and conquer us ... But what most distressed me was this:
If honest and critical self-evaluation cannot even take place in a closed
room among highly active Jewish students at a Jewish conference, then
it is hard to imagine where such desperately needed exploration can take
place." [BRETTSCHNEIDER, p. 89-90]

Earlier, in 1979, an American Jewish organization called Breira was hounded out of existence by mainstream Jewry. Breira -- never numbering more than 1500 members -- sought, in its own words, to "break the 'taboo' on public criticism of Israel within the American Jewish community." [WERTHEIMER, p. 399] "Breira activists," notes Jack Wertheimer, "consistently interpreted the public controversy [in Jewish circles] as an orchestrated smear campaign.... [WERTHEIMER, p. 405] ... Breira was cast as a group of subversives to Israel. Its harsh critique of the organized American Jewish community, its program to democratize and re-channel Jewish life in the United States, and its denigration of established leaders were barely noted." [WERTHEIMER, p. 406]

In 1990 a Reform rabbi, Adi Assabi, in South Africa received 23 death threats from Jewish callers for allowing anti-apartheid Black leader Nelson Mandela a forum to speak at the rabbi's synagogue. Mandela, the international hero of the human rights movement in South Africa who spent 28 years in prison, "outraged most South African Jews by his expressions of solidarity with Palestinian Liberation Organization leader Yasir Arafat and by photographs in the press of Mandela embracing Arafat." [RAPHAELY, p. 10]

In 1998, Norman Rosenberg, the Executive Director of the New Jewish Agenda, a "progressive" organization, wrote an article in the (Washington) Jewish Week complaining about the dangerous censorship powers within the Jewish community; the Smithsonian Museum --rather than hold a planned lecture series in connection with Israel's fiftieth birthday celebration -- succumbed to censorial and harassment efforts by some American Jewish groups against "controversial" speakers. Those lobbied against were fellow Jews, including members of Israel's Knesset, journalism, and universities. Rosenberg notes that

"In canceling the program ... the Smithsonian was bullied by a
disinformation campaign led by a group of far-right Jewish
ultranationalists. Rather than staying the course and presenting what
was to be both a celebration of Israel's democratic triumphs and an
honest, fair, and intellectually rigorous examination of the unresolved
issues which that democracy is wrestling with, the Smithsonian chose
to fold at the first hint of controversy ... What we have here is nothing
less than nascent Jewish McCarthyism ... Believers in free speech and
free inquiry can only be appalled by this debacle." [ROSENBERG, p.
20]

Four months later, Smithsonian magazine published the permissible image of Israel: a full page ad by the History Channel announcing the premiere of Israel: Birth of a Nation. "After 3,000 years of persecution," proclaims the ad, "an Inquisition, and a Holocaust, you're finally allowed to go home ... Join host Martin Gilbert as we take an intimate look at a nation born of resolve, courage, sacrifice and, ultimately, destiny." [SMITHSONIAN, MAY 1998, p. 29]

Even in leftist Jewish circles, support for the noble principles of free speech and the hallowed Constitution can disintegrate when clouded by Jewish emotionalism. A good case in point involved the American Civil Liberties Union and a 1977 neo-Nazi march planned for Skokie, Illinois, a suburb with a large Jewish population. The town banned the march. Simply based upon the most elemental principle of the First Amendment, the ACLU argued an appeal on behalf of the neo-Nazis right to hold their event in Skokie. (The ACLU won the case, a Federal district court ruled that Skokie's ban was unconstitutional, but the right-wing group never marched). In the wake of the ACLU's involvement in the case, an estimated 15% of the ACLU's national membership (presumably constituting the most liberal, "open-minded," and principled lawyers and others in America) resigned. Most were Jews. In hindsight, Albert Foer, the Vice-Chairman of the Washington D.C.-area ACLU, still felt the need to argue the issues of the case in a Jewish forum in 1998:

"The ACLU's legal victory in Skokie was in fact a victory for Jews ...
The First Amendment stands as a protector of minority rights and
the situation in Skokie, where Jews happened not to be a minority,
was unique." [FOER, p. 20]

Ever ready to brand any critic of Jewry or Israel an anti-Semite, organized Jewish efforts in patrolling knowledge, and in controlling and suppressing information are widespread and varied, focusing upon a range of subjects and issues, but always Jewish and/or Israeli-based. In Canada, for example, R. T. Naylor wrote an article entitled Israel and the Cocaine Barons. For Israeli Mercenaries, It's All In a Day's Work that was published in Toronto's Now magazine in December 1989. "When the article was first published," says Naylor, "Israel's propaganda arm in Canada began frothing at the mouth in indignation. The reaction included the usual smear stories planted by the Israel lobby in the Canadian Jewish News and the [ADL's parent organization] B'nai B'rith Monitor. The point of the campaign was not to 'correct' the record, since the facts as stated were incontestably true, but to terrorize critics of Israel into keeping quiet." [NAYLOR, p. 139]

In 1987, claiming that an NBC documentary called "Six Days Plus 20 Years: A Dream is Dying" was "biased," the Israeli government forbid Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, Foreign Minister Shimon Peres and Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin from appearing on NBC News programs. [BOXER, 6-31-87, p. 3] The next year ABC faced Jewish demonstrations against "one-sided anti-Israel press coverage being given the current unrest in Israel's administered territories." [JW, 1-29-88, p. 8] The Anti-Defamation League attacked ABC coverage as "a mockery of journalistic responsibility," and particularly singled out ABC news anchorman Peter Jennings. "Apparently," said the ADL's 'Israel director,' Harry Wall, "Israel's actions have given license for the expression of anti-Semitism among certain representatives of the media." [JW, 1-29-88]

Censorship of those seeking to document on film Israel's many injustices, and crimes, against Palestinian Arabs is an institutionalized norm in America. In the 1980s, an American Jewish filmmaker, Joan Mandel, joined with others in producing a documentary film (Gaza Ghetto) about Arab conditions as veritable prisoners in the Israeli-occupied Gaza Strip. "I began," she says, "to learn the intricacies of how forms of censorship were used against films about Palestinian. When I returned to the United States in 1984, over the course of the next two years ... I learned that I was involved in a war in this country -- to redefine the limits of censorship ... [MANDEL, p. 187-188] ... [There is] censorship at all stages [in making a film about Israel] -- production, post-production, funding, programming, and distribution." [MANDEL, p. 190] Among the most ardent, and overt, censorial organizations are the Anti-Defamation League, the American-Israel Public Affairs Council (AIPAC), and CAMERA.

