Contested Terrain

Challenging Antisemitism in Berlin

Jewish Currents Magazine, July-August 2007

In the post-9/11 world, progressive people are faced with deep challenges. Racist and anti-Semitic resentments are informing judgments about social groups and legitimizing discrimination, terrorism, war and hatred. In too many parts of the world, groups of victims seem to be in desperate confrontation with each other. In Berlin, Germany, I encountered a group working on some of these issues in ways that could provide insights for the left.

Kreuzberg is the easternmost district of what used to be West Berlin and was a poor and dilapidated section of the city. Since the 1970s, it has been home to a large community of Turkish migrants who came during the post-WWII guest worker program. Low rents and abandoned buildings attracted students and activists and set the stage for a large and militant squatters’ movement. Throughout the 1980s and ’90s, Kreuzbergers fought pitched battles with the police over housing issues, development plans, and a variety of other causes.

Today, Kreuzberg, nicknamed “Little Istanbul,” is still the main district for the roughly 116,000 German residents of Turkish background. The district is also home to people from a host of Arab countries; the number of registered Muslims in Berlin is now roughly 213,000. While May Day riots have subsided and ‘squats’ no longer number in the hundreds, Kreuzberg remains a major, transnational site of left activism and counterculture.

Lately, however, Kreuzberg schools have been making the headlines for anti-Jewish incidents, often perpetrated by youth with Turkish, Arab or Muslim backgrounds. Last November, the head of Berlin’s Jewish community, Gideon Joffe, said that such incidents are occurring daily in Berlin, many in Kreuzberg. “We have been getting reports from school children about having been at the center of verbal and physical attacks,” Joffe said. The word “Jew” is regularly being used as an expletive, “and the children are beginning to think of this as something totally normal.”

During the Israel-Hezbollah war last summer, attacks on synagogues and other Jewish sites rose sharply across Europe. In Kreuzberg, a 14-year-old Jewish girl became the target of repeated verbal and physical attacks from Arab classmates. She was given police escort to school, and eventually, like many other Jewish youth in Berlin, she transferred to the Mitte district’s Jewish high school, described in Der Spiegel as resembling a “high-security ward.”

Though these incidents of anti-Semitism occurred among youth from Arab, Muslim and Turkish backgrounds, historian Susanne Urban, a staff writer on the Jewish Tribune, reports that “in Germany, Islamic and pro-Palestinian groups are involved in only a very small percentage of anti-Jewish incidents: indigenous German anti-Semitism does not need ‘support’ from others.” A recent crime report for Berlin shows a more than twofold increase in right-extremist acts of violence in 2006, evidence of a rise in neo-Nazi activity.

Anti-Semitism, moreover, exists not only on the margins of society. Opinion polls regularly show anti-Jewish stereotypes present across the political and social spectrums in German society. In a 2002 study, Urban reports, 20 percent agreed that “Jews are to blame for the major conflicts in the world,” and another 26 percent shared this opinion to some extent. Such attitudes are what sociologists call “secondary anti-Semitism,” which is the tendency to express anti-Jewish resentments towards the State of Israel.

Anti-Jewish prejudices may thus be found among neo-Nazis, liberals and conservatives, soccer hooligans, school children, and people of Arab, Muslim and Turkish background who are themselves discriminated against in racist ways. This makes the topic of anti-Semitism incredibly complex, particularly in multicultural places like Kreuzberg, where a variety of struggles are at play.

Following twin synagogue bombings in Istanbul by two young Turkish Muslims in November, 2003, a group of Berlin youth, mainly from Turkish backgrounds, began an initiative in opposition to anti-Semitism in their communities. The Kreuzberg Initiative Against Anti-Semitism (KIgA) is a publicly funded group that organizes workshops against anti-Semitism and offers education about Jewish history in the district before and during the Nazi persecutions.

Assistant Director Elif Kayi, at KIgA’s office on the popular Kreuzberg street, Oranienstrasse, told me how she experienced the contradictions of leftist politics in her own activism. “I come from a politically active family and I was always active with student organizations, and I was involved in the Palestinian issue.” During the second intifada, she said, she witnessed growing sections of the left becoming supportive of Islamists, “and this didn’t make sense to me. The two [leftism and Islamic fundamentalism] don’t go together.” She would raise this contradiction with her political friends, but they always avoided it. “It was like touching something holy [to them]. I was feeling completely like an outsider. And I thought that there must be something other than just that issue at play.” That “something,” she came to believe, were anti-Jewish assumptions.

In a workshop geared towards youth, KIgA organizes role-plays about the Middle East conflict and the foundation of the State of Israel. The workshop begins with an interactive quiz on Israel, the country’s inhabitants, and their motivations for immigrating to Israel. Participants learn about the situation in Palestine before 1947 and the historical events that led to today’s conflicts. With this background, they take on different roles in a fictional conference aimed at resolving the conflict.

