Psychodynamics of antisemitism: recommend readings for lay people?
ryoud...@gmail.com
Burton N. Seitler
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Paul Elovitz
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Rachel Youdelman
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Jeffrey Rubin
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Brian D'Agostino
Hi,bi
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Rachel Youdelman
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Brian D'Agostino
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Howard Stein
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Rachel Youdelman
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jerome chanes
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Baruch College, CUNY
Rachel Youdelman
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Ken Fuchsman
1. A universal of being human past and present is dividing an in-group from an out-group, and us from them. This is one of 98 universals found by Jewish-American anthropologist and physician Melvin Konner and published in 2010.
2. Anti-Semitism is one of many examples of us vs. them.
3. Anti-Semitism has at times ebbed and flowed. In 1867, Jews were first given the right to be admitted to the University of Vienna medical school. If Sigmund Freud had been born in 1806, he would not have been admissible. Freud would not have had patients that led him to discover psychoanalysis. Who knows if there would have been psychoanalysis if restrictions in Vienna against Jews had not been lifted. The same earlier restrictions would have applied to Freud’s Jewish mentor and initial collaborator, Josef Breuer.
4. The World War II, German effort to exterminate Jews is the worst crime in human history.
5. After World War II in the U.S., independently of each other two prominent historians of Judaism, Robert Wistrich and Deborah Lipstadt, found that there was a dramatic decline of hostility to Jews. It lasted through the end of the twentieth century.
6. After the biracial Obama was elected President in 2008, there became a resurgence of a racist American radical right. The FBI is required to annually publish findings on hate crimes. Since 2010, these reports indicate that per capita more hate crimes are committed against Jews than any other group. The FBI also finds that racist radical rightists are the predominant committers of these crimes. The hatred of Jews mandates that we recognize where on the political spectrum those opposed to Judaism are.
7. There are a variety of stereotypes of Jews rather than just one type. In 1954, Harvard psychologist Gordon Allport in his The Nature of Prejudice found that the stereotypes of Jews in Europe corresponded to the images of African-Americans in the U.S. While the portrait of American Jews had a completely different character. Anti-Semitism cannot be understood without looking at its historic and geographical varieties.
8. Given this history, psychoanalysis by itself is not sufficient to comprehend the diversity of hostility to Jews.
9. An informed psychohistory has a better chance of understanding the totality of the dreadful and enduring phenomenon of anti-Semitism.
10. One of the posts in this discussion alluded to lefty anti-Semitism. Since 1919 the American political radical left has been divided into hostile factions with contradictory ideologies, and have often been in conflict with each other. There is also a leftist political radicalism and a leftist cultural radicalism. They have not seen eye to eye. Any characterization of leftism has to recognize the disarray and opposition within the radical left. It is a major challenge to clearly define and characterize the American left with precision. Stereotypes of the left are not any better than stereotypes of Jews.
11. Recently, there are some who equate anti-Semitism with being critical of Israel’s action in the current war. This characterizations runs into a number of problems. One of these is that in a poll this month 39% of American Jews characterize Israel’s actions in Gaza as genocide.
12. It is not only native-born Americans who reach this conclusion. Israeli born Omer Bartov, a professor of Holocaust and genocide studies wrote, “My inescapable conclusion has become that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian people. Having grown up in a Zionist home…served in the I.D.F. as a soldier and officer and spent most of my career researching and writing on war crimes and the Holocaust, this was a painful conclusion to reach, and one that I resisted as long as I could.” Novelist David Grossmanis is often considered Israel’s leading living novelist. In an August 1, 2025, interview Grossman said, “For many years, I refused to use that term: ‘genocide'….But now, after the images I have seen and after talking to people who were there, I can’t help using it.” He says he uses the word “with immense pain and with a broken heart.”