For his part, filmmaker Tom Hayes notes the endless censorial difficulties he had with PBS, and its grant-giving arm ITVS, over his film about Arabs under Israeli rule, "People of the Land":

"For me, work on Palestine was a test of the relevance of independent
filmmaking. If you couldn't get funding and dissemination for work
about [Israel's] super-power culpability in cultural genocide, then what
exactly was the point of independent filmmaking? Entertainment? Media
titillation?" [HAYES, p. 6]

In 1990 the Israeli government succeeded in briefly getting a New York State Supreme Court Justice, Michael Dontzin, to ban a book in America; an Appellate Court later overruled the censorship. The banned book, By Way of Perception: The Making and Unmaking of a Mossad Officer, described author Victor Ostrovsky's life as an Israeli Mossad (CIA-like organization) agent and his moral disenchantment with the organization's policies. The judge's ban of the book disturbed First Amendment experts, especially that a foreign government could assert such influence in America. Attorney Richard Winfield called Judge Dontzin's censorship "without precedent and egregious." Attorney Floyd Abrams described it as "an aberration." Critics said, noted the Jewish Week, that "it apparently marked the first time a foreign nation sought to stop publication of a book in the United States." [JW, 9-21-90, p. 20] [See further Jewish-inspired censorial actions in the mass media section]

Under threat from a lawsuit from Israel, in 1991 the Huntington Library in San Marino, California, announced that it was still opening its complete set of photographs of the famous Dead Sea Scrolls to all qualified scholars interested in studying them. The original scrolls have been housed in a Jerusalem museum since 1947 and controlled by a "tight academic cartel" in Israel, particularly the Israel Antiquities Authority who limited access to scroll study to about 40 people over four decades. "Israeli officials," noted the Jewish Week, "contend that open access to the uncompleted texts could prevent a 'definitive interpretation' of the scrolls." [TUGEND, T, DEAD, p. 15]

In 1989 a radio talk show host, Jim Bleilkamp, was fired by his Albany station manager, Dennis Israel, after a campaign against him by a local Jewish lobbying group, the Shield of David, with support from the ADL, Americans for a Safe Israel, and the [Jewish-based] Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting. Among Bielkamp's crimes, says the Jewish Week, was an "accusation that Israeli soldiers are committing 'genocide' against Arabs ... [Bleikamp] acknowledged mentioning the word 'genocide' on the air, but says he did not mean to imply comparison between the Palestinian uprising and the Holocaust." [WEISS, Y, p. 18]

In 1991 Linda Rios Brook, the head of Channel 11 in Minneapolis, lost her job because of her "outspoken religious views," specifically for giving speeches as a devout Christian in which she said "that the Jews pressured Pilate into killing Jesus." For this, Brook was accused of being an anti-Semite, although what she said has been a foundation of Christian belief (and Jewish belief) for centuries. The law firm of Milaretz and Associates headed a group of advertisers who withdrew their advertising contract with the TV station to "send a message" to Channel 11's parent company, and force Brook out. [KATZ-STONE, p. 2]

In 2001, Michael Lopez-Calderon, a non-Jewish social studies teacher at Hebrew Academy's Rabbi Alexander S. Gross High School in Miami, made the news when he was fired for posting anti-Israel comments at a pro-Palestinian web site, Palestine Media Watch. "Lopez-Calderon, a non-Catholic Cuban-American who believes Israel is oppressing the Palestinians, said the trouble began when he heard other teachers make what he felt were callous comments on the fatal shooting of a Palestinian teenager. 'It broke me,' he said." [TALLAHASSEE DEMOCRAT, 3-10-01]

Also in 2001, the publisher of the Oneida Daily Dispatch (New York) fired its two top editors (Jean Ryan and Dale Seth) for an editorial that local Jewish lawyer, Randy Schaal, didn't like. Alerting the local Jewish Community Federation of Mohawk Valley, the Jewish lobby began to pressure the newspaper. The editorial (its key excerpt linked here) was charged with being "anti-Semitic." [SUNG, E., 11-02-01]


In 1990, the New York Times noted that "a Harvard divinity professor's verbal attacks on Jews, Judaism and Israel led to his dismissal as chief editor of the Dead Sea Scrolls." Dr. John Strugnell was quoted by an Israeli journalist as declaring that Judaism was "originally racist," it was "not a higher religion," and that modern Israel "is founded on a lie, or at least a premise that cannot be sustained." Most of these observations, as this volume meticulously evidences, are undeniably true. The crime is to speak them freely. Strugnell was dismissed by the Times as having a rumored "drinking problem" and a "mental condition." Laurence Schiffman, a professor of Hebrew and Judaic Studies at New York University, told the newspaper that "Here comes a custodian of these materials and [he] drenches the scrolls in the blood of the victims of anti-Semitism. How can we have confidence in the fairness and scholarship of a man who comes to the material with such deeply ingrained prejudices, prejudices which are repugnant to most of his colleagues, both Christians and Jews." [WILFORD, J.N., 12-12-90, p. A14]

In 2001, a scientific journal published an article that assailed both Jewish (the "Chosen People") and Zionist dogma. The journal was pressured so heavily by Jews that it quickly sought to rip out the article in its already published volume. As London's Guardian noted:

"A keynote research paper showing that Middle Eastern Jews and Palestinians
are genetically almost identical has been pulled from a leading journal. Academics
who have already received copies of Human Immunology have been urged to
rip out the offending pages and throw them away. Such a drastic act of
self-censorship is unprecedented in research publishing and has created widespread
disquiet, generating fears that it may involve the suppression of scientific work
that questions Biblical dogma. 'I have authored several hundred scientific papers,
some for Nature and Science, and this has never happened to me before,' said
the article's lead author, Spanish geneticist Professor Antonio Arnaiz-Villena,
of Complutense University in Madrid. 'I am stunned' ... In common with
earlier studies, the team found no data to support the idea that Jewish people
were genetically different from other people in the region. In doing so, the
team's research challenges claims that Jews are a special, chosen people
and that Judaism can only be inherited ... [Human Immunology's] editor
told the journal Nature last week that she was threatened by mass resignations
from members if she did not retract the article." [McKie, R., 11-25-01]


In England, in 1991, the Board of Deputies of British Jews announced that they "may take legal action against Bob Beckman, the financial adviser, if he repeats 'anti-Jewish' comments in his weekly business bulletin. Mr. Beckman, who once advised LBC radio listeners on shares, was cautioned by the financial watchdog Fimbra after the Board of Deputies of British Jews complained about his inflammatory anti-Zionist comments in his financial newsletter." According to a BDBJ complainer, a whole issue of Beckman's publication was devoted to "Jewish conspiracy theory in the financial sphere." The BDBJ said that Beckman's writings constitute "incitement to racial hatred" and thereby subject to action via the Race Relations Act." [THE TIMES (OF LONDON), 4-21-91]

