I found this gem from 2009 the other day - it was originally an opinion editorial published in Ha'Aretz. Since I am still writing a post on a similar theme, I thought I would present it in its entirety. Keep in mind that most Jews mean well, but the results of anti-Jewish or anti-Israel actions can be disastrous, especially performed by Jews, especially in the land of Israel, where we all live together...
It is rather lengthy, but well worth the read, even though I believe there is a little more "wiggle room" for a change of heart than Mr. Silber does.
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The Jew Flu: The Strange Illness of
Jewish anti-Semitism
by Uzi Silber
by Uzi Silber
Flus are contagious and incurable,
but containable; the ancient and resilient virus known as Jew Flu is no
different.
Diagnosis
The 1930s Labor Zionist leader Berl Katznelson asked "Is there another People on Earth so emotionally twisted that they consider everything their nation does despicable and hateful, while every murder, rape, robbery committed by their enemies fill their hearts with admiration and awe?"
This is Jew Flu - the virus of
Jewish Anti-Semitism, and its Jewish Anti- and Post-Zionist mutations,
afflicting a small but inordinately loud minority of Hebrews.
Its modern symptoms are a rejection
of Israel's identity as a Jewish state and a dismissal of its right to defend
itself militarily, while embracing the goals of its nihilistic Arab enemies.
Those infected with the virus wildly inflate Israeli sins real or imagined,
while excusing or rationalizing Palestinian anti-semitism and outrages against
Jews.
Those afflicted with Jew Flu often
view the notion of Peoplehood as an artifice, which implies a rejection of
Jewish national self-determination and acceptance of the 90-year-old
Palestinian Arab contention that Jews are not a nation but merely members of a
religion, and as such don’t merit a national home of their own.
Is Jew Flu a bona-fide illness?
Michael Welner, a psychiatrist at New York University, suggests that Jewish
Anti-Semitism is akin to a personality disorder, enabling a person to
"derive some psychological benefit from this pathological thinking."
What causes Jew Flu? Harvard
psychiatrist Kenneth Levin argues for twin culprits: so-called 'Stockholm
Syndrome', where "population segments under chronic siege commonly embrace
the indictments of their besiegers however bigoted and outrageous", as
well as "the psychodynamics of abused children who blame themselves for
their situation and believe they could mollify their tormenters if they were
'good'."
Julie Ancis, a psychology professor
at Georgia State University says that it isn't "uncommon for a minority
group with a history of oppression and persecution to possess internalized
self-hatred regarding their cultural/religious identity."
I'm no therapist, but that won't
restrain me from proposing my own theory for the ultimate cause of Jew Flu.
More on that later.
Since the defamations of Jew Flu
victims are propagated across the Internet and are extensively documented and
challenged in many fine books and articles, repeating them here would be
redundant.
Suffice it to say that Noam Chomsky,
Daniel Boyarin, Joel Kovel, Avrum Burg, Ilan Pappe, Steve Quester, Jacqueline
Rose, Tony Judt, Naomi Klein, Michael Neumann, Ben Ehrenreich, (the apparently
"outed") Mahmoud Ahmedinejad and their ilk, spout pronouncements
eerily similar to the propaganda routinely ejaculated by representatives of
Fatah, Hamas or Hezbollah.
At the same time, a hearty
"shout out" is due those who have made it their business to forcefully
rebut the Jewish defamers, including Andrea Levin, Edward Alexander, Alan
Dershowitz, David Solway and others. Those interested in a quick and free
primer on Jew Flu should download Alvin Rosenfeld's UJA-sponsored brief,
"Progressive Jewish Thought and the New Anti-Semitism".
History
Jew Flu, of course, isn't new: It
has lurked in our midst for millennia. Jews collaborated with Greeks, Romans
and Inquisitors; Bolshevik self loathers displayed savagery towards their
brethren; their prophet Karl Marx was described by author Rafael Patai as the
"most influential of Jewish self haters", who thought "Israelite
faith" most repugnant, and whose rabid anti-Semitism was attributed by the
historian Simon Dubnow to "the natural hatred of the renegade for the camp
he deserted."
Incredibly, certain young Jews in
Weimar Germany, members of a certain Association of National-German Jews were
sufficiently maddened by Jew Flu to attempt to "identify and ingratiate
(themselves) with the Nazi Party".
