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A Jewish museum exhibit features the Palestinian flag. Some visitors wonder if it belongs.
(J. The Jewish News of Northern California via JTA) — Tucked in the far corner of a large, brightly-lit exhibition hall on the ground floor of the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco, there is a delicate-looking piece of art with a strong political message.
At first glance, it appears to be three circular vases with flowers in them. The ceramic vases sit on shelves attached to the wall, and colorful collages hang above them. On closer inspection, visitors will notice that the flowers are made out of paper and that affixed to each vase is an image of the Palestinian flag printed on foam board.
A nearby label written by the curators of the exhibit, titled “Tikkun: For the Cosmos, the Community, and Ourselves,” explains that the piece was inspired by a conversation the artist, Tosha Stimage of Berkeley, had with a Palestinian man. He told Stimage about the plants that are native to Palestine — “a place which he can no longer access due to the ongoing conflict in the region,” the curators write.
The label also includes a note about the flag: “Some may find its presence at The CJM troubling or confusing, while others may find it appropriate and forthright. Stimage recognizes the potential for these divergent responses and hopes to use them as a means of generating dialogue.”
On a Sunday afternoon in October, Maury Ostroff read the label and walked away without inspecting the artwork.
Visitors to the “Tikkun” exhibit are encouraged to share their responses to the artwork via comment cards. (Andrew Esensten)
Asked how the presence of the flag made him feel, Ostroff, who is Jewish and lives in Muir Beach, in Marin County, replied, “Unhappy.”
Why?
“It’s not offensive to me in the same way that a swastika is. My skin is a little bit thicker than that. But I wish it weren’t here.”
He added, “What’s so Jewish about this? What’s so ‘tikkun olam’ about all of this?”
For the “Tikkun” exhibit, which opened Feb. 17 and runs through Jan. 8, the CJM invited both Jewish and non-Jewish Bay Area artists to contribute new works on the theme of repair, however they chose to interpret it. “No one is listening to us,” the piece by Stimage, who is not Jewish, is the first work of art featuring the Palestinian flag to be shown at CJM in recent memory; the museum could not say when or if the flag has been displayed on its walls before.
The piece prompted several internal conversations among CJM staff when it was first submitted and, since it has been on display, has generated a variety of responses from museumgoers who have left comments in a box at the entrance to the exhibit. Intentionally or not, Stimage has raised numerous questions with the artwork, including: Does a work of art that is sympathetic to the Palestinian struggle for statehood belong in a Jewish museum? And what is the role of a contemporary Jewish museum, anyway?
“To truly be a contemporary art museum, meaning embedded in the contemporary issues of our day, our job is to provide a platform for dialogue and to share a diversity of perspectives on our walls,” said Chad Coerver, CJM’s executive director since September 2021. “If any institution [like ours] took the path of withholding artwork that troubled our staff, our board or our community, it would be very difficult to mount exhibitions.”
CJM is a member of the Council of American Jewish Museums, a network of 76 museums across the country. CAJM does not have guidelines about the kind of art its member museums can and cannot display, according to Executive Director Melissa Yaverbaum.
J. reached out to several CAJM member museums in New York, Los Angeles and other places by email to ask if they had ever shown artwork with Palestinian iconography or works by Palestinian artists. The museums declined to answer or did not respond.
In recent years, two Jewish museums have been embroiled in controversy over issues relating to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The Spertus Institute for Jewish Learning and Leadership in Chicago staged an exhibit in 2008 on Israeli and Palestinian concepts of homeland that included maps and portraits of Palestinians. Following outcry from members of the local Jewish community who felt the exhibit presented Israel in a negative light, the museum decided to close the exhibit after only a few weeks. And in 2019, the director of the Jewish Museum Berlin resigned after the museum tweeted a link to a pro-BDS article in a German newspaper. (The museum previously came under fire for welcoming anti-Zionist scholar Judith Butler and representatives of Iran.)
In a joint interview with J., two CJM staffers who worked on “Tikkun” — co-curator Qianjin Montoya, who is not Jewish, and a Jewish senior curator who served in an advisory role, Heidi Rabben — shared the story of how Stimage’s piece came to be in the exhibit. (Montoya’s co-curator for the exhibit, Arianne Gelardin, no longer works at the museum.)
