The Diaspora Syndrome,Kenneth Levin

Over the course of Jewish history, there has likely been no anti-Jewish canard, however absurd and bigoted, that has not won the endorsement of some Jews.

It is, in fact, common within chronically besieged communities that some members will take to heart the indictments of the assailants. They hope that by doing so, and by promoting reform to address the indictments, they can win relief.

The paradigm on the level of individual psychology is the response of children subjected to chronic abuse. Such children almost invariably blame themselves for their suffering. The explanation for this lies in the existential predicament of such children. They can, on the one hand, acknowledge that they are being unfairly victimized and are powerless to change their situation, and reconcile themselves to its hopelessness. Or they can blame themselves, interpret their predicament as a consequence of their being "bad," and endure the self-criticism that this perspective entails - but thereby sustain a fantasy of control.

In such a fantasy, by becoming "good" they will elicit more benign behavior from their tormentors and win relief. Children almost invariably seek to avoid hopelessness at all costs, and adults do the same.

In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, as the issue of extending citizenship rights to Jews was first being considered in the states of Central Europe, those opposed to granting such rights pointed to characteristics of the Jews that ostensibly rendered them unfit. They claimed, for example, that Yiddish was a crude, unwholesome language that reflected the degenerate nature of the Jews and illustrated their unfitness for citizenship rights, and that Jews were primarily engaged in trade and this was another mark of their degeneracy and inappropriateness for citizenship.

Both indictments, and others like them, were endorsed by important Jewish leaders and members of the Jewish cultural elite.

During the nineteenth century, Jews in substantial numbers abandoned Yiddish as their primary language to speak "good" German. Significant segments of the community also succeeded in leaving behind the commercial occupations of their fathers to become poets, composers, philosophers, and intellectuals of various other stripes.

Many leading voices in the surrounding society argued that Jews were still unable to apply their learning to true aesthetic or intellectual creativity but instead were subverting what they had learned to some lesser, alien end and were coarsening German culture. Even this indictment was embraced by some Jews.

One can argue that attempts by minorities to accommodate the wider society can and do at times succeed in winning them greater acceptance. This is true, and Jewish exertions to give up Yiddish and master normative German could be perceived as having been a pragmatic step. But that is very different from endorsing the derogation of Yiddish as intrinsically primitive, inferior, and corrupting.

Such endorsements were founded on the desire to believe that Jews were regarded with distaste and loathing and treated as inferior because they spoke an inferior language and had been coarsened by it. Becoming linguistically equal to their neighbors, then, would assure their eing treated as equal - a wish-driven delusion.

This example reflects a propensity for "categorical" thinking - that is, choosing to think in absolute, categorical terms about what may be simply pragmatic steps that could or could not have salutary consequences. Such a predilection is driven by the desperate desire for acceptance and a consequent wishful thinking that acceptance could inexorably be won by the right communal policies. The same mindset can be seen in other stances as well.

