19
(pt. 1)
THE ACCUSATION OF ANTI-SEMITISM
"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 forturne. But what will tell my children when I
am 70?"
-- millionaire Leonard Nevzlin, upon becoming
president of the
Russian Jewish Congress [GORODETSKY, L, 5-23-01]
"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 areligious state ideology -- Zionism
-- includes Orthodox Judaism's old conviction of an omnipresent
'anti-Semitism" in all non-Jews to be central to its identity dogma.
"Like the Nazi ideologues," wrote Jewish anti-Zionist William Zukerman
in 1960, "the Zionists take it for granted the Jews are a foreign and
inassimilable element in the body of all non-Jewish people ... [and]
that hatred for the Jews is something instinctive and mystical, forever
engrained in the subconscious of every non-Jew, which can never be
eradicated or cured." [ZUKERMAN, p. 63]
"It is impossible to comprehend the
largely irrational nature of [anti-Semitism], says popular Jewish
polemicist Alan Dershowitz, "...The important point is that Jews
are not to blame for anti-Semitism. Anti-Semitism is the problem of the
bigots who feel, express, and practice it. Nothing we do can
profoundly affect the twisted minds of the anti-Semites." [DERSHOWITZ,
p. 102, 101] In a 1995 book about anti-Semitism in Japan, scholar David
Goodman noted that "since anti-Semitism as we are defining it has
nothing to do with Jews, much less 'Semites,' we will neither hyphenate
nor capitalize the term." [GOODMAN, p. 11] Another Jewish scholar,
Daniel Pipes, in a book dismissing as nonsense a variety of conspiracy
theories, outlined his own personal lens to understand the world,
saying, "I spell [antisemitism] in lower case, without a hyphen (not
anti-Semitism), to signal that it refers to an ideology and to imply
that the phenomenon has almost nothing to do with the actions of Jews."
[PIPES, D., 1997, p. 27]
"The term Jew has been used as a term
of abuse, a curse and an accusation for centuries," says Irene
Bloomfield, a Jewish psychotherapist, "It expresses the anti-Semite’s
virulent and unreasoning hatred and contempt and has so often been the
preliminary of attacks, pogroms, persecution, and death ... The Jews had
thus been an archetypical bad object and universal enemy from time
immemorial." [BLOOMFIELD, p. 26] "Among most anti-Semites," adds
another Jewish psychotherapist, Mortimer Ostrow, "we found that their
irrational hatred was the expression of primary process thinking, that
is, thought that is driven by feeling and not subjected to the
discipline of reason, logic, and reality testing." [OSTROW, p. 176]
Early, and prominent, Zionist Max Nordau declared that "the anti-Semitic
accusations are valueless, because they are not based on a criticism of
real facts, but are merely due to the psychological law according to
which children, savages, and malevolent fools make persons and things
against which they have an aversion responsible for their sufferings.
Pretexts change, but the hatred remains. The Jews are not hated because
they have evil qualities; evil qualities are sought for in them because
they are hated." [HERTZ, J., 1954]
"Anti-Semitism," says prominent
(Jewish) historian Barbara Tuchman, "is independent of its object. What
Jews do or fail to do is not the determinant. The impetus comes out of
the needs of the persecutors." [CUDDIHY, p. 24] "We all know that
anti-Semitism really has nothing to do with Jews," says scholar Susannah
Herschel, "It can flourish even in places where no Jews live." "The
psychic needs of the Christians -- and not the actual characteristics of
Jewish life," asserts Todd Endelman, "give anti-Semitism its power and
appeal." "Jewish hatred is one-sided," adds Ruth Wisse, "... and
functions independent of its object." "Anti-Semitism is oblivious to
Jewish conduct," declared the Jerusalem Post in 1990, "it is
independent of the very presence of Jews." [all: LINDEMANN, 1997, p.
xvii]
"The existence of anti-Semitism and
the content of anti-Semitic charges...," wrote Daniel Goldhagen in his
best-selling 1996 book about Germany and the Jews, "are fundamentally
not a response to any objective evaluation of Jewish actions
... anti-Semitism draws on cultural sources that are independent
of the Jews' nature and actions." [Goldhagen's emphases;
FINKELSTEIN, N., 1998, p. 11] "Let's face it," wrote Harry Golden,
""anti-Semitism can't possibly be explained; it can merely be
recounted." "Understand and explain the problem [of anti-Semitism] as
much as you may," said Lewis Naimier, "there remains a hard, insoluble
core, incomprehensible and inexplicable." [LINDEMANN, p. 11]
In Jewish folklore, even
intra-community jokes reflect the same theme of Jewish categorical
innocence as the cause of anti-Semitism. In the following case, it is a
Jewish-created defamation of Poles and Poland: a "Pollock" joke:
"A few months after the end of
World War I, the premier of Poland
had a meeting with President Woodrow
Wilson. 'If you don't meet
our nation's demands at the peace
conference,' warned the premier,
'I foresee great troubles ahead. The
Polish people will be very
angry, and they'll go out and
massacre the Jews.'
'And if your demands are
met?' asked Wilson.
'In that case,' responded the
premier, 'my people will be delighted.
They'll go out in the streets and get
drunk -- and then they'll massacre
the Jews.'" [NOVAK/WALDOKS, 1981, p.
60]
"When it comes to the millions of
Jews who faced liquidation in Hitler's Europe," says Jewish author
Michael Medved,
"historians make little effort to figure out what, precisely, the
victims had done
to make Der Fuehrer so terribly angry. With racial and religious
antagonisms,
we understand that rage can flourish with no basis in reality."
[MEDVED, M.
11-12-01]
"Jews don't cause anti-Semitism," declares Jewish novelist Ann
Roiphe, "nothing provokes it, it's always there ... The object of
gentile racists and nationalist hate, chameleon-like, takes on the shape
of that moment's Jew." [ROIPHE, A., 1992, p. 40] "The notion that
anti-Semitism can be, in the slightest degree, the fault of the Jews,"
proclaims well-known Jewish author Cynthia Ozick, "is in itself -- even
when it crops up, as it frequently does among Jews -- a species of
anti-Semitism." [CUDDIHY, p. 24]
Eventual New York Times
Executive Editor A. M. Rosenthal and reporter Arthur Gelb put the
standard Jewish theme this way:
"The circumstantial evidence is that anti-Semitism is a mental
disorder, because
the anti-Semite sees certain human beings not as human beings but
as objects. They
are reflections of his own needs and passions and his inability to
recognize them for
what they are is such a severe form of irrationalism as to be a
symptom of
mental malfunction. The anti-Semite suffers from a fear of demons,
but since he
is not aware of his fear is convinced of the reality of demons -- a
clinical example
of paranoia." [ROSENTHAL/ GELB, 1967, p. 65]
"Not only does anything Jews do or
refrain from doing have nothing to do with anti-Semitism," notes a
non-Jewish scholar, John Michael Cuddihy, with incredulity and
exasperation, "but any attempt to explain anti-Semitism by referring to
the Jewish contribution to anti-Semitism is itself an instance of
anti-Semitism!" [CUDDIHY, p. 24]
Such widespread Jewish Orwellian
doublethink loops of logic to fend off blame and responsibility for
their historical deeds stems from the old Chosen People syndrome itself,
popularly secularized as an impenetrable fortress of denial against all
non-Jewish (or Jewish) critical attack, an intellectual ghetto with
locked gates: by self-edict declared separate, blameless, unaccountable,
and completely untouchable. "This reductio ad absurdum," observes
Cuddihy, "has stunning implications. It means that Jews have not been
causal agents in their own history ... They did not act and interact
causally and historically with other groups in history. Morally
blameless, the Jews ... were outside of history, aspiring to ...
'angelism.'" [CUDDIHY, p. 24]
This outrageously ahistorical
perspective is reflected in a comment by Elie Wiesel about the defining
Jewish event of the 20th century: "The Holocaust is beyond politics and
beyond analogies." [ELLIS, M., 1990, p. 76]
In the modern Jewish community
post-World War II, notes Jewish critic William Zukerman, "criticism and
self-criticism which were the basis of inspiration of the Enlightenment
period, have been discredited as almost the equivalent of treason. By a
kind of perverted chauvinistic reasoning, criticism of anything
pertaining to Jews, whether it is of Israel, of the dominant nationalist
party [of Israel], its institutions, or of its ideology, has been
defined as anti-Semitism." [ZUKERMAN, p. 68] Irving Kristol calls it his
peoples' "propensity to gloss over their own shortcomings and blame the
always available anti-Semite for their misfortunes." [KRISTOL, p. 278]
Milton Steinberg notes that:
"Unfortunately Jews, like other human
beings, are so constituted as
to be reluctant to pass adverse
judgment on themselves. Hence,
whether with justice or not they will
hold their Jewishness at fault
for whatever goes wrong in their
lives." [NEUSNER, J., 1972, p. 78]
"The Cult of Victimhood," observes
David Klinghoffer, "performs two valuable services for us Jews with
guilty consciences. First, as it does for everyone else, it assures us
that, whatever we know we are doing wrong, we are really angels ... But
it does something else for us, which it may not do for other groups. We
believe that any hostility we can detect on the part of non-Jews is
entirely unmerited. We have done nothing to deserve it ... We American
Jews are not as ignorant as we seem. We know, in our souls, that we have
gone astray; but, to borrow a hackneyed phrase of psychological jargon,
we are in denial." [KLINGHOFFER, p. 10-13]
Facing this suffocating shield, once
defined as an anti-Semite for the crime of criticizing Jews, the
offending individual is completely marginalized in modern America.
"During the late 1950s and 1960s," says Benjamin Ginsberg,
"anti-Semitism has been successfully defined by Jews as a form of
extremism in which only politicians on the lunatic fringe engaged. As a
result, any effort to make political cause of anti-Semitism seemed
fraught with risk." [GINSBERG, B., 1993, p. 187] Once labeled an
"anti-Semite," the stigmatized individual is even subject to the most
preposterous of slanders, a virtual canon in much of the Jewish
community. Criticizing Jews is anti-Semitism, and therefore equivalent
to sending Jews to death camps. Says Konstanty Gebert, editor of a
Jewish journal in Poland, :
"The reality of [the Nazi death
camp] Treblinka exists, irremovably, and
contemporary anti-Semites do not
have the option of stating that it is not
their goal." [GEBERT]
Albert Lindemann notes such
accusations with amazement: "Some writers go so far as to condemn the
distinction ["between 'irritation' with Jews and calling for their
systematic murder"] as morally dubious, thus making any irritation with
Jews or criticism of them 'anti-Semitic,' a conclusion that takes on
extraordinary dimensions when linked to such assertions as 'all
anti-Semitism is essentially the same' or 'a little bit of anti-Semitism
is a little bit of cancer.'" [LINDEMANN, 1997, p. xiv]
(Professor Lindemann wrote an
extraordinarily unusual work, Esau's Tears: Modern Anti-Semitism and
the Rise of the Jews (Cambridge University Press, 1997), a volume
that seeks to "understand" anti-Semitism largely in terms of Jewish
belief and action that elicits it. Not unexpectedly, the reviewer for
the American Jewish Committee's influential Commentary magazine
decried the work in an article entitled "Blaming the Victim" as "deeply
pernicious" and Lindemann's "knowledge of Jewish history ... [is] little
better than that of the anti-Semites whose arguments he echoes."
[WISTRICH, 1998, p. 60-63] Likewise, John Landau reviewed Esau's
Tears in the Zionist journal Midstream, linking Lindemann's
reciting of the truths of history to Hitler fascism, warning readers
that "It appears that anti-Semitism remains a respectable intellectual
position on American and British college campuses, including history
department, provided that it is expressed with a degree of good manners
and restraint. We must not forget that the assault on Jews by German
academics and intellectuals preceded, and helped to lay the groundwork
for, the physical destruction of European Jewry." [LANDAU, J., FEB/MAR
99, p. 44-45]
Central to the modern Jewish world
view is the so-called "Holocaust." "The Holocaust," says Joseph Amato,
"serves as the point from which
Jews can morally survey the entire past
and classify all present society
... Some Jewish thinkers consider the
Holocaust [as] providing a singular
point of wrong innocence against
which they can judge everyone else.
It has consciously been chosen by
Jews to be their crucifixion: the
great sorrow they must mediate. Non-
Jews are tried by two questions:
What did they do (collectively or
individually, directly or
indirectly, by commission or omission) to further
anti-Semitism? What did they do to
stop the Holocaust? The most
severe judges find everyone guilty
who did not risk his family's lives
to save Jews in the Holocaust."
[AMATO, p. 181]
Reflecting again the old Chosen
People theme, Jewish convention also insists that anti-Semitism is a
"unique" form of prejudice. Non-Jewish historian John Higham, who had
written about anti-Semitism in the 1950s, defended himself against
Jewish attack, saying:
"[It is accused] that I have violated
the uniqueness of anti-Semitism
by comparing it with other
exclusionary movements -- illustrating
the unwillingness of some Jews to
measure their own experience
on a general human scale, unless
anti-Semitism is presented ... as
the very archetype of all prejudices
and anti-democratic attitudes.
For me the uniqueness of
anti-Semitism was not a foregone
conclusion but a question." [HIGHAM,
J., 1986, p. 225]
(It is interesting to wonder what
Higham might have said more freely about the subject if he was not so
beholding to the Jewish community -- his basic studies in this subject
had been "generously" supported by the American Jewish Committee --
[HIMMELFARB, M., 1986, p. 197])
Despite the long historical list of
very legitimate complaints against Jews by people all over the world
through history, the institutionalized self-celebration of the Nazis as
a polar German "chosen people," Hitler's heralding of the ruthlessness
of war as a noble enterprise, the Nazi determination to rid Germany of
Jews via the clinically brutal scientism of mass murder, Eli Weisel
echoes many Jews in completely mystifying the Holocaust in his
introduction to The Encyclopedia of the Shoah: "Unlike other
tragedies, there was no logical reason underlying the tragedy of the
Holocaust, and all attempts to discover rational reasons have failed." [March
of the Living, p. 5]
Jewish blameless innocence
throughout history, framing itself as an eternal scapegoats for the old
religious nemesis of Christianity, is elaborately and imaginatively
expounded upon by Jewish critic George Steiner. Hyam Maccoby notes that
Steiner's
"theory of anti-Semitism [is that
it] is caused by the atavistic pagan
element in western religion by which
Jews are regarded as a collective
Executioner of a central human
sacrifice. We have to do here with a
shifting moral responsibility, by
which the individual lays his moral
burden firstly on Jesus himself, who
dies to save him; and secondly,
on the Jews who bring about the
necessary death of Jesus ... In any
event, the Jews have been elected,
'chosen' if you will, to the position
of scapegoat so that all others can
escape guilt into the innocence of
childhood and recover the joy of
Eden." [MACCOBY, p. 34]
Roger 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 nad Jews irresistible ... many
obscure forces and emotions, all the more powerful the less they were
defined in words: ... Only to my Jewish nature did I owed the two
qualities which had become indispensable to me on my hard road. Because
I was a Jew, I found myself free of many prejudices and being a Jew, I
was prepared to enter opposition and to renounce agreement with the
compact majority." [ACKERMAN, N., 1965, p. xii] "However abused," adds
Ackerman, paraphrasing Freud, "the Jew must remain true to his people;
there is no other way: 'It always seemed to me [said Freud] not only
shameful but downright senseless to deny it." [ACKERMAN, N., 1965, p.
xiii]
"Psychoanalysis is widely thought of as a 'Jewish science,'" says
Arnold Jacob Wolf,
"Indeed, Freud took pains to avart just such a notion, though he
himself was,
the chief reason for it. The enemies of depth psychology still
dismiss it as
peculiarly relevant to Jews; its friends note with gratifiation the
biblical roots of
the new wisdom. Not 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 imporant point is that it was quite clear to
me that the Jew
and the psychotherapist joined forces in the abolition of WASP
hypocrisy,
WASP decorum, and WASP censorship. I even came to see a parallel --
while obviously aware of the disparities -- between Jewish social
liberation
and my own psychological liberation. My ghetto was my head, my
assimilation was through therapy ... So when I say that
psychotherapy
revealed to me the autheticity of feeling, I'm saying that the
experience was
a way of becoming a mensch [Yiddish for 'good man']. Thus, to me,
psychotherapy became what Freud most feared -- a Jewish science ...
I regard myself as an 'honorary' Jew."
[WEZSTEON, R., SEPT 6-12, 1998]
Freud's broad version of
psychoanalysis as a respected "science" to this day has a constrictive
ideological foundation. And what is the essential spirit of it? "The
negative character of psycho dynamic theory," suggests Martin Gross,
"with its emphasis on abnormalities ... is a magnificent legacy of
Freud's own neuroses." Freud's official biographer, wrote that for
nearly a decade up to 1900 the founder of psychoanalysis had his own
"considerable psycho neurosis, characterized by swings of mood from
extreme exhilaration to profound depression and twilight states of
consciousness." [EYSENCK, p. 38] Freud was also addicted to cocaine, and
he prescribed it to others. [GROSS, p. 234-235; ROTHCHILD, S., 11-26-98,
p. 24]
And, if one resists Freudian dictates? For the psychoanlytic
Thought Police, it is evidence, of course, of anti-Semitism. "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
interreligious unity.
The ADL and the AJC both obscured the Jewish origins of theeir
efforts
by unobtrusively subsidizing newspapers, church groups, labor
unions,
professional organizations, and German American organizations that
spread
anti-Nazi, pro-democratic propaganda." [SVONKIN, S., 1997, p.
15-16]
Glen Jean Sonne describes one of the successful American Jewish
prototypes to silence a critic of Jewry, this one a preacher and
right-winger, Gerald K. Smith, in the 1940s:
"Indeed there was a Jewish plan ('plot' is too strong a
word); and it was more
effective than many of Smith's opponents anticipated. The strategy
devised was
to deny Smith any publicity. This plan evolved after several years
of spirited
debate within the Jewish community; it required a herculean effort
to convince
and coordinate the press as well as fellow Jews. Although never
completely
effective, the strategy reduced Smith from a highly publicized
public figure
in the 1930s to a pariah in the postwar period ..." [SONNE, J.,
1986, p. 153]
Popular Jewish convention also held --as one 1950s study of Jewish
American colleges students found -- organized Jewish efforts to thwart
anti-Jewish hostility should be accomplished "secretly." "The desire to
please and appease the powerful Gentile," noted Joseph Adelson in
discussing the results of his survey of Jews, "is reflected in the
belief that organizational response to anti-Semitism, when it is
necessary, should be of a quiet, secret, conspiratorial nature.
Organizations such as the Anti-Defamation League should avoid stirring
up public attention." [ADELSON, J., 1960, p. 478]
By 1950, the "Department of
Scientific Research" (headed by Horkheimer) of the AJC sponsored an
influential study, led by Dr. Nathan Ackerman of Columbia University,
designed to equate mental illness and anti-Semitism. The resultant
volume, Anti-Semitism and Emotional Disorder (co-authored with
Marie Jahoda), became an authoritative source and is cited in the
bibliographies of many later books about anti-Semitism. Ackerman's
research was not exploratory investigation per se. Cloaked beneath the
robes of psychoanalytic scientism, it was closer in spirit to a
McCarthy-inspired witch hunt, which entered American political life a
few years later. Information was merely solicited from American
psychoanalysts by open invitation in this study to prove the thesis that
anyone who complains about any aspect of Jewish behavior is crazy. (In
1996, Jewish psychoanalyst Mortimer Ostrow reported upon his own 9-year
research project sponsored by the "Psychoanalysis Research and
Development Fund" on the same topic: "We anticipated that the
psychoanalytic method could be usefully applied to the phenomenon of
anti-Semitism, since anti-Semitism seems to be largely irrational. Its
ubiquity and presence cannot be explained by any realistic
considerations.") [OSTROW, p. 3]
The bedrock for such a study
originates here: "[Freud's] historic neurotic personality," says Martin
Gross," has had a profound effect on our culture. It has thrust Freud's
worst indispositions into our language, our mental habits, and our
psychology ... one trait was his bad-tempered insistence that secret
hostility was paramount in the human psyche." [GROSS, p. 243] (Might
this be a clue, one wonders, to distinctly Jewish "secret
hostility.")
In the introductory statements to his
study of anti-Semitism, Ackerman notes that he and his colleagues are
Jews. He then bluntly confesses his emotional bias on the subject of
anti-Semitism, dismisses objectivity and "detachment from the issue" as
being "logically and psychologically untenable," declares that "value
judgments enter into every step of social research," and then begins --
paradoxically and hypocritically -- a discussion of the evils of
"prejudice" and "prejudgment" (as expressed by anti-Semites) on the very
next pages! [ACKERMAN, p. 1-4] "Inherent," he boldly pronounces, " in
the process of prejudgments is the danger of stereotypical thinking."
Lost in his zealous dedication to diagnose his preconceived world of
endemic Jew-haters Ackerman somehow misses -- from the very start --
that his own "value judgments" are quintessential prejudgments.
Ackerman conjures up a broad
definition of anti-Semitism, wide enough to catch virtually anyone in
his "prejudicial" net (including plenty of Jews, as we shall see):
"Anti-Semitism is any expression of hostility, verbal or behavioral,
mild or violent, against Jews as a group, or against an individual Jew
because of his belonging to that group." [ACKERMAN, p. 19] That's the
entire definition. This net that even includes
"any-mild-verbal-hostility" catches a lot of minnows, and anyone short
of a saint. In fact, it catches -- as intended -- everyone. Lest anyone
dare to think that they are not themselves fertile grounds for the
disease of anti-Semitism, Ackerman notes that "the difference between
the 'sick' and the 'healthy' personality is one of degree and quantity
rather than one of quality." [ACKERMAN, p. 18]
This professor, in consort with the
American Jewish Committee, contacted a number of "accredited" New York
city psychiatrists -- some were Jews, some were not. He doesn't provide
exact numbers or proportions. Ackerman only says that " a small number
of psychiatrists were first approached." [ACKERMAN, p.11] Later he says
"the cooperation of psychoanalysts was then enlisted on a large scale,"
[ACKERMAN, p.15] and he leaves it at that, except to add that some case
histories were further solicited from two social-welfare agencies.
[ACKERMAN, p.16] Suspiciously, he does not ever note, other than in
these vague terms, the number of psychiatrists who participated in his
project, let alone how many were Jewish and how many Gentile. Whoever
they were, he asked them to submit case histories of patients who
exhibited "signs of anti-Semitism" (the psychiatrists were to determine
the "signs" as they wished -- "The psychoanalyst was completely at
liberty to include any fact that seemed relevant to the patient's
anti-Semitism)." [ACKERMAN, p. 11] Ackerman doesn't note if the patients
gave consent to use their personal traumas, fears, and pains for this
study, or even if they were informed of its existence.
Ackerman then decided that it was
"essential" that those under his employ (who interviewed the New York
psychiatrists about anti-Semitism) had to be themselves psychoanalyzed.
"This," he says, "helped to establish quickly an atmosphere of
confidence between the psychoanalyst and research personnel."
[ACKERMAN, p.15] It would also, of course, be an invasive and
authoritarian way to weed out anyone who might have questions about the
direction, or methodology, of his project.
The conclusions reached by Ackerman
and his colleagues from the collection of random case histories
volunteered to them are self-fulfilling, and sometimes outright bizarre.
Whose "prejudices and prejudgments" are we hearing about when Ackerman
states that "some of the psychoanalysts said that they had not
encountered a single case of anti-Semitism in all their practice, others
declared that every patient they had ever treated, whether Gentile or
Jew, showed some traces of it"? [ACKERMAN, p. 20] (Ackerman discreetly
avoids telling us how Jewish and Gentile psychiatrists line up behind
these opposite experiences).
A few highlights from his research
conclusions are as follows:
* "Anti-Semitic
reactions are found in psycho neurotics in
various types; in
character disorders, perhaps more
particularly of the
sado-masochistic type."
* "All individuals ...
suffer from anxiety.... In most cases
it was of a special
nature: it was diffuse, pervasive,
relatively
unorganized, and not adequately channeled
through specific
symptom-formation."
* "Plagued by a vague
apprehension of the world at-large,
these patients seem
to derive little, if any, strength from
their own identity."
* "It is extremely
difficult for these anti-Semitic personalities
to achieve
satisfactory personal relationships."
* "The very existence
of the Jews ... is a constant and
painful reminder of
the anti-Semites own emotional
deficiencies."
* "The emotional
deficiencies of these patients, extending
beyond the sphere
of human relations, seem also to have
impaired their
capacity to establish a satisfactory
relationship with
external objects."
* "At the psychic
level, anti-Semitic hostility can be viewed
as a profound
though irrational and futile defensive effort
to restore a
crippled self."
* "In a pathetic and
futile attempt at genuine acceptance
by other human
beings, these persons are often driven
into a slavish
imitation of habits and ideologies by those
who represent
cohesive power in their community." [p.
69]
This is, of course, an entire
volume of such material. But one of Ackerman's more summary insights
into the generic, stereotypical enemy is this: "The tendency to blame
the outside world rather than oneself accompanies all the reactions of
the anti-Semite." This rebellious trait against the "outside world" and
the refusal to blame oneself for the social, economic and political
failings of the world would have to be considered endemic to the world's
greatest social thinkers and revolutionaries, humanitarians, artists and
intellectuals of all kinds (including Ralph Waldo Emerson who wrote that
"Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of
its members ... The base doctrine of the majority of voices usurps the
place of the doctrine of the soul." Ironically, conversely, the tendency
to "blame the outside world rather than oneself" has also always been a
Jewish defense mechanism in denying Jewish responsibility for
anti-Semitism.
Among the most extraordinary findings
in Ackerman's research was the ethnicity of the "anti-Semites" he and
his cohorts discovered. Of the 40 case studies cited in the book, 8
individuals were themselves born Jews, another 3 were "half-Jews," one
more was "part Jewish," another was married to a Jew, and yet another
was "half-Jewish" and adopted by a Jewish couple. Only one of the
non-Jewish anti-Semites, as Ackerman tells us, was "colored." [ACKERMAN,
p. 95-129] (Ackerman, of course, decides that the Black woman's dislike
of Jews was displaced. Didn't she know that she really hated Whites?
"But," says the professor, "to admit hostility against all whites was
realistically too dangerous, particularly since she was being advised by
a white psychiatrist worker. She, therefore, displaced her hostility to
the Jews.")
Does this tell us, as these kinds of
researchers would propagandize, that evidence of such great Jewish
self-disdain merely evidences that the scourge of anti-Semitism is so
prominent in American society that even large numbers of Jews blindly
absorb it like mindless sponges? Or might it indicate that being Jewish
is not sacrosanct, and that some parts of the Jewish experience -- like
any other people on earth -- warrant reasonable criticism? And, further,
might it not be psychologically healthy for those troubled with their
Jewish identities to give free vent to their complaints and concerns in
an open forum towards resolution, rather than stifle and deny some of
the uncertainties of Jewish identity in the real world.
The function of Ackerman's study was
Orwellian in nature: its intent was to obfuscate real social, political,
and economic realities regarding Jews and replace them with the world of
Sigmund Freud: implanted illusions of personal inadequacies and mental
illnesses. Such a "study" never once even remotely considered that the
slightest "hostility" towards a single Jew, or Jews in general, was in
any way legitimate. Rather, anyone who dares to question anything
whatsoever about Jewry is categorized as a veritable species -- an
"anti-Semite," this term itself a quintessential stereotype.
Ackerman even psychoanalyzed (by
remote control) professional colleagues who refused to work with him on
this study. For those principled psychoanalysts who declined to
participate in Ackerman's biased undertaking "for fear [that it] might
detract from the more fundamental social and economic causes of
anti-Semitism ... [Ackerman decided that] it appeared to us, in a few
cases, as rationalizations for the wish not to be concerned with
anti-Semitism at too close range, as an attempt to keep away from its
horror and to avoid identification with its victims -- in short, it
seemed to be an expression of self-preservation." [ACKERMAN, p.20]
The entire construct of this dubious
scientific study would not merit the slightest attention 50 years later,
except that its theses and conclusions remain the foundation of Jewish
public opinion today. In this "study" we find one of the monster embryos
for the vast Jewish propaganda machinery against what is generically
known today as "anti-Semitism." Ackerman and co-author, noted the
volume, "both are convinced that decisive social action should and can
be taken to prevent the spread of anti-Semitism ... Indeed, one of the
motives for undertaking this study was the concern for its potential
pragmatic value." [ACKERMAN, p.2]
There are precedents for such
psychoanalytically-based manipulation which stretches to preposterous
lengths in a socio-political context. Sigmund Freud himself turned into
a naked political hack in using psychoanalysis in a book -- finally
published 28 years after his own death -- to defame a U.S. President,
Woodrow Wilson. It was, according to Martin Gross, "a classic of
historical distortion" that was "greeted with an embarrassed apology
from the psychological community." [GROSS, p. 72-73] Even Jewish
historian Barbara Tuchman wrote that [Freud and his co-author] "have
allowed emotional bias to direct their inquiry, which has led to
undisciplined reasoning, wild overstatement, and false conclusions."
