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How Germany’s Holocaust remembrance culture kicked off a democratic crisis
WEIMAR, Thuringia, Germany — Walking through Weimar, Germany, the legacy of the Holocaust seems inescapable. Stolpersteine — German for “stumbling blocks” — are placed outside the homes of people killed during the Shoah, essential evidence of Erinnerungskultur, or memory culture, a national commitment to memorializing, and learning from, the Nazis’ atrocities.
But this commitment is being challenged. Alan Bern, a Yiddish musician described to me as “the man who solved the Shoah,” had just returned from a press conference when I met him, where he spoke alongside local law enforcement officials about a 51-year-old man charged with the 33rd case of vandalism of the memorial stones in the Eastern German city this year.
Bern, 70, an American who came to Germany nearly 40 years ago and holds the nation’s highest civilian honor, said, “Attacks on Stolpersteine are not primarily attacks against Jews, but rather against society and, not least, against human dignity.”
Bern, a composer, founded a school called the Other Music Academy, where he and his colleagues are creating encounters critical to the fight against Jew-hatred in Germany.
They bring together Jews and the descendants of Nazis, Israelis and Palestinians, and Germans and Syrian migrants in an attempt to apply the lessons of the Holocaust forward to the issues facing Germany today. Democracy is in the center’s DNA both in ethos and architecture — the entrance to their dance hall is a 100 year-old door from the Deutsches Nationaltheater in Weimar, where Germany’s first constitution was written and ratified.
“I believe that the encounter with otherness,” Bern said, “is essential to transforming yourself and transforming society.”
Bern’s work helps extend Germany’s memory culture, applying its lessons beyond the Holocaust to address threats against democracy posed by the far-right, which is gaining popularity around the country.
Although not all incidents of antisemitism in Germany are coming from the right, the rise of the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party has forced a new debate over Germany’s commitment to remembering the Holocaust and other Nazi atrocities. AfD holds a plurality in Thuringia’s state parliament, and, after this year’s February elections, became the main opposition party in Germany’s federal parliament. The party’s most radical wing says that memory culture is a “guilt cult” and calls for a “180 degree turnaround” in the nation’s approach to remembering its history.
And while many Jews are deeply concerned about the right’s desire to abandon memory culture, some Jews in Germany, particularly those on the left, feel that the societal commitment to preventing another Holocaust has caused the state to police their ability to act and think freely, particularly when critiquing Israel. Since Oct. 7, 2023, Jewish activists have lost awards and speaking engagements, and have even been labeled extremists and put under surveillance by Germany’s state intelligence service.
Memory culture is not just essential to Germans, however; it’s a key for Jews around the world, who take heritage trips to concentration camps and ancestral homes there as part of memorializing the Holocaust. And worldwide, memory culture is essential to remembering global atrocities — yet its tenets are under attack. The Trump administration has criticized the Smithsonian’s approach to slavery, while Turkey refuses to acknowledge the existence of the Armenian genocide.
I went to Germany to speak with both Jews and non-Jewish Germans who are doing the work of bringing memory culture to life, to see how their work is being impacted by these political shifts, and to find out: What is lost if Germany loses its memory?
A brief history of memory culture
After the Berlin Wall fell, in 1989, the newly reunited and democratic Germany defined its national identity as a state committed to learning from the atrocities it committed in the past, thus preventing them from ever happening again.
But this devotion to the Holocaust wasn’t always the case. At the end of World War II, fewer than 15,000 Jews remained in Germany, the majority of whom went to West Germany when the country was partitioned after World War II. West Germany largely avoided accepting responsibility for the Holocaust until 1970, when Chancellor Willy Brandt visited the Warsaw Ghetto, in Poland, and laid a wreath at its memorial.
Meanwhile, under East Germany’s Soviet-style system, Nazi crimes were stripped of their antisemitic motivations and recast as offenses to communism; the small Jewish community of less than 1,000 people who remained there continued to be persecuted by the Stasi for perceived opposition to socialist values.
After the Berlin Wall came down and Germany reunified the following year, Chancellor Helmut Kohl oversaw the immigration of some 200,000 Jews from the former Soviet Union. The majority of Germany’s new Jews moved to Berlin, but others repopulated Jewish communities in the former East.
