Samantha Carmel: Die falschen Lehren aus dem Holocaust: Deutschland stiehlt mir meine jüdische Identität [The wrong lessons from the Holocaust: Germany is stealing my Jewish identity], der Freitag, December 5, 2024.
This thought-provoking article by Jewish-American intellectual historian Samantha Carmel is hidden behind a paywall. It explains with painful consistency what the anti-Semitism resolution passed by the Bundestag on November 7, 2024, and the German “Never again is now!” mean for left-wing Jews who refuse to identify with the State of Israel:
“The core aim of the resolution is not to protect jews, but rather to silence criticism of the Israeli government’s war on the Palestinian people and to shift the blame for increasing anti-Semitism in Germany onto refugees, migrants, and marginalized groups. To this end, it uses the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) definition of antisemitism, whose original authors say is not suitable for legal and political use.
By censoring everyone’s right to criticize Israel and the actions of the far-right Netanyahu administration, the German government also censors the rights of Jews to do so … By implication, Germany is censoring me in my efforts to protest a government that supposedly represents me as a Jew … The resolution thus not only narrows Israel down to the Israeli government, but also attacks legitimate expressions of Jewish identity and presumes to decide who should be recognized and heard as a Jew: ultimately, only those who are represented by the Central Council of Jews in Germany. For me and other Jews who are not allowed to speak, this attempt to hierarchize and control the Jewish population is nothing other than anti-Semitism. (…)
The resolution invokes the protection of Jewish life to enable a complete reversal of victim and perpetrator by creating two new social categories. With the concept of the “left-wing anti-imperialist antisemite,” it provides a rhetorical framework in which I am effectively stripped of my Jewishness. At the same time, with the concept of “Israel-solidarity thinking,” it allows non-Jewish Germans to effectively become Jews. Their freedom of expression, the resolution states, must be protected against antisemitism just as much as that of people “with Jewish roots and of Israeli origin.
In this way, the descendants of the Nazis write me out of their definition of Jewishness. They classify me as an anti-Semite because I don’t belong to the category of Jew that’s politically useful to them. They combine this denial of my identity with their own self-proclamation as potential victims of—anti-Semitism! … And all this as a political maneuver to circumvent recognition of the genocide in Gaza and to legitimize a racist, anti-immigration turn in Germany? My head spins, my heart breaks.”
↗ https://www.freitag.de/autoren/der-freitag/nie-wieder-bedeutet-nichts