Since 2009, CJM has invited local artists from different backgrounds to create new work as part of the museum’s annual Dorothy Saxe Invitational. The idea for “Tikkun” was hatched before the pandemic put the planning process on hold. Once the CJM and Saxe — a local philanthropist and art collector — agreed on the theme, the co-curators invited artists “already engaged in healing through their relationship to community or in their practice of daily life,” Gelardin told J. last February.
The 30 artists who accepted the museum’s invitation were given only four months to conceive of and submit new works. That was likely the shortest timeline in the history of the invitational, which has been held 11 previous times, according to the museum. Each artist received a packet of materials compiled by CJM staff, with input from the Shalom Hartman Institute, a non-degree granting Jewish education center, to guide their thinking on “tikkun.”
Stimage was invited to participate because she is “very active” in the Bay Area and because “her work reflects ideas of community and connection,” Montoya said.
The curators said Stimage’s inclusion of the Palestinian flag in her submitted piece came as a surprise and prompted challenging conversations. However, they noted that they found the content of some of the other artists’ work surprising, too, and that it’s not unusual for contemporary artists to push the envelope in their work.
“I wouldn’t say we expected to receive a piece about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but we weren’t steering anyone away from that, either,” Rabben told J., adding that the submission guidelines did not place any topic off limits. “That’s a commitment from the museum to authentically represent the creative spirit of the artists that we’re working with,” she said.
Still, the curators said they engaged in a dialogue with Stimage in order to better understand each aspect of her piece and her overall intentions. Through those conversations, the curators learned that Stimage wanted to explore a moment of “rupture,” and that through her piece she hoped to communicate “that before healing or repair might happen, you have to first acknowledge that rupture,” Rabben said.
The Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco is showing “Tikkun,” an exhibit of works by Jewish and non-Jewish artists on the theme of repair. (Andrew Esensten)
Coerver, who was involved in some of the conversations, stressed that “careful consideration” was given to including the piece in the exhibit. “We felt an artwork addressing the plight of the Palestinians was appropriate in an exhibition on healing and repair,” he said. (No work submitted as part of the Dorothy Saxe Invitational has ever been outright rejected, the museum said.)
Stimage did not respond to interview requests from J. According to a CV on her website, she was born in Jackson, Mississippi, and earned an MFA from California College of the Arts in 2016. She is a past fellow at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco and was an artist-in-residence at Facebook in 2018. She also owns a floral gift shop in Oakland called Saint Flora.
Her work often touches on Black identity; she created a piece honoring Sandra Bland, an African-American woman whose 2015 arrest and death in a Texas jail cell sparked protests, and contributed to a 2019 San Francisco Art Institute exhibit on the Black Panther Party.
“I have a responsibility to create things that will, to the best of my present knowledge, do more good than harm, heal, inspire and uplift other humans,” she told the San Francisco Bay View National Black Newspaper in 2015.
Stimage’s precise views on Israel are unknown. CJM referred J. to her artist statement for “No one is listening to us,” which reads: “Olive, sage, and sumac are flowering plants native to the Mediterranean (including regions of Gaza and the West Bank) that have a direct relationship to contested ancestral land and affect the livelihood of so many Palestinian farmers and families caught in the conflict. They are positioned in the space of The Contemporary Jewish Museum as a metaphor for the ongoing conflict over land rights and the desperate need for restoration and healing of an age-old wound.”
The curators told J. that during their conversations with Stimage about her piece, they asked her why including images of the Palestinian flag was important to her but did not request that she remove them.
“We determined that none of [the piece’s] components in and of themselves signified something problematic or concerning,” Rabben said. “Of course, we had the awareness that the symbol [of the flag] will be read in a variety of ways by a variety of people.”
(Rabben pointed out that the exhibit includes other works with national symbols rendered in provocative ways, such as a black-and-white photograph of an American flag that was torn apart and partially reassembled by Mexican-American artist Jose Arias.)
The Palestinian flag — which contains the Pan-Arab colors of black, white, green and red — was adopted by the Palestine Liberation Organization in 1964. Since then, it has been the primary symbol of Palestinian nationalism.
