shown.
Not being Christian in a world that hates the Jew , the homosexual, the castrated male, haunts the post-Holocaust Jew : he has seen the future and it is annihilation. Especially the contemporary Jew
is fighting for his m asculinity. In the camps Jew ish men were castrated: some, only some. The castration was literal for individuals; two thirds of the world’s Jew ry was exterminated, which castrates
the people as a whole rather effectively. Nothing threatens the
Jewish male now more than a perception of him as being deficient
in m asculinity. For this reason, Israel is a m ilitarist nation: no one
will ever again accuse the Jew s of being soft. For this reason,
Amerikan Jew ish writers are apostles of machismo and pimp masculinity. And for this reason, there is a growing segment of the Amerikan Jew ish population that is part of the Christian evangelical Right.
First, there is the trade-off. On television, a rabbi and a priest
were talking. T he priest said: we feel about abortion the w ay you
feel about Israel. I think we can talk, said the rabbi. It is in the
interests of male Jew s (the power structure) to increase the population of Jew s. The trade-off—abortion for Israel— is in the interests of Jew s both for the sake of Israel and for the sake of rebuilding a
Jewish population in the easiest w ay— through male domination.
Second, there is the effort to dissociate the Jewish men from any
perception of fem ininity, being less masculine. Israel, of course,
makes Jew s more male: owning land, controlling a state, having a
nation, having an arm y, having borders to defend and to transgress. In associating with the Christian Right, there is a repudiation of homosexuality, liberal social tolerance of it (still blamed on Jews), a strong move against women (reestablishing male dominance), and in general making an alliance with the rulers— with the
Christians who run a Christian country.
Third, there is the fact that suffering has not made Jews good,
which means that there are greedy Jews who think that power
means safety and also who take pleasure in power. The Christian
Right offers Jews not only a means of dissociation from homosexuality but also real dominance over women, if the social order the Christians want is effectively legislated.
Fourth, there is the fact that suffering has not made Jews good,
which means that there are Jews who hate homosexuals, women,
blacks, children, reading, writing, air, trees, and everything else
the Christian Right seems to hate.
Fifth, the right-wing emphasis on the importance of property
offers Jews a way of changing the history of Jews with respect to
property—whether the property is Israel or land or housing or factories or farms. The protection of property suggests to Jews that they will not be driven off what they own.
Sixth, religious conservatism has its analogue in social conservatism, in that both particularly uphold the rights of men to ownership of women and children. Right-wing Jews who are religiously orthodox see the secular pluralism of Western society in general and the United States in particular as taking Jews away
from Judaism: this, despite the emphasis that Judaism puts on
learning, makes them hostile to secular learning, secular intellectuals, secular Jew s, any education that is not strictly and explicitly Jewish. This brings them into a harmony of values with Christians
who do not like Jews because Jews represent learning: the right-
wing Jews are under the illusion that they and the Christian Right
dislike the same Jews for similar reasons.
Seventh, strangely enough it is in this quasi-religious coalition
with the Christian Right that right-wing Jews seek to find the assimilation that has always been the hope of Jews. We feel the same way you do, they say; we have the same values you have, the same
ideals, the same goals, and we are doing our share. It has been
brilliant strategy on the part of the Christian Right in the United
States to welcome the participation of Jew s, to support the state of
Israel, and to use pedestal anti-Semitism: rather than being ground
under stomping boots, Jew s loyal in their right-wing values are
being lifted up onto a pedestal— where the footing is always precarious, as women know. Believing they can fit in— assimilate
—these Jew s are turning to the one group of people— the fundamentalists— who w ill never forget that “the Jew s killed C hrist. ”
Anything not to be that castrate, that homosexual; there is more
dignity in the killing of Christ than in the concentration camps
when the measure is masculinity.
In the contemporary world, Jew s have an extra burden as creators of culture: Freud and Marx were Jew s. The ideas of both are repugnant to the Christian Right. Freud, right or wrong, made sex
a central social issue. Marx brought half the world to revolution. It
is Marx that the United States government and the Christian Right
are fighting; armies are raised and missiles are built to do it. It is
Freud who asked w hy the family works the w ay it does and suggested that the fam ily was a sexual unit. The intellectual Jew Freud had ideas that undermined what the Christian Right regards
as the cornerstone of Amerikan life: the family. The real question,
of course, was not about the family as such but about the paterfamilias: who is daddy having sex with and why? Freud refused to ask that question finally; but perhaps it would not have ever been
asked, or no one would be asking it now, if Freud had not dissected the sexual underbelly of the family with his formidable intellect.
Right-wing Jew s have a special stake in repudiating the ideas of
both Freud and Marx. Ideas are sissifying, and Jew s need masculinity. The ideas of these two Jewish intellectuals are dangerous: dangerous because right-wing Christianity hates them, therefore
dangerous to Jew s who do not want to be hated. Jew s are cultural
radicals and political revolutionaries by contamination. It’s the
damn Jews, a Klan member will say; and even he will mean Freud
and M arx. * Ideas, however potent, do not serve to masculinize
Jews. Ideas only make Jews more Jewish: more effeminate as
intellectuals.
In the end, Jewish men join up with the Christian Right because
they want domination over women and children, which is the social program of the Right; and because they want to be the opposite of homosexual, whatever that is.
*
Everything in woman is a riddle, and everything in
woman hath one solution— it is called pregnancy.
Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra
Within the frame of male domination, there is good reason for