Victims Are Not Sacrifices

The unspoken sub-text for Uri Hadar’s elegant, emotive and disturbing piece is Primo Levi’s 1982 comment, in the wake of the Sabra and Shatilla massacres, that ‘Everybody is somebody’s Jew. And today the Palestinians are the Jews of the Israelis.’ For many Jews, reading this through the lens of their idealisation of Levi as the most principled writer about the Holocaust, the resonance was unbearable. For those who could think about it and not simply discard Levi as a lost soul, too damaged by the Nazis to know his own mind, the question was, ‘What have we done?’ After Sabra and Shatilla, the relative innocence of those of us who had grown up with heroic tales of Zionism was shattered, and questions of responsibility, of guilt, even of reparation were raised. Over time, this set of questions has been obscured or repressed, then uncovered, then repressed again, in a dynamic that in many ways reveals the potency of Uri’s assertion that what is being enacted is an unconscious transmission of victimhood, in which one people is being made to stand in for another. This assaults a self-image of Jews as ethical, and a religious image of Jews and Judaism as a supposed ‘light to the nations’. As Uri suggests, the ‘need to conceive of oneself as good and just’ results in a terrible twisting of reality in the face of events. Read more

Putting the Id back in Yid by Stephen Frosh

The Freudian century began in Vienna but found its eventual home in America. There it was that most psychoanalysts wound up and entered the blood stream of the culture so that Freudian speech and American speech — or at least a certain kind of American speech: broad, aspiring, complaining, witty, frenzied, guilt-ridden — ran together.
At its height, mid-century, American psychoanalysis testified to the presence of unconscious sexual or violent wishes that were geared towards producing trouble. Ego psychology assumed that something explosive (the id) needed controlling and turning to good use. Freud lived at a time of social upheaval and genuine revolutionary fervour, in which the masses, like the unconscious, were breaking free from centuries-long repression. It was also the start of a period of Jewish emancipation that shared these same characteristics. The Jews of the West had burst out of their ghettoes like water breaching a dam, and, despite their continuing exclusion and the continued growth of anti-Semitism (or maybe because of it), their immense, pent-up energy was visible everywhere. Freud’s own work depended on this moment of Jewish freedom which existed in complex relation to the ubiquitous anti-Semitism.

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