Loathsome Jews and Engulfing Women : Metaphors of Projection in the Works of Wyndham Lewis, Charles Williams, and Graham Greene

"A remarkable study, one that I recommend to any reader fascinated by the shaping of culture and the power of the psyche." - The Forward How typical of his generation was T.S. Eliot when he complained that Hitler made an intelligent anti-semitism impossible for a generation? In her new book, Loathsome Jews and Engulfing Women, novelist and critic, Andrea Freud Loewenstein examines the persistent anti-semitic tendencies in modernist, British intellectual culture. Pursuing her subject with literary, historical, and psychological analyses, Loewenstein argues that this anti-semitism must be understood in terms of its metaphorical link with misogyny. Situated in the context of the history of Jews in Britain, Loathsome Jews and Engulfing Women begins by questioning the widespread belief that the British government was a friend to the Jews in the 30s and 40s. Loewenstein shows that, as evident in the hypocrisy of many British governmental policies prior to and during WWII, Britain actively collaborated in the Jews' destruction. Against the backdrop of this tragic complicity in the Holocaust, Loewenstein evaluates Jewish stereotypes in the works of three representative twentieth-century British thinkers and writers. Her analysis provides a revealing critique of British modernism. In a larger sense, Loathsome Jews and Engulfing Womenexplores the riddle of prejudice. Loewenstein argues that anti-semitism is nurtured in an environment populated by other hatreds --misogyny, homophobia, and racism. To explain the interaction of these prejudices, she develops an investigative model grounded in object relations theory and informed by the works of such theoretically diverse authors as Virginia Woolf, Kate Millett, and Alice Miller. Loewenstein lucidly argues within an autobiographical framework, insisting on the need for critics to . . . look within ourselves for 'that terrible other' rather than to complacently assume that we ourselves exist outside the ideology of power. This well-written and readable book will be of interest to many people, ranging students of British history to psychoanalysts, from historians of Jewish culture to anyone interested in feminist and literary theory. Biases held by artists have been a constant source of controversy in appraisals of their works, most recently in critiques of such authors as H.L. Mencken and Paul de Man. Should the belief systems of these thinkers be taken into account in assessing the value of the works which they made public? Andrea Freud Loewenstein here undertakes to address this crucial issue. At the heart of her study is an examination of the figures of Jew and woman in the works of three British male authors written between 1929 and 1945. While instances of misogyny and anti-Semitism were not uncommon in the literature of the period, Loewenstein argues that a hatred and fear of women was often the dominating preoccupation of their work, from which stemmed the intertwined and closely related loathing of Jews. Basing her interpretations on biographical information and on the close analysis of a large body of fiction by each author, Loewenstein reconstructs the psychological system through which each one envisions the world, showing how Jews and women function in their texts, and in each individual psychopathology, as a representation of the Other. Ranging far beyond a narrow study of three authors, Loewenstein situates the works studied in the context of the history of Jews in Britain, concentrating on recent historical scholarship on Britain and the Jews in the 1930s. She questions the widespread belief that the British government was a friend to the Jews and shows, as evident in the double-talk and hypocrisy behind some British governmental policies, that Britain instead actively collaborated in the Jews' destruction. To provide a greater context for her argument, Loewenstein presents a timeline of the history of the Jews in Britain. Firmly grounded in a range of disciplines, Loathsome Jews and Engulfing Women is a masterful blend of history, psychology, and literary criticism