Tag: anti-Semitism

Babi Yar and the Politics of Memory 

To this day a memorial honouring the dead at Babi Yar on September 29-30, 1941 remains a site of intense ideological contestation.

                          The woman I had never met.

                      My dearest child! My rosy blushes!

                      My countless relatives, my own!

                      From every gorge your summons rushes:

                      You plead with me, beseech and moan.

                      We”ll gather all our strength and rise,

                      Our bones will clatter as we wend – we”ll haunt the towns still left alive,

                      Where bread and perfumes waft their scent.

                      Your candles sputter. Flags rip out their seams.

                     We’ve come to you. Not we – but the ravine.

These lines drip with death and despair. But unless you knew the title of this poem – or unless the word ‘ravine’ in the last line stuck in your gullet – you would find it hard to relate to the poem’s immediate context. At any rate the first time the poem appeared in print in the Russian magazine Novy Mir in 1944, it was one of several untitled poetic reflections by Ilya Ehrenburg on Nazi Germany’s apocalyptic war on the Soviet Union, then still ongoing. It was only in an 1959 anthology of his poems that Ehrenmburg added the title Baby Yar to this racking little poem. But, with the title or without it, contemporary Ukrainians – indeed the Soviet citizenry at large – always knew just what the Ehrenburg poem was about, as much in 1959 as in 1944. Soviet readers could hardly fail to see the linkages between Ehrenburg’s searing lines and the unspeakable crimes Hitler’s hordes committed in the Baby Yar ravine in Kyiv on 29-30 September, 1941.

And yet Yevgeni Yevtushenko in his 1961 poem Babi Yar was right to lament that

No monuments stand over Babi Yar,

A sudden drop sheer as a gross graveslab.

Yevtushenko was only eight years old when Babi Yar happened, so  he was unlikely to have been greatly affected at the time. (Ehrenburg was 41 years his senior.) And yet the fact that the site lacked a proper monument a good sixteen years after the defeat of Nazi Germany deeply troubled Yevtushenko. An anguished cry bursts forth from him as he stands contemplating the ravine’s bleak landscape:

The wildgrass rustles over Babi Yar.

Trees stare down stern,

                                        judicial,

                                               cold as day.

All things scream silent here.

Hat in my arm,

I feel myself now

slowly going grey.

I myself am

one all-out soundless scream

For the thousand buried thousands in this char.

I’m every old man

shot in this ravine.

I’m every baby

burned in Baby Yar.

The pathos here is as profound as in the Ehrenburg poem, but there is also something else: a sense of exasperation, of anger, even, not only at the perpetrators of the Babi Yar massacre but also at the colossal indifference to the massacre’s victims that Yevtushenko sensed around him. And he traces that impassivity to what he believed Babi Yar really stood for: essentially as a site of a racial genocide, of an anti-Semitic carnage, and not just another horrendous war-time atrocity. Yevtushenko clearly implies that this indifference was a function of the anti-Semitism which was as endemic to Soviet society as it had been to pre-revolutionary Russia. He then goes a step further. He, a non-Jewish Russian, identifies himself with the victims of Baby Yar and the ordinary Jewish citizens of the Soviet Union who, he suggests, daily suffered multiple indignities. He calls up graphic images of Jewish pogroms, suggesting that  the Jewish nightmare was nowhere near ending even in a country like Russia which had experienced a great revolution.

I have been

hounded, hunted,

slandered, spat on,

And demoiselles dolled up in Brussels lace

Shrieked as they poked their parasols in my face,

 And now I am 

a boy in Bialystok,

Blood runs across the floor. Blood on the wall.

The bar-room rabble-rousers run amok

Reeking of onion and hard alcohol.

Yevtushenko, then, sees Babi Yar as an obnoxious link in the unbroken chain of anti-Semitic prejudice that goes back centuries. It has often intrigued commentators that Ilya Ehrenburg, himself a Jew and, in his day, one of the Soviet Union’s leading public intellectuals, did not appear to see Babi Yar as racial genocide but the much-younger, non-Jewish Yevtushenko clearly did. What explains the two divergent perspectives? In trying to answer this question, we will find ourselves engaging with the two contesting narratives around Babi Yar that persist to this day.                 

Notice pasted at public places in Kyiv on September 28, 1941 ordering all Jews to assemble.

The bare facts are as follows. Three months into Operation Barbarossa, in September 1941, virtually all of Ukraine had come under German occupation. On September 28, or nine days after the 6th army moved into Kyiv, the city woke up to printed notices posted all over its public spaces ordering Kyiv’s Jews to assemble in a clearing between two city cemeteries on the morning of September 29 “with valuables, cash, documents….. and warm clothes”. Jews, the order curtly said, would disobey the instructions at their own peril.

Anticipating forced deportation at worst but nothing more sinister, a large majority of Kyiv’s Jews – mainly women, children and elderly men (most able-bodied males having alrerady been drafted into the Red army or joined the partisans) – turned up on the morning of the 29th as ordered. They were then marched in batches towards a densely wooded part of the Babin Yar ravine at the city’s edge. What followed was one of the worst mass murders of the War until that point. At a rough count, nearly 34,000 Jews were slaughtered inside the ravine on September 29 and 30 by machinegun fire. The ravine’s walls were later undermined to bury the bodies, some still breathing, under mud and rubble. 

Word of the carnage filtered slowly out of Kyiv, thanks to the Nazis’ tight control over all information channels. And as the Nazi holocaust was as yet a little-known phenomenon, the news was met with disbelief and shock in equal measure. Once the facts became a little clearer, however, the Soviet government’s denunciation of the massacre clearly referred to the large number of Jewish dead. Indeed, Foreign Minister Molotov’s message to the Allies highlighted the essentially anti-Jewish character of the Babi Yar savagery. At this point, the Soviet narrative around Babi Yar was pretty straightforward and uncomplicated. 

To understand how the picture began to blur over the following months and years, however, a look at the Soviet Union’s record of dealing with anti-Semitism would be instructive. The aggressive atheistic secularism of October Revolution’s first decade began later to yield ground to sectarian prejudices of many kinds. Anti-Semitism had been an embedded feature of Russian society for centuries, and, among the Soviet republics, historically Ukraine was perhaps the most plagued by this disease. No wonder then that parts of Ukraine erupted not infrequently in ugly anti-Semitic episodes well into the 1930s/1940s. Sadly, the Soviet elite itself was not wholly immune to this malady in the Stalin years. Whether Stalin himself was a confirmed anti-Semite it is hard to say, but there’s no doubt that, at best, he was deeply ambivalent. The result was that a steady, low-burn variety of anti-Semitism was well tolerated by the Soviet leadership. 

Rather than confronting the virulent racism underlying Nazi theory and practice, therefore, the Stalinist leadership embraced the expedient of presenting Hitlerism as a particularly malevolent variant of hyper-nationalism – which it certainly was, but not that alone– intent on destroying Soviet socialism. Stalin’s antidote to Nazi expansionism was the Great Patriotic War which would, he hoped, harness every Soviet nationality in full measure to the object of beating back the German invaders. In this great project, all ethnic markers had presumably to be submerged in the high tide of patriotic passion. The Great Patritic War was a campaign sustained by the Soviet people as an organic whole; any ethnic boundaries drawn between the Soviet defenders fof their Fatherland, for whatever purpose, could only weaken the Soviet cause. The tens of thousands of luckless victims of Babi Yar were Soviet citizens – first and always. They were killed because they were Soviet citizens. It was unnecessary – indeed, counter-productive – to identify their ethnic nationality which no longer had any meaning in a socialist state which, by definition, was internationalist. The narrative of the Great Patriotic War would, it was hoped, subsume all other minor narratives.

Therefore, it was decided to downplay the racist angle to the Babi Yar carnage. And that’s why the demand for a memorial at the site was repeatedly resisted by Soviet authorities. There was another, more down-to-earth motivation for the stonewalling. As the Naziz were driven out of Kyiv in late 1943, non-Jewish Ukrainians who had fled their homes started returning to the city in large numbers. It would have been ‘injudicious’ to hurt their sentiments by erecting a memorial principally to Kyiv’s Jews at that critical juncture when the war against Germany had not yet been won. (The hurt would likely have been felt more keenly by those Ukrainians who had occupied the homes of the dead Jews of Babi Yar.)

A part of the ravine in the 1960s.

For all his occasional spells of waywardness, Ilya Ehrenburg was a pillar of the Soviet establishment. At times he did test the limits of what was permissible, but he was careful never to stray too far beyond those limits. The Black Book of Soviet Jewry, of which he with Vasily Grosman were joint editors, never saw the light of day till well after Stalin’s death. The 1932-born  Yevtushenko, on the other hand, really made his mark in 1956, the year of the 20th Party Congress, and absorbed some of the creative energies that deStalinzation’s first few years famously undammed. (To be fair to Ehrenburg, in 1944 he mightn’t have liked to rock the boat at any rate: the war with Nazi Germany had still to be won.)

But let this not mean that Yevtushenko’s Babi Yar was greeted with open arms in the Soviet Union of 1961. Far from it. Indeed, he was roundly excoriated both by the Party bureaucracy and the semi-official Writers’ Union for his ‘rootless cosmopolitanism’.  And when Dmitri Shostakovich wanted to incorporate stanzas from the poem as an aria in his 13th Symphony, he ran into serious difficulties with the authorities. Only after some of the verses were sanitised and the paradigm of complete racial amity in the Soviet state built into the stanzas that the composer could go ahead with further pulic performances.

Babi Yar memorial (1976).

Post Stalin, the clamour for a Babi Yar memorial grew steadily louder. Soviet authorities blew hot cold for many years. Government plans around the site ranged from the outrageous (flattening the gorge and building a dam at the ravine’s northern-most edge) to the ludicrous (a sports complex on the flattened mass graves). By then monuments memorialising the dead of the Great Patriotic War had come up all over the country. Some serious efforts were begun in the mid-1960s to remedy the glaring omission at Baby Yar.

Suggestions and layout designs were sought alike from sculptors and ordinary citizens, and in-depth consultations started. The memorial was finally unveiled in the summer of 1976 – a mess of tangled bodies, twisting, writhing, flailing desperately. At over 50 feet tall and 30 feet across, its dimensions are also appropriately monumental. 

One imagined the installation of the memorial would have laid the unremitting controversy around Babi Yar finally to rest. But that didn’t happen, the reason being that the plaque at the foot of the monument read

                                         Here in 1941-43 German Fascist invaders

                                        Executed more than 100,000 citizens of the

                                        City of Kyiv and prisoners of war

The wording raised the hackles of nearly every Jewish institution without exception. The Museum of Jewish Heritage at New York summed up their skepticism quite candidly:

The Soviet Union was still unwilling to acknowledge that Babi Yar was a killing site for Jews specifically, or that it was one of many such sites that comprised the larger Holocaust. (Emphasis added) 

When Elie Wisel, Nobel laureate and one of the the best-known Jewish voices of the latter part of the 20th century, visited Babi Yar in 1979 as Chairman of the President’s Commission of the Holocaust, he was, he said, greatly disappointed by the monument. He spoke of a deep feeling of frustration, shame and rage that the Soviet government chose to perpetuate the memory of Babi Yar’s victims without acknowledging that

(T)he men and women buried in this ravine were murdered for being Jewish! …. While still alive, the Jews of Babi Yar were abandoned, and now their memory is being betrayed. 

Wiesel’s anguish is palpable, but is he speaking the whole truth? Is the Jewish Museum or everyone else from that spectrum of opinion right to fault the Babi Yar plaque for the reasons they state? Hardly.

The dead buried in Babi Yar number, by current estimates, between 140,000 and 150,000. That’s because Babi Yar was not just one massacre but a whole series of them stretching over the Occupation’s entire duration. And besides Kyiv’s Jews, the victims included partisans, POWs, communists, Romanis/Gypsies, the physically disabled, Christian pastors and even many Ukrainian Nationalists (who were Nazi collaborators till the Nazis turned on them towards the end). It’s believed that non-Jewish victims account for at least 15 percent of the total number. And not only that Babi Yar is not an unmixed Jewish mass grave.

It is now well-established that the mass executions at Babi Yar commenced immediately after the Nazis entered Kyiv, or at least a week before 29/30 September, and that the first targets of the shootings were not Jews but Russian POWs. This gives the lie to the claim that Babi Yar was a killing site specifically or exclusively for Jews. And what this means is this:  the Soviet regime’s refusal to acknowledge the linkages between Babi Yar and racial genocide surely smacked of prejudice and insensitivity; equally, Jewish leaders’ (and Western observers’) failure to recognise that the Soviet Union was justified in claiming Babi Yar as also one of the battlegrounds of the Great Patriotic War is unacceptable and wrong.

Anjan Basu can be reached at basuanjan52@gmail.com

Anti-Semitism, Palestinians and the West: A Historical Background of the Current Bombing of Gaza

It is western policy that defines Israel’s role in safeguarding its interest which accounts for Israel’s acts today.

The Hamas attack as well as Israel’s response might be placed in the context of the history of Zionism.

Specifically, Theodor Herzl’s decision to abandon his liberal Hungarian nationalism – upon realising this identity would soon be overwhelmed by the new European ethnic nationalisms, which, having gained currency after the failure of the revolutions of 1848, would eventually make all Europe unsafe for the Jews. And then, I should suggest, to seek to defend the Jewish peoples of Europe from ethnic nationalism, by inventing his Zionism as yet another, accommodating thereby the inherently anti-Semitic claim that the Jewish people did not belong in the West but in Palestine. 

Long after his death this has enabled the West to minimise its responsibility for Shoah. Today, when Israel bombs Gaza, it is in fact the West that does so. And the West it is that admonishes bewildered Palestinians as they die, “Never again!” 

And, thereafter, in terrorising the Arab and the Muslim world, the West terrorises at the same time Israelis, placing them forever as anxious local gendarmerie, ever threatened, ever dependent on Western largesse, forever denied the possibility of real freedom. 

Andrew Handler, wartime member of the Zionist youth Maccabi ha-Za’ir has shown (Dori: The Life & Times of Theodor Herzl in Budapest 1860-1878, University of Alabama Press, 1983) how the campaign for an ethnic Magyar-dominated Hungarian Kingdom had made up the lie that rule from Vienna had enabled the Jews to rob the Hungarian people. 

