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In Indiana, a vaunted Jewish studies program is upended by red-state politics over Israel and speech
A sudden change in leadership at Indiana University’s Jewish studies program has erupted into a bitter internal feud, pitting a new interim director against faculty and students who say he is undermining academic freedom and reshaping the program’s direction amid national tensions over Israel and campus speech.
The turmoil began with the abrupt replacement of the department’s longtime director, continued with a clash between the new director and an ardently pro-Palestinian graduate student, and culminated last week with a statement of support for the new director from the college’s dean.
The conflict, first reported by the student newspaper, began in August, when the longtime director of the Borns Jewish Studies Program, Mark Roseman, unexpectedly stepped down a year before his term ended. Roseman said he was told, without explanation, that IU’s newly installed chancellor, David Reingold, sought to replace him.
Günther Jikeli, a scholar of antisemitism and associate director of IU’s Center for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism, stepped into the role.
Soon after taking over, Jikeli clashed with graduate student Sabina Ali, who identifies as Jewish and supports the Palestinian cause. He expelled her from a Zoom seminar for displaying a “Free Palestine” image and later denied her travel funding to present a paper critical of “Jewish indigeneity” claims related to Israel. Jikeli said her work was “political activism, not scholarship.”
Many of the Borns Jewish Studies faculty and graduate students have publicly sided against Jikeli, fearing that his actions will threaten academic freedom and damage the reputation of one of the oldest and most storied Jewish studies programs in the country.
“We used to have a Jewish studies program where we knew we had political differences, but we had really great academic working relationships,” said Sarah Imhoff, a tenured professor who has been at IU for 16 years. “And that has significantly deteriorated.”
At the same time, dozens of faculty at universities around the world, most of them in Jewish studies, have signed a letter to the dean supporting Jikeli. They wrote that he was “facing an entirely unwarranted political assault on his professional integrity and judgment.”
“What Professor Jikeli is trying to do is restore rigor and objectivity in the department,” Allon Friedman, a medical school professor on IU’s Indianapolis campus and leader of multiple pro-Israel advocacy groups in the state, told JTA.
Friedman continued, “We’ve seen over the last few decades a real deterioration — not only the quality of scholarship in Jewish Studies in particular, but also an injection of politics that is oftentimes anti-Israel, if not overtly antisemitic. That’s what we’re seeing here.”
Mark Roseman, former director of Indiana University’s Jewish Studies program, in a promotional video for the program, Oct. 28, 2015. (Screenshot via YouTube)
Jikeli, who is not Jewish, declined to comment to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency for this story. Representatives for IU and the dean’s office did not return repeated requests for comment.
Jikeli’s appointment in August came as a surprise to Roseman, who directed Jewish Studies at IU from 2013 to 2020 before reassuming the position last year. Roseman, who unlike Jikeli is Jewish, told JTA he stepped down after Jikeli told him that Reingold, who was named chancellor in June, had privately offered the director role to him.
This was considered a highly unusual arrangement for an academic program, where directors are not typically forced out before the end of their term and any replacements would typically be vetted by committee.
“I was surprised by it, obviously. It didn’t make sense to me to continue not having the confidence of the campus leadership,” Roseman said. He added that, in his eyes, “the program operated very harmoniously.” He remains affiliated with the program as a tenured faculty.
Jikeli told the Indiana Daily Student that he, too, was given no reason for the leadership change. Seemingly no one in the program was. At a meeting with Rick Van Kooten, the dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, Jewish studies faculty asked why their director was being replaced now.
“I can’t tell you that,” the dean responded, according to multiple accounts of the meeting.
This scene was part of a broader cultural shift at IU, where around 12% of the student body is Jewish — and where new personnel and new oversight have been installed at various levels in a broader effort to comply with the nationwide campus crackdown led by President Donald Trump.
Indiana’s Republican state legislature, following Trump’s model, has wrested control of public university governance and pressured IU to curb the power of faculty decision-making, leading to a broader revolt over free speech on campus. During last year’s pro-Palestinian encampments, state police dispatched snipers to campus rooftops as a peacekeeping measure in a much-criticized move.
After the encampments, IU, like other schools, convened an antisemitism advisory board. Roseman and Jikeli served on it together, along with Dean Van Kooten and others including an Indianapolis congregational rabbi. (Unlike similar antisemitism task forces at other schools, IU’s has not produced a formal report.)
