The Dangerous Self-Hating Jew

'I am determined that if they have one drop of Japanese blood in them they must all go to camp.' 

- Karl Bendetsen (October 11, 1907 – June 28, 1989) 

You’d be forgiven for thinking these words were spoken by Adolf Hitler, or Heinrich Himmler, the principal architect of the Nazi concentration camp system and the Final Solution.

In fact, they were spoken by Karl Bendetsen, a Stanford-educated U.S. Army officer who rose to the rank of colonel and later became Under Secretary of the Army.

The quote comes from an exchange reported by Father Hugh Lavery of the Catholic Maryknoll Mission in Los Angeles. Lavery explained to Bendetsen that there were children in his orphanage who were half-Japanese, others one-quarter Japanese or less. He asked, “Which children should we send to the relocation centers?”

Bendetsen’s reply was unequivocal.

Bendetsen was one of the chief architects of the U.S. government’s plan to intern approximately 125,000 Japanese Americans during World War II—native-born citizens and legal residents alike—on the basis of race alone. He played a central role in implementing one of the most shameful and unconstitutional policies in American history, aided by countless officials, including the Supreme Court.

I learned about Bendetsen through Rachel Maddow’s recent podcast series Burn Order, which recounts the internment, the long fight for justice by survivors, and the government’s sustained efforts to conceal its wrongdoing. In the series, Bendetsen emerges as the principal antagonist: ambitious, highly intelligent, conniving, ruthless, and unrepentant.

Why do I care about Karl Bendetsen?

Partly because there are unmistakable echoes of his logic in today’s America, as masked and armed government agents sweep through communities and transport people to brutal penal colonies abroad, without due process.

But there is another reason—one that hits closer to home.

Karl Bendetsen was Jewish.

His grandparents immigrated to America in the 1860s from Lithuania and Poland. His father was born in New York and co-owned a clothing store. And yet Bendetsen repeatedly denied his Jewish identity, inventing elaborate and shifting genealogies that traced his lineage to Danish farmers or 17th-century timber families. All of it was fabrication.

In 1970, he claimed descent from “Benedict and Dora Robbins Bendetsen” of Denmark. In 1983, while testifying against redress for Japanese American internment survivors, he asserted that his family had arrived in 1670, abandoned seafaring for farming, and had been “in timber ever since.” In reality, Bendetsen entered the timber business only after retiring from the army in the 1950s.

What accounts for this erasure? Shame? Strategy? Delusion? Or a calculated understanding that Jewishness was an obstacle to advancement in the military and government of his time?

What we do know is this: Bendetsen believed race alone was sufficient to establish guilt. He pursued this belief with extraordinary zeal, as if performing loyalty, proving patriotism, and distancing himself—violently—from any association with the persecuted.

Jewish self-hatred is not a new phenomenon. The term was coined in 1930 by the German philosopher Theodor Lessing to describe the internalization of antisemitic stereotypes by Jews themselves. The most infamous example is Otto Weininger, the Austrian philosopher who absorbed antisemitic ideas so thoroughly that he came to despise Jewishness itself, before taking his own life in 1903 at the age of 23.

This is not mere assimilation. It is not anglicizing a name or smoothing an accent to fit in. It is assimilation taken to the extreme—identification with the persecutor.

The term is often abused today, particularly as a political weapon. Disagreement with Israeli policy does not constitute self-hatred. But there is a line—crossed when critique becomes zeal, when participation shifts from dissent to active self-righteous efforts at delegitimization. Here I am thinking of someone like Norman Finkelstein.  

Bendetsen crossed that line decisively. At a time when reports of the annihilation of European Jewry were already circulating, he embraced his role as inquisitor and jailer of another racialized minority. Though he did not target Jews directly, it is difficult not to see Japanese Americans as stand-ins for his own repudiated identity.

What unsettled me most in listening to Burn Order was not the cruelty itself, but how administrative it all sounded—how carefully reasoned, how legally scrubbed, how certain of its own righteousness.

Karl Bendetsen did not act out of rage. He acted out of conviction, ambition, and a belief that his loyalty required visible severity. That combination—zeal, intelligence, and bureaucratic power—is far more dangerous than demagoguery.

Bendetsen had his camps. He had his memos. He had his courts. We tell ourselves that we would recognize such a figure if he appeared again. But I'm not so sure.

Every generation produces an official who translates prejudice into policy and calls it security. And sometimes that dangerous official is a self-hating Jew. 

In ours, that role has been filled by Stephen Miller.