“Were you uncomfortable?” the photographer Nan Goldin asked from a lectern in Berlin’s Neue Nationalgalerie on a chilly Saturday in late November.
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“I hope so. We need to feel uncomfortable,” Goldin continued, after pausing to survey the crowd that had packed into Mies van der Rohe’s atrium-like glass-and-steel building for the opening of her career retrospective, “This Will Not End Well.” (On view until April 6).
Goldin, one of the contemporary art world’s most visible and most politically vocal figures, observed four minutes of silence for the Gazans and Lebanese killed by Israeli troops as well as the Israeli civilians killed by Hamas on Oct. 7, before launching into a fiery oration that the Jewish-American artist addressed to the country hosting her exhibition.
“Why am I talking to you, Germany?” Goldin queried, before denouncing what she termed “the cultural crackdown” against those perceived to be overly critical of Israel or overly supportive of the Palestinians.
“This is a city that we used to consider a refuge,” said Goldin, who has lived in Berlin on and off since the 1980s. “Now over 180 artists, writers and teachers have been canceled since Oct. 7, some for something as banal as a like on Instagram, many of them Palestinian, 20% of them Jews,” she claimed.
As an American Jew who has made Germany his home for nearly two decades, I have watched with growing concern as a wave of repression has swept the country, ostensibly in the name of keeping Jews safe. As a writer, I fear the chilling effect that a new resolution passed last month by Germany’s parliament, the Bundestag, will have on free artistic expression. Its cumbersome title is “Never Again is Now: Protecting, Preserving and Strengthening Jewish Life in Germany.” Like an earlier resolution that labeled the Boycott, Sanctions and Divestment (BDS) movement antisemitic in nature, “Never Again is Now” seems designed to stifle criticism of Israel rather than combat the real scourge of antisemitism.
At the heart of this scramble lies a kind of moral panic—a fear that if Israel falters, Germany’s historical reckoning after the Holocaust has been in vain.
And like the 2019 BDS resolution, “Never Again in Now” is nonbinding, but it seems destined to sow similar panic and confusion, since it may require that artists (and others) under consideration for public support (including invitations extended by museums and other institutions) adhere to the principles laid out in these documents. A climate of uncertainly, fear and moral panic has gripped this country’s cultural sector, and some organizations have already rushed to enforce the resolution as if it were law. Behind the lofty rhetoric of its title, the text of the resolution does not reflect a genuine commitment to fighting antisemitism. Rather, it is an effort to protect a fragile narrative that allows Germany to avoid facing uncomfortable truths.
At the heart of this scramble lies a kind of moral panic—a fear that if Israel falters, Germany’s historical reckoning after the Holocaust has been in vain. If Israel stands accused of some version of the crime that Germany perpetuated against the Jewish people 80 years ago, then Germany’s self-image as a nation that has confronted, atoned for, learned and moved on from its dark history is shaken to the core.
Since the beginning of Israel’s assault on Gaza, which followed Hamas’ massacre of Israelis on Oct. 7, 2023, this very German anxiety has fueled a culture of censorship disguised as solidarity, where critique of Israel is met with kneejerk accusations of antisemitism. What was meant to be a commitment to justice has become a shield for national self-righteousness.
Since a draft of the resolution was leaked by the newspaper Die Zeit over the summer, there has been a flurry of concern about what its adoption could mean for civic, academic, and cultural life in Germany. In late August, an open letter signed by roughly 150 Jewish artists and intellectuals called the resolution draft “evidence that Germany has yet to overcome its past.”
Apparently, it was a message that politicians here didn’t want to hear. When the Bundestag voted on the final text of the resolution, a large majority of lawmakers approved it.
The resolution incorporates a controversial definition of antisemitism proposed by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) that, according to some, conflates criticism of Israel with hatred of Jews. This expansive definition blurs the line between legitimate critique of a state’s actions and hate speech. It allows political dissent to be misread as prejudice, putting Jewish critics of Israeli policy—alongside Palestinian and German activists—at risk of being silenced. This is not a move that protects Jewish life; it is a move that protects Germany’s conscience even as it puts the country on a collision course with the liberal democratic values it claims to espouse.
For example, the IHRA construes as antisemitic “denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor,” “applying double standards by requiring of [Israel] a behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation” and “drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.”
We saw the chillingly illiberal effects of this stance in late 2023, when Berlin cracked down on nonviolent pro-Palestinian protest in the German capital. In a particularly absurd twist, a number of antiwar demonstrations organized by Israelis and other Jews living in Berlin were among the gatherings that were banned.
The “Never Again is Now” resolution’s selective vision of antisemitism is especially troubling because it skews the reality of where the greatest dangers to Jewish life in Germany lie.