[GROSS, p. 73]
It must be admitted, however, that
widespread Jewish faith in psychoanalysis to explain the world for them,
and sometimes impugn historical figures who are long dead, is not
discriminatory. In 1993 a Jewish psychoanalyst, Avner Falk, turned his
probe for neurosis onto Theodore Herzl, the Jewish Zionist hero. Falk's
book, subtitled "a Psychoanalytical Biography," declares,
according to one Jewish reviewer, that Herzl was "inwardly dependent on
his parents, stunted emotionally, extremely arrogant and supercilious,
completely self-obsessed, and [was] ... never really able to sustain
close personal relationships." [ADLER, p. 44] Herzl had a miserable
personal life. He had three children. Pauline died of drug addiction,
Hans converted to Catholicism and later committed suicide, and Trude
spent a "lifetime of mental illness." Of these Herzl children, only
Trude had a child, Stephan, who also committed suicide. [STEWART, D.,
Genealogical chart, 1974]
Another Jewish psychoanalyst, Jay
Gonen, even takes Freudianism so far as to explain the core of
collective Jewish neurosis like this:
"Because of their covenant with God,
because of their obedience to Him,
the sons of Israel end up with
shorter penises. Having yielded to
circumcision, they will never be
endowed with the same phallic prowess
as the Gentiles, and will never have
as good and big a penis as their
mighty father. Thus, they have to be
careful that Jewish women do not
learn that Gentiles are more
satisfying and they have to continue to love
the God-Father whom they also
unconsciously hate." [GONEN, p. 14]
Prominent Jewish author Erica Jong undescores 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 epitomy 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
academeze of the era, it was "a study of minority group
authoritarianism." What Adelson was interested in was to what degree
"anti-Semitic" attitudes were reflected in Jews themselves. (This is
popularly known as "self-hatred" in the Jewish community and will be
discussed a little later). The Jewish college students were asked to
response to a variety of sentences. They were given the choice of six
numbered responses to each question. A "7" represented complete
agreement and a "0" complete disagreement with the statement. Here are
the Jewish scores for acceptance of some of the most "anti-Semitic"
questions: (the "Mean for Total Group" follows each statement):
"There are many Jews to whom anti-Semitic statements do apply." (4.49)
"I feel personally ashamed when I see Jews making themselves
conspicuous." (4.31)
"The Jewish group in this country would get along better if many Jews
were not so clannish." (4.12)
"I have often been embarrased by the anti-social conduct of certain Jews
in public life." (4.05)
"Too many Jews try to intrude themselves into circles where they're not
wanted. (3.33)
"Most Jews who meet a great deal of anti-Semitism bring it about by
their own obnoxious behavior." (3.20)
"A lot of anti-Semitism is caused by the number of Jewish radicals."
(3.19)
[ADELSON, J., 1960, p. 481, 484]
In other words, a lot of Jews put some stock in "anti-Semitic"
beliefs as part of 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 outgroup [Jews in
Gentile society]
incorporates the essential elements of the
anti-Semitic stereotype; even the
contradictions are retained, as
in the attribution of both seclusive and intrusive motives.
One
important component of Gentile anti-Semitism is omitted; the Jews is
never
seen as a sinister or dangerous force. The theme of Jewish power,
when it does
appear, is greeted not with hostility, but with pride
and admiration." [ADELSON, J.,
1960, p. 477] (In other words,
Jewish "power," a staple of the anti-Semitic charge
which is
publicly denied always, is secretly celebrated]
In essence, Adelson's study attempts to explain widespread Jewish
admission to truths about popular stereotypes about Jews as merely
Jewish distancing efforts to gain acceptance to the world of the
prejudicial, irrational, "authoritarian" Gentile majority culture.
Along with this, and many
AJC-sponsored titles about anti-Semitism, we can find on the library
shelves other such titles as Anti-Semitism: A Social Disease,
Anti-Judaism: A Psychohistory, and still flowing, in 1990,
Anti-Semitism: A Disease of the Mind, and, in 1996, Myth and
Madness. The Psychodynamics of Anti-Semitism (i.e., the
"anti-Semite's" myths are expressed by "madness"). At one major
Midwestern state university library a computer subject search of
"anti-Semitism" coughed up 719 titles. By comparison, the generic word
"flowers" only had 632 listings and "anatomy" 1110. The word "Polish"
(including anything whatsoever about Polish people anywhere, as well as
the word's other potential meanings, including car wax) had 1361. Even
the generic word "racism" (any kind, anywhere, at any time in history,
of everyone else on earth) had 802 listings, only about 80 more than
those texts that focused solely on injustices to Jews, a minuscule part
of the world's population. In our American society that has, even by
many scholarly Jewish accounts, anti-Semitism "under control," The
Index of Jewish Periodicals listed 196 new articles on the subject
in 1996 alone.
While a pair of Jewish psychiatrists
write that "the higher the income of the father, the greater the
proportion of anti-Semite," (Else Frenkel-Brunswik and R. Nevitt
Sanford, p. 103] in the same book a colleague writes that anti-Semitism
is found "in those places where ... the pariahs of society meet. By this
I refer to the cheap locales where chronic alcoholics, addicts, and
psychopathic criminals gather. These are the psychological slums ...
[that are used] as strategic positions in which to spread
anti-Semitism.; they need mental sanitation..." [SIMMEL, p. 75]
"At some point in the course of
analytic treatment," says Rudolf Loewenstein, "almost all non-Jewish
patients will manifest varying degrees of anti-Semitism." [PERLMUTTER,
p. 64] Moshe Leshem, joins in to note that "Freud attributed Christian
resentment of the Jews to the son-father tension in the superego."
Maurice Samuel out-Freuds Freud in suggesting that anti-Semitism is an
outlet for the yearning of Christians to free themselves from the
inhibitive yoke of Jewish morality inherited in their faith and to open
wide the gates to the pagan, orgiastic "id." [LESHEM, p. 62-63]
Freud himself said, about his own
invention: "Nor is it perhaps entirely a matter of chance that the first
advocate of psychoanalysis was a Jew." [THE JEWISH MYSTIQUE, p. 55]
"Freud believed," says Richard Bank, "in the inheritance of acquired
characteristics and that in some unknown fashion, his Jewishness became
part of his phylogenetic heritage. Thus, Freud identifies certain Jewish
traits in himself and his adherents which provided a predisposition
towards psychoanalysis." [BANK, p. 21]
Some studies have even suggested
that Jews are "prone" to "have fast and frequent mood swings ...
alternative periods of elation and depression ... manic depressive
psychosis, neurotic symptoms, and somatic complaints (nervousness,
feeling uneasy, shortness of breath)." [MACDONALD, p. 211] In the 1970s
a University of California study of 421 therapists "revealed that they
feel irrepressibly superior [to others] ... [yet] one concern among
professionals, whispered within the establishment, is that [the
psychoanalytic/psychiatric field] attracts people who are particularly
anxious about their emotional stability ... Psychiatrists appear at the
top of the [occupational] list [of suicides]." [GROSS, p. 45]
Even one of Freud's earliest
disciples, Isidor Sadger, once ventured that "the disposition of the
Jews to obsessive neurosis is perhaps connected with the addiction to
brooding ... characteristic of them for thousands of years." [GAY, p.
135] Molly Katz jokes that
"Natural-born Jews leave the womb
with a worry reservoir that is
filled early and replenished
constantly. We worry about everything.
Worrying is as essential to our
well-being as a balanced breakfast.
It is our duty, our birthright, and
our most profound satisfaction.
There are no exceptions to this rule.
All Jews worry all the time. If
there is nothing handy to worry
about, we are breath-stoppingly
creative at finding something."
[KATZ, M., 1991, p. 47]
James Yaffe blames Jewish neurosis
largely on the Jewish family: "Psychoanalysts ... see a great many
Jewish neurotics. The conditions of family life, both its virtues and
its weaknesses, go a long way toward accounting for this." [YAFFE, J.,
1968, p. 294] In an article on Jewish family life, Fredda Herz and
Elliot Rosen also observed that "hypochondriasis is a common Jewish
syndrome." [HERZ/ROSEN, p. 367] Rudolph Loewenstein also makes note
that it "occurs frequently in Jews." [LOEWENSTEIN, R., p. 131-132] Other
"possible" common "neurotic" Jewish traits he also cites are extremes of
miserliness and ostentation -- "[Some Jews] are spendthrift to the point
of extravagance, driven in their spending by a compulsion to efface
their sense of inferiority, an exaggerated terror of anti-Semitism," and
a "feeling of terror at being Jewish." [LOEWENSTEIN, R., p. 132-133]
Indeed, more often evident than the
proposed mental unbalance of the generic anti-Semite Everyman in the
many volumes about the generic mental illness of anti-Semitism are hints
of their Jewish authors' own peculiar neuroses:
"The anti-Semite is often
both envious and suspicious
of Jewish talking." --
Theodore Rubin, p. 75
"Reference is often made
to the opinion once expressed
by Freud that
anti-Semitism is connected with the Jewish
custom of circumcision ...
Even today, we find deep in the
unconscious of man the
fear that his penis may be cut off
if he sins ... "
-- Otto Fenischel, p. 27
"We have come to know that
in certain cases the basic
complex at the bottom of
the individual obsessional
idea of the anti-Semite is
the latent homosexual complex,
that complex which
produces hate as a defense against
the dangers of homosexual
love ... "
-- Ernest Simmel, p. 35
"In the mind of [some
anti-Semitic] patients ... the Jewish analyst
is conceived as
alternately as a mephistophelean personage
or as an effeminate,
emasculated man. The fact that
Jews are circumcised and
so in a sense mutilated stirs
up in them superstitious
horror, thereby revealing their
unconscious fear of being
mutilated or castrated as a
punishment for forbidden
desires. In some patients the
analyst can observe at
first hand the sadistic satisfaction
derived consciously or
unconsciously from the idea of
Jews being tortured and
massacred. Neurotics who
suffer from an intense
sense of guilt and who live in
anticipation of punishment
protect themselves by projecting
their faults onto the
Jewish analyst or onto Jews in general."
-- Rudolf Loewenstein, 1951, p. 34]
"The anti-Semite sees in
the Jew everything which brings
him misery -- not only his
social oppressor but also his
own unconscious instincts
which have gained a bloody,
dirty, dreadful character
from their socially induced
repression."
-- Otto Fenichel, p. 29
"The anti-Semites most
buried and unconscious secret
-- from himself and
others -- is to be a Jew ... He believes
that to be a Jew is to be
able to transcend everything
material, religious, and
racial; to be a Jew is to be free;
to be a Jew is to be the
ultimate individual ... "
-- Theodore Rubin
p. 79
(This bizarrely
narcissistic conviction is not unusual
in Jewish psychoanalytic
circles. Another therapist,
Herbert Strean,
suggests that this secret desire to be a Jew
is "an envy which lies
buried deep behind all
anti-Semitic attacks."
[COOPER, p. 14]
"Norman Cohn ...
stresses the role of the Jews as
the castrating father in
the paranoid fantasies of the
anti-Semite. There is
merit to Cohn's hypothesis...
For a balanced
evaluation of the attempt to understand
anti-Semitism primarily
in terms of castration anxiety,
see Erickson,
Childhood and Society."
-- Richard L.
Rubenstein, p. 313
"The historical facts
are that the anti-Jew trying to free
himself from the pangs
of anxiety, turns the tree of life
into the tree of death,
the cross, nailed his Christ onto it,
and transformed his
anxiety to this product of his perverse
sado-masochistic
imagination."
-- Ernest Rappaport,
p. 282
"It is a strange thing
that the Jews have always been
attacked -- even before
the rise of Christianity. The
attacks have been so
stereotyped, they have always
followed the same
pattern so closely that one is tempted
to say that though the
Jews, who have changed much
in the course of
history, are certainly no race, the anti-
Semite in a way ARE a
race, because they always use
the same slogans,
displaying the same attitudes, indeed
almost look alike."
-- Max Horkheimer, [in Simmel,
p. 6]
Here Horkheimer declares the most
preposterous of stereotypes, that "anti-Semites" across history,
language, and culture are "in a way" racially linked. John Murray
Cuddihy is on the right track when he raises up the obvious mirror to
all the Jewish "analysts" who entirely obfuscate Jewish history,
identity, religion, and deeds in their bizarre inventions of the roots
of anti-Semitism: "The ideology of the Jewish intellectual is frequently
a projection onto the general Gentile culture of a forbidden ethnic
self-criticism. Shame for 'one's own kind' is universalized into anger
at the ancestral enemy." [CUDDIHY, p. 5]
In 1951, Milton Steinbeg put Jewish "shame for one's own kind"
(very common in the Jewish community and called "self-hatred" -- to be
discussed a little later in this chapter) like this:
"[A Jew's] association with the Jewish group is likely to touch him
more
intimately, at the very core of his being. For, as a Jew he is
subject to certain
psychic influences, of which he may be unaware but which may affect
his
personality adversely nonetheless. Thus, he tends to regard himself
as not
altogether wanted by the majority society of which he wishes to be
a part,
the approval and acceptance of which he desires earnestly. Again,
he is inclined
to feel that his Jewishness exposes him to a speical set of
insecurities beyond
those which are the lot of all men of his station ... The
anti-Semite when he talks
about Jews rarely addresses himself to them, but Jews overhear and
may quite
readily be convinced that the criticisms are quite justified by the
facts, and applicable,
not to them, of course, but to their
fellows. The upshot of all this is that many an
American Jew is in
mortal peril of losing his sense of worth, his self-respect, his
dignity in his own eyes. He may feel secretly ashamed of his
Jewishness ... He may
be haunted by the misgiving that, by the very virtue of the fact
that he is Jewish,
he is somehow a human being inferior to the Gentile." [STEINBERG,
M., 1951, p.
87-88]
There are, of course, other angles on
the "all non-Jews are automatically anti-Semites" theme. Reflecting
millennia-old Jewish hostility, special targets for odium are those who
define themselves, or were raised, as Christians. There are no
protective multi-million dollar Christian lobbying organizations and no
generic word, like "anti-Semitism," to brand Jewish hatred of, and
prejudice against, Christianity into a defensive slogan that can be
thrown in the face of critics. So Jews have a completely open field.
Some Jews go so far as to believe
that, according to David Novak, "hatred and murder of Jews is something
particularly Christian. Those that assert this position claim that the
Nazi program for the extermination of the Jews is the direct historical
consequence of Christian contempt for Jews. They thus hold that all
Christians -- whether actual perpetrators of atrocities against Jews or
not -- are considered to be eo ipso incorrigible anti-Semites.
Dialogue with such incorrigible enemies can hardly be regarded as
anything other than group masochism." [NOVAK, DIA. p. 5]
There are many innovative angles
reflecting Jewry's contempt for Christianity. Maurice Samuel, for
instance, decided that "the basic factor in intense anti-Semitism is
hatred of Christianity -- a hatred that cannot be openly acknowledged
and is therefore projected onto Jews. When this factor enters, according
to Samuel, an essentially unique phenomenon, not just another prejudice,
is created." [SIMPSON/YINGER, p. 330]
In the emphatic context of the
Holocaust, Christians and Christianity itself are bitterly condemned
today by many Jewish thinkers. Those Christians in good stead are
considered to be only those who revise traditional Christian texts
towards support of Jewish "particularism" and its modern political
expression: Zionism. Any "Christian dialogue with Jews," demands Emil
Fackenheim, is predicated upon "the 'destructive recovery' of the whole
Christian tradition." [p. 282] Among Christian obligations to Jews, he
declares that "Christians after the Holocaust ... must be Zionist on
behalf not only of Jews but also of Christianity itself." [p. 303]
Mark Gelber echoes this common
Jewish blanket condemnation of Christianity in the Jewish Journal of
Social Studies: "The widespread acceptance of anti-Semitic
legislation and the nearly ubiquitous complicity of Gentile populations
in the attempted Nazi destruction of the Jewish people is totally
incomprehensible without the extensive background of the centuries-old
phenomena of Christian anti-Semitism." [GELBER, p. 4]
There are a number of Christian
activists for Jewish/Zionist causes who have subsequently absorbed a
guilt-laden notion about the Holocaust, accepting the presumption that
Christianity and an innate anti-Semitism within it were a major part of
the Holocaust's cause. Among the most important to this movement of
Christian Zionism were two authors of German heritage, Paul Tillich and
Reinhold Niebuhr, whose apparent shame of their German link was
reconfigured along Christian lines. An ideological descendent, Robert
Everett, a pastor in the United Church of Christ, goes so far as to say
"I see the Christian response to
Israel and her survival as a sign of
whether or not Christians care
about Jews. The forces of Ultimate
Evil seem again ready to strike
against Jews ... Only those voices
that speak of solidarity with
Israel and her right to exist are able to
call themselves servants of
Life." [p. 11]
There are a number of books that
have appeared over the years that argue Christian culpability in the
Holocaust. Christian Zionist writers have sometimes served as honorary
Jews to more diplomatically deliver the hatchet blows of condemnation to
other Christians. "As a Methodist minister," says Richard Libowitz,
"[Franklin Littell] maintains a credibility of Christian witness which
make his charges far more difficult for Christian audiences to refute."
[LIBOWTIZ, p. 73]
Franklin Littell, founder and
chairman of the Zionist-oriented Christians Concerned for Israel,
focuses on indicting themes in his book, The Crucifixion of the Jews.
His central thesis is that Nazi fascism was the natural expression of
Christianity which, he argues, has always been "contemptuous or
demeaning" of Jews. He argues this despite the fact that German Nazism
was expressly anti-Christian and murdered masses of clergy in its
extermination programs. (In Poland alone the Nazis murdered 1,932
priests, including six bishops, 850 monks, as well as 289 nuns. [BART,
Convert, p. 150] Littell then goes for maximum slander against
the rival faith by claiming that "Christendum ... led directly to
genocide." [p. 1] If that's not contemptuous and demeaning enough of
Christians, he stuffs his whole volume full of this venomous, libelous
hysteria, including "Before the Holocaust, the spirit of murder ... was
well advanced in Christian circles." [LITTELL, p. 49] and "Adolf Hitler
... and the death camps ... were legitimate offspring of a 'Christian
civilization ... [which] was formless and heathen at heart." Littlell's
questionable conclusions were published by a major publisher, Harper and
Row in 1975, and his "research" was funded by a faculty research grant
at Temple University and the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture.
Another non-Jewish writer, Alan
Davies, in Anti-Semitism and the Christian Mind: The Crisis of
Conscience, demands "that every Christian owes to every Jew [an
apology] for the part which historic Christendom has played in the
shaping of modern anti-Semitism." Others of this ilk include a Jewish
convert to Christianity, John Oesterreicher, Director of the Institute
for Judeo-Christian Studies at Seton Hall University. As Alfred
Lilenthal noted in 1983:
"Oesterreicher makes support for
Israel 'a test for every Christian,'
advocates arms aid for the Zionist
state; rejects as 'absolutely ridiculous'
the proposition that Palestinian
self-determinism is essential to
peace; and has publicly rhapsodized
that 'we must shout from the
housetops that this state [Israel]
has a right to live.'" [LILIENTHAL, A.,
1983, p. 494]
The continuous trashing of
Christianity for crimes against Jews is a veritable cottage industry
these days. Rosemary Ruether, described as a "female theologian,” worked
with the Jewish lobbying group, the Anti-Defamation League, and one of
its rabbis on her book Faith and Fraticide. Reuther is so
Judeo-centric (as a guilt-ridden Christian) in her appraisal of
Christianity that she claims that her faith would virtually collapse
without its alleged basis of anti-Semitism: "Possibly anti-Judaism is
too deeply embedded in the foundations of Christianity to be rooted out
entirely without destroying the whole structure." [RUETHER, p. 27]
(Curiously, this is a counter-echo to the notion [often raised in
scholarly circles] that modern Jewish self-identity needs the
threat of omnipresent anti-Semitism to ensure its very survival against
assimilation).
Widely heralded by the Jewish
community as a splendid blow against Christian anti-Semitism,
ironically, Faith and Fraticide didn't protect Reuther's later
writings from the charge of anti-Semitism. Reuther was publicly
word-whipped by a fellow feminist (Jewish of course) for making the
sinful inference that the undeniably wrathful, dictatorial, and
patriarchal Jewish Old Testament God was considerably more harmful to
women than the Christian's Jesus, patient champion of the dispossessed
and downtrodden. [PLASKOW, p. 102] The publishing of the fact that the
ancient male-centered Israelites exterminated people (including the
Canaanites) whose religion included the worship of goddesses is also not
appreciated. Reuther's (and others') allusion to the ideology of male
domination enforced by the Jewish God was deemed by many Jews to be
"anti-Jewish." One guilt-ridden feminist of German-Christian heritage
noted that [the criticism of Reuther] made clear to me once more how
very necessary constant external [i.e., Jewish] correction is to us and
how wrong it is to think we can finally rest at the present level of
awareness.") [WACKER, p. 113]
Not only was Reuther harangued for
attacking Jewish male-centeredness, she reversed field since Faith
and Fraticide and dared to attack in another book -- with her
husband -- the holiest of Jewish holies, Israel. Denounced as a
"liberal," she came under attack from the aforementioned Christian
Zionist, Franklin Littell, for her book, The Wrath of Jonah,
which Littell calls "one of the most viciously partisan tracts to appear
in the 'Palestinian' cause in the English language." [LITTLE, Judaism,
p. 518]
Reuther's fall from Jewish grace is
sharp. Her book about Israel, wrote David Biale, "is an anti-Zionist
diatribe cloaked in the sweet light of Christian universalism; as such
it stands as a singular warning of how a Christian critique can slide
unwittingly into the swamp of anti-Semitism. [BIALE, p. 406] ... [The
Reuthers'] wild and unsubstantiated conspiracy theories, which inflate
Zionist power beyond recognition, smell suspiciously like the older
myths of a world Jewish conspiracy." [BIALE, p. 409] Reuther, it seems,
successfully confirmed the Jewish myth that all non-Jews -- no matter
what they say or do to defend Jews -- are, inevitably at root, sooner or
later, revealed to be vile anti-Semites.
Traditional Jewish martyrological
canon insists that the most hated anti-Semites by Jews must be generic
Christians because of their reputed persecution through the ages and the
fact that the Holocaust happened in Christian Europe. "The crime
against the Jewish people," declares Rabbi Eliezer Berkovitz, "is the
cancer at the very heart of Christianity... [HALBERSTAM, p. 232] ... In
order to pacify the Christian conscience it is said that the Nazis were
not Christians. But they were all the children of Christians ... [p.
226] ... Without Christianity's New Testament, Hitler's Mein Kampf
could never have been written." [HALBERSTAM, p. 238] "Let's not shy away
from the hard truth," says Joshua Halberstam, "For many Jews, the
unspoken lesson of the Shoah is that they cannot trust Christians with
their children. Tens of thousands of Christians with crosses around
their necks sent millions of innocent Jews and millions of other
innocent men, women, and children to their horrid deaths while many of
their fellow Christians cheered." [HALBERSTAM, p. 226]
Stanislaw 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 othrs 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 "Chimeric
anti-Semitism." [VOLKMAN, p. 53-54] At the Hebrew University in
Jerusalem, there is a department called the Vidal Sassoon International
Center for the Study of Anti-Semitism which publishes studies on
"anti-Semitism, ancient or modern, from a broad range of perspectives:
historical, religious, political, cultural, social, psychological, and
economic." [MODRAS, TITLE PAGE]
A sure sign of anti-Semitism in
Madison, Wisconsin, noted Evelyn Tornton Beck, was that "I heard someone
say that Jews were 'taking over' the local chapter of the national
lesbian feminist organization in Madison." [KESTENBAUM, p. 30] "I
believe that Jewish lesbian feminists have internalized much of the
subtle anti-Semitism of this society," declared Irene Klepfisz, "They
have been old that Jews are too pushy, too aggressive; and so they have
been silent about their Jewishness, have not protested against what
threatens them." [KLEPFISZ, I., 1982, p. 46] Recent anti-Semitism in the
Australian lesbian movement? There was a 1999 article written to
keep us informed of the subject by Hinde Burstin. [BURSTIN, 1999]
At every turn Jews find offense and
insult. For instance, notes Kayla Weiner, "For many Jews, to be wished
'Merry Christmas' is to deny their personal reality and uniqueness."
[WEINER, p. 121] And, "any lack of sympathy for Israel and its survival
on the part of Christians," says Peter Medding, " is, for many Jews,
indistinguishable from anti-Semitic prejudice." [MEDDING, p. 110]
It is unfathomable for such Jews
that Gentiles are largely disinterested in undying Jewish crusades of
self-pity and victimization as central themes in their own (non-Jewish)
lives. For Ruth Wisse, Gentile silence is not just silence, it
"may be [because non-Jews are] reluctant to confront the subject of
Jew-hatred because they are worried about stirring up latent
anti-Semitism in themselves or others." [WISSE, p. 48]
Complaining about the lack of
sufficient homage by Gentile writers to "Jewish suffering," Guy Stern's
obsession with Jewishness is probably the most audacious in blatantly
encompassing the passively innocent as anti-Semites. It is what Stern
calls "the anti-Semitism of silence. It is difficult to define ...
Silent literary anti-Semitism is ... definitely an omission of a
declaration of sympathy for Jewish suffering." [STERN, p. 304] In this
genre of accusers who essentially demand everyone to be activists
for Jewish causes (and those who do not are anti-Semites), is Ernest
Volkman, who labels this the "anti-Semitism of indifference." In this
view, there are those non-Jews who do not "attack Jews directly, but
...[they] assume that Jews do not even exist, that their concerns and
survival are not even relevant questions." [VOLKMAN, p. 12] Even when
Jews aren't even around to be anti-Semitic towards, the fact that they
aren't present may, of course, be evidence of anti-Semitism. Indeed, the
lack of 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 apeared in the U.S.
Communist party's Daily World on June 5, 1979: 'Has nationalism
wrapped in money turned all the 'leaders' of the Jewish people into
stone?' This type of language, the Left's critics contend, either is
anti-Semitic itself and/or contributes to anti-Semitism through
reinforcement of traditional anti-Semitic stereotypes." [LIEBMAN, A.,
1986, p. 350]
Michael Lerner, editor of the
left-wing Jewish journal Tikkun, confirms this fear of leftist
non-Jews in his book, The Socialism of Fools: Anti-Semitism on the
Left, which was advertised in his own publication with a drawing
that connotes crowds entering the gas chambers of the Holocaust. The
"Socialism of Fools" phrase is credited to August Bebel as a description
of anti-Semitism in the leftist community. It refers to traditional
socialist animosity towards prominent Jewish European bankers,
capitalists, and war profiteers -- major symbols of class oppression
since the development of Marxist theory in the nineteenth century. Many
socialists were also hostile to transnational Jewish "nationalism" and
its attendant chauvinism. Even "Bebel, the socialist leader who stood in
the vanguard of the fight against anti-Semitism in Wilhelmian Germany,
called Jewish socialists brilliant but pushy, difficult to subject to
party discipline." [MOSSE, G., 1985, p. 67] "Long barred by anti-Semitic
laws and customs from agriculture, guild occupations, and the
professions," says apologetic Jewish scholar Arthur Liebman, "in the
nineteenth century Jews were largely to be found in middlemen
occupations: merchants, hucksters, estate managers, loan and mortage
collectors, and money lenders. These were popularly considered (and by
segments of the Jewish community like the labor Zionists as well), to be
non-productive or 'parasitic' occupations ... Many late nineteenth- and
twentieth century Leftists obviously shared this economically rooted
hatred of Jews as well as the long-engrained religious prejudice against
them." [LIEBMAN, A., 1986, p. 331]
Illustrating the all-encompassing
latitude of the charge of "anti-Semitism," a term that is applied by
Jews -- as the need for it suits them -- in any direction, an
influential Russian Jewish Zionist and socialist of the early twentieth
century, Ber Borochov, even proclaimed that "we must strike at the
anti-Semitism of the Jewish capitalist." [BOROCHOV, p. 82]
And what of this specifically
Jewish socialist tradition, of which there was so much, with
its origins in Eastern Europe? Says Israel Shahak,
"[Many] East-European Jewish
socialists ... were themselves tainted with
a ferocious anti-peasant attitude
inherited from classical Judaism ...
A typical example is their
opposition to the formation of peasant
cooperatives promoted by the
Catholic clergy, on the grounds that
this was an act of anti-Semitism."
[SHAHAK]
Jewish obsession with anti-Semitism
in all directions has even afforded them their own share of draconian
book burners. E. L. Dachslager argues for a ban of all
books in American public schools that "defame, vilify, or otherwise
promote a negative image of Jews." [GELBER, p. 8] A lot of book shelves
for classical Western literature would have to go empty. "Anti-Semitic"
works cited here to be banned or censored could include books by William
Shakespeare, Geoffrey Chaucer, Christopher Marlowe, Charles Dickens,
Frank Norris, Theodore Dreiser, Ernest Hemingway (especially The Sun
Also Rises), Celine, Henry Adams, Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, E.E.