Yet this very anti-Semitism was to inspire, paradoxically, as Handler has argued, the Zionist programme itself. On June 24, 1878, Győző  Istóczy set out in the Hungarian Diet that the Jews would destroy Hungary and the “solution is none other than the restoration of the ancient Jewish state”. The Jewish Question was a national one, he said, of the “establishment in Palestine of an independent Jewish state”. 

Handler points out the “striking similarity between key passages of Istoczy’s anti-Semitic screed A Palesztina Beszcd and Herzl’s Der Judenstaat” laying out the ideology of the future state of Israel. 

For Herzl decided that the Jewish peoples of Europe could only gain safety by creating their own ethnic nationalism, & so adopted the anti-Semitic demand that Palestine become the Jewish homeland.

Yet Herzl’s Zionism & the policy to which it led, namely the Balfour Declaration, was opposed by liberal Western Jews such as the British statesman Edwin Montagu: 

“…I wish to place on record my view that the policy of His Majesty’s Government is anti-Semitic and in result will prove a rallying ground for Anti-Semites in every country in the world…I assert that there is not a Jewish nation…When the Jews are told that Palestine is their national home, every country will immediately desire to get rid of its Jewish citizens, and you will find a population in Palestine driving out its present inhabitants…

Nevertheless, the new ethnic nationalisms spread rapidly, each ethnic majority seeking to award itself a territory and the state that went with it, promoting mutually exclusive extravagant claims intolerant of those outside the mythical “nation”, all seized by the identical Hobbesian paranoia about outsiders within. Look to India to see how this travelled: for Vinayak Damodar Savarkar who did much to shape the Indian ideology of today justified what Hitler was doing shortly before Kristallnacht: 

“Several communities may live in one country for thousands of years but this does not help in forming a nation…In Germany the movement of the Germans is the national movement but that of the Jews is a communal one.”

Savarkar’s speech was reported in the weekly confidential (Intelligence) report to the District Magistrate Poona, October 1938 . He then elaborated on this to students of the Law College, Poona in July 1939, before hostilities commenced in World War II:

 “Nationality did not depend so much on a common geographical area as on unity of thought, religion, language and culture. For this reason the Germans and Jews could not be regarded as one nation. In the same way India was a nation of Hindus as they were in the majority (emphasis added, Bombay Province Weekly Letter, No. 20, September 30, 1939).”

 Authoritarian variants produced distinct European fascisms: although Germany is the most cited, we might look to France, turning in on itself after defeat at Sedan and the Paris Commune to look for an “enemy within” when it persecuted Alfred Dreyfus.

Despite that falsehood being exposed, anti-Semitism persisted, fortified by the colonial racism common to most European states; so years later it powered popular support for Petain & his Vichy collaboration with National Socialism, which rounded up Jews to send them off to be tortured and murdered, in the ‘Rafle du Vel’ d’Hiv’ at the cycling stadium in Paris in July 1942. Maurice Papon, one of its high functionaries, was like most never punished; accordingly, he was to go on to torture Algerians and detain them in the same stadium in Paris in 1961 and organise their murder. Insufficiently acknowledged, this very anti-Semitism is reborn today as Islamophobia, serving to appease both traditional anti-Semites as well as survivors of genocide. 

It is such French tradition that accounts for the surreal spectacle of the Sephardic Éric Zemmour reassuring the French that their ancestors had no responsibility for Shoah, even as his fellow right wing colleague Marine Le Pen supports Israel yet is silent on her own family’s rich anti-Semitic history; as well as the absurdity of how the “hijab question” has now become the central concern of French laïcité, rapidly occidentalising the Jews whom it so recently orientalised, and orientalising instead Muslims, consistent with the creation of “anti-Semitism” as a matter of concern as entirely distinct from other racism. 

Might we not therefore see Zionism itself not as a lobby that impedes US strategic concerns, but a subordinate agent that enacts them, limiting thereby its own agency? We might recall that during the Suez Crisis the British MP Nye Bevan had focused on those responsible for the debacle: 

“If we complain about the tune, there is no reason to criticise the monkey when the organ-grinder is present (House of Commons Debates, May 16, 1957).” 

So  it is not “Jewish control of the media” – that conspiratorial anti-Semitic fantasy that serves some as well as Islamophobia – but Western policy, specifically American, which defines Israel’s role in safeguarding its interest in controlling petroleum and  international waterways, which accounts for Israel’s acts today.

Kannan Srinivasan is at Wertheim Study New York Public Library and can be reached at kannansrinivasan@icloud.com.

Srinivasan is grateful for inspiration from Catherine Benoit, Akeel Bilgrami, Faisal Devji, Gowri Gurumurthy, Carol Krinsky and Sanjay Reddy.  

The Art World Is Succumbing to the Pressure of Ostracising Those Who Support Palestine

The conflation of anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism is dangerous and the culture sector is cracking under its weight.

As a Jewish girl growing up in provincial England then Italy,  I grew accustomed to anti-Semitism. “Don’t be Jewey!” in the playground when I wouldn’t share sweets. “Steen? Don’t you mean Stein?” when I told teachers my mother’s maiden name. And over and over: “You don’t look Jewish” though my blonde, snub-nosed looks make me a ringer for my Polish grandmother. One elderly Italian lady told me that she thought Jews struggled with Nazis because they were similar.

Such occasions are upsetting but I have never felt unsafe. This is not the experience of many Jews. If you attend synagogue and if your appearance marks you as Jewish, such badges of belonging make you a target. Since Hamas’s attack of October 7, and Israel’s retaliation, reports of anti-Semitic attacks have soared in Europe and the US.

But Islamophobia is also ever-present. A 2021 report by the UN found it is rising worldwide. The victory of anti-Islamic politician Geert Wilders in the Dutch elections mirrors the success of populist leaders such as Trump and Narendra Modi. Since October 7, that hatred has intensified.

Also read: The Right Wing Is on the Rise Globally

Equality and justice are collective operations. It is unjust to Muslims when governments and institutions fail to tackle Islamophobia with the same ferocity with which they tackle anti-Semitism. But it also endangers Jews because it suggests they deserve special treatment.

The conflation of anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism is also dangerous. There is an irrationality coiled within a concept that states Israel and Jewishness are the same thing. There is an old Jewish joke about one Jew needing two synagogues: the one he goes to and the one he doesn’t. There are a myriad ways of being Jewish. Many of us identify as Jewish but also as a cornucopia of other things. To riff on the US poet Walt Whitman, Jews – like everyone else – contain multitudes.

The culture sector is cracking under the weight of this unreason. Recently international dealer Lisson Gallery cancelled a show by Ai Weiwei after a tweet which reportedly stated: “Financially, culturally, and in terms of media influence, the Jewish community has had a significant presence in the United States. The annual $3 billion aid package to Israel has, for decades, been touted as one of the most valuable investments the United States has ever made. This partnership is often described as one of shared destiny”. 

Ai seemed to conflate Jewishness with Zionism. Furthermore, by implying that the Jewish community is a powerful, homogenous entity, he risked falling into anti-Semitic tropes that the Jews run Hollywood and Congress and are plotting world domination. Certainly, there are powerful Jews in the United States. There are many powerless ones too. Some support Israel. Many don’t.

But Ai deleted his tweet. Given that, couldn’t Lisson have gone ahead? One erased tweet, from an artist indubitably committed to justice, does not make a pogrom.

There are parallels to be drawn with last year’s debacle at the German contemporary arts festival Documenta when it became embroiled in accusations of anti-Semitism stoked by a government which fails to distinguish between Zionism and Judaism.

Other baffling decisions have followed. For Documenta to accuse committee member Ranjit Hoskoté, the most sensitive of thinkers, of anti-Semitism is to drive out exactly the kind of reflective, nuanced voice that culture needs. A photography biennale actually cancelled itself rather than permit curation by photojournalist, teacher and activist Shahidul Alam whom they dubbed anti-Semitic for describing the situation in Gaza as a genocide and comparing it to the Holocaust.

Also read: What Explains the Political Right’s Ascendancy to Global Power?

As someone who knows Alam well, I can verify that he is not anti-Semitic. His courage, wisdom and humanity have been proven time and again not least when he went to prison for criticising his own government in Bangladesh. If I were in danger from anti-Semitism – or anything else – it’s Alam I would want at my side.

Alam and I may debate his posts. I try to avoid comparisons between different atrocities because I believe that specificity is intrinsic to solutions. He and I will probably, as we have before, agree to differ.

Art should be a space where differences are permitted freedom. Art springs from friction. From contradiction, paradox, opposing forces birthing newness. Within that alchemy, more complex, imaginative truths emerge. For Alam and his team, the cancellation signals that voices from the Global South – the majority world, as Alam puts it – are not truly welcome beyond the region despite the lip service paid to “diversity”.

These repressions are in lockstep with a wider crackdown on expression. In the UK, Bristol’s Arnolfini Gallery has dropped Palestinian events for fear they contradict state guidance that culture venues must remain apolitical or risk funding cuts. Given the political kernel of so much contemporary culture, this demand is absurd but it is indicative of Britain’s intolerant Tory administration. In truth, Arnolfini has held many political events so why do the Palestinian ones provoke censorship?

The situation is becoming Orwellian in its mechanisms of exclusion, erasure and silence. Even Jewish artists, such as Candice Breitz, are now being ostracised for their Palestinian sympathies.

There is anti-Semitism and there is Islamophobia: real, violent ideologies that destroy lives. There are also a million ghosts, fantasies, mis-speakings and mis-perceptions of those hate crimes. We need to be able to distinguish them. We need to understand who has the power to kill us and who is expressing an opinion with which we may not agree but which does not endanger us. Otherwise, we will waste our energy fighting shadows while the real monsters thrive.

When I argued that Ai’s tweet could be construed as anti-Semitic, my non-Jewish partner didn’t get it. I explained. He got it. Or said he did. That’s ok. That’s two people having different histories. (My partner’s Argentinian and objects every time I forget to describe those islands in the South Atlantic as Las Malvinas.) That’s all of us.

The horror in Gaza is ripping faultlines through the art sector. The failure of major institutions to condemn Israel’s war crimes in Gaza as they condemned Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has triggered outrage, protests and sit-ins. Those who disagree say that Hamas’s massacre makes such comparisons shaky.

Time and again I remember lines by the radical poet Adrienne Rich, who was Jewish on her father’s side. “Split at the root/Neither Gentile nor Jew […but] I’m a good reader of histories.”

We don’t have to be superlative historians to recognise, as António Guterres said, that October 7 didn’t happen in a vacuum. Nor did the atrocities in Gaza. The ghosts of millions in Europe and Palestine haunt those dying today.

Even as I condemn October 7, I don’t believe Palestinian people should pay for Hitler’s crimes. Art stakes itself on empathy: between artist and subject; art and viewer. It also wagers on mystery: that which bewilders us, makes us hesitate. Sometimes it makes us angry. Sometimes it redeems us. Sometimes it does both. It’s somewhere to backtrack, rethink then recomplicate. The lady who compared the Jews to Nazis had, as a young woman, hidden a Jew in her attic during the war at enormous personal risk. Humanity is as multi-faceted as a diamond. Art is a place where its strangeness can shine.

The cancellations damage the freedom and creativity they claim to protect. As James Baldwin put it: “Life is more important than art. That’s why art is so important.” If dialogue across difference is shut down in the house of culture, what hope remains elsewhere?

Rachel Spence is a poet and arts writer. Her latest book is Venice Unclocked (2022, Ivory Press). Her work has appeared in the Financial Times, Hyperallergic and The Art Newspaper.

German Photo Biennale Cancelled Over Curator’s Support for Palestinian Rights, Criticism of Israel

The announcement comes just a week after a similar controversy involving the international art festival Documenta in Germany’s Kassel resulted in the resignation of all six members of its search panel.

New Delhi: The 2024 edition of the Biennale für aktuelle Fotografie, a contemporary photo exhibition, curated by Shahidul Alam, Tanzim Wahab and Munem Wasif, has been cancelled due to Shahidul’s Facebook posts in support of Palestine.

The curators were informed of the cancellation through a press release on November 23.

The tenth edition of the exhibition was due to be held in the German cities of Mannheim, Ludwigshafen and Heidelberg, in March 2024.

According to the Biennale’s press release, as first reported by the Art Newspaper, Alam critical posts about the Israeli military’s campaign in Gaza on social media prompted the decision. Alam’s Facebook page contained “content that can be read as antisemitic and antisemitic content”, the event’s organisers alleged in a statement, a charge that Alam and his colleagues have refuted.

“We were invited to curate the Biennale because they claimed they wanted our voice, and our perspective on how we see the world. But in a moment of crisis, it has appeared that our voices were only invited on their terms, subservient to their conditions,” they said in a statement.

Alam is a photojournalist based in Dhaka who has been actively posting on social media since October 7, when Hamas militants invaded Israeli territory, resulting in approximately 1,200 deaths and the taking of over 200 hostages.

The Biennale organisers released a statement saying they voiced concerns to Alam and the festival’s other curators, Bangladeshi photographers Tanzim Wahab and Munem Wasif, in attempts to “sensitise [them] to Germany’s special historical responsibility for the state of Israel and its right to exist.” However, Alam continued to post pro-Palestinian content because he “sees himself as an activist and demands freedom of expression.”

Meanwhile, Wahab and Wasif said they would not participate in the Biennale without Alam, the newspaper added.

“The consequences of the cancellation for the Biennale für aktuelle Fotografie and the organising team are far-reaching. They jeopardise the future of the entire event. In the time ahead, we will do everything in our power to maintain the Biennale as one of the largest and most important photography events in Germany and Europe in the long term,” said the organisers.

In a statement, the curators said: “Since 15 October, we had been in multiple discussions with the Biennale management regarding social media posts made by Shahidul Alam, on his Facebook account, related to the ongoing war crimes in Gaza. While the posts were a response to the actions of the Israeli government, the Biennale incorrectly equated these to anti-Semitism. We feel that the failure to draw a distinction between criticism of a government and of a people, is irresponsible and damaging to the honesty of public discourse.”

“In times of crisis, cultural institutions are meant to create a safe space for careful listening, with and despite our differences. The very institution that was supposed to host us, and make space for diverse voices, has slandered their invited curators. Many of us, from the Global South, who are invited to work with Western institutions, on the premise of inclusivity, often share this scepticism – of how far our diversity is being tokenised or instrumentalised for course correction of their historical legacies,” they said.