13. This is a challenging time to be Jewish. As we know, discrimination against Jews is a serious, enduring, and complex problem. It is one that requires extensive knowledge of history, political science, psychology, and psychoanalysis. Part of this understanding ought to include examining how and why us vs. them is a human universal.
Ken
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Rachel Youdelman
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Judith Logue
This is excellent, Ken. Thank you for giving me permission to send it to my friends and colleagues.
Judy
Judith Logue, Ph.D.
18604 Tranquility Base Lane
Port St. Lucie, Florida 34987
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jerome chanes
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Rachel Youdelman
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Brian D'Agostino
This raises similar questions about point #2, namely, what do we mean, exactly, by "antisemitism"? If it means that gentiles would rather play cards with other gentiles rather than with Jews, many would take issue with such attitudes, but again, what exactly is the problem here? Especially if Jews would also rather play cards with other Jews than with gentiles, which seems to be implied by point #1.
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Esa Palosaari
If international finance Jewry inside and outside Europe should succeed in plunging the nations once more into a world war, the result will be not the Bolshevization of the earth and thereby the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe.
What particular social element has to be overcome in order to abolish Judaism? For the present-day Jew’s capacity for emancipation is the relation of Judaism to the emancipation of the modern world. This relation necessarily results from the special position of Judaism in the contemporary enslaved world.
Let us consider the actual, worldly Jew – not the Sabbath Jew, as Bauer does, but the everyday Jew.
Let us not look for the secret of the Jew in his religion, but let us look for the secret of his religion in the real Jew.
What is the secular basis of Judaism? Practical need, self-interest. What is the worldly religion of the Jew? Huckstering. What is his worldly God? Money.
Very well then! Emancipation from huckstering and money, consequently from practical, real Judaism, would be the self-emancipation of our time.
An organization of society which would abolish the preconditions for huckstering, and therefore the possibility of huckstering, would make the Jew impossible. His religious consciousness would be dissipated like a thin haze in the real, vital air of society. On the other hand, if the Jew recognizes that this practical nature of his is futile and works to abolish it, he extricates himself from his previous development and works for human emancipation as such and turns against the supreme practical expression of human self-estrangement.
We recognize in Judaism, therefore, a general anti-social element of the present time, an element which through historical development – to which in this harmful respect the Jews have zealously contributed – has been brought to its present high level, at which it must necessarily begin to disintegrate.
In the final analysis, the emancipation of the Jews is the emancipation of mankind from Judaism.
— —
This is no isolated fact. The Jew has emancipated himself in a Jewish manner, not only because he has acquired financial power, but also because, through him and also apart from him, money has become a world power and the practical Jewish spirit has become the practical spirit of the Christian nations. The Jews have emancipated themselves insofar as the Christians have become Jews.
Thus we find every tyrant backed by a Jew, as is every Pope by a Jesuit. In truth, the cravings of oppressors would be hopeless, and the practicability of war out of the question, if there were not an army of Jesuits to smother thought and a handful of Jews to ransack pockets.https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Russian_Loan
December 26, 1847: Jews. Write an article against this race that poisons everything by sticking its nose into everything without ever mixing with any other people. Demand its expulsion from France with the exception of those individuals married to French women. Abolish synagogues and not admit them to any employment. Demand its expulsion Finally, pursue the abolition of this religion. It’s not without cause that the Christians called them deicides. The Jew is the enemy of humankind. They must be sent back to Asia or be exterminated. H. Heine, A. Weill, and others are nothing but secret spies ; Rothschild, Crémieux, Marx, Fould, wicked, bilious, envious, bitter, etc. etc. beings who hate us. The Jew must disappear by steel or by fusion or by expulsion. Tolerate the elderly who no longer have children. Work to be done – What the peoples of the Middle Ages hated instinctively I hate upon reflection and irrevocably. The hatred of the Jew like the hatred of the English should be our first article of political faith. Moreover, the abolition of Judaism will come with the abolition of other religions. Begin by not allocating funds to the clergy and leaving this to religious offerings. – And then, a short while later, abolish the religion.
