Internalized Judeophobia: Explaining the Self-Hating Jew
Part 1: An Introduction
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“Israel has converted Jews from people who were not harmful to anyone, to people who are harmful to the whole planet. Who are the chaos engine of humanity, and of the west.”
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What brings a person to hate and fear their own identity? How does a person get to the point where they are making accusations so farfetched, so hateful, that they are calling their own race of people harmful to the entire planet?
This quote is shockingly very real, and was said this weekend at the “Jewish Anti-Zionist Congress” in Dublin, Ireland.
I do not know this man, I had never heard of him until this weekend. But I absolutely recognize him for what he is. I know his story.
The self-hating Jew is a trope that has been a part of Judaism, the Jewish faith, and the Jewish culture since the times of the Torah.
In Exodus chapter 32, the Israelites left unsupervised, abandon their faith and adopt the rituals of their oppressors. They melt down their jewelry and forge a golden calf. They reject their monotheism. These might have been the very first recorded self-hating Jews.
In Numbers chapter 13, some Jewish scouts come back to the tribe after a mission to investigate the land of Canaan. Many of them actively try to sabotage their own community and prevent them from entering the land of Israel and prospering. Perhaps these were the first Jewish anti-Zionists.
Neither is a new phenomenon.
Today we can easily recognize both of these ancient stories with a modern coat of paint. Echos of our past. We have some self-hating Jews, those who reject certain or all attachments to the religion or culture. More insidiously, and far more commonly we have a very potent kind of Jewish anti-Zionist.
History tells us that this is a feature of Judaism. But how do we go about explaining the origin of someone who hates their own people? How do we explain a self-hating Jew?
We all know a Jewish person that we either grew up with or knew in high school who has since become vocally antagonistic towards Israel or Judaism. We wonder, perplexed, what has happened to them. What experiences or people sent them on the path that landed on such a stark rebuke of their own culture? How could they possibly arrive at a different set of facts, and a different set of conclusions than we have on what is right and what is wrong? Why are they letting themselves be tokenized, their identities hijacked by elements who so clearly hate Jews? It does not compute.
When we look hard enough, and in the right frame, we can begin to see a common path. A logical flow. This is not a random occurrence. There are mechanisms at play that need to be named, acknowledged, and hopefully acted on.
In Western society, there is an acceptance that marginalized groups have varying degrees of patterns of trauma derived from cultural experience. While I do not subscribe to a holistic idea that group identity necessitates trauma, I do believe this idea should be met with nuance. There is some truth to understanding cultural incentives and how those incentives can impact an individual’s world view and life experience.
This acknowledgement is key to the framework as it connects the Jewish experience to that of other minorities. Other minorities also face prejudice and difficulty. They also have their own populations of “self-haters”
There are gay men who hate gay people. There are people within all racialized groups that look down on their own racial identities and cultures. There is significant academic literature on this phenomenon. The key difference is that these groups are not referred to as “self-hating”. Instead, these people are describe by well-established terms as having internalized homophobia or internalized racism.
There are clinical frameworks built around these phenomena. There are therapeutic responses and community movements in place to assist people who are confused, insecure, and hateful about their identities. But until now, no one has connected the dots in quite the same way for Jews. Jews, like in many aspects of discussion around intersectionality, are omitted.
As a parable, we can examine the following: When a gay man is growing up in a society where, for whatever reason, he feels like being gay is not acceptable or makes him a lesser person, it is not unreasonable to imagine that man espousing homophobic behaviours. This is what is called internalized homophobia.
When we encounter a person who has absorbed their surrounding culture’s contempt for their own racial identity, we call it internalized racism, and we try to empathize with them. When we see someone distancing themselves from their community, who deflects or minimizes indicators of their culture, who has come to see their own skin tone as something to be overcome — we have the tools to recognize that person as a victim and help them overcome it.
When it comes to Jews, we do not yet have those tools. We uniquely have “self-hating Jew.” This is not accurate enough to be useful though. “Self-hating” is an incomplete term. Besides, a majority of the hate espoused from these people is directed against other Jews. They hate Jews, or Israel. Not always themselves.
We require more precise language for a precise phenomenon. There is a model for this, and thus the term to use is Internalized Judeophobia. Exactly the way a gay man can have internalized homophobia, a Jew can have internalized Judeophobia.
Judeophobia, is the fear, hatred, or aversion to Jews, Israelis, Judaism, and/or Israel. All are fundamental aspects of what it means to be Jewish, though their expression varies greatly among Jews. The delineation is when the expression crosses the membrane of dormant, to actively prejudice.
Specifically, to have internalized Judeophobia is to take the external forces of anti-Jewish discrimination, stereotypes, and prejudices, and — for a number of reasons that I will explain — truly feel and believe that those are legitimate positions.
Notably, like any radicalized group, Jews experiencing internalized Judeophobia cannot be debated. Logic does not move the needle when an idea has attached itself to the soul. Internalized ideologies cannot be argued away. The remedy starts with an acknowledgement of the cognitive dissonance. That’s why naming it is so important. After recognition, we must be able to provide empathy. Once you understand the triggers as well as the fight or flight responses that are underpinning their behaviour, we can begin to see a path to return to a state of harmony with a person’s identity.
Just like the gay man who has built up a set of behaviours to come to terms with his homosexuality, someone with internalized Judeophobia did not arrive in their predicament out of contempt. They arrived there because of fear. The world told them, in a hundred ways, that their identity was a problem — and they found a way to survive by agreeing.
While their conclusions do ultimately need to be rebuked, their experience deserves explanation, recognition, compassion and pity.
There is a lot to say on this matter, so I am penning a seven part series with my theory of the case.
After this introduction, I will elaborate on the framework of internalized Judeophobia via the following ideas:
The history and scale of systemic Judeophobia — the oldest and most persistent form of discrimination in Western history
The illusion of assimilation and why it fails
What internalized Judeophobia looks like and how it manifests
The inevitability of the cycle, and why it is so insidious
How internalized Judeophobia translates into tokenization — and how it has been weaponized from the outside
Potential solutions: how the Jewish community can prevent this from continuing, and how to support Jews who are experiencing the internal struggle
This series is a culmination of a year of research, discussion, and reflection on internalized Judeophobia. It is further informed by 30 years of lived experience, oscillating between different levels of enfranchisement within the Canadian Jewish community.
These articles are not about any one specific person, though there are many individuals who I have used as case studies to validate the framework.
It is broken into sections so that readers can digest it in smaller pieces.
Ultimately, I am optimistic that with the assistance of this framework, we can emerge from these times as a community the way that Jews always have: united and strong.