Towards a Non-Carceral Anti-Antisemitism
Editors’ Note: In an interview conducted in early March, Felix Klein, Germany’s Federal Antisemitism Commissioner, called for harsher punishment of incidents of alleged antisemitism at universities. “Education does not protect against antisemitism, that should be clear by now,” he said. Instead, he urged universities to call in intelligence services, suggesting that statements like “from the river to the sea” should be treated as criminal offenses. “Prevention,” he warned, “was no longer enough.”
Klein’s statement follows the Bundestag’s adoption of two controversial non-binding resolutions on antisemitism, which encourage stricter discipline of alleged infractions (involving expulsions and immigration law), while also blurring the distinction between antisemitism and criticism of (or “hostility to”) Israel. In the same interview, Klein insisted that migrants to Germany should understand that adopting the country’s “culture of remembrance” included an obligation to protect Israel — even if they themselves are being targeted by rising anti-migrant sentiment and discrimination. As Achan Malonda recently wrote for the Diasporist, “In Germany, the response to violence against racialized people is even more violence.”
In this intervention, the authors offer a paradigm to understand the risks of punitive responses to antisemitism. Drawing upon feminist theory, social justice frameworks, and carceral studies, the authors examine the measures by which Germany has attempted to address antisemitism and problematize the belief that policing, censorship, and anti-migration policy result in more safety for Jews. The Diasporist invites response to the ideas outlined in this text, particularly suggestions for further applications for the theory and disagreements taken in good faith: [email protected]
In what follows, we try to articulate what is wrong with the way federal and local governments, as well as many political collectives in Germany, address the problem of antisemitism. We recognize the exploratory and therefore rudimentary character of our approach, which we see as an open invitation to experiment collectively. We acknowledge that the proposals we put forward are in conversation with the analysis and work that many collectives already do, and that they are part of the lived practices of many (Jewish and non-Jewish) communities and initiatives. It is our attempt to amplify these practices, and to support those ongoing struggles. We call on social justice movements to learn from these analyses and practices, and to further develop strategies that address both antisemitism and racist state violence in a united struggle against fascism.
Carceral anti-antisemitism in Germany today
In November 2024, the German Bundestag passed the resolution entitled “Nie wieder ist jetzt — Jüdisches Leben in Deutschland schützen, bewahren und stärken” (“Never Again is Now — Protecting, Conserving and Strengthening Jewish Life in Germany”). With antisemitism reportedly on the rise globally and domestically, concrete measures to ensure the safety and well-being of Jews and Jewish communities are certainly needed.
However, almost all the concrete measures that the resolution proposes to combat antisemitism fall under the rubric of what we call carceral anti-antisemitism. This strategy, we argue, not only does not help “protect, conserve and strengthen Jewish life” — on the contrary, the exposure to violent state measures places marginalized and racialized groups, including Jews, at greater risk.
As many Jewish organizations worldwide have pointed out, the problem with the resolution and similar measures starts with how we define antisemitism. This is in part because of a contentious definition that critics charge obscures more than it elucidates. The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) working definition of antisemitism, currently used not only by the Bundestag but also by other state actors such as local governments and ministries as well as educational and social institutions, is too broad, while the highly specific examples attached to it are frequently used as a political tool to conflate criticism of Israeli government policy with antisemitism. Even though the IHRA working definition of antisemitism was never intended for codification or as a tool for enforcement, it currently serves as the basis for heavy-handed and harmful public policies that often serve a punitive function.
Carceral anti-antisemitism follows a logic that criminalizes or scandalizes any consideration of cause and context behind various instances of angry, unreasonable, ignorant, or hyperbolic speech, broadly subsuming them under a generalized umbrella of hatred against Jews.
But the main problem lies with the nature of the measures that are being prescribed to counter incidents of real or perceived antisemitism. The Bundestag resolution lists not only withdrawing funding for research and events, but also suggests deploying “criminal law as well as residence, asylum and nationality law in order to ensure the most effective fight against antisemitism.” These are prime examples of state strategies that can be described as “carceral.” This term refers not only to state violence in the specific sense of police, prisons, and borders, but also to disciplinary and policing measures that may be carried out by actors and institutions on behalf of the state. These strategies are also employed within institutions that are usually perceived as “less harmful,” such as social welfare programs or social work, which nonetheless function according to disciplinary logics. Since they disproportionately affect racialized working-class communities, carceral measures also increase tendencies of state racism. Currently, these measures are taking place amid an atmosphere in which fears of antisemitism run high, alongside various forms of racism — particularly targeting Arab, Muslim, and Palestinian communities.