With the formation of the new German republic, the government moved back to Berlin, and in 1999, voted to construct the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in the heart of the city — next to Berlin’s famous Brandenburg Gate. They expanded concentration camp memorials to include details about the Holocaust and built a world-renowned Jewish museum designed by Daniel Libeskind. Visits to these sites became a regular part of German school curricula. A centralized national Jewish council — The Zentralrat der Juden in Deutschland, or the Central Council of Jews in Germany — today receives €22 million in government funding to serve as the official voice of Jewish people and to advocate against antisemitism across society.
Memory culture is palpable everywhere in Germany, whether in large memorials and historical sites like concentration camps, or the small plaques and reminders, like the stumbling blocks, about the Jews who once lived there.
For years, however, shame over the Holocaust has muted national pride. Many Germans avoided flying their flag for fear of invoking the kind of nationalism that led to the rise of the Nazi party. (Though in the past two decades, flags have become more common at German sporting matches and events.)
That has led some, such as the far-right AfD party, to claim that memory culture has harmed Germany. Former party leader Alexander Gauland referred in 2018 to the Nazi era as a speck of “bird shit” in an otherwise grand national history, a speck that was given outsize importance.
And more recently, memory culture has become complicated by modern political concerns. In 2008, Chancellor Angela Merkel declared that supporting Israel was Germany’s “reason of state,” and the government has consistently operated with an iron-clad support for Israel as a form of reparations for the Holocaust.
But as Israel’s actions have come under increasing international condemnation since Oct. 7, Germany’s memory culture too has come under broader criticism by Jews and non-Jews alike. Some Jews in Germany are concerned over what they see as Germany abandoning Israel after Chancellor Friedrich Merz halted weapons exports to the Jewish state in August to curb the supply that could be used in Gaza. Other Jews, meanwhile, feel unable to speak out against the war given the national devotion to Israel.
And the Central Council, the state Jewish voice, believes that AfD is taking advantage of the war to inflame tensions between a new wave of Muslim immigrants and Germany’s Jews — and, in turn, win Jewish support for their party, including their belief in dismantling memory culture. Before this year’s elections, the Council circulated a letter signed by the leaders of every Jewish state organization warning that the AfD “uses Jews as an excuse to spread its racist and anti-Muslim slogans.”
The right-wing critique of memory culture in Germany
The AfD was officially designated a ‘rightwing extremist’ force by Germany’s intelligence agency, a status the far-right party is contesting in court. Still, it is the largest party in Thuringia and is poised to take over at least one state in next year’s elections. This would give it control over the educational and cultural agencies that fund memory culture in Germany, agencies it hopes to defund. Clearly, the AfD is not a fringe group.
And it is gaining increasing influence nationally and visibility internationally. Prior to their strong showing in February’s elections, both vice president JD Vance and President Trump’s ally Elon Musk encouraged German voters to vote for AfD.
The official voice of the Jewish community in Germany unambiguously says that the AfD is a growing threat to German Jews, and Jews around the world. In their 2024 annual report, the Council called the AfD a “legitimizing bridge” between the political mainstream and extremist actors — like the man who livestreamed himself ranting about the Great Replacement Theory before trying and failing to break into the synagogue in Halle with a gun in 2019, killing two people outside its doors.
“There is a will in this party to change the remembrance and the memory of National Socialism in focusing on the positive parts of German history,” said Shila Erlbaum, the Council’s director of policy. “This is an attack on Jewish history and Jewish memory.”
But not all Jews agree the AfD is such a threat. In 2018, a group of Jewish party members founded the Federal Association of Jews in the AfD (JAfD), a small caucus within the party’s 70,000 members. Today, JAfD has only 25 members, along with another 80 supporters who are not full members.
Artur Abramovych, the JAfD’s 29-year-old chairman, told me that they established the caucus after anti-immigrant demonstrations broke out in the eastern city of Chemnitz, when two Kurdish immigrants stabbed and killed a man.
Like the party’s leaders, the JAfD believes, according to its website, that “the greatest threat to Europe in the 21st century is the growth of the Muslim population” and adds that “the rise of political Islam is also primarily a threat to Jews.” While party leaders’ statements contradict AfD’s official support for Israel, the JAfD is strongly and unequivocally pro-Israel.
In January 2024, the German investigative newsroom Correctiv reported that AfD members secretly met with neo-Nazis and wealthy businessmen to plan the mass deportation of immigrants from Germany in a plot called “remigration.” The news brought hundreds of thousands of Germans into the streets in protest.