“How truly welcoming are these institutions towards radically different ways of thinking, which emerge from vastly different contexts, both contemporary and historical? Have we lost the basic human right to question, protest, or collectively mourn?” they added.

Separately, the curatorial advisors of Biennale have criticised the move as a “witch hunting practice”, taking place in German cultural institutions for several years.

“This disdainful form of scapegoating of Shahidul Alam and many others is outright censorship; it is racist and discriminatory. The ease and callousness with which these type of accusations are pronounced in Germany these days suggests that fascism is returning to the present,” they said in a statement.

The announcement comes just a week after a similar controversy involving the international art festival Documenta in Germany’s Kassel resulted in the resignation of all six Finding Committee members. Ranjit Hoskote, a writer and curator based in Mumbai, faced allegations of anti-Semitism due to his endorsement of a Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions petition in 2019.

Following the accusations, he stepped down, saying, “I feel, strongly, that I have been subjected to the proceedings of a kangaroo court.”

Alam referred to the collective resignation letter from four of Hoskote’s colleagues as an exposé of Germany’s “blinkered position on freedom of expression.”

Below are the full statements from the curators and curatorial advisors:

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Statement by Curators of Biennale für aktuelle Fotografie 2024

We are dismayed by the decision of the Director, Yasmin Meinicke, and the Board of the Biennale für aktuelle Fotografie, taken in consultation with German state authorities to unilaterally cancel the 2024 edition. For 18 months, we worked with 44 artists, six partner organisations, three advisors and various colleagues to bring the Biennale to fruition. As the curators, we only found out about this cancellation through a press release in the public domain, published without our consent, on 23 November 2023.

We find the conduct of the Director and the Board of the Biennale to be a breach of trust and antithetical to the very premise of the theme we were intending to explore in this edition.

Further, it is in violation of our contractual agreement, which states, “All press releases are published in agreement with the curator and the managing director of the Biennale.”

The title of our edition was “Listening to Disquiet,” which looked to address the question of what embodied listening may mean—as a precondition to forming opinions—in the context of a biennale. Our belief in social justice, our collective struggles, our friendships, our mutual losses, and our solidarity urge us to listen carefully. Not only to hear, but to absorb the range of frequencies emitted by this disquiet, and by the images produced by artists across geographies and temporalities. We are saddened that we will not be able to share our planned exhibition with the public.

Since 15 October, we had been in multiple discussions with the Biennale management regarding social media posts made by Shahidul Alam, on his Facebook account, related to the ongoing war crimes in Gaza. While the posts were a response to the actions of the Israeli government, the Biennale incorrectly equated these to anti-Semitism. We feel that the failure to draw a distinction between criticism of a government and of a people, is irresponsible and damaging to the honesty of public discourse.

During in-person discussions in Mannheim, in the week of 23 October, several partners to the biennale—including multiple directors of associated institutions, some members of the Board as well as the Biennale team expressed their disagreement with the position of the director on these social media posts. Several members of the Biennale team voiced their indignation at the developing atmosphere of self-censorship.

After a series of communications, we were informed on 14 November that we could continue as curators of the upcoming edition. Yet, on 23 November, the Biennale Director, after meeting with the mayors of cultural affairs of all three cities in which the Biennale was to be held—Mannheim, Ludwigshafen and Heidelberg—sent a press release, unilaterally announcing the cancellation of the event. The director did not seek to challenge state censorship or to fulfil her role as a leader of the inviting institution, to exercise care towards the curators, and in turn the artists.

At a time where there has been an indefensible escalation in relentless brutalities against the Palestinian people, we believe that we have a moral responsibility to decide which side of history we will stand on. Recent events have led to the killing of civilians on both the Israeli and Palestinian side, which we have stood against, and continue to condemn. However, we cannot ignore the disproportionate toll on Palestinians now and historically since 1948. For us to disregard this stark difference—in the number of Palestinians killed, their homes destroyed, their basic civil liberties curtailed by the State of Israel—would be to turn a blind eye to unfolding realities.

Our acknowledgment of the history of the Palestinian cause, and the present assault in Gaza on civilians, does not, in any way, translate to us dismissing the historical persecution of the Jewish people. Such a conflation is a deliberate and dangerous misreading of our position. It is this shrinking space for care towards the persecution of any community, that we seek to address in the critical space of arts, education, and discourse.

In times of crisis, cultural institutions are meant to create a safe space for careful listening, with and despite our differences. The very institution that was supposed to host us, and make space for diverse voices, has slandered their invited curators. Many of us, from the Global South, who are invited to work with Western institutions, on the premise of inclusivity, often share this skepticism—of how far our diversity is being tokenised or instrumentalised for course correction of their historical legacies. How truly welcoming are these institutions towards radically different ways of thinking, which emerge from vastly different contexts, both contemporary and historical? Have we lost the basic human right to question, protest, or collectively mourn? Our difference of perspective—shaped by our colonial past—in reading history and its contemporary fallouts is seen as a reason to educate or “sensitize” us. We were invited to curate the Biennale because they claimed they wanted our voice, and our perspective on how we see the world. But in a moment of crisis, it has appeared that our voices were only invited on their terms, subservient to their conditions.

Censorship cannot separate the waves of communication by force. We will have to take the initiative to listen differently in our own communities. Space must be created. Creating true pluralism by moving beyond our individual comfort zones is part of a long struggle.

Shahidul Alam
Tanzim Wahab
Munem Wasif

Statement by curatorial advisors of Biennale für aktuelle Fotografie 2024

The accusation of anti-semitism against Dr. Shahidul Alam comes as no surprise. It is the logical continuation of a witch hunting practice taking place in German cultural institutions for several years now (at least since early 2020 when Achille Mbembe was desinvited from the Ruhrtriennale). It reveals the incapacity of Germany and its institutions to deal with its own past, to deal with conflict, and to question its self-awarded chronic superiority and entitlement — even in a context in which the object of its Staatsraison has clearly and publicly stated genocidal intent.

This disdainful form of scapegoating of Dr. Shahidul Alam and many others is outright censorship, it is racist and discriminatory.

The ease and callousness with which these type of accusations are pronounced in Germany these days suggests that fascism is returning to the present.

In this context we should all actively refuse to contribute to cultural labour in Germany!

Yasmine Eid Sabbagh

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We often see western cultural institutions call upon the labour of many, under the ostensible premise of supporting a diversity of voices and fostering critical thought. However, this decision of the Biennale to cancel an entire an entire edition over Shahidul’s social media posts and to communicate it through a press release before they even personally informed the curators, reveals a hierarchical mindset. By offering an invitation, it is assumed that they define the parameters of this diversity, and a critical lens can be used to view the rest of the world, but not themselves. It is worth asking then, if these so-called collaborations are meant for toeing the institutional line and if those invited must express gratitude, in so far as, posing no challenge to that position.

With this censorship, the Western liberal democracy, with its supposed tenets of free speech and expression, is exposing its racist double-standards—valuing the rights of some communities above others. In selectively acknowledging history, and the persecution of only one set of people, it appears that Germany is seeking to absolve itself of its complicity in past events at the cost of another historical wrong in the making. I stand in full solidarity with all three curators, for having the courage to acknowledge the long arc of multiple histories and oppose the grotesque war crimes being committed by Israel in the present moment.

Tanvi Mishra

 

 

‘No Space in Germany for Open Exchange of Ideas’: After Hoskote, Other Documenta Panel Members Resign

Mumbai-based author and curator Ranjit Hoskote resigned from the Finding Committee for the upcoming 16th edition of Documenta in Kassel, Germany last week amid accusations of ‘anti-Semitism’.

New Delhi: Days after Mumbai-based author and curator Ranjit Hoskote and Israeli painter Bracha Ettinger resigned from the Finding Committee for the upcoming 16th edition of Documenta in Kassel, Germany, the four remaining members have also stepped down.

The four members, including Paris-based independent curator, lecturer, art critic Simon Njami; Gong Yan of the Shanghai Institute of Visual Art; Vienna-based art curator Kathrin Rhomberg; and São Paulo-based curator María Inés Rodríguez, resigned in an open letter addressed to Dr. Andreas Hoffmann, managing director, Documenta and Museum Fridericianum gGmbH on November 16.

Documenta is the world’s most prestigious art exhibition, which takes place every five years in Kassel, Germany.

In their letter, the four members said that their decision comes against the backdrop of the resignations of Hoskote and Ettinger.

“The dynamics of the last few days, with their unchallenged media and public discrediting of our colleague Ranjit Hoskote, which forced him to resign from the Finding Committee, make us very doubtful if this prerequisite for any coming edition of Documenta is currently given in Germany. Art requires a critical and multi-perspective examination of its diverse forms and contents to be able to resonate and develop its transformative capacity. Categorical, one-sided reductions and over-simplifications of complex contexts threaten to nip any such examination in the bud,” they wrote in the letter.

Hoskote’s resignation followed an article published in Germany’s daily Süddeutsche Zeitung on November 9, 2023.

Saying that a 2019 letter signed by Hoskote, among others, was “clearly antisemitic”, Germany’s culture minister Claudia Roth threatened to withdraw public funding for the event.

The 2019 letter was published as part of the article in Suddeutsche Zeitung on November 9.

The letter, circulated by the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) global movement, aimed to exert pressure on Tel Aviv to withdraw from the occupied Palestinian territories and adhere to human rights laws.

Ettinger’s resignation on November 12 was unrelated to the controversy surrounding Hoskote. ARTnews reported that her decision was prompted by the “dark times” affecting her country, Israel.

In their letter, the four members said that they understand that in view of its past, Germany has “distinct social and political responsibilities.”

“The great sensitivity towards all anti-Semitic tendencies bears eloquent witness to the extent to which the nation has internalised this responsibility. The ongoing fulfilment of this very responsibility deserves the greatest appreciation, especially now, when alarming signs of deep-rooted anti-Semitism are once again making themselves felt around the world.”

“At the same time, however, this awareness of special responsibilities runs the risk of being misused for opinion politics in order to suppress undesirable approaches and their broad and open discussion right from the start. Instead of debate and discussion, over-simplification and prejudgments are thus all too easily substituted,” they said.

In the last edition as well, the exhibition was engulfed in a scandal around its alleged proximity to BDS and a dispute over anti-Semitic iconography.

The four members said in the letter: “It is this emotional and intellectual climate of over-simplification of complex realities and its resulting restrictive limitations, which has been prevalent since documenta15 and especially against the background of the current crises our world is facing, that makes it impossible for us to conceive of a strong and signal exhibition project, and consequently to allow for a responsible continuation of the selection process to determine a curatorial concept for documenta16.”

The Finding Committee, according to the organisers, “has the task of inviting pioneering figures in contemporary art to apply to take on the role of Artistic Direction of documenta 16, and to select the most promising format from the concepts presented. Appointment of the Artistic Direction is targeted for late 2023 / early 2024.”

However, the four members said that against the backdrop of current developments, there is no space for “open exchange of ideas” in Germany.

“In the current circumstances we do not believe that there is a space in Germany for an open exchange of ideas and the development of complex and nuanced artistic approaches that documenta artists and curators deserve. We do not believe that any acceptable conditions can be created in short term and consider it to be disrespectful of documenta’s legacy to simply remain content with the current situation,” the four members’ letter said.

 

Prior to Hoskote’s resignation on November 12, Ettinger had also stepped down  for reasons that she stated were not connected to the accusations levelled against Hoskote but because Israel was enduring “dark times.”

 

Curator Ranjit Hoskote Resigns from German Arts Panel Due to Row Over 2019 Statement Critical of Israel

Hoskote’s resignation is the latest in a string of escalating scandals that have followed an anti-BDS resolution passed by the German parliament in 2019, with artists and curators increasingly finding themselves targeted by weaponised accusations of anti-Semitism.

New Delhi: Mumbai-based author and curator, Ranjit Hoskote, has resigned from the Finding Committee for the upcoming 16th edition of Documenta in Kassel, Germany.

Documenta is the world’s most prestigious art exhibition, which takes place every five years in Kassel, Germany.

According to the organisers, the Finding Committee “has the task of inviting pioneering figures in contemporary art to apply to take on the role of Artistic Direction of documenta 16, and to select the most promising format from the concepts presented. Appointment of the Artistic Direction is targeted for late 2023 / early 2024.”

His resignation follows an article published in Germany’s daily Süddeutsche Zeitung on November 9, 2023. It accused Hoskote of BDS [Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions against Israel] sympathies and “anti-Semitism,” based on his signing of a 2019 BDS petition against a far-right event on “Zionism and Hindutva,” co-hosted by the Consulate General of Israel in Mumbai.

Germany’s Green Party culture minister, Claudia Roth, condemned the statement as “clearly anti-Semitic” for depicting Zionism as a “racist ideology” and Israel as a “settler-colonial apartheid state.” Roth warned of withdrawing state funding for Documenta.

In the last edition as well, the exhibition was engulfed in a scandal around its alleged proximity to BDS and a dispute over anti-Semitic iconography.

In the context of future developments for German cultural institutions, Documenta was to ensure that the members of the new Finding Committee, and particularly the next artistic director(s), held no BDS sympathies.

Earlier this week, another member of the new Finding Committee resigned – the Israeli painter Bracha Ettinger, for reasons that she stated were not connected to the accusations levelled against Hoskote but because Israel was enduring “dark times.”

Hoskote’s resignation is the latest in a string of escalating scandals that have followed an anti-BDS resolution passed by the German parliament in 2019, with artists and curators, especially from non-European backgrounds, increasingly finding themselves targeted by weaponised accusations of anti-Semitism.

Reproduced below is the full text of Hoskote’s resignation letter.

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Mumbai, November 12, 2023

Dear Professor Dr. Andreas Hoffmann (managing director, Documenta und Museum Fridericianum gGmbH),

These last few days have been among the most deeply distressing days of my life. The monstrous charge of anti-Semitism has been brought against my name in Germany, a country I have regarded with love and admiration, and to whose cultural institutions and intellectual life I have contributed for several decades, as a writer, curator, and cultural theorist. Members of the German commentariat who have no acquaintance with my life and work have judged, denounced, and stigmatized me on the basis of a single signature on a petition, taken out of its context and not approached in the spirit of reason. I have been written about with harshness and condescension, and none of my detractors has thought it important to ask me for my point of view. I feel, strongly, that I have been subjected to the proceedings of a kangaroo court.

