Ctrl+F didn’t turn up any results for your quote (“alleged”/“allegedly”) , and I’m not going to read the whole article searching for what you might have meant instead.
I am sorry. It was not mentioned in the article, but the podcast.
Here is another interview where it is mentioned
https://jacobin.com/2024/03/the-cost-of-germanys-guilt-politics
Here is the “Dienstaufsichtsbeschwerde” (complaint about the violation of duty by a public official) by the German Jewish Voice for Peace reacting to the attack by the anti antisemitism commissioner Michael Blume of the state Baden Wurtemmberg:
Here is the Tweet of Blume. His exact wording was “vorgeblich” which translates to “allegedly” but more in the sense of “pretending to be”.
Thanks!
I think “vorgeblich” has some more nuance, as it does not say the claim is necessarily wrong (https://de.wiktionary.org/wiki/vorgeblich). But like I said in the other sub-thread: he is very wrong with this statement (addendum: and in his job). It’s still a different picture than one might imagine when hearing “German government officials are deciding whether you are jewish enough” (which you didn’t write, but apparently was understood like that by other commenters).
The key points in this and many other examples where Jewish anti-zionists are targeted, be it by such verbal attacks, deplatforming or police violence are imo.:
- Germany (as in gov. officials and politicians) feels entitled to make value judgements about jewish people
- Germany does not extend its support and protection to jewish people because of the German history. This support is conditional on them adhering to the idea of how the Jews should and shouldnt be.
- Germany conflates jewish identity with the state of Israel and setting a sort of equality to it. Ironically that is an example of antisemitism by some definitions including thr IHRA preffered by German politics.
- The guilt and responsibility is increasingly shifted onto Arab and other immigrants often highly critical of Israel. This serves to absolve Germany from the still rampant “Nazi-antisemitism” but is mainly used to justify racism against the groups “importing” antisemitism.
So once again German government officials judge as to who are “good” or “bad” or well “real” Jews. The fundamental being that those who fall into the categories acceptable are championed as examples in a sometimes absurd way (philosemitism) and those who are outside these categoroes get targeted with repressions.
But it is very simple. Jewish people are people like anyone else. Be it by religion or ethnicity, there is people of all sorts of personal, societal and political identities. Where they face discrimination because of their jewish identity it needs to be adressed and there should be a special emphasis on this, due to the German history. But it cannot and must not be conflated with the state of Israel and allegiance to it.
It’s not a source for a quote if the quote does not show up in the link.
edit: the fact that this gets downvoted really says a lot about the quality of the discussion :D
Blume was embroiled in a small scandal after he referred to Jüdische Stimme as “ostensibly Jewish” on Twitter
Blume demurred, claiming that, while he was happy to accept anyone’s self-definition as Jewish as a matter of personal religious freedom, he was not sure whether the group’s members counted as members of the Jewish religious communities that are legal partners of the German state
In Germany, membership in religious communities is regulated by state-designated institutions, meaning that to be officially Jewish, one must join the Jüdische Gemeinde, the state-affiliated Jewish community