Jews and/or Judaism are thus tied up with money, with power, and with oppression. Through such an analysis, violence and demonisation of Jews are justified by some leftists. Consider Ulrike Meinhof of the Marxist Red Army Faction. For her, hatred of Jews was actually the hatred of capitalism. As a witness at the trial of Horst Mahler in 1972, she posed the question “How was Auschwitz possible, what was anti-Semitism?” Her stated opinion: “Auschwitz means that six million Jews were murdered and carted on to the rubbish dumps of Europe for being that which was maintained of them—Money-Jews.” Also, for her, the murder of the Israeli Olympic team at 1972 Munich Olympics was not only justified but something that could be praised.
”Defeating Israel means defeating the U.S., Canada, the settlements who exist on the backs of the Indigenous people and the Black People. Defeating Israel means defeating this colonial institution.”
”I don’t understand it but … basically the Death Star has a place in it that if you shoot through that specific place in the Death Star you explode the entire Death Star. So somebody said that Palestine is that place. And the construction, the Death Star, is like all of if, Sudan, Congo, all of it, Nigeria, everywhere. If we can free Palestine, it explodes everything.”
One study that attempted to answer this question by actually examining evidence concluded, "Contrary to the expectation of horseshoe theory, the data show the epicenter of antisemitic attitudes is young adults on the far right." See Eitan Hersch and Laura Royden, "Antisemitic Attitudes Across the Ideological Spectrum," Political Research Quarterly (2023). This is consistent with Milburn and Conrad's finding that punitive parenting is correlated with right wing attitudes. (https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/10659129221111081)
Moving from liberal to conservative is associated with higher antisemitic views; however, socialist identifiers appear to have higher agreement with the antisemitic statements than others on the left. Alt-right identifiers stand out with the highest rate of support for antisemitic statements.
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Ken Fuchsman
Brian,
You asked for my definition of anti-Semitism. Instead, I present three reputable definitions. The respected Cambridge Dictionary defines anti-Semitism as “hate directed at Jewish people, or cruel or unfair treatment of people because they are Jewish.” Then there is “Antisemitism” according to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, “is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of antisemitism are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities.” The Bard College Center for the Study of Hate says, “Antisemitism consists of anti-Jewish beliefs, attitudes, actions, or systemic conditions. It includes negative beliefs and feelings about Jews, hostile behavior directed against Jews (because they are Jews), and conditions that discriminate against Jews and significantly impede their ability to participate as equals in political, religious, cultural, economic, or social life.”
What is clear from these definitions is that hostility to Jews is a form of the dark emotion of hatred. What then characterized being hateful? Columbia University psychiatrist Willard Gaylin writes, hatred is “a sustained emotion of rage that occupies an individual” and allows “him to feel delight in observing or inflicting suffering on the hated one” To him, “hatred represents displacement of an internal conflict onto external sources” Otto Kernberg finds that hatred can include “envy or an inordinate need for revenge,” and/or a wish to destroy, control, or make suffer. “Paranoid fears of retaliation also usually accompany intense hatred.” Sadism can also be an integral element in hatred. Philosopher Berit Brogaard has the subtitle of her book on hatred that it is our most dangerous emotion. How so? Because it “spurs atrocities like genocides, mass shootings, and other violent attacks.” Hate contains “malevolence or evilness.”
The hatred that is contained in anti-Semitism can contain delight in making the other suffer, fulfill a need for revenge, and be sadistic and malevolent. Anti-Semitism is an extreme that may be akin to what Conrad describes as the heart of darkness.
To return to the universality of us vs. them, what Dr. Konner describes is not about who one individual wants to associate with. That is a me vs. you. The human universal Konner discusses is us vs. them. It is one human group downgrading another human group. It is a collective activity. Konner also says in group vs. out group contains ethical dualism, likely entailing discriminatory action against the out group. There is often stereotyping and demonizing of the “them.” There are of course various grades and types of this phenomenon ranging from the trivial to the deadly.
