It’s Not “Gaslighting” to Say that American Jews Are Moving Away from Israel

“Jews Gaslighting Jews” was the headline given a July 22 report by Dr. Alex Joffe of Bar-Ilan University’s BESA (Begin-Sadat) Center for Strategic Studies. The piece dealt with a “National Survey of Jewish Voters” released a week previously by GBAO Strategies, a Washington research institute.

“Gaslighting” is a word that, within a few years, has come from seemingly nowhere to be nearly as ubiquitous as “the” and “a.” At first, I didn’t know exactly what it meant. Everywhere, everyone was suddenly gaslighting everyone else—but just what was it they were doing to one another?

Well, one can’t afford to be permanently ignorant about such things and eventually I looked for help. I found it in an article by the psychoanalyst Robin Stern, the associate director of the Yale Center of Emotional Intelligence and author of the 2007 book, The Gaslight Effect: How To Spot and Survive the Hidden Manipulation Others Use To Control Your Life. Gaslighting, I learned from her, “refers to the act of undermining [other people’s] reality by denying facts, the environment around them, or their feelings,” so that its victims “are turned against their cognition, their emotions, and who they fundamentally are as people.”