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Friends, colleagues and fans remember Rabbi Harold Kushner, whose voice ‘will continue to resonate’
(JTA) — Rabbi Harold Kushner was often identified as the author of “Why Bad Things Happen to Good People,” when the correct title of his best-selling 1981 book is “When Bad Things Happen to Good People.” The book was never meant to provide a definitive solution to the age-old question of theodicy — why God permits evil or suffering — although he proposed an answer.
Instead, the book was, like Kushner’s rabbinate, a call to action. As he told an interviewer in 2013, “An idea that is probably more emphasized in Judaism than in any of the Christian traditions is to minimize the theology and maximize the sense of community.” That is, when bad things happen to good people, it is a religious community’s responsibility to offer them the compassion and solace they crave in the form of chesed, or acts of loving-kindness.
When Kushner died Friday at age 88, it led to an outpouring from readers, friends and colleagues who experienced that compassion and solace first hand, or felt they knew him through his writing. Beyond that first book, which sold millions of copies worldwide, Kushner was an admired rabbi at the Conservative Temple Israel in Natick, Massachusetts, taught at several universities, and wrote over a dozen books.
The Jewish Telegraphic Agency collected a number of the responses that appeared online and solicited others. A sampling of reminiscences about Kushner appears below.
Rabbi Mark Cooper, Riverdale, New York: My rabbinic career began in 1985 when I became associate rabbi to Rabbi Harold Kushner at Temple Israel of Natick. Fresh out of rabbinical school, there was much to learn and experience in order to fully embrace the demanding role of being a congregational rabbi. As I look back on the six years I spent with Harold, I can’t imagine a more nurturing or supportive start to my rabbinate.
Harold showed me what an excellent sermon looks and sounds like (not that most rabbis would ever be able to come close to the quality of homiletics that he possessed), how to use humor to connect with a congregation, how to console someone who has suffered a tragedy, and how to work with lay leaders and volunteers. He created space for me to experiment and grow in a congregation he had spent years building. And he did this always with a gentle kindness that came naturally to him.
Harold saw me not as a solution to his busy schedule, and not as someone to do the legwork he was now unavailable to do. He saw me as someone he could teach, someone to help shape and direct to be the kind of rabbi he knew others would be proud of. Harold befriended me, invited me to get to know him, and I quickly came to feel that he genuinely cared about me, about my wife Amy, and about the children we began to raise while in Natick.
(Cooper spoke at Kushner’s funeral on Monday in Natick; above are excerpts from his remarks.)
Mary Jo Franchi-Rothecker, Ontario, Canada: When I read “When Bad Things Happen to Good People” in 2008, I was able to start thinking and analyzing about recent, extremely challenging events in my life. I lost my father in late 2007, lost my 20-year legal career and was in a financial nightmare. Rabbi Kushner’s writing (I went on to read “Overcoming LIfe’s Disappointments”) gave me hope, insight and a path to “being my best self.” I am forever grateful.
Rabbi Jill Jacobs, CEO, T’ruah: The Rabbinic Call for Human Rights: Rabbi Kushner was the rabbi of the shul where I grew up. By the time I was there, he was already famous, and mostly not in the day-to-day running of the shul, but he and his wife Suzette were almost always there on Shabbat, sitting quietly in the back (and of course he would give powerful sermons on the High Holidays, which even the teenagers would come in to hear). And he was an important mentor for me throughout. When I was in college at Columbia, we loved to compare notes on the core curriculum (which hadn’t changed that much in between) and then we had many conversations as I made the decision to go to rabbinical school, and as I made my way through and beyond. He truly modeled what it meant to be a rabbi, and his voice — both for those of us fortunate enough to hear it directly and the millions who read his books — will continue to resonate.
Rabbi David Wolpe, Sinai Temple, Los Angeles: I always learned from Rabbi Kushner and he was very kind to me and I had wonderful exchanges with him, but the thing that most impressed me was this: When I was on book tour, the same drivers would take other authors in various cities. So I heard about the conduct of various authors, especially when they were unkind to the drivers, as too many were. Yet over and over again people would ask me if I knew Rabbi Kushner and say how unfailingly kind he was to the drivers, the hotel clerks, to everyone. I felt proud and grateful to have such a representative of our people, and we will all miss him very much.