Cummings, Henry Miller, Byron Scott, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Henry James,
Dostoyevsky, Trollope, Thomas Wolfe, and Ezra Pound. [GELBER, p. 8,
12] "I cannot resist the opportunity," wrote Jewish author Richard
Lewontin in the New York Review of Books in 1990, "... of making
a remark about the anti-Semitism of American intellectuals during the
early decades of this century. It was pervasive, if in a somewhat
genteel form." [LEWONTIN, R., 10-25-90]
Poet and literature critic Ezra Pound is among the most emphatic
anti-Semites in the literature field. Sympathetic to Mussolini, Ezra
Pound had regular radio broadcasts from Italy that "urged America to
stay of of the war [World War II] and concentrated on anti-Semitism as
his chief message: 'Clever Kikes,' he said, were 'runnin' ALL our
communications system.'" After the war, Pound, an American citizen, was
indicted for treason. Psychiatrists deemed him certifiably crazy and he
was sent to the St. Elizabeth Federal Hospital for the Insane. There, in
1948, "he was awarded the prestigious $10,000 Bollingen Prize for
Poetry. Congress then ordered the prize's sponsor, the Library of
Congress, to give no more awards." [KNAPPMAN, E., 1995, p. 197, 198]
"The Jew is a persistent
figure in [Henry] James' fiction," notes Jewish author Michael
Dobkowski, "He appears in ten of twenty novels, in eight short stories,
one critical essay, and several travel essays. The Hebrew symbolizes
basically the same areas of human experience that James explored in
other literary themes -- internationalism, bourgeois corruption, social
stratification, genteel decline, the conflict between money and manners,
and the exploitation of one human being by another for gain."
[DOBKOWSKI, M., 1979, p. 85]
Dobkowski sites other Jewish critics to add Anthony Trollope, Emile
Zola, Guy de Maupassant, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, among others, as those
who wrote anti-Semitic text about "the parasitic and usurious nature of
the Jew." Still others writing objectionable passages about Jews include
major 19th century American authors William Cullen Bryant (Jews'
"unquenchable lust for lucre") and Oliver Wendell Holmes ("the principal
use of the Jews seemed to be to lend money ..."). [DOBKOWSKI, M., 1979,
p. 79, 105]
William Faulkner? Dobkowski notes that:
"In the beginning of Faulkner's first novel, Soldier's Pay,
(1926), we meet a salesman
named Schluss who says to some returning soldiers of World War I:
'I would
have liked to fought by your side, see. But someone got to look out
for the
business while the boys are gone.' In his second book,
Mosquitoes (1927)
another sad-eyed Jewish salesman is said to remark: "You can't
ignore money ...
It took my people to teach the world that ...' Faulkner does not
use this major
character's name, calling him 'the Semitic man' and 'fat Jew.' It
is as if
this anonymous entity -- the Jew -- represents something mysterious
and
pernicious that has infiltrated into American society." [DOBKOWSKI,
M.,
1979, p. 103]
Another Jewish critic, Daniel
Walden, "would have [all of T.S.] Elliot's poetry placed under general
suspicion." [GELBER, p. 10] Doris Grumbach adds H. L. Mencken, Edith
Warton, and Willa Cather onto the list of prominent literary
anti-Semites. [GRUMBACH, p. A23] More current writers cited by Jewish
critics who might qualify for censorial action include Imamu Amiri
Baraka (Leroi Jones), Katherine Ann Porter, Gore Vidal, Truman Capote,
Richard Kostelanetz, and John Cheever. Alvin Rosenfeld sees in all
authors writing critically of Jews "the dangerous possibility,
gruesomely actualized in Europe between 1933 and 1945, of proceeding
from literary Jew-hatred to literal murder of whole communities."
[GELBER, p. 11] "[There is a] prevailing opinion," wrote Mark Gelber, a
professor at Yale, in 1979, "that there is a 'risk inherent for world
Jewry,' and by implication mankind, by 'exposing works like The
Merchant of Venice, Oliver Twist, and certain poems by T. S.
Eliot to high school and college students." [GELBER, Teaching, p.
1] "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
clawlike,
prehensile fingers -- the fingers of a man who accumulates, but
never disburses.
It was impossible to look at Zerkow and not know instantly that
greed -- inordinate,
insatiable greed -- was the dominant passion of the man. He was the
Man with the
Rake, groping hourly in the muck heap of the city for gold, for
gold, for gold. It
was his dream, his passion; at every instant he seemed to feel the
generous
solid weight of the crude fat metal in his palms." [DOBKOWSKI, M.,
1979,
p. 91]
What about George Orwell, creator of the great novel 1984
-- the indictment of totalitarian thinking? "No doubt many Jews who read
his first, autobiographical book, down and Out in Paris and London
(1933) which, like Homage to Catalonia, did not sell, suspected
he was anti-Semitic," says Milton Goldin. "This was not a far-fetched
assumption, given three Jewish characters in the book, the first of whom
owns a second-hand clothing shop and swindles his customers." [GOLDIN,
M., 9-4-99]
J. R. Tolkien (The Hobbit, Lord of the Rings) and
James Joyce (Ulysses) have also come under Jewish scrutiny for
signs of anti-Semitism. Both, barely, at least in the following Jewish
magazines, evade the smear. But the Cleveland Jewish News asks:
"Was J. R. Tolkien antisemitic? ... Most troubling for many is
Tolkien's love for
and use of the Norse pagan myth -- the same ones the Nazis (and
many present-day
White Supremacists) turned to for inspiration.
Also the Roman Catholic Church of
his era (he was born in 1892), which he loved so fiercely, was
known to harbor
many with anti-Jewish sentiments ... Tolkien once said: 'The
Dwarves [in my fiction],
of course, are quite obvious -- wouldn't you say that in many ways
they remind you
of the Jews? Their words are semitic obviously, constructed to be
semitic. The
Hobbits are just a rustic English people.' That well may be his
only recorded
comment linking Jews with the Lord of the Rings. The stereotype is
there if one
wants to use it. The dwarves' primary weakness, as revealed in the
saga -- to their
own detriment as well as harm to the quest of the Fellowship -- is
a lust for gaining,
protecting and hoarding jewels, gold and
silver."
The author of this article ultimately spares Tolkien the indictment
of antisemitism, especially since the author is also on record as having
rejected Aryan Nazism and praising Jewry. [BIRD, C., 12-14-2001, p. 56-]
The Jewish ethnic magaizne 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 misportrayals
across history onto center stage of classical works of English
literature. In an introduction to a reissue of Charles Dickens' classic
novel, Oliver Twist, for example, published by Bantam Books in
1981, Jewish author Irving Howe was afforded space to force the reader's
attention (for nearly four pages) to modern Jewish polemics surrounding
Dickens' character 'Fagin,' an "archetypical Jewish villain." As preface
to the novel, readers are served a mini-history of Jewish objection to
the Fagin persona -- a Jewish woman, it seems, had even written a
complaint to Dickens that the character was too negatively
stereotypical. Dickens actually wrote back to her, saying, "Fagin is a
Jew because it is unfortunately true, of the time to which the story
refers, that that class of criminal almost invariably was Jewish."
[HOWE, p. 369-373] (A real life model for Dickens may have been Ikey
Solomon who had undergone a much publicized trial in England a few years
before the book was written). The disturbing precedent Howe's framing of
the novel sets, of course (for those who have the power to enforce such
things), is that any literature must be subject to polemical rebuttal in
a kind of aggrieved "class action" to begin (and
essentially merge with, and reframe) the original writing itself.
Hence, a novel becomes -- first and foremost -- a polemical course on
Jewish history and identity.
In 1962, Oliver Twist was recreated
as a British musical comedy. Reflecting the revisionist times, the actor
who played Fagin expressed the character, as one reviewer observed, "as
the dottiest old dear imaginable." [BELTH, p. 56]
This strategy of revisionism has
become common. In 1997, for example, bowing to Jewish pressure, the
Marin Center Showcase Theatre in San Rafael, California, agreed to a
Jewish Community Relations Council question-and-answer discussion after
each performance of Geoffey Chaucer's "Prioress' Tale," from his famous
Canterbury Tales. "Hotly debated," noted the Jewish Bulletin,
"is whether the 'Prioress' Tale' is indeed a satire of ... violently
anti-Semitic attitudes or merely an expression of them." [STERLING,
1997, p. 30]
One of the most famous negative
portrayals of Jews in English literature is the character Shylock in
Shakespeare's play, Merchant of Venice. Written in 16th and 17th
century England, Shylock reflects the Christian perceptions of the era;
he is depicted as usurious, villainous, fraudulent, exploitive, and
cruel. "The most effective way of making the play acceptable to
post-Holocaust sensibilities," notes Jewish critic John Gross, "in the
view of many directors, is to underscore the prejudices of the Christian
characters, and generally show them in an ugly light." [GROSS, p. 329]
In some productions of the play, Shylock is even completely
reconstituted, as in Arnold Wesker's version, where Shylock became
"scholarly, impetuous, and warm-hearted." [GROSS, p. 335] One French
critic, Pierre Spriet, has even went so far as to dismiss the play
entirely, suggesting that the work is so anti-Semitic, "it must be
abandoned." [GROSS, p. 345] In 1999, an actor on tour from South Africa,
Percy Sieff, was portraying Shylock as "a worldly, successful
businessman who has become embittered by discrimination and compensated
by focusing on money." [BLOCH, F., 9/10-16/99]
In 1994 Rabbi Richard Litvak
spearheaded a protest of a performance of the Merchant of Venice
by a Shakespeare theatre group in Santa Cruz, California. Jewish
lobbying resulted in a plan for "discussion groups" and "program notes"
about Jewish concerns about the Shylock character. Rabbi Litvak noted
the effect of Jewish protest, turning the performance of a Shakespeare
play into quite something else: "The director and the festival have
expressed a commitment to try to make the play a vehicle for raising
awareness of anti-Semitism." [ROSENBERG, N., 5-27-94, p. 35]
"It was with great trepidation that I agreed to undertake the
responsibility of commenting on yet another production of William
Shakespeare's 'The Merchant of Venice,'" wrote censorial Jewish
professor Racelle Weinman in 2001,
"In this instance the venue is the PBS Masterpiece Theatre series
... I have come
to the conclusion that the Holocaust negates the untenable premise
of 'The
Merchant of Venice.' It should not be produced ... [T]he bottom
line is that the
text remains the text ... [Director Trevor] Nunn tries to make the
character of the
Jewish usurer, Shylock, more palatable by casting a Jew, Henry
Goodman, in the role."
[WEINMAN, R., 10-4-01, p. 23-]
As early as 1912 Jewish American
organizations were successfully lobbying the College Entrance
Examination Board to remove the Merchant of Venice as a required
reading for its tests. "School superintendents in all cities of 10,000
population or more" were then lobbied by the Anti-Defamation League of
B'nai B'rith to remove the text from study. "Between 1917 and 1920 many
school systems discontinued study of the play." [BELTH, p. 51-52]
Mother Goose was censored of its Jewish contents by the late
1930s:
"Jack sold his egg
to a rogue of a Jew
Who cheated him out
of half his due.
The Jew got his goose,
Which he vowed he would kill
Resolving at once
His pockets to fill. [DOBKOWSKI, M., 1979, p. 104]
A curious angle to all this, in view
of the fact that the Shylock stereotype of the Middle Ages -- a figure
that symbolizes classically Orthodox Jewish separatism from non-Jews,
exploitation and manipulation of Gentiles, communal resistance to
defense obligations to the country in which they live, double moral
standards for Jews and non-Jews, cheats, liars, ghetto-loving, et al --
is held to be totally groundless today, yet it is a fact that the
closest parallels in our own time to the Orthodox Jews of Elizabethan
England are the black-dressed, self-cloistered Orthodox Hasidim of which
there are today hundreds of thousands in Israel and America.
(Eventually, the ultra-Orthodox Hasidic movement, which was
created in the 1700s and represents a particular back-to-basics strand
of Judaism, numbered about half of the Eastern European Jewish
population. [LEVIN, M., 1966, p. xi] David Berger notes that "with the
dawn of the 19th century, Hasidism .. became the dominant form of
Judaism in much of Eastern Europe, the heartland of 19th-century Jewry."
[BERGER, D., 2001, p. 24] Jewish scholar Solomon Poll even notes, for
example, that, according to a Hungarian government report in 1914,
Orthodox Judaism dominated the Jewish community in that country. And the
attitude of Hungarian Jews not part of this traditional
community? "Among the less observant and nonobservant Jews," says Poll,
"... they considered the observant Jews "old-fashioned," "bigoted," and
"unreasonable.") [POLL, S., 1969, p 14-15]
Not surprisingly, the perception by
many secular Jews today -- most particularly in Israel -- of the
self-segregated Hassidim (also called Haredi) communities is
extremely similar to the classical non-Jewish Shakespearean-era
perception of Shylock. An Israeli professor, Menachem Friedman, notes
the characterization of these Ultra-Orthodox talmudists by secular
fellow Jews in Israel: "The alienation and isolation of the Haredim,
their eagerness to claim exemption from service in the Israeli army,
their demands for increasing allocations for their society of scholars
and sometimes unrestrained use of political power arouses resentment and
even hatred among large sections of the Israeli public." [FRIEDMAN, M,
p. 190] [See also former, and later, chapters].
"Hatred of the ultra-Orthodox has
deep roots [in Israel]," noted Israeli critic Laor Yitzhak in 1998,
"There is no offense so great that
one cannot tag it on the Haredim --
especially the guy with the black
hat, frock coat, and side curls beloved
of modern anti-Semites ... 'Death to
the black hatters' is scribbled on
toilet doors at the Tel Aviv School
of Humanities; if fliers showing
Haredi children and screaming 'Kill
them while they're young!' are being
distributed in Kfar Saba, then it is
those who participate in fomenting
hatred against the Haredi minority
who must prove there is not something
behind their behavior frighteningly
like anti-Semitism." [LAOR]
Israeli scholar Yeshayahu Leibowitz
notes the conflicts between secular Jews and the Ultra-Orthodox, and
that "Perhaps we will reluctantly arrive at a separation into two
nations [in Israel], with a differentiation not only from the aspect of
marriage, but also with each going his historic way imbued by intense
hatred [of the other]." [HUPPERT, U., 1988, p. 40]
In 1986 the Jerusalem Post
reported an Israeli poll that found one-fourth of its secular Jewish
respondents called the Ultra-Orthodox -- who like their ancestral
counterparts have retreated into self-created ghettos, even in Israel --
"opportunists, liars, and charlatans." [LINDEMANN, Esau's, p.
24] "There is much hostility to the Orthodox rabbinate among the
majority (about 70% of the Jewish population) of secular Israeli Jews,"
says Adam Garfinkel, "They see the rabbis as coercive and intolerant ...
excessively political and unspiritual ... seeming never to have a word
to say about kindness, humility, and God's love for humanity ... To be
blunt, some secular Israelis see the haredim as fanatical atavistic
freeloaders who have yet to discover modern hygiene." [GARFINKEL, p.
140]
In 2000, the results of study by
Jerusalem's Hebrew University about "hate" in 168 secular Israeli
schools indicated that "47% of the Jewish students hate haredim."
[PRINCE-GIBSON, E., 9-17-2000] A Jewish religious organization, Ahavat
Israel, has even posted an entire section at its Internet site about
what it calls "anti-Semitism in Israel":
"Today, the attack upon the religious Jewish population is most
heavily felt
in the Israeli media, including newspapers, radio and TV ... In a
recent 9 (Dec
98) column, Israel Eichler charges that many of the stereotypes
used by the
Nazis against Jews have been translated into Hebrew and employed to
delegitimize the haredi (religious) public ... [Meretz political
party founder]
Shulamit Aloni described the haredi population as 'suck[ing] from
the
same sinister passions which nurtured the Nazis' ... 'We have to
storm Mea
She'arim [a famous Jerusalem ultra-Orthodox enclave] with machine
guns
and mow them down,' recommends left-wing darling Uri Avneri. 'I
would
take all those weird people from Shas, Aguda, and Degel Hatorah and
tie
all their beards together and light a match,' says Popolitika's
Amnon
Danker. Yonaten Gefen announces his wilingness to cast the first
stone
in the intifada [uprising] against haredim, and Prof. Uri Arnon
tells a
Kol Ha'ir interviewer, 'Haredim should be suspended on an
electricity
pole' ... Today 'bloodsucker' is a favored term for haredim ...
'Parasite'
has become used so frequently in connection with haredim that the
two have become virtually synonymous ... 'When I see the haredim
surrounded by their large families, I understand the Nazis,' wrote
sculptor Yigal Tumarkin -- a statement which did not prevent him
from being honored by Yad Vashem [Israel's Holocaust memorial
center]. And Tommy Lapid sees the haredim as having usurped
the traditional Jewish role of 'taking advantage of the gentile,
trading in his blood, and laughing at him,' only this time with
the secular [Jewish] public in the role of the gentile."
[AHAVAT ISRAEL, 2001]
At another site, the Freeman Center for Strategic Studies, a Jewish
author sites a list of anti-chasid charges compiled by the editor of the
Israeli magazine NATIV:
"'Black ants.' 'Dogs tied up in the back yard, barking psalms all
nights.' 'Humming
locusts.' 'Forces of darkness and kidnappers of Souls.' 'Vulgar
baboons.'
'Barbarians, the Black Front ... representing the magical,
bewitched and
most primitive ... whose schools are colleges of darkness.' 'The
darkest and
and most horrible phenomena (sic) of our age,' (by a senior Israeli
diplomat
in the United States). From two different members of the Knesset:
'Leeches,
snakes, suckled on the same evil urges as Nazism, greedy and
domineering,
evil and primitive, corrupt, parasites, ambitious.' 'A horrible
evil, a black
devil.' Finally, Arie Stav quotes one of Israel's best known
writers: 'A
band of armed gangsters comitting crimes against humanity, sadists,
pogromchiks and murderers." [WINSTON, E., 10-98]
"Stav [the editor of NATIV]," says Emmanuel Winston, "quotes even
worse examples of statements and caricatures that are actually blood
libel by the self-styled 'intellectual elite of the Israeli Left. They
are authors, members of the Knesset, senior journalists, diplomats and
professors." [WINSTON, E., 10-98]
In 2000, the Cleveland Jewish News reported that, in Israel,
"there have been many instances of anti-haredi graffiti on haredi
synagogues, and even, in 1998, the torching of two haredi classrooms in
Pardess Hanna, where local secular [Jewish] residents tried to keep
haredim from moving into their neighborhood." [DERFNER, L., 6-30-2000,
p. 10-]
Robert Eisenberg, whose parents are Yiddish-speaking Jews from
Eastern Europe, even notes what a Holocaust survivor had to say about
the ultra-Orthodox. Here Eisenberg speaks to an older Jewish couple in
New Jersey:
"My [husband] Morris was in Auschwitz. Ask him what he thinks of the
Hasidim.
Morris, come here,'' she orders. He shuffles in like a Foghorn
Leghorn auditioning
for a part, cigar clenched firmly between his teeth. 'What do you
think of the
Hasidism?' Without missing a beat in he begins to intone,
Huset Ganef
Geh Ka' Chrzanow
Koif a fayert
Lieg in drayert.
(Hasid, you crook
Travel to Chrzanow, for a look
Buy a horse
Then drop dead, of course.)
It's a child nursery rhyme my grandmother used to chant on
those rare occasions when she saw a Hasid in Nebraska."
[EISENBERGER, R., 1995, p. 158]
In a 1982 book Jewish American author Earl Shorris noted the Hasids
in a chapter about Jewish shame ("anti-Semitism?" "Self-hatred?") for
the behavior of other Jews. Here Shorris is troubled by an encounter
with Hasidic salesmen at a photo shop in New York City:
"As we neared [the sale counter], now sweating like everyone else
in the
salesroom, I saw that the salesmen were all young Hasidic Jews. A
fat boy
in his twenties -- his white shirt smudged; his fly partly
unzipped below
his bulging belly; his spotty, untrimmed beard curling with sweat
--waited
on the customer next to me. When my turn came, he said, Well?
I want an AM-FM portable radio, one that sounds reasonablly
good.
You want ten dollars? A hundred dollars? what?
Somewhere in the middle. Fifty.
He thrust a catalogue in front of me, opened it to the pages
devoted to portable
radios, and said, When you know, you'll tell me.
The Hasidim have given up ritual bathing, I thought, for I could
smell him
from across the counter. He stank of the gruel of seat and
detritus that collects
in the creases of the body and sours. His clothes stank. He
eyeglasses were
smudged. His hands were pale and dirty ... He went to another
customer. I
could not think of the radio, only of him, of this Jew who had
presented himself
to me. I chose a radio ... [A second Hasidic salesman comes over
to help him]
... We stared at each other for a moment, as if to compare our
lives. I , too,
wear a bear, a curly Jewish beard, once black, now turning gray.
He knew what
I was thinking. Well, what? he said. He did not hide his irritaion
at my
examination of him ... Hostility grew between us. He saw in my
eyes what the
Ostjuden [Eastern European Jews] had seen in
the eyes of the German Jews. He
could dance, he could fly, he could tell stories of the Baal Shem
Tov that even
Martin Buber did not know. How dare I look at him with scathing
eyes! ... [As
he left, he paid a female cashier for his purchase] ... I gave her
the money. She
gave me the package. We did not speak. She told me that she knew
what I was
thinking and that she had known similar thoughts. She
smiled. It was not a real
smile. It seemed to belong to a prisoner ... It's difficult to be
in a place like that
... I'm so put off by them. I have to keep reminding myself that
we're brothers."
[SHORRIS, E., 1982, p. 67, 68] ... Is it possible
that Jews could rise completely
above the pain of disapproval that we call shame?" [SHORRIS, E.,
1982, p. 72]
In the 1990s, secular Jewish professor Stephen Bloom tried to
connect to his Jewish heritage via a Chabad Lubavitcher
(ultra-Orthodox/Hassidic) community in the little town of Postville,
Iowa. He went there with the legends of Jewish historic identity and was
stunned with what he found. "Many of the Hasidim I had encountered in
Postville pretended to be holy," he wrote,
"but their actions displayed bigotry and racism of the worst
degree. The book
[Bloom wrote, entitled Postville] explored taboo topics
such as bargaining, poor
hygiene, atrocious manners, disrepair of homes, Jewish elitism,
sexism, crime
and prejudice directed a gentiles. In response, I've received
dozens of hate letters,
all from Orthodox Jewish readers, who essentially pose the same
question as my
father's. To these readers, to criticize any aspect of Judaism is
patently unacceptable.
To them, I wasn't a journalist doing my job. I was a self-loathing
Jew, the worst
kind of anti-Semite. I was embarrassing the family ... When
journalists parachuted
into Postville, if the locals said anything bad -- or even neutral
-- about the Hasidic
Jews, the response was swift and to the
point. Mayor John Hyman was labeled an
anti-Semite when he told a reporter for the Minneapolis
Star-Tribune that the
Jews in Postville don't pay their bills on time [which Bloom found
to be a true
assessment]." [BLOOM, S., 2000, p. 355, p. 340]
What does all this mean? The
foundation of animosity (defined as "anti-Semitism") towards
"traditional" Jewish behavior, as best manifest today by the cloistered,
seclusionist, Jewish haredim/hasidic communities -- a behavior that was
a mainstay for centuries by all Jews in Europe and
throughout the world, is so great that even other (secularized)
Jews today express vehement disdain and
outrage towards their obsessively "particularist" -- and exploitive --
fellows. And this is crucial: today's haredim merely reflect
meticulous attention to the ages-old religious laws of Jewish
orthodoxy. As Michael Govrin notes, living under the Halacha --
Jewish religious law -- "until two hundred years ago was the only way a
Jew could define him or herself." [GOVRIN, M., 2001]
As Israeli Amos Elon notes, more
mildly, about the tensions within the secular Jewish psyche when they
visit Mea Shearim (the hasidic ghetto in Jerusalem):
"Modern Israelis ...are attracted to
the notion of encountering their
own roots and at the same time they
are repelled ... When they gaze
now at these bearded men, with their
alarmingly pallid faces, at their
ringlets and strange clothes, so
unsuited to the climate, and at their tired
looking wives, modern Jews are torn
by conflicted feelings ... They see
their own grandfathers and
grandmothers, who went up as smoke
through the chimneys of Auschwitz
and Treblinka. 'Because of Hitler
you have no right to oppose this
kind of Judaism,' the [Israeli] novelist
wrote in 1982." [ALON, 1991, p. 189]
Melford Spiro, in a study of the
Israeli kibbutz system (known for his socialist system), has the
following commentary:
"Religious Jews -- or more
accurately, orthodox Jews whose 'visibility'
is pronounced -- are the objects of
similar attitudes [among residents of
the kibbutz]. A fourth-grade girl,
asking her father if he had ever prayed,
proceeded to describe with much
laughter how the 'Jews in Europe' had
prayed. Her description, accompanied
by grotesque gestures, was in
the tradition of anti-Semitic
caricature. And from the other end of the
age scale came this comment from an
adult sabra [native born Israeli]:
'I hate them (the orthodox Jews), and
when I see them I can understand
why people are anti-Semitic." [SPIRO,
p. 388]
Yet another angle on all this is
Israeli Ashkenazim (Jews from Europe) views of their Sephardic (Jews
from Arab countries, Iran, et al) fellow citizens. As Raphael Patai
notes: "In addition to instability, emotionalism, impulsiveness,
unreliability, and incompetence, the Oriental [Sephardic] Jew is accused
[by other Israeli Jews] of habitual lying and cheating, laziness,
uncontrolled temper, superstitiousness, childishness, lack of
cleanliness and in general 'primitivity' and 'lack of culture.'" [PATAI,
in Selzer, p. 58] (This, of course, probably also reflects racist
Jewish views of Arab culture, by which the Sephardic were inevitably
tainted). In former centuries, "in some countries and places Ashkenazim
and Sephardim refused to intermarry. At one time in the eighteenth
century the Sephardic Jews in the town of Bordeaux in France tried to
persuade the Christian authorities to forbid Ashkenazic Jews to live
there. Here was the unbelievable spectacle of one group of Jews urging
the government to banish another group of Jews!" [GITTELSOHN, R., 1964,
p. 32]
In the early years of the 20th century, German Jews ostracized Jews
from Eastern Europe. For example, "[In a small midwestern town] a
student rabbi," says Rabbi Roland Gittelsohn,
"there for the Holydays, was interested in discovering why the
women of his Reform
congregation seemed to be antagonistic to Hadassah, the women's
Zionist
organization. After questioning several women and receiving
answers which he knew
were merely excuses, he finally found a young woman, new to the
community,
who explained the situation honestly. 'Our women stay away from
Hadassah,'
she said, 'because the present members of the organization are
mostly Russian
and Polish Jews. Most of them are rather poor, and some of them
haven't
completely lost their foreign accents. Because these women were the
organizers
of Hadassah here, our women, who are mostly German Jews, wealthier
and more
Americanized than they, rarely join Hadassah." 'GITTLELSOHN, R.,
1964, p. 34]
Incredibly, intolerant ultra-Orthodox Jews of Israel are themselves
guilty of what one Israeli newspaper called "Jewish antisemitism." While
a graffiti-laden Jewish tombstone in, say, Bulgaria is international
news, the following kind of story never gets beyond in-house Jewish
ethnic news circles. As part of inter-religious conflicts between
Orthodox and Reform/Conservative Judaism movements in Israel, the
Cleveland Jewish News noted the following in 2000:
"The Israeli political and religious establishment condemned
Saturday night's
arson at a Jerusalem Conservative synagogue, but something was
missing from
their statements -- any hint that the fire might have been started
by Jewish
extremists, or Jews at all ... Chief Rabbi Yisrael Meir Lau, who
in the past
compared Reform Jewry (the term Israelis use for all non-Orthodox
Jewry) to
Hezbollah terrorists, condemned the arson, but couldn't bring
himself to use the
term 'synagogue.' Instead he called it a 'building specified for
prayer by a stream,'
without specifying which religion the stream
belonged to. In an editorial about
the arson titled 'Jewish antisemitism,' The Jerusalem Post said of
Lau's remarks:
'This type of refusal to recognize other legitimate streams of
Judaism creates an
atmosphere that may have led to the attack.'
The fire, which got within a few yards
of the Torah ark, was the second arson in three weeks at the
synagogue located in
Ramat, a sprawling, increasingly haredi
(rigorously Orthodox) area of Jerusalem ...
While Jerusalem Mayor Ehud Olmert, who visited the synagogue two
days after the
arson, declined to point a finger in any direction,
a senior municipal offical said, 'Of
course this was done by Jews ... In the past, arson and attacks of
vandalism against
Reform and Conservative synagogues have gone
unpunished. No one has ever been
arrested for the 1997 burning of
a Reform nurse school in Mevasseret Zion, a
suburb of Jerusalem, even though local Shah (Sepharid rigorously
Orthodox)
Party supporters had threated the lives of Reform Jews in town
only months
before. Likewise, no arrests were ever made in the 1997 attacks on
the Har-El
(Reform) synagogue in Jerusalem, which included pouring acid on
the synagogue
garden, smearing excrement on the front door,
painting swastikas and religious
curses. The Eshel Avraham (Conservative) synagogue in Beer Sheva,
which has
woman rabbi, Gila Dror, can 'expect to have its windows broken
every couple of
weeks,' said Masorti (Israeli Conservative)
movement spokesman Yonatan
Liebowitz. The above, of course, is only a partial list."
[DERFNER, L., 6-30-00, p. 10-]
"As for the political and religious establishment's refusal to
accuse anybody of the crime -- even when the enemies of the Conservative
and Reform are only too well-known," remarked Israeli rabbi David Rosen
in response to these arsons and the fact that no one was ever charged
with crimes for them, "This is an unfortunate reflection of the
political intimidation carried out by the religious extremists."
