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Disclaimer: The author of this article stated publicly on ZEIT ONLINE in 2023 that contrary to his original assumption, he is not Jewish. His article on the subject has been strongly criticized and was put through a fact-checking process. Based on the knowledge we have today, we regret having published this article. We are leaving it online temporarily for reasons of transparency.

1.

I don’t enjoy writing this in German, a language I often experience as a burden. That sounds grandiose, like some declaration of principle from a character in a Cynthia Ozick story; some German-Jewish assyriologist from Freiburg, maybe, languishing in exile at a small college in the midwest. A bit pretentious, then, for someone like me, someone born right here in East Berlin just before the wall fell. I’ve never lived anywhere else, but I did spend seven days in the United States last February, and briefly, in the parking lot of an Olive Garden, felt as though I was free.

The reason for this grandiosity and the alienation that fuels it, the reason for the doubt, the feeling of being permanently trapped between screaming and hesitant silence, is simple (and of course, complicated): I am a Jew in Germany. To quote that tough guy Maxim Biller: people like me aren’t – or still aren’t, depending on the situation – supposed to be in this country.

My family history has bequeathed me two pieces of baggage: the famous packed suitcase under the bed, and an unpacked suitcase in "Hotel Deutschland," where I extend my booking every two weeks, like Barton Fink. (Barton Fink, who took himself too seriously, and who couldn’t even finish a page of writing because of his own self-righteous idealism — well, no one can say that I don’t know myself.)

Denial: maybe there is room for me here after all. Maybe I will be understood. Bargaining: "being understood" may be asking too much. Who actually gets to be understood? But maybe, at least, we can shake hands? Anger: Why is everything so goddamn German in Germany? Depression: I’ll never make it out of here alive! But after the first four stages of grief, acceptance does not follow, boruch hashem; instead, what follows is an inner retreat into my Jewishness. (But without losing sight of the fascist in the hotel room next door. This is what distinguishes me from Barton Fink).

On the High Holidays, I go to shul. There, the rituals are performed in Hebrew, which I don’t understand, and the Kaddish in Aramaic, which I know by heart. Then there is always some clumsy sentence or two of German that I could take or leave. Otherwise, my Jewish life takes place in English, far from the German-Jewish Gemeinde. I am nonetheless part of a community of friends and comrades; people all over the US with whom I constantly talk online, American ex-pats and left-wing Israelis in Berlin, plus some people from Germany, mostly of Eastern European origin.

We talk about Jewish history and Jewish contradictions, Uncut Gems and Hester Street, Chantal Akerman and Eyal Sivan, Albert Memmi and Susan Taubes, Sarah Schulman and Vasily Grossman, Ezra Furman and Rose Ausländer, about belonging and foreignness. We talk about "the Germans," as we call all non-migrant Gentiles, even family members, and their lack of understanding, their strange ways. More still, we talk about our frustration with other Jews: about our official representation in every country in the world, including Germany, about right-wing community politics and rigid thinking.

We talk about Israel, about propagandistic youth travel and the political and social reality in the region. We talk about religion. Some of my friends are genuinely observant, almost frum, and I find them more flexible and open than many secular Jews, whose Jewishness consists only of pop culture and liberal truisms. Rarely do we just talk about antisemitism. The idea of emigration is often in the air. There are many ways to expel somebody.

Not just the opposite of German

I often think that these conversations – when a friend from the Upper West Side talks about packs of Jewish mean girls at her old high school, or a left-wing Israeli friend points out the depth of the abyss of Israeli Shoah remembrance – would frighten and confuse Germans. And then, I think: this is the "Jewish life" that they’re always going on about. This mix of religion and philosophy, culture and politics is exactly what is worth protecting and promoting.

This Jewish life stands for itself. Self-sufficient, confident that Jewish history is not just the story of how the non-Jewish world has shaped it, it shows that Jews can empower themselves, that they had, and have, agency. (This word, agency, does not exist in German.)