AfD initially disputed what was discussed at the meeting, though eventually party leader Alice Weidel embraced remigration as the official party platform. Though the party is once again trying to distance itself from the controversial remigration concept to create a broader appeal among the mainstream electorate, JAfD still believes that the plan is essential. Abramovych himself is an immigrant — from Ukraine — but claimed that immigration is threatening German society due to Muslim fertility rates.
Like the party’s hardliners, JAfD is also critical of Germany’s memory culture. Abramovych said that it didn’t originally hurt Jewish people, but now does “because people are forcing German politics to keep the borders open and let millions of Jew haters into the country” due to the state’s Holocaust guilt.
Germany’s immigration politics have moved to the right since Oct. 7, 2023. In an interview with Der Spiegel after the Hamas attack, former Chancellor Olaf Scholz told the magazine, “We have to deport people more often and faster.” Earlier this year, Merz’s government tightened border controls, and in October the Bundestag, analogous to the U.S. House of Representatives, voted to revoke a fast-track to citizenship law passed by Scholz.
While he smoked handrolled cigarettes and drank a cup of black coffee outside of a Ukrainian cafe in Berlin’s Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg neighborhood, I asked Abramovych if he was concerned that Jewish immigrants like himself could be deported from Germany in the future if the AfD gained power and remigration became government policy.
“What? Who would deport the Jews? That’s ridiculous,” Abramovych said.
An alternative critique of memory culture from the left
AfD had its first electoral win in the Bundestag, Germany’s lower parliamentary house, in 2017, becoming the third-largest party in the parliament. Shortly after, poet and political scientist Max Czollek published the best-selling De-Integrate!: A Jewish Survival Guide for the 21st Century, a polemic about Jewish assimilation into German culture. As a result of his edgy take on memory culture in Germany, Czollek has become something of a celebrity, and a bit of a pariah.
For Czollek, AfD is the symptom of a greater problem in Germany where the nation’s guilt over the Holocaust creates a “theater of memory” — a term borrowed from the late sociologist Y. Michal Bodemann — in which Jews play out their dutiful role on the national stage, held up by the state as model minorities, but are subject to losing its protection if they deviate from accepted norms.
Thuringian AfD leader Bjorn Höcke gained infamy when he called Berlin’s Holocaust memorial a “monument of shame,” but Czollek wrote that the idea was not new; in 1998, famed German left-wing intellectual Martin Walser called Germany’s Holocaust remembrance culture “monumentalization of shame” in his acceptance speech for the Peace Prize of the German Publishers’ Association.
To Czollek, AfD is just the latest step in a proud German tradition of tacitly accepting Nazism, albeit by a different name, in the East.
Behind Balenciaga sunglasses outside of a Kreuzberg cafe, Czollek described his family’s life in the former East Germany, part of a very small community of Jews who stayed after the war instead of departing for West Germany, America or Israel.
“The Jewish rituals I grew up with when my father started to reconnect to this tradition is more like the old, dark, empty synagogue singing of 20 people,” he explained. “And it’s like, ‘Why are there no people?’”
Czollek was born just before the Berlin wall came down, but for his family in East Germany, the Shoah was ever present in the absence of Jews. And it was magnified by what he described as a betrayal by the communist government that took over, which declared itself, its state and all of its citizens to be anti-Nazi — even if they had previously been active members of the Nazi party.
A report by the CIA in 1959 identified over 150 former high-ranking Nazi officials then working in positions of power within the communist East German government, and called it “doubtful” that they were sincere in the “change of political thinking.”
“You have this first generation of Jewish communists who came to Germany to build a better Germany and build up on this idea of anti-fascism as a proper fighting position,” he explained. “Suddenly, a lot of former Nazis were declared anti-fascist. So this is where the memory work fails.”
After the wall came down, Czollek argues that memory culture became a branding tool for Germany to prove itself as a democracy on the international stage — a tool that never offered anything meaningful to the few East German Jews like him, and that has proved ineffective at preventing the revival of a new ethno-nationalist right.
“Memory culture has become a tool in legitimizing and justifying the pride in Germany,” he said. But, he noted, memory culture is a relatively young part of German life; its widespread adoption came, ironically, during the “Years of the Baseball Bat” in the ‘90s, when neo-Nazi violence against migrants escalated severely.