[DERFNER, L., 6-30-01, p. 10-]
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 Europans, in the Jewish "collective memory,"
were/are rapists. Based upon the ages-old Jewish martyrological
tradition, left-wing Jewish author Earl Shorris noted his racial hatred
of Russians as he toured the country in the 1970s:
"We had no common ancestors [with Russians]. Tony [Shorris's son],
I said
softly careful not to wake him, you will discover one day that you
are not
descended from Russians but from Jews who happened to live in
Russia.
And if you do have Russian blood, it entered the line when a
Cossack fell on
a Jewish woman and raped her. It's either history or racial
memory, but I know
it's true. This is not home. And where is home? On his mother's
side Tony is
descended from Sheikh Sason ben Saleh, who is
descended from Abraham
Sason, the Venetian mystic who claimed to be a direct descendant
of Shephatiah,
the fifth son of King David. I laughed aloud at the thought of
traveling with royalty,
and a Marxist-Leninist king at that!") [SHORRIS, E., 1982, p. 149]
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,
Doestoevsky (of Crime and Punishment fame)? A French Jew, David
Goldstein, denounced him as an anti-Semite in a book called
Doestoevsky and the Jews. American Jewish scholar Gary Morson also
expressed concern, saying that "it disturbed me that almost no one
talked about [Doestoevsky's] anti-Semitism." Yet Morson also criticized
Goldstein, saying,
"I was struck by how Goldstein
handled the fact that earlier in his life
Doestoevsky wrote in defense
of the Jews. For me, such a turn of
events raised the question of what
made Doestoevsky change his mind,
but for Goldstein, who began with
the assumption that anti-Semitism is
innate and that Doestoevsky was an
anti-Semite 'a-priori,' the articles on
behalf of Jews were dismissed as
hypocritical, a devious attempt to
appeal to liberals. Goldstein's
model of anti-Semitism as a sort of
congenital disease ... itself
seemed perilously close to prejudice."
[MORSON, p. 82]
More recently, Russian novelist and
famous Soviet prisoner and refugee (to America) from communism,
Alexander Solzhenitsyn, also is branded by some as an anti-Semite. Under
particular scrutiny is Solzhenitsyn's Red Wheels, a novel based
on historical fact, that described a Jewish assassin and financial
sponsor of V.I. Lenin in less than flattering terms. "The facts are
true," says Israeli scholar Abram Ben Yakov, in reviewing the book, "
but the glue between them is anti-Semitic." [i.e., descriptions of the
characters] [SINGER, N., p. 2] Solzhenitsyn had come under Jewish
investigation for "anti-Semitism" as early as 1972, when the Zionist
journal, Midstream, published an article by Mark Perakh. Perakh, said
the New York Times, felt that "a disproportionately large number
of unattractive Jews appear in his work." Among those defending
Solzhenitsyn against attack was his wife, Natalia, who is half-Jewish.
[GRENIER, R., 11-13-85, p. C21]
French playwright and novelist Jean
Genet? "Whether or not Genet is an anti-Semite," says Edith Wyschogrod,
"... comes to the fore in the content of the Arab-Israeli conflict in
[his] Prisoner of Love. In teaching Genet, it will not do simply
to cordon off bigotry and condemn it; rather, one must show how it seeps
into his aesthetic." [Wyschogrod, p. 256]
The work of German philosopher Martin
Heidegger is also dismissed by many Jews as, ultimately, the expressions
of a closet Nazi. "Jewish philosophy," says Robert Gibbs, "... disavows
Heidegger, seeing him a Nazi, even if a somewhat idiosyncratic one. It
suspects that his philosophy was comfortable to Nazism, if not actually
inclined to it." [GIBBS, p. 157] The Jewish philosopher Wittgenstein?
There are some who think he too had an "anti-Semitic" streak. [SZABADOS,
B., 3-99, p. 1-27]
In 2002, lobbyists succeeded in banning the Muslim holy book, the
Koran (Quran), from the Los Angeles school system. As the Los Angeles
Times reported:
"Los Angeles city school officials have pulled nearly 300
translations of the
Koran from school libraries after learning that commentary in the
books was
derogatory towards Jews. Copies of 'The Meaning of the Holy Quran'
were
donated in December to the Los Angeles Unified School District by a
local
Muslim foundation ... On Monday, [Jim] Konantz [director of
information
technology for the district] received a complaint from a history
teacher who
concluded some of the book's footnotes were anti-Semitic."
[SMITH, D., 2-7-02]
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 Mendelsohn
and Mahler, both of whom converted to Christianity? Should we conduct
and play Handel's [Christian] Messiah? Should Shakespeare not be read
because Shylock has entered the English vocabulary as an anti-Semitic
word? Should Israelis stop using [German-made] Mercedes cars as taxis
and American Jews refrain from driving Volkswagens? Ambiguities abound."
[RASKAS, p. 11]
Ultimately, if aforementioned
Jewish critics like E. L. Dachslager really want to censor all
literature that criticizes Jewry, and others like Rosen want to at least
demote them from greatness to unread obscurity, entire libraries will
have to be burned down and/or trucked to inaccessible warehouses. Not
only literature but American and world history will have to be totally
reshaped (as is happening) to accommodate an image entirely flattering
to Jews. The problem is that some of the greatest and most respected
authors in American (let alone worldwide) writing, associated with the
best of the American democratic tradition and progressive values, as
well as some of the foremost political strugglers for American liberty,
published sometimes bitter condemnations about the facts
of self-absorbed Jewish particularism and behavior.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, for example, the
great American essayist of self-reliance, transcendence of the material
world, and the sacredness of individual expression and self-reliance
(all anathema to traditional Jewish materialist collectivism) wrote that
"the sufferance which is the
badge of the Jew has made him, in these
days, the ruler of the rulers of
the earth." [EMERSON, p. 39]
As Jewish scholar Robert Michael
complains,"[Emerson] saw Judaism, the Jewish idea, as a stumbling block
to authentic human liberation. The Jewish God was cruel; the Jewish Law
stifling. What was bad about Christianity was its Jewish substance. At
the less ideological level, his work is also peppered with anti-Jewish
sentiments ... In his journal entry for 3 July 1839, he wrote: In the
Allston Gallery the Polish Jews are an offense to me; they degrade and
animalize." [MICHAEL, R., 9-7-98]
The great British poet, Lord Byron,
wrote "Tis gold, not steel, that rears the conqueror's arch ... Jews ...
direct the world with all the spirit of their sect." [FELDMAN, p. 638]
Mark Twain, whose novel
Huckleberry Finn is usually regarded as a pioneering classic of
interracial compassion, was solicited by the American Hebrew
magazine in 1890 for his views on anti-Semitism. Twain wrote a short
reply, for the most part expounding the requisite platitudes for the
Jewish journal. [TWAIN, FABLES, p. 445-448] Twain elaborated more openly
upon the antisemitic theme nine years later in Harper's magazine:
"In the cotton states, after the
[Civil] war, the simple and ignorant Negroes
made the crops for the white planter
on shares. The Jew came down in
force, set up shop on the
plantation, supplied all the Negroes on credit,
and at the end of the season was
proprietor of the Negro’s share of the
present crop and of part of his
share of the next one ... The Jew is being
legislated out of Russia. The reason
is not concealed. The movement
was instituted because the Christian
peasant and villager stood no chance
against his commercial abilities. He
was always ready to lend money on
a crop, and sell vodka and other
necessities of life on credit while the
crop was growing. When settlement
day came he owned the crop; the
next year or year after he owned the
farm ...."
"In the dull and ignorant England of
John's time everybody got into debt
to the Jew. He gathered all
lucrative enterprise into his hands; He was the
king of commerce; he was ready to be
helpful in a profitable way; he
even financed the crusades for the
rescue of [Christianity's Holy]
sepulcher [from the Muslims of
Jerusalem] . . ... He had to be banished
from the realm... For the like
reasons, Spain had to banish him four
hundred years ago, and Austria about
a couple of centuries later. In all
ages Christian Europe has been
obliged to curtail his activities. If he
entered upon a mechanical trade, the
Christian had to retire from it. If
he set up as a doctor, he was the
best one, and he took the business. If
he exploited agriculture, the other
farmer had to get at something else.
Since there was no way to
successfully compete with him in any
vocation, the law had to step in to
save the Christian from the
poorhouse, even ways to get rich.
This history has a very, very
commercial look, a most sordid and
practical commercial look ... I
am convinced that the persecution of
the Jew is due not in any large
degree to religious practice. No,
the Jew is a money-getter ... With
precocious wisdom [the Jew] found
out in the moving of time
that some men worship rank, some
worship heroes, some worship
power, some worship God, and that
over these ideals, they dispute
and cannot unite -- but they all
worship money; so [the Jew] made
it the end and aim of his life to
get it. He was at it in Egypt thirty six
centuries ago; he was at it in Rome
when the Christian got persecuted
by mistake for him; he has been at
it ever since. The cost to him has
been heavy; his success has made the
whole human race his enemy."
[TWAIN, Conc. p. 360-363]
Curiously, a Jewish scholar bends
the essay from which this excerpt comes, Concerning the Jews, to
his own needs for Jewish confirmation. He sees in Twain's piece
"remarkable praise for Jewish characteristics and virtue while at the
same time striving for balance ... What is really noteworthy about
Concerning the Jews ... is its effect to make judgments based upon
reliable facts rather than perceived myths." [SARNA, p. 69]
In the mood of the Jewish
martyr-hero tradition enforced upon modern America, in 1998 the
Baltimore Sun decided that its readers would be interested not only
in Twain's 1898 article, but specifically an examination of whether it
was anti-Semitic or not. Kenneth Lasson quotes this excerpt from Twain
to conclude his own piece: "All other forces pass, but the Jews remain.
What is the secret of their immortality?" [LASSON, p. 18]
H.G. Wells, the great British
novelist and social critic, commented that
"A careful study of anti-Semitism
prejudice and accusations might
be of great value to many Jews
who do not realize the irritation they
inflict."
The novelist D. H. Lawrence wrote:
"Why humanity has hated the
Jews, I have come to the conclusion, is
that the Jews have always taken
religion -- since the great days, that is
-- and used it for their own
personal and private gratification, as if it
were a thing administered to
their own importance and well-being and
conceit ... The material world
dominates them with a base kind of
fetish domination. Yet they
know the truth all the while. Yet they
cringe their buttocks to the
fetish of Mammon [money] ...."
[GOULD, p. 225]
Novelist Theodore Dreiser:
"He [the Jew] has been in America
all of two hundred years, and he
has not faded into a pure America
by any means, and he will not.
As I said before, he maintains
his religious dogmas and his racial
sympathies, race characteristics,
and race cohesion as against all
types of nationalities
surrounding him whatsoever." [GOULD, p. 298]
George Sand, the French author who
skirted gender prejudice by having a male pseudonym, noted that
"I saw in the 'Wandering Jew' the
personification of the Jewish people,
exiled in the Middle Ages.
Nevertheless, they are once again extremely
rich, owing to their unfailing rude
greediness and their indefatigable
activity. With their
hard-heartedness that they extend towards people of
other faiths and races, they are at
the point of making themselves kings
of the world. This people can thank
its obstinacy that France will be
Judaized within fifty years. Already
some wise Jews prophesy this
frankly." [1857]
James Fenimore Cooper (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 Massachusets and
Generals
Benjamin Butler, William T. Sherman, and Ulysses S. Grant, as well
as
others, that Jews were engaged in passing counterfeit money; that
they
fed the inflation by charging outrageous prices; that they were
driving
well-established Christian firms out of business by using unfair
competitive
methods and generally were parasites who thrived on the misery of
others." [DOBKOWSKI, M., 1979, p. 83]
As we have more than amply seen
already, an exploitive Jewish history during war conditions is not
uncommon. Another testament, in the aftermath of the Nazi invasion of
Poland, is that of Chaim Kaplan who noted the reputation of immigrant
Jews in the Soviet-Polish border areas: "The bad behavior of some of our
people in the border towns which were annexed to Russia has made us all
hated and unwanted ... Until the storm [war conditions] should subside,
they occupied themselves with all kinds of ugly speculation, which has
since become their livelihood and life's work. The émigrés created an
atmosphere of profiteering." [KAPLAN, C., p. 90]
Another historical icon of American
democracy, Thomas Jefferson, in a private letter, cited the works of
others as his own opinion about Jewish ethics:
"Ethics were so little studied among
the Jews, that, in their whole
compilation called the Talmud, there
is only one treatise on moral
subjects. Their books of morals
chiefly consisted in a minute
enumeration of duties ... What a
wretched depravity of sentiment
and manners must have prevailed
before such corrupt maxims could
have attained credit. It is
impossible to collect from these writings a
consistent series of moral Doctrine."
[CAPPON, p. 383]
"Moses," said Jefferson elsewhere,
".... instilled into his people the most anti-social spirit towards
other nations; the other [Jesus/the Christian] preaches philanthropy and
universal charity and benevolence." [GOULD, p. 75]
John Quincy Adams, another early
American president, visited a synagogue in Amsterdam and bitterly
remarked in his diary:
"I am sure [the Jews in Amsterdam]
are all wretched creatures for I think
I never saw in my life such a set of
miserable looking people, and they
would steal your eyes out of your
head if they could." [ADAMS, p. 59]
Commenting on Jewish religious identity,
Thomas Paine (1737-1789), author of the famous American patriotic
pamphlet Common Sense, wrote that
"The character of Moses as stated
in the Bible is the most horrid that
can be imagined. If those accounts
are true, he was the wretch that first
began and carried on wars on the
score or on the pretense of religion;
and under the mask, or the
infatuation, committed the most unexampled
atrocities that are to be found in
the history of any nation." [GOULD, p.
76]
Henry Feingold suggest that Jewish
dual allegiance (to both Jewish and American identities) can be
"especially vexing for the Jewish-conscious historians" who are
especially numerous these days. Feingold cites traditional American folk
heroes like Henry Ford, Charles Lindbergh, and Ulysses S. Grant as being
first and foremost, to Jewish scholars, anti-Semites, as is rendered the
entire American Populist movement at the turn of the twentieth century.
[FEINGOLD, p. 36-37] Famed World War II General George S. Patton? Rabbi
Marvin Hier's Holocaust documentary, The Long Way Home, says the
Baltimore Jewish Times, "revealed that U.S. Army Gen. George S.
Patton believed Holocaust survivors should be interned in Displaced
Person camps. 'People did not know that Patton wrote in his diary that
Jews are the lowest of the low and have to be kept behind barbed wire,'
[Hier] said.'" [HIRSCH, R., 4-24-98, p. 38]
Throw Thomas Edison into the list.
Although author Neil Baldwin's "editor thought Baldwin dwelled on
Edison's relationship with Jews too much" in his book about the great
American inventor, all of the Jewish-related material remained. Edison,
says Baldwin, had a "Shylock complex" about Jews. "I wish," wrote
Edison, "they would all quit making money." [EZOR, p. 46]
Modern Jewish anti-"anti-Semitic"
discourse insists that all such historical and critical commentary
should never be put to the test of open evidential debate but, rather,
that such criticism is merely part of baseless, groundless, and
irrational prejudice. It should therefore, the argument goes, not be
seen in the first place; it is best, in fact, forbidden.
This attitude of free speech
suppression is exemplified these days, in an institutional sense, by one
of the best known and most powerful Jewish lobbying organizations, the
Simon Wiesenthal Center for Holocaust Studies, which, in the words of
the American Civil Liberties Union, waged "a campaign pressuring
Internet Service providers to censor the Web page of right wing hate
groups housed on their servers." [ACLU, Internet ONLINE, 1996] What
exactly, one wonders, is a "right wing hate group?" Who
decides its definition to bar their contribution to critical exchange?
Would the former criticisms of Jews by Mark Twain, George Washington,
and George Bernard Shaw rate as "right wing hate" material? If so, would
we have to conclude that everything else they had to say was no doubt
subtly contaminated by "hate" too? Does the Wiesenthal Center "hate"
anybody? Would its director, an Orthodox rabbi named Marvin Hier, censor
the great Jewish philosopher, Baruch Spinoza, when he called traditional
Jewry "a hating people?" What would Rabbi Hier say when publicly
confronted with some of the most vile material in the Talmud? Should
that be kept off the Internet? Should it be banned? Don't people have
the right to explore all facts and opinions available to decide their
own? Isn't that the most intelligent way to come to an opinion in the
first place? Isn't it the beauty of the Internet that, by its very
unedited nature, it has the potential to be a democratic forum of
profound proportions?
One of the Wiesenthal Center's
stock-in-trades is a kind of Inquisition against whatever it defines as
anti-Semitism. High priority (by the Wiesenthal Center and virtually
all other Jewish "watchdog" groups) are the so-called "Holocaust
Deniers" espousing "Holocaust revisionism." Often (but not always)
right-wingers, Holocaust deniers argue that the Jewish Holocaust is a
conspiratorial myth and never (or in minor form) happened. Whatever the
merits of their arguments, one would presume that they would have, in a
free society, the right to state their case and then be thoroughly
discredited in the open exchange of contesting evidence. Not so. The
Wiesenthal Center, and other Jewish lobbying organizations, and
sometimes non-Jewish sympathizers, have largely succeeded in
internationally censoring them. (The Wiesenthal Center even had the
audacity in 2001 to "initiate an international campaign to have YMCAs
around the world stop funding the world center." Why does this Jewish
lobbying group seek to fulfill anti-Jewish conspiracy theories and
economically break a Christian organization? Because the YMCA's world
center in Geneva dared to indict the state of Israel in a report for its
"oppression" of Palestinians.) [WOHLGELERNTER, E., 2-16-01, p. 1A]
"Holocaust denial is not a serious
scholarly debate," Antony Polansky, a Jewish professor and Holocaust
survivor told a campus audience, "This is a new form of hate propaganda.
This is not a form of first amendment issue." [RESPONSE, SPRING, 1994,
p. 7] Jewish critic Mary Lefkokwitz noted the case of a Northwestern
University engineering professor, Earl Butz (author of a volume on the
Holocaust entitled The Hoax of the Twentieth Century), in 1996:
"It is entirely appropriate that a professor's use of university
property, even of something as tangential as a website, should come
under scrutiny, if that professor uses it for the purpose of
disseminating nonhistorical information as is claimed in the current
controversy about a professor's placing of Holocaust denial propaganda
on the Northwestern University website." [LEFKOWITZ, p. 186]
In 1994, Yale, Brown, and Harvard
University were among those universities that refused to print an ad in
the campus paper by "The Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust." A
few colleges did run the ad. Portland's major daily, The Oregonian,
published the ad and ended up under Jewish assault, eventually
apologizing for its decision. [RESPONSE, SPRING, 1994, p. 7] In 1996
David Irving, an alleged "holocaust denier," had a manuscript,
Goebbels: Mastermind of the Third Reich, accepted for publication at
St. Martin's Press. Described by one reviewer as "soft pedaling ...
German blame for the treatment of Jews," under massive Jewish pressure
the publisher reversed its decision to produce the volume. [RESPONSE,
SPRING, p. 1996, p. 12]
In Canada, "Jewish pressure" sought,
via trials in 1985 and 1988, to send Ernst Zundel to prison for
publishing a pamphlet that claimed the Holocaust never happened.
[DERSHOWITZ, p. 171] "Zundel was convicted in Toronto in 1988," notes
the Toronto Star, "of spreading false news but the conviction was
declared unconstitutional in 1992 by the Supreme Court of Canada."
[TORONTO STAR, 4-18-95, p. A3] "Zundel -- producer of a British-based
writing called Did the Six Million Really Die? -- was actually
tried twice "on the charge of publishing views he knew to be false."
[BAIN, p. 45] The first trial was well covered by the Canadian news
media and afforded Zundel widespread publicity. "Media coverage," noted
Sherri Aikenhead in MacLean's magazine, "was so intense that it
provoked fierce arguments -- particularly among Jewish activists --
about whose interests the reports served." [AIKENHEAD, p. 44] For the
second Zundel trial, none of the Canadian national news agency's 100
member newspapers covered the story. "What is curious," wrote George
Bain in a MacClean's editorial, "is the quickness and near
unanimity with which the media managers insist that no representations
to them, no feeling of pressure, affected their editorial decisions on
how to play -- or play down -- the second Zundel trial. Curiously, only
Ian Urquhart of the [Toronto] Star, the newspaper that (though
'judiciously,' as he puts it) covered the second trial throughout,
acknowledged that he received representatives from the Jewish community
about publicizing Zundel's hateful views." [BAIN, p. 45] Because of
Jewish lobbying efforts, an El Paso, Texas, radio station cancelled its
contract Zundel, and dropped his program there, "Voice of Freedom,"
[RESPONSE, Spring 1994] as did cable station in California. (Haters of
Zundel succeeded in burning his house down).
This particular Jewish tact of
intensive lobbying for censorship is not new. We have seen the exact
same thing as far back as 1700 when powerful Jewish lobbyists in
Germany successfully censored Johann Eisenmenger's scholarly
critique about Jews. In 2001, the Board of Deputies of British Jews,
attempted to sell at auction Sir Richard Burton's anti-Jewish
manuscript entitled "Human Sacrifice Among the Sephardine or
Eastern Jews." (Burton is best known as a 19th century world
explorer and translator of Tales of the Arabian Nights and
the Kama Sutra). This work about Jews was never published. As
the Jewish Telegraphic Agency explains it:
"[Burton] was British consul in Damascus in 1870-71, but was
recalled after
disputes with his superiors, the Ottoman government of Syria,
local Christian
missionaires -- and even a small clique of powerful Jewish
moneylenders in
Damascus ... W. H. Wilkins [tried to publish it in 1896 but]
the Board of
Deputies was on its guard and threatened to sue for libel. The
book was
withdrawn. The manuscript passed through several more hands
before the
Board managed to obtain it through court action in 1909."
[GREENE, R., 6-6-01]
The Board of Deputies of British Jews, notes JTA,
"sought to sell the document after suppressing it for nearly 100
years." Lord Janner, a former president of the Board, expressed
outrage that the Board sought to sell the work. In failing to find a
buyer (for over $200,000) the manuscript for sale brought attention
attracting attention to the work: it was "the worst of both worlds
-- the contents of this disgraceful document have been publicized,
and the Board has not raised the resources it needs." [GREENE, R.,
6-6-01]
In efforts to boycott a prominent right-wing critic of Jews in
the 1940s and 1950s, Gerald K. Smith, "working together," says
Benjamin Ginsberg, "officials of the American Jewish Committee,
American Jewish Congress, and the Anti-Defamation League would
approach the publishers of major newspapers and owners of radio
stations in cities where Smith had scheduled appearances, to ask
that Smith be given no coverage whatsoever. If newspapers failed to
cooperate on a voluntary basis, Jewish organizations were usually
able to secure their compliance by threatening boycotts of Jewish
advertisers. The strategy of dynamic silence was extremely
effective." [GINBSBERG, B., 1993, p. 124] The victim of this
particular censorship was decried as a right-wing extremist. But
this methodology in the suppression of free speech reflects Jewish
tactics over history, to our own day, in suppressing any and all
criticism about them.
"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 rechannel Jewish life in the United
States, and its denigration of established leaders were barely noted."
[WERTHEIMER, p. 406]
In 1990 a Reform rabbi, Adi Assabi,
in South Africa received 23 death threats from Jewish callers for
allowing anti-apartheid Black leader Nelson Mandela a forum to speak at
the rabbi's synagogue. Mandela, the international hero of the human
rights movement in South Africa who spent 28 years in prison, "outraged
most South African Jews by his expressions of solidarity with
Palestinian Liberation Organization leader Yasir Arafat and by
photographs in the press of Mandela embracing Arafat." [RAPHAELY, p. 10]
In 1998, Norman Rosenberg, the
Executive Director of the New Jewish Agenda, a "progressive"
organization, wrote an article in the (Washington) Jewish Week
complaining about the dangerous censorship powers within the Jewish
community; the Smithsonian Museum --rather than hold a planned lecture
series in connection with Israel's fiftieth birthday celebration --
succumbed to censorial and harassment efforts by some American Jewish
groups against "controversial" speakers. Those lobbied against were
fellow Jews, including members of Israel's Knesset, journalism, and
universities. Rosenberg notes that
"In canceling the program ... the
Smithsonian was bullied by a
disinformation campaign led by a
group of far-right Jewish
ultranationalists. Rather than
staying the course and presenting what
was to be both a celebration of
Israel's democratic triumphs and an
honest, fair, and intellectually
rigorous examination of the unresolved
issues which that democracy is
wrestling with, the Smithsonian chose
to fold at the first hint of
controversy ... What we have here is nothing
less than nascent Jewish
McCarthyism ... Believers in free speech and
free inquiry can only be appalled
by this debacle." [ROSENBERG, p.
20]
Four months later, Smithsonian
magazine published the permissible image of Israel: a full page ad by
the History Channel announcing the premiere of Israel: Birth of a
Nation. "After 3,000 years of persecution," proclaims the ad, "an
Inquisition, and a Holocaust, you're finally allowed to go home ... Join
host Martin Gilbert as we take an intimate look at a nation born of
resolve, courage, sacrifice and, ultimately, destiny." [SMITHSONIAN, MAY
1998, p. 29]
Even in leftist Jewish circles,
support for the noble principles of free speech and the hallowed
Constitution can disintegrate when clouded by Jewish emotionalism. A
good case in point involved the American Civil Liberties Union and a
1977 neo-Nazi march planned for Skokie, Illinois, a suburb with a large
Jewish population. The town banned the march. Simply based upon the most
elemental principle of the First Amendment, the ACLU argued an appeal on
behalf of the neo-Nazis right to hold their event in Skokie. (The ACLU
won the case, a Federal district court ruled that Skokie's ban was
unconstitutional, but the right-wing group never marched). In the wake
of the ACLU's involvement in the case, an estimated 15% of the ACLU's
national membership (presumably constituting the most liberal,
"open-minded," and principled lawyers and others in America) resigned.
Most were Jews. In hindsight, Albert Foer, the Vice-Chairman of the
Washington D.C.-area ACLU, still felt the need to argue the issues of
the case in a Jewish forum in 1998:
"The ACLU's legal victory in Skokie
was in fact a victory for Jews ...
The First Amendment stands as a
protector of minority rights and
the situation in Skokie, where Jews
happened not to be a minority,
was unique." [FOER, p. 20]
Ever ready to brand any critic of
Jewry or Israel an anti-Semite, organized Jewish efforts in patrolling
knowledge, and in controlling and suppressing information are widespread
and varied, focusing upon a range of subjects and issues, but always
Jewish and/or Israeli-based. In Canada, for example, R. T. Naylor wrote
an article entitled Israel and the Cocaine Barons. For Israeli
Mercenaries, It's All In a Day's Work that was published in
Toronto's Now magazine in December 1989. "When the article was
first published," says Naylor, "Israel's propaganda arm in Canada began
frothing at the mouth in indignation. The reaction included the usual
smear stories planted by the Israel lobby in the Canadian Jewish News
and the [ADL's parent organization] B'nai B'rith Monitor. The
point of the campaign was not to 'correct' the record, since the facts
as stated were incontestably true, but to terrorize critics of Israel
into keeping quiet." [NAYLOR, p. 139]
In 1987, claiming that an NBC
documentary called "Six Days Plus 20 Years: A Dream is Dying" was
"biased," the Israeli government forbid Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir,
Foreign Minister Shimon Peres and Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin from
appearing on NBC News programs. [BOXER, 6-31-87, p. 3] The next year ABC
faced Jewish demonstrations against "one-sided anti-Israel press
coverage being given the current unrest in Israel's administered
territories." [JW, 1-29-88, p. 8] The Anti-Defamation League attacked
ABC coverage as "a mockery of journalistic responsibility," and
particularly singled out ABC news anchorman Peter Jennings.
"Apparently," said the ADL's 'Israel director,' Harry Wall, "Israel's
actions have given license for the expression of anti-Semitism among
certain representatives of the media." [JW, 1-29-88]
Censorship of those seeking to
document on film Israel's many injustices, and crimes, against
Palestinian Arabs is an institutionalized norm in America. In the 1980s,
an American Jewish filmmaker, Joan Mandel, joined with others in
producing a documentary film (Gaza Ghetto) about Arab conditions
as veritable prisoners in the Israeli-occupied Gaza Strip. "I began,"
she says, "to learn the intricacies of how forms of censorship were used
against films about Palestinian. When I returned to the United States in
1984, over the course of the next two years ... I learned that I was
involved in a war in this country -- to redefine the limits of
censorship ... [MANDEL, p. 187-188] ... [There is] censorship at all
stages [in making a film about Israel] -- production, post-production,
funding, programming, and distribution." [MANDEL, p. 190] Among the
most ardent, and overt, censorial organizations are the Anti-Defamation
League, the American-Israel Public Affairs Council (AIPAC), and CAMERA.
