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Bosnian Jews mourn Moris Albahari, one of Sarajevo’s last Ladino speakers
(JTA) — Moris Albahari, a Holocaust survivor, former partisan fighter and one of the last Ladino speakers in Bosnia and Herzegovina’s dwindling Jewish community, passed away at the age of 93 last month.
It is believed that he was one of four native Ladino speakers remaining in a country where the Judeo-Spanish language once flourished and was spoken by luminaries like Flory Jagoda, the grande dame of Ladino song, and Laura Bohoretta, the founder of a uniquely Sephardic feminist movement in Bosnia.
Bosnia’s small Jewish community — with barely 900 members throughout the country, 500 of whom live in Sarajevo — are mourning the loss of a living link to communal memory as well as a dear friend.
“From you, uncle Moco, I learned a lot about Judaism, about life, about nature and especially about people. About both the good and the evil,” Igor Kožemjakin, the cantor of the Sarajevo Jewish community, wrote in a memorial post on Facebook, referring to Moris as “Čika,” or uncle, a term of endearment in Bosnian.
“It is a terrible loss, especially for Sarajevo. Our community is very small, especially after the Holocaust,” Eliezer Papo, a Sarajevo-born Jew and scholar of Ladino language and literature at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “We’re not speaking just in terms of prominent members of the community, we’re speaking in terms of family members. Everyone is like a family member.”
When Albahari was growing up in the 1930s, the Jewish community of his native Sarajevo numbered over 12,000. Jews made up more than a fifth of the city and it was one of the most important centers of Jewish life in the western Balkans.
In his youth, the city was part of what was then the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. Formed out of the borderlands between the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires, it was a multiethnic state composed of Croats, Serbs, Bosniaks, Slovenians, Macedonians, Hungarians, Albanians and more. Among them were many Jewish communities both Ashkenazi and Sephardic.
The unique mix of of Muslim, Jewish, Catholic and Orthodox Christian communities, with their mosques, synagogues and churches defining Sarajevo’s skyline, earned the city the nickname “Little Jerusalem.”
Speaking in a 2015 documentary made by American researchers, “Saved by Language,” Albahari explained that his family traced their roots back to Cordoba before the Spanish Inquisition, and through Venice, before settling in what would become Bosnia when it was part of the Ottoman Empire.
“We didn’t want to ‘just’ write an article about Moris or Sarajevo; we wanted [the audience] to see what we saw and hear what we heard,” Brian Kirschen, professor of Ladino at Binghamton University, who worked on the documentary with author Susanna Zaraysky, told JTA. “This resulted in a grassroots initiative to create the documentary.”
In the film, Albahari takes the researchers and their viewers on a tour through what was Jewish Sarajevo, giving glimpses of the thriving Ladino speaking community in which he was raised and explaining how ithe language would save him many times, when the Nazis and their Croat allies, the Ustaša, came to shatter it.
“In sharing your story of survival during the Holocaust, you opened doors that remained closed for decades,” Kirschen said in a memorial post on Facebook. “Some of your stories were even new to members of your family, but each survivor has their own timeline. While you experienced great pain during your life, from your story, we also learn about moments of kindness and heroism. Through your story, you also taught us about the power of language.”
Albahari wasn’t yet a teenager when, in 1941, Nazi Germany and Mussolini’s Italy invaded Yugoslavia. The Nazis occupied the eastern portion of the country, including what is now Serbia, while they raised up a Croat fascist party, known as the Ustaša, to administer the newly formed “Independent State of Croatia” — often known by its Serbo-Croatian initials, NDH — in the western regions that included the modern-day Bosnia and Herzegovina.
The Ustaša collaborated in the Nazis’ genocidal plans for Europe’s Jewish and Roma comunities, and they had genocidal designs of their own for the Orthodox Serb communities living in the NDH.
To that end they established the Jasenovac concentration camp, which would become known as the Auschwitz of the Balkans. By the war’s end it had become the third largest concentration camp in Europe, and behind its walls the overwhelming majority of Sarajevo’s Jews — at least 10,000 — were massacred. Including Serbs, Jews, Roma and political dissidents of Croat or Muslim Bosniak background, as many as 100,000 people were killed in Jasenovac.