It is clear to me that there is no room, in this toxic atmosphere, for a nuanced discussion of the issues at stake. And now—in what strikes me as a doomed attempt to save a situation that is beyond saving—I am being asked to accept a sweeping and untenable definition of anti-Semitism that conflates the Jewish people with the Israeli state; and that, correspondingly, misrepresents any expression of sympathy with the Palestinian people as support for Hamas.

My conscience does not permit me to accept this sweeping definition and these strictures on human empathy. Such a definition and such strictures have been opposed by prominent Jewish thinkers such as the philosopher Omri Boehm, the historian Moshe Zimmermann, the columnist Gideon Levy, the philosopher Michael Marder, and many, many others, who reject the equation of anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism. A system that insists on such a definition and such strictures—and which chooses to ignore both criticality and compassion—is a system that has lost its moral compass. I say this with the greatest sadness.

It pains me to say that such circumstances negate Documenta’s historic openness to a diversity of positions and its capacity for sustaining the life of the imagination in a supportive environment. I greatly fear that these circumstances will compromise the generosity of spirit and the willingness to engage in dialogue that have long been sterling features of Germany’s contribution to global cultural politics.

As such, I find myself unable to perform my duties towards Documenta, an institution for which I have had great affection and which I have known well for more than twenty years, ever since Okwui Enwezor invited me to chair a panel at the Delhi platform of Documenta 11 in May 2001. It has been an honor to serve on the Finding Committee for Documenta 16, and it has been a pleasure to get to know you and work with you. With much regret, I must offer you my resignation and step down from the Finding Committee.

***

As I leave, you will agree that it is only fair that I should be permitted to state my side of this case, for the record. I would like to do this as follows:

1. I wish to restate that I have the highest regard for the Jewish people, and have always had the deepest empathy with their historic sufferings and admiration for their glorious cultural achievements. This is evident in my essays, my lectures, and my books. I am appalled by the accusation that I am anti-Semitic, and the suggestion that I am in need of instruction on this sensitive subject. Simple biographical factors render this accusation absurd. I was brought up in a pluralist family, which took pride in the diversity of India, including the presence, among us, of three distinct Jewish communities—the Bene Israel, the Cochin Jews, and the Baghdadi Jews—for centuries. My first mentor and dear friend, the great Indian poet and art critic Nissim Ezekiel, was a member of the Bene Israel community. Indeed, one of my great-aunts, Kitty Shiva Rao, was born Kitty Verständig in a Viennese Jewish family; she made her home in a newly independent India, applying her knowledge of the Holocaust to healing a young country that had been born amidst the horrors of the Partition. The Shoah is not external to me; it is one of the strands in my own family history.

2. Putting aside biographical factors, I wish to place on record also that I have publicly opposed the intellectual and cultural boycott of Israel—on the grounds that this will further weaken and isolate our liberal, progressive, critical, and inclusive colleagues within Israel. I do not share the BDS position, and disagree with it. My heart goes out both to the Jewish people and the Palestinian people, who have suffered an unremitting condition of strife for more than seven decades in West Asia.

I condemn unequivocally the terror unleashed by Hamas against Israel on October 7, 2023, and the horrendous massacre by Hamas militants of Israeli men, women, and children as well as Palestinian, Thai, Filipino, Nepali, and other individuals. I mourn the deaths of these innocent people. At the same time, I cannot ignore the brutal program of annihilation that the government of Israel has launched against the Palestinian civilian population, in retaliation. I cannot look away from this humanitarian catastrophe, its cost exacted in the lives of innocent men, women, and children. Now, more than ever, there is a compelling need to bring the communities of Israel and Palestine together, to renounce the exceptionalism of suffering on both sides, and to craft a solidarity of grief, a communion of shared vulnerability, and a process of healing and renewal.

3. Let us now consider the so-called evidence that has been presented against me: my signature on a petition circulated by the Indian Cultural Forum and dated August 26, 2019, protesting a discussion hosted by the Consulate General of Israel in Mumbai, on “Leaders’ Idea of Nations: Zionism and Hindutva.” The invitation for this event presented a portrait of Theodor Herzl, the founding figure of Zionism, alongside a portrait of V. D. Savarkar, a founding figure of Hindutva.

My reason for signing this petition was because the event clearly posited an equivalence between Herzl and Savarkar, and was intended to develop intellectual respectability for an alliance between Zionism and Hindutva. I found this highly ironic, since Savarkar was known to be an admirer of Hitler and openly expressed his admiration for Nazi ideology and methods, which he proposed as a model for a Hindu-majoritarian India to follow, especially with regard to the treatment of the religious minorities.

No member of the German commentariat who denounced me has asked herself or himself why the Israeli Consulate General thought it appropriate to equate Zionism with Hindutva in the first place.

I have dedicated my life to opposing authoritarian forces and discriminatory ideologies, and my signature carried with it the weight of my commitment to dialogue, inclusiveness, mutuality, and the ceaseless quest for common ground. This commitment remains with me, as the cornerstone of my life.

With warm good wishes,

Ranjit

 

‘All Criticism of Israel Is Not Inherently Anti-Semitic’: An Open Letter From Jewish Writers

‘We find this rhetorical tactic antithetical to Jewish values, which teach us to repair the world, question authority, and champion the oppressed over the oppressor.’

The following letter and note below were first published on the n+1 magazine and have been republished with permission.

A group of Jewish writers drafted this letter after seeing an old argument gain new power: the claim that critiquing Israel is antisemitic. Editors at a corporate-owned magazine were prepared to publish the letter, but their lawyers advised against it. The writers share this letter in solidarity with those who continue to speak out in support of Palestinian freedom. Add your name here.

We are Jewish writers, artists, and activists who wish to disavow the widespread narrative that any criticism of Israel is inherently antisemitic. Israel and its defenders have long used this rhetorical tactic to shield Israel from accountability, dignify the US’s multibillion-dollar investment in Israel’s military, obscure the deadly reality of occupation, and deny Palestinian sovereignty. Now, this insidious gagging of free speech is being used to justify Israel’s ongoing military bombardment of Gaza and to silence criticism from the international community.

We condemn the recent attacks on Israeli and Palestinian civilians and mourn such harrowing loss of life. In our grief, we are horrified to see the fight against antisemitism weaponised as a pretext for war crimes with stated genocidal intent.

Antisemitism is an excruciatingly painful part of our community’s past and present. Our families have escaped wars, harassment, pogroms, and concentration camps. We have studied the long histories of persecution and violence against Jews, and we take seriously the ongoing antisemitism that jeopardises the safety of Jews around the world. This October just marked the five-year anniversary of the worst antisemitic attack ever committed in the United States: the eleven worshipers at Tree of Life – Or L’Simcha in Pittsburgh, who were murdered by a gunman who espoused conspiracy theories that blamed Jews for the arrival of Central American migrants, and in so doing, dehumanised both groups. We reject antisemitism in all its forms, including when it masquerades as criticism of Zionism or Israel’s policies. We also recognise that, as journalist Peter Beinart wrote in 2019, “Anti-Zionism is not inherently antisemitic—and claiming it is uses Jewish suffering to erase Palestinian experience.”

We find this rhetorical tactic antithetical to Jewish values, which teach us to repair the world, question authority, and champion the oppressed over the oppressor. It is precisely because of the painful history of antisemitism and lessons of Jewish texts that we advocate for the dignity and sovereignty of the Palestinian people. We refuse the false choice between Jewish safety and Palestinian freedom; between Jewish identity and ending the oppression of Palestinians. In fact, we believe the rights of Jews and Palestinians go hand-in-hand. The safety of each people depends on the other’s. We are certainly not the first to say so, and we admire those who have modeled this line of thinking in the wake of so much violence.

We understand how antisemitism and criticism of Israel or Zionism have been conflated. For years, dozens of countries have upheld the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of antisemitism. Most of its eleven examples of antisemitism regard comments on the state of Israel, with some open to interpretation enough that they limit the scope of acceptable critique. What’s more, the Anti-Defamation League classifies Anti-Zionism as antisemitism, despite the misgivings of many of its own experts. These definitions have scaffolded the Israeli government’s deepening relationships with far-right, antisemitic political forces, from Hungary to Poland to the United States and beyond—endangering Jews in diaspora. To counter these sweeping definitions, a group of scholars of antisemitism published the Jerusalem Declaration in 2020, offering more specific guidelines for identifying antisemitism and distinguishing it from criticism and debate around Israel and Zionism.

Accusations of antisemitism at the slightest objection to Israeli policy have long allowed Israel to uphold a regime that human rights groups, scholars, legal analysts, and Palestinian and Israeli organisations have called apartheid. These accusations continue to cast a chilling effect across our politics. This has meant political suppression in Gaza and the West Bank, where the Israeli government conflates the very existence of Palestinian people with Jew hatred the world over. In propaganda aimed internally at its own citizens and externally toward the West, the Israeli government asserts that Palestinian grievance is not about land, mobility, rights, or freedom, but instead, antisemitism. In the last weeks, Israeli leaders have continued to instrumentalise the history of Jewish trauma to dehumanise Palestinians. Meanwhile, Israelis are arrested or suspended from their jobs for social media posts defending Gaza. Israeli journalists fear consequences for criticising their government.

Characterising all critiques of Israel as antisemitic also conflates Israel and all Jewish people in the popular imagination. In the last two weeks, we’ve seen Democrats and Republicans alike gate-keep Jewish identity on the basis of support for Israel. A vague letter signed by dozens of public figures and published on October 23 parroted President Biden’s positioning of himself as an advocate for Jewish people based on his support for Israel. When the 92NY postponed an event with author Viet Thanh Nguyen, who had recently signed a letter calling for an end to Israel’s attacks on Gaza, its statement began by forefronting its identity as “a Jewish institution.” As others have observed, tools to historicise the October 7 attacks are seen as a repudiation of Jewish suffering rather than necessary to understand and end such violence.

The idea that all criticism of Israel is antisemitic extends a view of Palestinians, Arabs, and Muslims as inherently suspect; agents of antisemitism until they explicitly say otherwise. Since October 7, Palestinian journalists have faced unprecedented suppression. A Palestinian citizen of Israel was fired from his job at an Israeli hospital for a Facebook post from 2022 that quoted the first pillar of Islam. European leaders have banned pro-Palestine protests and criminalised displays of the Palestinian flag. In London, a hospital recently took down artwork by children from Gaza after a pro-Israel group claimed it made Jewish patients feel “vulnerable, harassed and victimised.” Somehow, even artwork by Palestinian children was accompanied by a hallucination of violence.

US leaders have welcomed this chance to further conflate Jewish safety with unquestioning, unwavering military funding for Israel with no intention of making peace. On October 13, the US State Department circulated an internal memo urging officials not to use the language of “de-escalation/ceasefire,” “end to violence/bloodshed,” or “restoring calm.” On October 25, Biden doubted the Palestinian death toll and called it the “price” of Israel’s war. Such cruel logic will continue to foster both antisemitism and Islamophobia. The Department of Homeland Security is preparing for an expected rise in hate crimes against both Jews and Muslims—it has already begun.

For each of us, Jewish identity is not a weapon to wield in a fight for statist power but a fount of generational wisdom that says justice, justice, you shall pursue. Tzedek, tzedek, tirdof. We object to the exploitation of our pain and the silencing of our allies.

We call for a ceasefire in Gaza, a solution for the safe return of the hostages in Gaza and Palestinian prisoners in Israel, and an end to Israel’s ongoing occupation. We also call on governments and civil society in the United States and across the West to stand up against the repression of support for Palestine.

And we refuse to allow such urgent, necessary demands to be suppressed in our names. When we say never again, we mean it.

SIGNED,

Leah Abrams, writer

Tavi Gevinson, writer and actor

Rebecca Zweig, writer and filmmaker

Nan Goldin, artist and activist

Naomi Klein

Tony Kushner, writer

Deborah Eisenberg, writer

Sarah Schulman, writer

Vivian Gornick

Annie Baker, playwright and director

Hari Nef, actor and writer

Judith Butler, writer

Ilana Glazer, comedian

Abbi Jacobson, writer and actor

Alison Leiby, writer

Judy Kuhn, actor

Emma Seligman, writer/director

James Schamus, filmmaker

Howard A. Rodman, writer, professor and former president of WGAW

Eli Valley, writer and artist

Emma Straub, writer

Lynne Tillman, writer

Molly Crabapple, artist and author

Hannah Black

Omer Bartov, Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Brown University

Lior Sternfeld, Associate Professor of History and Jewish Studies, Penn State University

Sarah Sophie Flicker, organizer, artist, writer and co-founder of Firebrand, The Meteor, The Resistance Revival Chorus, The Citizens Band and The Women’s March

Ryan Deitsch, writer, filmmaker, March For Our Lives Co-Founder

Morgan Bassichis, performer

Helen Rosner, writer

Mark Greif, writer

Soraya Nadia McDonald, writer

Fanny Singer, writer

Josh Gondelman, writer

Cyrus Dunham, writer

Laura Kipnis, writer

Nadja Spiegelman, writer and editor

Mark Harris, writer

Cindi Leive, writer

Nico Baumbach

Kate Kohn, freelance writer and independent artist

Noah Kulwin, writer and co-host of Blowback

Sam Marks, playwright

Natasha Lennard, columnist at The Intercept and professor at The New School for Social Research

Jesse A. Myerson, independent writer

Elvia Wilk, writer and editor

Sam Max, freelance writer and film director

Mark Krotov, coeditor and publisher of n+1

Anna Merlan, journalist and author

Sarah Strunin, documentary filmmaker and producer

Ari Brostoff, Senior Editor at Jewish Currents

Keith Gessen, n+1

Eric Wohlstadter, writer

Sam Adler-Bell, writer and co-host of the Know Your Enemy podcast

Claire Buss, filmmaker

Brian Becker, documentary filmmaker

Peter Goldberg, filmworker and writer

Hannah Zeavin, Founding Editor, Parapraxis

Micah Gottlieb, artistic director of Mezzanine

Maris Kreizman, writer

Alex Megaro, filmmaker

Andreas Petrossiants, writer

Alec Niedenthal, writer

Michelle Uranowitz, filmmaker and teacher

Collier Meyerson, writer

Adam Shatz, U.S. editor of the London Review of Books

Sara Skolnick, artist and activist

Lainey Rico Racah, artist

Alison Klayman, documentary filmmaker

Sarah Brin, futurist and writer

Jeremy Hersh, filmmaker

Sophie Ellman-Golan, Jews For Racial & Economic Justice (JFREJ)