For his part, filmmaker Tom Hayes
notes the endless censorial difficulties he had with PBS, and its
grant-giving arm ITVS, over his film about Arabs under Israeli rule,
"People of the Land":
"For me, work on Palestine was a
test of the relevance of independent
filmmaking. If you couldn't get
funding and dissemination for work
about [Israel's] super-power
culpability in cultural genocide, then what
exactly was the point of
independent filmmaking? Entertainment? Media
titillation?" [HAYES, p. 6]
In 1990 the Israeli government
succeeded in briefly getting a New York State Supreme Court Justice,
Michael Dontzin, to ban a book in America; an Appellate Court later
overruled the censorship. The banned book, By Way of Perception: The
Making and Unmaking of a Mossad Officer, described author Victor
Ostrovsky's life as an Israeli Mossad (CIA-like organization) agent and
his moral disenchantment with the organization's policies. The judge's
ban of the book disturbed First Amendment experts, especially that a
foreign government could assert such influence in America. Attorney
Richard Winfield called Judge Dontzin's censorship "without precedent
and egregious." Attorney Floyd Abrams described it as "an aberration."
Critics said, noted the Jewish Week, that "it apparently marked
the first time a foreign nation sought to stop publication of a book in
the United States." [JW, 9-21-90, p. 20] [See further Jewish-inspired
censorial actions in the mass media section]
Under threat from a lawsuit from
Israel, in 1991 the Huntington Library in San Marino, California,
announced that it was still opening its complete set of photographs of
the famous Dead Sea Scrolls to all qualified scholars interested in
studying them. The original scrolls have been housed in a Jerusalem
museum since 1947 and controlled by a "tight academic cartel" in Israel,
particularly the Israel Antiquities Authority who limited access to
scroll study to about 40 people over four decades. "Israeli officials,"
noted the Jewish Week, "contend that open access to the
uncompleted texts could prevent a 'definitive interpretation' of the
scrolls." [TUGEND, T, DEAD, p. 15]
In 1989 a radio talk show host, Jim
Bleilkamp, was fired by his Albany station manager, Dennis Israel, after
a campaign against him by a local Jewish lobbying group, the Shield of
David, with support from the ADL, Americans for a Safe Israel, and the
[Jewish-based] Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting. Among
Bielkamp's crimes, says the Jewish Week, was an "accusation that
Israeli soldiers are committing 'genocide' against Arabs ... [Bleikamp]
acknowledged mentioning the word 'genocide' on the air, but says he did
not mean to imply comparison between the Palestinian uprising and the
Holocaust." [WEISS, Y, p. 18]
In 1991 Linda Rios Brook, the head of
Channel 11 in Minneapolis, lost her job because of her "outspoken
religious views," specifically for giving speeches as a devout Christian
in which she said "that the Jews pressured Pilate into killing Jesus."
For this, Brook was accused of being an anti-Semite, although what she
said has been a foundation of Christian belief (and Jewish
belief) for centuries. The law firm of Milaretz and Associates headed a
group of advertisers who withdrew their advertising contract with the TV
station to "send a message" to Channel 11's parent company, and force
Brook out. [KATZ-STONE, p. 2]
In 2001, Michael Lopez-Calderon, a non-Jewish social studies
teacher at Hebrew Academy's Rabbi Alexander S. Gross High School in
Miami, made the news when he was fired for posting anti-Israel comments
at a pro-Palestinian web site, Palestine Media Watch. "Lopez-Calderon, a
non-Catholic Cuban-American who believes Israel is oppressing the
Palestinians, said the trouble began when he heard other teachers make
what he felt were callous comments on the fatal shooting of a
Palestinian teenager. 'It broke me,' he said." [TALLAHASSEE DEMOCRAT,
3-10-01]
Also in 2001, the publisher of the Oneida Daily Dispatch
(New York) fired its two top editors (Jean Ryan and Dale Seth) for an
editorial that local Jewish lawyer, Randy Schaal, didn't like. Alerting
the local Jewish Community Federation of Mohawk Valley, the Jewish lobby
began to pressure the newspaper. The editorial (its key excerpt linked
here) was
charged with being "anti-Semitic." [SUNG, E., 11-02-01]
In 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 desireability of a common American identity.
There is
now a nationwide industry of multicultural activists teaching
various 'sensitivity'
programs which increase awareness of racial identity, and result in
racial
separation and racial hostility." [PEARLSTEIN, C., 6-4-00]
In 2001, the national Anti-Defamation League director, Abraham
Foxman, was caught up in a major scandal when he wrote a letter to
President Clinton requesting a pardon for fugitive Jewish American
criminal Marc Rich. Rich, an ardent supporter of Israel, had given ADL
$100,000 shortly before Foxman decided to appeal to the president in
Rich's behalf. [BLOMQUIST, B., 3-24-01] Even Jewish New York Times
columnist William Safire suggested that Foxman resign over his ethical
blunder.
(In Australia, newspaper columnist Heather Brown expressed alarm
about the new "Racewatch" organization created in 1998. Instituted by
Community Aid Abroad and B'nai B'rith --the ADL's parent organization --
it sought to enlist volunteers 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 ttack from Britain's Jewish community yesterday after
he suggested
that global capitalism had caused more deaths than Hitler. The
Board of
Deputies of British Jews described the remarks as 'offensive' while
Labour
and Tory opponents said they proved Mr. Livingston was unfit to
become
mayor of London. Mr. Livingstone said economists had estimated that
in
in any year since 1981, up to 20 million people had died because
governments
cut back on health schemes to pay debts. 'Every year the
international
finance system kills more people than World War Two. But at least
Hitler
was mad, you know?' The comparison provoked an angry reaction from
the Board of Deputies of British Jews." [WAUGH, P., 4-12-00]
The Jewish Thought Police has also
followed up in publicly policing the use of words in the English
language. In 1997 the ADL began pressuring the publisher Random House
against adding a new meaning for the world "Nazi" into its upcoming
Webster's College Dictionary. The offensive new meaning? Nazi: "A person
who is fanatically dedicated to or seeks to control a specific activity,
practice, etc." This definition, so offensive to ADL sensibilities, was
perhaps recognized to fit too uncomfortably the Jewish lobbying
institution itself.
It cannot be denied that the word
"Nazi" is used colloquially these days in such a manner and merits
inclusion in any dictionary. But for the Jewish Thought Police so intent
upon controlling even the meanings of words, anything having to do with
the so-called Holocaust is sacred and anything short of a Hitler-style
Nazi, frozen in time, is viewed as a trivialization of Jewish Holocaust
dogma. According to an ADL press release to explain the group's
complaint, Abraham Foxman, the ADL national director, argued that "the
role of editor [at Random House is] to inform the public that there
should not be a 'jocular' usage of the word Nazi." [ADL ONLINE, 1-13-97]
(In an earlier attempt to censor history and language, in 1973
publishers of 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 modigy the word of God ... [O]ne major publisher that shares
Borosky's views is the 183-year old American Bible Society, based in New
York. Its 1995 Contemporary English Version, pitched to new
English-readers, conspicuously avoids 'the Jews' in the problematic
passages and substitues alternative terms like 'the leaders of the
people.'" [O'REILLY, D., 8-17-01]
In an odd way to prevent the spread
of anti-Semitism, in 2000 the Anti-Defamation League bought six
potential anti-Semitic World Wide Web domain names, including "kike.com,"
and "kike.net," so that anti-Semites couldn't have them. [LUM, R.,
1-14-2000, p. 1A]
In 1990, Michael Slomich, New England
Director of the Jewish Defense League, drew considerable media attention
in leading protests against the Hull, Massachusetts, community because
of a series of old swastika designs in the tile floor of the Hull Town
Hall. The building was built in 1923, years before the Nazis came to
power with their appropriation across the world of the ancient symbol
for good luck and fertility. The swastika was a popular symbol on
picture postcards in America at the turn of the century. The design was
even discovered during an archeological dig in the ruins of an ancient
synagogue in Israel. "Today tourists looking at these preserved ruins,"
says M. Hirsch Goldberg, "can also see a swastika -- another
demonstration of how symbols change, since the swastika was once a sign
of peace." [GOLDBERG, M., 1976, p. 29]
Slomich led a group of complainers
through Hull to demand the removal of the tiles, successfully forcing
such unwelcome publicity upon the borough that the town council spent
over $1500 to have the swastika motif extracted. Some critics felt the
Jewish attack was misplaced and even ridiculous. A Native American
professor at the nearby University of Massachusetts noted that the
swastika was a positive symbol in his own culture; he objected to Jewish
demands to excise them. "For many thousands of years, we have known and
used that sign [the swastika]...," professor Fox Tree wrote, "We do not
have a national people's defense league or access to our own media,
television, radio and newspapers to tell our own side of the story." [NEUMAN,
E, p. 4-5]
"By destroying the swastikas in the
town hall because a minority -- most from out of town -- does not like
them, aren't you doing the same as Hitler?" read one anti-JDL petition
to leave the swastikas alone. "I've never seen so many anti-Semites come
out of the woodwork," declared the JDL's Slomich, in evaluation of the
controversy, "It was a victory for us, but I'm upset about the amount of
opposition." [NEUMAN, E, p. 4-5]
Jewish historical revisionism,
demands, and distortion spreads in all directions with self-righteous
Jewish activists stepping forward in their respective occupational
fields and disciplines to educate their non-Jewish peers against the
omnipresent evils of irrational anti-Semitism and to present a favorable
Jewish image.
On a smaller, grass roots scale,
Jewish efforts to reform history and reality are everywhere. Steven
Soifer, for example, in the field of social work, wants to "infuse
content about Jews and anti-Semitism" into college social work programs
as part of the educational mandate to "educate students about the
differences among ethnic, racial, and cultural groups." Soifer's forum
for complaint is the Journal of Social Work Education (1991) and
here is a sampling of how he "educates" his fellow social workers:
"Jews are an oppressed group
in U.S. society." [p. 161]
This assertion, as we shall soon see
evidenced in future chapters if anyone needs proof to refute the
obvious, by all social, economic, and political measures, is ridiculous.
Unless Soifer means that Jews in America are oppressed here by other
Jews. In fact, he says as much later: "It is not uncommon
for some Jews to perceive themselves as ugly, weak, complaining, pushy,
caring too much about money, or being smarter than others. They may also
exhibit feelings of powerlessness or attack other Jews for exhibiting
supposed stereotypical behavior." [p. 161]
"Falasha or Ethiopian Jews are
often the targets of racism and classism as well as anti-Semitism."
[p. 162]
Soifer is right. But what he doesn't
mention is that the Falasha [Black Jews from Africa] face such
discrimination and abuse -- well documented -- at the hands, again, of
other (non-Black) Jews -- in Israel, where almost all
Falasha are currently living. [See later chapter about Israel.]
"Some ... literature [that has
"attempted to address the effects of anti-Semitism on therapy clients"]
even appears anti-Semitic in nature ... [arguing] that Jews themselves
contributed to the problem of anti-Semitism, thereby blaming the victims
of the problem." [p. 157]
Soifer doesn't detail the argument,
nor does he mention that the article he cites to illustrate this charge
was written by a Jewish author, C.G. Schoenfeld, in The
Psychoanalytic Review which itself reflects a field and discourse,
as we have already seen, that is predominately Jewish, including the
Review's editor, Theodore Reik, who selected the article in question
for print. Schoenfeld suggests possible reasons for anti-Semitism that
include self-enforced Jewish separatism from non-Jews through history,
arrogant Jewish conceits of superiority, and Jewish preoccupation with
money. [SCHOENFELD]
"It is important to realize that
no one is 'born' Jewish; rather, it is a culturally and religiously
acquired identity." [p. 163]
Not only does Orthodox Judaism
dictate that one is 'born' a Jew, but the possessor of such an identity
-- by traditional religious teachings -- can never leave it (except in
extraordinary excommunication occasions). "A Jew's religion is not only
his own business," notes Michael Asheri, in explaining traditional
Jewish dictate, "up to a certain point it is every Jew's business and he
has no more right to abandon it than a soldier has the right to abandon
his comrades in the middle of a battle because of a 'sincere' conviction
that the enemy is right. Such a man is considered a traitor and treated
like one ... In all laws concerning marriage, the rule is 'once a Jew,
always a Jew.' This means that if a woman becomes an apostate, any
children born to her will still be Jewish, even if they are born after
her apostasy." [ASHERI, M., 1983, p. 319-320] "There is the
constitutive idea of Judaism itself," says Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, one of
the pre-eminent rabbis in Great Britain, "that the Jews are born into
obligations ... A Jew is a Jew by virtue of birth. This fact carries
with it certain duties and obligations. Membership in the Jewish
community is thus simultaneously a biological and ethical proposition."
[SACKS, J., p. 156-157]
"Because of the historical
oppression and attempts at genocide against the Jewish people, most, if
not all Jews, have learned to function and survive despite oppression,
terror, and other abusive conditions. Thus, although many Jews appear to
be doing well, often they are living in fear. Some Jews try to
assimilate and pass as non-Jews. By being 'invisible,' they hope to
escape another Holocaust." [p. 163]
Jews are the wealthiest, most
comfortable, ethnic group in America and there has never been anything
remotely like "oppression, terror or other abusive conditions" for them
in this country. With Israel and its nuclear bombs and Jewish
hypersensitivity to the slightest criticism, and worldwide awareness to
the Nazi barbarism in Europe in an endless Jewish publicity campaign,
the notion of "another Holocaust" directed expressly towards Jews
anywhere on earth is preposterous. Nor are Jews in hiding in America,
trying to "pass as non-Jews"; they publicly celebrate their identity
everywhere. Teaching social workers such nonsense is insidious.
But, of course, even to criticize
Jewish perceptions and arguments here, by Jewish dictate, is rationally
and morally impossible. It is, to Jewish dogma, naked anti-Semitism. And
"anti-Semitism,” says Cynthia Ozick, a well known Jewish writer, at a
conference held by the Partisan Review in 1994, " ... has no need
or real Jews. It can thrive where no Jews have lived, or where all the
Jews are already dead. Anti-Semitism has nothing to do with Jews; it's
not about Jews. It is, and always has been, it always will be, about the
body and soul of the anti-Semite."[PR, p. 388]
Any argument that there may indeed be
social, behavioral, and economic issues throughout history that are
legitimate grounds for critical discussion and complaint about Jews are
routinely rejected as automatically anti-Semitic in nature. And, hence,
irrational. In fact, however, when Jews get too engrossed in detailed
accusations against perceived "anti-Semites," their assertions can
become completely self-contradictory. Consider Moshem Leshem's comment
in his book, Israel Alone, about "Johann Gottleib Fichte, the
eighteenth century philosopher ...[who] first sounded many of the themes
that later became the staple fare of the modern anti-Semite: Jewish
exclusiveness, their belief in their inherent superiority, their
predilection for trade, their disdain for gentiles. " [LESHEM, p. 54]
Yet Leshem, in this same book, earlier wrote of his own volition: " ...
In their [own] eyes, the Jews were a very different and superior
people. To preserve that sense of spiritual uniqueness, isolation from
the outside world was essential. Jews therefore limited their contact
with gentiles to the strictly necessary. They might do business with the
goyim, but they would not break bread with them ... " [p. 18] A little
exclusive, a little superior, and a little disdaining of Gentiles, no?
Or how about Leshem's fond
quotation of an Isaac Singer novel in which a character says: "I've long
been convinced that there is a hidden Messiah in every Jew. The Jew
himself is one big miracle." There's at least a wee bit of "superiority"
in considering oneself a miracle, extraordinary vehicle for a Messiah,
no? And how about Leshem's observation about Theodore Herzl, the
playwright and founder of Zionism and modern Israel: "His plays clearly
show his preoccupation with the ills afflicting his own class, the
Jewish bourgeoisie, especially the worship of money. He castigated the
shameful self-serving falsity that permeated the overstuffed drawing
rooms of equally overstuffed Jewish businessmen and stockbrokers ... [p.
79-80] A little "predilection for trade" here, no?
So how is it that Leshem can nakedly
state as fact (repeatedly throughout his own volume) the very same
unflattering portrayals of Jewish behavior that Fichte used, yet call
them "the staple of modern anti-Semitism" and dismiss Fichte as an evil
anti-Semite for mentioning them? There are two possible answers. One is
that a large portion of the Jewish noise about anti-Semitism is
nonsense: merely part of Jewish political illusions and smokescreens. It
is the "sustained noise" that Herzl encouraged to diffuse rational
discourse and criticism towards distracting attention from the horrible
policies of the modern Israeli state and a less than stellar Jewish past
that has historically led to such hatred of them. Or, following a long
Jewish tradition on such matters, unbeknownst to Mr. Leshem is the
apparent fact that he, himself, in speaking negatively about Jews, has
been somehow unconsciously wrestled and subsumed by Jew-hate and is, of
course, the ten millionth (or so) Jewish anti-Semite.
Hannah Arendt, a Jew, flushes out
this great maze of Jewish nonsense for exactly what it is worth:
"Jews concerned with the
survival of their people ... in a curious
desperate misinterpretation hit
on the consoling idea that anti-Semitism
... might be an excellent means
for keeping the people together, so
that the assumption of eternal
anti-Semitism would ever imply an eternal
guarantee of Jewish existence.
This superstition [is] a secularized
travesty of the idea of eternity
inherent in a faith in chosenness and a
Messianic hope..." [ARENDT, p. ]
Ultimately, there is really no escape
for Gentiles from the endemic, omnipresent Jewish accusation of
anti-Semitism. Jewish identity needs an antithetical and
hostile Other to conceptually exist. Even if one defends Jews, and
writes an entire volume attacking anti-Semitism -- as did the well-known
existentialist Jean Paul Sartre -- there are Jews who are able to dredge
up accusations of anti-Semitism in the very Gentile act of writing
against it. Donald Kuspit notes the case of the Jewish art critic Harold
Rosenberg who "finds that Sartre, despite his conscious intention to the
contrary, is unconsciously an anti-Semite." Reviewing Sartre's work,
Rosenberg argued that:
"From the image of the man limited
to abstract ideas [Jews], it is but
a step to that of the man
dedicated to cash, since the chief abstraction
in the modern world is, of course,
money. The explanation that [Jews]
are devoted to money fits together
and provides a description of a kind
of unlikable people." [KUSPIT, p.
32]
Chaim Bermant notes another (what
he calls "bizarre") Jewish attack on Sartre by Susan Rubin Suleiman:
"Sartre has many things to answer
for, but about the one thing he
was not was an anti-Semite, and
his Reflexions Sur Le Question Juive
[Reflections on the Jewish
Question], published in 1946, became a
classic defense of the Jew.
Suleiman, however, sees something sinister
in the very name: 'Sarte chose a
title [... the Jewish Question] that
provoked tens and hundreds of
anti-Semitic pamphlets and articles.'"
[BERMANT, p. 7]
Hence, no matter what a Gentile says
about Jews -- good, bad, or indifferent, there is probably a Jew
somewhere ready to condemn him. Richard L. Rubenstein even attacks
non-Jews with a pro-Jewish bias; he asserts that even this is an
equivalent of anti-Semitism: "Philo-Semitism is as unrealistic and
pernicious as anti-Semitism, for it destroys our most precious
attribute, our simple humanity." [RUBENSTEIN, R., p. 21]
Jewish determination to include any-
and everyone into the accusative net of "anti-Semite" knows no bounds.
Even the self-critical Jew, wracked with doubt, and shame, about his or
her identity and/or critical of Jewish heritage, strangely, is also
considered among Jews to be a veritable institution. This parallel
tradition to the burdens of Jewish wonderfulness is Jewish
anti-Semitism, popularly called the "self-hating Jew." "Self hatred, in
fact," declared James Yaffe in 1968,
"is a word often used to describe a
common phenomena -- Jewish
anti-Semitism ... The Jew believes
all the epithets that the anti-Semite
throws at him, even the ones that
contradict each other. He believes
that Jews are clannish and pushy,
miserly and ostentatious, vulgar and
excessively intellectual ... [YAFFE,
J., 1968, p. 70] ... In his attitudes
toward anti-Semitism, the self-hating
Jew is especially confused. The
subject is on his mind constantly. He
is far more sensitive to so-called
'Jewish traits' than most gentiles
are."[YAFFE, J., 1968, p. 72] ... So
why not recognize the truth? Hardly
any Jews are entirely free from the
effects of this disease [of Jewish
self-hatred]. In AJC's Baltimore survey
[the American Jewish Committee’s
study of the Jews of Baltimore in 1962],
two-thirds of the respondents
admitted to believing that other Jews are
pushy, hostile, vulgar,
materialistic, and the cause of anti-Semitism. And
those were only the ones who were
willing to admit it." [YAFFE, J., 1968,
p. 73]
"To this disease of the psyche
[anti-Semitism/Jewish self-hatred]," wrote Milton Steinberg,
"some American Jews have fallen
victim. How many, no one knows;
but there are at least thousands who
'think ill of themselves,' who
suffer from shame, who are plagued by
a sense of inferiority -- all
because they are Jews. And
occasionally one meets a Jew in whom
the malady is virulent, a Jew who
literally hates Judaism, and other
Jews and himself." [NEUSNER, J.,
1972, p. 76]
Jewish self-doubt, since the
Enlightenment, created such widespread "anti-Semitic" feelings among
Jews themselves that Max Nordeau (who became one of Herzl's faithful
Zionist organization men) estimated "that by the middle of the
nineteenth century two-thirds of all the prominent personalities of
Jewish origin no longer identified with Judaism in any form." [LESHEM,
p. 33] In 1848 a prominent European rabbi complained (however
hyperbolically) that nine-tenths of the young Jews of his era "were
ashamed of their faith." [LAQUER, p. 9]
The pejorative word "kike" for Jews
was coined by upper class New York City Jews to refer to the masses of
Eastern European Jewish immigrants flooding into their city in the late
1800s. [GROSE, p. 32] Indigenous Jewish Americans' sentiment about the
new arrivals was little different than that of the average
"anti-Semite." "Prominent Jews in America," notes Albert Lindemann,
"seemed to corroborate precisely what Russian officials maintained about
Russia's Jewish population: it was clannish, religiously fanatical, and
bent on domination." [LINDEMANN, p. 219] "It is next to an impossibility
to associate or identify oneself," proclaimed influential Reform rabbi
Isaac Meyer Wise, "with that half-civilized Orthodoxy which constitutes
the bulk of the [Jewish] population in those cities ... We are Americans
and they are not. We are Israelites of the 19th century and a free
country, and they gnaw the dead bones of past centuries ... The good
reputation of Judaism must naturally suffer materially, which must
without fail lower our social status." [GROSE, p. 32-33] A Jewish
journal in 1893 complained that, for the American Jew, "on the one
hand, here are his true relatives who are dear to him and whom he wants
to help; on the other hand, what a blemish!" [GROSE, p. 32]
"Not only were most [of New York's
millions of Eastern European immigrant] Jews uncultivated," says
sociologist John Higham,
"but there is considerable
evidence that they were loud, ostentatious,
and pushing. Both Jews and
friendly non-Jewish observers confessed
something of this kind ... In
cartoons and in a good deal of middle
class opinion, the Jew became
identified as the quintessential parvenu
-- glittering with conspicuous
and vulgar jewelry, lacking table manners,
attracting attention by clamorous
behavior, and always forcing his way
into society that was above him
... Before the 1930s, sober an humane
observers took note of the core
of reality behind the stereotype ... The
Jews symbolized the pecuniary
vice and entered more prominently than
any other ethnic group into the
struggle for status." [HIGHAM, p. 145-
146]
"Between 1881 and World War I," notes Joseph Bendersky,
"those Jews seen as the very physical embodiment of Old World
stereotypes were immigrating to America by the millions. These
despised
Eastern Jews, so different in appearance, speech, and behavior, not
only confirmed but augmented negative perceptions already evident
in the era. So distinct and offensive were these immigrants that
certain German-American Jews worried about being identified
with them or wondered whether the very presence of such vulgar
masses might engender the European variety of vocal, political,
and violent anti-Semitism from which America had generally been
spared." [BENDERSKY, J., 2000, p. 34]
Emma Lazarus, a member of a
prominent Jewish New York family and author of the famous "welcome
huddled masses" quote on the Statue of Liberty, suggested that Eastern
European Jewry should stop pouring into America: "For the mass of
semi-Orientals, kabbalists, and Hassidim, some more practical measure of
reforms must be devised than their transportation to a state of society
[the United States] utterly at variance with their time-honored customs
and sacred beliefs." [GROSE, p. 32] "Not content merely to reject
identification with Jews," notes Howard Sachar, "[Jewish author] Simone
Weil went so far as to identify the spirit of Nazism with the spirit of
Judaism; Hitler, she insisted, was seeking only to revive under another
name and for his own benefit the God of Israel, 'earthly, cruel, and
exclusive.' It was devotion to such a God, she argued, that transformed
the Jews into 'a nation of fugitive slaves ... No wonder such a people
was able to give scarcely anything good to the world.'" [SACHAR, p. 488]
Jewish "anti-Semitism" was
also evidenced against Eastern European Jews in pre-Nazi Germany where
"many assimilated Jews ... considered themselves culturally superior to
the Eastern Jews ... [Jewish men of letters like] Theodor Wolff, for
instance, the editor of the Berliner Tagleblatt newspaper, Georg
Hermann, the author of the best-selling novel Jettchen Gebert and
others exploded in tirades of hatred against the foreign undesirables."
[GIDAL, N., p. 399] Walter Ratheneau, a Jewish high-ranking German
official in pre-Nazi Germany, noted under a pseudonym that Jews were an
"Asiatic horde" and a "population of foreign stock." "Look in the
mirror," he wrote, "This is the first step towards self-criticism."
[TRAVERSO, p. 94] "The hostility of German Jews toward the eastern
European Jewish immigrants (Ostjuden)," says Adam Weisberger,
"represented a form of redirected self-hate." [WEISBEGER, A., 1997, p.
48]
Jewish American novelist Kathy Acker
(author of ten volumes) notes traditional German Jewish elitism, even
towards other Jews:
"My parents were high German Jews,
and I was trained to run away
from Polish Jews. And I have that
childhood in me. It's kind of a knee-
jerk reaction ... I was raised as a
JAP [Jewish American Princess]; I
just got ousted. I think I still have
little JAP elements. People who know
me really see it. I'm really good
when I have a dinner party or when
I have someone clean my place. I was
trained to be good with servants.
I've got a real elitist streak in me;
I just don't take it seriously."
[BRESSLER/KAUFMAN, 2000]
In the late 19th century, Meyer Carl
Rothschild (one of the heirs to the Rothschild fortune in Germany)
wrote: "As for anti-Semitic feeling, the Jews themselves are to blame,
and the present agitation must be ascribed to their arrogance, vanity,
and unspeakable insolence." [LINDEMANN, p. 103] A western European Jew,
Chaim Kaplan, himself an eventual victim of Nazi terror, cited in his
memoirs that in his personal experience living in Eastern Europe he had
finally found one man that broke his negative stereotype of Polish Jews:
"Sometimes it bothered me that he
was a superior person among
the millions of lesser people, for
as a type he contradicted my opinion
about Polish Jewry. That is, the
existence of Jakub Zajac clashed with
my opinion about the Jews of Poland,
which are not too positive. For
years I settled among the Jews of
Poland and I am known to them. I
deal with them and I am well
acquainted with their way of life and their
cultural level as human beings and
as Jews. To my great sorrow, I have
not always spoken well of them. My
opinions are based upon concrete
examples, and from year to year the
instances proving the validity of my
opinions multiplied." [KAPLAN, C.,
p. 76]
(Karl Marx, grandson of rabbis, once
weighed in with a collective defamation of Poland's Jews, saying "The
Jews of Poland are the smeariest of all races.") [MARX, K., 1959, p.
vii]
German Jews shared non-Jewish German attitudes about the Jews in
Eastern Europe. They were even important in the forming of such
"anti-Semitic" views. As Steven Aschheim notes,
"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 genreal distaste for the ghetto and what it symbolized,
but
because they themselves were products of the ghetto they
internalized the distaste in a particularly intense and urgent
way." [ASCHHEIM, S., 1982, p. 3, 4, 11]
Secular Jew Stephen Bloom notes (in his study of an ultra-Orthodox
Jewish community in Postville, Iowa) how Gentile outrage about obnoxious
Jewish behavior towards non-Jews is automatically, still today, twisted
into accusations of non-Jewish "anti-Semitism":
"The Hasidim [ultra-Orthodox] were waging a cultural holy war, in
Postville,
Jerusalem, New York, Los Angeles, Paris -- everywhere. The world
was Jew
vs. non-Jew, and the dichotomy existed in everything they did.
Hasidic children
went to separate schools, their parents arduously stayed among
themselves. If
the city of Postville tried to enforce an ordinance the Jews
disagreed with, the
immediate cry was anti-Semitism. If a local complained about noise
from the
shul [religious center], if anyone disagreed about annexation [into
the town of
a local Jewish-owned slaughterhouse], he or she was quickly branded
an
anti-Semite. Ultimately, I discovered, carrying on a conversation
with any
of the Postville Hasidim was virtually impossible. If you didn't
agree, you
were at fault, part of the problem. You were paving the way for the
ultimate
destruction of the Jews, the world's Chosen People. There was no
room
for compromise, no room for negotiation, no room for anything but
total
and complete submission." [BLOOM, S., 2001, p. 197]
Bloom's honest conclusion about the tensions between the Jewish and
non-Jewish communities in Postville are poignant:
"Many of the Hasidim I had encountered in Postville pretended to be
holy,
but their actions displayed bigotry and racism of the worst degree.