Carceral anti-antisemitism follows a logic that criminalizes or scandalizes any consideration of cause and context behind various instances of angry, unreasonable, ignorant, or hyperbolic speech, broadly subsuming them under a generalized umbrella of hatred against Jews. Its measures range from police violence against protesters to the criminalization of political slogans with contested meanings; the criminalization of children who wear Palestinian symbols in schools; the termination of funding, employment or speaking opportunities on grounds of antisemitism accusations; the securitization of cultural and educational spaces; digital policing and defamations; the introduction of clauses designed to shut down critical voices at institutions under the label of “extremism;” as well as border policing and migration regimes, which include national citizenship reform and the deportation apparatus. The Bundestag resolution provides a framework for the systematic implementation of precisely such carceral measures.
Situating the Carceral Turn
After decades of largely neglecting antisemitism, the German state began to expend resources for the fight against it in the late 2010s, beginning with the creation of the office of a federal commissioner “to combat antisemitism and protect Jewish life.” This process coincided with demonstrations in Berlin in 2017 against Donald Trump’s decision to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, during which reports of widespread antisemitic chants were disseminated by numerous media outlets despite a lack of evidence, thus portraying these political protests as antisemitic in their entirety. It also coincided with international efforts by the Israeli state and its allies to reframe opposition to Israel as antisemitic by pushing the IHRA working definition of antisemitism.
With the passage in 2019 of a Bundestag resolution that declared the methods and argumentative structures of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement to be antisemitic (the Bundestag doubled down on this claim with its November 2024 resolution), the fight against antisemitism became increasingly reduced to penalizing anti-Israel opinions. Only repression can work against hardened antisemites, Berlin’s antisemitism commissioner Samuel Salzborn said in May 2021, following incidents of antisemitic chants at a demonstration protesting evictions in the Palestinian neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah in East Jerusalem — chants from which other protesters clearly distanced themselves.
The carceral turn in the fight against antisemitism echoes the development of carceral feminism — a concept that is used in abolitionist thought and practice to critique the alignment of feminist movements with the state and its criminal legal systems.
To better understand why carceral responses are harmful, it is helpful to take a closer look at another field in which carceral logic has played out, namely carceral responses to sexual and gendered violence. The carceral turn in the fight against antisemitism echoes the development of carceral feminism — a concept that is used in abolitionist thought and practice to critique the alignment of feminist movements with the state and its criminal legal systems. Similarly, carceral feminism occurs in the context of neoliberalization, which mobilizes carcerality as one of its major instruments. Against the background of a more general shift away from social justice frameworks towards state control and punishment, feminist movements have also increasingly called for punishment of gendered and sexual violence, thereby embracing the neoliberal carceral state.
Radical feminists of color in particular have pointed out the manifold problematic consequences of carceral feminism: First, state (hetero-) patriarchy is concealed; second, the focus on the punishment of perpetrators neglects the support that people who are exposed to gendered violence often seek; third, gender justice is increasingly weaponized against racialized working class populations; and fourth, multi-marginalized gender diverse persons, who experience gendered violence within their communities or on interpersonal levels and state violence — such as illegalized migrants or racialized women and queers — not only cannot turn to the state for protection but are further brutalized by the state that pretends to protect women and gender diverse people.
Carceral anti-antisemitism fosters similar yet distinct problems. At first glance, increased vigilance toward identifying antisemitic ideologies and sanctioning of antisemitic attacks may appear like a welcome development. However, drawing on state measures to combat antisemitism entails taking on the repressive, divisive, and racializing logics intrinsic to carceral mechanisms. This can lead to a situation in which safety for Jews is not increased but rather reduced, because these measures criminalize left-wing Jews, or place concerns for Jewish safety in institutions fomenting nationalism and authoritarianism. As a result, carceral measures pose a danger to Jews and other marginalized communities alike.
What is wrong with carceral anti-antisemitism?
Carceral perspectives often involve de-articulating the antisemitism of mainstream society. If the main means available for combating a problem is criminalization, then antisemitism is constructed as external to the norms of a society. It is thereby detached from broader societal structures, suggesting that it can be overcome through isolation or exclusion. This effectively exonerates the (Christian, white) majority society, which makes itself the arbiter of an antisemitism that is frequently externalized through rhetorical constructions such as those around the idea of “imported antisemitism.” As a result, while Palestinian demonstrators often face repercussions for accusations of antisemitism, the antisemitism of, say, Elon Musk or the antisemitic pamphlets alleged to have originated with Bavaria’s deputy prime minister Hubert Aiwanger remain without consequences.