One Jewish professor who had played a leading role in the encampments was disciplined over the summer after being found in violation of an “intellectual diversity” law recently passed by the state senate. That professor, Benjamin Robinson, has since been sanctioned by the school. The complaint said that by sharing his views on Israel and Gaza in one of his Germanic studies classes, he violated a state law that forbids faculty from discussing their views in the classroom if they are unrelated to the professor’s expertise.
Many saw the recent shutdown of the student newspaper as a further attempt to quash dissent. (IU walked back its decision last week, but not before having fired the student media director.)
At the same time, not all speech has been silenced on campus. Recently Tucker Carlson, the former Fox News host, spoke to 3,000 IU students as part of the Turning Point USA tour days before releasing a chummy interview with avowed antisemite Nick Fuentes.
Roseman alluded to such pressures in the Jewish studies program’s most recent alumni newsletter, dated fall 2025. In a “director’s report” written before he stepped down, he warns of recent actions from the state legislature forcing public universities to close programs that enroll under a certain threshold of majors. Such actions, he told alums, could jeopardize the program’s future.
The same newsletter included an “editor’s note” stating that Roseman would no longer be serving as director — and a welcome note from Jikeli. His primary concerns were different.
Günther Jikeli, a professor of antisemitism, addresses an audience in Cleveland, Ohio, Dec. 7, 2018. In 2025 Jikeli was installed as interim director of Indiana University’s Jewish Studies program over the wishes of some of his colleagues. (Screenshot via YouTube)
“Rising antisemitism is a challenge on campuses across the country,” Jikeli wrote. “While IU is not immune, we are fortunate to have strong partnerships and resources to address these concerns, and we will continue to work together to ensure that Jewish Studies remains a place of learning, resilience, and community.”
Roseman, a renowned British scholar of the Holocaust who most recently edited a comprehensive four-volume Cambridge history of the Shoah, had tried to keep a low profile on campus in the two years since the Hamas attacks and outbreak of war in Gaza. Even as IU, like many other schools, contended with encampments and accusations that Israel was committing genocide, the resident genocide scholar sought to keep his own views out of the spotlight, colleagues said.
That has not been the case with Jikeli, whose research specialties include monitoring antisemitism among pro-Palestinian supporters on Instagram and in European Muslim communities, including Syrian refugees. Last year he helped to organize a “Rally Against Hamas Propaganda” on campus, alongside the leaders of IU’s Hillel and Chabad centers and the president of Hoosiers for Israel. At the time, Jikeli told the Indiana Daily Student that the rally was not intended as a direct counter to the encampments.
Speaking to the Combat Antisemitism Movement, an activist group, over the summer prior to his appointment as director, Jikeli warned that tensions on campuses like his own were “entering a more dangerous phase.” He painted anti-Zionist activists in stark terms.
“We’re not just dealing with protests,” he said then. “We’re facing a hardened core of ideologically driven actors, empowered by digital amplification and real-world networks, who are reshaping campus discourse — and possibly campus safety — in deeply troubling ways.”
In the two months since Jikeli took over the Jewish studies director post, he has taken a harder line against a strain of pro-Palestinian activism that had been running through some aspects of the program. In his view, expressed in emails viewed by JTA, he is protecting the program from influence or activism that could harm its mission.
Indiana University graduate student Sabina Ali holds a sign with her name on it as members of the Indiana Graduate Workers Coalition and its supporters picket while striking for union recognition in Bloomington, Indiana, April 25, 2022. (Jeremy Hogan/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)
His efforts soon focused on a chief adversary: Sabina Ali, a sixth-year doctoral student pursuing a Ph.D. in religious studies with a minor in Jewish studies and a former managing editor of the American Religion Journal, a scholarly publication based at IU.
Over email, Ali told JTA she identifies as “post-Soviet Jewish,” with a mixed family including Muslims. “My Jewish identity is inseparable from the struggle against all forms of oppression, including Israel’s ongoing occupation, apartheid, and genocide against Palestinians,” she wrote.
Last year Ali was one of dozens to sign an open letter from “Jewish Faculty, Staff, Students, and Alumni” protesting the university’s breaking up of a student encampment — a letter not signed by Roseman, Imhoff or any other current Jewish studies faculty save one. (An emeritus professor who is on the Jewish studies faculty advisory board also signed.) She supports a movement pressuring IU to divest from Israel, and her Zoom profile picture, visible when her camera is off, is a drawing of a woman wearing a keffiyeh accompanied by a Palestinian flag and the words “Free Palestine.”
