[Excerpt about the “shiksa cult” from Anti-Semitism chapter]:

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.