Defenselessness itself licenses and provokes oppression across women, natives, and Jews.

Evidence

Page 339 saw anti-Semitism as being at work wherever anger and cruelty were directed against weakness and fear or happiness and longing. Woman, however, is marked out by her weakness; her weakness puts her in the minority, even where women are numerically superior to men. As with the oppressed aboriginal inhabitants in early national states, or the colonial natives whose organization and weapons are primitive compared with those of their conquerors, or the Jews among the `Aryans’, women’s defenselessness is the legal title of their oppression … The signs of powerlessness, sudden uncoordinated movements, animal fear, confusion, awaken the thirst for blood. The justification for hatred for woman that represents her as intellectually and physically inferior, and bearing the brand of domination on her forehead, is equally that of hatred for Jews. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 362

Categorization

• XREF: Adorno’s account of the projection mechanism in the anti-Semitism chapters connects to the reader’s notes on the culture industry’s manufacture of consent and on anti-Semitic projection as objectless anger.
• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that weakness and greater affinity to nature are what enrage the strong, because strength costs alienation from nature, is a compact theory of sadism that resists paraphrase.