From this awareness comes the ability to position oneself in the Jewish and also the non-Jewish world, to recognize injustices and also to recognize one’s own implication in them. There are Jews who talk about nothing except their own marginalization. That is real — but perhaps it is in speaking and acting as though marginalization did not exist that we can discover the possibility of, at least briefly, transcending it.

This idea of self-empowerment brings together two historical currents, the diasporists and the Zionists. Zionists believe in a Jewish collective that stands only for itself; diasporists do not believe in being absorbed in the foreign land, but in a self-confident life in the diaspora, which here means the whole world.

My Jewishness doesn’t end at the German border, it’s not just being the opposite of German. This is why recent attempts to proclaim a new radical Jewishness in Germany also do not appeal to me. What is called "dis-integrated" seems to me like just another overplayed farce in the theatre of German-Jewish memory. I see immediately the limits of what you’re supposed, even allowed, to say. For this I also have to thank my friends from the US, because they told me, early on, "I get it, Germany, yadda yadda, but can you talk about anything else?" They confronted my illusions with ideas and positions and truths that have no place here.

The illusions I had to shed were these: that Germans are aware that Jewish life exists outside their field of vision and their way of knowing. That they are capable of understanding, without fetishizing or pinning down a speaker’s specific standpoint, that Jewish conversations about Jewish issues have a meaning beyond and apart from what these Germans themselves think or would like to hear. Regardless of whether – no, especially when – they share the opinion being discussed.

The German soul and the German raison d’état

I realized the depth of these illusions a few years ago when I was reviewing an album by the rapper Haftbefehl, and defended him against accusations of antisemitism. As stupid as I found his antisemitic lines (literally, youthful sins), I found that his aesthetics, his polyglot approach to writing, and his despair presented a picture of this country that all in all spoke to me more than bougie kids’ songs about awkward silences at family functions. I wanted to express that, in my own voice, as a Jew. A futile but meaningful gesture.

Then a Titanic author wrote a parody poem about me, connecting me to Günter Grass and race-hate. I have no idea whether he even knew I was Jewish; probably not, my last name isn’t Cohen or Goldfarb. He probably didn’t think much about it. But I haven’t gotten over it, and the author has never apologized to me. Now he works for an educational organization that fights antisemitism, and jokes in interviews that he only talks about Jewish issues because it annoys the other Germans.

It is of course petty of me to hold onto this grudge; but the episode now seems like an omen.

2.

Let’s face it: in Germany, it is not taboo to love Israel. It does not require any courage to declare your support for and solidarity with that country, to proclaim your love for the sun, the sea, the beautiful people. It's not just part of the official German raison d'état, but has long been a part of the German soul, especially the soul of those Germans with the greatest influence on the cultural and political discourse. These Germans hope that their unconditional love for Israel, their stance against antisemitism, might somehow transcend their guilt. The declared aim of this authoritarian project is the protection of Jewish life.

There are many Jews in Germany –- perhaps, even a majority – who shake their heads at the excesses of this performance, who are distressed by it, but who say nothing because they share its political goals, or because they do not want to disturb this supposed harmony, or because they are too scared, vain, or dumb to understand the game that is really being played.

When a real-life Jew with a different opinion attempts to enter this constellation, they are not not greeted as a welcome voice, but instead find themselves vilified. Germans are astonishingly quick to insinuate that Jews who disagree with them are self-hating and at least almost antisemitic. German philosemitism is imperious, implicitly or explicitly dividing between good Jews and bad Jews. The litmus test is our attitude towards Israel. Good Jews love Israel.

