The 1960s enjoy a place of choice among decades deemed “long” in historical scholarship. The period of unprecedented affluence in Western Europe began in the late 1950s; the aftershock of generational rebellion was still felt in the late 1970s. The “long 1960s,” however, were also a pivotal period for postwar philosemitism. Although legal means against defamation already existed before 1960, the criminalization of anti-Jewish incitement strengthened the moratorium on antisemitism enforced since 1945. The weakening of antisemitism in public opinion also coincided with the redeployment of racism toward non-European immigrants; and with the entry of the Holocaust into public culture. In West Germany, the student protests of 1967–68 mounted the first postwar challenge against the Federal Republic’s official philosemitism. Yet as in France, the 1968 antiauthoritarian revolt generated critical discussions on guilt and complicity. The “year of the barricades” also included a vocal anti-Zionist component. But if the left of the left delegitimized the Jewish state, a new Western European consensus on Israel emerged at the dawn of the two-state solution era.

Antisemitism as Hate Speech

“Antisemitism has now ceased to be the main problem of World Jewry,” announced the representative of the World Jewish Congress at the United Nations in 1959.Footnote ¹ But the 1960s began with a spate of antisemitic vandalism in West Germany, a “Swastika Epidemic” soon to spread across borders. After two neo-Nazi youth defaced the Cologne synagogue on Christmas eve 1959, Jewish houses of worship and cemeteries were desecrated in other cities. By mid February, hundreds of antisemitic incidents had been recorded across all West German states. Potentially instigated by the Soviet KGB, which sought to discredit the Federal Republic by enlisting far-right radicals, the Swastika Epidemic revived the specter of Nazism fifteen years after Hitler’s defeat. For the Central Council of Jews in Germany, this episode revealed “a mystical avowal of the Nazi past” and a “hatred without Jews” after the Holocaust.Footnote ²

Fears of international repercussions, however, prompted Bonn to reassure “the whole world that the Germany of today totally rejects anti-Semitism.” In a televised address delivered on January 16, 1960, Konrad Adenauer pledged to his “fellow Jewish citizens” that the “state is behind them with all its power.” Antisemitism, in Adenauer’s view, was not an endemic problem but the disease of marginal hoodlums. Student protests in Cologne, Frankfurt, Munich, and West Berlin nonetheless kept the Schmierwelle (“wave of outrage”) on the national agenda. The parliamentary socialist opposition, for its part, pressured Adenauer to not minimize German responsibility. In May 1960, the Bundestag unanimously modified article 130 of the German Penal Code to make incitement against “a national, racial, religious group or a group defined by their ethnic origins” a criminal offense. Thousands of former Nazis had since 1949 obtained amnesty and government pensions, or occupied leading positions in civil service and public life. Yet the anti-incitement bill opened a new avenue for the prosecution of antisemitic libel in the Federal Republic.Footnote ³ In post-Fascist Italy, by comparison, a tribunal acquitted a magistrate from Turin who in May 1961 called Jews “God-killers deprived of morality.” The defendant claimed in his defense that as an antifascist partisan he had personally saved Jews during the war. The court ruled that his statement was of strict religious nature and “did not constitute an offense.” Proposed amendments to the 1930 Penal Code drafted under Mussolini reassured the small Italian Jewish community, but the first law prohibiting hate speech was only passed in 1975.Footnote ⁴

While simultaneously reaching North America and other parts of the globe, the Swastika Epidemic also swept through Western Europe. Antisemitic inscriptions were spotted in thirty Italian cities; threatening letters were sent to Jewish community leaders in Amsterdam; Nazi scribblings appeared in Brussels and Antwerp; 119 youth were arrested for neo-Nazi activities in Austria; similar incidents were reported in Switzerland, Scandinavia, and Greece.Footnote ⁵ In France, hundreds of anti-Jewish slogans scrawled on synagogues, schools, or the hallways of the Parisian subway sparked public indignation. As in West Germany, the upsurge of antisemitism directed attention to the penalization of hate speech. The existing Marchandeau Law technically allowed courts to prosecute attacks in the press against racial and religious groups. But the burden placed on plaintiffs to prove that injurious statements also intended to incite limited the law’s applicability. Over the next decade, the left-wing Movement against Racism, Antisemitism and for Peace (MRAP) lobbied lawmakers for more stringent legislation. In 1972, the landmark Pleven Law unanimously adopted by the French parliament offered broad criminal and civil remedies against antisemitic and racist slander: a legal interventionism contrasting with the First Amendment protections liberally afforded to hate speech in the United States.Footnote ⁶