Albahari was 11 years old when the Ustaša came to deport him and his large family to Jasenovac. A former teacher working as an Ustaša guard in the town of Drvar, where the train stopped, warned Albahari’s father, David, about their destination, and he was able to help his son escape from the train.
The teacher helped guide the young Moris to an Italian soldier named Lino Marchione who was secretly helping Jews.
This was the first case when Albahari’s Ladino came in handy. Ladino is largely based on medieval Spanish, with a mixture of Hebrew, Aramaic, Turkish and other languages mixed in. For speakers of Serbo-Croatian, a Slavic language, it’s entirely incomprehensible. But for a speaker of another Romance language such as Italian, it’s not such a stretch to understand, and Moris was able to converse with his Italian savior.
With his family gone, he was taken in by a Serb family, and changed his name to Milan Adamovic to hide his Jewish identity. Still, by 1942, it became clear that neither as Adamovic nor Albahari would he be safe in the town. So he fled to the mountains.
“If there was [a battle] I took clothes from a dead soldier to wear, I lived like a wolf in the mountains, you know. Visiting villages [asking for something] to give me for eating, it was a terrible time,” Albahari recalled in “Saved By Language.”
He would only feel safe in villages under the control of partisan forces. Yugoslavia was the only country in Europe to be liberated from Nazi rule by its own grassroots resistance.
During his time in the mountains, Albahari joined up with a partisan unit aligned with the movement of Josip Broz Tito, who would lead Communist Yugoslavia after the war. By the war’s end, Tito’s partisans numbered over 80,000 and included more than 6,000 Jews, many in prominent positions, such as Moša Pijade, who would go on to serve as vice president of the Yugoslav parliament after the war.
Moris was out on patrol as a partisan when he came upon a group of American and British paratroopers. They raised their weapons at him, thinking he was an enemy. Moris tried to communicate, but he spoke no English.
When he asked the soldiers if they spoke German or Italian, they shook their heads. When he asked about Spanish, one perked up: a Hispanic-American soldier by the name of David Garijo.
In Ladino, Alabahari was able to explain that he was not an enemy but could lead them to a nearby partisan camp where they would be safe.
“Ladino saved my life in the war,” Albahari recalled in the documentary.
At the partisan camp, Morris received even bigger news: The family that he had assumed had all perished after he left the train were in fact alive. The former school teacher and Ustaša guard who had warned his father had met them at the next train junction to help them escape. Furthermore, around half of the Jews in the train car were able to escape using the same hole Moris used during his initial escape.
Ultimately the family all survived the war, unlike so many other Jews of Sarajevo.
“Where is Samuel, where is Dudo, where is Gedala? They never came back,” Albahari lamented, listing missing neighbors while walking through Sarajevo’s old Jewish neighborhood in the documentary. “Maybe we are happy because we are alive after the Second World War, but also unlikely because every day we must cry for these dead people.”
When Moris returned to Sarajevo, it was an entirely different place from the bustling Jewish community he had once known.
Gone was the sound of Ladino in the streets and alleyways of Bascarsija, the market district where so many of Sarajevo’s Jews had once lived. Gone were the synagogues — only one of the many synagogues that had existed before WWII still functions. Gone was the robust Jewish life that was once a central part of Sarajevo.
Moris was still only 14 by the war’s end, so he returned to school and ultimately graduated at the top of his class. He became a pilot and later director of the Sarajevo Airport.
In this new world, Ladino was spoken, if at all, only in the home.
“Always, when I hear Spanish, I hear my father and mother, and all the synagogues, prayers in Ladino and rabbis who spoke Ladino. But that is in the past,” Albahari says in “Saved by Language.”
Eliezer Papo, who is a generation younger than Albahari, recalled that in his youth Ladino had long been reduced to a language of secrets.
“Mostly, Ladino was used when the elders didn’t want youngsters to understand,” Papo said.
Only later, in the 1980s, did community members realize what was being lost and begin to gather to maintain their language, recount what Jewish Sarajevo had been like and share their wartime stories of survival.
