Jewish prisoners distorted reality by stereotyping anti-Semites as all-powerful and contemptible

Evidence

Some years later, Bettelheim published an article on `The Victim’s Image of the Anti-Semite’, based on his experiences with Jewish prisoners in the concentration camps. This tackled the explosive problem of the way in which the Jews reacted to the effective psychological mechanisms of the anti-Semites by developing reality-distorting psychological mechanisms of their own, and endangered themselves by stereotyping their opponents as simultaneously all-powerful and contemptible, since they did not see where their real chances lay. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 1622

Categorization

• QUESTION: Bettelheim’s claim here was later heavily contested as victim-blaming. Worth chasing the controversy to weigh this against critics.
• XREF: Parallels the dialectic of recognition and the psychology of oppression, as in Fanon and the Frankfurt School’s analysis of how victims internalize their oppressors’ categories. — connects to: Jewish political homelessness caused fatal misreading of modern antisemitism as old religious Jew-hatred — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 75; Anti-Semites erase the existence of Jewish workers to fit a stereotype — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 392

Broader Connections

• Jewish political homelessness caused fatal misreading of modern antisemitism as old religious Jew-hatred #corroborates (0.80) — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 75