Is it a disease to prefer your own kind and to dislike those who are different? To me that seems healthy.
According to the Amazon.com description of Dr. Theodore Isaac Rubin’s book Anti-Semitism: A Disease of the Mind: “As a psychiatrist, Dr. Rubin learned that anti-Semitism and other deep-seated prejudices are non-organic diseases of the mind: malignant emotional illnesses that can be treated only by first understanding the unique psychodynamics involved. Little has been written about this aspect of bigotry. Anti-Semitism is a bold endeavor to shed light on one of humankind’s most destructive and contagious illnesses, and offers hope and healing for the future.”
According to Publisher’s Weekly:
With a surgeon’s precision, psychiatrist Rubin explores the dark crannies of the anti-Semite’s mind. He finds, among Christian Jew-haters, ambivalence over the fact that Jesus was a Jew and a “conscience-giver.” Jews, according to Rubin ( Compassion and Self-Hate ), are turned into objects of the bigot’s projected guilt and self-hate. He sees anti-Semitism as a “symbol sickness” that involves envy, low self-esteem and projection of one’s inner conflicts onto a stereotyped other. Violent “acting out,” in the case of anti-Semites, often results from gender confusion, homophobia and an identification with macho toughness, claims Rubin. To medicalize anti-Jewish prejudice by interpreting it as a psychiatric disorder, one runs the risk of letting bigots off the hook too easily, but Rubin for the most part overcomes this pitfall in an eloquent, valuable book that pinpoints the dynamics of anti-Semitism from its milder to its more virulent forms.