“He never took his story to the places of revenge, but he took it and his life experience to a place of ‘Never again,’ not just ‘Never again for Jews’, but never again for anybody,” said Papo.
Like many Sarajevans, World War II would not be the last major conflict Albahari would see. Less than 40 years later, war would once again come to Sarajevo with the break-up of Yugoslavia.
From 1992-1995 the city remained under constant siege by Bosnian Serb forces looking to break away from what would become Bosnia and Herzegovina. Moris joined with other Jews of Sarajevo in working to provide aid to their fellow Sarajevans during the harsh period.
Sarajevo’s synagogue was turned into a shelter and a soup kitchen. The community ran a network of underground pharmacies and a message service allowing Sarajevans to get word to family and friends outside of the city during what became the longest siege of a capital city in the history of modern warfare.
“Moris was an inspirational persona to many members of Jewish community and La Benevolencija,” Vlado Anderle, the current president of that local Jewish humanitarian organization told JTA. “He was a man with such inviting spirit and energy.”
When the dust settled on the breakup of Yugoslavia, and the new Bosnian state rose from its ashes, Moris found himself once again in a new role.
During the communist era in Yugoslavia, religious activity was discouraged. Sarajevo’s Jews emphasized the ethnic character of Jewish culture rather than the religious one. In the new Bosnia and Herzegovina, that was no longer true. So the community worked to reconnect with their religious identity as well.
“Everybody looked up to the people who had Jewish upbringing before the Second World War,” Papo recalled. “This doesn’t mean that they were rabbis. Just that they knew it better than anyone else.”
Moris, whose formal Jewish education ended in his preteen years, was appointed president of the community’s religious committee.
As such it often fell on him to represent Judaism to the Bosnian society at large, often in a very creative way, according to Papo, who in addition to being a scholar of Ladino is ordained as a rabbi and serves the Sarajevo community as a rabbi-at-large from Israel.
In one case, while being interviewed on a major Bosnian television station, Moris was asked why Jews cover their head with a kippah or other hat during prayer. Moris’ response, or rather creative interpretation, as Papo called it, was made up on the spot.
Moris’ interpretation began with the ancient temple in Jerusalem where Jews once had to fully immerse in a ritual bath before entering.
“Since the Temple in Jerusalem was destroyed it was reduced to washing the uncovered parts of the body only, before entering a synagogue, similarly to Muslims: the feet, the head, the hands…” Papo recalled him saying. But in Europe, as Moris’ answer went, they began to cover more and more of their body. “In Europe they started wearing shoes, so the feet were not uncovered anymore, and then they started wearing a hat, not to have to wash their head… you know it’s Europe, one could catch a cold if going out with wet hair…”
“A few months later, I came to Sarajevo, and found that everyone has heard this explanation and is talking about it, not just people in the community, but in the street,” Papo said. “And you know, I let it pass, I couldn’t correct them, it was just so beautiful. That was his genius.”
“Identity is all about telling stories. And Moris was one of the great storytellers of the community,” Papo added. And through his stories he expressed an identity which was “made of the same contradictions that Sephardic Judaism is made of, that Sarajevo is made of, that Bosnia and Herzegovina is made and that Yugoslavia was and is made of and that the Balkans are made of.”
Albahari is survived by his wife and a son.
—
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The new U.S. passport design is fueling a Star of David conspiracy theory. Here’s what’s really there.
When Secretary of State Marco Rubio unveiled a new U.S. passport design last week, online sleuths zeroed in on a curious detail: “Is that the star of david???” one TikTok user commented on a video of Rubio showing off the document’s revamped look.
“Why do we rock the Star of David on American passports?” asked an X user in a post that garnered 1.6 million views.
The symbol was not, in fact, the Star of David, but rather 13 stars arranged in a hexagram, representing the original 13 colonies. The design is part of the official Great Seal of the United States, approved by the Continental Congress in 1782 as the official symbol for the newly sovereign country.
The hexagram shape wasn’t a new addition to the passport, either. The Great Seal has long been a fixture of the U.S. passport cover; the new design just enlarges it. The seal — including the cluster of 13 stars in a hexagram — appears on all sorts of government materials, including military uniforms, official presidential documents, and the dollar bill.
