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"Turner on the Pommel Horse” by Heinrich Hamann, c. 1902. Image courtesy of pdimagearchive.org.
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Eva Menasse
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Translated from the German by Julia Bosson
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“This is what the German feuilleton will never understand: The debate over Omri Boehm is not about freedom of expression. It is not about whether it is acceptable to criticize the Israeli government (as if that were lacking, or even taboo). It’s about pure hatred of Israel, anti-Israeli annihilation fantasies, the intolerable political instrumentalization of the Holocaust, support for BDS — and all this during a memorial speech at Buchenwald.”
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This post is typical of Philipp Peyman Engel, the editor-in-chief of the Jüdische Allgemeine newspaper, in whose defense nearly the entire feuilleton pages of this country spent a week standing on self-erected barricades frothing with indignation. Yes, that’s right, the same feuilleton pages that Engel lambasted have now come out in full force to preserve his honor.
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It is worth taking a closer look at Engel’s post. The German “debate” could hardly operate in more extreme terms: “hatred of Israel,” “anti-Israeli annihilation fantasies,” “intolerable political instrumentalization of the Holocaust.” The question remains: Who do these phrases actually refer to? Is Engel truly speaking about Omri Boehm, the internationally renowned Israeli German philosopher who explores the big questions of universalism and human rights in complex texts?
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Since it’s only Boehm’s name in this post, Engel deliberately implicates him in his bombastic battle cries. After all, it was Boehm who was supposed to deliver the commemorative speech in Buchenwald on the 80th anniversary of its liberation, until the Israeli ambassador to Germany prevented it through a scandalous intervention that was hardly perceived as actually scandalous by anyone. On a purely linguistic level, Engel’s phrases are vaguely aimed at “the debate,” yet they remain spuriously attached to Boehm.
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This is how, until now, the black-and-white world of Philipp Peyman Engel has functioned. Engel, who is now being safely protected from the possibility that he too could fall victim to “online rumblings.” That’s really sweet.
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Arm-in-arm with the Israeli ambassador Ron Prosor, an undiplomatic social media warrior of the highest order, Engel is one of the loudest digital rabble-rousers in a narrative as one-dimensional as it is consequential, in which the majority of the German feuilleton has been mired for years. In this narrative, virtually everyone is suspected of antisemitism and/or hatred of Israel, and anyone who doubts this truth proves it by doing so.
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Engel, then: “There are statements that are unforgivable,” “dialogue ends with hatred of humanity” (what constitutes “hatred of humanity” in this case is, of course, determined by Engel himself), “ZDF2 is contributing to making hatred of Jews socially acceptable.” Everywhere he directs his grim X-ray vision, he finds, as expected, “pure antisemitism.” He is often at the forefront of calls for politicians to resign — such as the case of former Federal Commissioner for Culture and the Media Claudia Roth or former Vice President of the Bundestag Aydan Özoğuz — and one particular quote from Engel has been shared repeatedly over the years: “It is Islamists, secular Muslims, and left-wing extremists who make our lives hell.” By “our,” he means Jews living in Germany, whom Engel presumes to speak for by virtue of his position.
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Philipp Peyman Engel, who became editor-in-chief of the Jüdische Allgemeine shortly before October 7, 2023, has transformed the publication into a permanently accusatory, self-righteous mouthpiece — even more so than it already was. The JA irresponsibly fuels the fears of its readers, who must feel surrounded by antisemites and murderous enemies of Israel, be they Muslim neighbors or leftwing artists.
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Much of this lacks any factual basis, but it is as cleverly worded as Engel’s tweet about Omri Boehm. The Canadian German sociologist Y. Michal Bodemann, who passed away recently, spent decades examining German-Jewish relations and coined the term “memory theater.” In his last published text, he turned his attention to the publication Engel is responsible for. Although its subtitle is “Weekly newspaper for politics, culture, religion, and Jewish life,” Bodemann pointedly remarked that the Jüdische Allgemeine “is more reminiscent of a travel magazine for tourism in Israel, with lots of archaeology, Israeli cuisine, the military, and Hezbollah, but not a word about discrimination against Jewish and non-Jewish minorities in Israel or corruption in Netanyahu’s circle or the land grabs by violent settlers in the occupied territories.”
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A clear verdict. The Jüdische Allgemeine is published by the Central Council of Jews in Germany — a “political, not a moral institution,” as Meron Mendel, director of the Anne Frank Educational Center in Frankfurt, once said, a statement as apt as it was not understood. And the Central Council, whose journalistic organ is the JA, was itself once more liberal and less identitarian, to put it mildly.
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Today, the JA no longer even pretends to represent the broad spectrum of German-Jewish opinion, which theoretically ranges from the far-left Jewish Voice for a Just Peace in the Middle East to the Jews in the AfD. Perhaps it should also be remembered more often that Jews are normal people, with all the reasonable and unreasonable opinions, fears, and contradictions imaginable. Jewish intellectuals of international renown keep a safe distance from the JA and call it the German Breitbart News. Politically reliable non-Jews, on the other hand, such as Stefan Laurin, editor of the influential defamatory blog Ruhrbarone (which specializes in combing through old BDS petitions to publicly discredit “left-wing” artists), are welcome authors there. JA is free to do this, of course, but for Jews who think differently, ranging from those with liberal-progressive to left-wing views, there are other, more intellectually demanding publications, at least internationally. For political coverage, it is generally sufficient to read the English-language Haaretz, which publishes daily reports on the Gaza war that Engel would probably deem “pure hatred of Israel,” especially since he categorically considers all people in Gaza to be members of Hamas, i.e., terrorists.
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The editorial stance of the Jüdische Allgemeine becomes a problem because many non-Jewish German feuilleton writers (with the exception of the foreign correspondents and war reporters on the ground) neither read nor know of other Jewish opinions and publications beyond the JA — and consider the views of the Central Council and its Jüdische Allgemeine to be the Jewish position, set in stone and certified kosher, like the laws Moses brought down from the mountain. And because of this, their rather extreme editorial stance has become the moral compass of the German feuilleton.
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