A common way in which ‘good Jews’ place ‘bad Jews’ beyond the pale is by labelling them ‘self-hating’.

The obvious implication is that the ‘self-hater’ loathes the fact that they were born Jewish and that others see them as Jews. A scholar who acknowledges that the term is used ‘to silence and discredit’ says that it is aimed at ‘those Jews whose overly unfavorable attitudes toward their Jewish heritage or overly favorable attitudes toward non-Jewish culture allegedly threaten the survival or well-being of Judaism and Jewry’. He adds that authors – including the pioneering psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud and the philosophers Hannah Arendt and Jean-Paul Sartre – ‘basically agree that selfhating Jews regard negatively all or some aspect of Jewish identity, including their own, in terms acquired from a dominant, non-Jewish, culture in which mistaken and malicious perceptions of Jews and Judaism prevail’. The term is as much an accusation as a description. Mick Finlay, a social psychologist, notes that it ‘is often used rhetorically to discount Jews who differ in their lifestyles, interests or political positions from their accusers’.

The ‘self-hating’ Jew is the ‘bad Jew’ in purest form: she or he is Jewish in the eyes of others but not themselves. It follows from this that the ‘good Jew’ is the genuine article, the ‘real Jew’, and that the ‘bad Jew’ is trying to opt out of Jewishness. In this view, the ‘self-hating’ or ‘bad’ Jew would be much like the black person discussed by Fanon who feels inferior because they internalise the prejudices of white racism. ‘The feeling of inferiority of the colonized is the correlative to the European’s feeling of superiority.’ Understood in this way, the ‘self-hating Jews’ respond and act much as people classified as ‘coloured’ by apartheid who tried to pass for white. They seek to be as much like the dominating group as possible to integrate into the dominant society.