The thing is, I know a lot of Jews who do not love Israel. I even know Jews who support the boycott movement, BDS, which is rarely discussed in the German media without the epithet "antisemitic" attached. I know Jews who boycott the Israeli state and its institutions, and who do so loudly, openly, disruptively. They boycott Israeli companies and universities that work closely with the IDF. They boycott cultural events when concerts by international stars are used to normalize the political situation there. Outside Israel, they boycott the financial involvement of the Israeli state in cultural and academic events. If, for example, the Israeli embassy pays 500 euro for a musician’s plane ticket to Berlin and is then listed as the co-sponsor of an event, then these Jews boycott it: not the musician, they claim, but the embassy and the state it represents.

These Jews do not want to please any imagined gentiles, but have developed their political positions, up to and including antizionism, through their own experience and reflection. Some grew up as leftists in right-wing parts of the United States, and understand their criticism of Israel as criticism of American foreign policy. Some are Israelis who exercise a fundamental democratic right, the right to critique your own state, even radically, even to call for its abolition. Their attitude is that the current State of Israel is founded on racist and settler-colonial violence against the Palestinians. Some of these Jews are actually a part of the loose and heterogeneous BDS movement, others understand the boycott as part of their political practice without supporting all the movement’s goals.

Increasingly drastic means

They are a part of the Jewish left, a formation that existed before the Shoah, especially in Poland, and is now experiencing somewhat of a renaissance in the United States. One of the questions this Jewish left must face is the old struggle between diaspora and Zion. There are those who think the 20th century resolved this dispute, and that the Jews will ultimately only be safe among themselves. I am not without sympathy for this attitude. Even the great Polish-Jewish Trotskyist Isaac Deutscher ended up believing it. If more Jews had been Zionists and emigrated to Palestine in 1939 more Jews would have survived, he said in 1954, regretting his naive belief in Europe.

Deutscher, however, was a proper Marxist, and so for him the question was never settled and his critique of Israel and of Zionism never ended. Today this critique is made even more urgent as Israel becomes more and more right-wing. Jewish Americans see themselves implicated in this because they grew up with one of two narratives: a liberal Zionist story where Israel was the land of the free, a story they now have to question, or a conservative story about frightened Jews and bloodthirsty, antisemitic Arabs, a narrative that fits in all too well with the American War on Terror and all its bloody and fateful consequences.

As a diaspora boy with roots in a Soviet satellite state, my role in these narratives is not particularly clear. I do feel very fond of the United States, which has been very good to me and at the same time so terrible to others. While I'm trying to figure that out, and maybe even to become a part of that story myself, I understand and appreciate the struggle of my comrades there. I also happen to believe that Germany can learn a lot from them.

I listen when Israelis tell me about Israel with great moral clarity (another term that does not exist in German). About what it means to live in a country that, in their name, disenfranchises and excludes some of the people who live in it. These Israelis want to stand for something, to show that things cannot go on like this. They do so nonviolently precisely because of the violence of the conflict; a violence they know all too well, having both experienced and perpetrated it.

Human Rights Watch and the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem describe an "apartheid regime" between the river and the sea. The director Udi Aloni says that he supports BDS, as an Israeli, because it's a way of protecting his Jewish values.

That is not my perspective, but it is also not up to me to dictate to someone else how they should live their Jewishness. My Jewish friends who support BDS do this because of, not despite, their self-conception as Jews. I take that seriously and want to defend it: in the name of Jewish plurality and in the name of Jewish life.

3.

This defense has become necessary. The plurality of Jewish life is under attack in Germany, most of all from the people who claim to be our strongest allies. Jewish artists and intellectuals who managed to grow up free of all German neuroses find themselves being dragged, with increasing violence, into one of those overplayed farces in the theatre of German memory.

The awarding of the Adorno Prize to Judith Butler in 2012, in the context of their support of BDS, and statements misunderstood to construe their support for Hamas and Hezbollah, led to a journalistic controversy; they received the award anyway. In 2016, Laurie Penny, who like Butler is a Jewish supporter of BDS, found themself the subject of a far more violent debate: the fact that Penny grounds their criticism of Israel in their own Jewish origins was interpreted by the left-wing magazine Jungle World as "relativizing the Holocaust."

