In a poem in 1961, the Jewish writer and later Nobel Prize winner for literature Nelly Sachs asked: “Why the black response of hatred to your existence, Israel?” The state already existed at that time, but throughout her life Nelly Sachs used the word Israel to refer to Jewish existence in general. And so the question leads right to the middle of my lecture. Because hatred of Jews and hatred of Israel form an inseparable symbiosis.
I was asked to speak about anti-Semitism after October 7, 2023. I have been researching anti-Semitism for 20 years and am familiar with the depths and manifestations of this cultural hatred. And yet I have never found it so difficult to formulate a lecture on this topic. This is not only because of the brutality of the massacre, but also because the reactions to this monstrosity were and are monstrous in themselves. Because it has shown us in stark terms that parts of humanity have learned nothing from history.
October 7th showed the quintessence of Jew-hatred, its ultima ratio, the unconditional will to wipe out Jewish existence. Here we encounter not the banality of evil, but anti-Semitic evil per se in its most horrifying form. Just as the National Socialists believed that Jews had to be eradicated as a world evil for the good of humanity. On October 7th, this eliminatory anti-Semitism was celebrated and sacralized.
One scene illustrates this: a recorded cell phone conversation in which the proud voice of a young Palestinian can be heard. “Mother, your son killed ten Jews today! I’m calling you from the phone of a dead Jew. Tell father! Their blood is on my hands. Mother, your son is a hero!” The father calls out joyfully: “Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill!” The Holocaust survivor and Nobel Prize winner for literature Imre Kertesz warned accordingly: “And the anti-Semite of our time no longer wants to express his antipathy towards Jews, he wants Auschwitz.”
On October 7, 2023, over 1,200 people of all ages were tortured, mutilated and burned. With shouts of joy. Only by explicitly mentioning these atrocities can the extent of the moral failure of large parts of the world’s population be understood. There should have been an international outcry. But instead there was a deafening silence from those who are usually the first to voice their outrage. The feminists were silent about the mass rapes, the progressive academies and art scenes were silent about the cruel murders of young people, the peace activists and anti-racists were silent about the brutalities.
The politically correct moralists, who otherwise cry out at every instance of discrimination against minorities, mocked the victims and their families by reversing the roles of perpetrator and victim in an anti-Semitic way, including – and particularly virulently – at universities (as we are currently seeing in the USA). The yes-but rhetoric of the pseudo-intellectual and political discourse (right up to the UN level) reproduced the old anti-Semitic argument that the Jews themselves were to blame for their misfortune under the slogan “contextualization”.
Reason, decency and compassion were abandoned in favor of ideological blindness, in favor of an anti-Israel narrative. And not only in Israel, but in Jewish communities around the world, re-traumatization came with force and with it the bitter realization of how alone one remained in the 21st century, despite all the assurances of the clichéd “Never again.”
There was a post on social media based on the famous quote by Niemöller, which reflects the dismay of young progressive Jews in particular, which I would like to read out here (in translation): “They attacked lesbians and gays and I stood up against them, they attacked the black community and I stood up against them, they attacked the migrants and I stood up against them. Then they attacked me, but I stood up alone because I am Jewish.”
The refusal to show empathy and the outbursts of hatred were not surprising. The groundwork for this had been laid years ago, and we experienced something similar during the Gaza crisis in 2014, when people in the streets of Europe chanted “Hamas, gas the Jews” and there were verbal excesses of violence on the Internet. In empirical research, we have long warned – repeatedly and publicly – about anti-Semitism, which establishes an enemy and distorted image of the Jewish state in the media discourse.
The conclusion of our conference “Current anti-Semitism – a phenomenon of the middle” (Evyatar Friesel/Jehuda Reinharz/Monika Schwarz-Friesel) was “Israel-related anti-Semitism is the most common form of current anti-Jewish sentiment, but it is precisely this that is met with the least resistance in politics and civil society. This is where the danger of the expansion and habituation of anti-Semitism in the … majority society lies.” – That was 15 years ago!
I currently identify four political and ideological forms of anti-Semitism: left-wing, right-wing, Muslim – and a centrist anti-Semitism in the arts and culture sections. Despite all the ideological differences, all four exhibit synergies and sometimes form alliances, as has long been the case with left-wing extremist and Islamist movements. All of them converge in the demonization of Israel.
