In 1930, German-Jewish philosopher Theodor Lessing published a book that would cost him his life. Der jüdische Selbsthaß (Jewish Self-Hatred) offered a devastating psychological portrait of Jews who turned against their own people, desperate to win acceptance from a society that would never truly embrace them. Nearly a century later, his insights feel unnervingly fresh.
Lessing wrote from painful firsthand observation. He had watched brilliant Jewish intellectuals attempt the impossible: trying to escape antisemitism by becoming Judaism’s harshest critics. The strategy never worked. Their gentile audiences might applaud the performance, but they never forgot who was performing.
Consider Lessing’s most haunting example: Otto Weininger, a young Viennese intellectual who wrote Sex and Character in 1903. The book’s antisemitic vitriol could have been penned by Wagner himself. Weininger converted to Protestantism, declared Jews inherently incapable of creativity or genuine morality, and then, at just 23, shot himself in the room where Beethoven died.
His suicide revealed the terrible paradox at the heart of self-hatred: You can change your religion, your philosophy, even your name, but you cannot change how others see you. Weininger’s desperate attempt to transcend his Jewishness by denouncing it only underscored what he was trying to escape.
But Lessing’s genius lay in recognizing this as more than individual tragedy. He identified a recurring pattern: the minority intellectual who gains status by performing a kind of public ethnic suicide, becoming the “good Jew” who confirms every prejudice of the majority culture. These figures didn’t merely distance themselves from Judaism; they competed to denounce it most eloquently, most savagely, most “objectively.”
The performative nature was key. This wasn’t quiet assimilation or private doubt. It was public theater, with the self-hating Jew cast as both prosecutor and defendant, offering themselves up as proof of their people’s failings.
Watch certain Jewish academics, activists, and cultural figures discuss Israel today. Measured criticism of specific policies reflects healthy political discourse in any democracy. But notice when the rhetoric shifts into something darker: when Israel becomes not just flawed but uniquely evil, not just wrong but the world’s primary source of suffering. When Jewish self-determination itself becomes the problem.
The patterns Lessing identified ring familiar:
Selective moral outrage: Why is Israel labeled “genocidal” while actual genocides barely merit a mention? Why does one country’s military response generate more fury than systematic slaughter elsewhere?
Adoption of eliminationist language: Embracing slogans like “from the river to the sea” that explicitly or implicitly call for Israel’s destruction, not reform.
Performative identity: Using Jewish identity as a cudgel (“As a Jew, I am ashamed…”), weaponizing their background to add weight to their condemnation.
Asymmetric skepticism: Dismissing antisemitism from their allies as overblown while detecting it everywhere among their opponents.
Lessing understood this wasn’t really about political positions but about psychology: the desperate attempt to purchase acceptance by offering up one’s own people as a sacrifice. He would immediately recognize the Jewish academic who builds their career on comparing Israel to Nazi Germany, or the Jewish activist who finds “liberation” in movements that openly call for Israel’s destruction.
The cruelest irony? It never works. The antisemites who applaud these performances don’t suddenly accept their Jewish performers as equals. They simply use them as shields and weapons (“Even the Jews agree with us!”) while the self-hating Jew remains forever outside, belonging neither to the people they’ve rejected nor the people whose approval they seek.
Even Bernie Sanders, who has spent years condemning Israel, calling its actions immoral and illegal, demanding ceasefires, opposing defense funding, and leading efforts to block U.S. arms transfers, discovered this bitter truth. Despite his consistent criticism of Israel, he was still heckled and branded a “genocide supporter” by pro-Palestinian activists. The approval he sought remained forever out of reach. [See featured video from Tamer Masudin’s Instagram]:
Lessing himself was murdered by the Nazis in 1933, despite (or perhaps because of) his penetrating analysis of Jewish identity. His death underscored his own thesis: understanding self-hatred doesn’t cure it, and eloquence about antisemitism doesn’t protect you from it.
His work reminds us that this phenomenon isn’t about legitimate political disagreement. People of good faith can and should debate Israel’s policies, just as they debate any nation’s choices. But there’s a difference between criticism and the kind of performative self-flagellation Lessing described.
Today’s version plays out on social media, in academic conferences, in activist spaces. The technology is new but the underlying drama remains unchanged: the impossible attempt to escape oneself by denouncing one’s origins, and the inevitable discovery that the exit door was always an illusion.
What Lessing understood in 1930 remains true today: You cannot purchase acceptance by offering your people as a sacrifice. The minority member who internalizes the majority’s hatred and redirects it at their own doesn’t transcend their identity. They simply become trapped in a more painful version of it.
In our current moment, as debates about Israel grow increasingly poisonous, Lessing’s century-old insights offer both a warning and a strange comfort. This pattern is not new. It has been documented, analyzed, and understood. And perhaps in understanding it, we can begin to move beyond it, toward conversations about Israel and Palestine that are rooted in genuine moral concern rather than the ancient psychological drama of self-hatred.
[Originally published here]