Karin McQuillan recently posed the question, Are Jews Traumatized? Ms. McQuillan indicates that she is a psychotherapist trying to fathom the unconscious psychodynamics of the Jew-hating voiced by a professor of Judaism at Brandeis University. Ms. McQuillan's answer is that the traumata of historic or contemporary anti-Semitism is the primary cause of institutional Jew-hating at Brandeis. But if trauma were the cause, it would follow that earlier generations of Jewish Americans would have been more anti-Israel. The opposite is true. As Jewish Americans experience less first- and second-hand trauma they become more disloyal to Israel. It is not Jewish self-hatred, it is Jew-hating. The professor does not hate himself; he hates the Jews he views as unlike himself, those loyal to Israel.
Before answering Ms. McQuillan's question, here is a nip of esoterica. One school of psychology accepts reincarnation and would agree with Ms. McQuillan. Of course, Carl Jung theorized a collective unconscious. His theories would suggest that the Jewish people carry a special narrative of suffering down through the ages. More specifically, Rabbi Yonassan Gershom wrote a book entitled Beyond the Ashes: Cases of Reincarnation from the Holocaust. The Rabbi asserts that the aversion to Judaism among Jewish-Americans of the baby-boom generation is because they remember the Holocaust from their last lives, and they reject their Jewish identity out of unconscious terror.
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