Greetings delivered by Stephan J. Kramer, Secretary General of the Central Council of Jews in Germany
Delivered at the founding conference of the European Forum on Antisemitism, on March 13th, 2008, in Berlin
Dear Rabbi Andy Baker,
Dear Gert Weisskirchen,
Dear Deidre Berger, Sergey Lagodinsky and many friends whose faces I see among the many here that I would love to welcome this morning!
The list of participants shows so many distinguished and important friends from the EJC and AJC that I want to ask you to forgive me if I welcome each and every one of you not personally, but simply by saying dear friends and colleagues.
On behalf of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, and of course very personally, I want to convey to you a very warm welcome and many thanks for contributing to this outstanding conference on the subject of “A communal response to a societal challenge – European Jewish Communities and the Threat of Antisemitism”. I think we will all benefit from the various presentations and discussions to come during this day and I also hope that there will be an ongoing process of discussion beyond this conference.
Also I would like to use this opportunity to convey words of thanks to the Friedrich Ebert Foundation and the American Jewish Committee for their long-lasting cooperation and friendship, with each other as well as with the Central Council of Jews in Germany, in working together, both bilaterally and trilaterally – and not only here in Germany – on various political and societal challenges.
I was asked to combine my welcoming remarks with some theses on the threat of antisemitism and the possibilities of fighting this threat successfully.
Antisemitism is a virus that is more than 2000 years old, and many generations of scientists have spent their entire careers trying to develop successful therapies against it. The fact that we meet today, under the conference title I already mentioned, is hard proof that there is no medication that guarantees an absolute cure for this virus.
The hard facts of the daily news reports and statistics remind us every single day that antisemitism not only exists – even in countries where there are no Jews – but has grown very much in the last few years. Especially the violent forms. One has to admit that Germany’s problem with antisemitism is no better or worse than in any other European country. Having said that, this state of affairs provides no reason to lull us into a false sense of security. The opposite is true, because if in a country like Germany – which invented and executed the Holocaust from 1933 until 1945, but which has since the liberation in 1945 initiated numerous educational and scientific research programs on the Holocaust and has even developed the strongest network of laws against hate crime and Holocaust denial – the situation is assessed to be the same as in any other European country, then this is indeed alarming.
Paul Spiegel, may his memory be blessed, one of the former presidents of the Central Council in Germany, compared Germany with a patient which once had pneumonia. If such a patient, even after a full recovery, starts coughing again, every medic goes on high alert. To stay with this image: Germany had a very bad case of pneumonia between 1933 and 1945 and, since a few years ago, Germany has been starting to cough heavily again. I am not only talking about violent attacks on kids who do not look like neo-Nazis, the hunting of migrants, the desecration of cemeteries and the damage to Jewish community property which we see almost daily. I am also talking about antisemitic and racist hate-crime music and movie clips distributed on CDs at schools and on the famous Internet platform YouTube. I am talking about: right wing extremist parties that claim to be the authentic representative of the people gaining more and more acceptance and seats in city and state parliaments, youth work which is rationalized out of existence and replaced by right wing groups of comrades hosting barbecues and adventure games that have the kids marching in uniforms, and, last but not least, well-accepted politicians who during election campaigns blame foreigners as the main or only source of juvenile delinquency.
Other examples are the various forms of intellectual anti-Israelism and anti-Zionism, also from the political left and among young radical Muslims. I could even add more examples of the different faces of antisemitism that we are confronted with in today’s world.
Ignatz Bubis, may his memory be blessed, was once asked whether he had an idea for a successful therapy against antisemitism. Bubis used to answer: “Very simple, you have to know a Jew.” (Let me just sarcastically add: You have to know the right Jew, otherwise you become an antisemite.) This answer sounds too simple to be true, and most people think that can’t be all there is to it. The truth is that nobody is born an antisemite. Societies produce antisemites and education is the worst and best enemy of prejudice and resentments.
Something that you do not know looks suspicious, unsafe, foreign, and might be a threat. Therefore it has to be – as a natural defense reaction – excluded and in the worst case demonized. To break through this routine of hatred, we have to educate and increase knowledge about Jewish life. That is the only way to break this vicious circle of prejudice in the case of antisemitism and also other forms of racism that threaten our societies.
Antisemitism is not only a legal conflict. You cannot prohibit Nazi ideas by law and ban them from people’s brains by court orders. We have to have a combined legal and political approach. Hate crimes and hate speech have to be sanctioned by laws, of course, but the lines of tolerance have to be defined in a process of societal discussion and finally social consensus. Instead of legally enforced silence, we need more open discussion and verbal confrontation with those antisemitic opinions and voices in public. We have to unmask those ideologies and their representatives. It is not any longer just a problem of bold-headed leather-boots-wearing idiots, but rather of very nice and decent-looking suit-and-tie-wearing men and women.
There is much more to say, but time is running short and you have a full day of very interesting panels and presentations. I wish you – us – all a very interesting, challenging and hopefully fruitful conference.
Let me conclude with words taken from a famous American politician and philosopher named Edmund Burke, which remind us all and encourage us also in the fight against antisemitism and racism:
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men and women to do nothing.
Thank you for your attention.
