Honorable anti-Semitism
Honorable Anti-Semitism is an essay by the Austrian writer and Holocaust survivor Jean Améry . It was published on July 25, 1969 in the weekly newspaper Die Zeit with the subtitle The Barricade United with the Spießer Stammtisch against the State of the Jews . He was one of the first to address anti-Semitic tendencies in the German left after 1945. The essay was created in particular under the impression of German-language reactions to the Six Day War , as a result of which numerous left and progressive intellectuals, publicists and politicians viewed each other favorably from the previous year, 1948 turned away from the founded Jewish state. Améry's core thesis was that anti-Semitism “ exists in anti-Israelism or anti-Zionism like the thunderstorm in the cloud”, but has assumed a supposedly respectable form through its coding as anti-imperialism .
To this day, Améry's essay is one of the most cited positions in the overall social and left-wing internal debate about anti-Zionism and, in the late 1980s, made a significant contribution to the formation of the anti-Germans , a movement of the radical left that referred to Améry and his claim that the left had itself in the fight against anti-Semitism and in their relationship to Israel . Améry had concluded in his essay: “If the historical fate of the Jews - or the anti-Semite question, to which the foundation of the now existing State of Israel may well belong - is again constructed into the idea of Jewish guilt, then a leftist is responsible for this that forgets itself. "
literature
Stephan Steiner (Ed.): Jean Améry. Works , Volume 7, Stuttgart 2005
Individual evidence
- ↑ Timo Stein: Between anti-Semitism and Israel criticism: Antizionism in the German Left , VS-Verlag 2011, p. 9
- ↑ Monika Schwarz-Friesel (Ed.): Current anti-Semitism - a phenomenon of the middle , Saur Verlag, 2010, p. 73
- ↑ With pennants and hats , Stephan Grigat in the Jungle World newspaper on August 7, 2008