Jewish Self-Hate / / Theodor Lessing.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter Berghahn Books Complete eBook-Package 2021
• VerfasserIn: Lessing, Theodor,
• MitwirkendeR: Appelbaum, Peter C.,; Gilman, Sander L.,; Reitter, Paul,
• Place / Publishing House: New York; , Oxford : : Berghahn Books, , [2021]; ©2021
• Year of Publication: 2021
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (186 p.)

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 concept’s origins are not widely appreciated. In its modern form, it received its earliest and fullest expression in Theodor Lessing’s 1930 book Der jüdische Selbsthaß. Written on the eve of Hitler’s ascent to power, Lessing’s 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 Lessing’s 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 Lessing’s (1872–1933) 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…. Lessing’s 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.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Translator’s Preface -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- Atrium -- Chapter 1. Jewish Destiny in the East – History as Meaning – How to Apportion Blame -- Chapter 2. Jewish Destiny in the West – The Class Struggle, Antisemitism, and Zionism -- Chapter 3. The Psychology and Pathology of Self-Hate – The Logic and Morality of Self-Hate – Prophets and Psalmists -- Chapter 4. The Impractical Dreamer – Six Symbolic Figures – Present-Day Examples -- Chapter 5. The Suff ering of Self-Hate – Its Three Paths – Healing -- Six Life Stories -- Paul Rée -- Otto Weininger -- Arthur Trebitsch -- Max Steiner -- Walter Calé -- Maximilian Harden -- Vault -- Afterword -- About the Translator -- About the Editor