The book
[Bloom wrote called Postville] explored taboo topics such as
bargaining, poor
hygiene, atrocious manners, disrepair of homes, Jewish elitism,
sexism,
crime and prejudice directed at gentiles. In response, I've
received dozens
of hate letters, all from Orthodox Jewish readers, who essentially
pose the
same question as my fathe's. To these readers, to criticize any
aspect
of Judaism is patently unacceptable. To them, I wasn't a journalist
doing my
job. I was a self-loathing Jew, the worst kind of anti-Semite. I
was embarrassing
the family." [BLOOM, S., 2001, p. 355]
In 1950 prominent art critic Clement
Greenberg announced that "it is only reluctantly that I have become
persuaded that self-hatred in one form or another is almost universal
among Jews -- or at least much more prevalent than is commonly thought
or admitted." [GREENBERG, p. 426] "I've experienced anti-Jewish
feelings I'd be ashamed to admit," wrote Jewish author Philip Weiss in
1996, "I also sense that I'm not alone. One Jewish friend prays that her
son won't marry a Jew. A Jewish editor at the New Republic ...
once said to me over the phone, 'I'll have to Jew you down' on a fee."
[WEISS, p. 24]
Important propagators of anti-Semitic
stereotypes in the entertainment world, a field largely populated by
Jews, were also Jewish. As Nathan Belth notes, "Many of the most
objectionable anti-Semitic vaudeville acts were performed by Jewish
comedians, and Jewish movie producers were responsible for some of the
films most damaging to the Jewish image." [BELTH, p. 46] "It is a
startling fact of American stage (and film) history," adds Ellen Schiff,
"that Jews have had a hand in creating vitually all the prevailing
contemporary Jewish stereotypes." [SCHIFF, E., 1986, p. 93]
"It is impossible," wrote Jewish
commentator Ralph Boas in 1917,
"for a Jew to live apart from his
race for several years without looking
upon his people in a new light.
For one thing, distance has enabled him
to focus. He has learned to
sympathize more with those hotel-keepers
whose ban upon Jews is a terrible
thorn in the flesh of the man whose
money ought to take him anywhere.
He has come to see that the
clannishness of Jews serves only
to intensify what social discrimination
may exist ... And finally he has
perceived that there is an arrogance of
persecution, and that for a man to
be continually assuming that people
are taking the trouble to despise
him for his birth is to postulate an
importance that does not exist."
[BOAS, p. 149]
Another Jewish author, Joel Blau,
wrote in 1930 that
"The Jew seems to be the cause of
the irritation and unease everywhere.
It is the mark of the gentleman,
not only that he possesses ease, but,
chiefly, that he knows how to put
others at ease. This is an inimitable
faculty and to its absence must be
attributed most of the social
discrimination the Jew complains
of ... The loudness and vulgarity he
is often charged with are but
extreme manifestation of this unease."
[BLAU, p. 170]
Selig Adler and Thomas Connolly, in their history of the Jews of
Buffalo, New York, note the comments in 1922 of an unidentified Jewish
businessman in that city:
"I am a Jew, of course. I never deny it. But I rarely have occasion
to admit
it. I don't look much like a Jew and so few people know it ... In
fact, I
learn more every day why Gentiles hate Jews! And, in fact, you
know,
I really don't blame them in most cases." [ADLER/CONNOLLY, 1960, p.
335]
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 til, like
the hatred of other nations, it must have
passed into their nature.
Their daily worship was not only
different from that of
other nations (as it might well be,
considering the way they
were a peculiar people and
entirely apart from the
rest), it was absolutely contrary.
Such daily reprobation
naturally gave rise to a lasting
hatred deeply implanted in
the heart: for all hatreds none
is more deep and tenacious
than that which springs from
extreme devoutness or
piety, and is itself cherished as
pious." [SPINOZA, p. 229]
Spinoza's work includes a
rationalist critique that impugned the Biblical claims of Jewish
history. His writings, say Norman Cantor, "constitute a fundamental
threat to traditional Judaism, ultimately more perilous than the
conventional Christian anti-Semitism." [CANTOR, p. 194-95]
A nineteenth century Jewish
socialist (and later Zionist), in France, Bernard Lazare, said that
"Everywhere up to the present time,
the Jew has been an unsociable
being ... The Jewish nation is
small and miserable ... demoralized
and corrupted by an unjustifiable
pride." [LINDEMANN, p. 61]
The Jewish-born journalist Walter
Lippman wrote to Harvard University's President in 1922 in support of
limiting Jewish enrollment: "I do not regard the Jews as innocent
victims; They hand on unconsciously and uncritically from one generation
to another many distressing personal and social habits ... My sympathies
are with the non-Jew. His personal manners and physical habits are, I
believe, distinctly superior to the prevailing manner and habits of the
Jews." [LIPPMANN, p. 149]
Stanley Kubrick, the famed (Jewish)
filmmaker of 2001: A Space Odyssey, Dr. Strangelove, and
A Clockwork Orange, was christened a self-hater by some after he
had died. The New York Post announced that
"the late Stanley Kubrick once
remarked that 'Hitler was right about
almost everything,' and insisted that
any trace of Jewishness be
expunged from the 'Eyes Wide Shut'
script that author Frederic
Raphael was writing for him ... And
Kubrick was downright acidic
on the subject of [Stephen Spielberg's
film] Schindler's List. 'That
was about success, wasn't it?' he
reportedly said. 'The Holocaust is
about six million people who get
killed. Schindlers List was about
six hundred people who don't.'"
[DREHER, R., 6-16-99]
Yet another, particularly tragic,
Jewish "self-hater" was Otto Weininger, whose strange depreciative ideas
about Jews and women have afforded him a kinky cult status amongst some
intellectuals, a Diane Arbus of philosophy. Weininger, a convert to
Protestantism, floating around the edge of the Freud group in Vienna,
committed suicide at age 23 in 1904, not long after his controversial
book Sex and Character was published, a misogynist work that
managed to also offend with the strange claim that Jewish males were
intrinsically effeminate.
Prominent nineteenth century French
Jewish socialist Ferdinand Lasalle? "There are two classes of men whom I
hate, journalists and Jews," he once wrote. "Unfortunately, I belong to
both." [WEISBERGER, A., 1997, p. 47] Prominent turn-of-the century
European Jewish socialist Rosa Luxemberg noted the complexion of the
audience at a 1902 political meeting: "Half the hall, and comme de
raison the best places in front, were naturally taken by Russians or
rather by Jewboys, from Russia -- they were sickening to look at."
[WEISBERG, A., 1997, p. 97] "The eternal truth," said Arnold Schnitzler,
a Jewish doctor and contemporary of Sigmund Freud in Vienna, "is that no
Jew has any real respect for his fellow Jews, ever." [CLARKE, R.,
8-2-99, p. 5]
And, of course, let's not forget
Jesus Christ, a Jew, (who, Messiah or not, rebelled against Jewish
conventions of his time) and many of his early followers who were Jews,
all apostates, and the long lineage of trouble that they have
effectively caused upon those who never left the fold. "The founder [of
Christianity]," notes R.J. Zwi Werblowsky in the Oxford Dictionary of
the Jewish Religion, "and its early adherents were all Jews."
[WERBLOWSKY, p. 158] "Like Jesus," says M. H. Goldberg, "all the
apostles were Jews, as was the first Pope. Jews wrote all of the books
of the New Testament except for those written by Luke." [GOLDBERG, M.
H., 1976, p. 67] It would seem that "anti-Semitism," in the religious
context, as it is presently conceived, was in its origins an in-house
Jewish dialogue.
The psychologically-charged term
"self-hating Jew" is a harsh one. It was created and is commonly used by
the Jewish community as a pejorative term for member critics of
communal Jewish selves. The stigma of "self-hating" linguistically
atomizes the offender and distances him from the rest of the community
as a "self" in a remote negative orbit. No person accused of being a
"self-hating Jew" is likely to see it that way. But to admit that such a
person (short of Jewish Nazis and other truly unbalanced types) has
possibly legitimate grievances and complaints against Jewish tradition,
behavior, or heritage is too threatening, especially since there has
been so many "self-haters" running around. If termed, distanced, and
understood as self-haters, the community rides the waves of criticism,
safely above them. Self-haters are then easily dismissed -- no matter
how many there are -- as unfortunate mental cases infected with
disillusions and delusions from Gentile culture. Self-haters
internalize Gentile criticism (and accept it as true) about Jewishness.
Of course, there is a psychoanalytic invention to explain how this all
works, a theory which supports popular Jewish conventions about
anti-Semitism and Jewish self-hatred: this is the notion of
psychological transference and any victim's "identification with the
aggressor." [GRUNFELD, F., 1996, p. 83]
Smothered by the Tidal Waves of
Jewish self-glorification, rebellious Jews like Alain Finkelkraut must
occasionally come up for air:
"There's no other way to say it --
I was sick and tired of being Jewish.
Disgusted ... saturated ...
stuffed to the gills with it ... I'd had enough,
been worn out from repetitions,
was numbed by the hackneyed clichés
about our peoples' peerless
destiny, bludgeoned with the constant
refrain about a people who no one
loved. The prize goose was asking
for mercy -- not God's, or the
systems', but from those feeders, my
parents and their perpetual
Jewish obsession." [FINKELKRAUT, p.
102]
Philip Roth expressed similar feelings in his famous novel,
Portnoy's Complaint, renowned in Jewish circles as a very
self-consciously Jewish piece of fiction:
"And that goes for the goyim, too ! We all haven't been
lucky enough
to have been born Jews, okay? Because I am sick and tired of
goyische
[the Yiddish term for non-Jews; it is pejorative] this and
goyische that!
It it's bad it's the goyim, if it's good it's the Jew! Can't
you see, my dear
parents, from whose loins I somehow leaped, that such thinking is a
trifle barbaric? That all you are expressing is your fear?
The very first distinction
I learned from you, I'm sure, was not night and day, or hot and
cold, but
goyishe and Jewish! ... Oh, how I hate you for your
narrow-minded minds!"
[ROTH, P., 1969, p. 74]
"Having reasserted connection to the
[Jewish] tribe in grand terms," said Ann Roiphe, about her renewed
dedication to Jewish identity,"I immediately felt claustrophobic and
this claustrophobia cannot be hidden or denied." [ROIPHE, 1981, p. 183]
"Perhaps to be Jewish is to be trapped always with other Jews," wondered
Daphne Merkin, "even with those other Jews one doesn't
like. There is a stifling quality to enforced tribalism, a negative air
space, like being in a gas chamber. It is difficult, for instance, to
conceive of having the luxury of disliking the person standing next to
you in a gas chamber." [MERKIN, p. 17]
Yet another recent Jewish
"self-hater" of some renown, forcing his way out of Merkin's Jewish "gas
chamber," is Bruno Kreisky, Chancellor of Austria in the 1970s. His
Jewish pedigree is substantial: he lost both his parents to the
Holocaust. But Kreisky was a freethinker in office who chose mainstream
Austrian society as his complete identity orientation; he felt no ties
whatsoever to Jewish or Zionist mythologies. A prominent Jewish scholar
of anti-Semitism, Robert Wistrich, noted "the neurotic features" of
Kreisky's "Jewish complex." [WISTRICH, p. 78] And the Jerusalem Post
complained that (in Kreisky) "a depravity of mind is clearly indicated."
Chancellor Kreisky's "depravity" and offense to Jews and their secular
religion of Israel included zingers like these:
"The fact of being a Jew is for me
without meaning."
"If Jews are a people, they are a
wretched people."
"[Simon Wiesenthal, the famed
fugitive Nazi hunter] is a Jewish
fascist -- happily one finds
reactionaries among Jews. .. I am the
only one who can stand up to him
because of my Jewish origins,
anybody else trying to stand up
to him would immediately be
accused of being anti-Semitic and
against the Jews."
"I don't submit to Zionism. I
reject it ... There is nothing that binds
me to Israel or what is called
the Jewish "people" or to Zionism."
[WISTRICH, p. 78-95]
"Kreisky," once declared famed Jewish
activist and post-war Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal, "has severed himself
from the Jewish community of destiny. And, in my eyes, anyone who does
that is a deserter." [WIESENTHAL, p. 6] To the Jewish community at
large, such a "deserter" -- one who completely rejects allegiance to the
principals of Jewish tribalism --epitimizes Jewish self-hatred.
Strong currents of "self-hatred" have
been part of Jewish communal identity at least since the Enlightenment
when Jewish religious-inspired traditions of "apartness," insularity,
parochialism, "specialness," et al were devalued by the broader European
intellectual movement towards human universalism. In this context, notes
Talcott Parsons,
"it is not surprising ... that the
Jews have often displayed a rather
extreme sensitiveness in matters
touching self-respect and status.
So long as their emotional
attachments were limited exclusively to
the Jewish community and all that
mattered to them was the honor
in which they had been held in their
own community, they remained
relatively free of conflicts. As
soon, however, as they were permitted,
through emancipation, to participate
as members of the larger
community, the balance was largely
lost and they found themselves
torn between two worlds and victims
of serious emotional difficulties."
[PARSONS, p. 109]
"If we look for pathological cases of
Jewish self-hatred among North American Jewry," wrote Jacob Neusner in
1981, "we should easily find them. But on the whole, self-hatred takes a
different form here. It is merely neurotic, but it is not limited to
individuals. It characterizes the community as a whole, and is reflected
in the Jewish community's commitment to nonsectarianism, and in its
niggardly support for the cultural, scholarly, and religious programs
and institutions that makes Jews Jewish." [NEUSNER, Stranger, p.
56]
In 1964, the Union of American Hebrew Congregations published a
book (Modern Jewish Problems) for Jewish high school students.
Rabbi Roland Gittelsohn addressed Jewish self-hatred/anti-Semitism:
"Is there anti-Semitism among Jews themselves? Would it
surprise you to hear that
there is anti-Semitism even among Jews themselves? Strange though
this sounds, it
it is true. We call this Jewish self-hate. Very often Christians
who are criticized
for discriminating aginst Jews justify themselves by pointing to
this Jewish
anti-Semitism. Indeed, this strange hatred has at times been so
widespread that
a great German Jewish scholar [Theodore Lessing] once wrote a book
called
Der Judische Selbsthass, or Jewish Self-Hate. Jewish
anti-Semitism manifests
itself in many ways. One of the most obvious is the instance of the
Jew who
refuses to have any association with Jews, the Jewish community, or
Judaism.
The following are some of the reasons given by such people. 1) Jews
are
are too clannish. 2) Jews are loud and chauvinistic. 3) Jews are
too concerned
with themselves and their own survival." [GITTELSOHN, R., 1964, p.
135-136]
This famous book about Jewish
self-hatred was that, in the 1930's, of a Jewish German physician,
Theodore Lessing -- a man who had converted to Christianity and then
back to Judaism again. Der Judische Selbsthass was a classic on
the widespread phenomena of Jewish self-hatred. Jules Carlebach
summarizes Lessing's basic thesis like this:
"There is a fundamental
principle in the Old Testament that the fate
of the Jewish people is
always a consequence of their own behavior.
Suffering therefore implies
sin and guilt. Logically, the greater the
suffering, the greater the
guilt. Here, for Lessing, is the root of self-
hatred. Other people have
interpreted their misfortunes by pointing
to those who brought
misfortune to them, whereas the Jews
enmeshed in their conviction
that they have brought misfortune
on themselves, can see their
tormentors only as instruments of God.
The tormentor in turn can use
the Jews' own view of his guilt to
explain why he ill-treats
Jews. Hence anti-Semitism is not a product
of ill will, national egoism
or hate and jealousy in international
competition. It is the Jewish
conception of meaning in history."
[CARLEBACH, p. 334]
The notion that Jewish self-hatred
(and its parallel in others -- anti-Semitism) is (religiously) divinely
instilled and/or (secularly) has origins in Jewish action, and that it
stems from Jews' own psycho-religious views of themselves, has -- in the
post-Holocaust era -- fallen into extreme disfavor among most secular
Jews. Lessing's view that in Jewish tradition blame for Jewish
misfortune falls inevitably upon Jews themselves -- in the wake of the
likes of Auschwitz and the birth of an aggressive nationalist spirit,
per Israel -- became way to much to bear. Accordingly, Jewish theorists
-- seeking to escape the religious burdens of cosmic blame and now
united in a new "psycho-politic," began creating new conceptual models
for understanding self-hate that refocused upon complete Jewish
innocence and victimization by others through history, totally
repositioning blame, responsibility, and God's wrath away from them.
Among such proponents was Kurt Lewin,
who decided that Jewish self-hate stemmed from Jewish inability to live
up to mainstream, non-Jewish standards of perception, behavior, and even
physical appearance. (Who, one wonders, Jew or non-Jew, can live up to
today's myths of popular American culture, from Ozzie and Harriet to
Marilyn Monroe and this month's airbrushed figure on the cover of
Vogue magazine?) It is true, however, that throughout history,
Gentiles, with their own standards of behavior, have always looked
askance at their Jewish counterparts. In 1942, for example, a non-Jewish
Harvard professor, Talcott Parsons, "the most influential sociologist of
our time," argued that reasons for anti-Semitism included Jewish
"oversensitiveness to criticism" and "abnormal aggressiveness and
self-assertion ... The 'chosen people' idea held by the Jews is another
source of friction ... [SILBERMAN, p. 56] ... Since many Jews are
typical 'intellectuals' they are unaware of the extent to which they
offend the nonrational sentiments of others." [PARSONS, p. 116]
The logic of the turn-of-the-century
work, Anti-Semitism and Modern Science, by Jewish Italian Cesare
Lombroso, is likewise dismissed by Nancy Harrowitz:
"He turns his attention to the Jews
themselves and their role in instigating
anti-Semitism, what we would view
today as a classic example of
'blame the victim.' Most of the book
is devoted to derisive accounts
of Jewish cultural and religious
practices." [HARROWITZ, p. 115]
The classical notions that Jews are
pushy, loud, and obnoxious have been -- until more recent times of
defiance and assertions of "Jewish is Beautiful" themes -- subjects on
which many Jews felt deep need to brood upon. "[The Jew, in identifying
with mainstream, non-Jewish culture]," explains Gordon Allport, "sees
his own group through [non-Jewish] eyes ... since he cannot escape his
own group, he thus in a real sense hates himself -- or at least the part
of himself that is Jewish. To make matters worse, he may hate himself
for feeling this way. He is badly torn. His divided mind may make for
furtive and self-conscious behavior, for 'nervousness' and a lasting
sense of insecurity. Since these are unpleasant traits, they augment his
hatred for his own Jewishness and then aggravate the conflict. The
circle is vicious and never-ending." [ALLPORT, p. 151]
Ultimately, these days non-Jewish
society is commonly held responsible by Jews for their own cycles of
neurosis, an attitude expressed by Sander Gilman who, in 1986, wrote an
entire volume on the subject of Jewish self-hate. Gilman loyally
followed the standard "Jew as victim" motif and locates the origin of
Jewish self-hatred not even partially in Jews themselves, nor their
community, but in non-Jews and their culture which are both perceived,
as always, to be eternally victimizing them. (An interesting expression
of this displacement, transnationally, came from Jewish communist
ideologue Roman Werfel, under critical fire for his role in the
post-World War II brutal oppression of Polish nationalism: "I'm against
self-criticism. It's a disgusting Stalinist custom which derives from
the [Russian] Orthodox Church.") [TORANSKA, p. 113])
When a Jew criticizes his own
community so severely that he disavows it, or simply allows this
identity to fade, by Jewish standards, it is never part of reasonable
discourse to presume that the defector might have even the grain of a
legitimate cause. Rather, as modern institutionalized canon in Jewish
commentary, responsibility is automatically deflected, i.e., there
cannot be a cause in the Jewish community itself for
"self-hatred." Jews are superior to others, especially morally, after
all. Of course the cause must therefore stem from the evil non-Jew and
their standards that omnipotently oppresses Jews.
Hence, per Gilman and modern Jewish
interpretation, Jewish self-hatred occurs when Jews internalize
Gentiles' malicious ideas about them. Gilman doesn't say it that simply;
he spends an entire chapter trying to blind the reader with academese,
like this:
"Self-hatred results from
outsiders' acceptance of the mirage of
themselves generated by
their reference group -- that group in
society which they see as
defining them -- as a reality. This
acceptance provides the
criteria for the myth making that is
the basis of communal
identity. This illusionary definition
of the self, the
identification with the reference group's
mirage of the Other, is
contaminated by protean variables
existing within what seems
to the outsider to be the
homogeneous group in power."
[GILMAN]
This leads inexorably to the
conclusion that Jews need accept no blame for anything, even their own
concepts of themselves. This "Alien Gentile in Jewish Brain" is
stock-in-trade in Jewish circles. Michael Lerner, editor of the leftist
Jewish journal, Tikkun, claims that "Jews have been victims of
'internalized oppression,' taking the viewpoint of those who disdain
them and making it their own." [LERNER, p. 5] Based on a foundation of
Freudian psycho-babble, Barbara Breitman blames non-Jews for endemic
Jewish neurosis, outrageously lifting blame from Jews for even their own
thinking. The following is a classic example of twisted Jewish
"Victimspeak," a system of complete irresponsibility by which
all blame for individual thought and action is surrendered to
exterior forces:
"For Jews, the masculine and feminine archetypes in the collective
unconscious
have been reversed by the anti-Semitism of the dominant, white,
male
Christian culture. Jewish men may well experience themselves, and
be
experienced by Jewish women as somehow less masculine than men
of the dominant culture; Jewish women may well experience
themselves
and be experienced by Jewish men as somehow less feminine than
women of the dominant culture. Although Jewish men and women may
blame each other for this phenomenon, the insidious process has its
roots in anti-Semitism." [BREITMAN, B., 1988, p. 112-113]
Bretiman even blames non-Jewish culture for "interfer[ing] in
relationships between Jewish fathers and sons, preventing a criticially
important identification between the generations of men." [BREITMAN, B.,
1988, p. 104]
In this kind of "everything's your fault/we don't control our own
private lives" context, Norman Cantor can thereby excuse Jews en masse
and blame Muslim mind control (while slurring Islamic society) for
Jewish immorality in southwestern Europe in medieval times:
"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 daugher why she thought so. 'Because the boys say the prayer
thanking God for not making them women,' Re'ut replied."
WALL, A., 11-23-01]
"Rabbi after rabbi," says Rabbi
Gerald Skolnick, "reluctant to change the traditional formulation of the
blessing [for men], has split hairs by trying to explain how the
blessing is not sexist, or demeaning, to women. I know all the
explanations because I was brought up on them. But the reality is that
the blessing says what it says ... There are in halakhic [Jewish
religious law] literature repeated groupings of women in categories with
slaves, minors, fools, deaf mutes, and the like which are so offensive
as to take one's breath away ... The issue is an attitude which was
deeply and systematically imbued into Judaism." [SKOLNICK, p. 3-4]
(Meanwhile, in a later issue of the same Jewish periodical in which
Skolnick's comments appeared, Claire Kinsberg wrote: "Lines from
[Muriel] Rukeyser's poetry, 'to be a Jew in the twentieth century / is
to be offered a gift,' have been used as an epigraph on more than one
contemporary Jewish feminist story.") [KINBERG, SHMA]
The large Conservative Judaism
movement has tried to mask the demeaning implications to women in such
prayers by resorting to a semantic change:
"Instead of thanking God for 'not
having created me a woman,' the new
blessing seeks to avoid invidious
comparison and thanks God for
'having created me a man.'"
[DANZGER, p. 291]
In a study of depression in
middle-aged women in Los Angeles county, sociologist Pauline Bart found
that "Jewish women are roughly twice as likely to be diagnosed depressed
as non-Jewish women ... None mentioned any accomplishment of their own,
except being a good mother." According to Bart, they demonstrated a
classic pre-illness "of martyrdom with no payoff ... to make up
for the years of sacrifice ... " [KAYE, p. 165] Among younger
generations, "A high percentage of anorexics," says Schnecter, "are
Jewish women." [SCHNECTER, p. 246]
Leslie Hazelton notes traditional
Jewish values that hideously oppress women as applied in today's Israel:
"By giving secular legal status to
religious law, Israel has raised an
insuperable barrier to equality for
women. To call the laws of Orthodox
Judaism (the only Judaism accepted in
Israel) sexist is an understatement:
they do not recognize woman's
existence as a full human being. To say
that they promote a double standard
avoids the issue: they promote
only one standard, the male one.
Women are not allowed to give
evidence in Rabbinical courts,
the courts that control marriage and
divorce, since they are considered
emotionally unreliable ... Women are
classed with children, the mentally
deficient, the insane and criminals,
none of whom can testify in Rabbinical
courts. Women cannot be judges in
these courts either. They have no
place in the public life of Judaism,
whose attitude to women in public
is succinctly expressed by Joseph
Caro, author of the fifteenth-century
code of Jewish law, the Shulhan
Aruch: 'A man shall not walk between
two women, two dogs or two pigs, and
two men shall not allow a
woman, a dog or a pig to walk between
them.'" [HAZELTON, p. 41]
Evelyn Kaye, who was raised as an
Orthodox Jew, wrote an entire volume, The Hole in the Sheet,
documenting the miserable life women face under traditional Judaism.
Women are not only forbidden from testimony in court, they cannot even
sign a document as a legal witness. [KAYE, p. 18] "Orthodox and Hasidic
men ... ," she says, "believe women are wicked, unreliable, sexual
temptresses ... When I walk past the Hasidic Jews on the streets of New
York, I feel them avoid me as I pass. It's rather like being a leper."
[KAYE, p. 19]
Menstruating women face rules "about
what they may touch (not their husbands...), where they may go (nowhere
alone), and with whom they may speak (only Jews.) [KAYE, p. 20]
"Masturbation is forbidden. And during sexual intercourse, there are
strict rules about what you may wear, what you must think and how you
must behave ... The entire event must be carried out in pitch darkness,
and at no time must a man look at his naked wife ... Women are expected
to be completely modest and withdrawn, and at no time are they supposed
to show themselves without covering ... In order to protect the modesty
of the wife during intercourse, a sheet is kept between her and her
husband, with a hole at the appropriate place for the correct connection
to be made." [KAYE, p. 20-21] [See also Samuel Heilman's chapter about
the institutionalization of repressed sexuality in today's
ultra-Orthodox communities: HEILMAN, S., 1992, p. 313-350]
The man and woman should not talk "at
copulation or immediately before, excepting about matters directly
needed for the act." [KAYE, p. 124] "When having intercourse ... [the
man's] intention should be not to satisfy his personal desire, but to
perform his marital duty, like paying a debt ... " [KAYE, p. 125] And
the dangers of criticizing all this? "It is difficult to speak out,"
says Kaye, "The immediate reaction is the passionate cry of
anti-Semitism." [KAYE, p. 175] It should not be surprising that so many
Jewish women were in the vanguard of the women's liberation movement,
including Betty Friedan, Susan Brownmiller, Robin Morgan, Gloria
Steinhem, Erica Jung, Shulamith Firestone, Andrea Dworkin, and many
others.
While Susan Schneider perceives
anti-Semitism in the "Jewish American Princess (JAP)" stereotype (that
depicts Jewish women as vain, materialist, cold, ostentatious,
manipulative, and demanding), she concedes its origin to Jewish
novelists like Philip Roth and Herman Wouk, and Jewish standup
comedians. "The verbal hostility between Jewish men and women goes back
far," says Susan Schneider, "... The jokes Jewish men tell about Jewish
women have no parallel in other cultures; there's no comparable
oeuvre of jokes about Greek or Baptist or Irish women." [SCHNEIDER,
p. 290] "Who has done the most to inject anti-Semitic images into the
popular culture?" asks Rabbi Daniel Lapin, "Just think of mean
stereotypes such as the notorious JAP, or Jewish American Princess. Is
it the work of Jesse Helms, Pat Buchanan or Newt Gingrich? No, it is the
work of Jewish artists like Woody Allen, Roseanne Barr, Philip Roth and
Howard Stern that portrays Jewish women as unresponsive, selfish, and
materialistic." [LAPIN, D., 1999, p. 292] "What's the difference between
a chess player and a Jewish wife in bed?" asks Jewish comedian Milton
Berle, "Every once and a while, the chess player moves." [BERLE, M.,
1996, p. 311]
"When Jews themselves participate in
an environment hostile to Jewish women," complains Evelyn Torton-Beck,
reframing intra-Jewish assault as Gentile attack, "the dominant culture
is quick to follow suit." [TORTON-BECK, p. 20-21] "Jokes about the
greed of Jewish women," says Ann Roiphe, "began to spread and they
contained the message of Jewish materialism. But by directing
antisemitic whisperings against females, bigotry was slipped past the
general public, and Jewish males became vehicles for antisemitic
propaganda as they happily repeated slurs aimed against their wives and
sisters." [ROIPHE, p. 455] Melanie Kaye-Kantrowitz even blames the
"persecution [of Jews] by Gentiles" for, as she says, "the nosiness
characteristic" of Jewish culture. "If you constantly monitor
information," she explains, harkening to the eternal Jewish persecution
complex of the millennia, "you may be able to ward off disaster." [KAYE,
p. 1]
Jewish author Bob Gluck even places problems within Jewish
male/female relationships at the feet of Gentiles:
"The Jewish community succeeds in denying abuse in our
midst because
we project negative aspects of the male experience upon women.
