Category: Psychology

Feeling the Loyalty to the Jewish State of Israel

By Max Blumenthal and Joseph Dana

The Israeli Knesset is debating a bill proposed by David Rotem of the extreme right Yisrael Beiteinu party that would require all Israeli citizens to swear loyalty to Israel as a “Jewish and democratic state.” This bill is targeted at increasing pressure on the twenty percent of Israelis who are Palestinian citizens while forcing the ultra Orthodox Jewish minority who reject the legitimacy of any state not based on Jewish biblical law to accept Zionism. If passed in its proposed form, citizens unwilling to take the loyalty oath would be at risk of losing citizenship.

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Schizophrenia and Race

From C. S. Soong’s excellent Against the Grain.


The diagnosis of mental illness has always been colored by social biases, but a striking shift occurred during the turmoil of the Civil Rights and Black Power movements. Jonathan Metzl describes how African American men became disproportionately diagnosed with schizophrenia, which was reclassified as a disease of the violent, and how that skewed diagnosis continues to this day.

Jonathan Metzl is the author of The Protest Psychosis: How Schizophrenia Became a Black Disease (Beacon, 2009).