For decades, the PLO was considered an enemy organization by Israel, and anything associated with it “had no place in Israeli public life,” said Eran Kaplan, an Israeli-born professor of Israel studies at San Francisco State University. Israel never went so far as to ban the flag. However, during the First Intifada, which lasted from 1987 to 1993, Israeli soldiers sometimes followed orders to confiscate the flag from protesters in the West Bank and Gaza.
With the signing of the Oslo Accord in 1993, Israel and the PLO recognized each other as negotiating partners. Yet the Palestinian flag remains a contentious symbol in Israel today. Kaplan noted that it recently served as a flashpoint during the funeral procession of Shireen Abu Akleh, the Palestinian American broadcaster who was killed in the West Bank in May. (The IDF conducted a review and admitted that the Israeli soldier who shot her had most likely misidentified her as an armed militant.) After warning Abu Akleh’s family not to display the flag, Israeli police attacked mourners in East Jerusalem, ripping flags out of their hands and off of the vehicle carrying her casket.
Today, the flag holds different meanings for Israelis and American Jews from different generations and political persuasions.
“There are large segments in Israeli society who view any form of Palestinian national identity as a threat to the existence of Israel,” Kaplan said. “There are others who view the PLO as legitimate partners in any form of negotiations [over the creation of a Palestinian state], but there’s an absolute split over those questions.”
Given the sensitive nature of Stimage’s work and others in the exhibit, the curators decided to solicit feedback from visitors via comment cards available at the entrance to the hall. Rabben said the museum has received a number of comments specifically about “No one is listening to us,” most of which were positive. “The majority of those comments were ‘Thank you for offering space for this topic at the museum,’” she said.
Last month, a security guard sitting in the “Tikkun” exhibition hall told a reporter that he had not witnessed any expressions of outrage or protest through the first nine months of the exhibit. “When we opened we were afraid of negative reactions, but they’re not stressed about it,” he said of visitors. “We have shown worse things here.” The guard, who has worked at the museum since it opened in 2008, mentioned a 2010 exhibit, “Our Struggle: Responding to Mein Kampf,” which included a copy of Hitler’s autobiography. “Some people were cussing us out” for displaying the book, he recalled.
Meanwhile, on the same floor as “Tikkun,” there is another, smaller exhibit containing potentially offensive art. A sign outside of the room warns visitors that inside is a Hitler marionette created by the parents of puppeteer Frank Oz. “Our intention in displaying this object is to keep the memory of the Holocaust alive through the objects and firsthand stories of those who experienced its persecution, and to encourage conversation and education about the ongoing horrors of antisemitism and authoritarianism today,” the sign says.
Coerver, CJM’s executive director, said he was proud that the museum’s three current exhibits — “Tikkun,” “Oz is for Oznowicz: A Puppet Family’s History” and “Gillian Laub: Family Matters,” which includes photographs that Laub took of her Trump-supporting relatives — are raising “challenging questions” and providing opportunities for both visitors and museum staff to “expand our horizons.”
“We’ve been wading into some issues that I think are a little thicker than maybe we’ve been confronting in the past,” he said, “and I hope that continues.”
A version of this piece originally ran in J. The Jewish News of Northern California, and is reprinted with permission.
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The post A Jewish museum exhibit features the Palestinian flag. Some visitors wonder if it belongs. appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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City of Austin Enshrines ‘CAIR Day’ After Texas Designates Islamic Group as Terror Organization
CAIR officials give press conference on the Israel-Hamas war. Photo: Kyle Mazza / SOPA Images/Sipa USA via Reuters Connect
The city of Austin, Texas has declared Jan. 22 as “CAIR-Austin Day,” honoring a controversial organization that has been designated by multiple US states as a terrorist group and scrutinized by federal authorities over alleged ties to Hamas.
On Thursday morning, the local holiday was announced with a proclamation at city hall acknowledging the efforts of civic and community engagement by the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), a nonprofit organization that advocates on behalf of Muslim Americans.
Representatives of the group praised the decision.
“Our proclamation today, declaring Jan. 22 as CAIR-Austin Day, means a lot, not only to the CAIR-Austin staff and board members, but for the whole Muslim community in our city statewide,” CAIR said in a statement.
The proclamation came about two months after Texas Gov. Greg Abbott formally designated CAIR and the Muslim Brotherhood as terrorist organizations under state law, citing in part what officials described as longstanding ideological and operational ties with Islamist movements hostile to the US and its allies.