After Oct. 7, Czollek believes that memory culture warped into something else entirely; today, anyone who speaks out against Israel’s response to the attacks in Gaza faces cancellation, disinvitation or even arrest.
“Memory culture used to be a pretty self-centered process of German self-improvement and reinvention,” Czollek said. “By now, it has become a tool of dominance and hegemony.”
“It’s almost like we have done the worst, and we have remembered the best,” he continued, opining that Holocaust and concentration camp memorials boost Germany’s national self-esteem and identity as a moral actor. Then, “you can start accusing migrants of not being as good as you are.”
And Jews who criticize the government’s version of memory culture risk losing state protection.
“There’s a tempting quality to playing along with the theater of memory, because being Jewish is rewarded if you do it in a specific way,” he continued. “Being a non-aligned Jew comes with a price.”
Although solidarity between Germany’s minorities — particularly Jews and Muslims — has become strained post-Oct. 7, exacerbated by the AfD, Czollek believes it’s the only way through the crisis brought about by memory culture and the rise of the far-right.
That’s why Czollek’s new book is called Alles auf Anfang — or, Everything Back to the Beginning. It’s a search for a new culture of remembrance in German life that includes not just Jews, but recognition of other migrant victims in German society.
Currently, much of Germany’s memory culture, exemplified in memorials like the Buchenwald concentration camp, keep their focus firmly in the past. But Czollek believes that, to address the current era, Germany needs to also find ways to commemorate violence perpetrated against its other minority groups.
“If you want to have memory culture as a living, active and productive thing today, it has to be updated every generation,” he said. “Sadness or grief is not a limited resource. We can all grieve together.”
The weaponization of memory culture against Jews
Immediately after Oct. 7, Wieland Hoban, a Jewish German living in Frankfurt am Main, began demonstrating against Germany’s support for Israel, and was arrested multiple times — the first time for wearing a shirt displaying a revolutionary fist logo, which is associated with the pro-Palestinian and anti-Israel organization Samidoun that was banned in Germany a few days following the attack.
The next month, Hoban gave a speech where he said, “Germany can’t wash away its Holocaust guilt with the blood of Palestinians.” Afterwards, he was taken aside by police and charged on suspicion of Volksverhetzung — “incitement to hatred” — a charge that has been used by the German government to prosecute neo-Nazis and far-right extremists, and carries a sentence of up to five years in prison.
In Hoban’s view, memory culture had extended past its logical limits to charge him, a Jew, with a violation of the German criminal code for invoking his own history.
“They explained to me that I had mentioned the Holocaust and that in Germany, they take the Holocaust very seriously,” Hoban said. “This was a bit surreal.”
Hoban, a composer and translator, has been chairman of Jüdische Stimme für gerechten Frieden in Nahost (Jewish Voice for Just Peace in the Middle East) since 2021. He told me that, like many artists in Germany, the cause of Palestinian self-determination has been important to him.
“This occupation of Judaism, through Zionism, had just pushed me away from any identification with Jewishness,” Hoban said. But joining Jüdische Stimme helped him resolve “an inner contradiction” he felt in being Jewish and also supporting Palestinians.
This June, Hoban received a text from a journalist asking him if he’d seen the latest report from the BfV, Germany’s domestic intelligence agency, on extremist groups in Germany. He hadn’t, but when he looked it up, Hoban learned that his organization had been labeled as a “foreign-related extremist” group.
While AfD is using the courts in an attempt to clear their domestic extremist label, Jüdische Stimme is not pushing back. Hoban doesn’t dispute the reasons for the label — he does criticize Israel and Germany’s memory culture — so his group sees no way to clear its name.
“I wish more people would just have the balls to say, ‘I don’t care if you call me antisemitic, I’m sticking to my guns here,’” Hoban said.
With the BfV’s extremist designation, Jüdische Stimme is now vulnerable to surveillance by the intelligence agency, as well as infiltration by informants.
But while the state is adamantly opposed to their cause, Hoban believes that public opinion is changing. The week that we spoke in September, a poll showed that 62% of all German voters believe Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, including a majority of both Christian Democratic Union and AfD voters. A report by the International Federation for Human Rights also found in October that Germany, among other nations, has weaponized the fight against antisemitism to suppress dissent.
