📚 The following is a passage from Stephen Eric Bronner's book 'Critical Theory - A Very Short Introduction'

"Dialectic of Enlightenment included fragments of a sensational last chapter, 'Elements of Anti-Semitism,' added in 1947. Prejudice is interpreted there as having its own dynamic and a logic resistant to rational argumentation. Anti-Semitism is viewed as an expression of humanity's 'second nature' with anthropological roots. Horkheimer and Adorno insist that there has always been something 'different' about the Jews. If modernity is increasingly and repressively standardising individuality, then the encounter with difference and autonomy will logically generate a resentment born of unconscious envy. Such resentment marks the anti-Semite. Nazi hatred of the Jew fulfils the presentiments of the past even as it produces a 'turning point in history.'

Capitalism also fits into the picture. Anti-Semitism is not reduced to some prefabricated economic interest. But it is linked to the commodity form through which people are no longer seen as ends unto themselves. They are instead considered costs of production within a bureaucratically structured capitalist accumulation process. And, in turn, this impacts upon the capacity of individuals to exercise their more judgment. Reducing people to things, through reification, projects the treatment of the concentration camp inmate. According to Horkheimer and Adorno, the erosion of subjectivity began long before Auschwitz. The Other was always in danger. This had particular meaning for the Jew, whom anti-Semites traditionally identified with the sphere of circulation and as the evil harbinger of capitalism. Not merely capitalism requires interrogation, therefore, but civilisation itself. Thus, the critical theory of society takes an anthropological form in which resistance relies upon an increasingly imperiled subjectivity."