The shape’s resemblance to the Magen David, however, has long fueled conspiracy theories about secret Jewish or Israeli influence over the U.S. government. To some online commentators, the redesigned passport was fresh confirmation of that belief.
“It’s a colony of israel (sic) so it makes sense to pay homage to their owners,” a TikToker commented about the new design.
The seal’s history
Shortly after they adopted the Declaration of Independence, the Founding Fathers had another important matter to attend to: appointing a committee to design a seal for the United States.
Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams made up the all-star team. Franklin suggested an image of Moses parting the Red Sea. Jefferson wanted “the children of Israel in the wilderness, led by a cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night.” Adams preferred an image of Hercules, the Greek hero known for his strength.
Evidently, none of them had a great eye for graphic design. Congress tabled their proposals.
Two more committees took up the project. In 1782, Secretary of the Continental Congress Charles Thomson integrated the various committees’ ideas into a new design, which featured a bald eagle, a shield, an olive branch and arrows, and a constellation of 13 stars. Congress approved the seal that year.
Thomson described the design as featuring “thirteen stars forming a constellation”; he did not specify a hexagram or six-pointed star. Original sketches, in fact, show the stars in a seemingly random arrangement.
Robert Scot, the chief engraver of the United States Mint, is credited with arranging the 13 stars into the six-pointed geometric star.
According to legend, George Washington ordered the 13 stars arranged as a Star of David as a tribute to Haym Salomon, a Jewish financier who aided the Revolutionary cause. But there’s no historical evidence of that, nor that Washington or Salomon had any role at all in designing the seal.
One plausible theory is that Scot may have simply been emulating the arrangement of stars on the American flag at the time, rearranging the 13 stars to fit symmetrically inside a circular field.
Even so, the myth of the Star of David intentionally appearing on the seal has reached as far as former presidential candidate Ben Carson, who in 2015 suggested that “Salomon gave all his funds to save the U.S. Army and, some say, no one knows for sure, that’s the reason there’s a Star of David on the back of the one dollar bill.”
Historians were quick to correct the record.
“If you squint, you can say there’s some resemblance but that certainly was not the intention of the designers, that we’re aware,” Wayne Homren of the Numismatic Bibliomania Society, which studies currency, told ABC News.
The theory behind the theory
Kent Harber, a professor of psychology at Rutgers University who studies conspiracy theories, said the passport claim fits within the emerging zeitgeist, in which “conspiracy beliefs about Jews and Israel are getting an increasing amount of currency.”
In this case, gaps in the historical record surrounding the hexagram’s design may have helped the theory take hold.
“We can’t take ‘no reason’ for an answer,” Harber said. “We have to have an explanation, and we will fill in that blank with other explanations, even bogus, sometimes sort of seemingly silly ones.”
Harber’s research has found a strong relationship between conspiracy theories, antisemitic attitudes, and hostility toward Israel.
Conspiracy theories are like “epistemological junk food,” he said. “They satisfy this craving by giving you exactly what you want, even though it’s not particularly good for you or for society.”
The post The new U.S. passport design is fueling a Star of David conspiracy theory. Here’s what’s really there. appeared first on The Forward.
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Swastikas, racist slurs painted on a playground and a golf course outside Philadelphia
The police were still there when neighbors arrived to clean up the Philadelphia playground where vandals had struck.
They had come to a playground in Abington Township, just outside Philadelphia, on Saturday morning with cleaning supplies. Officers had been called and were still collecting evidence from the swastikas that someone had spray-painted on the playground equipment and the blacktop, and from the N-word painted on the playground’s sign. So the volunteers waited. Then dozens of them, along with volunteer firefighters and school district staff, went to work.
Abington Township police have several investigative leads, Deputy Chief Ed Quinn told the Forward. “I’m confident we’re making an arrest and holding those responsible accountable for their actions,” he said, adding that it is too early to say whether charges would include a hate crime.
A week earlier, about 25 miles away, someone carved swastikas and a racial slur into the greens at Yardley Country Club, a private golf course. The similar incidents occurred at both the start and the close of the festival of Sukkot.
