Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Assmann, Aleida

Titel

A Spectre is Haunting Germany: The Mbembe Debate and the New Antisemitism

Ist Teil von

• Journal of genocide research, 2021-07, Vol.23 (3), p.400-411

Ort / Verlag

Abingdon: Routledge

Erscheinungsjahr

2021

Quelle

Taylor & Francis Journals Auto-Holdings Collection

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• "A spectre is haunting Europe: it is the accusation of antisemitism. It places us Europeans, especially Germans, under general suspicion." With these words Jan Assmann and I opened a letter in June 2019. It was written in defence of a colleague, the renowned Judaist and emeritus professor at Princeton University, Peter Schafer. He was suddenly considered unfit to continue to serve as director of the Jewish Museum after the chairman of the Jewish community, Josef Schuster, had raised the question "how Jewish still is the Jewish Museum actually?" What had happened? The immediate reason for the resignation was a tweet from the museum's press office, which had shared a taz newspaper article about international criticism of the BDS resolution of the German Bundestag. The director of the museum's academy programmes, Yasemin Shooman, who had initiated interreligious and intercultural discussions at the museum and had also addressed discrimination against Muslims and other minorities, decided to leave the Jewish Museum and move to the German Centre for Integration and Migration Research. Schafer had already been sharply criticized in 2018 by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the US Embassy and the Central Council of Jews in Germany for an exhibition on Jerusalem that included the Muslim-Palestinian perspective. The Frankfurt Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) called Schafer's dismissal the 'end point of a development that had lasted for years and had turned the Jewish Museum Berlin into a forum for Israel critics and BDS sympathizers with links to political Islam."