In 1990, someone at the Dartmouth Review -- an ideologically conservative newspaper at Dartmouth College -- secretly inserted an anti-Jewish quote by Adolf Hitler into the paper's masthead as an act of sabotage. The resultant furor drew a letter of complaint to the paper from a Jewish Congressman from California, Mel Levine, signed by 83 other Congressmen. The Review's President and two staff members were forced to resign. Dartmouth trustee Dinah D'Souza ultimately attacked the President of Dartmouth College, James Freedman, who is Jewish, for his handling of the matter. Freedman, complained D'Souza, was a "bully ... who had contributed to a lynch mob mentality on campus." [BAKER, p. 6]

In 1990 Jewish journalists, editors, and publishers from around the world gathered in Jerusalem for the Third International Conference of Jewish Media to address worldwide issues and concerns in their community. Among the concerns were these: "To what extent can [Jewish journalists] be critical of Israel? How should they play articles that reflect poorly on Israel?" Gary Rosenblatt, an editor of Jewish newspapers in Baltimore, Detroit, and Atlanta remarked that "I once heard an editor say that [the totalitarian Russian communist newspaper] Pravda has more independence than Jewish newspapers ... In some [United Jewish Appeal-sponsored] federation newspapers, you would be hard pressed to find a critical letter [to the editor] about the federation or about Israel." [KEINOW, p. 22] A Jewish freelance journalist from Santiago, Chile -- Patricia Politzer -- complained that

"I lived 16 years under a dictatorship in Chile and I am amazed to hear
things [at this conference] that I heard in Chile under [dictator]
Pinochet." [KEINON, p. 22]

Politzer was referring to the likes of Michelin Ratzerdorfer, the editor of Amit magazine. Ratzerdorfer, noted the Jewish Week, asserted "that journalistic integrity must be redefined for Jewish journalists. Before putting pen to paper, Jewish newspaper editors and writers must ask themselves whether what they write will harm Israel, and whether they have the 'moral right' to write critical editorials." [KEINON, p. 22] A good example of the censorial basis of the conference occurred in Jerusalem the same year as the journalistic gathering; efforts to stifle free speech were evidenced in the case of the Jerusalem Post, the only English language newspaper in Israel (and crucially important for that reason), which was purchased by Hollinger, a Canadian media group that installed publisher Yehuda Levy. The managing editor, David Landau, and 29 other Post staff members soon demanded that Levy be fired for his editorial premise of "a special responsibility to protect Israel's image." Instead, all 30 protesting staffers were fired with a half-hour notice, and Levy was retained.

"Journalism is an act of the spirit and that spirit has to be free," said departing Managing Editor Landau, "This seems to have been lost on Mr. Levy, and our hope was that in the course of time Mr. Levy would come to understand the special nature of a newspaper in a free society. But those hopes have not been realized -- quite the contrary." [JEWISH WEEK, 1-26-90, p. 20]

In 2001, Jews gathered for a "special program for student journalists sponsored by the Jewish Agency for Israel and the World Zionist Organization at the General Assembly of the United Jewish Communities." "Do Jewish journalists have more obligations than others?," asked the Jewish Bulletin of Northern California, "Are they responsible first to their communities, and do they need to represent Israel in their newspapers?" [RAGOLSKY, H., 11-23-01] "On campus there is already so much anti-Israel sentiment that we have to be careful about any additional criticism against Israel," Marita Gringaus told a reporter,

"This is our responsibility as Jews, which obviously contradicts our responsibilities
as journalists." [RAGOLSKY, H., 11-23-01]

"I'm a Jew before I'm a journalist," added Uzi Safanov, a reporter for Long Island University's school newspaper,

"before someone pays me to write. If I find a negative thing about Israel, I
will not print it and I will sink into why did it happen and what can I do to
change it." ("If he eventually wrote about negative incidents that happen to
Israel," added the Jewish Bulletin, "he would try to find the way 'to shift the
blame.'" [RAGOLSKY, H., 11-23-01]

In 2001, Debbie Ducrocq, the managing editor of the Kansas City Jewish Chronicle, was fired for printing a letter to the editor that was critical of Israel. Also, her "Conservative rabbi denounced her at shul and she had had to remove her children from a Chabad Sunday school." [ELLIS, C., 3-16-01, p. 8] That same year, Jewish poets Chana Bloch and Chana Kronfeld were assailed by fellow Jews for briefly criticizing Israel at a poetry reading at the bastion of the "free speech" movement in America: Berkeley, California. "As an Israeli," remarked Chana Kronfeld after ten angry people walked out on her, "I'm used to hearing people argue, but this was really extraordinary. I was really shocked and offended by the reaction. I really couldn't believe that in a place like Berkeley or wherever there is a Jewish community that values open speech, that a five-minute statement could cause that kind of rude, vocal interruption." [ESKENAZI, J., 5-18-01]


As evidenced here, efforts by many in the Jewish community to censor free speech and revise (and/or control) history are varied, well-funded and widespread. In America, a central organizational player in efforts to limit intellectual discourse (with its $50 million a year budget), particularly regarding Jews and Israel, is the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith. "It is," says Robert Friedman, "the most powerful Jewish organization in America. [It attempts] to determine what should be taught in our nation's schools, what should be read in our nation's libraries, and what should be publicly discussed about Israel at public forums. Through its 31 offices across the country, the ADL monitors school curricula, library acquisition lists, and public conferences and symposiums, working behind the scenes to stifle intellectual freedom." [FRIEDMAN, p. 34] (Jewish author Paul Krassner even writes that "When I originally met [Jewish publisher] Lyle [Stuart] in 1953, he had published an article in The Independent about how the Anti-Defamation League was secretly subsidizing anti-Semitic publications and then using them to scare contributions out of wealthy Jews.") [KRASSNER, P., 1993, p. 225]

Joan Mandel, a Jewish filmmaker, notes the stratagems of censorship used by the ADL when it comes to documentary films about Israel:

"[The ADL] equate[s] criticism of Israel and support for Palestinian
rights with anti-Semitism. ADL tactics feature: warnings to institutions
to ban screenings of 'anti-Semitic' films, and the preparation of 'fact
sheets' distributed to members of local Jewish organizations to condemn
films and filmmakers at public screening, and to use in protesting TV
programs. ADL 'vigilance' campaigns include targeting Jews and Israelis
who oppose the Israeli occupation or who actively support Palestinian
rights. The ADL has set up a model of censorship that other mainstream
Jewish organizations -- the Council for Jewish Federations, the American
Jewish Committee, and the Jewish Community Relations Councils --
follow." [MANDELL, p. 191]

The ADL has even regularly tried to defame and censor fellow Jew Noam Chomsky, an outspoken critic of Israel and Jewish chauvinism. Chomsky complained that

