Jewish Self-Love: Overcoming Internalized Anti-Semitism
“Love every single Jew, without exception, with the full depth of your heart and with the fire of your soul, no matter who he is or how he behaves.” — Last words said to the Ba’al Shem Tov by his father
“You shall not hate your sibling in your heart” (Leviticus 19:17).
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A friend told me that when she went to a workshop for Jews on internalized anti-Semitism, the first question the group was asked was, “What type of Jew do you hate most?”
I have no doubt that Jews reading this have already begun visualizing sort images:
The Chabad teenager brusquely asking passersby, “You Jewish?”…
The friend wearing an Israeli flag in their profile picture…
The old woman at synagogue who sneaks cookies into her pockets…
The overweight banker interviewed on CNN this morning…
I have met very few, if any, fellow Jews who didn’t harbor a visible disdain for some members of our brethren. I certainly don’t mean to exempt myself — I didn’t come up with the images above out of nowhere.
In “The Oppression of America’s Jews,” Aviva Cantor Zuckoff, a founder of the Jewish Liberation Project, lists facets of Jewish identity that make other Jews uncomfortable:
How many of us cringe when we see a Chassid in a shtreimel and kaftan… walking, say, in the East Village when we’re in a mixed group? … One young Jew even told me that the Jews’ “special affinity” for money was a characteristic of the Jewish race!… How many of us now believe that Jews are “too emotional”…?
There are, surely, many different reasons why we Jews hate other types of Jews. Too tribalist. Too goyishe. Wealthy. Dirty. Zionist. Communist. Fearful. Arrogant. Goyim have come up with innumerable reasons for disliking Jews, and we’ve internalized all of them.
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We’re not alone. Given enough time, members of any oppressed group begin to believe certain stereotypes about themselves — a phenomenon termed “internalized oppression.” Dr. E. J. R. David, a Filipino American professor of psychology, defines internalized oppression as:
[The pattern wherein] we accept… the negative and inferiorizing messages that are propagated about who we are [and begin]… to internalize the oppression that we experienced. We… come to learn that—having certain traits, being a member of a particular group, and being who we are—are not good enough or are not desirable. Sometimes, we even learn to hate our traits, our groups, ourselves. Even further, sometimes we end up hurting ourselves, our communities, and those who we share many similarities with, the ones who likely care for us the most—our family and friends.
The particulars of internalized oppressions may vary across groups (and within them, as intersectionality demonstrates), but the core is similar: we hate ourselves and each other and therefore we hurt ourselves and each other.
One example of how these dynamics play out in our community can be seen among Jewish men. For centuries, Jewish men have been conditioned by the Christian world to see their bodies as weak, distorted, and — above all — “effeminate.” In response, Jewish men — myself included — have consciously and unconsciously sought ways to re-empower ourselves that have harmed ourselves and the women and the gender queer members of our community.
In “The Right Question Is Theological,” an article outlining feminist Jewish theology, Judith Plaskow details how Jewish men responded to their own “other-ing” by Christians by othering Jewish women:
The situation of the Jewish woman might well be compared to the situation of the Jew in non-Jewish culture. The Gentile projection of the Jew as Other — the stranger, the demon, the human non-quite-human — is repeated in — or should one say partly modelled [sic] on? —the Jewish understanding of the Jewish woman.
In tandem with displacing such stereotypes, Plaskow argues, Jewish men sought to reassert their power through stringently regulating women’s bodies. As Plaskow notes, an entire book of the six books of the Mishnah — the primary Jewish legal code — is devoted to female purity.
More recently, Jewish men’s discomfort with their bodies and social status has led them to embrace toxic images of masculinity, from the AEPi bro to the gun-toting soldier. I’m guilty of having embraced both. I have no doubt that joining my high school’s wrestling team, which required obsessive exercise and occasional starvation, was partially a response to having grown up as an awkward Jewish boy whose lack of athletic ability made it hard to fit in with non-Jewish boys.