Abbott’s proclamation described CAIR as a “successor organization” to the Muslim Brotherhood and noted the FBI called it a “front group” for “Hamas and its support network.” The document also outlined the history of the organizations and their historical associations with figures and networks tied to Hamas, an internationally designated terrorist group.
“The Muslim Brotherhood and CAIR have long made their goals clear: to forcibly impose Sharia law and establish Islam’s ‘mastership of the world,’” Abbott said in a statement while announcing the designations last month. “These radical extremists are not welcome in our state and are now prohibited from acquiring any real property interest in Texas.”
In response, the Dallas-Fort Worth and Austin chapters of CAIR sued Abbott and the state’s attorney general, Ken Paxton, arguing the proclamation “chills” their freedom of speech and association under the First Amendment of the US Constitution and “retaliates against” them for exercising such rights. The CAIR chapters asked the court to stop the state from enforcing the designations and requested “compensatory damages,” according to the complaint.
Paxton responded by filing an affidavit defending the Texas proclamation, arguing in part that the terrorist designation is a lawful national-security measure aimed at protecting Texans from extremist influence, not a violation of free speech.
Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller lambasted Austin’s decision to honor CAIR.
“Austin’s proclamation of Jan. 22 as ‘CAIR-Austin Day’ is an outrageous disgrace and a blatant surrender to radical ideology that’s hijacked city hall. This is pure political theater, shoving left-wing activists ahead of hard-working Texas families,” he said in a statement. “CAIR isn’t some harmless community group. Gov. Abbott and Attorney General Paxton have branded it a foreign terrorist organization under Texas law, citing ironclad ties that endanger America and our allies.”
CAIR has drawn scrutiny over its alleged history of lending material support for foreign terrorist groups. In the 2000s, CAIR was named as an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation terrorism financing case. Politico noted in 2010 that “US District Court Judge Jorge Solis found that the government presented ‘ample evidence to establish the association’” of CAIR with Hamas.
According to the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), “some of CAIR’s current leadership had early connections with organizations that are or were affiliated with Hamas.” CAIR has disputed the accuracy of the ADL’s claim and asserted that it “unequivocally condemn[s] all acts of terrorism, whether carried out by al-Qa’ida, the Real IRA, FARC, Hamas, ETA, or any other group designated by the US Department of State as a ‘Foreign Terrorist Organization.’”
US Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AK) has called on the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to investigate CAIR’s status as a nonprofit organization, arguing the group has ties to Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood, two internationally designated terrorist groups.
CAIR has denied any ties to Hamas or other terrorist organizations, portraying itself as a civil rights group defending Muslim Americans.
Additionally, CAIR leaders have also found themselves embroiled in further controversy since Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, atrocities in southern Israel.
The head of CAIR, for example, said he was “happy” to witness Hamas’s rampage of rape, murder, and kidnapping of Israelis in what was the largest single-day slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust.
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What we talk about when we talk about Anne Frank hiding from ICE
Anne Frank’s story — as told in her famed diary — is about many things: Persecution of Jews, the horrors of fascism, the perseverance of the human spirit.
But one of the main messages that many have taken from her life and death is this: It is wrong for children to be forced into hiding for any reason, and certainly on the basis of their identity.
That’s the connection that Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz drew while speaking on Monday.
“We have got children in Minnesota hiding in their houses, afraid to go outside,” he said at a press conference. “Many of us grew up reading that story of Anne Frank,” he added. Someday, he thinks, someone will write a similar story about the children of Minnesota.
Thus started one of the most vicious recent battles over what, exactly, Frank’s memory should mean. And in that battle, we can see what we risk by questioning whether it’s reasonable to draw any comparisons, ever, between those who lived in terror of the Nazis, and those who live in terror of other inhumane regimes.
The United States Holocaust Museum responded to Walz by posting on social media that “Anne Frank was targeted and murdered solely because she was Jewish. Leaders making false equivalencies to her experience for political purposes is never acceptable.”
“Despite tensions in Minneapolis,” they added, “exploiting the Holocaust is deeply offensive, especially as antisemitism surges.”
There are good reasons to be protective of Anne Frank’s story as a specifically Jewish one. The instinct to treat her experience as one of universal relevance has sometimes been taken too far, as in the case of a 2017 Dutch play about her that didn’t mention Jews or the Nazis.