_{For example, Central European liberals - some on the basis of principle, others for pragmatic reasons - were generally more receptive to the extension of rights to Jews than were more conservative elements. But many Jews, in aligning themselves with liberal groups, chose to construe this sympathy as intrinsic and not as something at least partly driven by a convergence of political interests that could change in the future.
Instead, in their desperation for support and for opportunities to diminish Jewish vulnerability by linking their fate to broader, and more powerful, social identities, they wishfully imbued the link with liberal parties as having transcendent significance and endurance.
Jews' categorical identification with parties of the Left became commonplace throughout Central and Western Europe. For some, this identification went beyond liberal parties to socialist and communist groups.
In Western Europe, many of those Jews who embraced socialism did so because they had ultimately become disenchanted with the liberal parties, which provided, for example, no bulwark against de facto discrimination and the rise of anti-Semitic political parties in the wake of German unification.
Some Jews hoped that in immersing Jewish concerns in the struggle of other disadvantaged groups, particularly the working class, and in seeking a more radical restructuring of society, they might win relief from persisting Jewish disabilities. Some hoped in particular that by Jews distancing themselves from the bourgeoisie and the excoriated Jewish link with the commercial class, they would mollify their enemies.
Other Jews in Western Europe embraced parties of the far Left in an effort to divest themselves of a Jewish identity entirely, assuming the alternative identity of champion of the working class.
In Eastern Europe, which at this time meant most notably czarist Russia, Jews retained more of a national consciousness and more robust communal institutions than elsewhere. Hence, in response to czarist depredations, Jews formed parties of the Left that were specifically Jewish, in contrast to Jewish socialists elsewhere who were more typically inclined to break with the Jewish community.
But in Russia as elsewhere, Jews who affiliated with socialist parties commonly took to heart anti-Jewish assaults on the Jewish bourgeoisie. They wished to believe that both the Jewish middle class and traditionally religious Jews were the true targets of Jew-haters and that their own path would be an escape from the shadow of anti-Semitism.
Throughout Europe, those Jews who supported socialism while retaining a sense of Jewish identity nevertheless tended to ignore or even give some credence to the intense anti-Jewish rhetoric that was almost everywhere an element of socialist cant. As for Jews who embraced socialism as an alternative identity and sought to shed any link to the Jewish community, they often endorsed anti-Jewish socialist rhetoric.
_{European Jewish immigrants to America, both from Central Europe and from those eastern areas where the vast majority of Jewish immigrants originated, brought their political predilections with them. Although in the first decades of the twentieth century this translated into some support for American socialist parties, with the presidency of Franklin Roosevelt Jews became overwhelmingly aligned with the Democratic Party.
Both pragmatism and principle figured in this embrace of the Democrats. At a time of intense anti-Semitism in America, starting in the post-World War I years and exacerbated by the socially corrosive effects of the Depression, Jews suffered expressions of bias that affected their basic capacity to function in the society. The public employment and other programs Roosevelt introduced as part of the New Deal were largely open to Jews at all levels and broke the prevailing blackballing of Jews.
In addition, the Jewish predilection to seek to immerse Jewish objectives in broader social agendas, and to pursue alliances of the disadvantaged as a means of winning greater acceptance, converged with Roosevelt's building of his grand Democratic alliance of the disadvantaged.
At the same time, one can see delusional elements similar to those at work in Jewish communities in Europe. These include a wishful thinking that inclined Jews to construe pragmatic and possibly transient alliances as representing transcendent and enduring convergences of interests and goals, and a consequent debilitating blindness to changes in the political landscape and slowness to respond to them.
With the rise of the Nazis in Germany, and even with the revelation, in late 1942, of the Nazis' program to exterminate all of Europe's Jews, these elements of Jewish political life in America compromised the American Jewish community's response. To be sure, effectively promoting the rescue of Jews from Europe faced great hurdles related to prevailing anti-Jewish attitudes and, more particularly, the hostility of the State Department. Yet it was primarily through the efforts of a small group of Jews acting outside the mainstream leadership that the Roosevelt administration was finally prevailed upon to create, in early 1944, the War Refugee Board that would succeed - despite persistent administration obstruction - in contributing to the rescue of perhaps 200,000 Jews.
Although the Jewish leadership did try to promote rescue, its exertions were compromised both by fear of an anti-Jewish backlash and by loyalty to Roosevelt.
Some in the mainstream leadership worried about Jewish advocacy of rescue being seen as Jewish parochialism and lack of patriotism in a time of war. For example, throughout the Nazi era the American Jewish leadership avoided campaigning for increasing Jewish immigration to the United States for fear of stirring still greater anti-Semitism.
