Zionism and the Rhetoric of Jewish Self-Hatred.

The author's aim is to offer a fresh genealogy of that enduringly controversial term, "Jewish self-hatred." In the first part of the article, the author seeks to show how a general rhetoric of Jewish self-hatred developed not so much as a means of diagnosing a psychological condition but more as in the context of new political needs or, more precisely, in the context of debates about Zionism in turn-of-the-century Germany and Austria. In the second part of the article, the author proceeds in a more microhistorical way, tracing the route the cultural Zionist Theodor Lessing took to popularizing the specific phrase "Jewish self-hatred." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]