‘Self-Hating’ Jews: A Defense
May 13th, 2007 by Menachem Wecker
My article, “In Defense of ‘Self-Hating’ Jews: Conversations with the Targets of Masada2000’s S.H.I.T. List” is in this issue of Jewish Currents. The article includes interviews with a number of so-called self-haters, including Noam Chomsky and David Marash.
Noam Chomsky
The article questions what, if anything, it might mean to be a self-hating Jew. The term seems mostly bankrupt to me–a pseudo-Freudian term that suggests that people hate the Judaism embedded within themselves. How could Bobby Fischer be a self-hater if he doesn’t consider himself a Jew?
Here’s the Jewish artist angle:
Israeli poet, musician, and artist, Roy “Chicky” Arad, offered the most humorous response to Masada2000 when he told me that he contacted the website and asked to be included because the list looked “impressive.” He actually likes the folks who wrote the list, he said: “I admire people that are serious in their mission.” A founder of the “Rave Against Occupation” dance parties of 2002 and 2003, which brought several thousand young Israelis (Jews and Arabs) to Tel Aviv and to the Negev to protest Israel’s occupation policies, Arad suggested that I imagine Rockwell Lazareth’s grandchildren, who “love their grandfather and are happy that he does something.” Presumably, most of the “self-haters’ ” own grandchildren would strongly disagree.