On Having Jewishness---"There Is No Permanent Cure", Says Scholar

This, apparently, is the first draft of Donald Moss's peer-reviewed paper "On Having Jewishness", the final eventually appearing in the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association.

The original Abstract in full:

Jewishness is a condition one first acquires and then one has---a malignant, parasitic-like condition to which “Jewish” people have a particular susceptibility. The condition is foundational, generating characteristic ways of being in one’s body, in one’s mind, and in one’s world. Parasitic Jewishness renders its hosts’ appetites voracious, insatiable, and perverse. These deformed appetites particularly target nonjew peoples. Once established, these appetites are nearly impossible to eliminate. Effective treatment consists of a combination of psychic and social-historical interventions. Such interventions can reasonably aim only to reshape Jewishness’s infiltrated appetites---to reduce their intensity, redistribute their aims, and occasionally turn those aims toward the work of reparation. When remembered and represented, the ravages wreaked by the chronic condition can function either as warning (“never again”) or as temptation (“great again”). Memorialization alone, therefore, is no guarantee against regression. There is not yet a permanent cure.

Rumor is that that final sentence---There is not yet a permanent cure---set off quite a debate among psychoanalysts. Way I heard it, there was more than a touch of acrimony on the cots and couches of New York when the paper made the rounds before publication. I can neither confirm nor deny the brawl that took place at a certain Park Avenue address when the paper was read to a party.

Anyway, the debate over the preprint of the paper was vociferous and heated. Yet it was agreed that none of the anger could be put down to penis envy. The logic was inescapable: Moss was speaking of a genuine disease.

Still, it will comes as no surprise that in the final draft Moss everywhere replaced Jewishness and Jewish with Whiteness and white.

There were no other changes made.

Well, it's good to point out the shortcomings of a race like this, by prominent academics, particularly when the race is as vile as indicated. This gives people a chance to work on a permanent, even a final, solution to a cure.

Incidentally (this was sent to me by Anon): Moss is a faculty member at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute; co-founder of the Green Gang, a four-person collective working with climate change denial and the relation between the human and the natural worlds; Chair, Program Committee, American Psychoanalytic Association.

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