IS THEKE A CUKE FOR ANTI-SEMITISM'
415
fired because of things he said, and that therefore his First Amendment
rights had been violated. I had never myself before known that there was
a First Amendment right to be the chairman of a department at a col–
lege, but apparently that is what the high court of New York State de–
cided.
Edith Kurzweil: I
think it had to do with legal technicalities and with
the ineptitude of the administration, its inability to squarely confront the
ISSUCS.
Robert Wistrich: I
agree with the proposition that it starts with the
Jews but never stops with them. But I would also point out that this
method of Jewish self-defense was tried in many countries before the
Holocaust with mixed success. It is a matter of circumstances which are
too complex to go into. It 's not a foolproof formula. Secondly, on the
issue of psychology and psychopathology, I don't think anybody here
actually said that the Nazis were sick, although I take it that you're not
suggesting that they were normal either. These concepts are not
particularly useful to work with.
My point was that I find it somewhat disappointing that our
psycholoJ?ica /und erstand ing of the dynamics of prejudice, of anti-Semitism
and indeed of many forms of racism and ethnic hatred has not advanced
very considerably in the last forty years. Perhaps Edith, who is an expert
in this field, might want to say something about that. I was very struck
by the fact, for instance, that Sigmund Freud himself, the founder of
psychoanalysis, barely dealt with the issue, although it was something
which as a Viennese Jew he suffered from very acutely throughout his
life. Perhaps it's an unfortunate legacy that Freud, for reasons we don't
have time to go into , chose not to app ly his psychoanalytic skills in any
great depth to this problem. I do believe that we need greater insight
and understanding. I don't think we shou ld be too dismissive of the
possibility that psychology might one day help us in some ways.
Unfortunately it hasn't particularly succeeded up to now.
Edith Kurzweil:
Actually, psychoanalysts have tried to get
to
the roots
of these problems. However, to some extent they, themselves, may be
ideologues, or addressing the issues in terms of the Zeitgeist.
Questioll:
The study that found intellectual blacks to be anti-Jewish is,
think, absolutely not to the point. As a high-school English teacher in
Brooklyn for many years, I found, at least for the last fifteen years, that
those teenagers who were mostly on the low socio-economic level were
