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In discussing the Oedipus complex, for instance, he assumes that the crucial element in Freud's childhood was his deep shame when he learned that his father had meekly endured an anti-Semitic insult on the streets of Vienna. Thereafter, Freud is bent on vengeance —"He will unmask these goyim" by putting the offending Gentiles on the analyst's couch. The problem is not that Cuddihy's theories are preposterous, but that he has left too much out of his calculations — most notably the vast clinical experience that Freud always refers to in his speculative essays.
The same mix of insight and overstatement results when Cuddihy transposes his theories to the contemporary scene. A spectacular foray into the 1970 Chicago Seven conspiracy trial, "A Tale of Two Hoffmans," provides one of the book's most fascinating moments. Cuddihy puts aside the legal issues and instead analyzes the proceedings as "an ancient scenario" played out in the courtroom by Defendant Abbie Hoffman, an uncompromisingly "coarse Yid" if ever there was one, and Trial Judge Julius Hoffman, archetype of the assimilating Jew striving for Gentile "refinement." When Abbie labels Julius a "front man for the Wasp power elite," he bluntly expresses the "sociocultural wounds" that, Cuddihy says, Marx and Freud expressed only indirectly. But when Cuddihy poaches upon the field of literary criticism, his judgments cloud his vision. He arrogantly dismisses Novelist Bernard Malamud as "a teller of Christian tales who 'passes' as a Jew." evidently because Malamud does not depict the Jewish ordeal the way Cuddihy defines it. Similarly, he laments the vogue for Yiddish Storyteller Isaac Bashevis Singer on the dubious grounds that he portrays not the real Jew, whatever that is, but a "sentimental myth" instead.
The final chapter provides an appealing clue to the sociocultural wounds that led the author to write the book. Though the subject is Jewry, Cuddihy also offers a particularly original meditation on a very old theme: the conflict between tree-swinging creative joy and the forces of social conformity.
As an intellectual gadfly, he makes a compassionate statement for all the mavericks and pariahs who refuse to become, in Max Weber's phrase, "specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart."
— Richard Bernstein