His analysis of Rose, Churchill and Lerman is correct, but I see it as a common fallacy among many of the Jewish Left,- they cannot imagine Jews sticking up for themselves. It is they who suffer from psychological guilt traumas. The modern Zionists have shed their feelings of inferiority, thanks to the brave Israelis who have known nothing but war and terror. Imagine,- they didn't give up and run away, but fought and fight back. The racists cannot take it, so they in turn have to accuse the Jews of racism against,- whom? Palestinians,- they are hardly the Left's favorite allies, but they'll do as long as they are anti-Jews. Only those Jews who feel guilty take it out on their own. See article
http://www.icjs-online.org/index.php?eid=6090&ICJS=139&article=1939.
But blaming it on some psychological pay-back is ludicrous!MM
Therapists to the Jews
by Shalom Lappin
Wednesday May 20, 2009
Psychologising the Jewish question
In the past few years an interesting mode of discourse has gained currency among some critics of Israel. It consists in characterizing most Israelis, and the Jews who are concerned about Israel's continued existence, as suffering from a deep collective psycho-pathology that conditions them to commit or to endorse systematic brutalization of the Palestinians. It takes Israel and its supporters to be acting out the effects of a long term historical trauma that reached its climax in the Holocaust. They are deflecting the intense anger, helplessness and shame accumulated over centuries of persecution in Europe on to innocent Arab victims in Israel/Palestine. These victims are surrogates for the real but no longer accessible oppressors of the Jews. The analogy driving this discourse is that of the abused child who grows into an abusive adult, imposing his childhood experiences of violence on members of his family and his adult environment.
Three clear examples of this psychologized view of the Israel-Palestine conflict are Jacqueline Rose's book The Question of Zion(Princeton University Press, 2005), Caryl Churchill's play Seven Jewish Children, recently staged at the Royal Court Theatre, and Anthony Lerman's article 'Must Jews always see themselves as victims' (The Independent, March 7, 2009). Rose argues that Zionism, and the country that it created, derive from the the same psychological disorder that generated the false messianism of Shabbtai Zvi and his followers. She regards it as a form of mass hysteria generated by the inability of Jews to respond rationally to prolonged suffering. Churchill adapts this diagnosis of Zionism to Israel's recent offensive in Gaza. She portrays Jewish children as obsessively raised with the collective memory of historical trauma as the pervasive background against which Israeli acts of murder and expulsion are justified or denied. Lerman invokes the work of Israeli political psychologist Daniel Bar Tal to claim that the inability of Israelis and Jews to deal adequately with the experience of the Holocaust has given rise to a persecution complex that is responsible for Israel's perverse behaviour towards the Palestinians, as well as the willingness of Jews abroad to support this behaviour.
There are at least five features of the psychologizing discourse worth noting. First, it provides an ostensibly scientific basis for attributing negative properties to an ethnic group. Inter alia, most (but not all) Israelis, and many of their Diaspora Jewish supporters suffer from a blood lust. They are insensitive to the suffering of innocent Palestinians. They are exclusively concerned with the welfare of their own people. They engage in illicit lobbying and hysterical political campaigning to promote a narrow and destructive group agenda. They refuse to acknowledge the normal constraints of universal human rights and morality. These are, of course, versions of longstanding anti-Jewish bigotries that infect European and Middle Eastern history. They are, however, rendered opaque and acceptable through translation into the psychological symptoms of a disturbed group. The painstaking clinical studies required to support serious psychological diagnoses are singularly absent from the psychologizing discourse. It is, in fact, a vintage case of pseudo-science in the service of prejudice. It does, however, serve an important political and cultural role. It renders acceptable attitudes and assumptions that would be inadmissible if expressed in traditional terms.
Second, the practitioners of psychologizing discourse do not, in general, present themselves as adversaries of Israel and the Jews. On the contrary, they are therapists moved by the highest motives of public responsibility. They seek to cure the patients of their collective disease by getting them to see the full extent of their malady and to recognize its roots in a historically disordered collective spirit. They do not see Israel and the Jews as evil, but as deeply pathological and in need of proper care. That they may, in many cases, prescribe a therapy that requires the patients (in the case of Israel) to cede their own collective existence is not an expression of hostility. It is a desire to free the patients from the agony that they are inflicting upon themselves and the rest of the world.
