Of Fear and Strangers: A History of Xenophobia by George Makari (review)

Sigmund Freud in his "Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego" (1921) outlined his take on this after World War I. British psychotherapists, including some of his English followers such as Wilfried Trotter, appropriated a psychology of difference popularized by Gustave Le Bon to define the valorous "Tommy" crusading against the inherently evil "Boche." In his 1921 essay, Freud began with the claim concerning collective behavior that had long been established in the psychological literature of the late 19th century—that "a group is extraordinarily credulous and open to influence, it has no critical faculty, and the improbable does not exist for it." In the first of many striking moments in this book, Makari locates the modern origin of xenophobia—and it is not where we expected to find it: the social fascination with the "phobias" had its origin in 19th-century medicine, which quickly devolved into social metaphor, as such diagnostic categories of behavior tend to do rather quickly. Makari begins his book locating his own discomfort with being seen as "different" and trying to understand his own family, Greek Orthodox inhabitants of Ottoman Lebanon, whose trek to the United States created (as many of us know from our own family experience) "better" Americans, initially struggling as peddlers and then establishing themselves in Texas as "real" Americans.

Placing the Blame for Covid-19 in and on Ultra-Orthodox Communities

The new coronavirus pandemic, COVID-19, has resurrected a number of historical and sociological problems associated with blaming collectives for the origin or transmission of infectious disease. The default example of the false accusation has been the case of the fourteenth century charge of well poisoning against the Jews of Western Europe causing the pandemic of the Black Death. Yet querying group actions in times of pandemics is not solely one of rebutting false attributions. What happens when a collective is at fault and how does the collective respond to the simultaneous burden of both false, stereotypical accusations and appropriate charges of culpability? The case study here is of Haredi communities and the 2020 outbreak of COVID-19.