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Merz warns that Jews are not safe in Germany, as voters choose parties linked to antisemitism
(JTA) — German Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s warning this week that Jewish life in his country “is no longer safe” reflects concerns voiced by some Jews in Berlin.
They are alarmed by the success of the left-wing socialist Left Party in Sunday’s municipal election, which coincides with the rising power of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) in several state elections this month.
Leaving the Left in charge of the country’s capital would be “like putting the fox in charge of the henhouse,” Berlin Jewish Community President Gideon Joffe said in an email press statement this week.
The Party “bears a special responsibility for the consequences” of tolerating Islamic extremism, left-wing antisemitism and what German authorities call “clan crime,” organized criminal activity involving extended-family networks in the capital, said Joffe, who represents some 9,000 registered Jewish community members, out of an estimated 30,000 Jews in the nation’s capital.
He spoke out after the Left received 25.7% of the votes in Berlin’s municipal elections, more than Merz’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU), which garnered 18.8%, followed by the AfD with 16.3%, the Greens with 14.3% and the Social Democratic Party (SPD) with 12.1%.
Berlin is a city of contrasts and deep political divisions, a city that has always been oppositional. It saw street fights between Nazis and communists in the 1930s, and similar face-offs in the 1990s after unification. It is also the German city where the most Jews were hidden and saved by non-Jews in defiance of authority during the Holocaust.
Thus it was not surprising that in Berlin, as the right-wing AfD is growing in popularity nationwide, the Left might be the strongest opposition to that development.
Mainstream parties, such as Merz’s CDU, which had tried to block the far-right, are flailing. The anti-immigration AfD, in contrast, took the lead in two former east German states: Saxony-Anhalt, on Sept. 6 with 43.8% of the vote, and Mecklenburg-West Pomerania on Sept. 20 with 38.2%.
The Left’s platform, which was adopted in 2024, takes an egalitarian approach: It supports Israel’s right to exist alongside a future Palestinian state and disavows antisemitism alongside other societal plagues. “For The Left Party, lived antifascism is linked to the fight against warmongering, antisemitism, Islamophobia, racism and national arrogance,” the platform reads in part.
The Party grounds its stance in the post-war slogan, “Never again war, never again fascism.” Some affiliates on the extreme left hold anti-Zionist stances; the Party has been criticized by Jewish leaders and mainstream parties for not forcefully distancing itself from those elements.
In 2010, prominent Party members took part in the Gaza Freedom Flotilla, which the Israeli military intercepted in an operation that killed 10 activists. German Left politicians were among those arrested and deported home.
At its convention in 2025, the Party adopted the “Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism,” which rejects the notion that some anti-Israel expressions are antisemitic, as put forward in the working definition of antisemitism of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance. The Party said that the IHRA definition “paves the way for authoritarian state action” by Israel.
More recently, during the Party’s Berlin campaign, “calls were made for the Intifada and the death of Israeli soldiers, and the audience sang and danced along,” said Josef Schuster, chair of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, in a statement released Sept. 22. The council represents some 90,000 members of Jewish communities nationwide. In all, there are about as many people who identify as Jewish but don’t belong to communities.
“That a party whose campaign stage openly called for the death of people emerged victorious from the election deeply disturbs me,” he said, adding that the party had “lost all credibility” by failing to combat “Jew hatred” within.
Berlin resident Anetta Kahane sees parallels between the extreme parties on the left and the right.
“It is a big shame that the AfD is winning, and it’s a big shame that the Linke Partei is winning,” Kahane, 72, who grew up in the former East Germany, said in a telephone interview. “Because both are very deeply antisemitic. And I don’t want to be governed by antisemites.”
Kahane, whose parents had fled Nazi Germany in 1933 and ultimately settled in East Germany (the German Democratic Republic, or GDR) as dedicated socialists, told JTA she realized as a young adult that the Communist party her parents supported was run by “the same antisemites, the same Germans as in the west.”
“Today, we hear the same slogans we heard about Israel and the Jews during the GDR: They are like the Nazis. Israel is a fascist state. They are imperialists. They are colonialists. They are the worst of the worst,” said Kahane, who founded the Berlin-based Amadeo Antonio Foundation, which fights xenophobia and antisemitism, in 1998.
“I hear people saying that, well, the world is so complicated, we don’t need [democracy], we need a good dictator,” said Kahane, because “democracy is discussing and discussing and never achieving anything.”
While the cost of living and taxes are rising, politicians fail to “talk in a way people can understand,” she added. The more “brutal and populist” their language, the more people will vote populist.