As the Talmud teaches (Yoma 9b), the Second Temple was destroyed because of sinat chinam (senseless hatred). There are myriad other ways in which internalized anti-Semitism plays out, but the ultimate result is the same: if we continue to hate ourselves and one another, we will destroy ourselves and one another.
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Just like with any harmful behavior, the first step towards recovery is admitting that we have a problem. Zuckoff writes, “[O]ppression that is experienced as oppression at least frees the oppressed from his self-hatred.”
Once we begin to examine and reckon with that hatred, though, how do we excise it from ourselves?
Admonitions like that of the Ba’al Shem Tov’s father — unconditional love for every Jew — are often read as backwards particularism, but I believe they may be part of the key to undoing the hate we’ve learned to hold. Rav Avraham Kook wrote, “If we were destroyed, and the world with us, because of sinat chinam, then we shall rebuild ourselves, and the world with us, with ahavat chinam (senseless love).”
There are some important caveats to Jewish self-love, of course. Far too often, love for “fellow Jews” has meant love for male, white, Ashkenazi, able-bodied, Zionist, straight Jews. True love for our siblings means loving Jews of all hues, bodies, and backgrounds. In addition, love for one’s oppressed fellow only obtains when one’s fellow is actually oppressed. In Israel, where Jews — at least Ashkenazi ones — have political hegemony, the situation is more complicated. Rav Kook’s current-day adherents exemplify the dangers of self-love coupled with power.
In America, at least, there is still a place for ahavat chinam. We must love other Jews so that we might love ourselves; we must love ourselves so that we might love other Jews.
This isn’t to say that we shouldn’t unconditionally love other things about ourselves and each other, or that we shouldn’t unconditionally love non-Jews as well. Rather, it’s to argue that Jewish self-love is a single piece of that puzzle.
I can’t love anyone — Jewish or not — until I love myself.
I can’t love myself until I love the pieces of myself that I can’t change.
I can’t love the pieces of myself that I can’t change until I love those pieces of others.
My siblings, I am trying to learn to love you: the bodies bent over books, the hair that curls with the resilience of weeds, the voices crashing against each other like waves.
I am trying to love those of you with whom I virulently disagree, those who, no doubt with good intentions, perpetuate our community’s oppression by cooperating with our oppressors in the hopes that such oppression will keep us safe. Loving you doesn’t mean I will stop criticizing you, or that I’ll agree to paper over our differences in the name of an anemic, unobtrusive “Jewish unity,” the pursuit of which is itself a pattern of our oppression. It does mean that even when I protest against you, I still see you as my sibling, and that like Esau and Jacob, I will still embrace you when we meet in the wilderness.
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What happens when we begin to love each other? Rav Kook’s words, while at first glance grandiose, are apt: when we love other Jews and ourselves, we can participate as Jews in the rebuilding of the world.
Zuckoff writes that in the face of oppression, we must ask ourselves: “Whom does it serve?” Who benefits when we direct our hatred toward one another? Who benefits when we hate those of our leaders who cooperate with unjust systems in exchange for safety, rather than the propagators of those systems themselves?
At the risk of putting too fine a point on it, the answer is: those in power. In the case of America, this means wealthy, white, Christian men. Certainly, there are plenty of folks who are not wealthy, white, Christian or male who cooperate with and participate in that power but, like Jews, they too are oppressed whether they realize it or not. Even wealthy, white, Christian men are oppressed by this system; in the words of Nelson Mandela, “I am not truly free if I am taking away someone else’s freedom.”
Loving ourselves and each other as we are is resistance against those who would have all of America become white, Christian, and heterosexual. Daniel Boyarin, a professor of religion, writes, “When Christianity is the hegemonic power in Europe and the United States, then the resistance of Jews to being universalized can be a critical force and model for the resistance of all peoples to being Europeanized out of bodily existence.”
“For love is strong as death, passion as adamant as Sheol… If one offered all their wealth for love, they would be laughed to scorn. ” (Song of Songs 8:6-7).