And, over a year after Hoban was charged with incitement to hatred, he received a letter from the public prosecutor’s office informing him that the charge against him had been dropped.
A concentration camp gets political
The Buchenwald Memorial was established in 1958 on the site of the former concentration camp by the government of East Germany to commemorate communist resistance fighters; it did not memorialize the dead Jews. But after reunification, the Memorial’s focus expanded to include the more than 56,000 people killed and 280,000 who were imprisoned at the site, becoming a centerpiece in Germany’s tapestry of memory.
Today, Buchenwald — one of the centerpieces of Germany’s memory culture — finds itself caught in the middle of the debate over how to remember the Holocaust. It’s using its mission to confront its dark history in a new way: fighting back against politicians who distort the Holocaust.
When an AfD member ran for mayor of Nordhausen, a city in Thuringia, in 2023, the Memorial’s official social media pages called him out online for dog whistling to right-wing extremists, invoking a false Holocaust-distorting conspiracy theory. The post changed the course of the election; in the first round of elections, the candidate had more than 45% of the vote, but after the Memorial’s statement, he failed to win in the second round.
“Many older inhabitants of Nordhausen who had not voted for many years said, ‘No, we don’t want to have a Holocaust denier as a mayor,’” the memorial’s director, Jens-Christian Wagner, said in an interview.
Last year, Wagner pursued a more extensive outreach with 300,000 letters mailed to seniors in Thuringia ahead of the state’s elections. The letters warned of the ways in which AfD party leaders have used Nazi language and distorted history.
The AfD fought back, taking the Memorial to court and accusing the Memorial of interfering in “political decision-making.” They lost.
“The court says explicitly that we can’t be neutral against any kind of Holocaust distortion,” Wagner explained to me.
With that mandate, Wagner now considers it his duty and the mission of the Memorial to combat Holocaust distortion, especially when it might affect elections. The Memorial has a particular interest; it’s located in Thuringia, where the AfD is gaining power, and it could lose its funding if the party wins control.
“With our interventions, we don’t think that we can change the positions of the AfD,” Wagner said. “We want to reach all these people who are not specifically voting for the AfD, who are in the gray zone, who can be rescued for democracy.”
Looking towards Germany’s future generations
The AfD has lately focused on reaching youth voters, spending heavily on digital outreach. As a result, young people in Germany are becoming increasingly anti-migrant, embracing far-right political ideas that were once verboten in Germany for being too close to Nazism.
Despite the Memorial’s successful interventions to deter adults from voting for AfD, Wagner is concerned about the rightward shift of younger generations, who are less likely to treat information from a Holocaust memorial with reverence — or even respect its history.
The director described young people who visit the Memorial on school trips displaying the Hitler salute, shouting “Sieg Heil” and photographing each other in front of crematory ovens.
“There were some right-wing young people in every school class for years, but these were only one or two, and the majority was against them, and this has completely changed,” Wagner said. “Now, spreading Holocaust distortion, being right-wing, is common sense in these school classes, and it’s very, very difficult for our educators to have a discourse with them.”
The Memorial has been attempting to revise their educational programming to make visits longer and more in-depth, and even built a youth hostel on the site so that school groups can stay and have extended experiences that they hope will make a lasting impact.
Alan Bern, of the Other Music Academy, also is also worried about the younger generations; he sees resonating with Germany’s youth as one of his most urgent and important challenges.
“Young people in Weimar have almost no real relationship to what it is that we’re doing,” Bern said. “So when they’re told ‘You shouldn’t be antisemitic,’ it’s just some adult telling them ‘Don’t do this.’”
Like at Buchenwald, where the education department has placed its hopes for the future into its youth hostel, Bern wants to transform the former youth prison next to Other Music Academy into a dormitory of sorts where young people can stay for several days. The dichotomy of the prison’s barbed wire courtyard and its painted exterior wall, which artists have covered with colorful Keith Haring murals, pose a striking question about the direction of Germany’s future: Which way?
Pointing towards the floor and then to the prison across the driveway, Bern said, jokingly: “It’s either this or that.”
Challenged from both the left and the right, it’s unclear what is next for Germany’s memory culture. For now, the younger generations are caught in the middle.
While waiting at the bus stop to head back from Buchenwald, I found myself unexpectedly sandwiched in the middle of a high school tour group as they posed for a class photo. After we all boarded the bus, about half of them sat quietly — maybe contemplating the horrors they’d just seen, maybe dozing off. But as we drove down the hill toward Weimar, the bus also filled with the sound of laughter.