Third, this discourse is a particularly effective method for shutting down serious political discussion and controlling reaction. If members of the deranged group dissent from this account, their comments are summarily dismissed as the delusional resistance of patients to the benign efforts of the therapist to treat their illness. Moreover, events like Israel's operation in Gaza are not construed as the destructive and misguided actions of an unpleasant government, phenomena common enough in other parts of the world. They are taken to be direct expressions of a perverse national psychology working itself out with the grim inexorability of a medical condition. They require not the sort of criticism appropriate for normal people and countries, but a complete quarantine of the patients for their own good, as well as that of everyone else. Jews and Israelis do not act from the same motives that determine the behaviour, good or bad, of balanced people. Their conduct is the result of a diseased nature that requires radical revision to restore them to health.
Fourth, the psychologizing discourse contrasts with 'root cause' explanations applied to terrorist violence and extremism from oppressed groups.
These explanations use past persecution to exculpate the agents of violence from responsibility for their choices. The actions that they commit are ultimately reduced to the oppression that they or their people have experienced. The therapists to the Jews do not treat Jewish suffering as a basis for mitigating Jewish or Israeli misbehaviour. Instead, it is used to highlight the depth of the pathology that generates it, and to focus on the need for drastic corrective measures, where these frequently require that Israel be politically eliminated as the best way of eradicating the disease.
Finally, the use of the psychologizing discourse for the Israel-Palestine conflict is sui generis. If anyone were to construe other conflicts in analogous terms, they would be quickly dismissed as racists or neo-colonialists. Imagine, for example, how progressive opinion would receive the suggestion that Africans were disposed to mass murder and civil war because they had been traumatized by centuries of colonial rule and so had internalized the treatment and mores to which Europeans had subjected them. Similarly, it seems unlikely that any attempt to analyze the contemporary Muslim world as suffering from a collective psychosis brought on by the trauma of European violence over the centuries will meet with much enthusiasm among people who regard themselves as politically enlightened. But it is precisely the fashionably 'progressive' who accept as the height of wisdom the psychologizing discourse about Jews and Israel.
Using group psychological profiling to attribute to Jews an unnatural and diseased nature is not new. In 1901 Otto Weininger published Sex and Character in Vienna (an anonymous English translation appeared in 1906, published by G.P. Putnam's Sons, New York). In this book, Weininger contrasts masculine and feminine character types. He identifies men with reason, virtue, heroism, ego, cultural creativity (genius) and social order. The female is weak, dependent, cowardly, amoral, lacking in ego, driven by sexual passion, incapable of genuine creativity, and subversive of order. Weininger cites a variety of biological and medical 'facts' to argue for his description of male and female typologies. He then distinguishes between 'Aryan' and Jewish characters, claiming that the Aryans instantiate male properties, while the Jews are largely feminine in nature.
Weininger wrote in turn of the century Vienna, when pseudo-scientific theories of race and sex were invoked to support racist anthropological views and misogynist attitudes towards women. These cultural themes defined the context in which Weininger formulated his ideas. They also provided the basis for Nazi policies in the following decades. However, it is important to distinguish carefully between some of these themes and Weininger's enterprise. While there are clear racist elements in his book, he is careful to insist that he is not characterizing Jews as a racial entity, but as an idealized psychological type, instantiated to a greater or lesser degree by actual Jews. He also clearly states that he opposes any attempt to persecute or disenfranchise Jews. He holds out the prospect of escape from their respective natures to both individual women and Jews. For women this requires adopting male values and forms of behaviour. Jews can redeem themselves from their type by converting to Christianity and embracing Aryan culture. Weininger himself had adopted Lutheranism. He identified with Protestantism, rather than Catholicism, because of a strong admiration for Kant and the reliance on individual conscience in achieving moral responsibility.
It is tempting to dismiss Weininger as a crackpot (Freud, who met him briefly, described him as 'highly gifted but sexually deranged'). He committed suicide at the age of 23, two years after the publication of Sex and Character, and became a romantic cult figure. In fact, his book had a significant impact on intellectual life in Vienna and abroad. Prominent cultural figures hailed it as a work of genius. So, for example, Karl Kraus, the noted Viennese satirist, and Ludwig Wittgenstein, the influential Austrian philosopher, expressed great admiration for Weininger's work. Like him, they were both converted Jews. Weininger's view of Jews resonated widely through Austrian literary society.