In London, a series of synagogue profanations began in Notting Hill on December 30, 1959 and peaked in February 1960. The radicalization of fringe extreme right organizations, however, allowed antisemitic agitation to persist. On July 1, 1962, Colin Jordan’s National Socialist Movement attempted to hold a rally in Trafalgar Square under the slogan “Free Britain from Jewish control.” Between March and July 1965, Jordan’s followers attacked fifteen synagogues in London and the provinces.Footnote ⁷ Passed under Harold Wilson’s Labour government, the 1965 Race Relations Act chiefly penalized discrimination against Blacks and South Asians “in places of public resort.” One of its sections, however, also outlawed “any intent to stir up hatred against any section of the public (…) distinguished by colour, race, or ethnic, or national origins.” The absence of religious groups from the list of protected categories raised doubts about the law’s intent. Wary of the categorization of British Jews as a racial or ethnic group, the Board of Jewish Deputies wondered if the Act effectively covered the implicitly “white” Anglo-Jewish community. Despite its ambiguous wording, however, the 1965 Race Relations Act denied written or spoken antisemitic propaganda the privilege of freedom of speech.Footnote ⁸ Founded in 1967, the far-right National Front initially eschewed blatant anti-Jewish rhetoric but the fringe party, like other neofascists and Holocaust revisionists in Western Europe, rapidly learned how to circumvent prohibition.Footnote ⁹ Yet in West Germany (1960), Britain (1965), France (1972), and most member states of the EEC soon after, hate-speech laws not only criminalized anti-Jewish incitement but also defamatory or provocative language: An “anti-antisemitic” legal architecture later enriched by memory laws against Holocaust denial passed within the European Union.Footnote ¹⁰

Antisemitism on the Wane

Despite their ominous beginnings, the 1960s also confirmed the decline of overt antisemitic sentiment in public opinion. Progress, to be sure, was only relative in the Federal Republic. In 1965, 19 percent of respondents to a survey answered “yes” to the question “Would Germany be better off without Jews?” – in a country in which the Jewish population did not exceed 35,000 people. This result indicated improvement from a similar poll conducted in 1952, yet nearly half of the interviewees cautiously declined to answer. Although the number of antisemitic hate crimes dropped after 1960, the defacement of Jewish cemeteries continued to make headlines. Public outrage, however, grew more vocal. In Bamberg, for instance, flags were flown at half-mast and 5,000 residents “assembled in a rainstorm to express their horror” after Jewish tombstones were profaned in June 1965.Footnote ¹¹ The nationalist weekly Deutsche National-Zeitung still had over 100,000 readers in the mid 1960s, but loud condemnations of far-right hooliganism showed the world that democratic Germans rejected extremism.

As public opinion research regularly confirmed, however, “secondary antisemitism” – the defense mechanism against guilt identified since the mid 1950s by Frankfurt School researchers – substituted the tabooed racism of the Third Reich era. Directed against Jewish disrupters of German good conscience, “secondary antisemitism” flourished because of guilt feelings needed to be repressed. “It seems the Germans will never forgive us Auschwitz,” stated the German-Jewish publicist Hilde Walter in 1967 – a phrase later popularized by other critics of the phenomenon.Footnote ¹² Yet if Jews – or mere thought of them – inspired resentment, displays of Israeli Jewishness in West German popular culture did not trigger similar defensiveness. In 1966, the public elected the twenty-five-year-old Esther Ofarim singer of the year. The photogenic Daliah Lavi elicited in turn similar fascination.Footnote ¹³ Enthusiasm for exotic Israeli female performers, or for Ephraim Kishon’s satirical essays translated from Hebrew, confirmed that for many citizens of the Federal Republic in the mid-to-late 1960s, distant Jews from Israel felt more heimlich or “familiar” than the puny Jewish community.

In Austria, the first governmental study of antisemitism was carried out in October 1966. A surprising 39 percent of respondents to a questionnaire agreed then that “the massacre of the Jews was the greatest shame of our century.”Footnote ¹⁴ The acquittal by jury courts of Austrian Nazis charged for wartime crimes nonetheless revealed hostility to the punishment of Holocaust perpetrators. Franz Razesberger, accused of ordering the killing of hundreds of Jews in Ukraine, walked free in July 1961. Charges against ghetto commander Franz Murer, known as the “Butcher of Vilnius,” were dropped in June 1963. Erich Rajakowitsch received a two-and-a-half-year prison sentence in March 1965 for his role in the deportation of Dutch Jews but only spent six months in jail. In February 1966, a jury in Salzburg acquitted Johann and Wilhelm Mauer for their active part in the execution of 12,000 Polish Jews from the Stanislaw ghetto. The two brothers were, respectively, sentenced to twelve and eight years in prison a few months later. But in October 1966, Viennese jurors exculpated Franz Novak, Adolf Eichmann’s railroad timetable expert, on behalf of his “obligation to obey binding orders.”Footnote ¹⁵

