The New York Times ran an absorbing story about the movement of ultra-orthodox Jews out of New York City into deteriorating neighborhoods of northern New Jersey and New York. Typically, they buy up blocks of boarded-up houses and construct what amounts to Jewish enclaves, with synagogues, community centers, and shops selling kosher food and other goods specific to Jewish practice. The influx of newcomers has been the source of worry among long-time residents who are concerned that the new arrivals will alter the existing culture in undesirable ways.
Orthodox Jews are industrious, frugal, and law-abiding, but they keep to themselves and seldom socialize with the goyim[1]. Reading the article prompted some thoughts.
The Shadow
According to Carl Jung, we are usually aware of a small fraction of our thoughts, experiences, and memories. The remaining matter resides in the subconscious. Jung named this mental structure the shadow. Consciousness, it has been said, is a peanut floating in the vast sea of the subconscious.[2] It is invisible because the mind cannot deal consciously with the firehose of sensations and the tsunami of thoughts with which we are daily bombarded.
The shadow contains, among other items, elements of our personality, both good and bad, that we have repressed. The conscious mind remains unaware of traits that it cannot or does not wish to acknowledge. A fearful person with repressed courage, a schoolyard bully with repressed tenderness, or a priest with repressed sexual desires are examples of persons possessing character traits that either society or individuals cannot tolerate.
Our minds make practical use of the shadow to store thoughts, impressions, and memories that we do not need or want. It is an alter ego, a semi-autonomous mind, a Doppelgänger, coexisting with and silently influencing the conscious mind. Dreams often afford us a glimpse of our own shadow. Jung believed that the shadow contains mostly good things that our conscious minds have been conditioned to reject.
Jung also discovered that the subconscious mind contains mental complexes of the opposite gender from the one with which we consciously identify. He named the anima as the female complex of men and the animus as the male complex of women, after the Latin[3].
Projection
Projection is the unconscious attribution of one’s shadow characteristics to another person, the target or subject.
A man falls in love with a woman by projecting his anima onto her, and, given the natural proclivities of the human species, she projects her animus onto him. It is a thrilling experience, as almost everyone who has fallen in love can attest. But both lovers are in love with a projection of their own anima or animus. This is the reason we so often fall in love with veritable strangers. It is much harder to project our anima or animus onto someone we know well, as we already know who they are.
Joseph Campbell[4], the noted scholar of myth, commented in a lecture that the course of courtship and marriage starts with each partner projecting their anima/animus onto the other. New love is passionate, but the lovers will invariably withdraw their projections as their familiarity with each other grows. As a result, their passion will subside. The couple must then learn compassion[5] towards each other if the relationship is to continue.
The universal propensity of humans to project their shadow content on others, for good or bad, has powerful political implications. Projection is not always benign. People can either project the good or evil within themselves upon others. The less they know about others, the easier it is to make them into targets.
Anna Marie Franz, a pupil and then an assistant to Carl Jung, illustrates both the beneficial and dangerous sides of the shadow in the following fragment of a case study:
Obviously, the problem of the shadow plays a [significant] role in all political conflicts. If the man [her patient] who had this dream had not been sensible about his shadow problem, he could easily have identified the desperate Frenchman [dream character] with the “dangerous Communists” of outer life, or the official [dream character] plus the prosperous man [dream character] with the “grasping capitalists.” In this way he would have avoided seeing that he had within him such warring elements. If people observe their own unconscious tendencies in other people, this is called a “projection.” Political agitation in all countries is full of such projections, just as much as the backyard gossip of little groups and individuals. Projections of all kinds obscure our view of our fellow men, spoiling its objectivity, and thus spoiling all possibility of genuine human relationships.[6]
Projection can also work the other way. Celebrities are frequent targets for positive projection. When we project our favorable shadow contents onto celebrities, we usually attribute to them virtues they do not possess. Such targets often appear to radiate an aura of glamour, intelligence, and love — characteristics that belong to the projector, not the target.
Anti-Semitism
Anti-semitism is seldom based on the anti-Semite’s acquaintance with Jews, but usually self-hatred residing in the anti-semite’s own shadow. Ask him why he hates Jews, and he will likely respond with either made-up fantasies created by his own imagination or what others have told him.
Why Jews? Why not Presbyterians or Buddhists? My theory is that it is much easier to project one’s dark side onto strangers. Jews, especially the ultra-orthodox, have different religious customs, diets, and cultures that differ markedly from the dominant culture.[7] It is an essential tenet of the Jewish faith that God set Jews aside as his special people, the chosen[8]. Ultra-orthodox Jews dress in different clothing, buy their groceries at Kosher grocers and butchers, and conduct their services in Hebrew, a language unfamiliar to non-Jews. Most important, their self-imposed isolation makes them a mystery to their non-Jewish neighbors.