Emma Copley Eisenberg, writer

Hilary Leichter, writer

Arlin Golden, filmworker

Moriel Rothman-Zecher, writer

Julia Fine, author

Adam Gundersheimer, cinematographer and filmmaker

Sasha Geffen, author

Mattie Lubchansky, artist and author

Jason Rosenberg, public health advocate and organizer

Hannah Gold, writer

Caroline Golum, filmmaker and writer

Brian Gersten, documentary filmmaker

Lena Ruth Solow, writer

Sarah Leonard, writer and editor

Chase Berggrun, poet

Jacqui Shine, writer

Jess Zimmerman, writer and editor

Leila Teitelman, writer, theater maker and professor

Temim Fruchter, writer

Sam Weinberg, musician and composer

Jiordan Castle, writer

Drew Burnett Gregory, filmmaker, writer and Senior Editor at Autostraddle

Mik Moore, writer and producer

Katie Halper, host of The Katie Halper Show, co-host of Useful Idiots

Elijah Kinch Spector, author

T Kira Māhealani Madden, writer

Nicola Maye Goldberg, novelist

Samara Breger, writer

Deborah Adelman, writer, Professor Emerita English and Film Studies, College of DuPage

Noelani Piters, writer

Annie Diamond, poet

Sophie Nunberg, writer

Antonia Angress, novelist

Hannah Withers, writer

Maggie Tokuda-Hall, children’s and YA book author

Jake Steinberg, writer

Ali Rachel Pearl, writer and community organizer

David Gorin, writer

Hannah Selinger, writer

Lindsay Eanet, freelance writer

Sophia Holtz, writer

Anne Alexander, filmmaker

Harrison Jacobs, journalist and digital director at ARTnews and Art in America

Aaron Freedman, writer

Natan Last, writer

Lily Meyer, writer

chloe feffer, writer

Danielle Lazarin, writer

Jake Maia Arlow, Writer

Charlotte Druckman, writer

Emma Specter, writer

Caren Beilin, writer

Mindy Isser, writer

Makenna Goodman, writer

Emma Goldman-Sherman, playwright and poet

Adin Dobkin, writer

Joshua Gutterman Tranen, writer

Rosamund Lannin, writer

Sarah Rebecca Kessler, writer and professor

Jackie Mansky, writer

Amy Rose Spiegel, author

Joshua Daniel Edwin, poet

Will Harrison, writer

Hannah Lane, writer in situ

Bela Shayevich, writer and translator

Dan Fishback, playwright

Twilight Greenaway, journalist and editor

Sarah Gottlieb, dancer, writer

Marianna Nash

Elizabeth Weiss, writer

Joey Gould, poet and editor

Sophie Reiff, independent writer, UC Berkeley School of Social Welfare

Zachary Zalman Green, poet

Elaine Kahn, writer and founder of Poetry Field School

Gal Amiram, Artist

Ryan Ruby, writer

Rose Lichter-Marck, writer

Phil Weiss, writer

Noah Hurowitz, journalist

Mitchell Plitnick, President of ReThinking Foreign Policy

Liam Benzvi, writer

P.E. Moskowitz, author

Theo Ellin-Ballew, poet

Laura Tanenbaum, writer, activist, professor

Gabriel Winant, historian

Zan Romanoff, writer and author

Lyle Jeremy Rubin, writer

Aaron Gell, writer

Eva Rosenfeld, writer

Lara Langer Cohen, professor and author

Greg Nissan, writer

Ajay Singh Chaudhary, Executive Director, Brooklyn Institute for Social Research

Elena Comay del Junco, writer and academic

Joshua Dubler, writer and teacher

Josh Cohen, writer

FT, philosopher

Arlene Stein, Professor of Sociology, Rutgers University

Jackson Howard, writer and Senior Editor at FSG

Kate Levin, writer

Alana Pockros, writer and editor at The Nation Magazine

Ben Lorber, writer

Benjamin Balthaser, Associate Professor of English, Indiana University, South Bend

Greg Nussen, film critic at Slant Magazine

Steven Levine, Professor of Philosophy, University of Massachusetts, Boston

Leor Galil, senior writer for Chicago Reader

Katrina Forrester, writer and professor

Julie Bush, writer and producer

Samuel Black, documentary filmmaker

Raya Shapiro, writer and editor

Ilana Cruger-Zaken, writer

Jenni Miller, writer and editor

Dan Sinykin, writer and professor

Daniel Poppick, poet

Mordecai Martin, writer and Yiddish translator

Elliot Sperber, writer and lawyer

Hannah Lifson, designer

Ezra David Mattes, artist and writer

JT Price, writer and editor-in-chief of Brazenhead Review

Thea Riofrancos, Associate Professor of Political Science

Anne Trubek, writer and publisher

Paul Rosenberg, reporter and editor

Jonathan L. Krohn, writer

David Kurnick, writer and teacher

Miriam Pensack, writer and editor

Dan Berger, historian and writer

Howard Winant, University of California, Santa Barbara

Elizabeth Greenspan, writer

Marcy Dermansky, writer

Sarah Jaffe, journalist and author

Zachary Levenson, writer, editor and professor

Joanne Limburg, writer

Max Asher Miller, author and journalist

Rachel Jane Andelman, writer

So Mayer, writer

Nick Cassenbaum, playwright and theater maker

Natasha Diaz, YA author and screenwriter

Asher Elbein, writer

Jeremy Howard Beck, composer

rax king, writer

Sam Goldner, freelance writer

Johanna Winant, writer

Jason Patinkin, journalist

Liz Loeb, community organizer

David Stein, historian and writer

Gemma Cooper-Novack, writer

Charna Albert, writer

Jolie Maya-Altshuler, writer and musician

Em Goldman, writer and musician

Ben Jay, data journalist and photographer

Rachel Lieberman, dancer and teacher

Juri Henley-Cohn, actor

Lawrence Rosenwald, Professor of English Emeritus, Wellesley College

Carly Usdin, filmmaker

Tristan Zelden, writer

Nadia Baram, photographer

Maxine Kaplan, writer

Sarah Kapit, writer

Agnes Monod-Gayraud, writer and translator

Jamie Peck, writer and podcaster

Avi Steinberg, writer

Andrea Kurland, journalist, writer, editor-in-chief (Huck) and documentary filmmaker

Anita Zsurzsán, independent scholar and writer

Melissa Pinsly, writer and filmmaker

Claire Bentley, writer

Leslie Auerbach, editor and translator

Ben Schrager, actor and writer

Benjamin Kemper, writer

Fred Baumgarten, writer and activist

Emily Wilder, writer, editor and researcher

Emily Heller, television writer and comedian

Jamie Lauren Keiles, writer

Dvora Meyers, journalist and author

Xander Gershberg, writer and editor

Shira Klein, Associate Professor of History, Chapman University

Brian Goldstone, writer

Helen Betya Rubinstein, writer

Jake Romm, writer and editor at Protean Magazine

Mandy Seiner, writer, poetry editor

Aaron Landsman, theater artist and organizer

Sophie Frances Kemp, writer

Federico Perelmuter, writer

Harry Eskin, moving-image archivist

Isaac Zisman, writer

Sammy Loren, writer and curator of Casual Encountersz

Elizabeth Weill-Greenberg, Senior Reporter, The Appeal

Nancy Ko, writer, critic and historian

Monica Uszerowicz, writer

Dorian Stuber, writer and professor

Sanders Isaac Bernstein, writer

Ken Ehrlich, artist and writer, faculty member at CalArts

Ben Libman, writer

David Klion, writer

Justin Feldman, writer and researcher

Bench Ansfield, writer

Jeremy Levick, writer

Daniela Fuentes-Eckman, writer

Charlotte Rosen, writer and editor

Linda Bosniak, academic writer

Alex Pomerantz, musician/improviser

Nico Millman, writer and editor

Daniela Dover, Associate Professor of Philosophy, Oxford University

Daniel Kolitz, writer

Adele Oltman, writer

Rachel Hinda Roberts, playwright

Zoe Dubno, writer

Alexander Fredman, writer

Nathan Tankus, writer

Joshua Abramson Cohen, writer

Aimee Levitt, writer

Eli Cohen, photo editor and writer

Peter C. Baker, writer

Umru Rothenberg, artist

Emily Martin

Andy Rose Fidoten, filmmaker

David Naimon, writer and host of Between the Covers

Allison Tamarkin Paller, Seven Stories Press

Rob Goyanes, writer and editor

Aron Lee Rosenberg, writer, activist

Rachel Davies, writer

Emma Blake Handler, artist

Noah Jacobs, freelance film producer/assistant

Emma Gometz, writer, artist

sierra, therapist and artist

Alana M. Vincent, historian of religion

Kyle Lukoff, author

haley mlotek, writer

Marcia Steinbock, artist

Deborah April, writer

Emily Lever

A.J. Goldmann, writer and critic

Naomi Gordon-Loebl, writer

David Kornfield, documentary filmmaker and producer

Andrew Feinstein, writer

Cari Luna, writer

Jessica Blatt, writer/professor

Jonathan Dubow, writer

Zack Furness, Associate Professor of Communications, Penn State University

Shoshana Adler, professor

Stacey Gladstone, writer

Alex Sherman, artist

Kendra Preston Leonard, writer

Sophia Munic, Jewish artist

Cosmo August, artist

Bradley Babendir, writer

Ian Zuckerman, Associate Professor, Regis University

Ben Alpers, historian

Derek Baron, writer

Noah Teichner, filmmaker, artist-researcher

Maggie Millner, poet

Daria Reaven, writer

Ruth Geye, playwright

Alan Bleiweiss, business consultant/advocate for the vulnerable

Joe G. Wessely, artist and editor

Nina Segal, playwright

David Iscoe, writer

Jeff Sharlet, writer, Professor of English, Dartmouth College

Emily Lipstein, editor

Zara Cadoux, educator and researcher

Jacob Bacharach, writer and critic

Jenny Slattery, documentary producer

Meli Sameh, writer, editor

Sheerly Avni, writer

Melanie Bilenker, artist

Jonathan Tall, journalist

Adrian Levy, writer, producer

Jake Aron, music producer, mixer, musician

H N Hirsch, political scientist, writer

Caroline Conrad, writer and filmmaker

Jason Adam Katzenstein, cartoonist

Damon Krukowski, writer, musician

Hannah Grieco, writer

Daniela Bologna, writer, artist

Melissa Finell, filmmaker

Jess Shane, artist

Hannah Levy, Editor, The Rebis

Emma Silvers, writer

Alex Liebman, artist

Pam Grossman, writer and host of The Witch Wave podcast

Gogo Lidz, Journalist, writer

Della Kurzer-Zlotnick, artist

Amy Kamp, writer

Caitlin Hughes

Harris Kornstein, writer

Natalia Winkelman, writer

Emma Horwitz, writer

Zachary Aborizk, writer and filmmaker

Alyx Gorman, editor

Delia Rainey, writer

Sarah Friedland, filmmaker and choreographer

Rebecca Gross, writer, organizer and academic

Eva Peskin, artist, writer, educator

Dani Martinez, composer

Karen Pittelman, writer

Hannah Kinney-Konre, writer

Daniel José Older, author

Eli Nachimson, writer

Steven Louis Goldstein, writer

Miryam Jivotovski, writer, activist

Justin Geldzahler, writer/filmmaker

Joe Eichner, writer

David Cohen, filmmaker and editor

Sadie Dupuis, writer

Clarke Sondermann, artist

Maurice Goldberg, artist

Never Angeline North, author, poet, artist

Danny Caine, poet and writer

Ben Katchor, cartoonist

Aaron Shay, writer and community organizer

Andrew Weiner, writer, academic

Julie Cohen, novelist

Nicole Panter, writer, editor

Jaclyn Zeccola, educator

Ruth Minah Buchwald, writer, comedian, host of lactose intolerant Reading Series

Matthew Whiman, writer and editor

Luke Dani Blue, writer

Lana Schwartz, writer

Pip Caplan, artist

Susana Medina, writer

Alice Proujansky, photographer, writer

Naama Carlin, writer and academic

Keaton Slansky, independent writer, activist, lapsed filmmaker, Graduate Student at The New School for Social Research

Seth L. Sanders, Professor of Religion and Jewish Studies, author of The Invention of Hebrew and From Adapa to Enoch, coeditor of Ancient Jewish Sciences and the History of Knowledge and Cuneiform in Canaan