Ali was drawn to Jewish studies, she said, “because my research engages core questions within the field while also expanding the field’s boundaries through critical approaches.” She also admired the work of the faculty, particularly Imhoff. “It matters deeply to me to be part of Jewish Studies because it is a field where I feel I can make meaningful contributions and connect it to broader interdisciplinary conversations,” she said.
When on campus she routinely wore a keffiyeh, the traditional Palestinian headscarf that has been adopted by protesters on the left, to Jewish studies events — something she said she did without incident before Jikeli’s appointment.
“I am fully aware that not everyone in the program shares my political views or my fundamental moral conviction that occupation, apartheid, and genocide are unacceptable,” Ali told JTA. “Academic freedom does not require that everyone is comfortable.”
Before the leadership change, Ali’s politics encountered little pushback within Jewish studies — although some faculty and students had expressed discomfort behind closed doors. But under Jikeli, it quickly became an issue.
Her Zoom picture became a sticking point in September when it was visible during a program event, as Imhoff prepared to present her own latest research to colleagues. According to those in attendance at the Zoom lecture, Jikeli ordered Ali to remove the pro-Palestinian image or he’d kick her off the call. When she refused, he booted her — prompting a mass exodus from nearly all of her colleagues, who reconvened in a separate Zoom meeting, sans Jikeli, to discuss the research.
The incident infuriated many on campus who viewed Jikeli’s actions as a violation of academic freedom, with one professor calling his behavior “autocratic.”
In an email obtained by JTA, Ali wrote, “The irony is not lost on me that I — a Jewish student — was excluded from a Jewish Studies event for expressing solidarity with Palestinians, while you, a ‘scholar’ of antisemitism, used your authority to decide what kinds of Jewish expression are acceptable.”
Some, however, supported Jikeli.
“I do not think it was wrong of Dr. Jikeli to ask, or to insist, that a Zoom profile with said imagery and said language be removed, given the program that we’re in, given the times that we’re in,” Joanna Martin, a second-year doctoral student with a Jewish studies minor, told JTA.
Things shortly escalated when Jikeli vetoed Ali’s request for funding to present her research paper, “Weaponizing Indigeneity,” at a conference on religious studies. According to the paper’s abstract, “claims about ‘Jewish indigeneity’ to Palestine…are appropriated to justify the existence and actions of the settler-colonial nation-state of Israel and deployed to legitimize the possession of Palestine.”
The funding request, typically pro forma, had already been approved by the faculty committee overseeing graduate studies. The program director’s decision to unilaterally override the committee was, observers said, unprecedented.
No one before Jikeli had raised a flag about her research proposal. “In fact,” Ali said, “my advisors and committee members have told me that my research is innovative for Jewish studies.”
Jikeli defended his decision to faculty in a September email, obtained by JTA, saying Ali’s research was too politicized. He suggested that the Department of Religious Studies, Ali’s primary doctoral home, could fund her travel instead.
Jikeli explained in a follow-up email that he had to act “in the best interest of Jewish Studies as a program,” and believed that funding Ali “could have harmed Jewish Studies.” He added, “I understand that reasonable people may disagree on where exactly to draw such lines.”
Many in the program weren’t persuaded.
“Many of us feel like this current arrangement is not one we would want to continue,” Imhoff said. “I would like to find a way forward where we can support all graduate students and faculty who are doing serious research, regardless of their politics.”
“She’s a graduate student. We’re all graduate students. Part of our job here is to learn how to fit within this discipline, fit within the field, and push boundaries of what that’s supposed to look like,” Daniel Reischler, a third-year doctoral student, told JTA.
Ali’s activism, long tolerated in the program, was now a flashpoint. “My sense is this is just what he was hired to do, to deny Sabina funding,” one member of the Jewish Studies faculty said of Jikeli. Some have argued it is, in fact, Jikeli who is imposing personal politics on Ali’s research.
“People are paranoid,” Claire Richters, a sixth-year Ph.D. student, told JTA. She was one of three members of the Jewish Studies graduate student executive committee, including Reischler, who signed an open letter to Jikeli protesting his decision to withhold funding to Ali. “There’s just a worry that this will start extending to any issue that the director has a political disagreement with.”