Weininger was an early therapist to the Jews. There are, however, fundamental differences between his project and that of the latter-day therapists: he regarded Jews and Judaism as a disease to be escaped; they, in general, do not, although they frequently slide into such a view of Israel. Some even present themselves as the guardians of 'true' Jewish values in the face of Zionist corruption. The traits that Weininger stigmatizes in his caricature of a Jewish cultural type are largely disjoint from those that the contemporary therapists select for opprobrium. Weininger states that the origins of the Jewish type are a mystery to him. By contrast the contemporary therapists explain negative collective Jewish features as the result of group trauma.
But important analogies do exist between Weininger's writings on Jews and the psychologizing discourse that has emerged in recent years. In both cases traditional anti-Jewish prejudices are effectively legitimized through a pseudo-scientific exercise in collective psychological portraiture. Weininger and the latter-day therapists both offer an exit from group stigma through recognition of the pathology that provokes it, and the adoption of an alternative set of cultural commitments. For the Jews among the therapists, this is a route out of quarantine into the mainstream of civilized opinion. No wonder, then, that it should prove to be attractive in the face of a hostile social environment.
Most therapists to the Jews would probably recoil at the suggestion that they share a common set of concerns with Weininger. They are undoubtedly sincere in their professed intention to be helpful and constructive. It is unfortunate that they have apparently failed to examine the defining assumptions of their enterprise. Should they do so, they may well be surprised to discover the deeply racist nature of some of these assumptions.
(Shalom Lappin, King's College, London)
__._,_.___
Tuesday, May 26, 2009
Wednesday, May 13, 2009
THE POPE IN THE ME: the limits of interfaith (Jerusalem Post).
"The Jerusalem Post Internet Edition"
Limits of interfaith
May. 12, 2009
THE JERUSALEM POST
Perhaps we expect too much of priests, rabbis and imams. We want our clergy to be spiritual beacons, above the temporal fray; and to be politically savvy. Alas, on this earth there is no unscrambling politics and religion. And this inevitable mingling of the holy and the profane sometimes leaves us dismayed that those who claim a deeper understanding of the Creator's will should behave parochially.
Still, man is a political animal and in his image did he create religion.
At Yad Vashem on Monday, Pope Benedict XVI spoke mostly as a theologian - which left many Jews wanting. Granted, the German-born pontiff expressed opposition to Holocaust denial: "May the names of these victims never perish! May their suffering never be denied, belittled, or forgotten!" Yet his pledge on arriving at Ben-Gurion Airport to "honor the memory of the six million" would have been better fulfilled had he referenced the relationship between the Church's age-old "teaching of contempt" and what the Nazis did.
It was a stark contrast to the March 2000 visit by the charismatic John Paul II, who found a way, politically, to combine personal testimony with the Catholic attestation: "The Catholic Church, motivated by the Gospel law of truth and love, and by no political considerations, is deeply saddened by the hatred, acts of persecution and displays of anti-Semitism directed against the Jews by Christians at any time and in any place."
At the Western Wall on Tuesday, Benedict's decision to speak briefly in Latin in theological vein, citing the Book of Lamentations, seemed eminently sensible. Moments earlier, on the Temple Mount, visiting what the Holy See diplomatically referred to as "Mosques Square," he also delivered an altogether apolitical, mildly theological statement about the children of Abraham.
Only at Hechal Shlomo, where his Orthodox audience received his denunciation of moral relativism with silent approval, did the pope manage the right combination of politics and religion, saying: "The Catholic Church is irrevocably committed to the path chosen at the Second Vatican Council."
We found ourselves feeling oddly positive about the Chief Rabbinate yesterday.
Politically and theologically, the Jewish world speaks to the Church in three ways - via world Jewish bodies; via biannual meetings between the chief rabbinate and the Vatican; and via the Israel Foreign Ministry. Hechal Shlomo united all three channels. Sephardi Chief Rabbi Shlomo Amar and his Ashkenazi counterpart Rabbi Yona Metzger acquitted themselves well - they could have been mistaken for the national religious chief rabbis of old. Their performances almost justified their annual budget.