At the same time, the exposure of right-wing extremist chat groups within the police has shown that police officers themselves often adhere to far-right world views.
Germany’s fight against antisemitism has also been decoupled from a fight against far-right extremism and neo-fascism. By way of example, federal antisemitism commissioner Felix Klein defended the former head of intelligence H.G. Maassen against charges of antisemitism for völkisch-nationalist speech, which included antisemitic insinuations that “globalists” are undermining German society. And Musk, who performed a Nazi salute during U.S. President Donald Trump’s inauguration celebrations, is still a respected businessman in Germany.
But the means of violence that are supposed to protect against antisemitism themselves also harbor and reproduce antisemitic structures. Jewish institutions in Germany are commonly under police protection — and for good reasons: As the 2019 antisemitic attack on the synagogue in Halle showed, Jewish communities in Germany are not at all safe from antisemitic terror. At the same time, the exposure of right-wing extremist chat groups within the police has shown that police officers themselves often adhere to far-right world views. In 2023, ZDF Magazin Royale and FragDenStaat published the content of a WhatsApp group that included over 100 Frankfurt police officers. The chats featured deeply racist and antisemitic content, including glorifications of Hitler, images of swastikas, and messages mocking Holocaust victims. Two years earlier, reports revealed that special unit police officers, who were members of another right-wing extremist chat group, were on duty during the Hanau terror attack in 2020, in which the police was criticized for their delay in apprehending the attacker. This connection between the police and antisemitism is not coincidental, but structural: The police, an institution for enforcing the state’s monopoly on violence, are a milieu characterized by hierarchical structures, masculinism, and esprit de corps, in which authoritarian, bigoted and conspiratorial attitudes flourish.
Carceral measures also play different groups affected by racism and marginalization off against each other. They claim to protect one group but endanger others in the process. For example, when the police are deployed to protect a Jewish event, racialized people face the risk of racial profiling, humiliation, or assaults. When police repress Palestine-solidarity protests in the name of protecting Jews, they contribute to a false construction of difference between social groups that are in fact neither fixed nor homogenous. This construction and enforcement of difference is hierarchically structured, making it seem as though Jews carry special favor with the state and its institutions, thereby obfuscating the grounds for mutual solidarity against the far-right as well as structural violence and damaging prospects for forging alliances based on shared experiences of oppression and exclusion.
In Germany, political and media debates that frame antisemitism as an “imported” phenomenon exemplify this divisive strategy and act as a justification for imposing anti-migrant policies. For example, when Chancellor Olaf Scholz calls for deportations “in grand style” on the cover of Der Spiegel one week, such anti-migrant rhetoric is legitimized the next week by a different cover announcing that Jews are scared in Germany — alongside a story perpetuating the racist narrative of “clan criminality.” Media narratives such as these instrumentalize Jewish fears to stoke racism, which permeates social and political life in Germany.
As “migration control” has become a priority across party platforms, politicians have identified charges of antisemitism as a powerful tool that can lend authority to racist policies.
Invoking the specter of antisemitism for anti-migrant rhetoric and policy proposals such as the Christian Democratic Union party’s efforts to tie German citizenship status to an affirmation of Israel need to be situated in the wider context of anti-migrant politics in Germany as well as the European Union: During the same week that carceral anti-antisemitism was on full display as Berlin police shut down the Palestine Congress in May 2024, the federal government outlawed cash benefits for refugees, and the so-called Common European Asylum System (CEAS) reform hollowed out asylum rights on the European level. Such a convergence is not coincidental. The recent Bundestag resolution specifically cites migration law and citizenship status as methods by which the purported fight against antisemitism is to be waged. As “migration control” has become a priority across party platforms, politicians have identified charges of antisemitism as a powerful tool that can lend authority to racist policies.
As alluded to earlier, carceral anti-antisemitism also threatens the safety of many Jews. As the protests and solidarity actions in recent months have shown, left-wing Jewish activists and scholars are disproportionately subjected to state repression, be it in the form of direct police violence or in the form of the cancellation of lectures or exhibitions. Largely unnoticed by the public, carceral policing also often goes hand in hand with economic insecurity and professional precarity, depriving targeted individuals of their livelihoods and platforms. This “collateral damage” of carceral anti-antisemitism actually enforces the neglect of the diversity of public life and positions — Jewish and otherwise.
Further, the invocation of state power as a protective authority reinforces the dependence on external protection. The carceral view is fixated on the state as the provider of protection on the basis of rendering others in lack of protection and care. This dependency prevents the cultivation of independent agency — agency in solidarity with other marginalized groups. In Germany and elsewhere, there are already various collectives that are pushing against carceral logics and are doing this kind of crucial work in their organizing and coalition-building on the ground — some of which we will elaborate on below.