The Novak ruling, like the scandal caused in 1965 by the unrepentant Nazi and economics professor Taras Borodajkewycz, stirred up protests in leftist ranks as well as among resistance veterans and concentration camps survivors. “Front stage,” democratic and republican Austria firmly stood against antisemitism, despite slips of the tongue in political discourse or in the press. “Backstage,” a study group found in 1970, negative stereotypes of Jews, in a country where the Jewish community amounted to 0.1 percent of the population, coexisted with democratic norms.Footnote ¹⁶ The appointment of the Jewish-born Bruno Kreisky to the chairmanship of the socialist party in February 1967 nonetheless suggested that antisemitism was on the wane. Appointed federal chancellor in April 1970, Kreisky was not only the first Jew to ever govern a German-speaking country. He also became the first Jewish head of government in post-Holocaust Western Europe to hold office for a long period of time. Before him, the French Jewish prime ministers Léon Blum, René Mayer, and Pierre Mendès-France only completed short tenures during the unstable Fourth Republic (1946–58). Upon Kreisky’s reelection in 1971, the New York Times did not hesitate to declare that “anti-Semitism has ceased to be a decisive factor in Austrian politics.”Footnote ¹⁷

Surveys of public opinion were less optimistic. A poll conducted in 1973 indicated that 70 percent of the Austrian population above the age of sixteen held antisemitic feelings. But depending on the type of questions asked, an equal proportion expressed either strong or mild “philosemitic tendencies.” Antisemitic animus and admiration for imputed Jewish traits – “intelligence,” “group solidarity,” and “contributors to culture” – complemented each other.Footnote ¹⁸ The popular Kreisky, in any case, always minored down his Jewish roots. Far-right politicians never forgot his origins but forgave them in exchange of political benefits. Kreisky voters, for their part, did not elect a public Jew: Despite his recognizable Viennese Jewish humor, the socialist prime minister in office between 1970 and 1983 always denied any connection to a Jewish people whose existence he denied. His controversial defense of politicians with a Nazi past, acrimonious relationship with Simon Wiesenthal, misgivings about Zionism, and amicable relationship with Yasser Arafat did not earn him many Jewish friends – even if the chancellor also facilitated the transit of Soviet Jews through Vienna. To Austrians, “Kaiser Bruno” offered an unthreatening “non-Jewish-Jewishness” compatible with social democratic tolerance and the postwar “victim thesis.” In traditionally socialist Vienna, surveys revealed in 1973 and 1976, the population harbored less prejudice than in other parts of the country: 30 percent of the city’s inhabitants even fell under the “strong philosemite” category. Yet Viennese or not, Kreisky sympathizers also belonged to the 67 percent of Austrians who still opposed any acknowledgment of the country’s responsibility in the Holocaust, let alone the compensation of spoliated Jewish survivors.Footnote ¹⁹

Throughout the 1960s, correspondents for the American Jewish Yearbook in Belgium, the Netherlands, and Italy, regularly reported on the appearance of antisemitic articles in Flemish, far-right or Catholic publications.Footnote ²⁰ Swastika daubings, neofascist activism, and the profanation of tombstones also remained a matter of concern. But for the small Jewish communities in these countries, as well as larger ones in France and Britain, the decade of modernization, secularization, and mass consumption, was also a period of security and belonging. Approximately 250,000 Jews from decolonized North Africa successfully resettled in France from the late 1950s to the mid 1960s, even if antagonistic feelings subsided in part of the population. According to a poll conducted in December 1966, one out of every three French citizens objected to having a Jewish son or daughter-in-law; one out of two did not want a president of Jewish origin. But progress was registered in other areas: 17% now believed that Jews “were not really French,” as opposed to 37% in 1946. Few respondents avowed feelings of hostility in the presence of Jews, while 82% remained indifferent to this issue. In the wake of France’s defeat in Algeria, negative views of Arabs were far more prevalent: In 1966, 60% of the French public had a “negative opinion” of Algerian, Moroccan, and Tunisian labor migrants, while 62% found them “too numerous.”Footnote ²¹ The emergence of a “Muslim problem” in postcolonial France coincided with the growing legitimation of Jewish identity in French society. As the sociologist Georges Lévitte observed in 1966, “it is now possible for a Jew to be a Frenchman (…) and be different at the same time.”Footnote ²² On November 27, 1967, Charles de Gaulle’s unpleasant evocation of a “Jewish people (…) sure of itself and domineering” shocked French Jews precisely because it appeared to roll back two decades of progress: The delegitimization of antisemitism in the public domain, and the ongoing normalization of Jewish difference in a Republic until then expecting polite confessionalism from its israélite citizenry.Footnote ²³

