Jews against Themselves

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Notes

1 Pascal Bruckner, La tyrannie de la penitence, mistranslated into English as The Tyranny of Guilt. On MOS, or the messianic delusion that “it's all our fault and if only we could be better we could fix anything,” see Richard Landes, “Proud to be Ashamed to be a Jew: On Jewish Self-Criticism and Its Pathologies,” ISGAP Working Paper Series, Number 9, April 2015; online: http://isgap.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Landes_Proud_to_be_Ashamed_Working_Paper.pdf.

2 On “Theobald Jews” (Theobald being the Christian convert/Jewish apostate who concocted the first blood libel in 1171), see David Solway, “Jewish Self-Hatred for Dummies,” Front Page, February 18, 2009, http://archive.frontpagemag.com/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=34091. On as-a-Jews, see “As-a-Jew explained,” UKMedia Watch, June 23, 2011, http://ukmediawatch.org/2011/06/23/as-a-jew-explained/.

3 Ian Buruma, “How to talk about Israel,” The New York Times, August 31, 2003.

4 See also his brilliant treatment of Holocaust denial (Chapter 8 on Noam Chomsky) and the bizarre forms of moral reasoning that some “Jews against themselves” derive from that catastrophe (Chapters 4, 7, 13, 17) and his analysis of Jews in the BDS movement (Chapters 14–16).

5 “Thou shalt surely rebuke your neighbor,” (Leviticus 19:17); among the traits that make it possible to acquire Torah is being “a lover of rebukes” (Ethics of the Fathers 6:6).

6 The pun between “cutting” as a teenage disorder, and Manfred Gerstenfeld's War of a Million Cuts (Jerusalem, 2015) from which Israel suffers, is intentional.

7 On the previous episode of moral and professional failure by the The New York Times, also driven by an aversion to being seen as “Jewish,” see their record in under-reporting the Holocaust, see Laurel Leff, Buried by the Times: The Holocaust and America's Most Important Newspaper (New York, 2005).

8 Tony Judt, “Israel: The Alternative,” New York Review of Books, October 23, 2003, http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2003/10/23/israel-the-alternative/.

9 Note how the same French who unthinkingly indulge in that cruel and Arab-driven amalgam against the Jews in France [Intifada des banlieues] formally forbade any trace of amalgam between radical and moderate Muslims.

10 Here, a close reading (and translation) of Golan Lahat's The Messianic Temptation: The Rise and Fall of the Israeli Left [Hebrew] (Tel Aviv, 2004) would be useful.