Those concerns aren’t shared by everyone. “There’s a lot of, like, ‘Will my research be denied?’ And it’s like, you’re doing Holocaust studies. I doubt it,” Martin said. Declining to share her thoughts on Ali’s research and its appropriateness for Jewish Studies, she added, “The majority don’t have reason to be worried.”
The letter from outside faculty supporting Jikeli also defends the actions he took against Ali.
“First, there was good reason, we believe, to turn down a request for travel support to deliver a programmatic indictment of Israel as a colonialist power. Nothing in the abstract demonstrates any original arguments,” the letter states. “Second, the decision to disallow a student in an online seminar to replace her face with a political slogan and an anonymized portrait in a keffiyeh was responsible and appropriate.”
Among the letter’s signatories: Alvin Rosenfeld, who founded Jewish studies at IU.
A police officer with a gun stands on a Palestinian flag during the arrest of an activist on the third day of a pro-Palestinian protest camp at Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana, April 27, 2024. (Jeremy Hogan/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)
Dean Van Kooten weighed in on the disputes with Ali in an internal email on Oct. 29.
He tried to walk a fine line. “I concur with the director’s decision to not use Borns Jewish Studies Program funding, particularly an IU foundation account[,] to fund the travel of the graduate student,” Van Kooten wrote in an email viewed by JTA. However, he added, Ali’s travel to the conference would still be funded, just from a different IU piggy bank. This would be done, he wrote, in the name of “respecting academic freedom.”
When it came to Zoomgate, Van Kooten was more circumspect. “Regarding the governance of the use of Zoom in department/program seminars, colloquia, etc., the college does not have a policy on this, and we don’t recommend one,” he wrote. Any Zoom policy going forward, he added, “should be voted on by the entire core faculty, and in consultation with Indiana University’s general counsel.”
The dean added that, in absence of any clear policy, “the convenor of an event must exercise sound judgment in balancing the importance of freedom of speech and expression [following university policies] with the obligation to maintain an inclusive learning environment, and limit disruptions when they occur.”
One graduate student told JTA the email felt like a “stalemate.” The work of the program goes on: This week its contemporary antisemitism center hosted a symposium on campus antisemitism, with many of its featured speakers having also signed the letter supporting Jikeli.
Unusually, the conference was supported with a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Under Trump the NEH has defunded virtually every other Jewish humanities program, with the exception of the conservative Tikvah Fund. The current acting chair of the NEH was expected to attend IU’s conference.
For some broader observers of the Jewish studies space, who’d long seen Indiana as a beacon for the field, the situation is deeply troubling.
“Indiana is more than a red state. It has an incredible history of white supremacy,” said Riv-Ellen Prell, an emeritus professor at the University of Minnesota who has studied the history of Jews on campus. “And here is IU, in the middle of this world, as this incredible magnet for Jewish students — because the Jewish studies program was so great, because they had a big Hillel.”
But with the forced changes, Prell said, the forces that shape higher education were sending a message: “‘We like these kinds of Jewish studies people. We don’t like those kinds of Jewish studies people.’”
Prell said that concerns about the appropriateness of Ali’s graduate studies were missing the point: that there were other ways the program’s director could have addressed them.
“This is where she is housed as a student, admitted as a student, and there is academic freedom, and there are faculty who wish to supervise and work with her,” Prell said. “If we are to begin saying, ‘Well, the faculty who work with these students aren’t allowed to teach or supervise people with this kind of work,’ then that is the death of academic freedom.”
Friedman sees things differently.
“It’s insane that we would even consider to pay for something like this,” he said, of Ali’s research. “What’s the point of a Jewish studies department if the students in the department are demonstrating that, not only do they know nothing about the history of the Jewish people, but they’re actively trying to undermine it? No one else would tolerate this.”
Jewish studies has increasingly been a growing lightning rod for Jewish campus politics, even before Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, attack and Israel’s assault in Gaza; the spike in campus antisemitism, and Trump’s college crackdown.
At other schools, donors have pulled funding for Jewish and Israel studies programs over political disagreements with faculty on Israel. Some Jewish studies faculty have been targeted or muscled out of campus antisemitism task forces because of their perceived views on Israel, while others have led protests against their own task forces. At Columbia, which reached a settlement with the Trump administration to protect its funding after becoming the epicenter of student protests, some angry Jewish donors have opted to support Jewish Studies, but not the rest of the university.