Michael and Zelia Goodboe, Palm Beach Gardens, Florida: I praise God for the goodness of Rabbi Kushner. I am Catholic, but I have come to value Judaism even to the point of attending (with my wife) classes at a Miami synagogue to get to really know Judaism, because of the good rabbi’s influence. Some people are just blessings in this crazy world. He was truly among the Righteous who left the world in much better shape than he found it! We have lost a great person.
Rabbi Eric Gurvis, the Mussar Institute, Sherborn, Massachusetts: I literally learned of the death of my colleague and teacher, Rabbi Harold Kushner, while quoting him during a graveside funeral last Friday. As I began to share his words, the funeral director let me know that he had died earlier in the day. I paused, collected myself and continued to cite his teaching.
My journey intersected with Rabbi Kushner on numerous occasions, the first while I was serving as rabbi in Jackson, Mississippi. A member of my congregation brought him to speak to a group from across the Jackson community. “Who Needs God,” still among my favorites of his books, had just been published. He was so gracious and kind to this young rabbi he’d just met. He always was.
Fast-forward to my time in Newton, Massachusetts. I had invited Rabbi Kushner to speak at my congregation. I don’t even remember what topic we had agreed upon. His talk came just days after a tragedy in our community, in which four middle school students were killed in a bus crash on a school trip. He asked me, “What would you like me to do?” I replied, “I am so grateful you are here. Please be you, and let us be lifted by whatever you wish to share with us.” And it was so, as it has been for so many of us over the years of his teaching, preaching and touching.
Rabbi Vanessa Ochs, professor of religious studies, University of Virginia: It was Rabbi Harold Kushner who taught us, in his thought-changing book, “When Bad Things Happen to Good People”: “I don’t know why one person gets sick and another does not. … I cannot believe that God ‘sends’ illness to a specific person for a specific reason.”
As we know, Jews do not interpret the Torah in a literal way. While the Torah’s God sends down punishment, Kushner’s interpretation of God does not. Kushner’s God does not punish us to teach us lessons. His God does not give us only as much as we can handle. Bad things happen. We have terrible losses. They just happen.
So where is God when we are grieving? For Kushner, this is certain, and his theology is compelling: God is with us when we grieve. God is with us when our communities organize to support us as mourners (and beyond) and when total strangers hold us up with random acts of kindness.
Rabbi Ron Kronish, Jerusalem: Rabbi Harold Kushner played an important role in my life and the life of my family more 40 years ago. In 1977, when our second daughter was born with a form of dwarfism, my wife Amy and I went to visit him and his wife Suzette in their home in Natick, Massachusetts. We were living nearby in Worcester at that time. That was a short time after their son, who was a boy with short stature, had tragically died.
Rabbi Kushner welcomed us warmly into his home and counseled us with empathy and compassion. He didn’t make us feel that he was going out of his way to meet with us or that he was meeting with us just because I was a rabbinic colleague. He was simply understanding, gracious and accommodating.
I can say that the spiritual and practical advice that he gave to us stayed with us for many years. We have always been grateful for it.
By the way, our daughter with short stature grew up to be a wonderful human being and a great rabbi-educator at the Heschel High School in New York City. Coincidentally, one of her former interns, who is now a teacher at the school, is Rabbi Kushner’s grandson! So the legacy continues to be a part of our family.
Rabbi Noam Raucher, Los Angeles, California: After reading “When Bad Things Happen to Good People,” I remember being excited to meet Rabbi Kushner. As the president of Hillel at Hofstra University at the time, I was responsible for escorting Rabbi Kushner through campus before his speaking engagement.
That was a big day at Hofstra, too. The men’s basketball team had made it to the 2001 NCAA tournament, and we were playing UCLA in the first round. As we walked through the student center, Rabbi Kushner heard the students cheering on our team and asked if we could stop to watch the game with them on television.
We stood in the back of a sea of student bodies, who would jump and shout with every shot made or blocked. I watched Rabbi Kushner as he watched the game. He stood there, tall and attentive, with his hands clasped behind his back. He had a grounding peacefulness about him. Every time the crowd grew animated, he just stood there, stoic and watching it all for the sheer enjoyment of being present for the experience.
