THE ACCUSATION OF ANTI-SEMITISM

      Jewish historical revisionism, demands, and distortion spreads in all directions with self-righteous Jewish activists stepping forward in their respective occupational fields and disciplines to educate their non-Jewish peers against the omnipresent evils of irrational anti-Semitism and to present a favorable Jewish image.

 

     On a smaller, grass roots scale, Jewish efforts to reform history and reality are everywhere. Steven Soifer, for example, in the field of social work, wants to "infuse content about Jews and anti-Semitism" into college social work programs as part of the educational mandate to "educate students about the differences among ethnic, racial, and cultural groups."  Soifer's forum for complaint is the Journal of Social Work Education (1991) and here is a sampling of how he "educates" his fellow social workers:

 

          "Jews are an oppressed group in U.S. society." [p. 161]

 

      This assertion, as we shall soon see evidenced in future chapters if anyone needs proof to refute the obvious, by all social, economic, and political measures, is ridiculous. Unless Soifer means that Jews in America are oppressed here by other Jews. In fact, he says as much later:  "It is not uncommon for some Jews to perceive themselves as ugly, weak, complaining, pushy, caring too much about money, or being smarter than others. They may also exhibit feelings of powerlessness or attack other Jews for exhibiting supposed stereotypical behavior." [p. 161]

 

         "Falasha or Ethiopian Jews are often the targets of racism and classism as well as anti-Semitism."  [p. 162]

 

      Soifer is right. But what he doesn't mention is that the Falasha [Black Jews from Africa] face such discrimination and abuse -- well documented -- at the hands, again, of other  (non-Black) Jews  -- in Israel, where almost all Falasha are currently living. [See later chapter about Israel.]

            

       "Some ... literature [that has "attempted to address the effects of anti-Semitism on therapy clients"] even appears anti-Semitic in nature ... [arguing] that Jews themselves contributed to the problem of anti-Semitism, thereby blaming the victims of the problem." [p. 157]

 

      Soifer doesn't detail the argument, nor does he mention that the article he cites to illustrate this charge was written by a Jewish author, C.G. Schoenfeld, in The Psychoanalytic Review which itself reflects a field and discourse, as we have already seen, that is predominately Jewish, including the Review's editor, Theodore Reik, who selected the article in question for print. Schoenfeld suggests possible reasons for anti-Semitism that include self-enforced Jewish separatism from non-Jews through history, arrogant Jewish conceits of superiority, and Jewish preoccupation with money. [SCHOENFELD]

 

      "It is important to realize that no one is 'born' Jewish; rather, it is a culturally and religiously acquired identity." [p. 163]

 

      Not only does Orthodox Judaism dictate that one is 'born' a Jew, but the possessor of such an identity -- by traditional religious teachings -- can never leave it (except in extraordinary excommunication occasions). "A Jew's religion is not only his own business," notes Michael Asheri, in explaining traditional Jewish dictate, "up to a certain point it is every Jew's business and he has no more right to abandon it than a soldier has the right to abandon his comrades in the middle of a battle because of a 'sincere' conviction that the enemy is right. Such a man is considered a traitor and treated like one ... In all laws concerning marriage, the rule is 'once a Jew, always a Jew.' This means that if a woman becomes an apostate, any children born to her will still be Jewish, even if they are born after her apostasy." [ASHERI, M., 1983, p. 319-320]  "There is the constitutive idea of Judaism itself," says Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, one of the pre-eminent rabbis in Great Britain, "that the Jews are born into obligations ... A Jew is a Jew by virtue of birth. This fact carries with it certain duties and obligations. Membership in the Jewish community is thus simultaneously a biological and ethical proposition." [SACKS, J., p. 156-157]

 

            "Because of the historical oppression and attempts at genocide against the Jewish people, most, if not all Jews, have learned to function and survive despite oppression, terror, and other abusive conditions. Thus, although many Jews appear to be doing well, often they are living in fear. Some Jews try to assimilate and pass as non-Jews. By being 'invisible,' they hope to escape another Holocaust." [p. 163]

 

     Jews are the wealthiest, most comfortable, ethnic group in America and there has never been anything remotely like "oppression, terror or other abusive conditions" for them in this country. With Israel and its nuclear bombs and Jewish hypersensitivity to the slightest criticism, and worldwide awareness to the Nazi barbarism in Europe in an endless Jewish publicity campaign, the notion of "another Holocaust" directed expressly towards Jews anywhere on earth is preposterous. Nor are Jews in hiding in America, trying to "pass as non-Jews"; they publicly celebrate their identity everywhere. Teaching social workers such nonsense is insidious.