Cleo Stiller, Editor-in-Chief

Frankie de la Cretaz, writer

Jacob Scheier, writer, poet

Natalie Weiner, writer

Michiums, artist

sally glass, writer, artist, editor

Lauren Sandler, writer

Rachel Krause, copywriter and editor

Charlie Schulman, playwright

Aaron Wolfson, writer

Ben Natan, writer at SB Nation

Nikolai Schulman, writer

Rachel Linsky, dancer, choreographer

Ryan Mandelbaum, writer

Katrina Forrester, writer and professor

Lynne Zeavin, psychoanalyst

Julie Bush, writer/producer

Naomi Asa, writer

Joe Wolfond, writer

Dan Schindel, writer, editor

Gary Barwin, writer and artist

Scott Dillon, writer

Philip Nobel, writer

Jay Babcock, writer/editor

Blythe Marks, writer and editor

Kylie Thomas, researcher and writer

Michael Isaac Stein, reporter

Daniel Felsenthal, writer

Amy Prickett, producer

Hannah Kingsley-Ma, writer

Andreas Martin, educator

Laura Landau, writer/scholar

Jane Drinkard, writer

Libby Alexander, painter

Harold Crooks, filmmaker

Miriam Klein Stahl, artist

Robin Beth Schaer, writer

Michael Cucher, professor, writer

Kyle Dillon Hertz, writer

Amy Goldwasser, writer, editor

Robert Cohen, writer

Jeremy Appel, writer

Sarah Resnick, writer and editor

Tracy Rosenthal, writer

Julia Rittenberg, writer

Willa Nasatir, artist

Eli Grober, writer

Josina Manu Maltzman, writer and organizer

Rhonda Lieberman, writer

Danielle Dutton, writer

Erich Strom, editor and writer

Shana Sippy, Associate Professor of Religion, Centre College

Nikki Columbus, writer and editor

karen whiteson, writer

Hannah Wilker, student

Alex Harrison, editor and critic

Nathan Strauss, broadcaster, journalist

zoe mendelson, writer

Michael Luxemburg, writer, director

Rachel Neumann, author

Julia Conrad, writer

Anna Cahn, writer

Emma Jude Harris, director and dramaturg

Michele Rosenthal, illustrator

David Grossman, writer

Yoni Gelernter, writer

Jeanne Vaccaro, writer and curator

Lila Byock, television writer

Shelly Jay Shore, writer

Rachel Saywitz, writer

Jenny Dubnau, artist

Stephen Fruchtman, playwright and actor

Rivka Schoenbaum, musician

Molly Wilvich, designer, creator, maker

Cara Onofrietti, artist

Emet North, writer

Lauren Hayes, musician, sound artist and professor

Molly Segal, artist

Kate Jessica Raphael, writer

Leo Rose Rodriguez, writer

Rebecca Watson Horn, artist

Fiona Lowenstein, writer and editor

Francisco Caicedo Montes, IT

Amy Schiller, writer

Faith Hillis, writer

Kayla Dinces, educator

Capri Jones, writer

Jed Proujansky, activist

Alhena Katsof, writer

Ariel Sussman, writer

Tim Wise, author, antiracism educator and activist

Adrienne Becker, creator, producer and entrepreneur

Samantha Ross, writer

Lux Alptraum, writer and author

Susan Miller, artist and educator

Becky Albertalli, author

Hester Fox, writer

Meg Cass, writer

Michael Rakowitz, artist

Gabriel Kahane, musician

Sarra Scherb, writer

Joshua Multer, writer

Casey Felton, chef

David Blumenstein, cartoonist

Erin Cornell, dancer, choreographer, HCP

Hannah Silver, writer

Daniel Sieradski, founder, Jewschool.com

A.V. Marraccini, writer

Rachel Eve Ginsberg, artist

Isabel Pabán Freed, writer

Dina Davis, author, editor

Sage Madans, writer and artist

Michael Blenner, writer and activist

Austin Smith, writer, dramatist, director

Matvei Yankelevich, poet, translator, editor

Dr. Sam Shuman, anthropologist

Jesse Mechanic, writer

Maia Ettinger, writer and translator

Kate Levin, writer and professor

Sydney Bauer, writer

Andrew Rosenblum, writer

Jason Grote, writer (Mad Men, Hannibal)

Sascha Cohen, writer

Raymonde Chira, writer and artist

Michelle Schaffner, artist

Jessica Friedmann, writer and editor

David Ben Yellowitz, musician and composer

Ashley Feinberg, writer

Janna Radovsky Frelich, musician, artist, writer

Amy Beecher, artist

Peli Grietzer, writer

Karen Pearlston, scholar and activist

Yve Laris Cohen, artist

Eli Winter, musician, writer

Jake Sonnenberg, health justice advocate

Amy Stillman, writer

Geoff Gerber

Naomi Kritzer, writer

Daniel Schwartz, writer, lyricist, playwright

Leora Fridman, writer, curator, educator

Julia Bouwsma, poet

David Jones-Krause, writer/editor

Emily Drew Miller, artist

Cookie Woolner, writer and professor

Eli Coplan, artist

Arkady Martine, writer

Nadiya Sivin-Kachala, student

Scott B. Ritner, Department of Political Science and Program for Writing and Rhetoric, University of Colorado, Boulder

Neil Schneider, writer

Daniel Luban, writer and academic

Alice R Wexler, writer

Daria Vaisman, writer

David Rosenberg, playwright, filmmaker and actor

Veronica Schanoes, writer and professor

Matilda Bickers, writer

Sonya Posmentier, writer/scholar

Jay Eisenberg, writer, actor, co-founder of WeAreMarried performance group

Rachel Murro, researcher

Annabelle Quezada, writer and filmmaker

Stanya Kahn, artist, film writer

Lynne Gerber, writer

Eliot Klein, musician, artist

Ryan Smith

Michelle Smirnova, sociologist

Emily Dreyfuss, writer and editor

Kat Cummings, writer

Ely Henry, actor

Naomi Fontanos, Filipina writer

David Mordecai Perry, historian

Kobe Bryan Coo, BS Architecture student, ‘MarAPAT’ author and head writer, tracker musician

Jay Shifman, writer

Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, writer and scientist

Ben Mauk, writer

Ocean Edgar, student, writer

Zylla Black, writer, editor, YouTuber

Rebecca Rubenstein, writer and editor

Jay Deshpande, poet and psychotherapist

Mickey Bloom, writer

Lovey Cooper, editor

Christopher Boone

Matthew Beinart, writer

Adam Brooks, artist

Barry Deutsch, cartoonist and writer

Gayle Brandeis, writer

Kate Gronner, artist

Allan Malkis, activist

Norman Chernick-Zeitlin, artist

Arielle Cohen, writer and communications strategist

Grace Glads, writer

Jonathan Graubart, author, Jewish Self-Determination Beyond Zionism: Lessons from Hannah Arendt and other Pariahs

Tsela Barr, artist

Cassandra Jensen, writer and editor

Mayahan Carmona, educator

Marina Michelson, filmmaker

Michael Levin, musician

Madeleine Wattenbarger, writer

Carina Guiterman, editor, Simon & Schuster

Hannah Aizenman, writer

Jay Schaffner, editor

Phil Goldstein, writer

Michael Levine, author

Alan Gilbert, writer, Professor, Josef Korbel School of International Studies, University of Denver

Kristin Herbeck, activist

Melanie Gayle Bowman, artist

Michael Kranz, software engineer

Laura McMahon, Associate Professor of Philosophy, Eastern Michigan University

Kayla Levy, writer

Jessie Male, writer and Disability Studies scholar

Anne Wolf, artist

Tamler Sommers, writer and philosophy professor

David Golbitz, writer

Abigail Segel, writer

Liz Speiser, artist

Kate Laster, Artist, writer

Grace Robins-Somerville, writer

Noga Wizansky, artist

Ari Mostov, writer

Yaël Krinsky, writer

Jimmy Goldblum, director and writer

Rebekah Erev, artist

Zachary Rice, writer

Morgan Spector, actor

Elizabeth Weil, writer

Lena Rose Walker, poet

Joanne Barkan, writer

Harriet Friedmann, writer

Lila Steinbach, student

Jonathan Dresner, historian

Siobhan Burke, writer

Lauren S. Berliner, writer and professor

Jessica Bruder, journalist and author

Ellen Tremper, Professor of English, CUNY Brooklyn College

Sam Greenspan, artist

Joshua Sperber, Assistant Professor of Political Science

Nina Fonoroff, filmmaker

Dr. Matthew Berger, author, From Shtetl To Suburb: An Immigrant Jewish Journey Through Philadelphia

Sandy Gerber, member, Minneapolis synagogue antiracism group

Phoebe Wahl, writer, illustrator

Debra Berliner, public health advocate

Gil Tighe, artist

Sasha Senderovich, Associate Professor of Slavic and Jewish Studies, University of Washington

Abe Ross Levine, writer, reporter, teacher

Franklin Zitter, producer

Shai Porter, writer, editor

Edie Griffin, writer, artist, activist

Jolie Maya-Altshuler, writer and musician

Amy Seroussi, artist

Emily O. Weltman, writer

Danny Abel, filmmaker

Samantha Yelensky Goodner, filmmaker

Megan R. Luke, writer and teacher

Joel Danilewitz, writer

Jacob/Amelia Isaacson, amateur/hobby creative

Sara Friedman, filmmaker

Joe Rivano Barros, editor at Mission Local

Charles Postel, historian, writer

Andrew Miller, musician

Steven Klein, writer and academic

Anna Perry, writer, artist, scientist

Menno Ong, attorney

Debra Landau, choreographer, dancer, aerialist, director, writer

Jordan Strafer, artist, filmmaker

Gemma Barnett, actor, writer

Sophie Moskowitz, software engineer and sometimes artist

David Beus, translator

Benjamin Moser, writer

emet ezell, poet

Ted Scheinman, journalist, author

F.I. Goldhaber, poet, essayist, fiction writer

Eleanor Stern, writer, video essayist

Lucas Scheelk, poet

Nina Berclaz, artist

Calli Ryan, artist

Ros Schwartz, translator

David Myer Temin, writer and professor

Aine Gormley, lecturer

Rebecca Schneid, writer

Dylan Shir, artist

Leon Dische Becker, writer, editor

Rachel Afi Quinn, writer and professor

Dr. Adina Lundy, researcher

Camille Charriere, writer

Seth R. M., artist

Lily Gurton-Wachter, writer/scholar

Dori Midnight, writer

Sophie Hurwitz, writer

Maya Schindler, artist

Madeleine Bazil, writer and filmmaker

Sally Wolchyn-Raab, artist

Sarah Spring, filmmaker

Asher Levinthal, documentary filmmaker

Serkan Ozturk, writer

Anna Dumont, art historian

EJ Marcus, writer, comedian

Jordan Hirsch, musician

Miriam Adelman, poet, researcher and translator, Professor Emeritus, Federal University of Paraná, Brazil

Adam Y. Stern, academic

Jared Beloff, poet

Sharyn Blum, artist, designer, writer, editor

Natalie Adler, writer, editor

Sierra Pettengill, filmmaker

Samira Feldman Marzochi, sociologist

Brant Rosen, writer, liturgist, poet

Ron Knox, writer

Sarah Marian Seltzer, writer

Theresa Lister, translator

  1. Melt, poet

Rivka Yeker, writer, editor and community organizer

Sonia Ruscoe, artist

Corey Atad, writer

Michael Kazin, historian

Sarah Weinman, writer

Philip Eil , writer and journalist

Brett Martin, writer

Amie Z. Morrison, composer, performance artist

Emma Teitelman, historian

Max Nelson, editor

Lilah Friedland, artist

Jessica Carr, Berman Scholar for Jewish Studies, Lafayette College, Easton, PA

Alex Wermer-Colan, writer, translator, editor

Sara Seinberg, artist, writer

Shelley Etkin, artist and educator

Anne Bernstein, artist

Sophie Lewis, translator and editor

Susan M. Reverby, Professor Emerita of the History of Ideas and Women’s and Gender Studies, Wellesley College