That image stands out as I think about all the commotion I have, or will, face in my life. There will be successes and failures. Rabbi Kushner taught me to appreciate being here for all of it.
Irving Pozmantier, president, Pozmantier, Williams & Stone Insurance Consultants: For several years, it was my privilege and honor to serve with Rabbi Kushner on the board of directors for List College of the Jewish Theological Seminary. His brilliant mind was matched only by his personal warmth which made every meeting an uplifting experience. On a few occasions, we shared taxi rides to the airport during which we had an opportunity to share information about our lives and experiences. Each of those personal talks left me with feelings of gratitude for the opportunity to know someone of such innate decency and kindness. When my first wife died, he was one of the first persons to call and offer condolences. His incredible ability to express compassion was never more meaningful.
Jim Rigby, pastor, St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church, Austin, Texas: What some critics of religion do not realize (understandably) is that people like Rabbi Kushner are trying to help dying and traumatized people make sense of their lives. It is a good thing to be scientific, but if someone is actively dying or traumatized we must enter their worldview to be helpful.
Reason and science are marvelous goals, but they can feel strangely irrelevant to someone lost in a waking nightmare. Before a terrified heart can hear an important truth it must first be healed of its fear. For me, religion has been the art of cave diving into someone else’s nightmare, learning the language of their heart, and then cheering them on as they climb out of their own private tomb and into the common light.
I will never forget sitting in a pastoral care class taught by seminary professor Will Spong (the brother of the late John Shelby Spong, bishop of the Episcopal Church). One of the students had debunked the simplistic religion of a dying patient. Suddenly, Dr. Spong began to shake like Jeremiah in an earthquake. Will’s face turned beet red and he shouted at all of us, “Don’t you dare kick out someone’s crutch unless you’ve got something better to replace it with!”
My life as a heretical minister began that year of chaplaincy. I realized theology born of abstraction was like a personal life jacket that kept me from entering the depths of another person’s fears and uncertainty. I could not descend into another person’s hell unless I could detach from my worldview and enter theirs.
What a gift it has been to be invited into peoples’ traumatic cocoons and to witness them sprouting wings that work in the real world. What a gift to be present when people discover a faith born of science, a hope born of realism, and a love unbounded by any religious creed.
Harold Kushner, Suzette Kushner and Dubi Gordon at Kibbutz Kfar Charuv in Israel. (Courtesy Gordon)
Dubi Gordon, Natick: Rabbi Kushner was my rabbi, teacher, advisor and dear friend. When I was Natick USY president, Rabbi Kushner was deeply involved and took pride that three of us became region officers in one of the most robust chapters in New England. When I helped establish a Judaic Studies program at UMass Amherst and founded Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry in Western Massachusetts, he offered invaluable advice and encouragement.
Rabbi Daniel Greyber, Beth El Synagogue, Durham, North Carolina: As a congregational rabbi, I give copies of his book, “When All You’ve Ever Wanted Isn’t Enough,” to high school seniors before they go off to college and I tell them the story of how my mom gave it to me and how it helped shape my life: endeavoring to live a life of meaning rather than chasing after wealth and things. I would not be a rabbi today were it not for his wisdom.
When I published my own book, I sent him a copy and asked him if he would give me an endorsement for the back cover. He told me he would be honored to read it, but that he hardly ever gave endorsements and was an especially “hard grader” on books that tackled the question of suffering. In the end, he demurred but sent me a long email with praise and constructive advice. It felt like knowing a Supreme Court judge had taken the time to read and respond to something you wrote. That correspondence is a great treasure and honor.
Rabbi Ysoscher Katz, chair of Talmud, Yeshivat Chovevei Torah Rabbinical School: If you study the biography of Moshe Rabbeinu, you notice something surprising in the Talmud. In the Bible, Moses is presented as a jurist; the “law” animates and inspires him. The Talmudic Moses is less of a jurist and more of a theologian, grappling with Judaism’s theological unanswerables.
Personally, I prefer the Talmudic version.
Judicially, his legal philosophy has been supplanted by Rabbinic jurisprudence; biblical “law” has little significance for contemporary jurists. His theology, on the other hand, is as relevant today as it was during the time of the Exodus. The things that perplexed him then still confound us today, many centuries later.
