"Surely Jews understand that in identifying an anti-Semite one

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.'"

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,

"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-Semiism 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,

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."

     "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."

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