The following comments refer to the interview with Michael Wolffsohn that appeared in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung on July 8, 2024. The interview is published in English translation on TelosScope here.
October 7 and its aftermath are matters primarily concerning regional security in the Middle East, including Israeli national security, the status of the Palestinians, but ultimately the root cause, Iranian hegemonic ambitions and Tehran’s hostility to the United States. But October 7 has simultaneously unleashed a revival of antisemitism across the West, and often enough especially in the universities in the form of a pernicious left-wing antisemitism. Telos and the Telos-Paul Piccone Institute have devoted considerable attention to this phenomenon.
Academic antisemitism is not fully congruent with antisemitism in other social sectors. What happens at Columbia is not exactly the same as what transpired notoriously at Charlottesville, but it would be foolish to deny the unmistakable affinities in the varieties of antisemitism. In the same vein, it is important to keep in mind differences between national settings, but comparative reflections can help tease out important strands common across current manifestations of antisemitism. National particularity in this matter is most salient for Germany, given the shadow of the Holocaust. Germany also incubated a far left that pursued a radically anti-Israel politics at least since the 1960s, and Germany more recently welcomed large numbers of refugees from the Middle East, countries where antisemitic views are widespread. At the same time, however, Germany, especially since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the subsequent unification, has witnessed the growth of a vibrant Jewish community. This combination of heterogeneous factors makes the German situation deserving of particular attention.
Against that background, a discussion took place in the popular Markus Lanz television talk show on July 4, 2024. Four members of the Jewish community in Germany gathered to comment on how Jewish life in Germany had changed since October 7. This was not intended primarily as an inquiry into the question of Israel and the Palestinians, although the politics of the Middle East inevitably recurred as a theme, but rather the rise of antisemitism in Germany, its character—recognizing all three parts, far right, far left, and Muslim—and its consequences. When one participant, Deborah Feldman, arguing from a progressive position, expressed her concern that the German police and state have been subverted or unterwandert by right-wing extremists, another, the historian Michael Wolffsohn, objected to her agitprop and threatened to leave. That scene plays out around 1:08 in the recording.
In the wake of that controversial television discussion, Wolffsohn was interviewed in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. That interview is available in translation here. Wolffsohn’s astute comments, while referencing Germany above all, include at least four points of special relevance after what has transpired in higher education in the United States. Germany is different, to be sure, but there are shared characteristics that yield similar analyses. The discussion and Wolffsohn’s comments are quite pertinent to the inquiry that Telos and the Telos-Paul Piccone Institute have been directing to October 7 and its ramifications.
First, while the virulence of post-October 7 antisemitism may have been surprising, it was fundamentally not new. It was only possible because of a latent antisemitism with deep roots. Wolffsohn points to the acid hostility toward Israel in the New Left of the late 1960s, which was amplified both by Palestinian radicalism—in the Lanz discussion he references the terror attacks at the 1972 Munich Olympics, for example—as well as by Soviet-style anti-Zionism. Left antisemitism was hardly restricted to universities (and of course has its own history going back to Marx), but it has been especially concentrated there. While one might optimistically expect academics to be distinguished by rationalism and moderation, blissfully free of stereotypes and bigotry, in fact in crisis situations the opposite has proven to be the case. Wolffsohn references the rapidity with which German academics, in particular, fell in line with the Hitler regime in 1933. In 2023–24 we saw how some academics, especially from the humanities, lined up enthusiastically on the pro-Hamas side of the debate. That was our Gleichschaltung. Some intellectuals appear to be predisposed to extremism that cancels out intellect. One has to keep this failure of professional intellectuals in mind when one hears claims that liberal arts education is a precondition for a functioning democracy; in light of what took place during this past year, there is a strong argument for the opposite.
Wolffsohn points out, secondly, how anti-Israel, antisemitic positions in Germany overlap with a hostility to the Federal Republic of Germany, which, in too many cases, is equated with the Nazi past. The target, in other words, is not just the Nazi past but the liberal democratic order of the Federal Republic’s present. That denunciation of the Federal Republic is immediately recognizable as a direct heir to Soviet and East German propaganda that pointed to Nazis in the West in order to legitimate their own totalitarianism. This convolute of antisemitism and antidemocratic instincts typically also involves a heavy dose of anti-Americanism. This constellation is familiar from the anti-Israel demonstrations in the United States as well, where “death to America” slogans often accompany “death to Israel” advocacy. The animosity to Israel turns out to involve an adversariality toward Western states more generally, inadvertently providing corroboration for the claim that Israel is the front line of defense of the West. Attacking the West is one of the possible meanings of the calls to “globalize the intifada” (the other self-evident meaning of the slogan is the call to kill Jews everywhere, not just in Israel). This anti-Westernism as part of contemporary anti-Zionism also involves stereotypical denunciations of police forces, libelous accusations that police are made up extensively of right-wing extremists and systematically engage in brutality against progressive demonstrators. The matter is addressed directly in the Lanz discussion. Obviously this animosity toward police forces is a direct heir to the “defund” the police movement of recent years, which has resulted in an inability of Western states to stem crime waves.
Third, Wolffsohn refers to a “fundamental ethical decadence” in Western societies, as evident in the inversion of victims and perpetrators. This ethical failure was arguably most prominent in the difficulty with which organized feminists but others as well had in denouncing the rape warfare carried out by Hamas in the October 7 attacks. A Telos-Paul Piccone Institute webinar discussed this issue in particular. However “ethical decadence” goes a lot further, as evidenced by the reluctance of the university presidents to criticize calls for genocide, the exhilaration that some faculty famously expressed in the face of the attacks, and perhaps especially the obtuseness of the widespread slogan “by any means necessary.” That phrase announces clearly an absolute consequentialism: there is no ethical restraint in the pursuit of the goal, i.e., the end justifies the means. Such is the thinking that has become epidemic in higher education, even after years of mandatory ethics classes.
Finally, Wolffsohn places the threats to Jews and Jewish communities in Germany and elsewhere in a larger context of a threatening world. Not only Jews are in danger. There is a more widespread decline in a sense of security in Western societies, as crime is perceived as rising and as the state, for ideological reasons, has grown reluctant to enforce its own laws. This decline in security goes hand in hand with the caricatured animosity toward policing mentioned above. To be sure, the texture in this decline of security varies from country to country, but it has by now become a generalized feature of Western societies. As Wolffsohn points out, however, this disappearance of domestic security runs in parallel to an increasingly insecure international environment. European countries, but the United States too, continue to struggle to invest sufficiently in maintaining credible militaries to deter adversaries with malign intentions, whether it is a matter of Iranian proxy forces, Russia in Ukraine, or an ambitious China in the western Pacific. It remains to be seen whether the West will defend its way of life. Jewish insecurity, in the face of rising antisemitism, is just one part of an era of threat that we have entered.
Russell A. Berman is the Walter A. Haas Professor in the Humanities at Stanford and Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, where he co-directs the Working Group on Islamism and the International Order. He previously served as Senior Advisor on the Policy Planning Staff of the United States Department of State and as a Commissioner on the Commission on Inalienable Rights. He is currently a member of the National Humanities Council. He is the Editor Emeritus of Telos and President of the Telos-Paul Piccone Institute.