We are told that in every generation there is one person who is imbued with a streak of Moses’ spirit and is charged with carrying on his legacy. In our generation that person was Rabbi Harold Kushner — at least as far as the theological aspect of Moses’ persona is concerned. He too, like Moses, was deeply plagued by the theodicy question, grappling and struggling with it throughout this life.
In traditional yeshivot one is taught that in Talmudic discourse the question is more important than the answer. The sophistication and passion of the inquiry proves that one has truly mastered the material.
That is Rabbi Kushner’s legacy: the anguished question of “Why?!” Why, Hakadosh Baruch Hu, do you allow bad things to happen to good people? How could you?
The validity of Kushner’s “solutions” to this perplexing question can be debated ad nauseam, but the power of his anguished Abrahamic cry — “Is it possible that the judge of the universe would condone injustice” — will outlive him, living in perpetuity as a clarion call to his survivors to do our utmost to eradicate the injustices (natural and man-made) that plague our world.
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Ed Sheeran urged to toss Macklemore from tour after criticizing Israel onstage
(JTA) — The Israeli-American Council is calling for the rapper Macklemore to be dropped from the opening slot on pop star Ed Sheeran’s U.S. tour for chanting “Free Palestine” and accusing Israel of apartheid and genocide during his performances at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey on Friday and Saturday nights.
Known for such hits as “Thrift Shop” and “Same Love,” the rapper’s anti-Israel monologue at the performances preceded his 2024 song, “Hind’s Hall,” referring to Columbia University’s Hamilton Hall, which pro-Palestinian protesters occupied and unofficially renamed for Hind Rajab, a 6-year-old Palestinian girl who was killed during the war in Gaza.
“I had wanted to stand up here on stages and stadiums across America and say two words that are very near and dear to my heart, ‘Free Palestine’,” he said at the show he opened for Ed Sheeran Saturday night, according to videos posted from the concerts. “I want those words to be loud and clear so the people from Gaza all the way to the occupied West Bank know that we have their back and that we have not forgotten them.”
He went on to dedicate the song to “the bravery of Columbia University students, the encampment movement that mobilized the entire world.”
“Ed Sheeran – do not allow your stage to be used to divide people or spread one-sided political propaganda,” IAC said, circulating a petition demanding Macklemore be taken off the bill for his remaining nine dates of the tour.
Messages left for representatives of Macklemore, Ed Sheeran and the concert promoters AEG and the Messina Group were not returned.
Macklemore addressed the Jewish community directly during his appearances, saying, “To all of my Jewish brothers and sisters: Criticism of Israel, criticism of apartheid, being against genocide in no way is criticism of you. My message is for peace, love and for all human beings to be treated with dignity, respect and equality.”
The reactions to Macklemore’s remarks were far from unanimous. Some fans took to social media to praise him.
Macklemore has been speaking out against Israel’s conduct of the war in Gaza since late October 2023. He was one of the first of 55 performers to sign the Artists4CeaseFire open letter to then-President Joe Biden calling for a permanent ceasefire, the release of all hostages and the delivery of lifesaving aid to civilians in Gaza.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Ed Sheeran urged to toss Macklemore from tour after criticizing Israel onstage appeared first on The Forward.
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Israeli ministers unveil plans to encourage voluntary Palestinian emigration from Gaza
(JTA) — TEL AVIV — The Oct. 27 elections have brought the concept of Palestinian emigration from Gaza to the forefront of Israeli political discourse. The once-taboo topic has become an increasingly popular position among right-wing politicians, even as it repels many in the American Jewish community and elicits condemnation from world leaders.
Several prominent politicians on the Israeli right, including some who currently hold key government positions, have raised the idea in recent weeks and pledged to advance it if they sit in the next coalition. Most starkly, ultra-nationalist National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir unveiled a seven-year plan Thursday to encourage Palestinians in Gaza “voluntarily” leave the embattled enclave where the IDF and Hamas have been fighting for almost three years.
“This is a free choice; we are not forcing anyone to leave, but there is encouragement for this,” Ben-Gvir said in a statement to the media after he announced his program during a virtual press conference in Lod, a working-class city southeast of Tel Aviv that was the scene of mass displacement of Arab residents during the 1948 War of Independence.