Unacceptable accusations

Before a concert in the fall of 2017, the Jewish rapper Kae Tempest, who deliberately does not perform in Israel, was attacked by Sybille Berg as "an ardent Israel boycotter," and this framing was picked up on by the right-populist tabloid Bild. Tempest cancelled their performances due to threats. It was unclear whether it could have taken place even without those threats: according to Berlin’s mayor, Michael Müller, only people who do not support BDS are allowed to appear in state-supported spaces, regardless of their motivation or background.

 Of course, not only Jews support BDS. Given British colonial history, many leftists in Britain, both Jewish and not, boycott Israel — and therefore find it increasingly difficult to make public appearances in Germany, due to German cities’ decisions, both formal and informal, to deplatform BDS supporters.

In Frankfurt in 2017, a concert by Roger Waters, a prominent BDS supporter – who certainly does not deserve too passionate a defense – was greeted with protest. The concert promoter, Marek Lieberberg, the child of survivors and born in a displaced persons camp, defended Waters, saying that he disagreed with him politically but was not an antisemite. The pop critic Jens Balzer wrote in response that this defense by the Jew Lieberberg was nonsense, but also understandable: "after all, he wants to keep earning money off his artist."

The Ruhrtriennale first invited the Black British band Young Fathers in 2018, then cancelled their appearance, then invited them again. Afterwards, some called for the dismissal of the festival’s director, Stefanie Carp. In Dortmund, the jury of the 2019 Nelly Sachs prize withdrew its decision to award the prize to the renowned author Kamila Shamsie.

The city of Munich sent the authorities to a Klezmer concert (!) to ensure that the Israeli singer Nirit Sommerfeld, whose grandfather was murdered in Sachsenhausen (!!), didn’t speak positively about BDS.

In October 2020, a group of Jewish Israeli artists at the College of Art in Berlin-Weisensee organized a project called October Program, part of an organization they had founded called School for Unlearning Zionism. They wanted to critically engage with the national myths they had grown up with and present an exhibition from their explicitly Jewish-Israeli perspective.

Eldad Beck, a journalist for the right-wing daily Israel Hayom, seized on this project as "an antizionist curriculum funded by the German government." The former member of the Bundestag Volker Beck (not related) then asked on Twitter whether such an event should be financed with taxpayer money. Frederik Schindler, a reporter for the right-wing daily newspaper DIE WELT, made a press inquiry to the art college complete with a list of "BDS supporters" who were supposed to speak on the program. Schindler’s list consisted of four Jewish Israelis who had said some positive things about BDS, and some of whom currently live in Israel. The college – perhaps overwhelmed, perhaps panicked, perhaps unwilling to defend its Jewish students — cancelled the project’s budget.

Anyone claiming that these incidents represent "censorship" will receive the toxic answer that none of the artists mentioned are being silenced, but simply banned from state-sponsored venues. This fails to acknowledge the reality of Germany’s cultural infrastructure, in which most venues exist only with state support. It is precisely for this reason that these cultural institutions cannot simply follow the state’s agenda and present officially-sanctioned positions and narratives. This argument, that even state-funded culture has the right to offend and to criticize the state, is actually a classic, common, even harmless left-liberal position.

This supposed counterargument also quite deliberately ignores what it means to be defamed as antisemitic in Germany. Kamila Shamsie is one of the most important voices of the Pakistani diaspora: will any review of her next book (if it is even reviewed) be without reference to the BDS controversy and her supposed antisemitism? What cultural institution would invite, commission, or support someone accused of antisemitism, however tenuously or tendentially? And finally, as absurd as the allegations may be, there is hardly anything more hurtful to a Jew than to be called antisemitic; to be called self-hating, or worse, a collaborator and a kapo, someone who wishes that the Jews would disappear, a Jewish antisemite and Holocaust denier like J. G. Burg or Gilad Atzmon.

