Germany manages world’s highest level of antisemitism; Berlin needs methods to confront it - opinion

In late July, Europe’s largest daily paper, the German Bild, declared “Nowhere in the world are there as many incidents of Jew-hatred as in Germany: The numbers of shame.”

The paper’s shocking headline referred to the recent report issued by the seven largest Diaspora Jewish communities (the J7) along with the Anti-Defamation League (ADL). According to an ADL statement based on the study, “Germany remains with the highest rate of antisemitic incidents per Jewish capita: nearly 70 per 1,000 Jewish residents in 2025. That is nearly five times Australia’s rate, six times the U.K.’s rate, and nearly 70 times the US rate.”

How did Germany, with its highly financed network of state-funded NGOs allegedly fighting hatred of Jews and anti-antisemitism statements from the mainstream political class, become the world champion again in outbreaks of Jew-hatred?

Former German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s decision to allow roughly 1 million Muslim migrants, who were steeped in the genocidal antisemitism of their nations (e.g., Syria, Lebanon, Afghanistan), to enter the Federal Republic without being vetted gave a huge shot in the arm to the already flourishing Jew-hatred.

The famous Bertolt Brecht quote from his 1941 play about Hitler, The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, conjures up the situation in 2015 Germany: “The womb from which that crawled is still fertile.”

The Israeli psychiatrist Zvi Rex famously noted in the 1980s, with his biting sarcasm and wit, that “The Germans will never forgive the Jews for Auschwitz.” The fancy academic term for this type of Jew-hatred is “secondary antisemitism.” In short, a pathological guilt-ridden response to the Holocaust exists among a large percentage of the German population. An updated version of Rex’s quote would probably be: Germans and Western Europeans will never forgive Israelis for the Holocaust.

The approximately one million aforementioned Muslims entered a Germany infected with this type of “guilt-defensiveness antisemitism.” In 2015, Germany’s security and intelligence agencies raised the alarm bells over the flood of migrants who harbor radical Islamic views and hatred of Jews.

According to a 2015 German security document, “We are importing Islamic extremism, Arab anti-Semitism, national and ethnic conflicts of other peoples as well as a different societal and legal understanding.”

The results of Merkel’s open-border policy resulted in deadly Islamist terrorist attacks on Germans, including Israeli tourists at the 2016 Berlin Christmas market.

Germany has largely shown no appetite to confront the main engines of Jew-hatred: Islamist and left-wing antisemitism engulfing many German cities and towns. Take the example of Felix Klein, who just ended his post as the German federal commissioner tasked with combating antisemitism. Klein, who had no experience in counter-terrorism or fighting antisemitism, started his job in 2018.

In an interview last month with the German news outlet SWR, Klein was incapable of naming Islamist-animated antisemitism. He referred to it as an “ideology originating from abroad,” which is responsible for the sharp rise in antisemitic crimes. Making matters worse, antisemitic crimes carried out by Islamists are frequently attributed to right-wing extremists in Germany.

Henryk Broder, the German author and journalist who is arguably Germany’s top expert on modern antisemitism, wrote about Klein on his popular website The Axis of Good: “He has little to no idea about antisemitism. That was already the case when he was appointed Federal Government Commissioner for Antisemitism in 2018, and little has changed in the past eight years.”

Broder, a German Jew known as a master polemicist and satirist, added: “If he were a businessman, he would have to file for bankruptcy. An exterminator under whose tenure the rat population has massively increased would have been fired long ago. Why should different rules apply to antisemitism commissioners?”

In 2022, Klein refused a request by Rabbi Abraham Cooper from the Simon Wiesenthal Center “to write a second report for Germany that focuses on Iran, its terrorist lackeys and allies, and their impact and threats to German Jews.” Klein refused.

When I sought comments from Klein over the years on whether he agreed with the US government that Iran is the “world’s chief trafficker in antisemitism” and the foremost state sponsor of Holocaust denial, he declined to comment. However, he blasted Trump as “dangerous for the Jewish community.”

The system of German state commissioners to combat antisemitism is obsolete, permeated with gross incompetence, and strips the Jewish community and its allies of self-organization and professional self-respect. Two German states, Baden-Württemberg and Schleswig-Holstein, hired accused antisemites, Michael Blume and the Protestant Bishop Gerhard Ulrich, who demonstrated sympathy for Palestinian terrorism and radical Islamism before assuming their posts.

Blume (Baden-Württemberg) has faced repeated, documented accusations of antisemitism (including two Hamburg court rulings that it is permissible to call him antisemitic) and criticism from Jewish and pro-Israel sources; he remains in the post under the new Özdemir government.

More than 70 percent of the antisemitic incidents registered in Baden-Württemberg are, according to a July RIAS (Research and Information Center on Antisemitism) report, shaped by hatred of Israel or directed against the Jewish state.

According to a DPA report, Minister-President Cem Özdemir (Green Party) was disturbed by the antisemitic incidents in Baden-Württemberg. “There can really only be a hard zero-tolerance policy for this.” Özdemir’s rhetoric is largely empty. He ignores calls from German Jews in the cities of Mannheim and Stuttgart in Baden-Württemberg (and across Germany) who have called for Blume to be dismissed.

Özdemir allows the capital city of Stuttgart to post information on the city website from a pro-Hamas group called the Palestine Committee Stuttgart. The information enables the pro-Hamas group to fundraise.

Özdemir could order his interior minister to classify Palestine Committee Stuttgart as a terrorist entity. Özdemir and his Christian Democratic Union (CDU) coalition partner, Manuel Hagel, approved funding for the well-known antisemitic agitator and BDS activist Mitri Raheb, President of the Dar-al-Kalima University in Bethlehem.

While Özdemir and the state government declare on its website that “There is no place for antisemitism in Baden-Württemberg,” there is, in fact, a great deal of space for Jew-hatred in the southwestern state of Baden-Württemberg.

Some new methods to confront the ubiquitous antisemitism in Germany include pro-Israel Germans creating a German-style AIPAC organizing model that is not reliant on German government funding. Germans need to punish politicians by not reelecting them if they support anti-Israel and pro-Iranian regime policies.

The current German-Israel Friendship Association (DIG) is simply an arm of the German foreign ministry, and the DIG executive board member, the CDU politician Jürgen Hardt, helped implement the German weapons embargo against Israel during the hot phase of the war against Hamas. Israeli tanks desperately needed German tank parts at the time. The over 9,000 DIG members should dissolve the DIG and help to form a German AIPAC.

Jewish communities need to self-arm and self-organize, for reliance on antisemitism commissioners and the justice system has largely been an exercise in futility.

Jews in Germany should build broad-based coalitions, including with German Iranians and Christian Zionists, natural allies, who oppose the clerical regime in Tehran. One pressing goal should be to compel Germany to end diplomatic relations with Iran and shut down the twinning partnership between the cities of Freiburg and Isfahan. The time is ripe to stop managing Antisemitism in Germany.