"When I give a talk at a university or elsewhere, it is common for a group
to distribute literature, invariably unsigned, containing a collection of
attacks on me spiced with 'quotes' (generally fabricated) from what I
am alleged to have said here and there. I have no doubt that the source
is the Anti-Defamation League and often the people distributing the
unsigned literature acknowledge the fact. These practices are vicious
and serve to intimidate many people. They are of course not illegal. If
the ADL chooses to behave in this fashion, it has a right to do so; but
this should also be exposed." [CURTISS, p. 31]

Ostensibly a "civil rights organization," and massively integrated into the American socio-cultural fabric as such, the ADL's central purpose is to combat "anti-Semitism" (as it widely defines it) and protect Israel and Jewish mythologies from critical attack. Founded in 1913, "the ADL," notes Friedman, "has successfully masqueraded as a civil rights organization concerned with the civil rights of all Americans." [FRIEDMAN, p. 37] For decades it has functioned as a kind of private FBI, commissioning "independent contractors" as spies to infiltrate large numbers of American organizations throughout the political spectrum. "In many instances," wrote eventual ADL Director Abraham Foxman (who is reported to keep a portrait of seminal right-wing Zionist Vladimir Jabotinsky in his office), [FRIEDMAN, p. 38] "our agents were employed by an outside investigation agency operating as an independent contractor." [FRIEDMAN, p. 37] As noted by the Washington Post, a former ADL General Counsel, Arnold Forster, had earlier admitted "that he was often a 'source' for the Mossad -- Israel's CIA." [MCGEE, p. 12] "Foreign minister Yitzhak Shamir [has disclosed]," wrote Ignacio Klich in 1986, "that the ADL coordinates its activities with Jerusalem diplomats more than any other United States-based organization." [KLICH, p. 38] In 1948, says Robert Friedman, "the ADL set up a joint intelligence-gathering operation with the government of Israel, an activity that seems to raise questions about its charitable, tax-exempt status." [FRIEDMAN, p. 38] With the founding of the state of Israel in 1948, says former national ADL director Benjamin Epstein, "we have maintained an information-gathering operation since 1948 relating to activities emanating from the Arab Consular offices, Arab United Nations Delegations, Arab Information Center, Arab Refugee Offices, and the Organization of Arab Students." [FRIEDMAN, p. 38]

For decades the ADL's spying tended to be upon right-wing groups, but in recent decades it has equally monitored others across the political spectrum, any group or individual that expresses what the ADL perceives to be anti-Israel, or of course anti-Jewish, opinion, both generically deemed "anti-Semitic." "During the spring of 1971," notes Jack Porter, "the ADL mounted a campaign against a number of groups -- Physicians for Social Responsibility, the Medical Committee for Human Rights, and the Student Health Organizations which called for better medical service in the ghettos and the restructuring of the 'health industry.' The ADL implied that these groups were anti-Semitic. The Jewish Left responded that rather than combating anti-Semitism, the ADL was creating it where there was none." [PORTER, p. xxxix] The ADL has also over the years shared information with the FBI and the Commerce Department "which reviews the files of applicants for government jobs, searching for 'subversives.'" [FRIEDMAN, p. 37] According to Henry Schwarzchild, an ADL official from 1962-64, the ADL even spied on Martin Luther King, Jr. and passed surveillance information about him to the FBI. [FRIEDMAN, p. 38]

In 1983 the ADL published the names of fellow Jews (and 27 non-Jews) Rabbi Elmer Berger, Edmund Hanauer, Mark Lane, Alfred Lilienthal, Haviv Shieber, Israel Shahak, and Grace Halsell for disseminating "pro-Arab propaganda" in America. "Since I have earned my living as a writer since my high school days," wrote Halsell, "it came as a surprise to learn that a Jewish organization chose, unilaterally and arbitrarily, to classify me not as a reporter, journalist, or writer, but rather as a propagandist." [HALSELL, p. 20]

In 1994 the ADL mounted a major public relations attack on the "Christian Right" in America with a document called The Assault on Tolerance and Pluralism in America. The attack was so extreme and misguided that it engendered an extraordinary response from Jewish conservatives: 75 "neo-conservative" Jews, in a paid newspaper ad, accused the ADL of assailing others "whose only crime seems to be the seriousness with which they act on their Christian convictions." [SILK, p. 298]

In April 1993 the ADL found itself embroiled in a much-publicized scandal that threatened to completely destroy its public image as a righteous civil rights organization. An FBI investigation into the activities of an "art dealer," Roy Bullock, and Tom Gerard, a San Francisco police officer and former CIA employee, particularly regarding the selling of information to the South African government about American anti-apartheid activists, led a police investigation to the Anti-Defamation League. The same anti-apartheid activist information was being sold to both the South African government and the ADL. It was then discovered that Bullock had for years been on the payroll of the ADL as a spy, carefully distanced as an "independent contractor." Bullock testified to the San Francisco police that the main client for his "information business" was the ADL, and the he worked full-time for them, working under "fact-finding" director Irwin Suall. Bullock's task "was to amass information -- heaps of it, from physical descriptions to birth dates to press clippings, anything that might one day become handy -- about 'potential' anti-Semites." [KALMANOFSKY, p. 42] The ADL directed him to infiltrate about thirty Arab-American and other organizations described as right or left wing. Bullock also sifted through garbage cans for phone numbers, mailing lists, bank balances, and group correspondence. Automobile license numbers were recorded at organization meetings and passed along to Tom Gerard who provided Bullock -- and thereby the ADL -- with the names, addresses, and driver's license information of their owners.

Bullock was paid $29,150 by the ADL in 1992 alone, and $169,375 between July 1985 and February 1993. To distance him as far as possible from the ADL, his salary was channeled through a Los Angeles attorney, Bruce Hochman, a former President of the Los Angeles Jewish Federation and a former member ADL board member. KALMANOFSKY, p. 43 When facing legal problems for his "monitoring" activities, the ADL spent over $100,000 to help him in his defense. [KALMANOFSKY, p. 64]

Police investigators discovered that Bullock had 1,363 computer files with the names of 12,000 individuals categorized as "Arabs," "Pinkos," "Rights," and "Skins." Files were maintained for the Earth Institute environmental organization, the American Civil Liberties Union, the Arab Democratic Club, New Jewish Agenda, the Asian Law Caucus, among many others. Upon raiding ADL offices, San Francisco police found there -- among other mountains of material -- copies of confidential law enforcement reports, fingerprint cards, driver's license photographs, and individual crime records from classified police sources. [MCGEE, p. A1]