Racial prejudice is certainly one form of in group out group dynamics. For instance, over the better part of a century states in the American South established a segregated school system. One less well-financed separate system for African-Americans, another where more money was spent on all-white schools. Lynching of American black males was another form of us vs. them. It was a deadly extra- legal execution that often included cutting off the black man’s penis.
Religious prejudice is another variation of an in-group lording it over a lesser group. Jews have been a main recipient of such us vs. them collective decisions. Even before Christianity in 139 BC Jews were banished from Rome. In the second century of the common era Christians made the slanderous claim that the Jews killed Jesus. For well over a millennium because of this alleged crime Jews were forbidden to live in many Christian nations. In some instances, where they had been permitted to reside, they were expelled. In the few countries that allowed them in, Jews were prevented from entering many occupations and were forced to live in ghettos. Some countries practiced pogroms against Jews including terrorizing and even murder. It is warranted to find that anti-Semitic discrimination and despising of Jews is an extreme variety of us vs. them, of hatred and persecution of Jews. And worse was yet to come. Murder and in-group vs out-group characterizations are not strangers to one another.
Another extreme form of collective in-group vs outgroup enterprise is war. Among Homo sapiens, war is lethal armed combat between or within self-governing, autonomous groups who are fighting together to kill, defeat, and/or deter the other group. As Randolph Bourne said war inevitably releases luxurious forms of hatred. One example of this hate filled ethical dualism was given by Arthur “Bomber” Harris, who in February 1942 became the head of the British Bomber Command. He proclaimed, “I personally do not regard the whole of the remaining cities in Germany as worth the bones of one British bombardier.” This parochial viewpoint allowed him to justify the fire-bombing of the German cities of Hamburg and Dresden. The initial British World War II use of incendiary bombs was of the city of Hamburg. It began on the night of July 27-28, 1943. The result of the initial bombardment was the first firestorm created by bombs. The flames reached a height of 7,000 feet, 45,000 dead bodies were in the streets, and half the cities buildings were totally destroyed (Grayling, 2006, pp. 18-20).
In February of 1945, the British and American forces firebombed Dresden, and the resulting firestorm killed 25,000 and destroyed the city. The 1,181 tons of fire-bombs started fires that historian Biddle writes “merged into a vast, self-sustaining conflagration” (Biddle. 2002, p. 255). A British air force officer was quoted as saying that the allied air force leaders had a policy of “deliberate terror-bombing of German population centres as a ruthless expedient of hastening Hitler’s doom” These barbarous attacks indicate how far us vs. them can drive antagonists in war. It can result in the most evil acts of which humans are capable. This hatred, as Berit Brogaard says. is chock full of malevolence.
Another most extreme form of in-group out-group is genocide. The World War II Nazi government enforced an effort to exterminate all Jews. Us vs. them and extreme anti-Semitic hatred were combined together in the Holocaust. The systematic German campaign to rid the world of Jews, though not completely successful, is not exceeded in horror and evil by any other human enterprise.
Given the dire actions within this collective violence, it is foolish to underestimate how horrendous an in-group out-group and anti-Semitic campaign can be. Any assessment of being human has to fully account for how we can be so deadly towards each other. A peculiarity of being human so far has been that it is less frequent that we identify with the shared commonality of our species, and more often that our identity and loyalty is to a nearby group with its built in universal of us vs. them. Homo sapiens, it should be noted, are just one of six mammals out of 6,495 who go to war and commit genocide against their own kind. Anti-Semitism is just one example of the 16 ways humans kill, making us the premier killing mammal on the planet. Included in these killings are that this hatred of Jews has led to the worst atrocity one people have committed on a religious group.
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Brian D'Agostino
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Brian D'Agostino
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Stephen Foster
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Rachel Youdelman
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