Lawrence Rosenwald, writer, translator

Todd Chandler, filmmaker

Kathryn Levy, poet

Jonathan Drucker, songwriter

Eloise Goldsmith, writer

Julie Fain, publisher, Haymarket Books

Natasha Bergman, musician, actor

Eli Friedman, writer

Emmett V. Pinsky, writer, arts worker

David Kahane, writer, political theorist

Zach Samalin, writer and professor

Elena Novak, freelance writer and member of the National Writers Union

Felicia Davin, writer

Amie Z. Morrison, composer, performance artist

Alexandra (Sasha) Weiss, writer

Jonathan Woollen, translator, publishing worker

Erica Friedman, writer, editor

Rachel Mannheimer, poet

Jacqueline Feldman, writer

Perri Meldon, writer and historian

Jenny Fran Davis, writer

Medaya Ocher, editor

David Waldstreicher, historian

Isaac Butler, writer

Emma Gorenberg, writer, educator

Lizzy Saxe, writer

Stephen Lurie, writer and organizer

Ben Steiner, artist and engineer

Nicolas Krief, writer

Pól Ó Duibhir, writer/blogger

Eric Marlin, playwright

Claire Schwartz, culture editor, Jewish Currents

Sandra Butler, writer

Alexandra Tanner, writer

Candice Breitz, artist

Joe McDowell, educator, artist

Kathy Engel, poet

Eli Jelly-Schapiro, writer and professor

Sam Eichner, writer

Sophia Schlesinger, poet

Susan Engel, professor

Ayaz Muratoglu, writer

Henry Freedland, writer, editor and musician

Ryann Liebenthal, writer

Mimi Eisen, writer

Juana Berrío, cultural producer

Rob Arcand, writer

Beverly Gologorsky, writer

James D. Bloom, teacher, writer

TaRessa Stovall, writer

Lyra Walsh Fuchs, writer, editor

Charles Star, writer, podcaster

Ian Dreiblatt, poet, translator, and soup-maker

Raina Lipsitz, writer

Alison Fairbrother, writer and editor

Zachary Siegel, writer

Ben Becker, artist

Blythe Eden Kanis, artist

Marilyn Hacker, poet and translator

Michael Grossman, designer, archivist, editor, tech ethics activist

Spencer Ackerman, journalist and author

Katz Tepper, artist

Sam Zucker, filmmaker

Adam Bresnick, teacher and writer

Marian Leighton Levy, independent music company founder

Benjamin Case, researcher and writer

Aaron David Kerner, translator

Pete Segall, writer

Gérald Lajoie-Restrepo, artist

Nikolai Melamed Kleivan, Morgenbladet

Theresa Ganz, artist

Jessie HF Hammerling, researcher, UC Berkeley

Kirby Chen Mages, writer, artist

Annelise Orleck, writer, historian, educator

Sam Sax, writer

Liza St. James, writer

Lucas Schaefer, writer

Andrew Schenker, writer

Suzanne Grace Demko, writer

Lainie Keper, unionist, activist

Rachel Ossip, editor

Sam Venis, writer

Miche Budin, artist, activist

Saifur Rahman Khan, writer and teacher

Camille Lévy Sarfati, writer, curator, filmmaker

Andy Hines, writer

Jeff Wood, artist, educator, theatermaker

Shelly Silver, filmmaker and artist

Charlotte Rubin, writer and human rights lawyer

sunny harris, writer

Kathryn Sabbeth, professor

Emily Green, writer

Adahlia Cole, artist, photographer

Johannah King-Slutzky, writer

Danuta Berger, freelance musician

Georgia Hampton, writer

Rob Rice, filmmaker

Lillian Fishman, writer

Taylor Minas, writer

Tyler McBrien, writer, editor

Kurt Suchman, writer

Daniel Stein, law professor

Cari Gardner, community organizer

Daniel Waite Penny, journalist

Hannah Feldman, writer and professor

Adrienne Brown, writer and professor

Yakov Hirsch, writer

Bruce Robbins, writer and academic

Gabriel Fine, writer

Sonia Feigelson, writer and editor

Harvey J. Graff, historian and professor emeritus

Sandee Lippman, editor

Justin Fedich, writer

Sarah Jean Grimm, poet

Zack Schlosberg, writer

Lotte Crawford, academic

Tyler McBrien, writer, editor

Andy Ratto, writer

Elianna Kan, writer, literary agent

Nicola Maye Goldberg, writer

Sean Keeley, writer and editor

Santi Carneri, writer, photographer, filmmaker

Claire Kahane, professor, writer

Eli Petzold, bookseller, artist

Ari Weismanchester, comedian

Sara Feldman, Yiddish instructor, scholar

Matthew Paley, artist

Hilarie Ashton, writer and college teacher

Peter Kuznick, historian

Rob Dubbin, writer

Rebecca Clark, writer, professor

Ellen Meeropol, writer

Zoë Dutka, writer

Koby Leff, filmmaker

Linda Hubner, ITDS, Child Developmental Specialist

Robert Meeropol, writer

Mark Bray, Assistant Teaching Professor of History, Rutgers University

Jeff Rice, political science, Northwestern University

Mark Sheldon, writer

Margaux Fitoussi, anthropologist

Michael Robin, therapist, writer

Kelsey Goodman, researcher

Aviva Shen, writer and editor

Suzanne Weiss, Holocaust survivor, author, activist

Andréa Becker, writer, researcher, advocate

Portia Krieger, theater director

Leanne Mella, curator and writer

Paul Weinfield, author, musician, and coach

Allie Gross, writer

Caren Levy-Van Slyke, editor

Kali Fajardo-Anstine, writer

Professor Mike Gibson, urban development consultant and community activist

Daniel Lukes, writer

Hillary Brenhouse, writer and editor

Catherine Schetina, writer and filmmaker

Michael Rothberg, scholar in Holocaust studies

Max Moorhead, writer, agent, editor

Max Fine, writer

Emily Laskin, translator and journalist

Rosalind Galt, professor of film studies

Juliet Kleber, contributing editor, n+1

Mark Goldwert, copywriter

Alex Kanefsky, writer

Lincoln Spector, former humorist, current film blogger

Sarah Jill Rubin, writer, editor

Michael Wolfson, creative

James Presson, writer

Sam Asher, Associate Professor of Economics, Imperial College London

Naomi Sussman, writer, historian

Brian Benson, writer

Micah Piven, architectural designer

Jacob Smith, podcast producer

Adam Golfer, artist

Peter Ekegren, retired senior lecturer

Laurie Levinger, writer

Ali Castleman, writer and editor

Jasper Diamond Nathaniel, writer

David Marcus, writer and editor

Debby Wolfinsohn, writer

Isabel Kaplan, writer

Julie Wolk, organizational consultant, activist, writer

Sam Geballe, artist

Sam Rappaport, writer

Daniel Sherrell, writer and climate activist

Leah Velez, writer

Matthew Mearns, attorney

Laura Gordon, artist and filmmaker

Molly Rosen Marriner, writer and editor

Amanda Grossman, artist

Tessa Andriopoulos, strategist

Karen Vost, artist

Sophie Abramowitz, writer and scholar

Naomie Romano, artist

Anna Shechtman, writer

Sydney Fuller, student

Lynne Peskoe-Yang, investigative journalist

Eli Rudavsky, writer and filmmaker

Alexander Theodore Moshe Cocotas, writer

Paul Breines, retired academic

Holly Higgins, retail

Zachary Finkelstein, artist

Mary Geraghty, history teacher

Rebecca Falkoff, writer, professor

Jacob Montgomery, writer

Zoey Hyams

Emma Keates, writer

Sophie Herron, poet and former 92NY staff

Tallulah Bark-Huss, writer

Amanda Nash, activist

Rachel Miller, medical field

Matthew Siegel, poet

Mary Zoeter

Talia Gorstein, student

Jessica Ritz, writer

Alex Remnick, interdisciplinary artist, DJ, producer

Vance Dietz, physician

Nathan Rand, writer

Nati Charney, student

Chelsea Ross, writer and artist

Sasha Costanza-Chock, writer

Tai Shani, artist

Maya Buffett-Davis, artist

CJ Ronan Nelson, illustrator

Jennifer Silverstein, mental health clinician, writer

Emil Kerenji, writer

Lazer Lederhendler, literary translator

Brook Becker, writer

Katherine Silver, writer, translator, interpreter

Maura Barrios, historian, writer

Micki Boden, writer

Jake Bittle, journalist

Lauren Gutterman, historian, professor

Dr. Monica Prendergast, professor

Andrea Lawson Gray, writer

Dee Howard, writer and artist

Jake Levin, writer and artist

Randi Axelrod, educator

Adam Schorin, writer

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This letter was originally published on n+1 magazine. 

Why Israel’s Supporters in the West Are No Friends of Jewish People

Israelis were given a poisoned gift, one that gave them a state at the cost of another people’s dignity. Those on the extremist right, have always embraced this, and even now speak of annihilating or ethnically cleansing the Palestinians that remain. A large set, though, have always struggled to reconcile these issues.

In his fantastic history of post-World War II Europe – Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945 – Tony Judt showed that many of the Jews who survived the genocidal Nazi regime returned to their former homes and found themselves unwelcome. Others had taken over their houses in their absence, and even many of their neighbours would not acknowledge the horrors visited upon them. Emigration to the newly founded Jewish homeland of Israel made increasing sense. Why would a community that had faced centuries of discrimination and violence simply for being who they were, after enduring the terrible industrialised mass slaughter of the Holocaust, not seek security somewhere where they were welcome, and hopefully safe? Stating a blunt fact, Judt said that continuing discrimination ended up making much of continental Europe with the calls for “Judenrein” (cleansed of Jews), the explicit goal of the Nazi Final Solution. The only exception to this is France, which retains a substantial Jewish population.

Implicit in this observation was that many of those in Europe who supported a homeland for the Jews in what had been the UN Mandate of Palestine under British rule were no friends of the Jews. They just wanted them gone.

Also read: The Israel-Palestine War Is a Stain on Every One of Us

Balfour’s Lines

Few people exemplified this better than Arthur Balfour, who as the British foreign secretary in 1917, wrote the Balfour Declaration – a letter to Lord Rotschild to be transmitted to the Zionist Federation of Great Britain and Ireland, promising a homeland for Jews in Palestine. As the Israeli historian Tom Segev shows in his excellent history of the Mandate period, One Palestine, Complete, Balfour did not do this with any great sympathy for Jews. Instead, for complicated reasons – akin to anti-semitic myths of world controlling Jewish manipulators – he believed that Jews exerted enormous control over both the Bolshevik movement and the leadership of the United States. In the context of World War I, he wanted them “onside” for the British Empire.

The Balfour Declaration was both an impossible promise and a poisoned chalice for the Zionist movement, at that a very small part of the larger Jewish community. While the declaration promised the foundation of a homeland, it went on to say that it could not be at the cost of the civil and religious rights of non-Jewish communities. At that point in time, the Jewish community in Mandatory Palestine was a tiny minority in what are now the internationally recognised pre-1967 borders of Israel. Migration into Palestine was slow before the rise of the genocidal Nazi regime, and even that resulted in pushback from the Arab communities – the Palestinians – living in the region, as well as creating hostility among the bordering Arab states, who saw no reason why a Jewish homeland needed to be created in Palestine.

The Warsaw Ghetto uprising became significant as a symbol of Jewish resistance against the Nazis. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

How was one to create a Jewish homeland if the Jews were a minority could be answered in another way, of course, the same way that the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand became European majority states. Ethnic cleansing by settler colonial movements against “natives” had been the norm for centuries, and anti-colonial movements were far from achieving prominence. Nonetheless, this poison in the cup was acknowledged by its glaring omission. The Zionist slogan of “a land with no people for a people with no land” tried to – at least verbally – cleanse Mandatory Palestine of the (non-Jewish) people who were very much there.

In the war that followed the establishment of Israel, the ethnic cleansing of a large section of Palestinians became a subsidiary goal, making Jews the majority in the UN-recognised borders of the new state. For a Jewish community that had seen its near extinction in the Holocaust, a place of security for its people had, understandably, become the ultimate objective.

Anti-semite bigots shifted the burden

But it was not just people that were displaced in the migration from Europe[i] into what would become Israel, guilt was shifted too. The murderous bigotry of anti-semitism was now considered the burden of Arabs who refused to accept a Jewish state, even by Palestinians whose family members had been murdered, brutalised, and ethnically cleansed from their lands. Those that had practiced centuries of Jew-hatred now portrayed themselves as “enlightened” and lectured the world about anti-semitism. To be fair, there is enough anti-semitism to go around. Many of those speaking about the injustice meted out to the Palestinians did not distinguish between Israeli policies and Jewish people, and have bred a Jew-hatred of their own, as murderous as the one that once led to pogroms in Europe.

For the bigots, though, this was wonderful. They could enjoy the sight of one people they despised – the Jews – fighting with another set of people they despised – the “natives”. Large parts of the European world have never confronted, or given up, either their anti-semitism, or their colonial attitudes, and this came with an added bonus – if Jews were committing crimes against humanity, then this could be used to (illegitimately) normalise past crimes against the Jewish people.

Also read: By Fully Supporting Israel, the West Has Chosen to Forget the Suffering of Palestinians

Tricky questions ahead

The reason this history is important is that – at a time of war between Israelis and Palestinians that exceeds every round of violence except for the foundation of the state – all these contradictions are increasingly clear. The Israelis were given a poisoned gift, one that gave them a state at the cost of another people’s dignity. Some of them, those on the extremist right, have always embraced this, and even now speak of annihilating or ethnically cleansing the Palestinians that remain. A large set, though, has always struggled to reconcile these issues, knowing that their tragedy was one of two demands – the Jewish need for safety and the Palestinian need for human dignity – that were set against each other.

At such a time, the non-extremist Israelis need their friends, those who would try to help them find a just solution that can somehow answer this impossible question. Unfortunately, they are confronted with a world in which their most vociferous supporters are those that are themselves difficult to trust, who may even support war crimes because this delegitimises the horrors that Jews have faced. Ideally, they would have found partners among post-colonial countries who also have had to deal with the tragedies that European colonial left behind. India, of course, would have qualified. Sadly, though, it is now governed by exactly the same type of anti-semites and bigots that cheer on Israeli extremists in this unwinnable war.

[i] The story of the migration of Arab Jews is a separate story with its own betrayals, heartbreak, and racism. The Jews of Arab countries and North Africa are referred to as the Mizrahi, or “Oriental Jews”, and number about half of the population of Israel, although very few of them have achieved political power with the exception of the former Defence Minister, Binyamin Ben-Eliezer, who often referred himself by the Arabic name Fuad. They were treated shockingly by the newly established Israeli state dominated by European-origin Jews. The term Israeli Arab does not recognise Arab Jews and is an obvious way to avoid the racism inherent in referring to non-Jewish Arabs.

Omair Ahmad is an author and journalist. 

How to Indict Perpetrators – Nuremberg’s History Lessons

The Nuremberg indictments show that a history of hate speech and disenfranchisement preceded the violence against Jews in Nazi Germany. They offer us a way of thinking through the consequences of hate speech for our time.

That the Nuremberg speeches, notably by Robert Jackson and Hartley Shawcross, made much of the ‘iconophilia’ built up around Adolf Hitler is now a truism. Jackson, as is well known, even implied that the culture of Nazi Germany and its political manoeuvres are object lessons for human civilisation.

But beyond this ‘iconophilia’, the actual Nuremberg indictments offer us such lessons. Although Hannah Arendt and others have already examined the nature and style of totalitarianism, several features of the indictments should arrest us not only for their analysis of Nazi Germany but for their implicit prognosis for humanity and the future.

The indictments of the war criminals are important documents for the history they trace: a genealogy of hate, the transformation of politics into demagoguery, the mutation of state machinery and processes into an apparatus of witch-hunting and murder, and the toxification of culture, speech and mindsets through propaganda and cultural nationalism.

The indictments appear in the form of four ‘counts’, as the trial documents term it. Count one is “the common plan or conspiracy”, count two is “crimes against peace”, count three is devoted to “war crimes” and count four deals with “crimes against humanity”. While each of these are important, two stand out: the first and the fourth.

The conspiracy of the state

Under count one (conspiracy), the prosecutors noted that the Nazi ‘conspirators’, as Goering, Speer and the defendants being tried are called throughout proceedings, reduced the Reichstag (the parliament) to “a body of their own nominees”. But this was not enough, for they sought nothing less than total control of the German life and mind.

Under count one, the indictment read: “to instil fear in the hearts of the German people”, the [Nazi] conspirators “established and extended a system of terror against opponents and supposed or suspected opponents of the regime”. They did so by imprisoning all suspect people and “subjected them to persecution, degradation, despoilment, enslavement, torture and murder”.

Also Read: From Culture Wars to the Culture of Wars

As the indictments record it: the conspirators went after the trade unions, the priestly and monastic orders and pacifist groups – in short, any civil society organisation or group that even remotely resembled opposition, ideological, intellectual or political.

But instilling fear, the prosecutors noted, was not possible through reprisals alone: it requires the identification of an internal enemy. To this end, says the indictment, the state encouraged hate speech targeting the so-called enemy.

Nuremberg’s prosecutors placed considerable importance on the rhetoric of hate, the enunciations of anti-Semitism, on the actual speeches calling for war against the Jews. They treated Nazi speech acts as preliminaries to extermination-acts. A language of genocide was beginning to appear by the early 1930s, the prosecutors noted, citing examples from Rosenberg, Ley, Goering, Ley and Streicher who “openly avowed their purpose”:

Anti-Semitism is the unifying element of the reconstruction of Germany … Germany will regard the Jewish question as solved only after the very last Jew has left the greater German living space … Europe will have its Jewish question solved only after the very last Jew has left the Continent. 

We swear we are not going to abandon the struggle until the last Jew in Europe has been exterminated and is actually dead. It is not enough to isolate the Jewish enemy of mankind – the Jew has got to be exterminated. 

The second German secret weapon is anti-Semitism, because if it is consistently pursued by Germany, it will become a universal problem which all nations will be forced to consider. 

The sun will not shine on the nations of the earth until the last Jew is dead.

By citing actual recorded quotes from speeches and rallies, the prosecutors were placing words with the power to injure and actions designed to injure in a linear sequence.

Nazi campaigns in the 1930s, noted the Nuremberg prosecutors, were infused with an ideology of the ‘master race’, and this ideology “reshaped the educational system and particularly the education and training of the German youth”.

