Akin Gump: Anti-Semitic Stereotyping?

Some time in late September or early October 1991 Katherine Harkness, a coworker at the law firm of Akin Gump, Strauss, Hauer & Feld, where I used to work as a paralegal, stated to me in her office that I was free to take work home and work all the overtime I wanted at home.

At the time I had a persecutory suspicion about Katherine Harkness's seemingly benign statement.  My long-term assignment at Hogan & Hartson, where I had worked as an agency-supplied temporary from 1985-1988, was abruptly terminated in late February 1988, a brief time after I made statement to coworker Daniel Cutler about "generating overtime."  My supervisor at Hogan, Miriam Chilton, did not tell me that she believed I was engaged in a scam to "generate overtime," but I believed that was a factor in her decision to terminate my assignment with Hogan.  It was my paranoid suspicion that this reason for the termination of the Hogan assignment was communicated to the legal assistant administrative staff at Akin Gump, and that Katherine Harkness's offer of unlimited overtime at home was a ploy intended to create facts that would lead to a rationale to terminate my employment at Akin Gump on the grounds that I was "generating overtime.  During my employment at Akin Gump I formed the paranoid suspicion that the legal assistant administrative staff rationalized my problems at the firm with the statement: "He had the same problems at Hogan that he has here," thereby implying that my employment problems were rooted in my personality and not the result of a hostile environment.  A frequent accusation hurled at Jews by anti-Semites is -- "They have the same problems everywhere they go.  Every country (or community) they live in, they have problems."

Katherine Harkness's offer of unlimited overtime might have been an instance of projective identification in which Harkness was trying to create circumstances in which the accusation "He has the same problems here that he had at Hogan (with respect to generating overtime)" was made real and seemingly objective.

A mainstay of anti-Semitic stereotyping is that Jews throughout the centuries have had the same problems with the people among whom they lived, in every country they inhabited.  Nazi propaganda played upon this theme, as in the following motion picture, The Eternal Jew:

I was terminated from my job at Akin Gump in late October 1991.  The firm offered to a state human rights agency the following rationale for the termination.  The firm alleged that it had spoken to two mental health professionals, including a psychiatrist, who advised that I appeared to have mental problems.  The psychiatrist allegedly advised the firm that I might become violent, in effect, that I posed a hazard to other employees.

A mainstay of anti-Semitism since the nineteenth-century (since the origin of the germ theory) is that Jews are parasites who transmit disease.  According to this line of thought Jews pose a health hazard to those among whom they live.