Despite their rising popularity, neither the Left nor the AfD is likely to be part of the newly elected state governments. That’s because the mainstream parties are forming coalitions to block out these upstarts – a firewall, when it comes to the far right.
In Berlin, most Jewish voters find themselves eschewing both extremes. But not all Jews are upset at the results.
“I’m hopeful that there will be a coalition with the SPD and the Greens, and that we’ll have a more promising future for Berlin,” Donna Swarthout, 67, told JTA in a telephone interview from Berlin.
She said she voted for the Greens “so that they would be in the governing coalition,” but she isn’t put off by the Left Party and has been drawn to its mayoral candidate Elif Eralp.
“She just really resonated with me because of her emphasis on social justice issues,” she said.
Swarthout, who grew up in the US and obtained German citizenship 14 years ago as the daughter of German Jewish refugees, says it’s important for Jews in Germany “to work in coalition with other minority groups… We need a broader, more positive, future-oriented dialogue. And I’m hoping that she [Eralp] can help shift the dialogue.”
Elvira Groezinger worries about younger voters in general. “As 16-year-olds were allowed to vote [in Berlin] for the first time, and Muslim migrants dominated the discourse, the outcome is a cause for concern,” Groezinger, a literary scholar who was born in Poland in 1947 to Holocaust survivors, said in an email to JTA. The Left’s campaign “was accompanied by antisemitic incidents and pro-Hamas declarations of Muslim candidates and voters.”
“The fact that 36 years after the unification, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the establishment of a democratic system, communist ideology is so attractive to over a quarter of voters, depicts the political failure in implementing democratic values,” she added.
The Left and the AfD have a lot in common, she noted: Both support Putin and oppose help for Ukraine; both espouse anti-Americanism and support totalitarian ideas.
The Left’s 2024 platform demands “the dissolution of NATO and its replacement by a collective security system with the participation of Russia.” While the AfD supports continued membership in NATO, it posits that “European security cannot be attained without Russia’s involvement.”
But while “the AfD is anti-Islamic and not openly antisemitic like the Left, and even claims to be pro-Israel, its ideology of ‘Germany for Germans’ is just as dangerous for Jews, who are regarded as non-German,” Groezinger remarked.
Left leaders this week rushed to defend themselves against accusations that they tolerate antisemitism and criminality in their ranks, after an alleged pro-Palestinian militant and a person with ties to a Middle Eastern crime family were seen celebrating with a Left legislator at a victory party on Sept. 20 in Berlin.
Eralp said it was “absolutely unacceptable” to “celebrate violence and terrorism,” adding that she would “do everything to ensure that Jewish people – just like Muslims, queer people and everyone in our city – can feel safe.”
A Party spokesperson did not get back to JTA by press time.
Elio Adler, founder of the Berlin-based, pro-democracy Jewish Values Initiative, has pushed back against both the Left Party and the AfD, urging mainstream parties to come up with clear options for voters.
“As long as politics still doesn’t address very relevant and burning topics, the extremist parties on both sides will have their voters and the firewall will get cracks, election after election and, one day, it will break down,” he said.
The Initiative published an open letter to Berlin’s democratic political parties on Sept. 15, urging them to shut both the AfD and Left out of any coalition talks to form a government for the city-state.
Up to now, the term “firewall” has generally referred to a boycott of far-right parties by the mainstream parties.
But “we say if you establish a firewall, it needs to be a round wall protecting democracy against attacks – or fire – from all sides. It can’t be a firewall just protecting against one side,” said Adler, who was born in Essen in 1971; his father was a Holocaust survivor.
”I’m not too happy that antisemitism somehow appears to be the main topic” of discussion. “It’s sort of a strawman argument, in place of many other topics,” he added. “As a group that is at risk and dependent on protection, we are deeply alarmed by the Left Party’s plans to weaken the police and, in particular, to abolish the domestic intelligence service.”
The Left Party “accepts a lot of antisemitism within their ranks. Of course, if you ask them, they are against antisemitism,” Adler said. “They’re against right-wing antisemitism, which is good, which is correct.”
But “they absolutely forget their own antisemitism and all the migrant antisemitism and the extreme-left antisemitism. So they are really blind in more than one eye.”
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Somerville councilors to discuss Israel divestment proposal
(JTA) — SOMERVILLE, Mass. — The issue of divestment from Israel returns to the Somerville City Council in Massachusetts on Tuesday night as lawmakers plan to discuss how to implement a nonbinding ballot question on the matter that passed last year.
