Assimilated Jews’ role-playing bitterness fed radical critique despite claimed non-discrimination

Evidence

And yet, for all their claims to total assimilation and assertions about the lack of discrimination in Weimar, one cannot avoid a sense of their protesting too much. If in fact Weimar was an environment in which anti-Semitism was on the wane, which itself seems questionable, it must be remembered that the Institut’s members all grew up before the First World War in a very different Germany. Even the most assimilated Jews in Wilhelmian Germany must have felt somewhat apart from their gentile counterparts, and coming to maturity in this atmosphere must surely have left its mark. The sense of role-playing that the Jew eager to forget his origins must have experienced could only have left a residue of bitterness, which might easily feed a radical critique of the society as a whole. — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, 166

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Jewish linguistic tradition predisposed assimilated intellectuals toward dialectical theory and psychoanalysis — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History…, 168; Schlegel grounded aesthetic and linguistic hierarchies in an Indo-European bias against Semitic peoples. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 273; The Institut subordinated Jewish identity and anti-Semitism to social class analysis — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History…, 162 (+2 more)

Broader Connections

• Jewish linguistic tradition predisposed assimilated intellectuals toward dialectical theory and psychoanalysis #expands (0.78) — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, 168
• The Institut subordinated Jewish identity and anti-Semitism to social class analysis #responds-to (0.78) — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, 162
• Schlegel grounded aesthetic and linguistic hierarchies in an Indo-European bias against Semitic peoples. #expands (0.72) — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 273