The American liberal pro-Israel group J Street was among those to condemn the proposal, stating on Friday that “It should horrify us to see a state, built in the aftermath of Jewish death and destruction, entertaining the ethnic cleansing of another people.”
The organization urged people not to dismiss Ben-Gvir’s plan as “fantasy or fringe,” adding, “this vision is now in the political mainstream, and that must be unequivocally rejected.”
Indeed, while few Israeli political observers expect such a plan to become government policy even if Israel continues to be ruled by a right-wing government, critics worry that the promotion of such measures throughout the election are already normalizing the concept in Israeli society and harming Israel’s international standing. Yair Golan, leader of the left-wing “Democratim” party, has previously described government calls to encourage the “voluntary emigration” of Gazans as “unacceptable.”
On Thursday, Ben-Gvir was careful to underscore that any departure of Palestinians from Gaza would be voluntary under his plan, which he has dubbed “Disengagement 710.” The name refers to the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza in 2005 known as “disengagement” that included the forced evacuation of around 8,000 Israeli settlers and the demolition of their 21 settlements in the enclave. The number “710” refers to the day and month of the Hamas-led attack on southern Israel in which 1,200 people were killed and another 251 taken hostage.
Under Ben-Gvir’s proposal, a government ministry with a dedicated minister would be established to oversee Palestinian emigration efforts. Incentives would be offered to Gazans who agreed to emigrate, and those countries that receive them would receive monetary benefits as well.
The program has a target goal of 250,000 Gazans leaving in the first year of the program and 1.86 million within seven years — nearly the entire 2.1 million population of the strip, Ben-Gvir said. There would be an absorption plan in another country for every Palestinian that left, according to Ben-Gvir, who maintained that there are countries willing to take in Palestinians in exchange for financial incentives.
Ben-Gvir sits on the far right of the Israeli political map, but earlier in the week, a leader in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s mainstream Likud Party endorsed a plan for Palestinian relocation from the coastal strip as well. Defense Minister Israel Katz said that “there is no real solution for Gaza without emigration.”
Already in February 2025, Katz announced the establishment of an agency tasked with encouraging emigration from Gaza, and said this week that it was “fully prepared” for the moment when conditions would allow Israel to encourage Gazans to leave.
In a public interview at a conference on Wednesday sponsored by the Hebrew media group Ynet and the think tank the Israel Democracy Institute, Katz said that President Donald Trump had “frozen” the initiative under pressure from Arab countries. Katz stressed, however, that the initiative had not been canceled and that discussions on the issue were ongoing.
In response to Katz’s statement, Democratic Sen. Chris Van Hollen of Maryland on Wednesday called to end complicity with Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. ”After our trip to the Gaza-Egypt border last year, Senator Jeff Merkle & I released a report entitled, ‘The Netanyahu Government is Implementing a Plan to Ethnically Cleanse Gaza of Palestinians’. Now the Israeli Min of Defense confirmed that’s the goal,” Van Hollen wrote on X.
But days later, on Saturday, U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee told reporters that “nobody is suggesting that there will be forced displacement – the Israelis are not, the Americans are certainly not, I know of no one who supports that.”
In January 2025, just days after taking office, President Donald Trump himself first floated the idea of Palestinians emigrating from Gaza as a possible solution to the conflict between Israel and Hamas and a way for them to escape the devastation surrounding them in the wake of the war.
There were some signs at that time that the idea of a pathway to voluntary emigration was not anathema to Palestinians who live in Gaza. A poll by the British-based Gallup International in March of 2025 showed that 52% of those in Gaza would leave for another country if given the choice, out of which 38% wanted a temporary exit and another 14% wanted a permanent one.
The idea was strongly condemned by international figures, however, particularly America’s Arab allies. Ultimately it was abandoned by the president and superseded by his 20-point plan to end the war, which specifically stated that there would be no encouragement of Gazans to leave.