No arrests have been announced in either case. Neither police department knew about the other’s case until the Forward called. Quinn said he had never heard of the golf course, and Yardley’s police chief, William Golden, said the same of the playground. Golden declined to discuss leads or whether the vandalism would be charged as a hate crime.
Golden said he had also learned of a golf course about five miles away in Morrisville that was vandalized a week before Yardley’s. The course, he believed, did not report it to police and repaired the damage on their own. Golden said there were no swastikas in that vandalism, but that it included a racist slur.
The Yardley Country Club is adjacent to the Abrams Hebrew Academy, a Jewish elementary school with close to 200 students. Rabbi Ira Budow has run the school for more than four decades. His car is parked beside the hole that was hit, he said, and golf balls sometimes sail onto the school grounds.
“I really think it was probably a prank,” he said, noting that he can’t recall any other local antisemitic incident in his time there. “This is a good town.” Yardley, where Budow lives, is also home to three synagogues. The local police work with the school on security, and he is scheduled to speak to the Borough Council on Tuesday night.
The school already receives state security money. Applications ask whether a school feels threatened and requires them to provide an example – which gave Budow a message for whoever did this.
“This person should know that because of him, the school will be able to get more security grants,” he said. “They did the job for me.”
Why Shapiro is watching
Abington Township is also home to Gov. Josh Shapiro’s private residence.
“Gov. Shapiro has always been clear: antisemitism and hate have no place in Pennsylvania,” Rosie Lapowsky, a spokesperson for Shapiro, told the Forward. “These acts are intended to intimidate our neighbors and we condemn them unequivocally. Every Pennsylvanian deserves to feel safe in their community.”
For Shapiro, it is close to home in more than one way. His wife, Lori, went to elementary school at Abrams, in the building beside the golf course. Shapiro was Pennsylvania’s attorney general on Oct. 27, 2018, when a gunman killed 11 worshippers at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh. That anniversary is three weeks away. He was sworn in as governor on three Bibles, one of them rescued from the synagogue.
His own brush with violence opens his memoir, Where We Keep the Light. In April 2025, hours after the Shapiro family hosted a Passover seder, a man firebombed the governor’s residence in Harrisburg while the family and guests slept inside. Shapiro writes that it sharpened his sense that antisemitic violence is a lived reality, even for a governor with a police detail. “The bubble burst that morning,” he writes.
Shapiro is up for reelection next month. He is also widely seen as a possible Democratic candidate for president in 2028, which would make him the nation’s first Jewish president if he won.
Two communities, one response
Jason Holtzman, who runs the Jewish Community Relations Council at the Jewish Federation of Greater Philadelphia, has been watching the headlines pile up. The region’s Jewish community, which he puts at between 250,000 and 300,000 people, now responds to incidents “far more often than we were a few years ago,” he said.
In August, the Weitzman National Museum of American Jewish History in Philadelphia was vandalized, the third attack on it in one year. “These headlines are regular to us,” he said.
What worries Holtzman this week is the setting. “It’s really concerning that it’s also moving into everyday spaces,” he said, like a playground and a golf course. The one in Yardley, beside a Jewish school, “definitely affects children and it definitely affects people in our community.”
He also sees an opening. Antisemitism and anti-Black racism, Holtzman said, “grow from the same root,” and local churches, synagogues and elected officials have rallied together. “While this is a horrible thing, we’re hoping that this is an opportunity to actually bring people together in both communities.”
The Salem Baptist Church of Abington said much the same in a statement. The church called the N-word “the nuclear weapon in the English language” and the swastika “the symbolic equivalent.” Ignorance, it said, “has shown its vile face. At a park. The symbol of civic unity.” It called the vandalism “yet another opportunity for Blacks and Jews to be reminded that our enemies are two sides of the same coin. Unity. Not polarity. Not isolation.”
On Thursday, the town is set to hold a vigil at the park. The idea, the invitation says, is to “reclaim a shared community space from hate.”
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What do Germans talk about when they talk about antisemitism?
