Loving Us Too Much

A polemical book can be one of quality. A strongly argued text can be solidly grounded in reliable evidence. So I wonder whether Will Skidelsky, chairman of the judging panel for the 2009 Jewish Quarterly Wingate literary prize, thought he had such a book in his hands when he described one of the six contenders, Dennis MacShane’s Globalizing Hatred: The New Antisemitism, as an ‘impassioned polemic about the resurgence of anti-Semitism as a global force’? MacShane, a Labour Member of Parliament and a former junior minister, is a talented populariser of political issues.
A similar description could be applied to a new book by experienced think-tanker Robin Shepherd, who used to run the European programme at the Royal Institute of International Affairs in London and is now Director of International Affairs at the Henry Jackson Society. His work, A State Beyond the Pale: Europe’s Problem with Israel, also strongly argued, seeks to explain why Israel is accorded disproportionate attention by Europe’s opinion formers. Read more

Jewish Self-Hatred : Myth or Reality ?

Antony Lerman contextualises the time-worn accusation

Those who level the charge obviously have no doubts. So much so that it’s deployed as the ‘killer fact’: to be called a self-hating Jew explains everything. No more need be said. Self-hatred means being a traitor to your race, an Uncle Tom, siding with the enemy, willing the destruction of your own people. In Jewish Self-Hatred: Anti-Semitism and the Hidden Language of the Jews, Sander L. Gilman says it’s ‘a term interchangeable with “Jewish anti-Judaism” or “Jewish anti-Semitism”’.

Recently you could have taken a course in the history of Jewish self-hatred at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The playwright David Mamet deploys the concept in his book, The Wicked Son: Anti-Semitism, Self-Hatred and the Jews (2006), a fierce denunciation of ‘apostate Jews’ and ‘race traitors’. And then there’s the outrageously gross ‘S.H.I.T.’ — Self-Hating, Israel Threatening — ‘list’, a website purportedly ‘exposing’ more than 8,000 self-hating Jews, given credence in the Israeli daily Ha’aretz in July 2007 in an article which argues that Muslims would benefit from a good dose of the kind of public self-hate so common among Jews. Rabbi Sir Jonathan Sacks refers to it uncritically in his most recent book, The Home We Build Together (an attack on multiculturalism): ‘[Self-hatred] is something Jews know about: we can fairly claim to have invented it (Arthur Koestler once memorably said, “Self-hatred is the Jew’s patriotism”). It occurred in mainland Europe in the later nineteenth and early twentieth century [sic], as Jews internalised the negative image others had of them. It represents the breakdown of an identity, and nothing good can come of it.’ Read more