But many on Israel’s right took the statement by Trump as encouragement to publicly advocate for a measure that had long been considered off-limits. Netanyahu himself expressed support for the idea soon after Trump broached the topic in early 2025, saying: “The door has also been opened to the vision of President Trump for Gazans to leave Gaza of their own free will. I think this is a very important idea. We are working on it continuously with the Americans, and I tell you that it is possible.”
Weeks later, in March 2025, a poll by The Jewish People Policy Institute in Jerusalem found that 52% of Jewish Israelis supported the relocation of Palestinians in Gaza along the outlines of Trump’s plan. The idea of voluntary emigration has also received support from some figures in Israel’s opposition. In 2025, opposition leader Yair Lapid said Israel should “develop a long-term plan to eliminate Hamas and encourage voluntary emigration.” The major parties in the opposition bloc, however, did not publicly endorse Ben Gvir’s proposal or put forward their own plans to encourage emigration.
More recently, some Israeli political figures have gone so far as to float scenarios in which the departure of Gazans would not be voluntary. A senior member of the ultra-nationalist Religious Zionist Party, led by Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, has spoken of forced migration.
Last month, before joining the party, right-wing firebrand Moshe Feiglin said, “We need, in one way or another, to make sure that there will be no Gazan left there,” including forcing them to leave “by any means possible.”
Retired Brig.-Gen. Ofer Winter, a new political candidate whose right-wing party Amcha Yisrael has been gaining momentum, said at the party’s launch conference in August that “the solution for Gaza is one — emigration,” later stressing that “these are not just slogans.”
But despite the wave of support on the right, there is no indication that such a scenario is in the offing. A senior Israeli official told reporters this week that no countries have agreed to accept Gazans, while Defense Minister Katz said that potential receiving countries want U.S. support. In the past, countries including Somaliland, South Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo have reportedly been floated in internal discussion in Israel as possible destinations for Gazans.
Trump’s 20-point plan for Gaza first published in September 2025, to which Israel has committed itself, explicitly contradicts the possibility of encouraging emigration from the strip, however. Article 12 of the plan states: “No one will be forced to leave Gaza,” and that “We will encourage people to stay and offer them the opportunity to build a better Gaza.”
Trump had originally raised the idea of relocating Gazans in part because of the dire circumstances they faced. “I think they should get a good, fresh, beautiful piece of land, and we get some people to put up the money to build it,” Trump said in the first weeks of his second presidential term, adding, “I don’t know how they could want to stay.”
The war’s devastation has left most of the Palestinian population internally displaced within Gaza, according to United Nations data, with 60% of homes destroyed. The U.N. has warned that reconstruction could cost $71.4 billion and take years.
But U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk warned that plans to relocate Gazans were tantamount to ethnic cleansing, a charge repeated by Palestinians and critics of Israel in the international community.
International opposition has been particularly fierce from Palestinian officials, Arab countries and key American allies in the West. Germany’s foreign minister said in 2025 that “the Gaza Strip belongs to the Palestinians. Expelling them would be unacceptable and contrary to international law.”
The United Arab Emirates along with foreign ministers from seven other countries — Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Jordan, Indonesia, Pakistan, Turkey and Egypt — issued a statement Sunday condemning the proposals by Ben-Gvir and Katz. They urged the international community including the United Nations Security Council, to halt any attempt to change the demographic reality in the Palestinian territories including Gaza.
“Such inflammatory statements and proposals flagrantly violate principles of international law, including international humanitarian law, and pose a direct threat to the legitimate and inalienable rights of the Palestinian people,” they stated.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Israeli ministers unveil plans to encourage voluntary Palestinian emigration from Gaza appeared first on The Forward.
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AfD is predicted to win 40% in the German state of Saxony-Anhalt. Should Jews be worried?
(JTA) — BERLIN – Why are so many Germans wringing their hands over Sunday’s election in Saxony-Anhalt?
After all, what impact could 1.7 million registered voters in this former East German state have on a nation with 16 Laender (federal states) and some 60 million voters?
Here’s why Sunday’s election matters:
As it turns out, German voters in Saxony-Anhalt could give the right-wing extremist political party — the Alternative for Germany, or AfD — its most significant achievement since its founding in 2013.
Although the AfD is predicted to win only 40 percent of the vote, that would be enough to affect upcoming general local elections in Lower Saxony on Sept. 13, and elections in the state of Mecklenburg-Pomerania and the city-state of Berlin on Sept. 20.
