Volume 4 No 1 - Journal for the Study of Antisemitism

248 JOURNAL FOR THE STUDY OF ANTISEMITISM [ VOL. 4:237
history of Jewish assimilation and its discontents—the subject that closes
my course. When it comes to the language of Jewish difference, the process
of acculturation makes the distinction between its Jewish and Gentile carriers
rather artificial, thereby rendering the common “I am myself a Jew”
alibi of today’s secular anti-Zionists quite unconvincing. It is by placing
them in the age-old psychodrama of Jewish acculturation, often referred to
by the simplistic moniker of Jewish self-hatred, that we can understand and
explain to young Jews how accomplished artists, scholars, and journalists,
out of a desire to be moral intellectuals, can paradoxically become intellectual
and moral failures as Jewish thinkers.
*Leonid Livak is a professor in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures
and the Centre for Jewish Studies at the University of Toronto. He is the
author of numerous works in European and Russian literary and cultural history,
including The Jewish Persona in the European Imagination: A Case of Russian
Literature (2010).