In August 1973, a convict named Jan-Erik Olsson walked into a bank on Norrmalmstorg square in central Stockholm, fired a shot into the ceiling, and took four employees hostage. Six days later, when the police finally moved in, something strange had happened. The captives had come to fear their rescuers more than the man holding the gun. The criminologist Nils Bejerot, advising the police, gave the reaction a name. The world now knows it as Stockholm syndrome.
The syndrome spares no one. When a power far greater than yourself takes you captive, the instinct for survival counsels appeasement: grow obedient, obliging, eager to please. “Death before dishonor” makes a fine motto, but the prisoners who carried it to its logical end are no longer around to recite it. Every group is susceptible, every human being without exception. So why does the affliction settle on Jews more heavily than on anyone else?
Because no people has been conquered, imprisoned, enslaved, hunted by pogroms, and marked for slaughter as relentlessly, for as many centuries. The captivity simply ran longer. When the cell is 2,000 years deep, the reflexes harden into something close to inheritance.
We have made this case before, and the diagnosis is older than either of us. In 1930, the German Jewish philosopher Theodor Lessing published a book whose title translates to “Jewish self-hatred,” anatomizing brilliant Jews who tried to outrun antisemitism by becoming its most fluent voices. His grimmest case was Otto Weininger, the Viennese prodigy who pronounced Jews incapable of genius or morality, converted to Protestantism, and, at 23, shot himself in the house where Beethoven died. He changed his religion, his philosophy, even his self-image, and still could not change how the world saw him. Lessing was murdered by Nazi agents in 1933, proving his own thesis in the cruelest way: Understanding the disease confers no immunity from it.
That this self-hatred is rampant today cannot be seriously disputed. Witness the mayoral victory of Zohran Mamdani, an open antagonist of Zionism, propelled by conspicuous Jewish support, especially among voters under 40. Witness nearly the entire Reform movement, and far too many of the ultra-Orthodox, lined up as bitter opponents of Israel. Witness the prestige campus uprisings at Harvard and Columbia, many of them organized and fronted by Jews. In any free society, sharp criticism of a government’s conduct is healthy and necessary. This is something else. This is the captive insisting the cell was his own idea.
How to read it, except as a bid to ingratiate oneself with one’s enemies, in the tender hope that once they reign supreme, they will judge gently? The tactic fails. It always fails. The antisemite who applauds the performance does not embrace the performer. He pockets him as a weapon, “even the Jews agree,” and discards him when the show is over.
Consider how thoroughly the lesson has been ignored. Jews were indispensable to black Americans in their long struggle. The NAACP, founded in 1909, was built and bankrolled with conspicuous Jewish help: Henry Moskowitz among its founders, Rabbis Emil Hirsch and Stephen Wise and the reformer Lillian Wald in its early ranks, the philanthropists Jacob Schiff and Julius Rosenwald underwriting it, Joel Spingarn serving as chairman and later president, the family name still fixed to the organization’s highest honor. How has that favor been repaid in Israel’s hour of need? Poorly, and from some quarters worse than poorly.
Ditto the Democratic Party. For decades, Jews have backed the donkey, never the elephant, and their reward has been Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), Rep Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), and the “Squad,” reliable adversaries every one of them. Sanders is the lesson in miniature. After years of branding Israel’s war immoral and illegal, demanding ceasefires and moving to block its arms, he was still jeered as a “fascist and a genocide supporter” by the very activists whose blessing he was chasing. The captive may polish his chains to a mirror shine. The jailer is not impressed.
THE PARTY OF NAZI ACCUSERS IS AWFULLY SILENT ABOUT JEW HATRED AFTER NYC SYNAGOGUE TERRORIZED
And still the pattern holds. New generations volunteer for it, certain that this time the bargain will be honored, this time the enemy will make an exception. He will not. There is no version of this trade in which the Jew who surrenders his own people is handed back his dignity. The exit he keeps reaching for was always painted on the wall.
Stockholm syndrome, it seems, is lodged deep in the Jewish psyche. The first step out of any captivity is the refusal to thank the captor.
Walter E. Block is the Harold E. Wirth eminent scholar endowed chairman and professor of economics at Loyola University New Orleans. Oded Kohn Faran holds degrees in law from Sha’arei Mishpat College in Israel. He is the general director of Faran & Co. International Translations and lives in Tbilisi, Georgia.