Have been reading Sartre’s Anti-Semite and Jew: An Exploration of the Etiology of Hate. Quite brilliant, with a number of very insightful passages. Still digesting it, but appreciating having to think through the dimension of class that he brings in.

Another interesting contribution is the film The Believer, which really … packs a punch. The (Jewish) filmmakers held nothing back in trying to reach the deepest level of pathology that is going on, and a lot of viewers were offended by this. But I think it’s a necessary thing to try and do. One scene stands out for me in this regard: Ryan Gosling (who is amazing in this) in a café with the New York Times reporter, laying out his philosophy. (His character is based upon a real person, a Jewish anti-Semite who became something of a terrorist.) Where Sartre focuses (at least so far, I’m only halfway through) on psychological processes of resentment and scapegoating, that scene takes the film perhaps even deeper, into “blood” and the body and sexuality–the Jew as culturally “effeminizing” force par excellence.

I find contemporary anti-Semitism quite terrifying in its paranoia and hysteria. “Anti-Semitism” isn’t actually a good word for it both because, of course, the Arab people are also Semitic, and because “anti” is far too mild a term to describe the literally deranged rantings one comes across online too often. I don’t know of any phenomenon quite like it. All the more reason that we descend as far as we can, and dare, to try and understand the swamps of confusion and fear out of which it arises.