The divestment push has divided the city of more than 84,000 residents, which has a long-standing Jewish population. It is located between Cambridge, home to Harvard University, and Medford, a city with which it shares the Tufts University campus.
After Question 3 passed with 55.7% of the residents’ vote in November 2025, the City Council that same month passed a resolution committing to work toward an ordinance within a year to enact the ballot’s goals.
The measure to that effect, introduced in June, would bar the city from investing in or procuring labor, services or goods from companies that support entities identified by the ordinance as violating international law, including Israel.
Unlike the divestment proposal awaiting a November ballot vote in Providence or the binding human rights divestment ordinance passed by Medford’s city council in 2025, the Somerville ordinance specifically mentions Israel and Palestine.
In response to the push for a binding ordinance, 74 registered voters in Somerville submitted a petition for a hearing, which was held in September, before final action is taken, citing concerns about its impact on the city. The issue has now moved to the city’s Legislative Matters Committee, which is meeting Tuesday night.
Among the groups opposing divestment is Shalom Somerville, which submitted the September petition stating that “the sense of belonging and safety experienced by Jewish, Israeli and other residents of diverse backgrounds” is at risk as a result of the ordinance.
Sam Gechter, co-founder and president of Shalom Somerville, said that the ordinance singles out Jews who support Israel, which makes it antisemitic. Deputy City Solicitor David Shapiro also advised in November 2024 that such an ordinance would be “likely invalid,” according to a letter from the Anti-Defamation League and the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law.
“I think it’s incredibly irresponsible,” Gechter said, suggesting that the ordinance would slow down governmental action. “But the biggest thing for me is that it makes Jews feel unwelcome in Somerville.”
A local organization, Somerville for Palestine (S4P), has been a driving force behind both the ballot question and the ordinance, which the group developed in collaboration with sponsoring city councilors Ben Ewen-Campen, Ben Wheeler, Wilfred N. Mbah and Jon Link. “It’s what people voted for,” said Mo Katz-Christy, a member of S4P’s leadership and Jewish Caucus. “We want to follow the will of the people.”
The ADL issued a statement condemning the ordinance in June. It also joined the Brandeis Center in issuing a letter calling the proposal an unconstitutional intrusion into foreign affairs.
Other Jewish organizations disagree. Jewish Voice for Peace Boston has worked closely with S4P to back the measures. “I don’t think that those objections have validity,” said Eli Gerzon, a longtime member of JVP. “As a Jewish organization, we are especially concerned that ‘never again’ really means what it says: never again, that we never let a Holocaust, a genocide happen.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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A major Jewish museum hopes to join the Smithsonian – at a difficult moment for the storied institution
(JTA) — Philadelphia’s Weitzman National Museum of American Jewish History is moving closer to becoming part of the Smithsonian Institution at a moment of significant upheaval for the storied museum network.
A new congressional commission will study whether to make the museum part of the Smithsonian. Its members were sworn in Tuesday, when they also held their first meeting.
In an exclusive interview with the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, the commission’s new chair Philip Darivoff, a former longtime chair of the Weitzman, and vice chair Dara Horn, a New York Times bestselling author, said that the Weitzman joining the Smithsonian would send a powerful message that Jews are a crucial component of the history of the country.
“It’s a different statement that our country makes when it says that the study of Jewish American history and culture is important to this nation,” Darivoff said. Both he and Horn also hope that a boost in the Weitzman’s profile could combat what they called an “epidemic of ignorance” among Americans when it comes to knowledge of Jewish history and culture.
“This really would be an elevation of the Jewish community,” Horn, author of “People Love Dead Jews” and “The Final Solution to the Jewish Question,” told JTA. “The place that Jews show up in a school curriculum is typically more about the Holocaust” — an area that the author has written critically about in the past as too limiting a view of Jewish life.
Horn believes in the Weitzman project, she said, because she hopes to emphasize the ways that Jews have contributed to American founding ideals such as religious pluralism.
“I’m really interested in the connections between the Jewish story and a lot of our foundational ideas in this country,” she said. Jewish ideas such as the Exodus from Egypt in the Passover story “were inspiring to Americans,” she added.
The wheels for the Weitzman joining the Smithsonian began turning in 2024, when Congress passed legislation in 2024, then signed by President Biden, to establish the commission. The group spent the next two years putting the commission together, and has two years from its first meeting to research and publish a report on the feasibility of such a move — though Darivoff said he hopes to finish the work well before the deadline.
Adding a new member to the Smithsonian has been known to take years, if not decades. The two most recent additions, the National Museum of the American Latino and the American Women’s History Museum, were both long in the works.