And yet, to Palestinian Arab ears, their remarks must have sounded politically loaded.
WITH HIS vitriolic Monday night performance at Notre Dame, the chief Islamic judge of the Palestinian Authority, Sheikh Tayseer Tamimi, embodied the most awful combination of politics and religion.
Tamimi stole the podium to deliver a harangue bereft of spirituality and drenched in the politically profane. Remember that Tamimi represents - not Hamas, but the moderate side of Palestinian religiosity. His Christian compatriots, no more moderate, waved PLO flags at yesterday's papal mass in the Kidron Valley, amid a sea of Vatican and Israeli flags. And if you missed the Palestinian Authority's apology for Tamimi's theatrics, so did we. The dirty little secret about interfaith work is that it's invariably spearheaded by non-Muslims.
The pope, visibly discomfited by Tamimi's tirade - though he didn't understand it - left earlier than scheduled, after a forced handshake with the Muslim cleric. Dozens of Arabs in the interfaith audience applauded the sheikh's anti-Israel calumnies.
The Vatican, to its credit, criticized Tamimi for this "direct negation of what a dialogue should be." To that, amen.
Tamimi will be delighted to learn that the Protestant World Council of Churches is planning its own week-long blitz in June: agitation against the "occupation," "settlements" and Jewish rights in Jerusalem. Fortunately, WCC-affiliated churches are in decline, whereas evangelical denominations displaying profound empathy with the Jewish state are thriving.
Since there is no separating politics from religion, the best we can strive for is that the spiritual in religion informs our politics more than the worst in our politics informs our religion.
Pray we have the wisdom to know the difference.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
L ETTER TO THE EDITOR IN THE AUSTRALIAN JEWISH NEWS. (6th MARCH 2009)
(MM)
Rabbi David Stav is quoted (AJN 27/2) as saying that Israel is divided in the middle between (Orthodox) religion and secular Israel. Unfortunately, the problems Israelis face in areas of personal status dealing with conversion, marriage, divorce, birth and death are due to the "politics of religion", not just religion.
Given the pluralist (religious) Judaism enjoyed by Jews all over the world, except in Israel, it is obvious that it is politics that is at the root of all the problems which Israelis face also internally. While Ben Gurion who gave over those rights exclusively to the Orthodox Rabbinate to rule over, did not know any other way of keeping Israel Jewish, it is totally different in this day and age.
I believe the majority of Western Jews today who are Zionist, practice their Judaism in an inclusive, modern, Progressive tradition. To whom was Rabbi Stav addressing himself when he said he would like Jewish people outside Israel to help ? "I think it is one of [the diaspora's] duties to take part in this dialogue" i.e. between secular and religious Jews. How can they when their leaders hardly communicate with each other in the diaspora, let alone with Israelis?
If Progressive Judaism's credentials would be recognised by the Israeli State, the push for the separation between religion and State on issues of personal status would be virtually eliminated. There would be no need for even totally Jewish couples to travel abroad to get married, given the difficult issues of divorce and agunot which are imposed on all non-Orthodox Israeli Jewish women and the difficulties currently imposed by the Rabbinate on conversions would certainly be eased for those who prefer to be non-Orthodox.
Will this make the State less Jewish? Hardly. It will make it a more harmonious, inclusive, tolerant and pluralist Jewish society in law as well as in fact. It will also prove far more inviting to Diaspora's modern Jews.
(MM,- March 2009)
Limits of interfaith
May. 12, 2009
THE JERUSALEM POST
Perhaps we expect too much of priests, rabbis and imams. We want our clergy to be spiritual beacons, above the temporal fray; and to be politically savvy. Alas, on this earth there is no unscrambling politics and religion. And this inevitable mingling of the holy and the profane sometimes leaves us dismayed that those who claim a deeper understanding of the Creator's will should behave parochially.
Still, man is a political animal and in his image did he create religion.
At Yad Vashem on Monday, Pope Benedict XVI spoke mostly as a theologian - which left many Jews wanting. Granted, the German-born pontiff expressed opposition to Holocaust denial: "May the names of these victims never perish! May their suffering never be denied, belittled, or forgotten!" Yet his pledge on arriving at Ben-Gurion Airport to "honor the memory of the six million" would have been better fulfilled had he referenced the relationship between the Church's age-old "teaching of contempt" and what the Nazis did.