Jew Flu developed its anti-Zionist
strain in the decades preceding the creation of Israel: renowned philosopher
Martin Buber of Hebrew University and others actually justified the Palestinian
Arab pogroms of 1921, 1929 and the late 30s, urging that desperate Jewish
holocaust refugees be permitted to enter Palestine only with Arab permission.
In 1944, and with the destruction of
European Jewry proceeding apace, Lessing Rosenwald, the President of the
American Council for Judaism equated the ideal of Jewish Statehood with the
concept of a racial state "the Hitlerian concept".
Following remission during the
post-Holocaust years, Jewry experienced a relapse of Jew Flu in the aftermath
of the '67 Six Day War. In the U.S., young Jewish radicals of the New Left
branded Israel a fascist, colonial power while praising Arab countries as
progressive and revolutionary - unsurprising since many were Soviet client
states.
They remained largely silent as
Soviet tanks crushed the 1968 Prague Spring - presumably a 'progressive'
development.
New Left sentiments found expression
in Israel even during the aftermath of the traumatic Yom Kippur War; at a Tel
Aviv reception in late 1973, my mother found herself amid a chatty crowd of
cocktailing cultural figures casually dismissive of their own country's right
to exist.
The infection among Israel's
cultural elites intensified through the Lebanon War and the two Intifadas that
sandwiched the delusional Oslo era. As author Aharon Meged lamented in 1994,
there existed "an emotional and moral identification by the majority of
Israel's intelligentsia, and its print and electronic media, with people
committed to our annihilation."
Epitomizing this "moral
identification" were the certain prominent Jewish journalists who,
according to Israeli journalist Nahum Barnea, crucially failed the so-called
'lynch test', by exhibiting an inability to ever criticize Palestinian terror,
even following the widely televised gruesome execution of two Jews by a
Palestinian mob in Ramallah In 2000.
Metamorphosis
It was at this time that Jew Flu
claimed a childhood friend of mine. We'd come of age together in the early
'80s, like-minded Zionists, he more "Kahanish" in temperament.
Immigrating to Israel the day after graduation, he'd serve in the IDF, settle
in Jerusalem, marry, spawn a brood, and settle into the life of an Israeli
academic, where anti Zionist stances are common and open identification as an
Israeli patriot is tantamount to career suicide.
Infection struck during the Oslo
years: before the millennium was out, the youthful Kahanist yeshiva boy had
morphed into a militant Jewish Anti Zionist, mindlessly spouting hackneyed and
malicious anti-Israel canards on leftwing and Arab websites, and regularly
consorting with a posse of Arab academics in Ramallah.
This episode recalled a scene from
"Radio Days", the Woody Allen movie in which an uncle fasting on Yom
Kippur indignantly watches the Jewish communists next door brazenly barbecuing.
In Holiday suit he marches out the front door to scold the Reds on their evil
ways, only to return shortly after chewing on a chicken drumstick, indignantly
decrying religion as the opiate of the masses.
Those like my friend afflicted with
Jew Flu deny their infection, contending that criticism of Israel isn't
Anti-Semitism or even Anti-Israel.
Helpfully, Natan Sharansky
formulated his so-called 3D litmus test to clearly distinguish mere Israel
critics from Jew Flu victims, and has allowed me to diagnose my old friend.
As it turns out, the afflicted
regularly engage in at least one of the following -Demonization (comparing
Israeli actions to Nazism and referring to Arab refugee camps as Auschwitz);-
Double Standards (singling out Israel for human rights abuses while ignoring
the blatant human rights violators such as Syria, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Egypt,
Palestinian Authority, North Korea, Cuba, China, Myanmar etc); and
Delegitimization (denying Israel the fundamental right to exist as a Jewish
state).
During March 2002, Jihadist suicide
murderers were exploding on Israeli buses every other day, massacring and
maiming hundreds of Jews in a cascade of latter-day pogroms; savage images of
Haim Nahman Bialik's monumental poem, "City of Slaughter" blazed
across the broken land.
125 Jews were massacred and hundreds
were wounded by Palestinian suicide murderers that month. Yet unsurprisingly my
stricken friend declined comment.
