ABSTRACT
Marxism, psychoanalysis, and the faith in liberal high Culture based on the cult of Reason, enlightenment, and cosmopolitanism can be seen, up to a point, as ‘Jewish’ strategies to cope with this problem of a hostile majority culture, of religious and racial stigmatization, and the anguish of a divided self. The bolder, self-assertive attitudes of contemporary French Jewry have obviously been influenced by the existence of Israel and the new patterns of behaviour among Jews which it has engendered in the post-war era. The chapter analyses the domestic and the wider international impact of the intensive Soviet propaganda effort to blacken and delegitimize Zionism as a racist, fascist, and even as a ‘Nazi’ type of movement – a campaign that particularly flourished under the Brezhnev regime. Labour Zionism was also more flexible in its approach to the Arab question, though it persisted in self-serving illusion that the Palestinian Arab population had no authentic national demands which needed to be faced.