But there are also good reasons to lean into the belief that Frank’s story is about humanity at large, as well as Jews, specifically. Frank’s father, Otto Frank, who edited her diary after her death during the Holocaust and pushed for its publication, was among those who said he wanted it to have universal appeal.
“I always said that Anne’s book is not a war-book,” he wrote in a letter in 1952. “War is the background. It is not a Jewish book either, though Jewish sphere, sentiment and surrounding is the background.” He wanted his daughter’s story to reach as many people as possible.
That’s the same instinct, I think, that motivated Walz to make his comparison: the drive to force people to confront the truth that children are suffering inhumanity, and to feel that truth must not be tolerated.
Consider just two of the stories of children in Minnesota over these past few weeks.
Liam Ramos, a 5-year-old, was detained along with his father and sent to a facility in Texas. A photo of Ramos wearing a Spiderman backpack while being forced into an SUV by federal agents went viral, in part, I think because of the profound human urge to protect children from the worst of existence — and the desperation provoked by seeing a child fall prey to it anyway.
Or think about a 2-year-old who was detained and flown to Texas along with her father. She was returned to her mother the next day, but it is impossible not to think that this experience of forced separation from her parents will mark her for life.
These two children were from Ecuador. But I do not see how it erases Frank’s Jewishness to show a parallel. It is wrong that she was forced into hiding because of her identity, and it is similarly wrong to force children in Minnesota into hiding because of theirs.
Far more concerning, I think, is the fact that misinformation about Frank’s story is being spread by some who argue that invoking her in this context is inappropriate.
Ambassador Rabbi Yehuda Kaploun, the U.S. State Department’s special envoy to monitor and combat antisemitism, posted in response to Walz that “ignorance like this cheapens the horror of the Holocaust. Anne Frank was in Amsterdam legally and abided by Dutch law. She was hauled off to a death camp because of her race and religion. Her story has nothing to do with the illegal immigration.”
That’s a terrible rewriting of history. It’s true that Frank was hauled off to a death camp because of her race and religion. But it is not true that she and her family were abiding by the law.
They went into hiding after Frank’s sister, Margot Frank, received and ignored a summons to go to a labor camp. They were hiding precisely because their existence in Amsterdam had become illegal the second that Margo failed to show up; they were all defying orders.
Frank and her family were quite literally breaking the law. It was the Nazis, and the people who turned in the Frank family, who were following it.
Questions of legality do not provide an excuse to force children into hiding because of their race, religion, or where they were born, nor a reason to scar or harm them.
For my own part, I think we are less at risk of forgetting that the Holocaust was carried out against Jews than of being so concerned about losing Jewish specificity that we miss that there are unspeakable harms being carried out against children today. Many of those harms are happening legally.
People can learn from what happened from Anne Frank, or not. People can disagree about exactly what we ought to learn from what happened to her, too.
But if insisting on the specific Jewishness of that story seems more important to you than recounting the history accurately, I think it’s only fair to ask: Are you actually upset about how people tell this story, or just upset that listeners might take away a different moral than you think they should?
The post What we talk about when we talk about Anne Frank hiding from ICE appeared first on The Forward.
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81 Years After the Holocaust, Antisemitism Pervasive in Germany, Poland
A demonstration in Schwerin, Germany under the slogan “All together to protect democracy”, with a banner reading “Against Nazis”. They want to demonstrate against new borders in Europe and protest against cooperation with right-wing extremists. Photo: Bernd Wüstneck/dpa via Reuters Connect.
Eighty-one years after the Holocaust, antisemitism remains rampant in the heart of the former Third Reich, with rising antisemitic hate crimes in Germany and incidents targeting Jewish communities in Poland drawing widespread condemnation.
On Tuesday, as the world marked International Holocaust Remembrance Day, a group of Orthodox Israelis waiting to board a flight to Israel at Krakow Airport in Poland were physically and verbally assaulted by an airport employee, in the latest antisemitic incident drawing condemnation from officials and community leaders.
The travelers were praying before boarding their flight when the employee noticed them and began shouting antisemitic slurs while demanding that they stop.
When the group members explained they were nearly finished, the assailant became even more aggressive, reportedly spitting on one person and pushing another.
