Self-Hating Jew

Until now, I've never seen an instance in which that term could be used fairly. And then, via Andrew Sullivan, I read this charming piece by Rabbi Daniel Lapin (for the uninitiated: a major Jewish ally of the evangelical movement), titled "Our Worst Enemy," an appellation which we swiftly find out refers to the Jews themselves. In a column littered with little gems of refracted, turned-in-on-itself anti-Semitism, this nugget stands out in particular:

You’d have to be a recent immigrant from Outer Mongolia not to know of the role that people with Jewish names play in the coarsening of our culture.

With a few substitutions for style and diction, there aren't many historically important anti-Semitic ideologues who didn't make statements more or less precisely the same as that one. Would I be violating Godwin's law if I suggested that Rabbi Lapin's immediate intellectual forbear in criticizing the Jewish role in cultural decadence was none other than Hitler? Most of the time, yes. But in this case, I think not. Not when Rabbi Lapin himself cites a juicy passage from Mein Kampf about degenerate Jewish art, only to aver that such sentiments "focused on a reality that resonated with the educated, and cultured Germans of his day." Not, further, when Lapin himself validates in toto the Nazi programme of cultural restoration:

The sad fact is that through Jewish actors, playwrights, and producers, the Berlin stage of Weimar Germany linked Jews and deviant sexuality in all its sordid manifestations just as surely as Broadway does today. Much of the filth in American entertainment today parallels that of Germany between the wars.

The rest of the piece ranges from unrelentingly egregious to unrelentingly risible, the latter evidenced by Lapin's repeated jeremiads against Woody Allen, whom Lapin fatuously charges with "portray[ing] Jews, not to mention rabbis, as loathsome liars, desperate psychotics, pathetic perverts, and ridiculously lecherous losers." Presumably it didn't occur to Lapin that these might have been self-portraits. It's just that lack of subtlety and surfeit of philistinism that "links" reactionary peasants with deviant views about freedom of expression, if I may borrow a phrase.

To conclude: I'm not all that surprised to see a right-wing demagogue engaging in a bit of disgraceful (but fun!) on-the-other-handism about Hitler. I am, however, somewhat surprised to see that the person doing so is a Jew.