Obscene distortions

It is no coincidence that the fight against BDS has been even more ferocious since 2015 and the so-called refugee crisis, and it is no coincidence that it often targets women, Jews, and people of color. The chimera of "imported antisemitism" is a welcome excuse to act out sublimated racism. People from immigrant families, especially with Arab or African origins, and Muslim (or seemingly Muslim) people in Germany always have to first prove that they are not antisemites, and are otherwise considered to be dangerous. Their own experiences have no place in the German memory culture. Palestinians have to literally deny their own identity in order to be allowed space even on the margins of the discourse; and even then, are regularly accused of antisemitism simply for existing.

All of this, the imperious anti-antisemites proclaim, feeling courageously anti-German even as they defend their profoundly German and even nativist interpretive sovereignty, protects Jewish life.

The commitments of these anti-antisemitic partisans are so subversive that they have on their side that well-known radical cell called the German Bundestag; which summarized various cities’ anti-BDS resolutions into its own national one in 2019. (This resolution was immediately protested by 240 Jewish and Israeli academics). The resolution turns curators into inquisitors: no longer is it just a question of disinviting people who actively promote the boycott (like Roger Waters). Instead, they are also supposed to disinvite people with a passive or even assumed proximity to BDS.

This guilt by association was endured by the philosopher Achille Mbembe, whose invitation to the Ruhrtriennale was immediately declared a scandal due to his alleged "proximity to BDS" and relativization of the Holocaust. These allegations were spread by the blog Ruhrbarone, whose genuine, deeply-felt, and consistent commitment to fighting antisemitism can be seen by their ongoing employment of a guest author who proudly named himself after the antisemitic murderer of Rosa Luxemburg.

The allegations were then taken up by an FDP politician named Lorenz Deutsch. Short passages in Mbembe’s work were obscenely distorted. His short preface to a book about apartheid in Israel, a signature on a petition linked to BDS in South Africa, and still not totally clear events about the participation of an Israeli academic at a conference were supposed to fill out the picture of a postcolonial antisemite.

The accusation of relativizing the Holocaust turned out to be completely untenable, and the political context of South Africa – a country that, due to its own apartheid history and to the good relations of Israel with its former white-supremacist regime, has historically allied with Palestine — was completely ignored. When Mbembe pointed out that his thinking was shaped by Jewish philosophers, this was presented only as further evidence of antisemitism, for which he was seeking an alibi.

Clear words ignored

The Ruhrtriennale that he was supposed to open with a lecture was cancelled due to Covid-19. This was perhaps the best outcome for the boycott boycotters: they were able to permanently damage Mbembe’s reputation in Germany, and at the same time shrug off allegations that the event had been censored. It was cancelled anyway. Why all the big fuss?

Against the background of this campaign of racist character assassination, many large German cultural institutions came together to affirm the principle of cosmopolitanism and to protest the Bundestag’s resolution. This was followed by an open letter from artists and authors all over the world, many of them Jewish, who supported the initiative, known as "G.G 5.3 Weltoffenheit." With reference to James Baldwin, this letter used clear words: "The fight against antisemitism cannot be decoupled at will from parallel struggles against islamophobia, racism and fascism." And: "Regardless of whether we support BDS or not, we, as the signatories of this letter, agree that there is a right to exert non-violent pressure on governments that violate human rights."

[Full disclosure: I signed this open letter and want to say, perhaps again somewhat pretentiously, that it was one of the most important acts of my life.)

[Full disclosure from the translator: me too.]

This initiative and letter were responded to with malice. The initiators and authors were attacked with blatantly right-wing language, defamed as art parasites and ivory-tower academics seeking to promote antisemitism with public money. Some of them, it was pointed out, didn’t even originally come from Germany. Brazen foreigners — rootless cosmopolitans, even — who want to teach Germany how to think about its culture, its history, and its minorities are currently a very popular enemy in the German press.

What threatens my life as a Jew?