It was a stark contrast to the March 2000 visit by the charismatic John Paul II, who found a way, politically, to combine personal testimony with the Catholic attestation: "The Catholic Church, motivated by the Gospel law of truth and love, and by no political considerations, is deeply saddened by the hatred, acts of persecution and displays of anti-Semitism directed against the Jews by Christians at any time and in any place."
At the Western Wall on Tuesday, Benedict's decision to speak briefly in Latin in theological vein, citing the Book of Lamentations, seemed eminently sensible. Moments earlier, on the Temple Mount, visiting what the Holy See diplomatically referred to as "Mosques Square," he also delivered an altogether apolitical, mildly theological statement about the children of Abraham.
Only at Hechal Shlomo, where his Orthodox audience received his denunciation of moral relativism with silent approval, did the pope manage the right combination of politics and religion, saying: "The Catholic Church is irrevocably committed to the path chosen at the Second Vatican Council."
We found ourselves feeling oddly positive about the Chief Rabbinate yesterday.
Politically and theologically, the Jewish world speaks to the Church in three ways - via world Jewish bodies; via biannual meetings between the chief rabbinate and the Vatican; and via the Israel Foreign Ministry. Hechal Shlomo united all three channels. Sephardi Chief Rabbi Shlomo Amar and his Ashkenazi counterpart Rabbi Yona Metzger acquitted themselves well - they could have been mistaken for the national religious chief rabbis of old. Their performances almost justified their annual budget.
And yet, to Palestinian Arab ears, their remarks must have sounded politically loaded.
WITH HIS vitriolic Monday night performance at Notre Dame, the chief Islamic judge of the Palestinian Authority, Sheikh Tayseer Tamimi, embodied the most awful combination of politics and religion.
Tamimi stole the podium to deliver a harangue bereft of spirituality and drenched in the politically profane. Remember that Tamimi represents - not Hamas, but the moderate side of Palestinian religiosity. His Christian compatriots, no more moderate, waved PLO flags at yesterday's papal mass in the Kidron Valley, amid a sea of Vatican and Israeli flags. And if you missed the Palestinian Authority's apology for Tamimi's theatrics, so did we. The dirty little secret about interfaith work is that it's invariably spearheaded by non-Muslims.
The pope, visibly discomfited by Tamimi's tirade - though he didn't understand it - left earlier than scheduled, after a forced handshake with the Muslim cleric. Dozens of Arabs in the interfaith audience applauded the sheikh's anti-Israel calumnies.
The Vatican, to its credit, criticized Tamimi for this "direct negation of what a dialogue should be." To that, amen.
Tamimi will be delighted to learn that the Protestant World Council of Churches is planning its own week-long blitz in June: agitation against the "occupation," "settlements" and Jewish rights in Jerusalem. Fortunately, WCC-affiliated churches are in decline, whereas evangelical denominations displaying profound empathy with the Jewish state are thriving.
Since there is no separating politics from religion, the best we can strive for is that the spiritual in religion informs our politics more than the worst in our politics informs our religion.
Pray we have the wisdom to know the difference.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
L ETTER TO THE EDITOR IN THE AUSTRALIAN JEWISH NEWS. (6th MARCH 2009)
(MM)
Rabbi David Stav is quoted (AJN 27/2) as saying that Israel is divided in the middle between (Orthodox) religion and secular Israel. Unfortunately, the problems Israelis face in areas of personal status dealing with conversion, marriage, divorce, birth and death are due to the "politics of religion", not just religion.
Given the pluralist (religious) Judaism enjoyed by Jews all over the world, except in Israel, it is obvious that it is politics that is at the root of all the problems which Israelis face also internally. While Ben Gurion who gave over those rights exclusively to the Orthodox Rabbinate to rule over, did not know any other way of keeping Israel Jewish, it is totally different in this day and age.
I believe the majority of Western Jews today who are Zionist, practice their Judaism in an inclusive, modern, Progressive tradition. To whom was Rabbi Stav addressing himself when he said he would like Jewish people outside Israel to help ? "I think it is one of [the diaspora's] duties to take part in this dialogue" i.e. between secular and religious Jews. How can they when their leaders hardly communicate with each other in the diaspora, let alone with Israelis?