Yet Jikeli’s fear that the IU controversy “could harm Jewish Studies” seems to some a self-fulfilling prophecy. On social media, current and former IU Jewish Studies faculty were bemoaning the spiritual end of the program. And citing the interim director’s actions, some prospective graduate students have told faculty they are no longer interested in enrolling.
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The post In Indiana, a vaunted Jewish studies program is upended by red-state politics over Israel and speech appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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J Street goes on the offensive against AIPAC-backed candidates
(JTA) — J Street, the liberal Jewish Middle East advocacy group, announced that it will spend $3 million to defeat a handful of Republican candidates backed by AIPAC, joining the plethora of progressive groups targeting the American Israel Public Affairs Committee this election year.
Such an attack campaign is an unusual initiative for J Street, which typically endorses candidates but does not target opponents on the basis of an AIPAC endorsement. Until now, according to J Street President Jeremy Ben-Ami, the likelier scenario for his organization was finding its endorsed candidates on the defensive against AIPAC’s spending.
“It’s a new era for us,” Ben-Ami said in an interview. In 2022, J Street targeted an AIPAC backed candidate — but only after AIPAC barraged the J Street endorsed candidate with negative spending.
In a statement, J Street said that this will be the group’s largest super PAC investment in its history, referring to political action committees that can raise unlimited funds but are forbidden from coordinating with campaigns.
The $3 million will be spent on ads targeting Republican Rep. Mike Collins, who is running for U.S. Senate in Georgia against Democratic Sen. Jon Ossoff, who is Jewish, and a handful of incumbents: Ohio Rep. Max Miller, who is running for reelection amid allegations of domestic abuse, which he denies; Wisconsin Rep. Derrick Van Orden; Pennsylvania Rep. Ryan Mackenzie; and Iowa Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks.
Ben-Ami said J Street targeted those particular candidates in part because they each face competitive races as the Democrats look to take control of the House and Senate and they have ideological distance from J Street. Many of them were also connected to the movement to deny and overturn the 2020 election results, Ben-Ami said.
J Street’s campaign comes as AIPAC’s brand has become increasingly toxic among voters, and as a growing number of Democratic politicians cross its red line of supporting conditions on U.S. military aid to Israel. J Street’s position, meanwhile, has recently drifted toward supporting a phasing-out of military aid to Israel in 2028.
AIPAC blasted the campaign in a post on X. “Is this from J Street or Justice Democrats?” AIPAC wrote, referring to the progressive organization that has increasingly aligned with pro-Palestinian advocacy.
“A dark money super PAC spending millions to defeat pro-Israel candidates and lie about AIPAC,” the group wrote. “Not a word about helping elect pro-Israel candidates further exposes the difference between J Street and actual pro-Israel organizations.”
AIPAC has been a heavy spender since it launched its super PAC, United Democracy Project, ahead of the 2022 midterms, and is the top outside spender in this election cycle, according to Open Secrets. A number of anti-AIPAC, pro-Palestinian groups have emerged over the past year to counter the pro-Israel lobbying group’s spending.
Unlike those groups, J Street and AIPAC have some overlap in which candidates they back: Both groups endorsed moderate, pro-Israel Democrats such as Reps. Hakeem Jeffries and Dan Goldman. J Street’s super PAC has also previously targeted individual candidates for their AIPAC endorsement, such as Rep. Haley Stevens in 2022, citing AIPAC’s donations from right-wing megadonors.
An AIPAC spokesperson wrote that it is “disappointing, but not surprising, that J Street continues to amplify lies about our community.”
“AIPAC members are focused on helping elect Democrats and Republicans who will strengthen the U.S.-Israel partnership, while J Street is focused on turning support for the Jewish state into a partisan political football,” said AIPAC’s spokesperson.
Ben-Ami said this year’s campaign is not about “the relationship between us and AIPAC,” but is rather about emboldening candidates who may otherwise worry that they will be up against AIPAC’s war chest.
“We are very conscious that there are many candidates who are afraid of what AIPAC might be able to do politically, and therefore adopt positions and say things about policy because they are afraid, and their fear and intimidation is holding them back,” Ben-Ami said.
Now, he said, J Street is putting “the shoe on the other foot.”
