SOURCE: "Jewish Anti-Semitism: The Problem of Self-Hate," in Creative Awakening: The Jewish Presence in Twentieth-Century American Literature, 1900-1940s, Greenwood Press, 1987, pp. 151-65.

In the following essay, Harap examines various indications of ethnic self-hatred in Jewish authors and literary characters.

For over two thousand years the Jews have been afflicted with numbers among them who wish to transfer their identity to that of their host people. Their lack of a national state before 1948 and the worldwide persistence of anti-Semitism in all its varieties, economic, political, and social, have caused them to be regarded as an alien people nearly everywhere they settled. Many have succumbed to the all-too-human tendency to avoid the ineligibilities attaching to their alien status and, as they thought, to head off anti-Semitism by religious conversion to a socially approved faith or by renouncing or concealing their Jewish origin. This tendency has become stronger since Emancipation...