If Progressive Judaism's credentials would be recognised by the Israeli State, the push for the separation between religion and State on issues of personal status would be virtually eliminated. There would be no need for even totally Jewish couples to travel abroad to get married, given the difficult issues of divorce and agunot which are imposed on all non-Orthodox Israeli Jewish women and the difficulties currently imposed by the Rabbinate on conversions would certainly be eased for those who prefer to be non-Orthodox.
Will this make the State less Jewish? Hardly. It will make it a more harmonious, inclusive, tolerant and pluralist Jewish society in law as well as in fact. It will also prove far more inviting to Diaspora's modern Jews.
(MM,- March 2009)
Monday, May 04, 2009
VALE Dick Pratt
When a person is a 'mensch'(a real humamn being in Yiddish) and befriends all,- from the smallest employee to the big and powerful, they stand by you in times of trouble as well as in the good times.
At least one hopes so.
Justice Marcus Einfeld was not so lucky.He may have done a lot of good for the Aboriginal community and perhaps others, but as an individual he was unfortunately not well liked.
Personally, I am happy to see that all the powerful elite stood by Richard at the end. However, the radio and Letters pages in The Age and elsewhere, keep harping about how much money he skimped off everyone in this cartel business.
Well, as a former very small businesswoman I can assure you that this business of "fair competition" is the worst myth perpetrated by the ACCC and everyone who believes them.
Why couldn't we in our retail shop be supplied by wholesalers at the prices the supermarkets were being supplied? We had to buy drinks like Coke, etc. from the supermarkets and sell them dearer of course, if we wanted to make a few cents on them. Then, when we bought a new product to try out, - next thing we knew, the supermarkets, or a bigger customer up the street would put pressure on the supplier not to supply it to us at all!
The big boys always win out over the small ones,- so who is kidding whom?
Consumers might have paid a few cents more per item for the packaging,- which then Visy recycled for everyone to save contaminating the earth with discarded waste.
The public company Amcor dobbed-in the individual businessman, Richard Pratt, - he who tried to give them each a chance not to drive one into the ground because he might be smaller and unable to survive the bigger one's competitive advantage. Big deal!
I am glad that all the VIPs whom Richard befriended and all those whom he helped, understood this very well,- it is only the small-minded who insist that he didn't deserve the adulation he actually received. They will disappear into insignificance, but Richard Pratt's contribution to society will remain into the future.
One just needs to read the hundreds of tributes from his employees to understand what kind of man he must have been. I know individuals whom he helped anonymously.
http://www.richardpratttribute.com
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
At least one hopes so.
Justice Marcus Einfeld was not so lucky.He may have done a lot of good for the Aboriginal community and perhaps others, but as an individual he was unfortunately not well liked.
Personally, I am happy to see that all the powerful elite stood by Richard at the end. However, the radio and Letters pages in The Age and elsewhere, keep harping about how much money he skimped off everyone in this cartel business.
Well, as a former very small businesswoman I can assure you that this business of "fair competition" is the worst myth perpetrated by the ACCC and everyone who believes them.
Why couldn't we in our retail shop be supplied by wholesalers at the prices the supermarkets were being supplied? We had to buy drinks like Coke, etc. from the supermarkets and sell them dearer of course, if we wanted to make a few cents on them. Then, when we bought a new product to try out, - next thing we knew, the supermarkets, or a bigger customer up the street would put pressure on the supplier not to supply it to us at all!
The big boys always win out over the small ones,- so who is kidding whom?
Consumers might have paid a few cents more per item for the packaging,- which then Visy recycled for everyone to save contaminating the earth with discarded waste.
The public company Amcor dobbed-in the individual businessman, Richard Pratt, - he who tried to give them each a chance not to drive one into the ground because he might be smaller and unable to survive the bigger one's competitive advantage. Big deal!
I am glad that all the VIPs whom Richard befriended and all those whom he helped, understood this very well,- it is only the small-minded who insist that he didn't deserve the adulation he actually received. They will disappear into insignificance, but Richard Pratt's contribution to society will remain into the future.
One just needs to read the hundreds of tributes from his employees to understand what kind of man he must have been. I know individuals whom he helped anonymously.
http://www.richardpratttribute.com
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)