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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
On the Origins of Jewish Self-Hatred

On the Origins of Jewish Self-Hatred

Reitter, Paul

Hardcover

JudaismAnthropologyGeneral World History

Currently unavailable to order

ISBN10: 0691119228
ISBN13: 9780691119229
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: Apr 29 2012
Pages: 176
Weight: 0.80
Height: 0.90 Width: 5.80 Depth: 8.90
Language: English

A new intellectual history that looks at Jewish self-hatred

Today, the term Jewish self-hatred often denotes a treasonous brand of Jewish self-loathing, and is frequently used as a smear, such as when it is applied to politically moderate Jews who are critical of Israel. In On the Origins of Jewish Self-Hatred, Paul Reitter demonstrates that the concept of Jewish self-hatred once had decidedly positive connotations. He traces the genesis of the term to Anton Kuh, a Viennese-Jewish journalist who coined it in the aftermath of World War I, and shows how the German-Jewish philosopher Theodor Lessing came, in 1930, to write a book that popularized Jewish self-hatred. Reitter contends that, as Kuh and Lessing used it, the concept of Jewish self-hatred described a complex and possibly redemptive way of being Jewish. Paradoxically, Jews could show the world how to get past the blight of self-hatred only by embracing their own, singularly advanced self-critical tendencies--their Jewish self-hatred.

Provocative and elegantly argued, On the Origins of Jewish Self-Hatred challenges widely held notions about the history and meaning of this idea, and explains why its history is so badly misrepresented today.

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