The darkest chapter of modern Jewish history involved Germany applying science to anti-Semitic degradation and violence. Seventy-five years later, the German government is still exorcising those demons, and as part of that effort, it’ll now be using scientific logic to stamp out resurgent Jew-hate within its own borders.
It’s been a long road. West Germans began paying financial reparations to the families of Holocaust victims in 1953. In the late 1970s, West Germany’s culture ministers standardized nationwide education about the country’s Nazi past, and along the way, Erinnerungskultur, the culture of remembrance, became widely embraced. In 2018, the German government appointed Felix Klein as the first-ever federal government commissioner for Jewish life in Germany and the fight against anti-Semitism. One testament to Klein’s efficacy and fair-handedness in that role, and also to the challenge he faces from political partisans, is a July 24 letter that “more than 60 German and Israeli academics” felt compelled to send to Chancellor Angela Merkel, complaining about the commissioner opposing left-wing anti-Semitism.
For his part, Klein remains optimistic about the outlook for Jewish life in Germany, telling me, “Jewish life is blossoming. Jews still like to live in Germany. We still have more Jews coming to live in Germany than leaving. We’re opening up new synagogues.” But the commissioner also sounds incredibly busy, because Germany faces its own rising anti-Semitism on multiple fronts.
Historic anti-Semitism reverberates in German churches’ Judensaus, artwork that features Jews and pigs and is intended to defame and humiliate; the movement (and court case) to remove Judensaus from church facades remains a work in progress. Meanwhile, Jewish students continue to face discrimination in German schools. It is not always safe for Jewish men to wear a kippah publicly. Yellow stars of David have appeared at anti-vaccine protests amid the coronavirus pandemic. An elite commando force was recently dissolved because of far-right extremism within its ranks. And Commissioner Klein faced calls for his firing this spring when he opposed inviting a supporter of the movement to boycott Israel to be the featured speaker at a significant, publicly funded cultural festival.
Because a country’s international relations always involve a dance among competing interests, Germany has remained close to Iran, which aspires to finish what Hitler started by wiping Israel‘s nearly 7 million Jewish citizens off the map. And it took Germany until April of this year to declare Iranian-linked Hezbollah a terrorist organization — nearly three decades into its existence.
It’s within this context that German leaders continue rethinking and refining their nation’s approach to fighting anti-Semitism. After last fall’s Yom Kippur attack on a synagogue in Halle, officials have shown increased urgency. Klein recounted, “Our parliament and government did the right thing and passed a package of measures against anti-Semitism, particularly regarding the fight against anti-Semitism and the internet.” For example, the Bundestag passed a law requiring that internet platforms share users’ information when they make anti-Semitic or other hateful comments, enabling police prosecution. There are also now plans to study anti-Semitism scientifically (by applying social science). Germany’s Federal Ministry of Education and Research is gearing up to launch a four-year, €12 million, interdisciplinary research program known as Current Dynamics and Challenges of Anti-Semitism that will explore the best ways to extinguish the oldest hatred.
The focus on scientific research has won plaudits from Dr. Remko Leemhuis, director of the American Jewish Committee’s Berlin Ramer Institute for German-Jewish Relations. It’s “the foundation to adequately fight anti-Semitism, especially when it comes to anti-Semitism in the cyber domain,” he told the Washington Examiner. “We still have huge knowledge gaps. We also need to understand better the Israel-related anti-Semitism, which is, in my view, the most virulent form of anti-Semitism in Germany today and spans all political camps. Scientific knowledge also in general helps to think of ways on how to combat anti-Semitism from the different sources. But I need to stress that in order to fight anti-Semitism, we must look at all sources, right, left, and Muslim anti-Semitism, and not only on the source that fits our political agenda.”
A Ministry of Education spokesperson emailed, “Universities, non-university research institutions, in some cases commercial companies, as well as other institutions and public and private organizations which conduct research on anti-Semitism” can participate in this nascent program, which will “support research collaborations which study the current dynamics and challenges associated with anti-Semitism in Germany and Europe, so that politics and society can more broadly address these developments on the basis of scientific findings.” Grantees are expected to be announced in the fall, in advance of the program’s spring 2021 start date.