Also Read: Curricular Wars and Averting Auschwitz

In addition, they “placed a considerable number of their dominated organisations on a progressively militarised footing”, indicating organisations like Hitler Youth but also noting the militarism that slowly crept into Nazi vigilantism – based on the idea that the Germans must arm themselves against the usurping Jews – through the 1930s.

The Nazi state was gearing up to the climax of 1939-1945: extermination. What count one of the indictments did was to show how the Nazis did so by systematically altering the state’s role, by creating and reinforcing its cultural and other apparatuses to control opposition, spread hatred and disenfranchise communities.

The state methodically prepared for war and ensured that the civil society lived in terror by employing networks of terror. And of course, it instituted racism – expanded to mean, simply, discrimination against a particular community – as a state policy.

Inhuman crimes, by humans

The prosecutors, under count four of the indictment, delineated the ‘crimes against humanity’ which had been earlier defined by Article 6 of the Nuremberg Charter.

Count four was organised around two principles: (a) “murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation, and other inhumane acts committed against civilian populations before and during the war”, and (b) “the persecution on political, racial and religious grounds in execution of and in connection with the common plan mentioned in count one”.

Nazi Germany’s air force commander Herman Goering being tried for war crimes at Nuremberg. Photo: Wikimedia Commons/Raymond D’Addario. Public domain.

Under (a), the prosecutors described how “the defendants adopted a policy of persecution, repression and extermination of all civilians in Germany who were, or who were believed to be, or who were believed likely to become, hostile to the Nazi Government”. The judicial process was ignored and people were incarcerated, “subjected to persecution, degradation, despoilment, enslavement, torture and murder”, says the indictment.

For this purpose, the “agencies of the state and Party were permitted to operate outside the range even of Nazified law and to crush all tendencies and elements which were considered “undesirable””.

The employment of state offices, bodies and agencies to demoralise and destroy any real or potential enemies became policy. The prosecutors noted the state’s transformation of its various agencies into tools of terror, employed to silence opposition and muzzle resistant voices.

That these voices were from within the country meant that the Nazi state turned against segments of its own population, and did not need to project a foreign enemy to ramp up its militarisation or terror tactics.

Also Read: How the Nazis First Burned Books, Then People

Under (b), the prosecutors noted how persecutions against the Jews were “also directed against persons whose political belief or spiritual aspirations were deemed to be in conflict with the aims of the Nazis”. The extermination followed, the prosecutors note, the systematic disenfranchisement and terrorising of Jewish citizenry.

This mode of preparing the indictment brief is important because Nuremberg’s prosecutors outline a stage-by-stage account of persecution that culminates in the camps. It is the run-up that is crucial, for it shows how, over the years, the Nazis had set about harassing, persecuting and disenfranchising Jews, resistant groups and those who didn’t toe the official (Party) line.

‘Planning’ the conspiracy against the Jews/humanity over more than a decade is central to the indictments, the prosecutors demonstrate. In the appendix to the indictments, the prosecutors listed against each of the 21 accused Nazis, their role in putting into operation the ‘planning’ described in counts one to six.

For higher officers like Goering and Ribbentrop, the prosecutors record how they “promoted the accession to power of the Nazi conspirators”, “participated in the planning and preparation of the Nazi conspirators for wars of aggression” and participated in the crimes against humanity.

Thus, the prosecutors made sure history recognises not the ones who pulled triggers to kill the Jews, but those like Karl Doenitz, Herman Goering, Albert Speer and others who plotted, planned and policed the policies that caused the lower-level Nazi functionaries to pull the triggers.

In other words, the responsibility of office was implicitly invoked to measure the intensity of their crimes: the higher the office they occupied, the greater their responsibility in the persecution of their citizens and culpability in crimes against peace and humanity.

Also Read: There Are No Bystanders

Nuremberg brings indictments against those in power, the brains behind the operations, who were able to enunciate hatred in public forums in their speeches and diktats, because they had first planned and put in place the machinery where hate speech and vituperative dialogue targeting segments of the population were not only excused but even welcomed.

The term ‘conspirator’ is accurate, as Nuremberg showed, because persecution is not an instinctive or unthought-out action: it is plotted and planned to the last detail, well in advance.

Nuremberg as a prehistory of the future

Nearly 75 years later, the UN would acknowledge the linear sequence (hate speech à extermination) first documented at Nuremberg in its 2019 ‘Strategy and Plan of Action on Hate Speech’ launched by the Director General with the words, “over the past 75 years, the world has seen hate speech as a precursor to atrocity crimes”. The UN mentions the Holocaust as a clear example of media manipulation of hate:

The media campaigns contributed significantly to normalising atrocity crimes. This facilitated the Holocaust, the planned and systematic persecution and annihilation of some 6 million Jewish children, women and men …

Nuremberg offers us a way of thinking through the consequences of hate speech for our time.

Nuremberg prosecutor Telford Taylor at one of the trials. Photo: Wikimedia Commons/OMGUS Military Tribunal. Public domain.

Telford Taylor, lead counsel for the prosecution, writes in his account of Nuremberg, Anatomy of the Nuremberg Trials: A Personal Memoir that the Versailles Treaty and the subsequent trials of Germans portrayed as war criminals after World War I were dangerous moves by the British and Americans:

The Allies presented to the Germans a list of 854 individuals, including many famous military and political figures, for turnover … There was an immediate explosion of indignation and defiance in Germany, but within two weeks the immediate crisis was resolved.

Taylor implicitly acknowledges the consequences of these post-World War I moves.

Robert Jackson, counsel for the USA at Nuremberg, mentions Versailles twice in his opening remarks and states that Germany under Hitler ‘violated’ the Treaty, but does not see a cause-effect link between the Treaty, the humiliation and the resultant Nazi movement.

That the Versailles Treaty and the aftermath produced Adolf Hitler is stated baldly by Franz Von Papen in his Memoirs. Papen, who was one of those who manipulated Hitler to power in 1933, and who was let off at Nuremberg, writes:

Hitler was a corollary of the punitive clauses of the Treaty of Versailles … Hitler and his movement were in essence a reaction against hopelessness, and for that sense of hopelessness the victorious powers must bear their full share of responsibility.

Thus, the future of Nazi Germany, 1939-45, and of the millions who perished under it, was written into the events around World War I, the humiliations meted out and the hate that lay smouldering under the German soil.

If Nazi Germany emerged from a particular past, Nuremberg, Taylor suggests, can be a template for the future. He writes:

“Nuremberg” – a name which conjures up the moral and legal issues raised by applying judicial methods and decisions to challenged wartime acts.

He elaborates this claim through the answers to “three major questions: How necessary was it?” “How well was it done?” “How successful was it?”. To the first question, he answers “absolutely”. To the second he answers with considerable detail about the process, the defence’s claims and counterclaims.

To the third, Taylor offers a more complicated answer. Speaking of the Tribunal’s creation of the ‘crimes against peace’ as a doctrine, he admits that “the use of that principle to punish individuals for actions committed several years before the principle was first applied” is a problem. But he also states:

[Surely] there would be nothing unlawful about creating such a principle for the future … to establish a precedent for punishing crimes against peace in the future …

Taylor, who later fought McCarthyism and opposed the Vietnam War – perhaps born out of his engagement with the Nazis at Nuremberg – concludes with a major point:

The laws of war do not apply only to the suspected criminals of vanquished nations. There is no moral or legal basis for immunising victorious nations from scrutiny. The laws of war are not a one-way street.

In other words, Taylor sees Nuremberg as giving us legal, moral and ethical principles to fault and indict not just Nazi war criminals but any nation for ‘crimes against peace’ and ‘crimes against humanity’ in the future. Nuremberg is future-directed, and offers the world a set of codes by which the state, its machinery, its propagandists and apologists, and its ‘enforcers’ may be measured.

The Nuremberg Principles, accepted by the UN in 1950, two years after the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the trials themselves, tell us that watching the state, especially those in power who innocuously at first and then more openly set about planning persecution in times of peace so that they can go to war, is crucial.

A Nazi-era poster describing the “Nuremberg Laws”. It includes lists of “allowed” and “forbidden” marriages based on ideas of racial purity. Photo: Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

Nuremberg’s focus on the powers that planned for decades what could be done to the Jews and prepared for it, calls for attention to official machinery and everyday hate, the brazen political and the subtle quotidian when these are all focused on repression and disenfranchisement.

The indictments of Nuremberg refuse to see the camps and the exterminations as just war-work. There is, the indictments show, a history to the violence: a history of hate speech, disenfranchisement and disempowerment. By tracing these plans and plots, the Nuremberg indictments are object lessons as to where a state, bent on genocide, is headed.

Nuremberg shapes the way we approach war crimes but also genocide, hate speech and systemic disenfranchisement. Nuremberg is a history lesson for our collective future.

The choice of Nuremberg itself for Nazi war trials was not accidental, but had its roots in history. Nuremberg was the capital of annual Nazi rallies, and the location from where the anti-Semitic ‘Nuremberg Laws’ originated. Goering, Speer, Ribbentrop and others were tried and convicted at the very place where they had once flexed their muscles. History would not, they discovered in 1945, treat them kindly although they had planned and called for the ‘Thousand Year Reich’.

It is poetry that teaches us a moral lesson about history. From W.H. Auden:

I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.

Pramod K. Nayar teaches at the University of Hyderabad.

Concerned Over Elevating Phobia Against One Religion to Level of Int’l Day: India at UN

The 193-member UN General Assembly adopted a resolution to proclaim March 15 as the International Day to Combat Islamophobia.

United Nations: As the UN General Assembly adopted a resolution on Tuesday to proclaim March 15 as International Day to Combat Islamophobia, India expressed concern over “phobia against one religion being elevated to the level of an international day” to the exclusion of all others, saying there are growing contemporary forms of religiophobia, especially anti-Hindu, anti-Buddhist and anti-Sikh sentiments.

The 193-member UN General Assembly adopted a resolution, introduced by Pakistan’s ambassador Munir Akram under agenda item Culture of peace, to proclaim March 15 as the International Day to Combat Islamophobia.

The resolution, introduced by the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), was co-sponsored by Afghanistan, Bangladesh, China, Egypt, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Kuwait, Kyrgyzstan, Lebanon, Libya, Malaysia, Maldives, Mali, Pakistan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Turkmenistan, Uganda, United Arab Emirates, Uzbekistan and Yemen.

Reacting to the adoption of the resolution, India’s Permanent Representative to the UN, T.S. Tirumurti said in the UN General Assembly that India hopes the resolution adopted “does not set a precedent which will lead to multiple resolutions on phobias based on selective religions and divide the United Nations into religious camps”.

Hinduism has more than 1.2 billion followers, Buddhism more than 535 million and Sikhism more than 30 million spread out around the world. It is time that we acknowledged the prevalence of religiophobia, rather than single out just one, he said.

“It is important that the United Nations remains above such religious matters which may seek to divide us rather than bring us together on one platform of peace and harmony and treat the World as One Family,” he said.

Following the adoption of the draft resolution, Tirumurti said that while India condemns all acts motivated by anti-Semitism, Christianophobia or Islamophobia, such phobias are not restricted to Abrahamic religions only.

“In fact, there is clear evidence that over decades such religiophobias have, in fact, affected the followers of non-Abrahamic religions as well. This has contributed to the emergence of contemporary forms of religiophobia, especially anti-Hindu, anti-Buddhist and anti-Sikh phobias,” he said.

He noted that the Member States should not forget that in 2019, August 22 has already been proclaimed as the International Day Commemorating the Victims of Acts of Violence Based on Religion or Belief, which is fully inclusive in nature.

“We even have an International Day of Tolerance observed on 16 November. We are not convinced that we need to elevate phobia against one religion to the level of an international day,” he said.

Tirumurti asserted that these contemporary forms of religiophobia can be witnessed in the increase in attacks on religious places of worship like gurudwaras, monasteries and temples or in the spreading of hatred and disinformation against non-Abrahamic religions in many countries.

He cited that several examples of these abound, including the destruction of the Bamyan Buddhas in Afghanistan by the Taliban, violation of gurudwara premises, massacre of Sikh pilgrims in gurudwara, attack on temples, glorification of breaking of idols in temples.

He said these contribute to the rise of contemporary forms of religiophobia against non-Abrahamic religions.

“It is in this context that we are concerned about elevating the phobia against one religion to the level of an international day, to the exclusion of all the others.

“Celebration of a religion is one thing but to commemorate the combatting of hatred against one religion is quite another. In fact, this resolution may well end up downplaying the seriousness of phobias against all other religions,” Tirumurti said in his statement after the adoption of the resolution.

He said India is proud that pluralism is at the core of its existence.

“We firmly believe in equal protection and promotion of all religions and faith. It is, therefore, unfortunate that the word pluralism’ finds no mention in the resolution and the sponsors have not found it fit to take on board our amendments to include the word pluralism in the text for reasons best known to them,” he said.

Tirumurti said that as a pluralistic and democratic country that is home to almost all religions of the world, India has always welcomed, over the centuries, those persecuted around the world for their faith or belief.

“They have always found in India a safe haven shorn of persecution or discrimination. This is true whether they were Zoroastrians or Buddhists or Jews or people of any other faith,” he said.

Tirumurti expressed deep concern over the rise in instances of discrimination, intolerance and violence directed against members of many religious communities in various parts of the world.

He emphasised that it is with deep concern that India views the growing manifestation of intolerance, discrimination or violence against followers of religions, including rising sectarian violence in some countries.

France’s Permanent Representative to the UN Ambassador Nicolas de Riviere, speaking after Tirumurti, said that by creating an international day to combat Islamophobia, the resolution does not respond to the concern that we all share to fight against all forms of discrimination.

“Because they create division within the fight against religious intolerance by only selecting one religion to the exclusion of others without reference to the freedom to believe or to not believe,” he said.

He said society is made up of diversity, with individuals practising a variety of religions or not practising any at all.

“Must we expect the creation of days dedicated to each religion, to each degree of belief or non-belief. There may not be enough days in the year to satisfy all these demands,” de Riviere said.

The French envoy said the text of the resolution that is submitted on Tuesday did raise a number of difficulties with regard to the determination to fight against discrimination based on religion or belief.

“The term Islamophobia does not have any agreed definition in international law, contrary to the freedom of religion or belief,” he said, adding that the resolution is “very unsatisfactory” as it currently stands and none of the proposals mooted by France was taken into consideration.

(PTI)