Rather than promoting a unitary position regarding the Middle East, the workshop aims to challenge the demonization and conspiracy theories that often inform perceptions of the conflict and of Israel itself. “There’s a widespread belief in anti-Semitic conspiracy theories in Turkey, and this travels to Turkish migrant communities in Germany through newspapers and the internet,” Kayi said. The most popular conspiracy theory accuses a small denomination of Dönmeh Jews of controlling Turkey behind the scenes, in league with ‘international Jewry.’ (The Dönmeh are descendants of Jews who followed Sabbatai Zvi, the wildly popular false messiah of the 17th century, into the Islamic faith when he was forcibly converted by Turkish authorities in 1666.) This conspiracy theory is popular across the political spectrum, Kayi told me, among nationalists, Islamists and leftists alike. In fact, it was a widely read 2002 book, Sebeke Network, by the leftist Yalçin Küçük, that is most responsible for popularizing the Dönmeh conspiracy theory.

The myth of Jewish control and collusion with evil then morphs into a variety of fables. The Turkish Islamist newspaper, Vakit, which has been banned from publication in Germany but is still available online, has published stories headlined, “Hitler Did What the Jews Wanted” and “Theodor Herzl Worked Together with Hitler.” One drawing shows a grotesque man up to his waist in a river of blood and drinking from a cocktail glass full of it. KIgA monitors and critiques such anti-Jewish propaganda in various media sources.

Since Israel, Zionism, and Jews are often characterized as an overarching power that controls and manipulates society from behind the scenes, KIgA workshops are organized on the topic of conspiracy theory itself. Participants are shown how conspiracy theories ‘explain’ complex social realities as good-versus-evil struggles involving ‘hidden’ forces. They learn to deconstruct the structure of conspiratorial thought, to see the connection of conspiracy theory to characterizations of Jews, and how to spot examples of this kind of thinking in Turkish and Arab newspapers. They even partake in a contest to invent the most convincing conspiracy theory

According to Elif Kayi, anti-Semitic conspiracy theories have a strong grip “because they help create an identity for migrant youth in Germany” by ‘explaining’ the social hardship and marginalization they face in Germany: the racism and discrimination, low economic status and poverty, and high rates of unemployment and social stigmatization. “Unlike in France or Britain,” Kayi said, “it is nearly impossible for migrant youth from Turkey or Arab countries to identify with German national identity, because German identity is closely bound with an ethnic identity rather than the republican model of civic identity.”

In Kreuzberg, youth from Turkish and Arab backgrounds interact and share common experiences of exclusion. Their ‘alternative’ identity, Kayi explains, does not draw upon that of previous generations, but rather forms in opposition to it: a transnational identity that transcends countries of origin and is based on exclusion, victimhood, and the politics of grievance, combined with anger over Mideast conflicts that Palestinian migrants have, in some cases, personally experienced. Anti-Zionism — sometimes crossing over into anti-Semitism — is an element of this identity.

Discussing anti-Semitism in Turkish, Muslim, and Arab communities is difficult. While KIgA workshops bring together youth from these communities with German youth who are not from migrant backgrounds, the organization has few relationships with Turkish, Arab, or Muslim groups, “who mostly tell us,” Kayi says, “that they have enough problems to worry about.” She agrees that there are a host of challenges facing these communities, but she argues against what she considers to be their self-perception as pure victims.

“Some sectors of the left also view migrants this way, as victims, not as actors, not as perpetrators,” Kayi explains. Replacing the Che Guevara t-shirt of yesterday with the Palestinian kaffiya of today, migrants of Turkish, Arab, or Muslim background are viewed as today’s revolutionary corps. Therefore, criticizing anti-Semitism within these communities has resulted in KIgA’s being accused of racism and Islamophobia.

I asked Rosa Fava, a founding member of the Kreuzberg Initiative, about this issue. Among German progressives, she said, “there is racism against people from Arab countries, from Turkey, and from other [culturally] Islamic countries. The expression of this racism often has an anti-Islamic element: Islam, for example, is made responsible for the oppression of women symbolized by the head scarf.” Around such issues, caution is necessary, she said, because on the one hand racism towards Muslims is a problem, while on the other hand oppression of women is widespread.

Originating as a migrant initiative itself, KIgA is quite sensitive about such issues. Instead of denying that problems exist, KIgA activists try to grapple with the complex relationships among them. The challenge is to show that anti-Semitism is no solution to the problems faced by the communities they serve, but rather an additional problem that makes it only harder to address the real issues.

The right, Kayi said, “would like to see anti-Semitism not as a German problem any longer but only as a problem of the Muslim minorities.” This is the case with German nationalists and conservatives who use the issue to maintain the exclusion of Muslims, Turks, and Arabs from German society. “There is a similar, small-scale discussion,” Fava noted, “about how Eastern European countries threaten to bring anti-Semitism into the European Union,” without acknowledgment of the fact that indigenous anti-Semitism already exists in the EU. Such projections, Fava said, fuel the rightwing culture war, national chauvinism, and closed-border policies.

KIgA’s work offers insights of use in the United States, where serious grappling with the intersection of anti-Semitism, racism, and global politics has largely been avoided. Unfortunately, budget cuts have meant less funding in Germany for groups fighting rightwing extremism, and have made it more difficult for groups like KIgA to survive. We may therefore find the polarization in Berlin worsening over the next few years — a concern for people of Arab, Muslim, and Turkish background as well as for Jews, women, queer people, and a whole host of others made vulnerable by the growth of rightwing politics in Berlin.

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Resources:

• Kreuzberg Initiative Against Antisemitism: http://www.kiga-berlin.org/

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