There is also an outside chance it could open the door to an AfD-led government in Saxony-Anhalt, a first for the far right since the end of World War II. Although that is considered unlikely, the party’s state website proclaims: “Everything is possible.”
Voters in this economically depressed state are, pundits say, drawn to the AfD’s anti-immigrant and anti-European Union rhetoric; its promise to expel non-citizens; its focus on German national pride rather than on the dark side of its past; and its ambition to repair relations with Putin’s Russia. Their drumbeat resonates particularly in former east German states, which have suffered since unification with the closing of factories and flight of younger workers to western states.
The AfD has also done well in elections in other former east German states, and increasingly in western ones. Last March, for example, it earned 19% of the popular vote in elections in Baden-Wuerttemburg, nearly doubling its previous tally there. In the 2025 federal election, it leapt to second place next to the conservative Christian Democratic Union led by German Chancellor Angela Merkel from 2005-2021. Opinion polls show the AfD is the leading party, if there were to be federal elections today.
While some observers note that the party’s agenda on national issues could not be implemented, they are troubled by the party’s goals on the state level.
Stephan Kramer, president of Germany’s domestic intelligence agency in the state of Thuringia, and former general secretary of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, told the JTA that the main concern is with the power the party could wield “over the interior ministry, police, the state intelligence service, education, appointments and the handling of sensitive information.”
“For the first time, the party could use the machinery of a state government and thereby gain substantially greater political and institutional influence at the federal level,” he said.
Banning the AfD would be a painstaking process, thanks to post-war protections of free speech. Former West Germany banned only two political parties: a neo-Nazi one in 1952, and a far-left Communist party in 1956. Later attempts to ban neo-Nazi parties stumbled on legal hurdles, and many politicians fear to try again, lest the AfD make hay of a failure.
Support for the AfD fits right in with trends on the European and UK level: According to the latest survey of European far-left, far-right and populist parties published by the PopuList research group, nearly a quarter of European and UK voters back far-right parties today, up from 5% in 1995. According to the Guardian newspaper, the biggest surge in support came in national elections in France and the UK in 2024, and Germany in 2025.
Here’s why AfD votes might not matter, yet:
A key difference from U.S. state elections is that “voters do not directly elect the equivalent of a governor,” Paulina Fröhlich, senior expert for democracy at the Gütersloh-based Bertelsmann Foundation, told the JTA. “Instead, the state parliament elects a state premier after the parties have built a coalition or secured enough support. So, the party that wins the most votes does not necessarily lead the government.”
In 1980, the CDU and its Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union (CSU), won 44.5% of the vote, but the Social Democratic Party (SPD) with 42.9% and the Free Democratic Party (FDP) with 10.6% support built a coalition government.
Two years ago in the state of Thuringia, the AfD became the first far-right party to get the most votes in a state election since World War II, but was blocked from forming a coalition.
Similarly, the likely outcome of Sunday’s Saxony-Anhalt election will be a coalition of minority parties that together exceed 50% of the vote; the AfD, despite a significant electoral achievement, will not be able to pull together the needed majority to take power.
It can take days, weeks, even months before a state or federal government is formed, including appointment of the minister-president or chancellor, and ministers dealing with education, policing and culture (and foreign policy, on the federal level). After the CDU and CSU won Germany’s federal election in February 2025 with only 28.5 percent of the vote, it took until early April for them to form a government with the SPD, as they argued over policy differences. But neither party would work with the AfD, which actually came in second
Most Germans still reject the AfD’s message. Several states have classified the party as right-wing extremist, a designation that its leaders have opposed in court. And there are calls to ban the party, including by prominent Jews such as Charlotte Knobloch, 93-year-old former chairwoman of the Central Council of Jews in Germany and head of the Jewish community of Munich and Upper Bavaria.
There has been much media buzz over an interview that Knobloch, who survived the Holocaust in hiding with a German Christian family, gave to Stern magazine. “Even the Nazi Party started small and tried out what was possible,” and now AfD politicians “are testing the limits of what is acceptable,” said Knobloch, arguing for a ban: “Everything that could help should be tried.”