An open letter signed by Jewish writers, artists, and academics living in Germany condemned what it called a “disturbing crackdown on civic life” and called on Germany to protect the democratic right to dissent and “freedom for the one who thinks differently.” The signories were not responding to an abstract threat. (Full disclosure: I was among the 121 Jews in Germany who signed the letter, which appeared, in German, in the Berlin daily, Taz, and, in English, in n+1). Over the past year and change, there have been numerous examples of prizes being rescinded, and exhibitions and performances being cancelled. In a particularly perverse and absurd twist, some of the most prominent artists and thinkers impacted have been Jewish, including the South African artist Candice Breitz and the Israeli theater director Yael Ronen.
In December 2022, the Heinrich Böll Stiftung refused to award a prize to the Russian-American journalist Masha Gessen (who is Jewish) after they compared Israel’s military tactics in Gaza to the liquidation of ghettos in Eastern Europe; this past November, the Schelling Architecture Foundation rescinded its prestigious award to architect and writer James Bridle due to his support for a boycott of Israeli cultural intuitions. These examples were almost certainly on Goldin’s mind when she spoke out against the chilling effect this climate has on free expression.
Such moves create a culture of fear among Germany’s cultural institutions, leading many to self-censor in an effort to avoid being perceived as problematic or, worse, antisemitic—perhaps the ultimate stigma in Germany, given the country’s history.
The “Never Again is Now” resolution’s selective vision of antisemitism is especially troubling because it skews the reality of where the greatest dangers to Jewish life in Germany lie. The document emphasizes antisemitism supposedly imported by Middle Eastern communities, including the wave of refugees who arrived in 2015, as a primary threat. This is not only inaccurate but also feeds into xenophobic fears. In reality, statistics consistently show that the majority of antisemitic incidents in Germany originate from right-wing extremists. The far-right Alternative for Germany (AFD) party, now a powerful political force, has a long record of anti-Jewish rhetoric and of trivializing the Holocaust.
Yet the resolution fails to mention the AFD or address the rise of homegrown right-wing nationalism that has proven to be the most persistent and dangerous source of antisemitism in Germany today, focusing instead on “the shocking extent of antisemitism based on immigration from Muslim-majority countries—where antisemitism and hostility toward Israel find particularly fertile ground.”
The new resolution does not protect Jewish communities; it shields Germany’s moral self-image by focusing of the “special relationship” with Israel.
By shifting the focus to “imported” antisemitism, Germany diverts attention from its own domestic problems, as if classic European antisemitism, responsible for centuries of persecution, has been vanquished by Germans whose representatives currently sit in the Bundestag.
For Germany in 2025, a genuine commitment to protecting Jewish life would mean facing down the threats posed by the AFD and other far-right movements. It would mean addressing the reality that antisemitism in Germany is primarily a homegrown problem, deeply rooted in nationalist and xenophobic ideologies that have survived since the end of the Second World War. It would mean listening to Jewish voices that challenge mainstream assumptions, rather than silencing them when they criticize Israel. And it would mean acknowledging that support for Jewish communities does not require blind loyalty to Israel.
If Germany wants to genuinely learn from its history, it must be willing to face uncomfortable truths not only about the past, but also the present. The new resolution does not protect Jewish communities; it shields Germany’s moral self-image by focusing of the “special relationship” with Israel. It merely allows the country to feel righteous without grappling either with the complexities of Jewish life today or the reality of the resurgence of the far right.
The way that Germany is trying to enforce an orthodoxy of opinion, ostensibly in the service of protecting Jews, shows how little its leaders understand of Jewish tradition, which is, after all, a tradition of inquiry and debate both in service of learning for its own sake and tikkun olam, the Jewish concept of repairing the world. Jews like to argue—think of the famous quip, “two Jews, three opinions”—and sometimes that means rolling out the chutzpah.
Much outrage was directed at Goldin leading up to the opening of her Neue Nationalgalerie show (a columnist for the Berliner Zeitung accused her of not appreciating the “finer points of the German discourse” about Israel and the minister of culture Claudia Roth called her speech “unbearably one-sided”) but up until now there haven’t been any official consequences for either Goldin or the museum. German-language media has been similarly merciless in their response to the artist and her speech. The Swiss newspaper, Die Neue Zürcher Zeitung, in a particularly ugly op-ed, called Goldin one of those “Jews who are the antisemites’ useful idiots.” Since then, other Jews in Germany who have openly critical of Israel have been denounced. And in December, an editor at the Berlin daily Die Welt tweeted that four writers, among them Deborah Feldman, the American writer of Unorthodox, exemplified the “anti-Semitic ivory tower and its vulgar lies.”
“I saw my show as a test case,” Goldin said at the opening. “If an artist in my position is able to express a political stance without being canceled, I hope I am paving a path for other artists to speak out without being censored. I hope that’s the result.”
From her podium in Berlin, Goldin was a living embodiment of the chutzpah that moral clarity sometimes requires, which is why she’s the kind of Jew that is deeply inconvenient to present-day Germany: a country in the thrall of a false ideology that equates protecting Jews with supporting Israel unconditionally and which ignores Goldin’s provocations at its peril.