What does non-carceral anti-antisemitism look like?
To say that carceral means are not well-suited to combating antisemitism is not to deny or trivialize the actual existence of antisemitism. Antisemitism is a violent reality in German society: Antisemitic views and affects extend from national socialism to post-fascism, from European Christianity to the secular Enlightenment, from the far-right fringes to the very center of society. And just as left-wing or migrant communities are not free from other forms of group-based racist stereotypes, they are not free from antisemitism either.
The basic idea of non-carceral anti-antisemitism is to develop non-governmental — i.e. civil society — responses instead of relying on state violence and repression. Such a perspective can take up important impulses from the abolitionist feminist movement. The starting point of their discussions, championed by groups such as INCITE! (a group of feminists of color) and Critical Resistance (an anti-prison organization) was the analysis that the feminist movement had become too closely involved with the state and had relied primarily on criminalization to combat sexualized violence, which exposed marginalized communities to even stronger state violence and did not go hand in hand with an increase in safety, especially for particularly vulnerable women and queer people. On the other hand, the anti-prison movement self-critically acknowledged that it had not developed good responses to violence within its own communities in the past, particularly sexualized violence, domestic violence, and intimate partner violence. It is this conjuncture that we take up as we call on social movements, communities, and initiatives to develop or strengthen non-state violence-based analysis and action against antisemitism and other forms of racism.
Such work can only be based on an alliance practice of several marginalized groups. The building blocks of such work could include grassroots educational measures, which offer a more promising strategy than efforts seeking to enforce education according to the ideas of the state. These forms of self-enlightenment may well include sharp conflicts that communities should be empowered to address and work through, developing tools and cultivating knowledge collectively. Within such work, non-Jewish community members are called upon to address their own antisemitism and take responsibility in their own political and community contexts. At the same time, this must entail committing to the safety of Palestinian lives as well.
Among other things, this requires establishing and rehearsing community practices of “calling in,” bringing attention to harmful behavior or words of an individual or group internally. Calling in allows us to foster accountability when people have engaged in harmful practices without exposing them publicly. In a context in which criminalization and punishment are the dominant forms of reaction, calling in presents an alternative, which aims to stop the reproduction and perpetuation of violent behavior. Important conditions for successful calling in are a somewhat close relationship to the person who will be addressed and the demonstration of openness or commitment. This does not exclude calling somebody out for their harmful actions if previous attempts to call in have been unsuccessful. However, such calls should always be attentive to differential vulnerabilities to state violence and repression.
It is important to recognize that engaging in this kind of work will require substantial work of repair and trust-building between different communities, given the context in which accusations of antisemitism have by now long been leveraged or even enforced in punitive ways. These kinds of reparative approaches will also require a public willingness on the part of those groups and actors calling people in about antisemitism to themselves be called in and educated about racism.
Where no such civil society responses are to be expected, the first task of a transformative fight against antisemitism is to build up such non-carceral defense infrastructures.
A particular challenge to which approaches grounded in transformative justice have not yet found a good answer is the protection of Jewish events and institutions from right-wing and terrorist attacks. Initiatives such as Jews for Racial and Economic Justice (JFREJ) and other groups who partner with other community and local organizations in the United States (which has seen more deadly antisemitic violence in recent years than Europe) and hold safety trainings in affected neighborhoods can serve as meaningful examples. A major part of JFREJ’s strategy is to organize Jews to stand up for and protect Muslim, immigrant, and other racialized communities without expectations of reciprocity. This constitutes some of the work of trust-building and repair alluded to earlier. Showing up to provide safety or infrastructural support for each other’s actions and events can help build long-term partnerships and coalitions. In Germany, there is a long anti-fascist tradition from which one can learn as well, though this entails, from our perspective, decoupling anti-fascism from the state and attending to an intersectional anti-fascist practice.
To learn from these examples, and to achieve “safety through solidarity,” all civil society actors must assume broad responsibility. As long as the protection of synagogues is necessary, such protection could be organized by institutions other than by the police: trade unions, churches, mosques, sports clubs, schools. These groups are not by default anti-carceral, but community accountability might trigger a (self-)education process within and between different groups.
Where no such civil society responses are to be expected, the first task of a transformative fight against antisemitism is to build up such non-carceral defense infrastructures. Given the prevalence and harmful impact of carceral approaches, it is important to underscore the urgency of this task as well as to recognize its open-ended and experimental character. We call on communities across Germany to take up this task collectively and collaboratively, in the spirit of solidarity.
