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The self-hating Jew claims always struck me as from the same sort of people who complained that Kramer burned a Puerto Rican flag in last week's episode.
Yes, there was the drunk rabbi and the rabbi who tried to seduce Elaine, but there was also the Greek (Albanian? Ukrainian) Orthodox nun who fell for Kramer, the Hindu wedding ceremony, the Italian barbers and restauranteur, the stereotypical Pakistani with an accent, the Russian thug who illegally installed cable and kicked in Jerry's TV set, the Hispanic pool guy who wants to be Jerry's friend, the gang of vicious dwarfs and midgets, Elaine's Korean manicurists (one of whom is Frank Costanza's former lover), Susan's WASP drunk mother, Jackie Chiles, vacuous blondes of both genders, Cubans, the minister who waggled his fingers as horns at Putty, Putty himself, Jerry's American Indian girlfriend. The stereotype was even broken in one episode for the psychotic Elaine kept promoting out of fear, who turned out to be Jewish, though that was, I think, a post-David episode.
The show's willingness to do ethnic humor (and otherwise make fun of political correctness: i.e. "not that there's anything wrong with that") differentiated it from the bland comedies that surrounded it.
The characters were "Jewish" in stereotype perhaps (their real-life models: Seinfeld, Kramer, Leifer, and David were all Jewish), but the characters themselves were not Jewish, except for Jerry. They were "New York," whatever that means.
Self-hating, yes, because Larry David is. I wouldn't regard it as anti- Semitic, just because every Jewish character wasn't a paragon of morality-- especially in a show where the only moral character was a girlfriend of Jerry's who hoarded sponges.
You can stretch that in there. (But then who's the black assistant prosecutor? George Steinbrenner?) The better explanation is that it was the best contrivance to get Sidra, the Bubble Boy, and the Soup Nazi back in the same episode while at the same time poking fun at the entire phenomenon in a self-referential way. The only other alternative would have been to kill the characters in a plane crash and then have a "Defending Your Life" scenario before a Higher Authority. Albert Brooks demonstrated that that isn't very funny past a five-minute Saturday Night Live sketch, though, and Elaine's already acknowledged she's going to Hell.
As the New York Times (and an ex) point out, the penultimate closing shot was a Sartre reference.
Why isn't it a response to the criticism that the characters are self-absorbed? Or just a "screw you" regarding a show that he was sick of, the way his killing off of Susan was?
You give David too much credit; he was never as subtle as you make him out to be here. If he wanted to make a parallel, it would've been more heavy-handed, the way the (still-funny) parallels to "Schindler's List," "Midnight Cowboy," or "JFK" were.