When Jews are antisemitic: Jonathan Glazer goes beyond self-hatred - opinion

Nearly 130 years ago, at a clinic in Vienna, a young Jewish doctor named Sigmund Shlomo Freud fathered modern psychoanalysis, giving the world a new tool with which to heal some of its unseen wounds.

In the interim, Jews have been at the forefront of the psychological profession, with luminaries such as Alfred Adler, Viktor Frankl, Abraham Maslow, and numerous others contributing greatly to our understanding of what ails people’s psyches.

And yet, despite all the advances in the field, and the intimate involvement of Jews in its development, there is one persistent ailment that has thus far escaped a cure – the age-old disorder of Jewish self-hatred.

In 1896, in his book The Jewish State, Theodor Herzl described people stricken with it as “disguised antisemites of Jewish origin.”

Were he alive today, I suspect Herzl would have been tempted to use even more colorful language.

Indeed, in recent months, since the start of the Oct. 7 war, the affliction of Jewish self-loathing has reached new lows, with some Jews demonstrating an inexplicable affinity for siding with the enemy rather than their own people.

On X, the platform previously known as Twitter, such sentiments unfortunately abound. People who otherwise never seem to identify as Jewish, at least in terms of what they post on their timelines, suddenly feel the need to assert their identity when choosing to bash Israel.

Among pro-Israel activists on X, it has become a running joke, albeit a somewhat sad one, to see people who invariably begin by writing  “As a Jew,” before launching into accusations of genocide, apartheid, and even worse, against the Jewish state.

They seem to feel as though this grants them greater authority to opine about what they perceive to be Israel’s sins, regardless of whether they have any true knowledge about the war beyond watching a CNN report or reading a diatribe in The New York Times. 

Some take it a step further and go to great lengths to disassociate themselves from Zionism, invoking woke terminology to denounce what they describe as a “settler-colonialist ideology.”

Jonathan Glazer and antisemitism

BUT IF this phenomenon has been largely confined until now to social media, all that changed last week when British-Jewish filmmaker Jonathan Glazer ascended the stage at the Academy Awards ceremony in California.

Accepting an Oscar for his Holocaust film The Zone of Interest, he used the opportunity to demonstrate just how vile Jewish self-loathing can be.

Reading from a statement he had prepared in advance, he said, “Our film shows where dehumanization leads: At its worst, it shaped all of our past and present. Right now, we stand here as men who refute their Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation that has led to conflict for so many innocent people.”

Incredibly, some in the star-studded audience applauded this shameful and hateful statement, which sought to exploit the murder of the six million Jews to score a political point against Israel.

But he didn’t stop there. Glazer went on to say, “Whether the victims of October the 7th in Israel or the ongoing attack on Gaza: all the victims of this dehumanization. How do we resist?”

Obviously, to compare the Hamas massacre of Israelis on Oct. 7 with Israel’s counter-terrorism operation in Gaza is both devious and delusional, and it reveals the moral rot that has clearly eaten away at Glazer’s soul.

But to ask, “How do we resist?” is to echo with sinister precision the language that Hamas and its supporters use in justifying their savagery, which included gang-raping women, burning alive entire families, and kidnapping children and Holocaust survivors to Gaza.

And that is why Glazer’s remarks were so beyond the pale because this is no longer a matter of a policy disagreement, however vehement.

It is a brazen act of self-hatred, of siding with the enemy of one’s own people in the most public and contemptible manner possible.

WHEN I watched the video of Glazer’s remarks, I simply could not believe that a thinking Jewish person with any sense of history, identity, and decency could possibly commit such an execrable act.

And yet, as we know all too well, it is hardly something new.

Seeking to understand what could lie behind this, I came across an article by psychotherapist Dr. Richard Alperin titled “Jewish Self-Hatred: The Internalization of Prejudice.”

Using historical and psychological analysis, Alperin argues that Jewish self-loathing is rooted in a reaction to generations of persecution, leading some Jews to fear being targeted by antisemitism and even to internalize antisemitic beliefs and tropes.

He notes that “even those who have no direct experience with antisemitism are affected, as its legacy is transgenerational.”

Hence, among some Jews, “the feeling persists that they have to prove that they or their community is different from antisemitic stereotypes or that they have to remake their community” – and this is what leads them down the road to spiritual ruin.

Whether or not that is the case, I do not know.

But what I do know is that it is time we recognize a simple yet painful truth: Just because someone is Jewish does not mean he or she cannot also be an antisemite.

If Al Sharpton, David Duke, or Mahmoud Abbas had said what Glazer did, they would rightfully have been denounced as antisemitic because that is what the content of his remarks were.

So let’s stop giving people like Glazer, or the “As a Jew” crowd, a pass of sorts by calling them “self-hating” just because they are Jewish.

Instead, let’s start calling them what they truly are: Jewish antisemites of the sorriest kind.

The writer served as deputy communications director under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during his first term of office.