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When Victims Rule (A Critique of Jewish Pre-eminence in America)
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WHEN VICTIMS RULE,
A Critique of Jewish Pre-eminence in America
Source: JTR Website



18. [Part 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 discoverin
g
     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 acco