Kill the Native, Save the Nation: Zionism as Identification with the Aggressor and the Gaza Genocide

Presenter: Kenji Kuramitsu, LCSW, M.Div., CGP, Adjunct Professor, McCormick Theological Seminary, Clinical Associate Faculty, Chicago Center for Psychoanalysis

CCSW is excited to host the Rev. Kenji Kuramitsu’s presentation of his award-winning paper (Maurice Burke Paper Prize, 2025, Chicago Center for Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy). The paper synthesizes psychoanalytic and postcolonialist thought to make sense of a significant racial enactment playing out now in psychoanalytic institutions: Zionist erasure of Palestinian genocide. Drawing on Anna Freud’s and Sandor Ferenczi’s concept of identification with the aggressor, Rev. Kuramitsu traces Zionism’s transformation over the past 125 years from a dream of strength and safety for persecuted Jews into a vehicle of violence towards Palestinians. He frames the attempts at “neutrality” that have characterized many institutional responses to the genocide as an extension of this ego defense. Our discussion during and after the presentation, moderated by CCSW’s Dr. Beth Kita, will take to heart Rev. Kuramitsu’s insistence that good faith dialogue about Zionism must recognize it as both “a dream in many wounded hearts and a headstone marking countless graves.”