 

      But, of course, even to criticize Jewish perceptions and arguments here, by Jewish dictate, is rationally and morally impossible. It is, to Jewish dogma, naked anti-Semitism. And "anti-Semitism,” says Cynthia Ozick, a well known Jewish writer, at a conference held by the Partisan Review in 1994, " ... has no need or real Jews. It can thrive where no Jews have lived, or where all the Jews are already dead. Anti-Semitism has nothing to do with Jews; it's not about Jews. It is, and always has been, it always will be, about the body and soul of the anti-Semite."[PR, p. 388] 

 

     Any argument that there may indeed be social, behavioral, and economic issues throughout history that are legitimate grounds for critical discussion and complaint about Jews are routinely rejected as automatically anti-Semitic in nature. And, hence, irrational. In fact, however, when Jews get too engrossed in detailed accusations against perceived "anti-Semites," their assertions can become completely self-contradictory. Consider Moshem Leshem's comment in his book, Israel Alone, about  "Johann Gottleib Fichte, the eighteenth century philosopher ...[who] first sounded many of the themes that later became the staple fare of the modern anti-Semite: Jewish exclusiveness, their belief in their inherent superiority, their predilection for trade, their disdain for gentiles. " [LESHEM, p. 54] Yet Leshem, in this same book, earlier wrote of his own volition: " ... In their [own] eyes, the Jews were a very different and superior people.  To preserve that sense of spiritual uniqueness, isolation from the outside world was essential. Jews therefore limited their contact with gentiles to the strictly necessary. They might do business with the goyim, but they would not break bread with them ... " [p. 18] A little exclusive, a little superior, and a little disdaining of Gentiles, no?

 

       Or how about Leshem's fond quotation of an Isaac Singer novel in which a character says: "I've long been convinced that there is a hidden Messiah in every Jew. The Jew himself is one big miracle." There's at least a wee bit of "superiority" in considering oneself a miracle, extraordinary vehicle for a Messiah, no? And how about Leshem's observation about Theodore Herzl, the playwright and founder of Zionism and modern Israel:  "His plays clearly show his preoccupation with the ills afflicting his own class, the Jewish bourgeoisie, especially the worship of money. He castigated the shameful self-serving falsity that permeated the overstuffed drawing rooms of equally overstuffed Jewish businessmen and stockbrokers ... [p. 79-80] A little "predilection for trade" here, no?

 

     So how is it that Leshem can nakedly state as fact (repeatedly throughout his own volume) the very same unflattering portrayals of Jewish behavior that Fichte used, yet call them "the staple of modern anti-Semitism" and dismiss Fichte as an evil anti-Semite for mentioning them? There are two possible answers. One is that a large portion of the Jewish noise about anti-Semitism is nonsense: merely part of Jewish political illusions and smokescreens. It is the "sustained noise" that Herzl encouraged to diffuse rational discourse and criticism towards distracting attention from the horrible policies of the modern Israeli state and a less than stellar Jewish past that has historically led to such hatred of them. Or, following a long Jewish tradition on such matters, unbeknownst to Mr. Leshem is the apparent fact that he, himself, in speaking negatively about Jews, has been somehow unconsciously wrestled and subsumed by Jew-hate and is, of course, the ten millionth (or so) Jewish anti-Semite.

 

      Hannah Arendt, a Jew, flushes out this great maze of Jewish nonsense for exactly what it is worth:

 

          "Jews concerned with the survival of their people ... in a curious

          desperate misinterpretation hit on the consoling idea that anti-Semitism

          ... might be an excellent means for keeping the people together, so

          that the assumption of eternal anti-Semitism would ever imply an eternal

          guarantee of Jewish existence. This superstition [is] a secularized

          travesty of the idea of eternity inherent in a faith in chosenness and a

          Messianic hope..." [ARENDT, p. ]

 

     Ultimately, there is really no escape for Gentiles from the endemic, omnipresent Jewish accusation of anti-Semitism. Jewish identity needs an antithetical and hostile Other to conceptually exist. Even if one defends Jews, and writes an entire volume attacking anti-Semitism -- as did the well-known existentialist Jean Paul Sartre -- there are Jews who are able to dredge up accusations of anti-Semitism in the very Gentile act of writing against it. Donald Kuspit notes the case of the Jewish art critic Harold Rosenberg who "finds that Sartre, despite his conscious intention to the contrary, is unconsciously an anti-Semite." Reviewing Sartre's work, Rosenberg argued that:

 

        "From the image of the man limited to abstract ideas [Jews], it is but

        a step to that of the man dedicated to cash, since the chief abstraction

        in the modern world is, of course, money. The explanation that [Jews]

        are devoted to money fits together and provides a description of a kind

        of unlikable people." [KUSPIT, p. 32]

 

       Chaim Bermant notes another (what he calls "bizarre") Jewish attack on Sartre by Susan Rubin Suleiman:

 

         "Sartre has many things to answer for, but about the one thing he

         was not was an anti-Semite, and his Reflexions Sur Le Question Juive

         [Reflections on the Jewish Question], published in 1946, became a

         classic defense of the Jew. Suleiman, however, sees something sinister

         in the very name: 'Sarte chose a title [... the Jewish Question] that

         provoked tens and hundreds of anti-Semitic pamphlets and articles.'"

         [BERMANT, p. 7]

 

     Hence, no matter what a Gentile says about Jews -- good, bad, or indifferent, there is probably a Jew somewhere ready to condemn him. Richard L. Rubenstein even attacks non-Jews with a pro-Jewish bias; he asserts that even this is an equivalent of anti-Semitism: "Philo-Semitism is as unrealistic and pernicious as anti-Semitism, for it destroys our most precious attribute, our simple humanity." [RUBENSTEIN, R., p. 21]

 

      Jewish determination to include any- and everyone into the accusative net of "anti-Semite" knows no bounds.  Even the self-critical Jew, wracked with doubt, and shame, about his or her identity and/or critical of Jewish heritage, strangely, is also considered among Jews to be a veritable institution. This parallel tradition to the burdens of Jewish wonderfulness is Jewish anti-Semitism, popularly called the "self-hating Jew." "Self hatred, in fact," declared James Yaffe in 1968,

 

     "is a word often used to describe a common phenomena -- Jewish

     anti-Semitism ... The Jew believes all the epithets that the anti-Semite

     throws at him, even the ones that contradict each other. He believes

     that Jews are clannish and pushy, miserly and ostentatious, vulgar and

     excessively intellectual ... [YAFFE, J., 1968, p. 70] ... In his attitudes

     toward anti-Semitism, the self-hating Jew is especially confused. The

     subject is on his mind constantly. He is far more sensitive to so-called

     'Jewish traits' than most gentiles are."[YAFFE, J., 1968, p. 72]  ... So

     why not recognize the truth? Hardly any Jews are entirely free from the

     effects of this disease [of Jewish self-hatred]. In AJC's Baltimore survey

     [the American Jewish Committee’s study of the Jews of Baltimore in 1962],

     two-thirds of the respondents admitted to believing that other Jews are

     pushy, hostile, vulgar, materialistic, and the cause of anti-Semitism. And

     those were only the ones who were willing to admit it." [YAFFE, J., 1968,

     p. 73]

 

     "To this disease of the psyche [anti-Semitism/Jewish self-hatred]," wrote Milton Steinberg,

 

     "some American Jews have fallen victim. How many, no one knows;

     but there are at least thousands who 'think ill of themselves,' who

     suffer from shame, who are plagued by a sense of inferiority -- all

     because they are Jews. And occasionally one meets a Jew in whom

     the malady is virulent, a Jew who literally hates Judaism, and other

     Jews and himself." [NEUSNER, J., 1972, p. 76]

 

     Jewish self-doubt, since the Enlightenment, created such widespread "anti-Semitic" feelings among Jews themselves that Max Nordeau (who became one of Herzl's faithful Zionist organization men) estimated "that by the middle of the nineteenth century two-thirds of all the prominent personalities of Jewish origin no longer identified with Judaism in any form." [LESHEM, p. 33]  In 1848 a prominent European rabbi complained (however hyperbolically) that nine-tenths of the young Jews of his era "were ashamed of their faith." [LAQUER, p. 9]

 

