The Anatomy of Frustration

In 1936, in a book entitled The Anatomy of Frustration, H.G. Wells wrote…

Zionism is an expression of Jewish refusal to assimilate. If the Jews have suffered, it is because they have regarded themselves as a chosen people.”

Jews stubbornly refused to stop being Jews, Wells said, and so may have suffered. But well before Hitler’s rise to power German Jews had become Germans first; yet when the crisis came their patriotism and willingness to conform did not seem to help. Before World War II German Jews…

…tended to adopt the culture of their non-Jewish neighbors. They dressed and talked like their countrymen, and traditional religious practices and Yiddish culture played a less important part in their lives. (Jewish Life in Europe before the Holocaust)

And despite Wells’ indictment of Zionism as a cause of Jewish suffering the growth of Zionism was clearly more the result of their pain than its source. According to Professor Monika Richarz, Professor Emeritus at the University of Hamburg , European Jews showed little interest in Zionism before Hitler began the final solution…

In Western Europe, the Zionist movement faced strong opposition from most Jews. They had not only become acculturated but were by now patriotic citizens of their countries and in large part, became middle class. They felt threatened by Zionism because they had a lot to lose. They did not want their loyalty to their country to be questioned or to endanger their citizenship. (Pre-Holocaust Jewish History in Europe)

History suggests that no degree of acculturation could have saved Germany’s Jews from the Shoa–but not all Jews have been convinced. Today in the US as well as in Israel many Jews go begging for acceptance, siding with those who hate them, hoping to fit in. It begins by turning one’s back on his heritage. Rod Dreher, in an article for The American Conservative entitled, Are US Jews Assimilating Themselves Out of Existence?  said…

It’s a bitter irony that Jewish life, which endured through countless persecutions and oppression in many nations, finds itself in an existential crisis in a society and polity [the US] in which it[s] Jews are more free to be the kind of Jews they want to be, and more secure from antisemitism, than in any society except Israel’s.

Rabbi Adam Jacobs, Managing Director, Aish Center in Manhattan, was even more emphatic in an article in the Huffington Post…

A fascinating thing has transpired in the 63-year-old relationship between the Israeli Jewish population and their brethren in the American diaspora. The latter have just realized that their days are numbered — not as a result of the encroaching existential dangers of the sort that Israel faces day in and day out — but rather as the result of a slow implosion borne on the back of apathy, cultural acceptance and assimilation. [emphasis added] (Jewish American Gut Check)

It is one thing for a Jew to hope to be like everyone else; it is another for him to side with those who wish to destroy Israel; to remain passive while one’s government arms Israel’s enemies, to yawn at the unprecedented publication of Israel’ top secret defense plans, to ignore end runs  to sway Israeli opinion and to join the world in censuring Israel for its stubborn efforts to stay alive. (Kerry, “A bit of an idiot…”)

Why do so many Jews side with Israel’s enemies?

Years ago I heard the following “joke”…

At a concentration camp in Poland during World War II hundreds of Jews  are shuffling into a gas chamber led by a handful of Nazi guards. One of the doomed shouts, “Let’s rush them; some of us will escape!” Another prisoner answers, “Be quiet. Do you want to make things worse?”

We are a battered people. Many have lost their will to be Jews.

Our name is a word of shame among the nations, a sign for the shaking of heads among the peoples. (Psa: 44-14)

Like battered wives we return again and again, riddled with unfounded guilt, to seek acceptance, begging the nations to take us in. They will not; but God shall. As it says in the same psalm; “He will not give us up forever.”