The kinds of material confiscated by police from the ADL office, and the publicized results of Bullock's and Gerard's conversations with police, wrote Jeremy Kalmanofsky in the Jewish Moment magazine, "gives the appearance that the ADL spies on everyone with whom it disagrees, including left- and right-wing Jewish groups. America for Peace Now, the New Jewish Agenda, and Israelis Against Occupation appeared in Bullock's files, as did the Jewish Defense League. Bullock also kept information about Greenpeace; KQED, the [San Francisco] Bay Area's public television station; and the anti-nuclear group SANE-FREEZE. Bullock's list also includes under the category "pinkos" many groups that are critical of Israel or that favor a Palestinian state but are not overtly antisemitic." [KALMANOFSKY, p. 43]

In an editorial about the ADL scandal, the Los Angeles Times expressed shock at the breadth of ADL "monitoring" activities:

"It is no surprise that the ADL has kept close tabs on individuals and
groups of all stripes in hate and violence, such as the KKK and the
White Aryan Resistance. But why has the ADL collected information
the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People,
Greenpeace, Mills College of Oakland, the board of directors of San
Francisco public television station KQED, the United Farm Workers,
Los Angeles Times correspondent Scott Kraft and several members of
Congress?" [LA TIMES, 4-14-93]

"The ethics of the whole ADL fact finding operation grows more ambiguous," noted Jeremy Kalmanofsky, "when you consider the League's monitoring of critics of Israel ... when an organization claims, as the ADL does, that it is dedicated to civil rights for all minorities, and yet monitors Arab-Americans for their opposition to Israel, it raises questions of how its various missions can be compatible." [KALMANOFSKY, p. 63] "A long time ago," explained Kenneth Bialkin, an ADL director from 1982-86, "we came to view that many anti-Israel people use that as a shield for anti-Semitism. Not to say that everyone does, but anti-Israel bias is something we expose whether or not it's anti-Semitic." [KALMANOFSKY, p. 63]

"The ADL's strategy to defend itself [against all charges]," says Kalmonfsky, "was a siege mentality, describing the crisis as an 'antisemitic Big Lie,' referring reporters to 80 years of ADL history and rarely discussing the details of the Bullock case." [KALMANOFSKY, p. 64] The ADL General Counsel, Abraham Foxman, reported the Washington Post, "called such questions about ADL's conduct 'anti-Semitism.'" "I'm sorry if it offends people," declared Foxman, "This is far reaching. We see a conspiracy. I see a conspiracy. It's out there ... It's proved every day." [MCGEE] Afforded space in an Op-Ed article in the New York Times entitled "It's a Big Lie, Hailed By Anti-Semites," Foxman insisted that the scandal surrounding his organization was "on one level ... simply a question of media irresponsibility. But there is likely something else going on in some circles, something more sinister -- something requiring more analysis. In a recent ADL public opinion poll on anti-Semitism, one of the most disturbing findings was that more than 30% believe Jews have too much power." [FOXMAN]

The Jewish community at-large rallied to the ADL's defense against criminal charges. "With virtual unanimity -- from the Orthodox Union to Americans for Peace Now," reported Jeremy Kalmanofsky, "the Jewish world has circled the wagons around ADL, defending its past work and urging it to stay its course." [KALMANOFSKY, p. 62]

Meanwhile, former United States Congressman Pete McCloskey led a law suit against the ADL by 19 monitored individuals, including peace activist Yigal Arens, son of a former Israeli defense minister, Moshe Arens. [FELDMAN, p. A3] A coalition of Arab-Americans listed in ADL surveillance files also filed suit, charging that the Jewish organization invaded their privacy and passed along information about them to the governments of Israel and South Africa. "The ADL wanted information on the ADC [Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee], "reported the Washington Post, a group that challenges defamatory Arab stereotypes, because it considered the organization 'a highly active pro-Palestinian propaganda group." [MCGEE, p. A12] Another lawsuit against the ADL by individuals and groups included former California Lieutenant Governor Mervyn Dymally, former Los Angeles City Councilman Robert Farrell, the National Conference of Black Lawyers, the Bay Area Anti-Apartheid Network, the American Indian Movement, the National Lawyer's Guild, the Coalition Against Police Abuse, and the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador." [REICH]

A huge break for the ADL legal defense occurred when a San Francisco civil court ruled that the Jewish organization was somehow entitled to the "journalists' shield law," protecting them from contempt of court for refusing to release requested information. Not long after, the San Francisco District Attorney completely dropped its investigation into the ADL's illegal spying activities. In a "negotiated settlement," the ADL's punishment was to pay up to $50,000 in reward money to solve hate crimes, and another $25,000 "to train [San Francisco chief prosecutor Arlo] Smith's prosecutors how to teach schoolchildren about the evils of bigotry." [PADDOCK, p. A32]

Those who had been subject to ADL spying were outraged with a legal resolvement that rendered a "punishment" to be merely a reaffirmation of the ADL's own prior activities and myth of itself. "Members of political groups who said they were spied upon," noted the New York Times, "expressed outrage at the settlement." [NYT, 11-17-93] "Individuals who had been targeted by the ADL," reported the Los Angeles Times, "accused the District Attorney of caving in to political pressure and letting the group off too lightly. Often, ADL critics have said, people were spied upon simply because they took public positions at odds with the state of Israel." [PADDOCK, p. A32] "Not only is there no admission of guilt," complained Riva Enteen, a spokeswoman for a coalition of groups trailed by the ADL, "but it is 'portrayed as good Samaritans waving the flag against bigotry." [NYT, 11-17-93] "This demonstrates once again the enormous clout of the Israeli lobby in America," said former Congressman Pete McCloskey, himself one of those targeting for surveillance by the ADL, "It's an unusual result for what appeared to be an ironclad case. One wonders whether all defendants are treated the same under the law." [PADDOCK, p. A32]

In 2000, however, in a separate case, the ADL lost for the first time a lawsuit brought against it. In Denver, Colorado, the regional ADL was forced by jury trial to pay a non-Jewish couple, William and Dorothy Quigley, $10.5 million. Why? Because the Anti-Defamation League had defamed the couple. The case began when the Quigleys and their Jewish neighbors, the Aronsons, began squabbling. The Jewish couple eventually began regularly taping the Quigleys' private cordless telephone messages: an illegal act. Comments to friends by Dorothy Quigley were deemed by the monitoring Aronsons to be antisemitic, they went to the ADL for help, and the Jewish organization publicly declared the Quigleys to be "anti-Semites." The Quigleys sued the ADL, the Aronsons, and the local District Attorney office that had joined the ADL's presumed anti-bigotry efforts. (The Aronsons and the District Attorney settled out of court). As Jewish journalist J. J. Goldberg noted about the profoundly disturbing Thought Police dimensions to this case, where George Orwell's (Jewish) "Big Brother" is everywhere listening:

"The ADL attacked private citizens for opinions voiced at home among
friends. That's chilling." [KARFELD, M., 5-19-2000, p. 24]

(In the private sphere, in 1989 Arthur Green was ordered to pay $5.5 million by a Miami court for driving Denis Rety out of business. Green, a former vice-president of Temple Israel of Greater Miami and an activist in the Greater Miami Jewish Federation, became involved in an argument over whether "a veal chop was too tough" at Rety's restaurant. Green "then wrote a letter accusing Mr. Rety of anti-Semitism threatening to put him out of business, according to court records ... [Green] distributed it to several prominent Jews in the community, including the Mayor and Vice Mayor of Bay Island and the president of a 1,000 member condominium association that has many Jewish members." The court ruled that Green's accusation of anti-Semitic statements from Rety were "completely fabricated.") [ASSOCIATED PRESS, 2-19-99]


Meanwhile, on go the widespread ADL socialization activities against "intolerance." Even as ADL spying was brought to light in the early months of 1993, the Los Angeles Times noted that "more than 100 southern California public school teachers attended the ADL's free 'World of Difference' human relations clinic." [FELDMAN, A32] This program to socialize people to multicultural tolerance in a framework most advantageous to Jews and the state of Israel has "trained" over 110,000 public school teachers, over 70,000 employees from 100 different companies, and staff and students at over 400 colleges. "Literally millions of people around the world have been reached by the program," said Abraham Foxman," and educated in the values it fosters." [FOXMAN, p. 321] At an April fund-raising luncheon, even as the scandal was about to become publicized, at the Century Plaza Hotel in Los Angeles, former United States Defense Secretary and later vice-presidential candidate Dick Cheney received the ADL's "Distinguished Public Service Award." (The ADL's omnipresence, influence, and/or dominance, in molding public opinion to its own perspectives about "prejudice" may be noted in the case of Richard Lobenthal, for 32 years the head of the Michigan Chapter of the ADL, who was appointed in 1997 to be the interim executive director of Michigan's American Civil Liberties Union. [SHEPARDSON, p. C5]

In 2001, an ADL Board Member, Carl Pearlston noted the destructive influence of the propaganda organization upon the American community. Pearlstein parted company with the Jewish group after 25 years of activism. "The program for changing hearts and minds," he wrote,

"A World of Difference, was created in 1985 to change prejudiced feelings
'sensitivity training.' It is reportedly very successful, highly commended, and
widely used by governmental agencies and many companies. Unfortunately,
my exposure to the program at a leadership conference indicated that
teaching the values of diversity, multiculturalism, and cultural relativism
resulted in denigrating the values of diversity, multiculturalism, and cultural
relativism resulted in the denigrating the values and achievements of Western
civilization and the desirability of a common American identity. There is
now a nationwide industry of multicultural activists teaching various 'sensitivity'
programs which increase awareness of racial identity, and result in racial
separation and racial hostility." [PEARLSTEIN, C., 6-4-00]

In 2001, the national Anti-Defamation League director, Abraham Foxman, was caught up in a major scandal when he wrote a letter to President Clinton requesting a pardon for fugitive Jewish American criminal Marc Rich. Rich, an ardent supporter of Israel, had given ADL $100,000 shortly before Foxman decided to appeal to the president in Rich's behalf. [BLOMQUIST, B., 3-24-01] Even Jewish New York Times columnist William Safire suggested that Foxman resign over his ethical blunder.

(In Australia, newspaper columnist Heather Brown expressed alarm about the new "Racewatch" organization created in 1998. Instituted by Community Aid Abroad and B'nai B'rith --the ADL's parent organization -- it sought to enlist volunteers to report instances of "racist" comments made by anyone. Such comments would then be reviewed and enter a database to smear the alleged speakers at a later date. "Racewatch," worried Brown, "lays the groundwork for the creation of blacklists and outright character assassination." In a politically-correct world where virtually anything can offend someone else, and where some consider "assimilationist policy" itself to be "racist," what exactly, wondered Brown, is a "racist" comment anyway? "It would seem," added Brown, "that Racewatch is a dangerous invention, the beast that can consume the very lamb it was to protect. Have we really reached the level of the Brownshirts, of private armies of secret, appointed pimps ready to snoop and spy? ... The thought of a secret army being specifically created to spy on its fellow citizens underlines one frightening truth: Australia, 1998, is no longer the kind of place I thought I was living in.") [BROWN, H., 8-15-98]


In the current celebrity field, everyone from media mogul Ted Turner to author Gore Vidal to actor Marlon Brando to South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu have been subjected to the accusation of anti-Semitism by Jewish lobbying organizations. (In 1984 Lucy Dawidowicz told the World Jewish Congress that Tutu was an anti-Semite and that Jews should not back his efforts to end apartheid in South Africa. [ROIPHE, p. 20] Tutu's "crime" was to have accused Israel of complicity in South Africa's suffocation of its Black populace.) Jewish singer Eddie Fisher declares in his autobiography that Arthur Godfrey, once "the host of radio's most important amateur talent contest," was also anti-Semitic. [FISHER, E., 1999, p. 10]

In 1997, Marlon Brando was attacked by the ADL for remarks he made about Jews controlling Hollywood during an interview on Larry King's TV show. The (Jewish) Forward noted that "Brando made his tearful apology for uttering anti-Jewish canards on the Larry King show at Rabbi Hier's Museum of Tolerance." [FORWARD, 11-14-97, p. 14] "The surprise," says Washington Post reporter Megan Rosenfeld, "is that Brando is not the only entertainer to have revealed his hidden depth of ignorance regarding Jews." [ROSENFELD, p. G1] She adds pop star Michael Jackson, country singer Dolly Parton, TV personality Kathy Lee Gifford, and Whoopi Goldberg to the anti-Semitic list. In 1998, singer Shirley Bassey ("Goldfinger," etc.) had to "appear in court to answer allegations that she slapped an employee [Hilard Levy] and called her a 'Jewish bitch.'" [URQUHART, p. 3] The alleged incident happened five years earlier on the occasion of Levy being fired. For controversial former chess champion, Bobby Fischer (whose mother was Jewish), in 1992 there were media "reports characterizing him as anti-Semitic." [ASSOCIATED PRESS, 9-1-92] In 1999, in Hungary, says the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Fischer

"launched into an anti-Semitic rant during a rare live interview ...
Fischer also claimed that Jews had invented the Holocaust to make
money ... When the interview was later repeated, Fischer's anti-Semitic
comments were omitted." [BOHM, A., 2-2099, p. 12]

