Jewish Self-Hate

A seminal text in Jewish thought accessible to English readers for the first time. The diagnosis of Jewish self-hatred has become almost commonplace in contemporary cultural and political debates, but the concepts origins are not widely appreciated. In its modern form, it received its earliest and fullest expression in Theodor Lessings 1930 book Der jdische Selbstha. Written on the eve of Hitlers ascent to power, Lessings hotly contested work has been variously read as a defense of the Weimar Republic, a platform for anti-Weimar sentiments, an attack on psychoanalysis, an inspirational personal guide, and a Zionist broadside. The truthful translation by Peter Appelbaum, including Lessings own footnotes, manages to make this book more readable than the German original. Two essays by Sander Gilman and Paul Reitter provide context and the wisdom of hindsight.Frank Mecklenburg, Leo Baeck Institute From the forward by Sander Gilman: Theodor Lessings (18721933) Jewish Self-Hatred (1930) is the classic study of the pitfalls (rather than the complexities) of acculturation. Growing out of his own experience as a middle-class, urban, marginally religious Jew in Imperial and then Weimar Germany, he used this study to reject the social integration of the Jews into Germany society, which had been his own experience, by tracking its most radical cases. Lessings case studies reflect the idea that assimilation (the radical end of acculturation) is by definition a doomed project, at least for Jews (no matter how defined) in the age of political antisemitism.