Founded in 1976, the Weitzman is already an existing, fully functioning institution — and also already a Smithsonian affiliate, meaning it can share resources with other museums in the system. Unlike a museum being built from scratch, the Weitzman already has a building and collection, which proponents hope could speed the process.”
Dan Tadmor, the Weitzman’s CEO, told JTA that joining the Smithsonian would improve their educational mission.
“We have a national footprint for our educational programming, but of course we’d like to widen it,” he said. “Who would say no to a curriculum that’s been developed by a Smithsonian museum?”
The Weitzman’s bid for increased prominence within the Smithsonian comes as the Trump administration has sought to exert greater control over the latter — home to such storied institutions as the National Museum of American History, the National Portrait Gallery and the National Zoo.
This summer the White House issued a report alleging “radical ideology” in the museums’ content, and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum recently announced plans for signs accusing Smithsonian leaders of ideological bias. Observers say such signs are indicative of larger administration priorities opposing the teaching of historical subjects such as slavery. Smithsonian Secretary Lonnie Bunch III is stepping down at the end of the year.
A representative from the Smithsonian declined to comment to JTA on the Weitzman’s bid, or on its current political conditions.
The commission’s chair and vice chair of the new Weitzman said that the current political upheaval shouldn’t affect their work. The Smithsonian, Horn said, “has lasted through many political winds.”
“I think we see this as a long-term project that’s about the place of Jewish Americans in this country’s history,” Darivoff said. “The Smithsonian is a really important institution for this country, and it is the great museum complex of our nation. God willing, it will be flourishing for centuries to come. It’d be an honor to be included in the Smithsonian.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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Two deaths in Manchester synagogue attack last year will be probed through public inquiry, Britain says
(JTA) — The deaths of two Jewish men in an attack on a synagogue in Manchester last year will be examined through a public inquiry, the British home secretary announced on Monday, a necessary step to include sensitive information in the investigation.
Melvin Cravitz and Adrian Daulby were killed during the attack on Yom Kippur on Oct. 2, 2025, when Jihad Al-Shamie rammed a car into a group of worshippers outside the Heaton Park Hebrew Congregation in Manchester and stabbed two people. Cravitz died from stab wounds and another man, Andrew Franks, was seriously injured but survived. Daulby was shot by police while blocking the synagogue doors to stop Al-Shamie from entering. Two other people were seriously injured.
Al-Shamie, a Syrian-born British citizen, said he was acting for the Islamic State, also known as ISIS, before police shot him dead.
Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood announced the public inquiry in a statement about national security at the House of Commons, saying that “what happened that day must be fully understood.”
“This will ensure that all evidence can be heard, including any sensitive national security material that could not otherwise be fully heard in the coroner’s court,” said Mahmood.
Judge Alexia Durran, the chief coroner of England and Wales, was overseeing inquests into the deaths of Cravitz and Daulby. Durran last month recommended that Mahmood convert the inquests into a public inquiry, following statements from Home Office lawyers that some information from MI5 would be withheld from open court due to national security concerns. A full investigation that involves hearing sensitive material in private requires a public inquiry.
Earlier this year, Greater Manchester Police’s chief constable Stephen Watson said he was “deeply sorry” for a “missed opportunity” to uncover the plot against the Heaton Park synagogue. Watson made the apology after prosecutors revealed that Al-Shamie had two prior arrests for allegedly breaching a non-molestation order and alleged rape, and his mobile devices were not examined until after the synagogue attack.
Mahmood listed “a series of attacks on our Jewish community” in the year since the synagogue attack, including the stabbing of two Jewish men in the London neighborhood of Golders Green, a spate of arson attacks and a “foiled but potentially lethal plot” against Jews in Manchester on the eve of Yom Kippur last month. In the last case, two Iranian men have been charged with terrorism offenses.
“Faced with the threat posed to our Jewish community, we have increased funding to the police by an additional £250 million to boost police presence in key Jewish areas and to tackle antisemitism on our streets,” said Mahmood.
She added, “I know we cannot simply build higher walls around our Jewish community and expect them to live in fear. So we must root out the evil of antisemitism wherever it lurks in society, and this government is committed to that effort.”
Mahmood’s announcement comes days after the Home Office released data showing that hate crimes against Jewish people in England and Wales rose 10% in the year ending in March.
Mahmood said the United Kingdom was aware that “the Iranian state is targeting our Jewish community,” adding that the threat posed to Jews demonstrated “how the lines are increasingly blurring between extremism and state threats.”
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