“If you are going to oppose American democracy and provide carte blanche to this Israeli government, then you need to be afraid,” he said.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post J Street goes on the offensive against AIPAC-backed candidates appeared first on The Forward.
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Germany’s far-right AfD, riding state win, targets more gains in elections from east to west
(JTA) — Germany’s far-right, riding high after winning an eastern state, seeks to capitalize on its momentum in a series of upcoming elections — starting with municipal voting this weekend, followed by two closely watched state contests.
The first test for the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party comes Sunday in municipal elections in the western state of Lower Saxony. A week later, the AfD has its sights on state elections in the capital, Berlin, and the Baltic coast state of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania.
The AfD beat out other parties in Saxony-Anhalt on Sept. 6 with 43.8% of the vote and 39 of 83 state parliament seats, falling just short of a majority and marking Germany’s greatest far-right victory in a state election since World War II.
“From previous elections, we know that the AfD is currently able to mobilize almost totally its own constituency and potential voters, while its democratic competitors have much more problems,” said Gideon Botsch, the head of the Emil Julius Gumbel Research Unit on Antisemitism and Right-Wing Extremism at Potsdam University.
While polls do not predict the next state election results will match the historic win in Saxony-Anhalt, the AfD currently leads other parties in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania with about 35% of the vote. And in Berlin, long a stronghold of Germany’s political left, the AfD is jockeying with the center-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and the left-wing Linke for first place, with all three polling around 20%.
The AfD, a nationalist, anti-immigrant party whose leaders have proposed rejecting Germany’s “guilt complex” over the Holocaust, has regularly topped nationwide opinion polls for the past year. In surveys asking Germans which party they would choose if federal elections were held “this Sunday,” the AfD often receives the highest results, Botsch told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
The AfD has built a dedicated and growing base, said Botsch. Its popularity signals frustration with the mainstream parties in power, particularly the CDU, Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s party, amid a sluggish economy. The AfD is especially popular in eastern Germany, where voters are poorer and hit hard by high energy prices exacerbated by the wars in Iran and Ukraine.
The AfD is likely to perform more weakly in the west, where Lower Saxony will hold a municipal election on Sunday. The party has stronger influence in the east, and Germany’s municipal elections tend to hinge more on well-known figures from established parties, said Roger Stöcker, a political scientist at Otto von Guericke University in Magdeburg. Still, even if the AfD doesn’t transform governments, Stöcker said that making inroads to further entrench itself in Lower Saxony would be “a strategically significant success.”
“It’s conceivable that the AfD wins a town hall or a county administration here and there or strengthens its presence in local councils, expanding its local base,” said Stöcker.
The three upcoming elections are being closely watched for signs of the AfD’s wider-scale momentum, said Daniel Schuster, who heads the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s European office.
“Taken together, these elections can help show whether Saxony-Anhalt was an exceptionally strong eastern result or part of a broader national expansion of the AfD’s electoral base,” said Schuster.
Remko Leemhuis, the director of the American Jewish Committee Berlin Lawrence and Lee Ramer Institute for German-Jewish Relations, added that residents will feel the effects of the AfD’s success even if it falls short of its victory in Saxony-Anhalt. A “very strong AfD result,” short of managing to enter government coalitions, would still “raise serious concerns” for Jewish residents about the party’s influence, said Leemhuis.
Residents in Saxony-Anhalt are waiting to see the ramifications of the AfD’s election victory. Without an outright majority, the party needs partners to join a coalition. Its nationalist agenda in the region includes teaching children less about Hitler, banning Pride flags in public buildings and requiring artists and cultural organizations to sign a declaration that they will not “disparage Germany and its culture” if they seek state funding.
State governments also control domestic policing and parts of the judiciary. The AfD could use its power in these areas to “put pressure on minorities it dislikes,” including immigrants, Muslims and Jews who are identified with Holocaust remembrance, said Stöcker. At the same time, the AfD could direct policing and intelligence away from right-wing extremism in Saxony-Anhalt, which recorded the second-highest number of right-wing extremist crimes per capita of Germany’s 16 states last year, Leemhuis said.
The AfD’s victory in Saxony-Anhalt marked a “watershed moment” in German politics, according to Roland Abold, the managing director of Infratest Dimap, a German election research institute. Abold said that the result heaped pressure on Merz and the federal government, as “calls for a change in political direction and a reassessment of cooperation with the AfD are likely to intensify.”