In the religious sphere, Father Paul Marx (of Jewish heritage?), the head of the anti-abortion organization Human Life International, found himself in trouble when, as Rabbi Daniel Lapin notes, he "cited a factually correct detail about the Jewish community. He noted the prominence of Jews in the pro-abortion movement. For this he was accused of anti-Semitism; he is now regularly picketed by Jewish groups wherever he speaks." (Even Jewish Boston Herald columnist Don Feder notes that a third of the organizations listed on the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice letterhead are Jewish). [LAPIN, D., 1999, p. 304] In 1999, the founder of the Moral Majority, Jerry Falwell, was publicly assailed for suggesting that the anti-Christ ("a full-grown counterfeit of Christ") will probably be Jewish. [WEISS, J., 1-24-99, p. 16A]

In 1998, hockey legend Bobby Hull found himself in hot water for comments he supposedly made to the Moscow Times in defense of Adolf Hitler. Hull, who was interviewed by a Russian reporter with the aid of a translator, reportedly praised Hitler in the context of remarks he made about cattle breeding. Hull claimed that what he said was completely twisted out of context and misrepresented, and another Russian translator present during the interview, Svetlana Murashkina, supported Hull's version of the incident. To repair his career as a public figure, Hull inevitably had to make the familiar Pilgrimage to the usual place in search of Forgiveness. "Bobby Hull," noted a Minneapolis newspaper, "has asked for, and been granted, a meeting with the Canadian Jewish leaders to explain pro-Hitler remarks attributed to him by the Moscow Times." [STAR-TRIBUNE, 8-29-98, p. 26]

In 2001, Joaquim Agut, chairman of the Terra Lycos Internet company, was accused of making anti-Semitic statements at a business meeting. According to a financial journalist, Augut asserted that Jews "have always tried to cheat me" and that he had Mafia acquaintances who could "take care of them." Agut denied the allegations. An unidentified "Wall Street analyst" told a reporter that "If Jewish organizations come down hard on this incident, the leadership structure at Terra Lycos will again be up in the air." [HELFT, D., 3-9-01] The same year, Ariel Musicant, president of Austria's Jewish community and owner of a giant real estate investment company, announced that he planned "to sue [Joerg] Haider for what he terms the politician's anti-Semitic attacks. Musicant told [Israeli newspaper] Ha'aretz that Haider is conducting an "'anti-Semitic strategy' -- a crime for which, under Austrian law, the maximum penalty is 10 years in prison ... The immediate cause of Musikant's suit is a statement Haider made at a Freedom Party rally two weeks ago. 'I don't understand how a man with the name of Ariel can be encrusted with so much dirt,' Haider told the 2,000 people present, playing on the fact that Ariel is also the name of a well-known Austrian cleaning supply company." [EITTINGER, Y., 3-11-01] Among Haider's defenders was a Jewish member, Peter Sichrovsky, of Haider's Freedom Party. Two of Sichrovsky's grandparents were killed at Auschwitz. "If Jews say [Haider is] a Nazi, which is ridiculous," Sichrovsky told the New York Times, "he can retort with cynical jokes about the Jews." [COHEN, R., 3-25-01]


In 1986 Gore Vidal wrote an article in the Nation that impugned Norman Podhoretz and his wife Midge Decter as examples of prominent Jews whose loyalty -- to Vidal's sensibilities -- leaned clearly towards Israel over America. Podhoretz used his editorship of the periodical Commentary, published by the American Jewish Committee, to brand Vidal's article as a classic example of anti-Semitism, "the most blatantly anti-Semitic outburst to have appeared in a respectable American periodical since World War II." [PODHORETZ] Podhortetz then wrote letters to thirty "liberal friends of the Nation," seeking unified protest against Vidal's piece. Twenty-one of Podhoretz's targets ignored his appeal entirely. Of the nine who responded, "six disapproved of [Vidal's] article; three resented Podhoretz's letter ... two saw no anti-Semitism in the piece." [BUCKLEY, NR, JE 6, 86; EDITORS, 1986]

In 1996 Ted Turner was publicly reprimanded by the ADL on two occasions for calling fellow media mogul, Rupert Murdoch, a "Nazi" and "like the late Fuhrer." The ADL's formal complaint had nothing to do with the insult to Murdoch (neither Turner nor Murdoch are Jewish). The ADL demanded that the word "Nazi" had a special meaning to Jews and should not be so trivialized. To ward off Jewish harassment, Turner apologized to the ADL on both occasions. [ADL ONLINE, 10-24-96, 10-2-96] In 1999, in a similar incident, the publisher of a professional football magazine, the Official Dallas Cowboys Weekly formally apologized (after a complaint by the Zionist Organization of America) for an article that called Washington Redskin owner Daniel Snyder "Hitler" and a "dictator." [ASSOCIATED PRESS, 9-28-99] Snyder was also Jewish.

In this regard, Jews jealously guard not only the term but the concept of "Nazi" as exclusive Jewish political capital. In 1997, there were objections to an anti-union poster using Nazi-like cartoon characters by the Santa Monica (California) Miramar Hotel. "Several Jewish and Santa Monica leaders," noted a local Jewish newspaper, "... angrily marched into the hotel ... [and] demanded to speak to someone in charge." [PFEFFERSON] In 2000, Michael Weinstein, president of the AIDS Healthcare Foundation, also charged that anonymously created posters appearing throughout West Hollywood, California, were anti-Semitic because they called him a "condom Nazi." Weinstein was advocating "mandatory distribution of condoms at bars and restaurants" in largely homosexual West Hollywood. [POOL, B., 1-25-2000, p. B3] In 2000, in England, London mayoral candidate Ken Livingstone

"came under attack from Britain's Jewish community yesterday after he suggested
that global capitalism had caused more deaths than Hitler. The Board of
Deputies of British Jews described the remarks as 'offensive' while Labour
and Tory opponents said they proved Mr. Livingston was unfit to become
mayor of London. Mr. Livingstone said economists had estimated that in
in any year since 1981, up to 20 million people had died because governments
cut back on health schemes to pay debts. 'Every year the international
finance system kills more people than World War Two. But at least Hitler
was mad, you know?' The comparison provoked an angry reaction from
the Board of Deputies of British Jews." [WAUGH, P., 4-12-00]

The Jewish Thought Police has also followed up in publicly policing the use of words in the English language. In 1997 the ADL began pressuring the publisher Random House against adding a new meaning for the world "Nazi" into its upcoming Webster's College Dictionary. The offensive new meaning? Nazi: "A person who is fanatically dedicated to or seeks to control a specific activity, practice, etc." This definition, so offensive to ADL sensibilities, was perhaps recognized to fit too uncomfortably the Jewish lobbying institution itself.