The future of memory culture, ultimately, will be up to them.
The post How Germany’s Holocaust remembrance culture kicked off a democratic crisis appeared first on The Forward.
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Manhattan Central Synagogue attacker faces federal hate crime charges
(JTA) — The man accused of disrupting Shabbat services at Manhattan’s Central Synagogue last week now faces federal hate crimes charges in addition to the state ones leveled against him immediately after the attack.
“These charges serve as notice that the Department of Justice will intervene to protect the public in the face of antisemitic and racially motivated attacks,” Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division said in a statement on Tuesday.
Larry Montes, 46, of the Bronx, New York, was charged with two counts of committing hate crimes, each of which carries a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison, and one count of damage to religious property resulting in bodily injury, which carries a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison.
During the attack last Friday at the Reform synagogue in Manhattan, Montes, who was sitting near the front of the sanctuary, allegedly stood up nine minutes into the service and began shouting, “You know who the f–ck I am.”
Montes then approached the stage of the synagogue and knocked over two ceremonial silver candle sticks, causing them to be damaged, according to the complaint filed by an FBI agent investigating the case.
As the synagogue’s head of security attempted to remove Montes from the sanctuary, he then said “F–ck you people” and “I don’t f–ck with you people” before punching a 63-year-old congregant in the face and knocking her to the ground.
While Montes was handcuffed and arrested in the lobby of the synagogue, he then allegedly told a security guard “F–ck you [n-word]” and headbutted him near his left eye socket.
During his subsequent interview with NYPD officers following his arrest, he allegedly told officers, “F–ck the Jews. … It’s racial” and “I will never affiliate with no filthy f–cking synagogues, either here or in fucking Israel.” Montes allegedly told officers that he had felt disrespected at the service, so he “got up, start[ed] some sh–t, [and] smacked somebody around.”
When asked by NYPD officers why he felt disrespected at the service, Montes allegedly replied, “it’s all a racial thing” and that it was “all religious motivated.” Montes also stated during his post-arrest interview that he identified as Jewish, according to the complaint. Montes’ aunt previously told the New York Post that he was “mentally traumatized because of his desire to belong to that religion [Judaism].”
Montes has been in custody since his arrest immediately after Friday’s attack. He was arraigned that same night and is due in Manhattan Criminal Court on Thursday.
The federal charges come as the attack has sparked widespread condemnation from New York leaders, including Mayor Zohran Mamdani, and spurred a Jewish security watchdog group to call on the NYPD to place more officers in hotspots for potential hate crimes.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Manhattan Central Synagogue attacker faces federal hate crime charges appeared first on The Forward.
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He’s campaigning to regulate Texas oil and gas. Why is he linking his Jewish opponent to the Bolshevik Revolution?
A Texas race that would normally focus on oil wells, pipelines and energy policy has spilled into accusations of antisemitism.
In a fundraising email last month, Bo French, the Republican nominee for the powerful Texas Railroad Commission, circulated an AI-generated image of Jon Rosenthal, his Jewish Democratic opponent, smiling inside the room where Russia’s Romanov royal family was killed after the Bolshevik Revolution.
Rosenthal has “much in common with the Marxist revolutionaries who brutally executed the Romanov family,” the email reads. “My opponent has spent his time in office mocking Christianity, the Virgin Birth, and Christian Communion, while voting against religious liberty and for the spread of Islam.”
The text “Radical Rosenthal” with a blood-red outline overlays the black-and-white image.
“I do see it as antisemitic,” Rosenthal, the only Jewish member of the Texas statehouse, told the Forward. “Look at the history of the Bolsheviks and how the Jews were scapegoated. To invoke that here and now is disturbing.”
French did not respond to the Forward’s request for comment.
The message echoes the antisemitic conspiracy theory “Judeo-Bolshevism” that Jews created or controlled communism to undermine Western society. It became central to the Nazi propaganda used as a justification for violence against Jews. The fundraising email was first reported by Texas Monthly magazine.
“This is something that Jews have faced in the arena forever,” said Arthur Pronin, the Jewish president of the Meyerland Area Democrats Club in Houston. “This sort of thing that ‘They’re not one of us. They’re communists. They don’t have allegiance to the values of this country.’ It has a very specific resonance.”