The CDU for now is standing behind Merz, the most unpopular chancellor in modern German history after 16 months in power. But if the CDU faces further heavy defeats in the upcoming elections, questions about Merz as the party’s leader could escalate, said Stöcker.
The AfD already has its eyes on his job. Alice Weidel, the national AfD’s co-chair, announced on Monday that she wants the party to win “at least 40% of the vote” in Germany’s next federal election in 2029.
Ulrich Siegmund, the AfD candidate in Saxony-Anhalt who hopes to become the state premier, said in the same press conference that his goal was “very clear.”
“As perhaps the next Minister-President of Saxony-Anhalt, I need a Federal Chancellor Alice Weidel here in Berlin, so that we can write here history side by side,” said Siegmund.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Germany’s far-right AfD, riding state win, targets more gains in elections from east to west appeared first on The Forward.
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I was born after 9/11. I still carry the memories of that day.
Earlier this week, I was talking with my mother over the phone about her experience on 9/11. She walked me through the familiar parts — how she was in our Upper West Side apartment when she learned about the attacks from a relative, how she went to the garage to get the car so they could drive to a friend’s house upstate once she realized the attacks were acts of terror. There were still hijacked planes in the air, and she worried New York City might be targeted again. Then, she said, “This part is going to make me cry.”
I hadn’t remembered what came next, but suddenly it came back to me. “Oh no, me too,” I said.
While she waited for my father to come back uptown from his office in the Financial District, she stopped inside a fire station across from the garage. Inside was a lone firefighter, who’d stayed behind to man the station while the rest of his company was inside the towers. He was watching the news on television, and my mom stood next to him, watching too, when the towers fell.
“We just lost so many men,” he said.
I wasn’t there when it happened; I wasn’t even alive. But I’d heard this story before, I’d walked dozens of times past that same fire station, which now has a plaque commemorating the seven firefighters who died on 9/11. Hearing the story again on the phone, I found myself walking down the streets of Washington D.C., bawling.
I’m 23, born a year-and-a-half after 9/11. Most Americans my age learned about the attacks in school, as history. I’m part of the 16% who learned through family or friends.
The discovery happened by accident, when I was in kindergarten. My mom and I were in a children’s store on the Upper West Side, when we started flipping through a picture book about the history of New York City. Most of the book was unremarkable, but the end was unexpected: a scene of the smoldering twin towers.
I forget what exactly happened next, but here’s what I do remember: My mom was upset that the shop hadn’t provided a warning about the book’s end, and I was confused about why she was upset. I was five, too young to understand the image and never one to let a question go unanswered; I must have pestered her until she offered up an explanation.
She hadn’t been prepared to tell me about terrorism. She’d been evading the topic for some time, telling half-truths to avoid it. When I’d ask her why we had to take our shoes off in line at the airport, she’d just say it was to make sure no one had anything dangerous, leaving out the part about how a man had tried to get on a flight with bombs hidden in his shoes.
“9/11 is a huge thing for a parent to have to tell a kid about,” my mom told me this week. “You were a happy kid, and I didn’t want you to get scared or traumatized.”
The events, and impacts, of that day slowly unfolded for me as the years passed. I learned that my father had watched from Battery Park as the South Tower fell; he ran westward as plumes of smoke billowed toward him. I learned that my parents had friends who’d died in the towers, one of whom was the father of a boy I grew up with. I remember going to the 9/11 Memorial and Museum when it opened in 2014, feeling sick as I watched footage of people jumping out of the towers.
The New York Times recently interviewed dozens of Gen Z Americans about 9/11. I was struck by how disconnected many felt from the event. “It’s hard to feel sad about something that you don’t remember,” said Annika Heegaard, a 25-year-old now living in New York.
But for me, 9/11 doesn’t feel quite so far away. By now I’ve lived through other mass casualty events, like the Parkland shooting and the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks. But 9/11 is the only tragedy that my family members had such a direct connection to. “It was devastating,” my mom said.
I think the reason I can remember the exact moment I found out about 9/11 is because it changed my view of the world. I remember being almost unable to comprehend that anyone would do what the hijackers did. I wasn’t, as my mom feared, traumatized by learning about the attacks; I didn’t fear for my safety each day. But the knowledge was in some ways a loss of innocence — a discovery that people could do awful things and that the world wasn’t as safe a place as I had assumed.
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