Recall
that it is the Jewish woman who is stereotyped as bossy, tough and
aggressive.
She is considered able to handle any challenge, and she (especially
when single)
is often seen as a dangerous provocateur. Jewish men are the ones
traditionally
and popularly perceived as the victims in gender relations.
Meanwhile, in the
morass of these stereotypes, the Jewish home is supposed to be a
protected
island of peace. Our difficulty acknowledging Jewish domestic
violence is
compounded by our great fear of anti-Semitism; conditioned, we may
naively
believe, by how the wider world perceives our character and actions
... In our
communities, information perceived as negative travels rapidly.
There is a
way in which our experience of anti-Semitism has caused us to
internalize
fault for our national experience into internalized negative
self-image." [GLUCK,
B., 1988, p. 168]
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, impertuous, uppity, rude,
profane, brash and overberaring." [ABZUG, B., 1972, p. 3] In Judith
Klein's Jewish therapy groups, participants are encouraged to pose
questions about the public image they maintain:
"Do I fit the stereotype of the
over-intellectual, arrogant, yet
dependent, non-physical Jewish
male?" "Am I the smothering,
achievement-oriented, demanding,
nerve-wracked Jewish woman?"
[KLEIN, p. 38]
How real is the JAP? Apparently so
bizarrely verifiable that another Steinberg who attacked his wife, this
one Steve in 1981, who stabbed her 26 times, was acquitted by a jury
after listening to "a progression of witnesses testif[y] to Elana's
incessant shopping, her habitual whining and complaining ... and ...
unending demands for clothing and furniture." [HALBERSTAM, p. 110]
These controversial "Jewish
characteristics" have been reformulated by Jewish deniers, apologists,
and polemicists as complete antisemitic falsehoods or, at the very
least, merely qualities that have been incongruously copied from
surrounding Gentile culture. Those Jews who concede such behavior as
having some factual basis tend to attribute it not to Jewish choices of
behavior in their own lives, but to the results of historical non-Jewish
oppression of the Jewish community.
In any case, this ongoing argument
has for decades centered upon the notion of a Gentile "civility" that is
pitted against a traditional Eastern European Jewish culture that
champions "pushing forward" at all costs as its "uncivil" hallmark of
intercommunication. Siegel calls this pushiness a "nurturing," and in
the context of mainstream non-Jewish society a "devalued ...
self-assertion." [SIEGEL, p. 253]
In the midst of all this, lies the
Jewish community's continuous struggle with its own collective face in
the mirror and the incessant echoes of "Jewish self-hatred."
Ironically, in an editorial crusading against "Jewish anti-Semitism,"
the Jewish 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 counselled evil and spoken falsely. We have rebelled,
provoked,
committed iniquity. We have transgressed. We have oppressed. We
have
been stiff-necked. We have acted wickedly. We have corrupted. We
have
committed abominations. We have erred and have caused others to err
...
[BERMANT, C., 1977, p. 15]
Sometimes even well-meaning
non-Jews, caught up in the post-Holocaust fervor of Judeo-centrism, can
take swipes at "self-hating" Jews. The existentialist king, Jean-Paul
Sartre, (beloved by many Judeo-centrists for his book about
anti-Semitism) asked friends to "psychoanalyze" the French Jewish
scholar, Maxime Rodinson, who was a fervent anti-Zionist, a harsh critic
of Israel, and critic of Jewish ethnocentrism. "Judeo-centrism," wrote
Rodinson in reply, "is now characteristic of Jews and non-Jews alike ...
I ... remain convinced that such attitudes ... are extremely harmful, as
pernicious, for the comprehension of facts and situations, as they are
for one's ability to influence the facts... I neither hate nor despise
myself. I have never denied my Jewish origin. But nor have I regarded it
as a mark of glory that automatically makes me superior to others, that
suffices to protect me from intellectual or moral error..." [RODINSON,
p. 9]
Among the many Jewish apostates of
all political persuasions was Karl Marx, the famed founder of communism.
Marx was of Jewish heritage. His father converted to Christianity and
young Karl was raised in a Christian household. He eventually grew to
reject all religious creeds as being "opiates for the masses,"
psychological tools of oppression to keep the masses in their meager
places, futilely planning on better times in a supposed afterlife. Marx
rejected the Jewish conviction that Jews were the consummate victims of
human history. In his broader humanitarian view, it was the poor masses
of ALL humanity --the proletariat -- exploited by economic oppressors
who were the greatest (and continuous) sufferers in the world. Too many
Jews, in Marx's view, were part of the economic matrix that suffocated
them.
Marx was part of a "radical" German
intellectual community -- many of them Jews -- in the early and
mid-1800's that sought to articulate possibilities for new social,
economic, and political systems -- universalistic and egalitarian in
scope -- that transcended then current religious dogma. Marx's ideas
echoed and elaborated upon other social critics of the era. Other
free-thinking Jews were attacking the social values and mores around
them too, including as targets fellow Jews and Judaism. David Strauss
(1808-74), for example, summarizes Jules Carlebach, "explained the
contrast between the open hostility of peasants [to Jews] and the
favorable attitude of human theorists towards Jews by claiming that only
the peasants knew 'the real actual Jew' who would deprive them of their
last cow if they could not meet their debts." [CARLEBACH, p. 102]
Strauss underscored the German problem with Jews to be "Jewish
dishonesty in business" and the "persistent particularism of the Jews
who deliberately separated themselves from their German fellow citizens
by their rituals and ceremonial laws." [CARLEBACH, p. 102]
Ludwig Feuerbach (1804-72), another
Jewish "radical" of the times, understood Judaism to be "Jewish
ethnocentrism enslaved by law." [CARLEBACH, p. 109] He remarked that
"the Jews have maintained their special peculiarities down to the
present day. Their principle, their God, is the practical principle of
the world -- egoism in the form of religion. Egoism centres and
concentrates man upon himself, but at the same time it limits his
theoretical outlook because he is indifferent to everything which is not
directly related to his own welfare." [MEHRING, F., p. 97] Yet another
Jewish social philosopher, Moses Hess (1812-75) may have been especially
influential to Marx's view of European Jewry. Hess, who was a pioneer
thinker in the founding of Zionism, when addressing Jewish influence in
the monetary and financial worlds, wrote that "the Jews, in the natural
history of the social animal world had the world-historic mission to
bring out the predator in mankind. They have finally completed the
task." [CARLEBACH, p. 123]
Among his many volumes of
socioeconomic theory, Marx had fiercely unkind words for the people of
his own origins -- Jews, and their relation to capitalism. Marx's best
known commentary about them was in response to an article in 1843 by
Bruno Bauer, another controversial theorist of the times. Bauer argued
that once Jews and Christians gave up their respective religious faiths,
they would become mutually "emancipated" from their factionalism and
discriminations.
But Marx's criticisms of Jews went
beyond religion. He bitterly wrote:
"What is the Jews'
foundation in our world? Material
necessity, private
advantage. What is the object of the
Jews' worship in this
world? Usury. What is his worldly
God? Money. Very well
then; emancipation from usury
and money, that is, from
practical, real Judaism, would
constitute the
emancipation of our times." [MARX, K.,
1959, p. 37]
Marx also argues that
"Thus we recognize in Judaism
generally an anti-social element which
has reached its present strength
through a historical development in
which the Jews eagerly collaborated.
Jewish emancipation means,
ultimately, the emancipation of
humanity from Judaism. He has already
emancipated himself in the Jewish
way: the Jew, who is, for example,
merely tolerated in Vienna,
determines by his money power the fate
of entire German Empire. The Jew, who
is without rights in the smallest
German state, decides the fate of
Europe ... This is no isolated fact.
The Jew has emancipated himself in
the Jewish fashion not only by
acquiring money power but through
money's having become (with
him or without him) the world power
and the Jewish spirit having
become the practical spirit of the
Christian peoples. The Jews have
emancipated themselves to the extent
that Christians have become
Jews." [MARX, K., 1959, p. 38]
Marx bemoans the fact that, as he sees
it, even the newly founded nation of America was emulating Jewish
materialism, where the American considered "the world to be no more than
a stock exchange, and he has no other destiny here below than to become
richer than his neighbor. Trade has seized upon all his thoughts, and he
has no other recreation than to exchange objects." [MARX, p. 32-36]
"The law of the Jew," wrote Marx,
"lacking all solid foundation, is only a religious caricature of
morality and of law in general ... The social emancipation of Jewry is
the emancipation of society from Jewry." [MARX, K., 1959, p. 42, 45]
These are strong -- and in the
celebratory pro-Jewish political climate of 1990s, even dangerous --
accusations. Is there any truth to them, or are they merely the twisted
ravings of an irrational nineteenth century Jewish anti-Semite? It is
profoundly ironic that such charges by Marx later found currency in the
most astonishing of places: Theodore Herzl, the "father" of modern
Israel, and the Zionist movement itself. In fact, Herzl's writings and
political theories reflect a lifelong embarrassment and disdain with
both shallow, wealthy Jews in Western Europe and the unsophisticated
blinder-based ghetto dwellers in Poland and Russia. Zionism, after all,
was founded upon some socialist principles, the changing of
objectionable Jewish "types," and its own myths emphasized the reforming
of a Jewish national character based on hard, honest, physical labor in
the farm fields of the Holy Land.
A number of other "Zionist
philosophers," like Theodore Lessing, were also harsh on their own
people. According to Daniel Niewyk, Lessing understood Jews to be "the
victims of historical developments that had deprived them of intimate
contact with nature and the soil, they had grown overly intellectualized
and morally and physically decadent under the Western world's implacable
pursuit of Mammon [the God of money]. Their resulting preoccupations
with security and material wealth had brought them a half deserved
reputation as exploiters." [NIEWYK, p. 137]
"Zionism," says Moshe Leshem, "wanted
to efface the image of the 'trading Jew,' grubbing for profit in
undignified, unhealthy Galut [exile] occupations. This was one area in
which the picture of the Jews as drawn by the anti-Semites and that
limned by the Zionists came agonizingly close to being identical."
[LESHEM, p. 84]
Some of Herzl's written observations
in his diaries about his own people qualify by today's standards as
strongly anti-Semitic:
"We Jews are a
vain people. We supply the biggest
quota of snobs
of 'good society.'" [p. 97]
"I looked at the
Paris Jews and saw a family likeness
in their
faces: bold, misshapen noses; furtive and
cunning eyes."
[p. 11]
"We cling to
money because [the rulers] flung us
onto money."
[p. 9]
"I wanted to
write a Jewish novel ... I wanted in
particular to
contest the suffering, despised, and
decent mass of
poor Jews with the rich ones. The
latter
experience nothing of anti-Semitism which
they are
actually and mainly responsible for." [p. 5]
"All Jews who
are well off are my opponents. So
I am
beginning to have the right to be the biggest
of
anti-Semites." [p. 481-482]
It is extremely troubling for Jews
today that Karl Marx, one of the most influential social thinkers and
humanists in history, was both a born Jew and, as evidenced by his
writings, a "Jew-hater." And to all the scholars (many Jewish) who still
pour over his secular humanist texts as analytic masterpieces to this
day, Marx's nasty remarks about Jews (from a man who was consumed with
exposing and explaining social injustice) are deeply troubling, and must
be explained away. And how do they do this? By character assassination
and psychoanalyzing him, of course. "Psychic structures may be more
significant determinants than social forces," says Jules Carlebach. "and
we must therefore look at an attempt to explain Marx's self-hatred from
a psychoanalytic perspective." [CARLEBACH, p. 337]
The scholars shake their wise heads
in unison. How could the champion of all the world's underdogs, so
brilliantly insightful in the realms of social and political theory,
have so terribly faltered in his understanding of his own origins? 150
years after Marx's words about Jews in his own society, modern
apologists insert themselves into his boots to proclaim that Marx really
didn't see what he saw. When it came to Jews -- of which by traditional
Jewish definition, Marx was still a member -- he didn't know what he was
talking about.
One critic claims that Marx's
"anti-Semitism” merely "reflected the norms of society." (The man most
associated in world history with the threatened destruction of the
"norms" of such a society?) Another (a typical Jewish chauvinist) says
"It was a tragic misunderstanding of the Hebrew roots of his humanism;"
yet another sees his severe criticism of his own disavowed people "as an
attempt to disassociate himself from a despised race and proclaim
himself a non-Jew." Perhaps, suggests one scholar, his comments about
Jews were "the natural reaction of baptized Jew" who had "little or no
knowledge of Judaism." Maybe Marx's animosity towards Jews, voices
another, stems from his "difficult relationship with his mother and
[her] narrow minded egoism in money matters." Robert Misrahi suggests
that Marx "wishes unconsciously to expiate his father's guilt and
complicity with the Prusso-Christian monarchy for having baptized his
family to pursue his legal career." One observer even turns the greedy
tables to suggest that Marx's criticism of Jews was really "a projection
of his [own] obsession with money, his frustration at finding himself
without an inheritance, and the desire to wreck vengeance on the ethnic
group from which he descended." [ALL QUOTES: WISTRICH, p. 14] "The
sheer violence of Marx's anti-Semitism," adds David Auerbach, "--
together with other distorted aspects of his personality -- indicates a
pathological element. [AUERBACH, p. 47] This author suggests that a full
understanding of Marx's animosity towards Jews should include a range of
psychological variables, including feelings emanating from the fact that
the hero of communism had a bad case of boils. [AUERBACH, p. 46]
The implications of a voluntary
"Exodus" OUT of the Jewish community, in varying degrees, over the past
few hundred years is a matter of great concern to those who hold tightly
to their 4,000 year old identity. For those Jews who cling to an elitist
sense of themselves, any kind of apostate -- religious, cultural, or
otherwise -- is a source of embarrassment and threatens to destabilize
the entire surviving system. The apostate impugns the beliefs of those
left behind. Nazi enemies a Jew can dialectically understand, at least
to the point of Nazi inhumanity, although even this can be stretched to
fit traditional Jewish theology of special punishment from God. But how
does one explain it to oneself when bonafide members of the Chosen
People choose not to be chosen anymore?
"M'shumad, or apostate," notes
Michael Asheri, in describing traditional Jewish thinking, "is an ugly
word in Jewish speech ... A m'shumad is not buried in a Jewish cemetery
nor is he mourned by his family. On the contrary, his brothers are
supposed to celebrate his death as the demise of an enemy of Israel."
[ASHERI, M., 1983, p. 319-320]
To the communal Jewish psyche, the
most horrible concept imaginable is not the threat of extermination of
Jewry in the Holocaust. There is something far more sinister, a much
more dangerous threat. It is assimilation. When Jews choose to surrender
ancient claims to specialness -- whether religious, racial, or cultural
-- and completely blend into the surrounding non-Jewish society, it is a
slap in the face to those who remain in the perpetual ideological
"ghetto." The free selection by Jewish individuals to surrender the
ancient burdens of superiority and elitism (and its undercurrents of
guilt and inferiority) that has been passed down through the centuries
is difficult for the defenders of the perpetual fort to comprehend.
What can be more horrible than when legitimate members of the Chosen
People consciously abandon all the Jewish myths and CHOOSE extinction?
In highlighting Nazi savageries against Jews there is powerful
affirmation for the surviving tribe that has weathered another terrible
obstacle. Whether Jews chose to be martyrs or not, they were gruesomely
sacrificed, and this reinforces --against horror -- the remaining
community. But when a Jew just waves goodbye and walks out the door
beneath the menuza forever, of his own free will, those behind are left
to brood upon threats to Jewish identity that are not -- almost
comfortably, in comparison -- external. "If leaving the Jewish people,"
explains Rabbi Jonathan Sacks about traditional Jewish thinking,
"regardless of transgression, is itself a fundamental sin, a
determination not to leave the Jewish people is itself a
fundamental virtue." [SACKS, J., p. 130]
Among the most horrible Jewish
apostates are those that do not blend into mainstream secularism, but
who, according to one 1982 study, make up in America 6% of the Reverend
Moon's Unification Church, 12 per cent of the Hare Krsna movement, and
25 per cent of Zen Buddhists. [DANZGER, p. 77] Joseph Goldstein, Jack
Kornfield, Jacqueline Schwartz, and Sharon Salzberg studied Buddhism in
India and Thailand and returned to the U.S. to found the Insight
Meditation Society in Massachusetts, "one of the most successful
Buddhist teaching institutions in America." [KAMENETZ, R., 1994, p. 8]
The well-known Naropa Institute was founded by Tibetan Chogyam Trungpa,
but he "used to joke that his students formed the Oy Vay school of
Buddhism." David Rome, also Jewish, was Trungpa's personal secretary;
Robin Kornman was a member of his "inner circle." Ram Dass (Richard
Alpert) is also a well known writer/master on Hinduism. His father was
chairman of the (Jewish) Joint Distribution Committee during World War
II. [KAMENETZ, R., 1994, p. 9, 266]
9% of Church of Scientology members
are also reputed to be of Jewish heritage. [SELENGUT, p. 95] Even
America's best-known "practicing witch," publicly known as Starhawk
(Miriam Simhof) adjusts Jewish Holocaust-type victimology to her new
identity, proclaiming that "to be a witch is to identify with 9 million
victims [witches] of bigotry and hatred." [DRESNER, p. 14] "Anyone who
cultivates the power of his or her will," proclaims Margot Adler, an
elder with the Covenant of the Goddess and granddaughter of prominent
Jewish psychoanalyst Alfred Adler, "can become a witch." [DRESNER, p.
15] Other newsworthy Jewish "witches” include Lexa Rosean (originally:
Ora Leiba) and Emunah D'vorah. [MARK, J., 1999, p. 1] (Even Anton LeVay
-- born Howard Stanton Levey -- was Jewish. Founder of the Church of
Satan, he was "a self-loathing man of Jewish descent who embraced
fascism toward the end of his life." [CHURCH OF SATAN/1]
One of the reasons so many (mostly
young) Jews join such religious organizations, says Charles Selengut, is
"the professed (though by no means realized) universalism of cult
movements; they are disenchanted with what they perceive as the
parochialism of Judaism." [SELENGUT, p. 104] One convert out of Judaism
even told Selengut that "Judaism was so ethnic and nationalistic it
wasn't a religion." [SELENGUT, p. 103]
Common Jewish chauvinistic inability
to fathom that some of such organizations' members might leave the
ideological fold of "God's Great Victims" for simply positive reasons in
the extra-Jewish universe is reflected by a Jewish scholar who decides
that "the experience of persecution and fear of the Holocaust is
probably related to the disproportionate numbers of American Jews who
join various cults." [DANZER p. 289] "Other Jewish critics,' says
Charles Selengut, "assert that it is the psychologically maladjusted who
join new religious movements and describe Jewish converts as people who
are 'selling their souls for the security of slavery.'" [SELENGUT, p.
95]
Margaret Brearly goes so far as to
proclaim that "New Age" movements in general "could pose as serious a
medium- and long-term threat to Jewish identity as Nazism did in the
1920s and 1930s "[and] it ... could eventually lead to the destruction
of many Jews and all Jewish identity." [BREARLY, p. 269] Ms. Brearly's
brush is broad for New Age Nazis. Innately antisemitic New Age movements
listed included the Unification Church (moonies), Scientologists, Zen
Buddhists, New Age "travelers," modern pagans, Wiccan witches,
"post-Christian" feminists, occultists, the Transcendental Meditation
(TM) movement, and EST followers. [BREARLY, p. 258-259] "At a deep,
esoteric level," worries Brearly, "New Age ideology is Aryan and
racist..." [BREARLY, p. 260] although, oddly enough, "a significant
number of New Age leaders and their followers are themselves Jewish in
origin." [BREARLY, p. 259] (In 1987 the Israeli government even
published a 500-page report "on the threat posed by mystic sects to
Israeli society." [JW, 3-13-87] According to the document, 5,000
Israelis were members of groups like Scientology, Transcendental
Mediation, Bhagwan Rajneesh, EST, and others.) When Jewish American
Phillip Gordon decided to join the Hare Krishnas and become Kurma Dasa,
his parents sent him to a psychiatrist. [COLLINS, E., 2000, p. 31]
Hannah Newman's online web site
(originally posted by the Jewish Student Union at the University of
Colorado) highlights "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 antiSemitic
individuals and organizations include Buckminster Fuller, Maharishi Yogi
and his Transcendental Meditation organization, Greenpeace, Planned
Parenthood, Bread for the World, Bahais and Sufis, Unesco, Scientology,
the Theosophical Society, "pop singers John Denver and Judy Collins,"
the Hunger Project, "most health food stores," and many, many more.
Newman's list of such people who espouse such anti-Semitic currents even
includes Jews like Erich Fromm, science fiction author Isaac Isamov,
Alvin Toffler, and Theodore Rozak. [NEWMAN, H., 2001]
How about vegetarianism as an expression of
anti-Semitism? Hitler, and other anti-Semites, have toyed with it, after
all. In 2001, Pat Sloane became confused at the online discussion of
mostly fellow Jewish scholars at the discussion group H-Antisemitism:
"Contrary to what you [Simon Weil] say, it's not unusual for
vegetarians to
feel compassion for animals, or to disapprove of cruelty to
animals. An
example is Leonardo da Vinci, who not only was a vegetarian but
also
purchased cage birds in the marketplace in order to set them free.
I
regard these as admirable attitudes that can be defended on either
a
religious or ethical level, and I'm a bit surprised to find you
slamming them
as 'antisemitic." Without resorting to who said what, could you
please
explain in simple language why you find an objection to cruelty to
be 'antisemitic?'
What has compassion for animals even got to do with Jews?"
[SLOANE,
P., 5-10-01]
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 refugee 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 nonradicals." [ROTHMAN/LICHTER, 1982, p. 137] As
Jewish social worker Bob Gluck observes more generally about the male
Jewish community:
"Social stereotypes in Jewish men contain a component of
denigration of their
masculinity ('wimp,' 'momma's boy,' 'sissy Jew-boy'). Such
emotional (and
and physical) assaults are not only received from outsiders, but
are passed
down from generation to generation from fathers who were similarly
denigrated in their own youth, and who yet struggle to overcome
their
own identity confusion and self-hate. The result is a heritage of
rage which
which can rarely be acknowledged or directly expressed. Popular
myth
states: 'Jewish men aren't angry people. They are warm, calm and
patient.'
The experience of many raised in at least the Eastern European
Ashkenazi
heritage, with which I am most familiar, suggests a more complex
reality.
Anger and bitterness are part of this reality. Jewish men may even
be
more emotionally expressive in their anger than those in the
societal
mainstream." [GLUCK, B., 1988, p. 165]
(Not surprisingly, Gluck blames Jewish male self-conception and
"the history of assaults on [Jewish] gender identity in adolescence" on
"anti-Semitism.") [GLUCK, B., 1988, p. 165]
Jewish American Paul Cowan recalls what motivated him to go and live
on a kibbutz in Israel:
"Passive Jews. Jews who don't fight back. Womanly men who can't
make love as
well as Gentiles. Who are paralyzed with self-doubt and fear. Who
got to the gas
chambers passively. Passive. That was the word that defined me. I
had to change
somehow. I realized that year, that I could only change myself --
and my image
of myself -- among the bravest of my own people: the Jews who lived
in Israel.
Within weeks of my arrival there, an explosion had taken place in
my
consciousness. I could never have imagined the new ways, woven into
details that most Israelis take for granted, that I learned to
obtain the sense
of identity, the sense of pride, that I had sought through my
adolescence."
[COWAN, P., 1982, p. 104]
In any case, the restoration of
Jewish "manliness" is THE most defining post-Holocaust Jewish experience
on the planet. And at the end of the twentieth century this attitude
best defines Jewry as manifest in Israel, and the international communal
Jewish defense of it. Where religion, culture, and race had failed as a
unifying force in the world of Jews, secular or religious, Ashkenazi or
Sephardim, the desire to swagger around with swords and machine guns and
multi-million dollar propaganda factories to scare off Nazis (and Arabs,
and anybody else) has come to define Jewry in our age, stockpiling Uzis
and atom bombs, sworn to protect Jews -- and Jews only -- everywhere,
and to revenge history's alleged injustices upon them. "If ... the
muscular Jew complex," says Shalom Carmy, "driving Kahanist types
[followers of militant rabbi Meir Kahane] to violent interaction with
Gentiles, is largely absent from the halls of Ponivezh and Lakewood [an
American Jewish suburb], the lamentable tendency to dehumanize the
goy is not." [CARMY, Rel, p. 21]
Take Paul Breines, self-described as
"an educated, nonreligious, non-Zionist, middle-aged, middle-class, male
American Jew on the political left [who] ... cherishes ... ideals of
gentleness and nonviolence." He was "unsettled" to find in himself a
deep attraction to a Mossad (Israel's CIA) character in a Ken Follett
novel.
"I was seduced, " says Breines, "by
Nat Dickstein. I delighted in his killings and warmed in ways I was
neither prepared for nor pleased with to the great and, in my eyes,
altogether un-Jewish exploits of this remarkably lethal Jew. The
achievements of Dickstein's Jewish body brought on adrenalin rushes and
raised goose bumps of excitement. This arousal -- it amounted to that --
was as lively as my understanding of its intensely ideological, even
racist, source. I was aware that the other bodies in the novel, those of
the largely incidental Russian and the more central Egyptian characters,
were the stock figures of Anglo-American cold war ideology and
Arab-fearing bigotry and were thus nonpersons even before Dickstein did
them in. Yet as Dickstein finished them off, I experienced a visceral
pleasure." [BREINES, p. 10]
Part of Breines' liberal concern is
the increasing support world Jewry -- and especially in America -- has
for violent vengeful sentiments, originating in their transnational
mythos of persecution and their own sense of physical weakness as small
minorities in host countries over the centuries. The 1967 Israeli
victory over the Arabs was for world Jewry, as always noted in Jewish
literature, was profoundly exhilarating -- a milestone towards regaining
a lost dignity. For world Jewry, after centuries of allegedly puttering
around with quill pens in the synagogue libraries and added up profits
in leather-bound ledgers, it proved that they had finally rejoined the
mythos of physical power, as daring, ruthless, and victorious warriors.
More ominously, notes J.J. Goldberg, "Jews were responding to Israel's
great victory by retreating into a politics of fear and suspicion."
[GOLDBERG, p. 138]
Paul Breines' book about increased
popular Jewish interest in themselves as brutal warriors and powerful
killers is called Tough Jews. Reflecting increasing Jewish
fascination in such a theme, this is the same title that a few years
later Rich Cohen chose for his own volume about the many Jewish American
gangsters in the early years of the twentieth century. Cohen's theme,
similar to Breines' (who is more concerned about it), is to romanticize,
idealize, and identify with Jewish thugs and murderers. These books
celebrate an abstract vengeance against the omnipresent evil
Gentile/anti-Semite. "My father's friends cling to the romantic image of
the Jewish gangster in their formative years," Cohen writes,
"those following the Holocaust, as
they were faced with the image
of dead, degraded Jews being
bulldozed into mass graves, here was
another image, closer to home --
Jews with guns, tough, fearless Jews.
Don't let the yarmulke fool ya.
These Jews will kill you before you go
around killing them ... [COHEN, R.,
1999, p. 20] ... The Jewish gangster
has been forgotten because no one
wants to remember him, because my
grandmother won't talk about him,
because he is something to be
ashamed of. Well, to me, remembering
Jewish gangsters is a good way
to deal with being born after 1945,
with being someone who has always
had the Holocaust at his back, the
distant tom-tom" six million, six
million,
six million." [COHEN, R. 1999, p. 31]
Elsewhere, Cohen even lovingly equates
Jewish mobster assassins with Israeli hero/soldiers: "To me, these
killers seem about as skillful as the Israeli commandos who slipped into
Entebbe, freeing Jews held hostage at the airport in Uganda. These were
men hand-picked by Lansky for their cool." Red Levine (who never killed
on the Sabbath) stabbed one victim six times. Another victim, notes
Cohen, "wild-eyed and dying, lunged at the killers, [and was] shot four
times. The killers then ran through the office and into the hall. I like
to think of them out there, the sound their shoes made on floor, sliding
around corners, wheels spinning." [COHEN, R., p. 66]
While Israeli novelist Amos Oz writes
a novel (A Late Love) about an "elderly hero [who] daydreams
about an Israeli armored column marching through Europe avenging the
blood of innocents," [RUBENSTEIN, A., p. 89] the site of the Holocaust
is too far away for the Jewish reader for pragmatic attack. Meanwhile
though, the vicarious appeal of beating up a scapegoat for the endlessly
heralded Jewish victimization through European centuries runs deep.
Amnon Rubenstein notes that when Israeli invaded Lebanon in the 1980s,
then-prime minister Menachem Begin "justified the war and the cruelty
inflicted upon the [Arab] civilian population by invoking repeatedly
images and memories of World War II and the Holocaust ... The PLO
[Palestinian Liberation Organization] were equated with Nazis."
[RUBENSTEIN, A., p. x]
"How splendidly 'we' had fought, I
told myself," says American Jewish journalist Robert Silverberg, after
Israel's 1967 war, "how fine it was that 'we' had once again foiled the
Arabs. We: I, no Zionist, hardly even a Jew except by
birth, was amused by an audacity in identifying myself with the Israeli
warriors." [SILVERBERG, p. 18] "The creation of the state of Israel,"
remarked Peter Schrag, "made it possible for every Jewish kid in the
Bronx to imagine himself a gunfighter mowing down Arabs in the Negev."
