Jewish DivideMaimon Schwarzschild

Worthwhile new book about Jewish opponents of Israel: “The Jewish Divide Over Israel: Accusers and Defenders”, edited by Edward Alexander and Paul Bogdanor.  The book’s contributors, who include Cynthia Ozick, Jacob Neusner, Irving Louis Horowitz, and Menachem Kellner, give a hard look at the anti-Israel intellectuals.  Menachem Kellner is particularly devastating about Daniel Boyarin, “professor of Talmud and hater of Israel”.

Read the book.  It’s especially timely given the renewed claims on the intellectual left – in the New York Review of Books and elsewhere – that Israel should never have been established, and that it ought to disappear as a Jewish state.

Here is Dennis Prager, a propos, who weighed in recently on “Jews Who Aid Those Who Hate Jews (and America)”.

But perhaps the first, and weirdest, Jewish anti-semite in the 20th century was Otto Weininger, a Viennese contemporary of Sigmund Freud, whose (newly translated and republished) “Sex and Character” argues (or at least insists) that Jews are archetypically “feminine” and therefore cowardly, without soul, and without a sense of good and evil.  Weininger committed suicide, logically enough for a Jew with his views about Judaism.  Hitler is reported to have said of Weininger “There was only one decent Jew, and he committed suicide”.

Weininger is said to have influenced – or at least to have impressed – Ludwig Wittgenstein, the philosopher (and childhood boarding-school classmate of Adolf Hitler’s).  It’s hard to top early 20th century Vienna for interconnected weirdness.