As the situation escalated and the assailant grew more hostile, airport police intervened to control the scene, with the incident captured and widely shared online.
In videos circulating on social media, the airport employee is seen approaching the group aggressively, shouting, “Why are you in Poland? Go back to Israel.”
The group members are seen speaking in English, asking him to stop, as he persists in claiming that Poland is “his country.”
Go back to Israel, what are you doing coming to Poland”:
A group of Israeli ultra-Orthodox Jews who traveled to Poland were attacked by a local airport employee – but they didn’t stay silent: “Be quiet.” | video pic.twitter.com/vu0Iz3rSy6— daniel amram – דניאל עמרם (@danielamram3) January 27, 2026
According to local media, airport officials have yet to release a public statement, confirm whether the employee has been suspended or disciplined, or clarify if an investigation into the incident is underway.
The airport workers’ remarks were reminiscent of comments made by Polish lawmaker Grzegorz Braun, a far-right politician notorious for his repeated antisemitic statements and outspoken criticism of Israel.
“Poland is for Poles. Other nations have their own countries, including the Jews,” Braun said during a press conference in November in Oświęcim, a town in southern Poland that is home to the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp memorial and museum. International Holocaust Remembrance Day is observed annually on Jan. 27, the date when Auschwitz, the largest and most notorious of the Nazi death camps, was liberated.
“Jews want to be super-humans in Poland, entitled to a better status, and the Polish police dance to their tune,” Braun continued.
Poland, like most countries across Europe and the broader Western world, has seen a rise in antisemitic incidents over the last two years, in the wake of Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, invasion of and massacre across southern Israel.
Germany has been one such country to experience a surge in antisemitism.
Most recently, unknown individuals vandalized the memorial at a local synagogue in Kiel, a city in the northwestern part of the country, destroying items left by people honoring the victims of the Holocaust — including a Star of David, candles, and a photograph.
“This attack is an utterly unacceptable act of antisemitic hatred and an affront to the memory of the crimes committed under National Socialism,” Daniel Günther, the minister-president of Schleswig-Holstein, a state in northern Germany, said in a statement. “Anyone who desecrates a memorial site like this violates historical responsibility and the core values of the state.”
“We are witnessing a growing number of antisemitic incidents. Ninety years ago, that hatred marked the beginning of the end,” he continued. “That is precisely why we cannot tolerate a single incident today. Every act must be investigated and punished under the rule of law.”
This latest antisemitic attack comes as the local Jewish community rallies to defend democracy and protest against antisemitism on International Holocaust Remembrance Day.
Observed each year on Jan. 27, the day honors the six million Jews and other victims killed by the Nazis and commemorates the liberation of Auschwitz in 1945.
“Holocaust survivors around the world are asking whether democracies and their citizens are sufficiently aware of the dangers posed by the hateful rhetoric of far-right and populist politicians and parties,” Christoph Heubner, vice president of the International Auschwitz Committee from Berlin, said in a statement.
“Antisemitism has an unfortunate characteristic: it serves as an ideological bridge between right-wing extremists, left-wing extremists, and Islamists alike,” he continued. “These forces will continue to grow stronger if, as a society, we do not stop these threatening developments.”
According to newly released figures from the German Ministry of the Interior obtained by the newspaper BILD, antisemitic incidents continued to rise last year, with 2,122 offenses reported in Berlin alome, including 60 violent attacks.
This represents a significant increase of 80 percent compared with the already high number of incidents in previous years, with Berlin police recording 901 such offenses in 2023 and 1,622 in 2024, BILD reported.
“The rise in these figures is alarming, but not surprising. When politicians allow antisemitic demonstrations to go unchallenged, it emboldens certain groups and reinforces their antisemitic attitudes and attacks,” Timur Husein, a member of Parliament from the CDU, Germany’s center-right Christian Democratic Union, who requested the data, told the German newspaper.
Husein also said that the CDU is looking to strengthen Germany’s assembly laws to ban antisemitic demonstrations, which he says are responsible for a significant share of these crimes.
Earlier this month, the commissioner to combat antisemitism in the German state of Hesse sounded the alarm after an arson attack on a local synagogue in the town of Giessen, warning that it reflects a “growing pogrom-like atmosphere” threatening Jewish life across Germany as Jews and Israelis continue to face an increasingly hostile climate.