It cannot be denied that the word "Nazi" is used colloquially these days in such a manner and merits inclusion in any dictionary. But for the Jewish Thought Police so intent upon controlling even the meanings of words, anything having to do with the so-called Holocaust is sacred and anything short of a Hitler-style Nazi, frozen in time, is viewed as a trivialization of Jewish Holocaust dogma. According to an ADL press release to explain the group's complaint, Abraham Foxman, the ADL national director, argued that "the role of editor [at Random House is] to inform the public that there should not be a 'jocular' usage of the word Nazi." [ADL ONLINE, 1-13-97] (In an earlier attempt to censor history and language, in 1973 publishers of the Oxford English Dictionary were sued for refusal to delete the verb "jew" from the English language -- colloquially widespread to mean "cheat").

By 1989, under regular Jewish lobbying pressure, the Concise Oxford Dictionary's second definition of "Jew" (after "person of Hebrew descent") was sanitized over the years as "person who drives hard bargains, usurer." Some Jews found even this objectionable, despite the dictionary's qualifier noting that the definition was "derogatory" and "racially offensive." The next edition was planned to be changed to accommodate Jewish revisionism even further, to explain that the "deeply offensive" definition "arose from historical associations of Jews as moneylenders in medieval England." Under continued pressure to excise the second definition entirely, S. K. Tulloch, the dictionary's senior assistant editor, noted that the purpose of dictionaries are to "try to record the language as it is used, not as we (or someone else) would like it to be used." [JW, 1-13-89, p. 2] Earlier, in 1982, pressure from the World Jewish Congress in Italy forced the publisher of the Dictionary of the Italian Language to recall all copies of the volume because of definitions of "Jew" and "Judaism" that were "insulting to Jews." [JW, 5-30-82, p. 13] In 1984, Eve Kaplan, founder of the "International Committee of Cross Cultural Relations," lobbied to change a Japanese dictionary's unsatisfactory definition of the word "Jew." [GOODMAN/MASANORI, p.29]

In 1995, after concerted Jewish pressure over a period of months, the publisher of a bible (The Christian Community Bible) in France, described by Jews as having "numerous passages with strong anti-Jewish connotations," announced that it was "withdrawing the book from distribution." [SINGER/SELDIN, 1997, p. 299] After Jewish complaints, in 2001, the verb "jew" was completely excised from the World Book Dictionary. "This was a definition left over from the 60s which we overlooked," said Michael Ross, World Book's publisher. "It's a slangy term, and it doesn't add anything to the body of human knowledge." [LEVINE, S., JUNE/JULY 2001] Then there is Irwin Borowsky. Borowsky, "though not a particularly observant Jew, ... created the American Interfaith Institute, dedicated to 'rethinking relationships among Protestants, Catholics and Jews ... Through books, international symposiums, and a scholarly newsletter, the insitute based at [Borowsky's] Liberty Museum, proposes that hoi Ioudaioi [the original Greek for "Jews" used in the New Testament] be translated not as 'the Jews' but with the equivalents drawn from the scriptural context, such as 'the people' or 'the religious leaders' or 'some Jews.' But most New Testament publishers are resistant. They say they have no right to modify the word of God ... [O]ne major publisher that shares Borosky's views is the 183-year old American Bible Society, based in New York. Its 1995 Contemporary English Version, pitched to new English-readers, conspicuously avoids 'the Jews' in the problematic passages and substitutes alternative terms like 'the leaders of the people.'" [O'REILLY, D., 8-17-01]

In an odd way to prevent the spread of anti-Semitism, in 2000 the Anti-Defamation League bought six potential anti-Semitic World Wide Web domain names, including "kike.com," and "kike.net," so that anti-Semites couldn't have them. [LUM, R., 1-14-2000, p. 1A]

In 1990, Michael Slomich, New England Director of the Jewish Defense League, drew considerable media attention in leading protests against the Hull, Massachusetts, community because of a series of old swastika designs in the tile floor of the Hull Town Hall. The building was built in 1923, years before the Nazis came to power with their appropriation across the world of the ancient symbol for good luck and fertility. The swastika was a popular symbol on picture postcards in America at the turn of the century. The design was even discovered during an archeological dig in the ruins of an ancient synagogue in Israel. "Today tourists looking at these preserved ruins," says M. Hirsch Goldberg, "can also see a swastika -- another demonstration of how symbols change, since the swastika was once a sign of peace." [GOLDBERG, M., 1976, p. 29]

Slomich led a group of complainers through Hull to demand the removal of the tiles, successfully forcing such unwelcome publicity upon the borough that the town council spent over $1500 to have the swastika motif extracted. Some critics felt the Jewish attack was misplaced and even ridiculous. A Native American professor at the nearby University of Massachusetts noted that the swastika was a positive symbol in his own culture; he objected to Jewish demands to excise them. "For many thousands of years, we have known and used that sign [the swastika]...," professor Fox Tree wrote, "We do not have a national people's defense league or access to our own media, television, radio and newspapers to tell our own side of the story." [NEUMAN, E, p. 4-5]

"By destroying the swastikas in the town hall because a minority -- most from out of town -- does not like them, aren't you doing the same as Hitler?" read one anti-JDL petition to leave the swastikas alone. "I've never seen so many anti-Semites come out of the woodwork," declared the JDL's Slomich, in evaluation of the controversy, "It was a victory for us, but I'm upset about the amount of opposition." [NEUMAN, E, p. 4-5]

"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 Gottlieb 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]


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 Rathenau, 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,
"East European Jews were held to be dirty, low, and coarse. They were regarded
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 general 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 father's. To these readers, to criticize any aspect
of Judaism is patently unacceptable. To them, I wasn't a journalist doing my
job. I was a self-loathing Jew, the worst kind of anti-Semite. I was embarrassing
the family." [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 virtually 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]

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]


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 till, 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]


"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 --epitomizes 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 non-sectarianism, 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 against 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 non-rational 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 critically 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 ]


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, entirely displaced. 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]

"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 tempting to teach our children that the Jewish family is superior to all others ... [we] must admit that our idealized concept of the Jewish family is ... a myth." [SCARF, p. 63]

"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]

Gluck's analysis of the Jewish male's endemic blaming of others for his own failings may well hold clues for comprehending the Jewish mental fabric of collective identity -- per Jewish self-hatred, suspicion of non-Jews, and even the underlying premises of the modern state of Israel:

"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 daughter 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]


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]


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).


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, impetuous, uppity, rude, profane, brash and overbearing." [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 Radical newsletter 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 counseled 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 "camouflaged 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 anti-Semitic 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]

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 prominent 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 business 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 non-radicals." [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 non-persons 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 are suspected 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 vengeance 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 ever-present 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]


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]


"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 bogeymen:

"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 innocence 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 claim 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 endanger 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:

"The Bible is full of castigations by the prophets of Israel of the shortcomings
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, boisterous 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 conviction:
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]

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. *

********************************************************


* 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 undedesirability 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]