On the night of August thirtieth, nineteen thirty-three, a trio of Sudeten German Nazi sympathizers fired through the window of the upstairs study where Theodor Lessing was working, in the Villa Edelweiss, the house in Marienbad in which he had taken refuge, and Lessing, who had fled Germany in March and had attended the Zionist Congress in Prague that summer, died the next day, at sixty-one, with the reputation of having been one of the most hated men in Weimar Germany. Three years earlier, he had published Der jüdische Selbsthass, the book that gave modern shape to the idea of Jewish self-hatred and examined the cases of six unhappy Jews, among them Otto Weininger and Arthur Trebitsch, the two who had come to see in Judaism the source of the world’s evil and to feed, with the authority of those who spoke from within, the antisemitism directed at their own people. It was that book that put into circulation the label of the self-hating Jew, which we reach for with a frequency that ought to worry us whenever a Diaspora Jew criticizes Israel.

The label travelled across nearly a century and arrived intact, and ready for use, last October, when the Washington Post published a poll, conducted between September second and ninth among eight hundred and fifteen American Jews, in which sixty-one in every hundred said that Israel had committed war crimes in Gaza and thirty-nine said that it had committed genocide, a share that rose to half among those aged eighteen to thirty-four. One of the respondents, Julia Seidman, a forty-two-year-old resident of Washington, told the paper that at the beginning Israel had had no choice, since no country could accept a threat of that size, and that two years on nothing could justify the suffering she was watching, which left her disgusted.

Before deciding what to do with Julia Seidman, the reader may want to know that, in the same questionnaire, ninety-four in........

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