The goal for the program’s research is to produce “concrete measures, for example: for education policy, for prevention efforts and policies, and for anti-discrimination policy, law enforcement and other relevant areas.” The ministry also wants this program to help embed the study of anti-Semitism “in the German university and research landscape … because, so far, the potential present in combining different research approaches and methods, of merging individual studies and large applied collaboration research, has yet to be sufficiently utilized.”
Klein is enthusiastic. “It’s a cross-disciplinary project,” he told me. “Until now, anti-Semitism has been looked at as a historical project or from a political science perspective, but it was never done across subjects. We have great opportunities to present cross-cutting research that comprise theology [and] political science that will give important inspiration for strategies in the fight against anti-Semitism. It will also be possible to combine computer science, so we will develop techniques to detect anti-Semitism in the internet by computer and to develop some strategies for the fight. So people in engineering can work with political science to present strategies against anti-Semitism.”
The internet-hate angle is seen as particularly important by experts. Holocaust historian and Emory professor Deborah Lipstadt told the Washington Examiner that a successful program would have to “analyze [the] impact of social media and how people, especially young people, are radicalized by social media.”
Where the Ministry of Education should focus its efforts, even within subcategories such as online hate, is one question. A spokesperson for the U.S. State Department emailed, “It is critical that any program aimed at monitoring or combating anti-Semitism focus on all three ideological sources of this global disease — far right ethnic supremacy, radical left Israel hatred, and militant Islamism. All three are using the internet and social media to spread across the world, recruit adherents, and radicalize our youth. We look forward to continuing to work with Germany on this urgent cause.”
That willingness to focus on hate across the ideological spectrum has become a common theme. Rising anti-Semitism on the Left, both in Europe and the United States, has made it crucial to understand left-wing sources of hate. But, as Klein has experienced, the organized effort to push back against any serious analysis of left-wing anti-Semitism is itself evidence of the problem.
“We know vastly more about right-wing anti-Semitism than we do about the left-wing kind (although, to be clear, the two are deeply intertwined and feed into one another),” emailed Izabella Tabarovsky, senior program associate at the Wilson Center. “East Germany, for example, was an important cog in the Soviet anti-Israel propaganda machine. Studying that could help us understand how anti-Semitic notions that are more characteristic of left-wing spaces (ones that we typically refer to as ‘anti-Zionism’) are developed and inculcated. Our gaps of knowledge in this regard are a key factor in our failure to counter it.”
There’s also the “ironic Nazi” aspect of online extremist culture. Sometimes, the line-crossing is presented as intentional provocation for its own sake, perhaps seeking refuge in the kind of carve-outs we make (or used to make) for comedians and other performers. Other times, it is billed as the counterculture, offering a sheen of coolness. And sometimes, adherents of this style pose as victims of political correctness and speech police in an attempt to turn the tables on the targets of their digital harassment. All of this is intended to appeal to a younger audience. Professor Cynthia Miller-Idriss, director of American University’s Polarization and Extremism Research and Innovation Lab, suggests this necessitates a focus on “youth culture and how the vast and evolving ecosystem of online communication contributes to the rapid spread of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories,” which itself points to the importance of developing strategies for “early intervention.”
The proliferation of online anti-Semitism and its ability to reach younger and younger audiences, thus priming future generations to repeat the tragedies of the past, highlight the stake that Germany in particular has in this fight. It is not out of guilt (or not solely out of guilt) but rather prevention: German society knows firsthand what happens when intervention comes too late or isn’t given sufficient resources.
“Right now, the manifestations of anti-Semitism are increasingly transnational and online, with real-world, local effects,” said Professor Brian Levin, director of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University, San Bernardino. “We’ll need people well-versed in psychology and criminal justice but also information technology as well, because the Nazis that would’ve gathered in a beer hall are now gathering on platforms online.”
Melissa Braunstein (@slowhoneybee) is a former Department of State speechwriter and an independent writer in Washington, D.C.
