/lit/ - Literature

>Sartre had by his own admission performed no research on Jewish history, culture, religion, or traditions. Had he done so, and thus inevitably encountered patterns of behavior and networks of influence throughout centuries of Jewish settlement in Europe, he may have come to some very different conclusions. And Sartre’s Jewish critics were, and are, correct in asserting that Jews are a clearly defined ethno-religious group with a distinct history, culture, and sense of peoplehood. One of the most serious flaws of Anti-Semite and Jew (and there are several) is therefore that in failing to recognize Jewish identity, Sartre denies that Jewish agency and Jewish interests play any role in the development of anti-Semitism. Indeed, he states plainly that “it is not the Jewish character that provokes anti-Semitism but, rather, that it is the anti-Semite who creates the Jew.”[15] This flawed thinking would lead to Sartre issuing a number of failed predictions.

http://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/2018/04/19/sartres-anti-semite-and-jew-a-critique-part-two/

>Sartre, in later life, would come to acknowledge this psychological entanglement of identities, writing “while I believed that I was describing the Jew in Anti-Semite and Jew, I was describing myself.”[5] I suggest that psychological mechanisms evident here in Sartre, alongside his ostensibly impartial literary/philosophical defense of the Jews, provide a useful counter-argument to the idea of ‘pathological altruism’ in White actions on behalf of minorities, at least among the more radical and dedicated of such socio-political actors. Essentially, in what may be described as self-deception, or a variation on the Marxist theme of ‘false consciousness,’ Sartre and those like him feel abandoned or targeted by their surrounding culture, and then begin to see themselves as having interests (often highly abstract rather than material) different from that culture. They then construct ideological frameworks in which they advance these wholly adopted interests but do so in such a way as to deceive themselves that these ideologies are moral-intellectual crusades rather than what they truly are — an elaborate flight from the weakness of the Self. It’s quite possible that there is a similar dynamic going on with many sexual non-conformists (LGBTQ…) who become hostile to traditional institutions and values because they have low social status within the traditional framework and then develop theories which condemn traditional values and institutions and in which their own particular sexual orientation is seen as morally above reproach or even superior to heterosexuality. Of course, a similar dynamic is likely in the case of Jews become hostile to the traditional social order because they see it as anti-Jewish.

http://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/2018/04/17/sartres-anti-semite-and-jew-a-critique-part-one/