Unlike in the United States, German elections include many political parties – from the large, mainstream ones to those on the fringes, which usually fail to meet the 5% vote threshold required to have seats in the parliament.
Even if the AfD receives a plurality this time, it is highly unlikely that it will rule the state. That’s because virtually no one else will work with them. Mainstream democratic parties have set up a “firewall” to that end. So the probable outcome will be a government built through a coalition of the remaining parties.
But this year, even some of the previous top parties are teetering on the edge of the 5% threshold, polls say.
Should the past winners – the CDU, and possibly the center-left Social Democratic Party, the center-right Free Democratic Party, and the progressive Green Party – make it past the threshold, they are expected to build that minority coalition, even holding their noses to do so: The CDU is even expected to seek informal support from the communist Left Party.
Thus the procedure in Saxony-Anhalt is likely to echo what happened in the neighboring state of Thuringia two years ago. While the AfD got the biggest piece of the electoral pie, it did not gain a majority of seats in the parliament. So the mainstream democratic parties were able to form a coalition government.
What do the AfD stand for? Why are they so popular?
Its appeal “comes from a mixture of protest, distrust of established parties, concerns about migration and social change, and a sense among some voters that [AfD] articulates grievances others avoid,” said Kramer of Thuringia’s domestic intelligence agency.
“The AfD officially presents itself as supportive of Jewish life and Israel,” he added. But the platform “explicitly demands a complete ban on ritual slaughter without exception, which would directly affect Jewish religious practice. AfD leaders also use world conspiracy arguments and antisemitic language, we should not forget.”
It’s illegal in Germany to celebrate the crimes of National Socialism, to repeat Nazi slogans and other propaganda. But AfD leaders “do not always stay on the safe side of the law,” Kramer added. For example, Björn Höcke, who heads the party’s parliamentary faction in the neighboring state of Thuringia, “was convicted for repeating the banned Nazi stormtrooper slogan ‘Alles für Deutschland’ [everything for Germany], and the Federal Court of Justice rejected his appeal in August 2025, making that conviction final.”
Höcke “is a certified history teacher, so he knows what he is doing,” Kramer added. “I would not describe the AfD simply as a party that carefully stays legal. Rather, parts of it repeatedly test those boundaries, and in some cases demonstrably cross them, [moving the] boundaries of what is acceptable to say in public and what is not.”
In Saxony-Anhalt, the party is “classified as definitely right-wing extremist” and is under observation by the domestic intelligence service, Maik Reichel, director of Saxony-Anhalt’s State Agency for Civic Education, told JTA. “And I think we also have the most extreme AfD state branch.”
The party wants to “restrict state-sponsored [school] trips to memorial sites, which they say turn young people into ‘memorial zombies,’ ” Reichel added.
“Our mission is to provide pluralistic civic education” and the AfD is against diversity, Reichel said. The AfD also takes a nationalist perspective, “which means we leave out important dictatorial, anti-democratic periods that were truly terrible in Germany,” he explained.
The main architect of the AfD’s platform in Saxony-Anhalt, Hans-Thomas Tillschneider, is known for wanting “more Bismarck, less Hitler.” Otto von Bismarck (1815-1898), who served as Germany’s first chancellor from 1871-1890, is seen as a hero by some German nationalists.
Despite such concerns, the AfD gained in the polls. At the EU parliament level, the AfD has 15 members, the largest contingent in the far-right Europe of Sovereign Nations group.
Should the AfD win an absolute majority on Sunday, they would most certainly appoint their state party leader Ulrich Siegmund, age 35, as minister president. He is described as personable, even affable.
But his messages are not so friendly, critics say. Siegmund says his “100-day immediate action plan” includes a promise to “deport from minute one” many foreign nationals, including professional specialists; to cut funding to pro-democracy NGOs; to crack down on diversity programs in the state; and to cut taxes that support such programs.
Whatever the final tally, the lead-up to tomorrow’s election has made it clear: A ballot cast for the AfD is no longer dismissible as a “protest vote.” Other mainstream parties are taking a plunge, while the AfD’s star continues to rise.
Ultimately, the other parties have to regain the people’s trust, said Reichel. In Saxony-Anhalt that means “solving the problems that concern people in a way that they actually notice a difference.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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