My friend seems to amuse his Arab
colleagues: Appearing at a conference some years ago at Cairo's American
University, an Egyptian fellow panelist quipped to the audience that our mutual
friend was "more pro-Palestinian than me - I am more pro-Israel than
him."
Incidentally, this college has since
instituted a ban on Israeli academics.
At this point allow me to complicate
things: It's easy to assume that those struck with Jew Flu would be contemptuous
of Jewish religious observance. They often hold Marxist views, which would
imply an atheist outlook.
Yet what one should one make of my
friend who performs Kiddush on Friday nights, fasts on Yom Kippur and uses two
sets of dishes in his kosher kitchen? Would such Jewish customs be performed by
an anti-Semite?
Knesset speaker Avrum Burg is a
lifelong modern orthodox Jew, a skull capped davener whose Jew Flu was latent
for years but burst out into the open when he took to smearing Israel in Nazi-like
browns.
Daniel and Jonathan Boyarin are
pleasant, prominent and yarmulked professors of Jewish history who don tefilin
daily, daven on Shabbat and holidays and are easily mistaken in appearance for
West Bank settlers.
Yet Daniel is comfortable vilifying
Israel regularly as a violent outlaw state. And Jonathan admitted to me some
years ago during an especially sweaty Simchat Torah "hakafa" on the
Lower East Side that his views are identical if not even more radical than
Daniel's (if that was possible.)
Actually, it is interesting that the
views of such radical yet observant Jews resemble the tenets of Catholic
Liberation Theology. But could such a trio be accused of outright
anti-Semitism?
The Burgs and Boyarins of this world
have long revered another devout Jew, the departed Yishayahu Leibowitz, a
renowned scholar, recipient of the Israel Prize, and editor of the Hebrew
Encyclopedia, a Jerusalemite who habitually referred to drafted Israeli
soldiers who happened to be defending his charmed way of life as "Judeo-Nazis".
Was Leibowitz an anti-Semite?
Submitting their pronouncements to
the Sharansky test demonstrates that even tefilin wearing, kosher food eating
Kiddush reciters can speak and write like anti-Semites.
Prognosis
But back to the elusive cause of Jew
Flu: what makes one Jew vulnerable and not another? Wouldn't a far larger
proportion of Jews fall prey to Jew Flu if, say, Stockholm syndrome was the
culprit? Is there a prime mover, some physiological or neurological smoking gun
pointing to a root cause?
There may be. David Brooks recently
reported in the New York Times on research by a Haifa University team led by
Reem Yahya who studied the brains scans of Arabs and Jews while showing them
images of hands and feet in painful situations.
Brooks reports that "the two
cultures perceived pain differently. The Arabs perceived higher levels of pain
over all while the Jews were more sensitive to pain suffered by members of a
group other than their own."
This phenomenon was epitomized by
Rosa Luxemburg, a prominent Bolshevik and Jew Flu victim. "I have no room
in my heart for Jewish suffering," declared Rosa the Red. "Why do you
pester me with Jewish troubles? I feel closer to the wretched victims of the
rubber plantations of Putumayo or the Negroes in Africa... I have no separate
corner in my heart for the ghetto."
And then there's the modest story
Ahmad the cabbie related to me last week as we drove through Eilat-like Palm
Springs: Ahmad's brother in Nablus was employed for many years by an Israeli
Jewish building contractor. When the outbreak of Intifada in 2000 permanently
barred Ahmad's brother from work in Israel, his Jewish boss continued to pay
the brother's salary for five years.
The intriguing research out of Haifa
suggests that Jews may very well be inherently altruistic. But while exhibiting
more sensitivity to another group's pain is one thing, embracing the goals of
people openly committed to one's destruction is a form of madness.
So here's my ultimate theory for the
cause of this nefarious virus: Jew Flu is a condition in which being "more
sensitive to pain suffered by members of a group other than (one's) own
metastasizes into a malignant emotional and moral identification with people
committed to (one's) annihilation."
Like any other virus, Jew Flu is
contagious but containable. Yet ultimately incurable.
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The original is here: The
Jew Flu: The Strange Illness of Jewish anti-Semitism (this one’s for free!)
H/T to Yenta Press’s comment found on Elder of Ziyon’s “Rabbi”
Michael Lerner Tramples Jewish Values.
More on this topic later.