In today’s Germany, an accusation of antisemitism can end careers, shutter institutions and put political alliances beyond consideration. That gravity is understandable in the country responsible for the Holocaust. What has become less clear, particularly since the Hamas-led attacks on southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, and the ensuing war in Gaza, is what Germans mean when they use the word “antisemitism.”
Days before Berliners went to the polls on Sept. 20, Germany’s chancellor Friedrich Merz provided a particularly awkward illustration. At a campaign event for his party, the CDU, Merz called antisemitism “the most perfidious form of xenophobia.” German Jews were quick to point out a glaring problem; they were not foreigners. The contentious IHRA framework officially embraced by Germany stresses that antisemitism and hostility toward foreigners are separate phenomena.
The confusion has become politically consequential since Berlin voted. Die Linke, a democratic socialist party, won 25.7%, more than doubling its 2023 share and finishing nearly seven points ahead of the CDU, which came in at 18.8%. The far-right AfD came third with 16.3%, itself an extraordinary gain of 7.2 points. Yet, since the election, the question consuming German politics has been whether Die Linke is too antisemitic to govern.
Israel’s ambassador, Ron Prosor, described antisemitism within Die Linke as systemic. The Central Council of Jews warned the SPD and Greens against joining a Linke-led coalition. Bavaria’s premier, Markus Söder, called Die Linke “deeply antisemitic.”
Philipp Peyman Engel, editor in chief of the Jüdische Allgemeine, the weekly newspaper of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, distilled the case against Die Linke in Britain’s Jewish Chronicle. The party, he wrote, was “riddled with people who hate Jews and Israel” and represented “the elimination of Israel.” Even voters drawn by rents and social policy had tolerated its hatred of Israel; SPD and Green politicians would forfeit any claim to moral seriousness by governing with it. “No non-Jewish democrat should simply accept this election result either,” he wrote.
That is an extraordinary indictment of a party that just received more votes than any other in the German capital. It is also hard to reconcile with the party that actually exists.
Die Linke does carry unusual historical baggage. It was formed in 2007 from a movement of trade unionists and Social Democrats alienated by Gerhard Schröder’s welfare reforms and the PDS, successor to East Germany’s ruling communist party. The GDR pursued an anti-Zionist foreign policy, strands of which survived reunification; the modern party also absorbed a western anti-imperialist tradition in which hostility toward Israel has at times shaded into antisemitism.
A 2011 analysis published by Germany’s Federal Agency for Civic Education found serious hostility toward Israel in parts of Die Linke but rejected describing the party itself as antisemitic. A year later, Die Linke nominated Beate Klarsfeld — the Nazi hunter who spent decades pursuing German war criminals and famously slapped former Chancellor Kurt Georg Kiesinger over his Nazi past — for the German presidency. She received 126 votes in the Federal Assembly.
Die Linke’s current official position is markedly different from Engel’s characterization in the Jewish Chronicle. At its federal congress in June, Die Linke explicitly affirmed Israeli and Palestinian self-determination and the right of both Israel and Palestine to exist. It passed a separate resolution condemning antisemitism and describing its sharp rise since Oct. 7. While one may regard those positions as inadequate, contradictory or politically naïve, they do not amount to a program for eliminating Israel.
The party that won Berlin last month has changed in other ways as well. Its candidate for mayor, Elif Eralp, a trained lawyer, was born in Munich to Turkish socialist trade unionists who fled the 1980 military coup. Her campaign centered on housing, rent controls and migrant rights, and borrowed consciously from Zohran Mamdani’s campaign in New York; Linke activists even traveled there to meet his advisers.
That helps explain why this election has rattled Germany’s political center. Die Linke is no longer easily dismissed as the residual party of eastern German communism. In Berlin, it has assembled a young, urban and increasingly diverse electorate around an issue — the cost of housing — that the governing parties have conspicuously failed to solve. Unlike the AfD, it also has potential coalition partners. A Linke-SPD-Green government could remove the CDU from power and seek to implement the result of a 2021 referendum, approved by 57.6% of voters, calling for the socialization of large housing companies.
