Frankfurt School Vernunft on Mass Anti-Semitism, Once More

Here are three gems from the anti-semitism chapter of Horkheimer's and Adorno's 'Dialectic of Enlightenment, and one from the Frankfurt School's 'Authoritatian Personality,' that I find particularly arresting. All four quotes seem to me to bear striking applicability to contemporary mass-psychoses.

The profundity of insight here (not to mention the contemporary relevance) I suspect stems BOTH from the authors' personal experience as Jewish refugees from a then Nazifying Europe, AND from their exceptionally deep grounding in Hegel-, Marx-, and Freud-informed sociopsychological-interpretive understanding (or 'reason,' 'Vernunft').

First quote:

'[A]nti-semitism is not simply an "opinion" about the Jews ... [I]t involves the entire personality of the anti-semite.'

Second quote:

'For the fascists the Jews are not a minority but the antirace, the negative principle as such; on their extermination the world's happiness depends.'

Third quote:

'The Jews are today the group which, in practice and in theory, draws to itself the destructive urge which the wrong social order spontaneously produces. They are branded as absolute evil by absolute evil. In this sense they are indeed the chosen people.'

Fourth quote:

'The enlightened self-control with which adapted [assimilated] Jews effaced within themselves the painful scars of domination by others, a kind of second circumcision, made them forsake their own dilapidated community and wholeheartedly embrace the life of the modern bourgeoisie, which was already advancing ineluctably toward a reversion to pure oppression and reorganization into an exclusively racial entity.'

Sad to say, I have been personally close to dear souls who have in recent times emerged either on the victim, or on the victimizer, sides of the social divides implicated by all four quotes.

With those on the victim sides I am all in, to the point that I attend services most Saturdays as a possible convert-in-the-making. I do not wish to be free of the vulnerabilities to which my dearest Beloveds are themselves now again vulnerable. 

I am of course NOT any longer in communication with those who have turned out to have been latent VICTIMIZERS all along. But I do literally pray, literally weekly when not daily, that they will receive the deep healing they need.

(One erstwhile friend's bizarre post some months back that 'all Zionists are Epstein' still haunts me with the thought that something quite terrible must once have happened to him as a child in an ultra-conservative Protestant-Christian family. Something that continued thrall to that tradition prevents his attributing to IT, and accordingly deflects to that tradition's ancient Oedipal target - 'the Christ-killers' - as classical ritual scapegoat instead.)