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Jew-Hating: The Black Milk of Civilization is a beautiful and disturbing book. It searchingly examines, in the past and present, one of the great, destructive expressions of prejudice in human history, the stigmatizing, demonizing, and attempted extermination of Jews. What does it mean to hate another human being and seek to destroy him and his group, defending your own narcissistic pride and sense of difference or distinctiveness, ready to deny the other the right even to exist?
Exploring such atrocities invites us to consider why we are not dismayed, all the time, outraged by the monstrous way we are taken possession of by conflicting, unconscious processes, entangling love and hate, ensnared in anger and helpless pride. A scapegoat must be provided for all our failings and disappointments, not just because of the guilt we feel from having behaved inhumanely, but from the intolerable frustrations resulting from simply being alive and not affirmed in our comforting self-estimations.
How to soothe this existential pain? We can submit to God; we can turn to science; we can give ourselves over to an amoral/psychopathic exploitation of others for the pleasure of doing so; we can clasp each other as sisters and brothers, acknowledging that our need for community is greater than the urge to preserve separation and difference. Has our presence in historical time not been long enough yet for us to recognize our shared minds and hearts? Will our unconscious conflicts—regarding the need for love, recognition, empowerment—always be sufficiently overmastering to keep us in a state of distress and fear of the exposure of our vulnerable selves to each other, afraid of a vision of the ideal, as one commentator said, that will not victimize or coerce? Our task is to not resist this recognition. Psychoanalysis showed the individuality in the oneness, the way we are governed by unconscious
processes that apply to all, demonstrating the many in the one. Jew-Hating is such a worthy e