In addition, key elements of the Jewish leadership were averse to criticizing Roosevelt, even though it was very clear that he could have saved large numbers of people at minimal political cost to himself and that he was at best indifferent to the plight of Europe's Jews. Simply insisting that the State Department stop erecting additional barriers to the issuing of visas and to the use of visas that had already been issued, and that it allow Jews to immigrate at least to the extent allowed by immigration quotas, would likely have saved several hundred thousand people; but Roosevelt refused to do so. At times he even parroted Nazi anti-Jewish assertions.
Caught up in categorical hinking about who was with them and who was not, it was very difficult for many Jews to look objectively at Roosevelt. They essentially refused to acknowledge that the leader who had forged the alliance of the underprivileged, whose administration employed Jews at all levels in a manner that contrasted dramatically to the obstacles to employment Jews routinely encountered in the wider society, was not interested in offering succor to the Jews of Europe who were being murdered at the rate of several thousand per day.
Rabbi Stephen Wise, leader of the American Jewish community and its efforts to promote rescue, defended Roosevelt even as he repeatedly encountered the administration's obstructionism. "[Roosevelt] is still our friend, even though he does not move as expeditiously as we would wish," he declared, and he took to task Jewish critics of the president.
In June 1944, the Republican National Convention put a strong pro-Zionist plank in its platform for the upcoming election and criticized Roosevelt for not pressing Britain to open Mandate Palestine to Jewish refugees. In reaction, Wise wrote to Roosevelt, "As an American Jew and Zionist, I am deeply ashamed of the reference to you in the Palestine Resolution adopted by the Republican National Convention. It is utterly unjust, and you may be sure that American Jews will come to understand how unjust it is."
This loyalty to Roosevelt also led the Jewish leadership to limit its engaging of the president's political foes in efforts to promote rescue. In contrast, the small group outside the leadership that did succeed in bringing about the creation of the War Refugee Board did not hesitate to work with sympathetic Republicans, and doing so was a key factor in its success.
_{In the years after World War II, anti-Semitism in America dramatically diminished. Yet American Jews, according to polls, continued to believe otherwise. A 1990 survey of affiliated Jews showed that some 75 percent considered anti-Semitism a serious problem in America. Perhaps for this reason elements of the community have continued to display psychological stigmata associated with besieged groups, such as the taking to heart of anti-Jewish canards.
American Jews also believe anti-Semitism is more rife among American conservatives than liberals, even though actual surveys of American opinion regarding Jews do not support this assumption. This is linked with that tendency to categorical thinking about political "allies," a wish to see protection in immersing Jewish interests in larger groups, particularly alliances of the disadvantaged, and a consequent difficulty recognizing that perceived allies may not see things the way one imagines and wishes.
A notable related phenomenon is that even though support for Israel has in recent years been significantly stronger among Republicans than Democrats, American Jews remain overwhelmingly Democrat.
Illustrative of the former point is a poll of American opinion conducted last August, during the Israel-Hizbullah war, by the Pew Research Center. To a question presenting various choices of what should be America's position on the war, 54 percent of Republican respondents favored supporting Israel and 5 percent preferred criticizing it. In contrast, 31 percent of Democrats chose support for Israel, 11 percent criticism. To a question of who was most responsible for the war, 55 percent of Republicans answered Hizbullah, 9 percent Israel. Among Democrats, 33 percent said Hizbullah, 15 percent Israel.
Regarding the political affiliation of American Jews, in October 2006 the American Jewish Cmmittee released its Annual Survey of American Jewish Opinion reflecting polling from late September to mid-October. It turned out that 54 percent of American Jews identified as Democrats and 15 percent as Republicans (29 percent as Independents). In the 2004 presidential election about three-quarters of American Jews voted for Democrat John Kerry and in the recent congressional elections an even higher percentage voted for Democratic candidates.
For those who, in the face of collective memories of anti-Jewish depredations, have hollowed out their "Jewish" identity and reduced it largely to a political commitment to a Left imagined as some righteous alliance of the traditionally targeted and disadvantaged, current political predilections are not likely to change.
For those whose Jewish identity is richer and in whom the dissonance between Jewish well-being and old political assumptions might arouse some inner tension, that tension could result in a shift in traditional political allegiances.
But in America, as in Israel itself, it is likely that old Jewish political patterns, born in response to chronic besiegement, will continue to compromise Jewish well-being and even undermine the Jewish state.

Kenneth Levin is a psychiatrist and historian and author of "The Oslo Syndrome: Delusions of a People under Siege" (Smith & Kraus, 2005), now available in paperback.

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an eye opener

Date 12:01, 01-31, 07

This article is an eye opener for me.
But will it change people's positions and behavior?}}}