Two Jewish academics involved in the initiative – Hanno Loewy, the director of the Jewish Museum in Hohenems, and Susan Neiman, the director of the Einstein Forum – have spent their entire careers working in the Jewish intellectual tradition, and their lives are closely linked with Israel. Once again this was conveniently ignored, or cited as proof of the antisemitic character of the initiative, with Loewy and Neiman cast as its self-hating token Jews.

In a radio discussion, Nieman referred to the lively Jewish culture of debate and disagreement, to the different perspectives that have shaped our history. Someone like Albert Einstein, she said, who was dubious of Zionism, would no longer be welcome in today’s Germany.

Felix Klein, the Federal Commissioner for Antisemitism – in the US he'd perhaps be called an antisemitism czar – responded by comparing Susan Neiman to antisemitic coronavirus conspiracy theorists. Klein is not Jewish.

4.

Of course, there are forms of antisemitism which, in their hatred of Israel as a Jewish state, as a Jewish project, as a manifestation of Jewish power instead of impotence, make Israel their target. And then there is protest against the state of Israel, even angry and unfair protest, targeting the structural racism against Palestinians in the country that was codified into law with the Nation-State Bill, targeting the brutal occupation policies in the West Bank, the disproportionate responses to Palestinian violence.

That protest is justified.

People offended by that protest, people who claim it is simply a case of 'Israel-related antisemitism,’ should first explain whether they consider the conditions being protested worth protesting at all. Or whether, as Hanno Loewy says, it is not instead a matter of "the Jews misbehaving in their own state in the same way that one would like to once again misbehave at home."

If the notion of ‘Israel-related antisemitism’ is based on the fact that Israel is always measured by double standards that do not apply to other states, then let's just consider it on its own merits. Israel is a real, existing state; with an army, and a security apparatus. This army and this security apparatus do what armies and security apparatuses do: they exert power and violence. And who should criticize this if not Israelis and Palestinians? Who, if not Jews, as whose state Israel presents itself? Who, if not all the victims of the Israeli army, for example from Lebanon, and everybody else who recognizes the injustice?

My life as a Jew is not threatened by this criticism. Neither are the lives of Israelis. It is obscene to claim that supporters of an explicitly non-violent boycott tolerate and even support violence against Israelis and Jews, and delusional to believe that someone will pick up a knife and start stabbing Jews just because a BDS supporter sets foot on a stage.

What actually threatens my life as a Jew? Incel nazis, like in Halle and Hanau. Police nazis, like the ones in the NSU 2.0. Bundeswehr nazis, like the ones in the Hannibal network. Coronavirus conspiracy theorist nazis marching in the streets with yellow "unvaccinated" stars and weapons. Antisemitism kills. It is precisely for this reason that it is important to clearly say what it is and what it is not.

The International Holocaust Remembrance Association’s definition of antisemitism has been discussed for many years; many European countries (including Germany) and organizations, even football teams have adopted it. It focuses on Israel-related antisemitism, that form of antisemitism that BDS opponents and German antisemitism experts seem to find much more interesting than actually existing Nazis. In the meantime, even Kenneth Stern, one of the definition’s authors, has distanced himself from it and especially from its political use. How good can a definition of antisemitism be if it is enthusiastically supported by the current regime in Hungary?

The Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism aims to present a more effective working definition of antisemitism, in order to better combat it and at the same time to decouple it from merely unpopular language about Israel and Palestine.

According to the JDA, "holding Jews collectively responsible for Israel’s conduct or treating Jews, simply because they are Jewish, as agents of Israel," is antisemitic. "Boycott, divestment and sanctions," however, "are commonplace, non-violent forms of political protest against states. In the Israeli case they are not, in and of themselves, antisemitic."

Boycotting Israel – the real existing state, not the object of German desire or the imagined manifestation of the Jewish people – is not antisemitic. It is also, according to the JDA, not antisemitic to criticize the nature of this state; to believe that a state for one people only is an outdated form of government, and to therefore argue for a one-state solution, for peace and equality for all the people between the river and the sea.