And yet, since time immemorial, educated anti-Semitism, which appears to be morally upright, with its polished rhetoric, which comes across as “concern for world peace,” has been the intellectual arsonist, because it puts ideas in people’s heads. The radicals, extremists, ignorant people, the indoctrinated students then act as accelerant.
After the pogrom, the well-known American gender icon Judith Butler interpreted the massacre as an “uprising” and “armed resistance”. She did not see it as an act of terrorism or anti-Semitism, and she once described Hamas as a “left-wing social movement”. She does not explain how the beheading and burning of babies is resistance. Instead, she too uses her prominence to bring the old anti-Jewish causal argument into the collective consciousness: If Jews are subjected to violence, it is because of the Jews’ behavior.
No one should be surprised to see anti-Semitism among highly educated people. One thinks of the anti-Jewish statements of Augustine, Luther, Voltaire, Fichte or Hegel; in the Bildungsromane of the liberal-progressive authors Dickens, Wilde and Dostoyevsky the topoi of the evil, dirty, greedy Jew are firmly anchored. Their writings dripped the poison into the consciousness of millions of readers. Until the middle of the 20th century the proportion of educated anti-Semites was higher than that of uneducated ones.
Anti-Jewish resentment is not prejudice, not just racism, but a collective way of thinking and feeling, and unfortunately education is no absolute guarantee against it. For centuries, anti-Semites believed that the collective evil Jew slaughtered children and made pacts with Satan; today, in direct reference to this distorted image, they believe that the Jewish state is a racist apartheid regime that murders children.
Educated and progressive people with doctorates and professorships are so dangerous because people listen to them without suspicion, because they outwardly claim to be the good guys. That is why their texts and their numerous signature lists carry so much weight in the public eye. Woke Manichaeism cultivates intolerance with great tolerance towards the Jewish state. The media publishes even the crudest ideas, for example, in recent years, statements from the post-colonial approach that relativizes the Shoah and delegitimizes Israel.
This historically distorting template has long since produced not only anti-Israel discrediting, but also collective discrediting of all Jews, for example when Anne Frank is posthumously referred to as a “white colonial girl” and her diary is burned. The salient symbol of Jewish life and survival in the world is Israel and therefore the thorn in the side of all modern anti-Semites. It is neither a new nor a political anti-Semitism of outrage, nor is it rooted in the Middle East conflict.
It has no other causal structure than anti-Judaism, with the conflict acting as a catalyst. It must therefore be expressly emphasized that hatred of Israel as a worldview has been and continues to be articulated without crises, wars and settlement construction. Anyone who believes that hatred of Israel is fed by the current conflict situation should read the hate messages that Asher Ben Nathan, Israel’s first ambassador to Germany, has already received.
Since its founding, the Jewish state has been hated because it exists, not because it does or does not do something. What I call the “Israelization of anti-Semitism” is characterized by the fact that classic stereotypes (such as child murderers, land robbers, destroyers of nations) are projected onto Israel in a contemporary adaptation, and that Jews all over the world are collectively attacked under the pretext of conflict. In research, we see all the characteristics of classic Jew-hatred.
Anti-Semitic concepts also permeate the massively increased processes of defence and denial: the much-vaunted taboo on criticism is a crude invention, because no country in the world is criticised as vehemently and as often as Israel; legitimate criticism and anti-Semitism are of course not equated, and due to clear criteria, there are no grey areas for us when it comes to differentiation.
All of these fantasies are produced in order to immunize oneself against the accusation of anti-Semitism. This is nothing new either: Wilhelm Marr, author of the most influential anti-Semitic pamphlet of the 19th century, asserted that he was not guided by hatred of Jews, but that he had to “truthfully reveal how harmful Jews were acting.”
Here we are confronted with interpretive struggles that, as Franz Kafka once said, want to make “the lie the world order.” The global lie about Jewish Israel is already well established. It is believed too often by too many people. And it has terrifying consequences. We are all faced with the challenge of countering this web of lies with facts.
The author teaches as a professor at the TU Berlin. The text is her commemorative speech for October 7, which she gave to the Austrian Parliament at the beginning of May. You can watch the video here.