Since Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel and Israel’s counterattack on Gaza, there is a rise in antisemitic attacks on Jews, Jewish property, and Jewish-identified institutions in Germany. German politicians have defined the protection of Israel as Germany’s Staatsraison because of Germany’s historical responsibility for the Holocaust. The commitment to protect Israel, and the association of Jews with Israel, is manifest in Bundestag legislation and in the office of state and federal-level commissioners “for Jewish life and the fight against antisemitism.”
Focusing on the role and concept of the witnesses and witnessing to explain the rush to protect Jews together with varied Jewish responses, my talk brings a new angle on German debates concerning antisemitism. German discourse on Holocaust memory, I argue, produces what it sees as witnesses and testimony to the Holocaust and by extension to antisemitism, through testifiers trained to approach antisemitism only in relation to the Holocaust and Israel. These experts produced new categories with which to measure antisemitism, based on the IHRA working definition. I will discuss this process as a mode of political engagement that neither deals with the problem of antisemitism in German society nor its entanglements with the complex history of racism-based discrimination and the rise of right-wing extremism.
Irit Dekel is a sociologist of culture who studies memory politics, and ethnic and religious inequality in contemporary Germany. She is Assistant Professor in the Department of Germanic Studies and the Borns Jewish Studies Program at Indiana University, Bloomington. Irit has published on philosemitism in contemporary German media, and on memory activism by migrants in Germany. She is the author of Mediation at the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin (Palgrave, 2013) and in 2023, together with Esra Özyürek, she published ‘The Logic of the Fight against Antisemitism in Germany in Three Cultural Shifts’ in Patterns of Prejudice. Her second monograph, Witnessing Positions: Jews, Memories and Minorities in Contemporary Germany is forthcoming.