In this way, the JDA positions itself clearly against the IHRA definition, but also aims to contribute to a broader discussion about antisemitism and how best to counter it. It was widely discussed in the United States, where it found both approval and criticism, especially from the left, but where its moral and intellectual commitments remained largely unquestioned.

In Germany, on the other hand, nobody seemed to wonder why so many Jewish and Israeli intellectuals find the current conversation about antisemitism so unhelpful, even dangerous. Instead of engaging with its arguments, Jürgen Kaube, in the right-wing daily FAZ, treated the JDA as the project of confused Germans, without mentioning that it had been written and signed by people like Sander Gilman, Michael Walzer, and Omer Bartov, living legends of Jewish studies, Holocaust research, and international law. It is possible that he did not recognize their names, or bother to look them up.

We know who our enemies are

"Well, who’s in the mood for a new round of debates about antisemitism? Not me," tweeted Nikolas Lelle, whose Twitter bio literally begins with the word "antisemitism." He is an employee of the Amadeu Antonio Foundation, Germany's most prominent anti-racist non-profit. It is named after a Black murder victim, but its staff is almost exclusively white; almost as if those directly affected by racism can’t be political actors themselves because they’re not objective and reliable enough. Instead of opposing the attacks on Achille Mbembe, it gave Felix Klein, in its 2020 report on antisemitism in Germany, a platform to take proud credit for having "deliberately triggered" that racist so-called debate.

For these German experts, antisemitism is not simply a form of racism with specific characteristics that have grown over millennia, but a form of hatred that stands outside of time; perhaps not even hatred, but some kind of ontological characteristic of thought. This position is referred to as "critical antisemitism research," and is, they claim, "scientifically true," despite its being divorced from and ignorant of many other broad tendencies of global thought in Jewish and Holocaust studies. Mostly, this way of knowing serves to prevent actual antisemitism from being understood and fought. Thanks to this relativization of the term, the School for Unlearning Zionism can be listed right next to a violent attack on a Jewish student in Hamburg with a shovel in the Amadeu Antonio Foundation’s annual list of antisemitic events in Germany.

Because many antisemites equate modernity – or capitalism, or Bolshevism – with Jews, "critical antisemitism research" simply reverses the equation and points to the tendentially antisemitic elements of any critique of them. It therefore makes any form of transformational leftist activism almost impossible – ironically, precisely the kind of activism that might help transform society away from producing so much antisemitism.

This strange "critical antisemitism research" does one thing very well: provide moral high ground from which to vilify antiracist theory and practice. Linked, if varying, concepts and schools of thought – intersectionality, Black feminisms, critical whiteness theory, postcolonial theory – and their development, transformation, and growth, are conveniently ignored. The consideration of the very real ideological and even personal links between European colonialism, American racism, and National Socialist antisemitism, which enables deeper thinking and new insights into all three, is defamed as Holocaust relativization, or victim envy, or the desire to stop remembering.

Frequently, reference is made to the fact that it is not immediately clear what connections might exist between, for example, anti-Slavic racism and Eastern European forced labor in the theories just mentioned. But instead of trying to engage, and to point out both continuities and differences, "critical antisemitism research" produces and then attacks a straw man version of "antiracism," an "antiracism" that simply imports American ideas, practices toxic identity politics, and denies Jewish histories of oppression and discrimination in favor of its preferred Black victims.

Memory culture as a shield

It is this distorted straw man that is the true American import. During the civil rights movement in the United States, many left-wing Jews supported and acted in solidarity with Black freedom struggles. The partly idealized memory of this alliance is a part of the identity of many Jews, me included. This alliance broke up in the early 1970s, and since then conservatives have warned of "Black antisemitism" in order to make the renewal of this alliance impossible. Its renewal would be a real danger for the fascist Republican Party, who are more and more openly antisemitic and whose commitment to white supremacy also endangers Jews.

