Welcome to the Hebrew Month of Adar: a season of “our acceptance among those we live,” until it wasn’t.
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Wanting, begging, pleading with your oppressor to be just like him — to be good enough, to prove your loyalty . . . and then proving it by turning on your own:
” . . . a lesson that Jews have been learning since the French Revolution: To the enlightened West, there is no such thing as a good-enough Jew.
(*see Commentary article below, cloaking NYT article – no firewall)
Note: The historian Bernard Lewis described Jewish self-hatred as a neurotic reaction to the impact of anti-semitism by Jews accepting, expressing, and even exaggerating, the basic assumptions of the antisemite. Bernard Lewis, “Semites and Anti-Semites,” W. W. Norton & Company 1999, pp. 255-256.
Perhaps we are witnessing the return of the Wicked Son, who manages to reappear . . . at a Seder he no longer can be a part of: instead of the Afikomen, he eats his own.
The Wicked Son asks . . .
The wicked son, who asks, “What is this service to you?”, is characterized by the Haggadah as isolating himself from the Jewish people, standing by objectively and watching their behavior rather than participating. Therefore, he is rebuked by the explanation that “It is because God acted for my sake when I left Egypt.” (This implies that the Seder is not for the wicked son because the wicked son would not have deserved to be freed from Egyptian slavery.) Where the four sons are illustrated in the Haggadah, this son has frequently been depicted as carrying weapons or wearing stylish contemporary fashions (perhaps the kefiyah is the new Tallis).
Call it whatever you would like: or perhaps report it accurately.
The terms “self-hating Jew”, “self-loathing Jew” and auto-antisemite are pejorative terms used to describe a Jew whose viewpoints on any specific matter are perceived as antisemitic.
Recognition of the concept gained widespread currency after German-Jewish ^ philosopher Theodor Lessing published his 1930 book Der jüdische Selbsthaß (lit. ’Jewish Self-Hatred’), which sought to explain a perceived inclination among Jewish intellectuals towards inciting antisemitism by stating their views about Judaism. More recently, this spotlight on antisemitism motivated by self-hatred within the Jewish Diaspora is said to have become “something of a key term of opprobrium in and beyond Cold War era debates about Zionism in light of how some Jews may despise their entire identity due to their perception of the Arab-Israeli conflict.
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* Articles to access:
Here Commentary highlights the Jews who beg on their knees to be accepted by their oppressors, and still, remain not good enough for Western Civilization.
“Feeding their fellow Jews to the Crocodile”
https://www.commentary.org/seth-mandel/feeding-their-fellow-jews-to-the-crocodile/
Here: NYT Article (no firewall) which highlights the Jew who is not good enough for Western Civilization: . . . .
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/12/arts/guernica-magazine-staff-quits-israel.html?unlocked_article_code=1.cU0.5M1Q.bnLf0K2qxO2C&smid=url-share
* Commentary Excerpt: Winston Churchill famously said of those who wouldn’t get off the sidelines against Hitler, “Each one hopes that if he feeds the crocodile enough, the crocodile will eat him last.”
“Over the weekend, there was an explosion in applications for the honor of being eaten last among Jews in arts and literature. Late Sunday night, the Academy Award for Most Trembling Knees went to Jonathan Glazer, the director who instantly went viral by equating his fellow Jews with the Nazis, but the festivities started earlier in the weekend. The magazine Guernica, which is the literary version of earplugs, accidentally published a Jew and immediately apologized.
The offending writer, whose essay was retracted after a slew of resignations by staffers, refused to serve in the IDF after moving to Israel and spends her days volunteering to help Palestinian children. But she learned an important lesson when the magazine nonetheless threw her under the bus in “solidarity,” a lesson that Jews have been learning since the French Revolution:
To the enlightened Western left, there is no such thing as a good-enough Jew. And so along came the crocodile.”
