Psychological projection

Saying that leaves room for both recognition and difference.

In psychoanalysis, there's something called projection, Projection, in its defensive sense, projection involves attributing an unacceptable feeling or impulse of our own to someone else without recognizing it as ours.

Imagine someone feels angry but has difficulty accepting their own anger.

In a hypothetical example of projection, they experience the other person as the angry one.

I have a couple of pieces up regarding this larger conflict.

I also have one a couple of days later called Zionism as Psychological Projection.

Folks who know me know that I'm an anti-Zionist Jew, so I go into deeper detail about why that is in the in that piece about why I'm anti-Zionist as a Jewish person.

But the McLemore-Ed Sheeran piece I talk about, you know, obviously I agree that there was profound cowardice in what Ed Sheeran did, but I also agree with AOC's take on this, which was that the real enemy, the real adversary, the real focus needs to be on Robert Kraft and the billionaires who have this disproportionate outsized power to limit art in this way.

I think everybody should.

But the only ones that would really probably matter in the long run are Jewish artists.

And I think, and the reason I say that, the reason I think Hannah Einbinder's voice is important, the reason I think that Mandy Patinkin's voice is important, the reason that I think Jewish artists' voices are important, and I go into this in my Zionism as psychological projection, commentary, the audio, is that I think that one of the things that keeps U.S. policy toward Israel as it is and has kept it as it is for so long is this perception of unanimity in the Jewish community.

There is such fear that the Jewish community is this monolith that is going to somehow punish the Democratic Party either with contributions or votes withheld if we – if the Democrats step out of line and don't go along with Israel or criticize Israel or withhold support from Israel.