The Vogue of Jewish Self-Hatred in Post-World War II America

This article asks how and why the concept of "Jewish self-hatred" came into theoretical, social scientific, literary, and critical vogue in 1940s and 1950s America. It argues that the proliferating public discourse on Jewish self-hatred grew out of three overlapping developments. First was the influence of psychological experts on American public life. Second was the influence of German Jewish émigré intellectuals like Kurt Lewin in giving social scientific legitimacy to the idea of Jewish self-hatred. Third was the polemical deployment of the concept of Jewish self-hatred and the idea of "the authoritarian personality" in the Jewish Cold War—a contentious public debate among defenders of Jewish particularism and Jewish nationalism, on the one hand, and proponents of liberal universalism, on the other. This debate revolved around questions of Jewish group loyalty, survival, and belonging, and it included figures as diverse as Ludwig Lewisohn, David Riesman, Philip Roth, Clement Greenberg, and Harold Rosenberg.