Jack Jacobs is a professor of political science at John Jay College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York. He is the author of On Socialists and 'the Jewish Question' after Marx (1992) and Bundist Counterculture in Interwar Poland (2009), and the editor of Jewish Politics in Eastern Europe: The Bund at 100 (2001). Professor Jacobs received his PhD from Columbia University, where he served as assistant professor of political science. He was a Fulbright Scholar at Tel Aviv University in 1996–1997, and was also a Fulbright Scholar at the Vilnius Yiddish Institute in 2009. Professor Jacobs' work has been translated into French, German, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Polish, Russian and Yiddish.
The following exchange will focus on Professor Jacobs’ book The Frankfurt School, Jewish Lives, and Antisemitism (Cambridge University Press, 2014). Part one can be found right here.
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Dear Professor Jacobs,
The second chapter of your book tells in detail the fascinating story of the development of the Frankfurt Institute’s (and especially Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno’s) work on Antisemitism.
While the chapter follows the many changes in the Frankfurt school’s attitude toward the subject and the curious history of its members' pioneering work on the phenomenon (much of which was funded by the AJC, with which these Marxist thinkers had an interesting dynamic), I’d once again like to ask you about the ‘big picture’: what role did the Frankfurt school play in the modern study and understanding of Antisemitism, and what type of insight can one gain by exploring Adorno and Horkheimer’s main writings on the subject?
Yours,
Shmuel.
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Dear Shmuel,
During the course of the Second World War, members of the Institute of Social Research came to the conclusion that there was a sharp differentiation between pre-totalitarian anti-Semitism on the one hand and totalitarian anti-Semitism on the other. Whereas the former had been directed against the Jews per se, the latter – the kind of antisemitism which manifested itself in Nazi Germany, for example – was ultimately aimed at democratic civilization, and was a symptom of the crisis facing democracies. “Hatred of the Jew” Horkheimer bluntly proclaimed “is hatred of democracy”. At a later point in time, Horkheimer explicitly underscored that anti-Americanism and antisemitism had become intertwined, and that the latter regularly served as a front for the former. For this reason, confronting antisemitism was, in Horkheimer’s opinion, of import not only to Jews, but to all those concerned with defending democracy in general and the US in particular.
Together with Theodor Adorno, Horkeheimer attempted to sketch out the roots of contemporary antisemitism, and underscored that there were many such roots — psychological, economic, political, religious, and philosophic – and that they could not be wholly separated from one another. Because antisemitism had non-rational and irrational components, Adorno and Horkheimer stressed in Dialectic of Enlightenment, antisemitism could not be combatted solely with rational counter-arguments.
Part of the appeal of antisemitism was that it provided a form of release — “Rage is vented on those who are both conspicuous and unprotected”. Parallel rage can be demonstrated to have been vented on other groups – Blacks, Catholics, vagrants – in other contexts. In this sense, the victims are interchangeable. So are the perpetrators.
The antisemites of their day, Horkheimer and Adorno pointed out, engaged in mimesis. They simultaneously feared Jews and imitated that which they feared. Antisemitism is, in addition, partially based on false projection “the reverse of genuine mimesis … If mimesis makes itself resemble its surroundings, false projection makes its surroundings resemble itself.” In Prophets of Deceit, co-written by Leo Lowenthal and Norbert Guterman and published as part of the series “Studies in Prejudice” under the auspices of the American Jewish Committee, the authors made conscious use of these insights and analyzed the techniques and arguments made by antisemitic agitators in the US, including the ways in which such agitators engaged in imitation of purported Jewish speech patterns and behaviors. “The fact that the audience enjoys such… imitations of allegedly weird Jewish behavior,” Lowenthal and Guterman write “shows that this Jewish foreignness is not as external to them as it might seem. They feel it in their own flesh, it is latent in them; the Jew is … the other who dwells in themselves … Into him they can conveniently project everything within themselves to which they deny recognition.”
But I hasten to add that the Critical Theorists did not believe that antisemitism could be explained by psychology alone. Rage, mimesis, and false projection are essential components of their explanation of antisemitism, but Horkheimer and Adorno insisted that economic and social factors were also key parts of their explanation.
For the Critical Theorists, Nazi antisemitism was not first and foremost the result of German history or German national cultural per se. It was yet another example of a pattern which had been replicated many times, in many places and cultures. Thus antisemitism, they feared, would be likely to reappear in altogether different contexts.
Specific contentions or predictions made by the Critical Theorists with regard to antisemitism have proven to be unfounded in the decades since they produced their works. But the explanations provided by the Frankfurt School as to the links between antisemitism and anti-Americanism, their astute analyses of the roles played by mimesis and projection, and their insistence that antisemitism is not the property of a particular nation or race or culture – among other matters – continue to ring true.
Sincerely,
Jack
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