Rosenthal, 63, was raised as a Reform Jew in an interfaith family, with a Jewish father and Christian mother. When Rosenthal was 14, he spent a year in Israel attending school in Hebrew and learning to speak the language while his father taught at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He later became a mechanical engineer and worked in the oil and gas industry for 30 years before entering politics in 2017. In 2018, Rosenthal was elected to the state legislature, taking his oath of office on a Torah he received as a bar mitzvah gift.
In an interview with the Forward last year, Rosenthal said that he has at times faced antisemitic comments from members in the state legislature, including stereotypical remarks about Jews and money.
“Antisemitism is alive and well in Texas,” Rosenthal told the Forward.
Last year, he led opposition to a bill requiring public schools to display the Ten Commandments in every classroom, which was signed into law by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott in May 2025.
To underscore what he considered hypocrisy of self-identified Christian nationalists who supported the legislation, Rosenthal introduced an amendment to require the display of both the Jewish and Roman Catholic versions of the Ten Commandments, a measure that failed.
Rosenthal ran unopposed for the Democratic nomination for Railroad Commissioner. He is seeking to become the first Democrat in more than three decades to win a seat on the three-member commission, created in 1891, that regulates the state’s oil and gas industry. (Despite its name, the Railroad Commission stopped regulating railroads in 2005.) Members are elected to serve six-year terms.
Rosenthal, who previously flipped his district in northwest Houston from red to blue, is making a case that his victory would “rebuke the politics of hate.”
A recent poll of 1,200 likely voters, with a reported margin of error of plus or minus 2.8%, showed French with a slim three-point lead over Rosenthal. Rosenthal could benefit from the competitive U.S. Senate race, as other polls show Democrat James Talarico and Republican Ken Paxton locked in a dead heat.
French’s past antisemitism accusations
It’s not the first time French, who previously served as a GOP leader in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, has been accused of antisemitism. Last June, he posted a social media poll asking “Who is a bigger threat to America?” and gave two options: “Jews” or “Muslims.”
After backlash, French deleted the poll and apologized, writing that “Some people clearly misunderstood the intent.” Ignoring calls to resign from high-ranking Texas Republicans, he announced in November 2025 that he was stepping down to run for railroad commissioner.
He narrowly won the Republican primary in May against the incumbent railroad commissioner, Jim Wright, with 50.5% of the vote.
Rather than focus solely on traditional regulatory issues in his campaign, French has infused culture war themes. His campaign website says he will end “the influence of radical Islam and the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) in Texas oil” and strengthen the railroad commission’s “partnership with our allies like Israel.” In March, French called on the U.S. to deport 100 million people and for Texas Republicans to more openly condemn Islam.
“To be fair, he seems to be a pretty equal opportunity hater,” Rosenthal told the Forward. “He says antisemitic stuff, but he’s also Islamophobic and anti-immigrant.”
The state’s top Republicans — Gov. Greg Abbott, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick and House Speaker Dustin Burrows — had all endorsed Wright in the primary. Now, all three are backing French.
Others won’t embrace French but see his victory as inevitable. Fred Zeidman, a Houston-based Jewish Republican donor who supported French’s rival in the primary, said the controversial campaign talking points are unrelated to the commission’s work on regulating gas and oil.
“I mean, I’m dead set against all that, and that’s why I worked against him,” said Zeidman, who serves as chairman of the board of Petroflow Energy, an independent oil and gas production and consulting firm. “Would I vote for him? Probably not. But he’s going to win. He might be effective at what he’s doing.”
The GOP support for French alarms Jewish Texans like Pronin, who said the candidate’s social media poll alone should have disqualified him.
The July fundraising email “should be roundly condemned by the Democratic Party, but also by Republicans,” Pronin said. “They’ve had a history of saying French is not acceptable. So why is it acceptable now?”
The post He’s campaigning to regulate Texas oil and gas. Why is he linking his Jewish opponent to the Bolshevik Revolution? appeared first on The Forward.
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‘An Israel run by undereducated Haredim risks being overrun by its enemies’
There is something surreal about Israel’s confrontation over Haredi education, which is rapidly coming to a boil. A dispute that has simmered for decades over whether ultra-Orthodox schools should be required to provide a basic secular education has become a test of something much larger: whether the Israeli government of Benjamin Netanyahu is still capable of governing in the interest of society when doing so threatens his own political survival.
