Word: jew
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Because the psychiatrist serves as little more than an interrogator assembling the pieces of Jackson's life, we never know why he is so interested in curing veterans like Jackson. The only apparent affinity between the two men is that the psychiatrist is a Polish Jew who suffered similar survival guilt when his family was killed by the Nazis--he was spared as part of a business deal with a German officer. It seems that other elements in his character must also fuel his interest in Jackson, but if Cole considered them at all, they remain hidden...
...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...
...evidence, Cuddihy presents "On the Jewish Question," Marx's still controversial essay about the economic behavior of the Jews. Many scholars have seen it as an anti-Semitic tract. To Cuddihy, on the contrary, it is a description of the Jew as the universal capitalist whose "worldly God" is money. The Gentile capitalists worshiped the same God, except that they affected a veneer of civility as "a figleaf for the cash nexus ... The civilities are a kind of games goyim [Gentiles] play...
...deepest suspicion clearly takes nerve. Ordeal, however,.is not antiSemitic. At its best it is a provocative revisionist ramble through the 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...
...book's most fascinating moments. Cuddihy puts aside the legal issues and instead analyzes the proceedings as "an ancient scenario" played out in the courtroom by 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...