U.S. President Joe Biden and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz will discuss increased reports of antisemitic acts in both countries over the last year as war has raged in the Middle East when they meet Friday in Berlin, a Biden administration official told reporters on the eve of Biden’s state visit to Germany.
“This is an area where the United States and Germany have worked very closely,” said the official, who was not named as a condition of the Wednesday night briefing.
The official added that while Biden is unlikely to hold a specific event centered on antisemitism during his one-day visit, the issue is “very important to President Biden, and one that he has, that we have, discussed with the German government over the years and continue to do so.”
The official did not give any more details on engagements or plans.
Watchdogs have sounded the alarm in both countries: According to a German government report, antisemitic incidents rose by about 83% last year. In the United States, the Anti-Defamation League has said that U.S. antisemitic incidents “skyrocketed” in the months after Hamas militants attacked Israel last October.
Biden has clearly tied the recent rise in anti-Jewish acts to a growing backlash over his staunch support of Israel.
In May, he spoke at the first Holocaust Remembrance Day since the start of the war on October 7, 2023. He warned of a “ferocious” rise in antisemitic incidents and said that, at the height of university protests, “Jewish students [were] blocked, harassed, attacked, while walking to class.”
He said protesters used “antisemitic posters, slogans calling for the annihilation of Israel, the world’s only Jewish state.”
Earlier this month, he spoke of his belief that “without an Israel, every Jew in the world’s security is less stable.”
He added, “It doesn’t mean that Jewish leadership doesn’t have to be more progressive than it is, but it does mean it has to exist, and that’s what worries me most about what’s going on now.”
Germany’s World War II history makes it particularly sensitive to this type of hatred, but critics say it has taken steps that stifle legitimate criticism.
In November, weeks into the Gaza conflict, a German museum canceled a show by a South African artist after she expressed support for the Palestinian cause. Candice Breitz, the artist, who is Jewish, called the act another example of “Germany’s increasingly entrenched habit of weaponizing false charges of antisemitism against intellectuals and cultural workers of various descriptions.”
In March, police canceled a conference of pro-Palestinian activists because a planned speaker had previously made antisemitic remarks. They blocked him from entering Germany and cut power to the Berlin building where conference participants had gathered to watch him on a livestream.
On the first anniversary of the war, Scholz warned against growing anti-Jewish sentiment and affirmed his support for Israel.
“We will never accept antisemitism and blind hatred of Israel. The Jewish people here in Germany have the full solidarity of our state,” he said.
A difficult definition
Key to managing antisemitism is the question of whether criticism of Israel is, by definition, antisemitic.
The Federal Association of Research and Information Centers for Antisemitism, Germany’s antisemitism watchdog, uses a working definition from the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, describing antisemitism as “a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews.” Although its definition of antisemitism does not mention Israel, many of its cited examples of antisemitism do.
The U.S. State Department also uses that definition, but when the White House produced its first strategy on antisemitism last year, before the start of the Gaza war, the strategy was not based solely on that definition.
One Jewish rights group that worked with the White House on the strategy said the decision to codify the definition of antisemitism “would only have made it harder to recognize and respond to antisemitic attacks in context" and "would have opened the door to infringement of First Amendment rights.”
That group, T’ruah: The Rabbinic Call for Human Rights, also opposed a proposed bill in Congress using the group’s definition, with CEO Rabbi Jill Jacobs saying in a statement: “The profoundly misguided Antisemitism Awareness Act does nothing to keep Jews safe, while also threatening the civil liberties fundamental to this country.”
Second gentleman Douglas Emhoff, who led the rollout of the White House strategy, said it is more important to look at what antisemitism does than what it is.
"At its core, antisemitism divides us, erodes our trust in government, institutions and one another," he said. "It threatens our democracy while undermining our American values of freedom, community and decency. Antisemitism delivers simplistic, false and dangerous narratives that have led to extremists perpetrating deadly violence against Jews.”
History professor Jonathan Elukin of Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, said the definition of antisemitism has shifted over the centuries. He focuses on antisemitism in the medieval and early modern periods — before Israel was founded.
This iteration of antisemitism in the U.S., he told VOA, is “more associated with a kind of larger sense of an anti-Western, anti-modern kind of feeling, both on the far right and on the far left. They both seem to be converging in some ways on resentment, hatred, suspicion, anxiety about the Jews.”
As for the sentiment on the far right, he said, “I think it's more a kind of tribal nostalgic sense that America is supposed to be or was thought to be kind of a Christian nation.”
He said the debate over definitions obscures a problem.
“Does it even matter whether it fits some kind of arbitrary notion of antisemitism, which in itself is a very arbitrary and time-bound definition?” he asked.
But, he said, talking about the problem is a start.
“In the short term, obviously it requires education, activism, political leadership to draw the line at acceptable or what's not acceptable expressions of anti-Jewish sentiment,” he said. “Both here and abroad.”
Kim Lewis contributed to this report.
