German anti-Semitism chief must resign, say Jewish and Israeli scholars | The Electronic Intifada
▻https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/german-anti-semitism-chief-must-resign-say-jewish-and-israeli-sc
The latest demand for the removal of Felix Klein comes following his claim at an event on 30 June that “anti-Semitism from the left-liberal milieu” had been “making life a bit harder for me personally.”
Klein went on to say that “even if right-wing narratives currently have a higher potential for violence, we must not underestimate this area.”
The scholars reject this entirely: “No ‘left-liberal anti-Semites’ are bullying you, but Jews and non-Jews are protesting the way in which you are weaponizing the fight against anti-Semitism at the expense of free speech and basic civil rights – and the fight against anti-Semitism itself.”
The signers include Dani Karavan, Alex Levac, Yehuda Judd Ne’eman and David Shulman – all winners of the Israel Prize, the state’s highest official cultural honor.
They also include Harvard University’s Jean Comaroff, writer and Yeshayahu Leibowitz Prize winner Ilana Hammerman, and Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan, a member of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities.
Among the signers are Mark Levene, retired professor at the University of Southampton and winner of the Lemkin Prize of the Institute for the Study of Genocide; Michael Rothberg, chair in Holocaust studies at the University of California; and Barry Trachtenberg, chair of Jewish history at Wake Forest University.
The scholars call Klein’s latest declaration “deeply offensive.”
“You basically called us and many others criticizing you in a legitimate way anti-Semites,” they write. “We demand an apology for that.”
They also accuse Klein of minimizing the “acute danger that Jews in Germany face due to the surge in far-right anti-Semitism.”