[SCHRAG, p. 109] "The glorious fighters of Israel," gushed a Denver
Jewish newspaper, "have mad an automatic hero of every Jew in America,
yea in the world." [UROFSKY, M., 1978, p. 358] "The Israeli victory in
the Six-Day War in 1967," said Sol Linowitz, the founder of Xerox, "was
the end of the image of the Jew as a loser." [SILBIGER, S., 2000, p.
21-22] "The establishment of the state of Israel," noted Joseph Adelson,
in reviewing a survey of American Jewish attitudes in the 1950s, "is
considered important not because of humanitarian or political
considerations but for the show of strength involved." [ADELSON, J.,
1960, p. 479]
The primordial, and tribal,
satisfaction Paul Breines finds in the murder of stereotypical Arabs and
Russians has, of course, its disturbing parallel in the German
population of the 1920's and 1930's. During and after World War I, they
too had their own suffering, identity crisis, national weakness, and all
the rest. And they too had a sense of communal bond and grievous
mistreatment at the hands of others. They too increasingly perceived
foes as dehumanized stick figures and proceeded on a brutal course
through the 1940's to vanquish them. As the Nazis saw it, one of their
primary -- but not only -- enemies were Jews.
Later, in another context, Breines
quotes Sigmund Freud who told Hans Herzl (son of the symbolic "founder"
of Zionism, Theodore Herzl) that "Your father is one of those people who
have turned dreams into reality. This is a very rare and dangerous breed
... [BREINES, p. 31]
Breines points this Freud quote
towards "anti-Semitic mass political movements of the turn of the
century," but doesn't address the obvious resonation here with his own
violent and vengeful "dream" feelings as a Jew and their potential
expression through the state of Israel. He entertains this notion,
later, obliquely; one is left to presume that for any Jew to make direct
parallels of any sort between the state of Israel and Nazi Germany is
sacrilegious.
Breines goes further, however,
becoming rhapsodic in his vicariously experienced killings: "I
capitulated, thrilling to the brutal melody of Dickstein's executions
... My imaginations, guided by moral conscience, changed the novel's
Egyptian and Soviet agents into the embodiment of every anti-Semite that
ever lived and Dickstein's killings into acceptable, even admirable,
examples of retributive justice ... As embodiments of every anti-Semite
who ever lived, they simply must be killed..." [BREINES, p. 15]
If this kind of indiscriminating
psychic energy, coming from a self-described "gentle, nonviolent
non-Zionist leftist," "guided by moral conscience," was ever unleashed
in tandem with a national objective (probably towards the generic
"anti-Semitic" everyman), we will find unmasked the consummate Nazi.
And if this is the "gentle" Jew speaking, what might lurk in those
vengeful Jews who see at every turn in history a tormenter, and who have
no illusions of themselves as being "gentle, nonviolent, and
non-Zionist?"
Take the 1995 case of Leon Bor
(Borshevsky), an Israeli who, apparently, obsessed with private demons,
hijacked a bus in Cologne, Germany. As the Jewish Telegraphic Agency
tells it:
"Bor walked down the aisle of the bus
and asked the blindfolded and
bound passengers their nationality.
When a 64-year old woman said
she was German, Bor shot and killed
her, then took a Polaroid picture
of the body. Bor then had a
passenger take a picture of him in his
combat uniform." [SEDAN, G., p. 3]
Jews at-large have an enduring
"desire for revenge" against the Germans, noted James Yaffe in 1968,
"It almost as if some symbiotic
relationship now exists between the
Jews and Germans. We can never break
loose from them; we're
doomed to go through the ages
together, tied to them by our hatred....
[YAFFE, J., 1968, p. 58] ... Jewish
feeling about Germany, however,
must be seen in perspective. It is a
special and extreme case of a feeling
which Jews have had about gentiles
for a long time, long before Hitler
came along. It is expressed in an
old folk saying which Jewish mothers
have been passing on to their
children for centuries: 'Scratch a goy and
you'll find an anti-Semite."
[YAFFE, J., 1968, p. 59]
Jewish need for some kind of
"revenge," deeply born by many American Jews whose very essence of
identity is rooted in the idea that they have been passive bearers of
persecution for centuries, is graphically reflected in this sickening
account by a Jewish concentration camp survivor, Sonja Milner:
"[Upon liberation from Auschwitz] one
day we experienced a sense of
deep satisfaction. As we were walking
about in the city [Danzig] we
saw some Germans lying in a field ...
A battalion of Russian soldiers
passed by. The soldiers fell upon the
Germans and began to rape the
young girls, the women and children.
Some ten or twenty of them fell
upon a little girl and raped her. We
watched and beamed with satisfaction.
We were finally being avenged ... At
that scene of rape and violence,
another picture superimposed itself.
It was my own niece and nephews
that I saw being ripped apart by the
Germans. My nieces and nephews
were seven, five, and three years
old. Still our revenge was vicarious."
[ROIPHE, p. 18]
The Jewish survivor's indiscriminate
revenge (in this particular case, wishfully unfulfilled in support of
Russian savagery, even against an innocent child so long as she is
German) is indeed vicarious, as is most of modern American Jewry's
communal identification with the gruesome tales of the Holocaust itself.
This kind of horrible tale has become the foundation of a Jewish world
view, both angry and fearful, finally expressed via the creation of the
state of Israel (exemplified in Menachem Begin's comment: "No one has
the right to tell us what is or is not moral.") Jews now have in their
hands the capacity to exact violent retribution upon enemies or -- as is
so common to Israeli military history -- pre-emptive strikes against
those who 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." [BREITMAN, 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 boogeymen:
"Many Jewish organizations rarely
fight the more deeply ingrained
anti-Semitism that is part of the
collective unconscious of Western
society. Their deep pessimism about
non-Jews expressed inside
the Jewish world as "goyim-bashing'
discouraged them from ever
beginning a full-scale assault on
anti-Semitism ... One reason
the public consciousness has never
fully addressed anti-Semitism
is the real and surplus
powerlessness of Jews." [LERNER,
SOCIALISM, p. 62]
Such hallucinatory assertions about
Jewish powerlessness [see later chapters] by the editor to Tikkun
magazine, so far removed from any semblance of reality where tens -- if
not hundreds -- of millions of dollars are poured into a continual war
against "anti-Semitism," are absolutely mind-boggling. What planet, one
wonders, are people like Lerner living on?
"For Jews today," says Rabbi Howard
Singer, "feeling safe is almost a form of disloyalty to Jewishness. We
view safety almost with a survivor's mentality -- with guilt. How dare
we be safe? We do not have a right to safety. Quite aside from the
objective situation, there [is] very definitely an identification of
fear with a kind of loyalty to the essence of the historic Jewish
predicament. Who are we to be different?" [SINGER, p. 74, in
STALLSWORTH]
"The [Jewish] outer coating," says
Stephen Isaacs, "may be resplendent with the rhetoric of universalism
and equality, but inside, most Jews maintain a sophisticated,
subterranean scanning system. This radar performs at peak efficiency
around non-Jews, ever alert to the slightest nuance, swiftly sensing
intimations of anti-Semitism." [ISAACS, p. 24] Isaacs even suggests that
for a non-Jew to use the word "Jew" could have anti-Semitic
implications:
"[The word Jew] is clipped and harsh
and, when used by a non-Jew, is
considered as almost pejorative in
itself, as if in other surroundings, it
might be followed by, say, bastard.
Its use by a non-Jew almost
automatically makes him suspect of
being an anti-Semite, for anti-Semites
often use Jew as a verb, as in
to jew someone down in price."
[ISAACS, p. 24]
"Negroes," complained Jacob Cohen in
1967, "have never learned that it is impolite to call a Jew a Jew in
public, perhaps because they are called Negro so irrelevantly, so
often." [COHEN, J., 1967, p. 13]
"It is very understandable," says
Irene Bloomfield, "that we suspect Gentiles of being anti-Semitic when
they refer to our Jewishness; it can become a pathological, rather
paranoid knee-jerk reaction of seeing even the most innocuous reference
to our Jewishness as a criticism or attack which means to a number of us
that we therefore do not have to examine what is said to us, and that
our past sufferings justify us in behaving badly toward any non-Jew
since he/she could be a potential anti-Semite." [BLOOMFIELD, p. 27]
The accusation of anti-Semitism has
thus taken the form of a collective Jewish neurosis and phobia based
upon a mythic martyrological past, a fabrication serving as a contrived
tool for Jewish solidarity and identity against the real threats to
modern Jewry: increasingly assimilation by Jews into mainstream American
culture and intermarriage to non-Jews. (Meanwhile, while Jews point
fingers at phantom oppressors when negative views of Jews in popular
opinion are at record lows, Jewish scholars found in 1990 "that more
than half of all American Jews continue to hold traditional negative
stereotypes of non-Jews." [CHANES, p. 21]
Jack Ruby, the killer of Lee Harvey
Oswald, "was always extremely sensitive to anti-Semitism." "There was
nothing that would get him angrier faster," remarked his brother, Earl.
"Jack was real touchy about anything said bad about Jews, and he would
fight with anyone who said it." [POSNER, p. 353] Upon arrest, the phobic
undercurrent of Jewish identity finally imploded in Ruby's mind. His
Holocaust-mania fueled his ultimate descent into madness. Jailed for the
murder of President Kennedy's assassin, Ruby's sister Eva noted that
"'he thinks they are going to kill
out all the Jews and he has made
remarks that 25 million Jews have
been slaughtered, on the floor below,
in the jail. Sometimes it's planes
going over and they are dropping
bombs on Jews.' He told Eva [his
sister] that he could hear and see
Jews boiled in oil and that he had
recurrent visions of his brother Earl
and his children being dismembered.
The police guards used to watch
him put his ear to the jail wall and
say, 'Shhh! Do you hear the screams?
They are torturing the Jews again
down in the basement." [POSNER,
1993, p. 401]
A. M. Rosenthal, eventually Executive Editor of the New York
Times, and Times reporter Arthur Gelb wax poetic (and
hyperbolic) about the Jewish blameless 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 calim a similar pleasure in putting themselves at risk.
All daredevils
know the thrill of danger. A Jew can find it at a cocktail party
or a business
lunch when an anti-Semitic remark suddenly comes into the
conversation. His
nerves sing with tension, a chill comes into his gut, he fears
himself, the chance
that he will fail this test of his courage, of his sense of
himself. The moment
does not endagner his physical life; but he feels the threat to
his humanness,
to his dignity; and he knows that without dignity he turns into a
thing that
can be bought and sold, he returns to the time before his exodus
from Egypt."
[SHORRIS, E., 1982, p. 47]
In 1996, a Jewish college student, Jacob Faturechi, wrote an
extremely unusual (and honest) article about the fact that the word
"anti-Semite" is grossly overused:
"Pat Buchanan 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, boisterious and loud people,' followed by 'uncultured,
unrefined, dumb people' at 14 percent and then all other other types."
The following year, another Roper poll found that 53 percent of the
Americans asked believed Jews were different from everyone else and that
these differences should lead to restrictions in business and social
life." [GOODWIN, D.K., 1995, p. 102]
In 1968, Jewish author James Yaffe
noted the results of an American Jewish Committee study conducted six
years earlier in the Jewish community in Baltimore. Yaffe's
subject was a criticism of Jewish "self-hatred," i.e., widespread belief
in the Jewish community that many "anti-Semitic" criticisms were true.
As Yaffe observes,
"So why not recognize the truth?
Hardly any Jews are entirely free
from the effects of this disease
[Jewish self-hatred]. In AJC's Baltimore
survey, two-thirds of the
respondents admitted to believing that other
Jews are pushy, hostile, vulgar,
materialistic, and the cause of anti-
Semitism. And those were only the
ones who were willing to admit it."
[YAFFE, J., 1968, p. 73]
So what are we to make of this
profound contradiction? Is Jewish self-criticism at root, as Yaffe
suggests, a "disease?" So on one hand, entire institutions embark on
crusades to weigh and eliminate irrational prejudices against Jews,
while, on the other, even many Jews themselves testify that such beliefs
are not always prejudices, but often based on facts indeed. It is clear
here that the ADL's accusation of prejudice is manipulated as a device
to deflect criticism of genuine, verifiable collectivist behavior.
Jewish "clannishness," for example, as perceived by Jews from within the
community, is in fact a cherished ideal. As institutionalized in modern
America, however, if this very same quality is noted by non-Jews, it is
held to be an unfounded, stereotypical misperception. Furthermore,
popular convention holds that the "prejudiced" individual cannot discern
the respective qualities of Jewish individuals from those
ascribed to the Jewish collective body. To the degree that this
is true, the Jewish collectivity, rooted in Judaic tradition, defines
this perception in quite the same manner and is precedentially
responsible for it. Likewise, the celebration of common Jewish
traits and a collective character, world view, communal destiny, et al,
as we shall soon see, is the foundation of a growing body of modern
Jewish literature. The issue is not in Jewish circles whether the
collective character does or does not exists, but what exactly it is.
Of course there are other
"prejudicial" perceptions about the Jewish community that have basis in
fact. The Jewish authors of the Tenacity of Prejudice study
conceded, for example, "some basis in reality" for the following
"anti-Semitic" statements from their own Index of Anti-Semitic Belief.
The following sentences were provided to those surveyed who were to
decide whether they were true or false:
The movie and television
industries are pretty much controlled by
Jews.
Jewish employers go out of
their way to hire other Jews.
Jews stick together too
much.
Jews like to be at the head
of things. [TENACITY]
It is credit to Jewish propaganda
organizations, such as the one that funded this study, that they are
effectively doing their job when only 47, 49, 52, and 54 per cent,
respectively, of American interviewees believed these four statements to
be true, when even those who created these statements concede that they
all "have some basis in reality." [See evidence throughout this
volume that underscores the essential reality of each of these four
statements.]
This admission of "some basis in
reality" in key anti-Semitic prejudices, of course, is a serious problem
for researchers who know that their ADL sponsors did not spend $500,000
to hear the likes of such concessions. So how do the researchers
explain these four acknowledged "realities" away, statements that are
supposed to be among the core of an anti-Semitic repertoire? Like this:
"It is frequently
contended, often by Jews themselves, that
beliefs such as these
should not be regarded as anti-Semitic
since they have at least
some basis in reality. This argument
assumes a basic
distinction between "true" beliefs and
"false" beliefs about
Jews. Undoubtedly some
generalizations about
Jews are more warranted
than others. But the
distinction between "true" and "false"
beliefs is misleading if
it implies that people typically acquire
their "true" beliefs
about Jews in one way and their "false"
beliefs in another."
[TENACITY]
Incredibly, these four
aforementioned statements of "reality" about Jews are already four of
the five needed (of the eleven statements of the "Index of Anti-Semitic
Belief") for an individual to be considered -- per the ADL study -- an
anti-Semite. In other words, within a large number of survey questions
that disguised the ADL's specific Jewish interest, if a respondent
accepted at least five of the eleven statements researchers considered
to be anti-Jewish, the person formally qualified as an "anti-Semite."
The other seven anti-Semitic statements from the Index about Jews
presented to interviewees were:
* Not as honest as other
businessmen.
* Too much power in the
business world.
* More loyal to Israel than
America.
* Control international
banking.
* Shrewd and tricky in
business.
* Have a lot of irritating
faults.
* Use shady business
practices to get ahead.
[See past and future
chapters that explore kernels of truth in each
of these realms]
As even the Tenacity authors
point out, "Have a lot of irritating faults" is a vague enough statement
that it may be reasonably applied to virtually any people. If any
reader accepts this about Jews, and is inclined to accept the earlier
four statements that had "some basis in reality" even to the
researchers, that's anti-Semitic statement number five and the reader
is, by the formal terms of the study, a certified anti-Semite.
One item not formally on the
Anti-Semite Index List, but an interesting aside nonetheless, is that
the authors noted that 60 per cent of their nationwide respondents
believed Jews had "more money" than other people. [As we shall soon see,
the Jews today are clearly, and demonstrably, the wealthiest ethnic
community -- per capita -- in America]. For their part, the ADL
researchers diplomatically conceded that Jews "exhibit at least their
fair share of concern for achievement and success. At the same time the
connection between Jews and money is one of the oldest elements of
anti-Semitic ideology." The "connection between Jews and money" is also,
as we have amply seen through history to the present day, true.
The ADL-sponsored researchers wrote this even as part of the $500,000
dangled out of their own pockets. What other ethnic group in America
could afford so spectacular a sum in the 1960s to simply try to
determine what other people think of them?
From the money angle, Tenacity
of Prejudice explains the broad-based anti-Semitic perception this
way, where the verifiable Jewish-money connection is linked to other
alleged Jewish attributes:
"A sizeable majority of
respondents believe that Jews are wealthier
than other Americans. Why
shouldn't they? The middle-class
status of Jews is a firmly
established fact. But the anti-Semite
tends to hold all his
beliefs about Jews with the same con-
viction: Jews ARE shrewd
and tricky. Jews DO have too
much power in the business
world. Jews ARE more loyal
to Israel than America.
These beliefs can and often do
provoke feelings of
hostility in the person who holds them.
[TENACITY]
In other words, in overview, if an
individual only believes "with conviction" in one or two of the posited
criticisms about Jews from the Index of anti-Semitism statement list
provided by researchers, the respondent is not categorized as an
anti-Semite. This is because, as even the researchers concede, there is
a "basis in reality" in at least SOME of the criticisms. But if the
critic becomes more than casually focused on any one or two of these
negative statements about Jews in general, and is consistent in
believing a range (at least five) of such characteristics as credible,
the casual critic is suddenly a threat to Jewish self-defensive
orthodoxy because he has recognized a logical relationship between a
number critical comments. He then qualifies for castigation by
Jewish-funded dictate as being maliciously intended, an irrational
anti-Semite.
In Jewish defensive orthodoxy, then,
being an anti-Semite is not merely the conviction that any of the above
mentioned characteristics of Jews is in any way true, because they may
well be true. Rather, anti-Semitism is understood as a
package of belief, the systematic understanding that a
variety of statements (as few as five from the "Anti-Semite Index") have
"some basis in reality." Being an anti-Semite in this view is the
recognition of a web of alleged Jewish collective
characteristics: an exceptionally strong attachment to money, prominence
in Hollywood, disproportionate power, adept in "tricky business
dealings," and so on. The recognition of these relationships, note the
researchers, tends to cause hostility against Jews. And here is where a
presumed threat to Jewry lies.
In 1979, another book,
Anti-Semitism in America, appeared as a "wrap-up" volume to the
ADL's fifteen year investigative program. This book, by Harold Quinley
and Charles Glock, summarized the results of a number of earlier
academically conducted ADL-funded surveys and studies about
anti-Semitism, including Tenacity of Prejudice. This newer book
also highlighted survey results about perceptions of Jews within the
American Black community, church groups, schools, and -- another of the
"educational powers" -- the mass media.
Quinley and Glock essentially pick up
where the other volume left off ten years earlier, still bending facts
about the Jewish general community into anti-Semitic misperceptions. As
always, however, unless these authors wish to be regarded as completely
blind, they must make the cautious concessions:
"Another common stereotype of
Jews is that they are clannish...
The perception of Jews as
clannish has some basis in fact and
can thus be accepted without
necessarily being a symptom
of prejudice."
"In an allusion to Jewish
pride, Jews are often referred to
scornfully in anti-Semitic
propaganda as the Chosen People...
Since this is a part of
traditional Jewish religion, it can hardly
be taken as an indicator of
anti-Semitism."
"The view that Jews are
money-oriented is an old and central part
of anti-Semitic ideology. In
the United States, a majority of Jews
are in fact monied in the
sense of having above average
income." [QUINLEY, p. 3-4]
Thus stated, the authors then note
only pages later that "the results cited so far reveal anti-Semitic
belief to be fairly common among non-Jewish Americans. Such traditional
images of Jews as dishonest, clannish, prideful, and pushy continue to
be widely subscribed to in America." [QUINLEY, p. 5] How can these
authors equate perceiving Jews to be "clannishness and prideful" with
anti-Semitic belief when they just stated, in the same chapter, that
these very same qualities had factual basis and were not anti-Semitic?
Again, it is the propagandists' need to fit their preconceived formulas.
And one of the formulas is simply this: the difference between an
anti-Semite (or Jewish "self-hater," for that matter) and anyone else is
that that the anti-Semite observes a series of facts about the
self-defined "Jewish community," reflects upon them as a whole, and
views the entirety critically.
And here we find the researchers'
ideological foundation: again not necessarily that the so-called
anti-Semite's views are erroneously based, but that his belief system is
colored by sweeping judgmental "prejudice." And prejudice is unfair,
unfactual, irrational, and even un-American. To be "prejudiced" against
anybody or anything in late 20th century America is, by popular
socialization, tantamount to harboring the thoughts of a criminal. The
danger, as the argument goes, is that the prejudicial patching together
of a series of "partial truths" results in distortion of the whole. As
Quinley and Glock stated it in 1979:
"Jews in America are in
fact more well-to-do than the average
American, and it is
also true that Jews 'overwhelmingly reject
Christ as the savior.'
There is a grain of truth in the popular
stereotypes concerning
Jewish influence in the media, motion
picture, and banking
industries. Jews do not "control" these
industries, but they
are disproportionately active in them.
There can also be
particular contexts in which Jews do act
in ways predicted in
the stereotype. Under some conditions,
Jews have sought to
"stick together" to a greater extent than
non-Jews.
Anti-Semites are
unable to distinguish between the
partial truths
contained in these tendencies and the
stereotyping involved
in prejudice." [QUINLEY, p. 197]
It would seem that an argument
based upon "partial truths" versus, presumably, full ones, is largely an
exercise in semantics. What exactly are the "complete
truths" that the authors of these studies have in the wings that all
intelligent and reasonable people can unanimously agree upon? Of course
all Jews are not wealthy. Of course all Jews
aren't working in the mass media. Of course not all Jews
-- every single one of them -- "stick together." Of course all those
born Jews don't even call themselves Jews anymore. Of course any
assertion about anything whatsoever is probably going to be a "partial
truth."
The researchers' own tact is to
completely ignore Jewish history and its separatist identity, its
Talmudic foundations and collectivist ideology, taking "partial truths"
and explaining them to their liking:
"[Anti-Semites] conceive of
Jewish wealth not resulting from the
occupational and educational
characteristics of Jews, but as
evidence Jews are
money-oriented and materialistic. Likewise,
they explain the presence of
Jews in the motion picture or media
industries not in terms of
career choice, and as a consequence
of the historic exclusion of
Jews from other industries, but as an
indication of a Jewish attempt
to control the communications
media in America. [QUINLEY, p.
197]
[An entire chapter will discuss
Jewish dominance in the mass media later]
Will Jewish media stars Ted Koppel or
Barbara Walters, Stephen Spielberg, and the Jewish founders of ABC, CBS,
and NBC tell us that they fell into their fields because they were
"historically excluded from other industries?" And isn't it the inherent
tendency for any large business concern -- Jewish or otherwise -- to
strive towards vanquishing its competition and establishing a
comfortable monopoly, based upon ruthless, purely self-aggrandizing and
nepotistic attitudes? Doesn't any serious large business enterprise--
existing solely for the profit of its owners -- at least attempt, if it
is in any way feasible, to "control the industry?"
Curiously, the ADL researchers found
that the anti-Semite is not merely a single-minded stick figure as some
might imagine. Researchers were somewhat surprised to have their own
stereotypes challenged when they discovered that those they termed
"anti-Semites" even recognized a variety of good qualities in
Jews:
"It is not entirely clear what
should be made of such findings. They
would seem to indicate that
Jews are widely admired and that a
reservoir of good will exists
towards them. At the same time, it is
apparent that many of the
positive responses were given by
respondents scoring high in
anti-Semitism. Indeed, it seems to
to be a characteristic of
prejudice that certain "positive"
stereotypes exist alongside
negative ones." [QUINLEY, p. 11]
There were other ADL studies exploring
the roots of anti-Jewish animus. Most Jews don't like Christmas carols
sung in public schools, for example, and it was discovered that "most
Americans clearly support the singing of Christmas carols in the schools
and are unsympathetic to charges that this constitutes discrimination
against Jews." [QUINLEY, p. 16] Other survey results revealed that, when
it comes to the Holocaust, as early as the 1970s, "43 percent [of
American respondents] agreed with the statement that Jews should stop
complaining about what happened to them in Nazi Germany." [QUINLEY, p.
18] And the researchers' concluding comment on this? :
... Lack of special sympathy for
Jews is often but not always grounded
in anti-Semitism." [QUINLEY, p. 19]
When turning to surveys for
anti-Semitism in the African-American community, Blacks are
disproportionately poor, as Jews are disproportionately well off, and
that's how Blacks know them. For decades Jews have been close contact
with the Black community as slumlords, merchants, and agents of various
kinds. It's impossible to ignore this relationship. Largely based upon
their economic relationships with Jews [see later chapter], "blacks are
more disposed than whites to be prejudiced against Jews." [QUINLEY, p.
55] As Jonathan Kaufman notes:
"A poll in 1983 showed blacks the
most hostile to Israel of fifteen
groups surveyed. They were also among
the groups holding the
highest percentage of anti-Semitic
attitudes. Anti-Semitic attitudes
increased among more educated blacks
... This was the only form
of bigotry that increased with
education." [KAUFMAN, J., 1988,
p. 229]
"Contrary to popular opinion," noted researcher Ronald Tskukashima
in 1979,
"Black anti-Semites tend to come from less ghettoized areas of Los
Angeles
and higher socio-economic backgrounds ... Those selectively hostile
toward
Jews feel that they have too much economic power in the Black
community
and indicate they would like to see them leave." [TSKUKASHIMA, R.,
1979,
p. 63]
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 underdesirability of a written constitution in which
such a law would embarrassingly have to be spelled out." In this
context, at the Eichmann trial itself, Arendt wrote that "there was
something breathtaking in the naiveté" of the Israeli prosecutors
condemnation of Nazi Nuremberg [race] laws of 1935, when parallels could
actually be found in such Nazi laws and those of the Israeli state.
"The better informed among the [press] correspondents were well aware of
this irony, but they didn't mention it in their reports." [ARENDT, p. 7]
*** The use of the word "anti-Semite"
is used so broadly by Jews that even Arabs are routinely called
anti-Semitic. This is a particularly odd misnomer, since Arabs -- like
Jews -- are themselves linguistically (and "racially") Semitic. Facing
no Diaspora over the millennium, Arabs are even more purely Semitic,
however one defines it, than Jews are. No matter. To chauvinist Jewish
popular opinion that continuously misuses the term to mean "anti-Jew,"
only Jews are Semites of consequence.
Traditional belief in both Arab and
Jewish lore is that both Semitic groups are familially related right up
to Abraham, the seminal patriarch for both. The Jewish ancestral lineage
is considered to have followed through Abraham's son, Isaac. Another boy
sired by Abraham -- Ishmael, born illegitimately to Abraham's
"maidservant", Hagar -- is understood to have begun the Arab racial
line. Hagar and her infant son, according to Old Testament and Quranic
sources -- fled into the perilous desert at the angry instigation of
Abraham's (considered today "Jewish") wife, Sarah, who had followed up
on Abraham's permission to treat Hagar as Sarah wished. Sarah was at the
time still barren and wrought with jealously over Hagar's child; she did
not conceive Isaac, the first Jewish progeny -- so the Old Testament
says -- until she was 100 years old. [GEN 20.16]
In the religious view, only God's
miraculous intervention saved Hagar and her infant from perishing in the
desert. In Islamic tradition, the reputed water source that saved them
-- the well of Zamzam -- is part of Muslim worship today at Mecca, in
Saudi Arabia.
In any case, the origin of the Jewish
Semitic clan of elite self, distinct from those who are not as
legitimately pure, cuts this ruthlessly. A religious foundation for
Jewish anti-Semitism (or whatever you call it) against Arabs can be
found in the Old Testament [GEN 20.16]: "Thou [Hagar]... shalt bear a
son ... Ismael ... He will be a wild man; his hand will be against every
man, and every man's hand against him..." In this vein, other respected
Jewish religious texts can be found "likening [Ishmael] to an ass or a
dog." [MARX, p. 44] Rabbi Tzvi Marx even encountered a "prestigious
scholar" in Israel who argued that Ishmael was technically referred to
in the Torah as a "manlike wilderness," not really a wild man,
thus completely dehumanizing him and all Arabs. [MARX, p. 95]
***************************************
Rabbi Roland Gittelsohn's listed his "Pyramid of Hate" (the most
"frequently heard" of alleged "anti-Semitic" beliefs) in a textbook for
Jewish high school students, in 1964:
1. All Jews are secretly united to overthrow governments and establish
Jewish rule over the entire world.
2. The first step in this plan is to control the finances of the country
by dominating the banking system and stock markets of the country.
3. Jews dominate the industry and big businesses in America, and are
therefore the wealthiest group in the country.
4. Jews try to avoid such occupations as farming and physical labor, and
crowd into occupations and professions that are easier.
5. Jews completely control the newspapers and press of this country.
6. Jews influence the public opinion of America unduly through their
control of the movies and the radio.
7. Jews are responsible for Communism.
8. Most Jews are criminals.
[GITTELSOHN, R., 1964, p. 122]