ABSTRACT
Sarah Annes Brown examines claims made in 2012 by the academic Oren Ben-Dor, and published by a respectable university press, regarding ‘pathologies that pertain to Jewish being and thinking’. She seeks to show that this already dangerously essentialising formula is turned into something even more sinister. Penetrating a rhetorical strategy of hints and allusions, Brown draws out the underlying logic: not only the conflict in the Middle East but also antisemitism, indeed the Holocaust itself, can apparently be traced back in some sense to the ‘endemic otherness and exile of Jewish being and thinking’ and to a ‘Zionist mentality’ that is ‘nourished by the desire to be hated’ and ‘stems, before all else, from sublimated hatred of, and supremacy towards, all “others”’. Jewish ‘being and thinking’ is framed as anti-human, and is even seemingly invoked as a driver of the Holocaust when Ben-Dor asks what is ‘that which gets stronger in generating so much hatred against itself again and again wherever it is’, and posits a ‘self-provoked hatred against Jews’ that ‘keeps re-igniting’ the ‘Jewish Question’.