There are nonetheless questions about parts of its Berlin organization, especially in Neukölln. A rapper at a campaign event sang “Yalla Yalla Intifada” and “Death to the IDF.” Ferat Koçak, the district’s Linke Bundestag member, was photographed on election night with Ibrahim Ibrahim, described by Democ, an anti-extremist monitoring group, as a longtime activist with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, which the EU lists as a terrorist organization. Ibrahim has also been reported to have praised Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar as a “steadfast leader” and “martyr hero.”
Beyond Berlin, a June investigation by Bayerischer Rundfunk into internal forums and chats of Linksjugend, the party’s youth organization, found messages by a spokesman for Die Linke’s youth organization in Rhineland-Palatinate referring to Israeli “concentration camps” and a “genocide in the name of Judaism” and telling Israel to “drop dead!”
Wolfgang Benz, who directed the Center for Research on Antisemitism at Berlin’s Technical University for more than two decades and edited an eight-volume handbook on antisemitism, told the Tagesspiegel that the term Antisemitismus is undergoing an Ausverkauf — an inflationary depletion of its meaning.
“Die Linke is not antisemitic,” he said. Anti-Israel slogans can be crude, denunciatory, even “misanthropic,” without thereby becoming Jew-hatred. His answer when asked whether the chant “Death to the IDF” was antisemitic was no.
In the same interview, Benz also argued that Die Linke’s leadership should deal loudly and decisively with genuinely unacceptable conduct and singled out Bodo Ramelow, who became Linke’s first minister-president in 2014, and Petra Pau, a veteran Linke politician and former Bundestag vice president, as politicians with strong records against antisemitism. Benz’s successor, Stefanie Schüler-Springorum, has likewise called the debate around Die Linke “overblown” and warned that antisemitism is being used to influence coalition formation.
The consequences of collapsing antisemitism and anti-Zionism have extended beyond electoral politics. In Verfassungsblog, an open-access forum on constitutional law and politics, scholars Dörthe Engelcke and Ilyas Saliba documented Palestinian-related events at German universities losing rooms or being canceled, while antisemitism commissioners intervened in debates over terms such as “genocide,” “apartheid” and “settler colonialism.” Berlin’s Jews, meanwhile, are hardly unanimous. An open letter signed by 150 Jewish Berliners, including Susan Neiman, Deborah Feldman and Eva Menasse, accused parts of the media and Jewish community of instrumentalizing antisemitism against Die Linke while the far right advances.
The signatories also point out some obvious facts that, I imagine, tend to get overlooked: that Jews in Berlin pay rent, send children to schools, use hospitals and, like their neighbors, worry about economic insecurity.
Britain’s Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn offers a cautionary precedent. As genuine failures over antisemitism became entangled with factional warfare, parts of Corbyn’s camp focused so heavily on the political motives behind the accusations that they appeared to minimize the underlying problem. The result was to strengthen the very attacks they regarded as politically motivated. Die Linke would be unwise to repeat that mistake.
Right now, far more than Die Linke’s reputation is on the line. The far-right AfD party won 43.8% in Saxony-Anhalt last month, an increase of 23 percentage points. On the same day Berlin voted, it won 38.2% in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, according to preliminary official results, while the CDU fell to 4.9% and disappeared from the state parliament. In Berlin, the AfD rose from 9.1 to 16.3% and finished third.
Those results should provide some perspective on the attempt to establish whether Die Linke’s 25.7% represents an antisemitic rupture in German democracy. Die Linke’s leadership will have to demonstrate that its stated opposition to antisemitism has real-world consequences. But the claim that Jew-hatred is baked into the party itself is unsupported by its program, its history or the records of many of its leading politicians.
What the controversy more clearly reveals is the alarm produced when a party long treated as marginal suddenly wins and becomes capable of leading its government. Antisemitism, the most devastating accusation available in German political language, offers Die Linke’s opponents a means of turning questions about the behavior of certain activists into a referendum on the party’s legitimacy.
Yet while Berlin argues over whether Die Linke is fit to govern, a far-right party with openly ethnonationalist positions and powerful antidemocratic currents, is winning close to 40% in parts of the former East. What’s shocking is that Germany’s political center is devoting its fiercest moral language to the left precisely when the far right is remaking the country’s electoral map.
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