At the center of the fight are the two major Haredi education networks, which educate most Haredi elementary-school children and receive full state funding in return for an obligation to teach the full core curriculum. For years, however, the state has largely failed to enforce that bargain, and the schools taught mainly religion.
The High Court in February demanded that the government explain why full funding continues despite failures to teach the required subjects. Still waiting for an answer, Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara several days ago took the next logical step, declaring that continued funding will depend on schools actually teaching the core curriculum, employing qualified teachers, participating in national assessments and accepting meaningful state supervision.
The immediate fight is about schools and money, but there is a larger story.
The stakes are considerably larger than the argument over a few hours of mathematics or English. They concern whether Israel can remain the kind of modern state it has spent three-quarters of a century building.
Haredim already constitute almost a sixth of the population, their fertility rate remains around six and a half children per woman, and they account for more than a quarter of elementary-school pupils. On current demographic projections, their share of the population will continue rising dramatically for decades.
That might not in itself pose a national problem if the community were being equipped to participate fully in a sophisticated 21st-century economy. But among Haredi men especially, low employment, low earnings and weak proficiency in the basic skills demanded by the modern labor market remain profound problems.
A smaller proportion of highly productive workers would increasingly be asked to finance a larger population, sustain an advanced technological economy, support an expensive welfare state and pay for one of the most sophisticated militaries in the world.
At some point the math becomes strategic. An Israel that becomes substantially poorer will find it harder to finance cutting-edge weapons, intelligence, research, universities and the other institutions on which its military superiority depends. An Israel run by undereducated Haredim risks being overrun by its enemies.
Clearly this cannot continue. But the Likud-led right has spent years avoiding decisions that might antagonize indispensable Haredi coalition partners. When the moderates were in power they had little stomach for this fight, preferring to kick the can down the road as they focused on a resolution with the Palestinians.
That left the attorney general, the courts and the civil service to enforce rules that elected politicians have proved unwilling to defend.
It is important to note that in Israel the attorney general is a very powerful civil servant. Indeed, curtailing this power has been at the center of Netanyahu’s attempted “judicial reforms.”
Baharav-Miara has effectively ruled that one cannot demand the full financial benefits of the state system while rejecting the obligations that accompany them.
For years Israel has managed to avoid confronting this contradiction by maintaining requirements on paper while tolerating a political system in which they were weakly supervised, inconsistently enforced or simply ignored.
The numbers suggest how hollow enforcement became. Research by the Israel Democracy Institute found that only a small fraction of Haredi boys’ schools failing to meet core-curriculum requirements actually suffered budget reductions. It was a failure to make the rules mean anything.
The political explanation is not difficult to discern. Haredi parties have become indispensable to governments led by Benjamin Netanyahu, who became Israel’s longest-serving prime minister by cementing this alliance. Thus their bargaining power has allowed questions of education, avoiding military service and ever-growing public subsidies to become matters of coalition arithmetic rather than coherent national policy.
Governments understood that enforcing requirements could provoke a confrontation with parties on which their parliamentary survival depended, while postponing enforcement carried almost no immediate political cost – until now. It is the demographic reality caused by the Haredi birthrate that is transforming the argument over mathematics and English into an argument about Israel’s future.
Judging by statements from Israel’s leading opposition politicians, a new Israeli government led by them would address the issue of a core curriculum and take significant steps to end the Haredi draft evasion.
Meanwhile, even if Netanyahu somehow wins, continuing the status quo will be hard, as the High Court and the Attorney-General are now forcing the issue. The rulings mean that schools must demonstrate that they are teaching the required curriculum, employ appropriately trained teachers, participate in assessment programs, cooperate with supervision and enforcement mechanisms and comply with reporting requirements.
This, of course, intersects with Israel’s larger and increasingly poisonous argument about the power of judges, legal advisers and civil servants. There is a legitimate democratic concern when unelected officials acquire enormous influence over public policy. Neither judges nor attorneys general should be treated as infallible guardians whose decisions are beyond criticism. But there is another danger, and Israel has spent years demonstrating it: elected politicians can become so dependent on organized political interests that they cease to perform some of the basic functions for which they were elected: to protect the country from great dangers. In this case the dangers are internal – and for all the regional wars of the past several years, the main coming conflict in Israel will be the one within.
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