Jews have the absolute right under the U. S. Constitution to remain Jewish and practice their religion, the same as non-Jews. The law, at least in the U.S., treats Jews and gentiles the same.
But there are psychological realities that judges and constitutions cannot change. People are afraid of the unknown because it resides within themselves. When any people set themselves apart from the rest of the population and make themselves strangers in the land, they risk becoming targets. It is beside the point that they are law-abiding, industrious citizens. By their self-imposed isolation, some Jews have created a psychological black hole in outsiders’ minds, a hole that outsiders often fill with fear and hatred from their own repressed feelings.
When groups keep to themselves, form mini-societies, and observe customs and traditions that differ markedly from the dominant culture, they will encounter misunderstanding and hostility, especially when society is put under stress[9], either from domestic or foreign actors. In such times, politicians intending to avoid accounting look for scapegoats and subcultures with which few are familiar and that can be easily demonized. Almost any minority will serve that purpose[10], but the tried and true targets of projection through the ages have been Jews.
Our power elite has obscured its real intentions. It has tricked the nation into supporting innumerable wars against nations of which Americans are barely aware. Through pervasive propaganda, it has transformed its opponents into cold, murderous enemies by skillfully directing mass projection at them. Americans know next to nothing about how their country became enemies of a foreign nation because most of us have never personally known Arabs, Pashtuns, Kurds, Palestinians, or Iranians, and therefore have never had the opportunity to know them as persons.
The millions of innocent lives our military has cavalierly extinguished[11] and the needless destruction of property and resources that could have served a better purpose, has made our elite richer and more powerful, but left the rest of us poorer and weaker[12]. Moreover, it is turning the rest of the world against us. [13]
Not only are these policies turning the world against us, but they are turning us against ourselves. A substantial minority, having been impoverished by the policies of the elite and their paid-for politicians, have turned to neofascism as a simple solution to the nation’s problems, as well as their own[14]
There is no easy solution.
Conversely and ironically, creating a Jewish nation in the middle east by ethnic cleansing has not turned out satisfactorily, either. Jews, having once been the victims of Nazi persecution, have become persecutors themselves, directing their projections onto the unfortunate Palestinian people. Israel is rapidly becoming a fascist nation, just as willing to persecute Palestinians as the Nazis were to persecute Jews. This cannot end well.
To intelligently deal with anti-semitism, we must recognize first our own tendency to project our dark side upon Jews and be mindful of our own weaknesses in that regard.
If Jews wish to live their lives in peace, they must avoid being made a target of projection. Doing this will be difficult but not impossible. I wish I knew how.
The best cure for anti-semitism is familiarity. It is almost impossible to turn friends and acquaintances into targets of projection.
Separation encourages both the minority and the majority to project their darkest feelings upon the other. Familiarity does not always lead to affection or reconciliation, but it promotes realism, the only effective antidote for projection.
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A Jewish term for non-Jews. From the Hebrew word gõy ‘people, nation.’ ↩
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From a workshop led by Fr. Michael Dwinell (1943–2009), author, priest, psychotherapist. ↩
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Anima is the female form of the Latin word “soul,” animus the male form. ↩
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1904–1987 ↩
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An interesting Buddhist parallel is the Four Sacred Abodes: loving kindness, compassion, sympathetic joy, and equanimity. ↩
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Meeting the Shadow, p. 37, ed. by Connie Zweig, Jeremiah Abrams, Penguin-Putnam, 1991. ↩
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The more Jews and gentiles mix socially, there seems to me that there is less anti-semitism. That is not always the case, however. Prior to the ascent of Hitler, Jews had become assimilated into German society to a degree that persecution was unthinkable to most Germans and Jews. Suddenly it became not only thinkable but the law of the land. ↩
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“But I have said unto you, Ye shall inherit their land, and I will give it unto you to possess it, a land that floweth with milk and honey: I am the LORD your God, which have separated you from other people.” Leviticus 20:24 ↩
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This could be a variety of unpleasant happenings: economic collapse, religious conflicts, climate change, revolutions, technological breakthroughs, etc. ↩
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For example, Blacks in the deep South, Hispanics, and Native Americans living in the Southwest. ↩
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Collateral damage ↩
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Neoliberalism requires a massive military and the expenditure of vast sums of money to upgrade and maintain. A discussion of neoliberalism is best reserved for another time. ↩
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Perkins, John, The New Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc., Oakland, CA 2016. Read this book if you would like more understanding of what is happening and how the Western World, especially the United States, has been stripping the rest of the world of its resources and helping to bring on global warming. (Don’t get me started.) ↩
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Hoffer, Eric, The True Believer The book is available from all the major web booksellers. I bought mine on Apple Books for less than a dollar, but I cannot guarantee the price. ↩
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