The question of the place of Jews in the concept of whiteness is not a simple one. My position is that white Jews in the western world are white at this historical moment. This does not make us any less subject to antisemitism, but it does make us responsible for standing up against other forms of racism, not least that against Black Jews, without waiting for invitations or for gratitude. After all, they have, in a double sense, skin in the game.

The fact that white Jews are white does not mean that we can expect any support from Germany’s white majority, other than a few stirring phrases. That white majority has been too busy demonizing the left and mainstreaming right-wing and even völkisch ideas to protect us.

The famed "German memory culture," the memory of the Jews and the Holocaust, has for a long time served this white majority only as a shield to defend everything from the fear of fair housing policies to one’s own anti-Black or anti-Muslim racism. Anything goes, as long as you love Israel.

Against this background it is obscene that empathetic and deeply theorized attempts by scholars and activists to understand the Shoah as part of a history of colonial violence are vilified as trivialization and relativization. The opposite is the case. If the Shoah is understood not as the most radical consequence of violent segregation and subjugation, not as part of historical processes that did not begin in 1933 or end in 1945, but instead as some hermetically-sealed expression of ontological antisemitism that occurred outside history and even outside time itself, then its memory cannot do anything to assure that Auschwitz will never happen again. For anyone.

5.

What does it mean to be a Jew? This question, I will admit, is often asked in Germany. On the other hand, no one ever asks why we are Jews. I’m not a Jew to give anyone absolution, that goes without saying; but I’m also not a Jew just to feign a critical position, to make some attempt at distinguishing myself only to find myself banging up again and again on Germans’ neurotic sensitivities, as thick as medieval ghetto walls.

I find my answer in the United States — for example, the magazine Jewish Currents, published in New York, which could never appear in Germany because its editorial team advocates for a free Palestine. They once printed an obituary for David Berman, an indie musician who took his own life. It read: "His albums took up the grand project of Jewishness, to which he came honestly: wrestling with God, playing the stranger. Watching the world die of old age while awaiting the messiah; catching the dazzling light reflected off the shattered glass of our material world."

Those phrases hardly work in German, which lacks English’s dialectical balance between grand gestures and skepticism. In German, I have to say something more like this: I am a Jew because Germany is cold and mean, and the world is overheated and broken, and it is the job of every Jew to try and fix it, a little. The Jewish project is not finished, and it never will be. Perhaps that is why this country reacts so sensitively to left-wing Jews: because they disturb the ultimately Christian idea that Israel is the apotheosis of Jewish history. These left-wing Jews disturb Germans’ self-satisfied image of themselves. Therefore, they must be eliminated.

But I am here, and boruch hashem again, I am not alone. Alliances are slowly emerging: migrant-Jewish, Jewish-Palestinian, interreligous, Black-Jewish, Migrantifa. These alliances are not just a marketing brand or a hashtag, they are the means of our common survival. They arise through open and often painful dialogue, dialogue that helps us find a shared language. We defend ourselves, we support one another, we listen to our stories and write new ones together. We know who our enemies are. And of course, we bitch about ze Germans.

David Berman himself said: "but there is the matter of Justice. And I'll tell you it's not just a metaphor. The desire for it actually burns. It hurts. There needs to be something more. I'll see what that might be."

Perhaps it is the promise that Muriel Rukeyser made in her poem "To Be a Jew in the Twentieth Century," in 1944:

The whole and fertile spirit as guarantee

For every human freedom, suffering to be free

Daring to live for the impossible.

I, too, would like to see what this ‘something more’ might be. And if we can’t choose our own path, then I would at least like to see, with open eyes, where the storm of progress is blowing us; instead of being gagged and blindfolded by the goyim, claiming, as always, that they know what's better for me, what’s better for us. Who knows, after all, where they might take us.

Translated by Ben Miller