      The pejorative word "kike" for Jews was coined by upper class New York City Jews to refer to the masses of Eastern European Jewish immigrants flooding into their city in the late 1800s. [GROSE, p. 32] Indigenous Jewish Americans' sentiment about the new arrivals was little different than that of the average "anti-Semite."  "Prominent Jews in America," notes Albert Lindemann, "seemed to corroborate precisely what Russian officials maintained about Russia's Jewish population: it was clannish, religiously fanatical, and bent on domination." [LINDEMANN, p. 219] "It is next to an impossibility to associate or identify oneself," proclaimed influential Reform rabbi Isaac Meyer Wise, "with that half-civilized Orthodoxy which constitutes the bulk of the [Jewish] population in those cities ... We are Americans and they are not. We are Israelites of the 19th century and a free country, and they gnaw the dead bones of past centuries ... The good reputation of Judaism must naturally suffer materially, which must without fail lower our social status." [GROSE, p. 32-33]  A Jewish journal in 1893 complained that, for the American Jew,  "on the one hand, here are his true relatives who are dear to him and whom he wants to help; on the other hand, what a blemish!" [GROSE, p. 32]  

 

     "Not only were most [of New York's millions of Eastern European immigrant] Jews uncultivated," says sociologist John Higham,

 

        "but there is considerable evidence that they were loud, ostentatious,

         and pushing. Both Jews and friendly non-Jewish observers confessed

         something of this kind ... In cartoons and in a good deal of middle

         class opinion, the Jew became identified as the quintessential parvenu

         -- glittering with conspicuous and vulgar jewelry, lacking table manners,

         attracting attention by clamorous behavior, and always forcing his way

         into society that was above him ... Before the 1930s, sober an humane

         observers took note of the core of reality behind the stereotype ... The

         Jews symbolized the pecuniary vice and entered more prominently than

         any other ethnic group into the struggle for status." [HIGHAM, p. 145-

         146]

         "Between 1881 and World War I," notes Joseph Bendersky,

     "those Jews seen as the very physical embodiment of Old World
     stereotypes were immigrating to America by the millions. These despised
     Eastern Jews, so different in appearance, speech, and behavior, not
     only confirmed but augmented negative perceptions already evident
     in the era. So distinct and offensive were these immigrants that
     certain German-American Jews worried about being identified
     with them or wondered whether the very presence of such vulgar
     masses might engender the European variety of vocal, political,
     and violent anti-Semitism from which America had generally been
     spared." [BENDERSKY, J., 2000, p. 34]

 

      Emma Lazarus, a member of a prominent Jewish New York family and author of the famous "welcome huddled masses" quote on the Statue of Liberty, suggested that Eastern European Jewry should stop pouring into America: "For the mass of semi-Orientals, kabbalists, and Hassidim, some more practical measure of reforms must be devised than their transportation to a state of society [the United States] utterly at variance with their time-honored customs and sacred beliefs." [GROSE, p. 32] "Not content merely to reject identification with Jews," notes Howard Sachar, "[Jewish author] Simone Weil went so far as to identify the spirit of Nazism with the spirit of Judaism; Hitler, she insisted, was seeking only to revive under another name and for his own benefit the God of Israel, 'earthly, cruel, and exclusive.' It was devotion to such a God, she argued, that transformed the Jews into 'a nation of fugitive slaves ... No wonder such a people was able to give scarcely anything good to the world.'" [SACHAR, p. 488]

 

     Jewish "anti-Semitism" was also evidenced against Eastern European Jews in pre-Nazi Germany where "many assimilated Jews ... considered themselves culturally superior to the Eastern Jews ... [Jewish men of letters like] Theodor Wolff, for instance, the editor of the Berliner Tagleblatt newspaper, Georg Hermann, the author of the best-selling novel Jettchen Gebert and others exploded in tirades of hatred against the foreign undesirables." [GIDAL, N., p. 399]   Walter Ratheneau, a Jewish high-ranking German official in pre-Nazi Germany, noted under a pseudonym that Jews were an "Asiatic horde" and a "population of foreign stock." "Look in the mirror," he wrote, "This is the first step towards self-criticism." [TRAVERSO, p. 94] "The hostility of German Jews toward the eastern European Jewish immigrants (Ostjuden)," says Adam Weisberger, "represented a form of redirected self-hate." [WEISBEGER, A., 1997, p. 48]

 

      Jewish American novelist Kathy Acker (author of ten volumes) notes traditional German Jewish elitism, even towards other Jews:

 

     "My parents were high German Jews, and I was trained to run away

     from Polish Jews. And I have that childhood in me. It's kind of a knee-

     jerk reaction ... I was raised as a JAP [Jewish American Princess]; I

     just got ousted. I think I still have little JAP elements. People who know

     me really see it. I'm really good when I have a dinner party or when

     I have someone clean my place. I was trained to be good with servants.

     I've got a real elitist streak in me; I just don't take it seriously."

