Word: freude
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...view, have been intellectual Davids slaying Gentile Goliaths. Why? Because historically, successful assimilation required that the Jews "be nice," that they accept the impersonal, formal civility of Gentile society at the expense of the more idiosyncratic, traditionally religious world of the ghetto. Instead of being nice, Marx, Freud and others persisted in the "coarseness that reveals," and codified their resistance into vast intellectual systems. Such people, says Cuddihy, reacted to anti-Semitism by exposing the hypocrisy at the root of non-Jewish "appearances," despising those who concealed their Jewishness out of embarrassment. They showed that behind the Gentile...
...Freud, the result was the theory of repression. Just as the assimilating Jew repressed the crude Yiddish-keit of his inner being, says Cuddihy, so did the Gentile repress the id that was at the root of everybody's being. As Ordeal would have it: "The importunate 'Yid' released from ghetto and shtetl is the model, I contend, for Freud's coarse, importunate Td.'" Marx, like Freud, is depicted as an iconoclastic unmasker of the hypocritical civility of the Gentiles...
...received ideas of the past hundred years, which encourages readers to alter their conceptions of the world. Cuddihy's presentation is flawed by excessive zeal. If a Jew utters a word like coarse, he automatically triggers, in Cuddihy's mind, visions of the primal scream. (Though, as Freud once pointed out, sometimes a cigar is only a cigar.) Cuddihy also has a tendency to expand a quirky coincidence into a theory of cultural history...
...discussing the Oedipus complex, for instance, he assumes that the crucial element in Freud's childhood was his deep shame when he learned that his father had meekly endured an anti-Semitic insult on the streets of Vienna. Thereafter, Freud is bent on vengeance -"He will unmask these goyim" by putting the offending Gentiles on the analyst's couch. The problem is not that Cuddihy's theories are preposterous, but that he has left too much out of his calculations - most notably the vast clinical experience that Freud always refers to in his speculative essays...
...Defendant Abbie Hoffman, an uncompromisingly "coarse Yid" if ever there was one, and Trial Judge Julius Hoffman, archetype of the assimilating Jew striving for Gentile "refinement." When Abbie labels Julius a "front man for the Wasp power elite," he bluntly expresses the "sociocultural wounds" that, Cuddihy says, Marx and Freud expressed only indirectly. But when Cuddihy poaches upon the field of literary criticism, his judgments cloud his vision. He arrogantly dismisses Novelist Bernard Malamud as "a teller of Christian tales who 'passes' as a Jew." evidently because Malamud does not depict the Jewish ordeal the way Cuddihy defines...