     [BRESSLER/KAUFMAN, 2000]

 

     In the late 19th century, Meyer Carl Rothschild (one of the heirs to the Rothschild fortune in Germany) wrote: "As for anti-Semitic feeling, the Jews themselves are to blame, and the present agitation must be ascribed to their arrogance, vanity, and unspeakable insolence." [LINDEMANN, p. 103]  A western European Jew, Chaim Kaplan, himself an eventual victim of Nazi terror, cited in his memoirs that in his personal experience living in Eastern Europe he had finally found one man that broke his negative stereotype of Polish Jews:

 

      "Sometimes it bothered me that he was a superior person among

      the millions of lesser people, for as a type he contradicted my opinion

      about Polish Jewry. That is, the existence of Jakub Zajac clashed with

      my opinion about the Jews of Poland, which are not too positive. For

      years I settled among the Jews of Poland and I am known to them. I

      deal with them and I am well acquainted with their way of life and their

      cultural level as human beings and as Jews. To my great sorrow, I have

      not always spoken well of them. My opinions are based upon concrete

      examples, and from year to year the instances proving the validity of my

      opinions multiplied."  [KAPLAN, C., p. 76]

 

     (Karl Marx, grandson of rabbis, once weighed in with a collective defamation of Poland's Jews, saying "The Jews of Poland are the smeariest of all races.") [MARX, K., 1959, p. vii]

     German Jews shared non-Jewish German attitudes about the Jews in Eastern Europe. They were even important in the forming of such "anti-Semitic" views. As Steven Aschheim notes,

     "East European Jews were held to be dirty, low, and coarse. They were regarded
     as immoral, culturally backward creatures of ugly and anachronistic ghettoes. In
     large part this was a view formulated and propagated by West European and
     especially German Jews ... [This] antipathy went hand in hand with the attempt to
     to modernize Jewish life and thinking ... Nineteenth-century German Jews, then,
     shared the genreal distaste for the ghetto and what it symbolized, but
     because they themselves were products of the ghetto they internalized the distaste in a      particularly intense and urgent way." [ASCHHEIM, S., 1982, p. 3, 4, 11]

     Secular Jew Stephen Bloom notes (in his study of an ultra-Orthodox Jewish community in Postville, Iowa) how Gentile outrage about obnoxious Jewish behavior towards non-Jews is automatically, still today, twisted into accusations of non-Jewish "anti-Semitism":

     "The Hasidim [ultra-Orthodox] were waging a cultural holy war, in Postville,
     Jerusalem, New York, Los Angeles, Paris -- everywhere. The world was Jew
     vs. non-Jew, and the dichotomy existed in everything they did. Hasidic children
     went to separate schools, their parents arduously stayed among themselves. If
     the city of Postville tried to enforce an ordinance the Jews disagreed with, the
     immediate cry was anti-Semitism. If a local complained about noise from the
     shul [religious center], if anyone disagreed about annexation [into the town of
     a local Jewish-owned slaughterhouse], he or she was quickly branded an
     anti-Semite. Ultimately, I discovered, carrying on a conversation with any
     of the Postville Hasidim was virtually impossible. If you didn't agree, you
     were at fault, part of the problem. You were paving the way for the ultimate
     destruction of the Jews, the world's Chosen People. There was no room
     for compromise, no room for negotiation, no room for anything but total
     and complete submission." [BLOOM, S., 2001, p. 197]

     Bloom's honest conclusion about the tensions between the Jewish and non-Jewish communities in Postville are poignant:

     "Many of the Hasidim I had encountered in Postville pretended to be holy,
     but their actions displayed bigotry and racism of the worst degree. The book
     [Bloom wrote called Postville] explored taboo topics such as bargaining, poor
     hygiene, atrocious manners, disrepair of homes, Jewish elitism, sexism,
     crime and prejudice directed at gentiles. In response, I've received dozens
     of hate letters, all from Orthodox Jewish readers, who essentially pose the
     same question as my fathe's. To these readers, to criticize any aspect
     of Judaism is patently unacceptable. To them, I wasn't a journalist doing my
     job. I was a self-loathing Jew, the worst kind of anti-Semite. I was embarrassing
     the family." [BLOOM, S., 2001, p. 355]

     In 1950 prominent art critic Clement Greenberg announced that "it is only reluctantly that I have become persuaded that self-hatred in one form or another is almost universal among Jews -- or at least much more prevalent than is commonly thought or admitted." [GREENBERG, p. 426]  "I've experienced anti-Jewish feelings I'd be ashamed to admit,"