In Britain, observed the Jewish historian Edgar Samuel in 1967, “overt antisemitism is out of fashion.” Jews still heard snide remarks about them, but racism was now “mostly directed against colored immigrants, particularly in areas suffering from severe housing shortages.” The Polish-born Isaac Deutscher was more pessimistic. “I know that looking for a flat in London, in Hampstead, say,” the Marxist scholar commented, “you can be told that the neighbors would object to a Negro tenant or a Jew moving in, but they would certainly welcome you as an ‘exception’.”Footnote ²⁴ Yet like Arabophobia in France, xenophobia directed against Afro-Caribbeans and South Asians symmetrically reinforced the “whiteness” of British Jews. In April 1968, Enoch Powell’s notorious Rivers of Blood speech stoked fears of “actual domination, first over fellow immigrants and then over the rest of the population.” Powell’s racially charged address, however, did not warn Britons against a potential Jewish peril: For the Tory forerunner of “great replacement theory,” Jews stood on the right side of the color line. The Labour politician Tony Benn countered that despite Powell’s avoidance of anti-Jewish rhetoric, “anti-Semitism is waiting to be exploited as Mosley exploited it before.”Footnote ²⁵ But Powell’s racialism did not posit incompatibility between Jewishness and Englishness: The conservative rising star Margaret Thatcher was already convinced of their special affinities.Footnote ²⁶ Anglo-Jewry, however, did not merely owe its “whiteness” to anti-foreigner sentiment. Since the late 1950s, suburbanization and upward mobility secured its place within the affluent white middle class. That the image of Israel in public opinion remained predominantly positive before and in the immediate aftermath of the Six-Day War also contributed to a favorable climate. In a BBC television debate held in June 1968 on whether “the Arab case is more powerful than the Israeli,” a panel of thirty lawyers returned a three to one verdict in favor of the Jewish state.Footnote ²⁷

Twenty years after the end of the war, public antisemitism in Western Europe was no longer significant while anti-immigrant sentiment deflected attention from the “Jewish problem.” In West Germany, hate crimes substantially decreased after 1960, although neo-nationalist weeklies and the far-right regularly dog-whistled antisemitism to their readers and followers.Footnote ²⁸ In 1967, however, the French historian Léon Poliakov noted in Western Europe a “regression [of antisemitism] compared to the first half of the current century.”Footnote ²⁹ The mid-to-late 1960s also witnessed a shift from confessionalism to public Jewishness, most notably in France where newly transplanted North African Jews departed from the assimilationist French Jewish tradition. In ethnocentric England, Jews did not express their religious or cultural distinctiveness demonstratively. Yet in the wake of the Six-Day War, a new generation of Jewish leaders shied away from anglicization in favor of a consciously articulated Jewish identity.Footnote ³⁰

This favorable climate did not prevent the return of old forms of Judeophobia believed to have disappeared from the collective psyche. In France, the “Orléans Rumor” of May 1969 demonstrated that in the midst of “thirty glorious years” of economic growth and modernization, devilish images of Jews resurfaced effortlessly. The contagious rumor about local Jewish business owners trafficking in Christian women, wrote then the sociologist Edgar Morin, indicated the subterranean existence of a “modern Middle Age.” Anti-Judaism similarly survived the modernist spirit of Vatican II. In 1969, as in earlier years, the inhabitants of the Bavarian village of Oberammergau fiercely opposed revisions to their notoriously anti-Judaic Passion Play. On Italian television, the series The Acts of the Apostles directed by Roberto Rossellini (1969) did nothing to challenge old accusations of deicide.Footnote ³¹ Yet even historians convinced that “the virus of antisemitism is embedded in the heart and the very bloodstream of European society and culture” have had to pause. The “longest hatred,” according to this eternalist view, only took a brief vacation after the Holocaust. For proponents of the “new Judeophobia” thesis, the rise of radical anti-Zionism after the Six-Day War spelled the end of this short respite. Yet the 1960s, conceded a leading representative of this school of thought, nevertheless remained “one of the most philo-Semitic in European and Western history.”Footnote ³²

Holocaust Memory and Public Culture (1961–1967)

The period ranging from the 1961 Eichmann trial to the Six-Day War was also a transitional moment in the encounter between West European societies and the Holocaust. Although its impact differed from country to country, the televised court proceedings made the realities of the Final Solution comprehensible to a wider public.Footnote ³³ In the Federal Republic, however, many still championed the idea of German victimhood. After the Soviets built the Berlin Wall in 1961, sixty-one percent of the population believed that “what the communists do today is just as bad as, or even worse than, what Eichmann is accused of.” His prosecution in Jerusalem, followed by the landmark Auschwitz Trial held in Frankfurt between 1963 and 1965, nevertheless forced the image of German perpetrators on a population reluctant to admit culpability. Although less publicized, court cases against the German personnel of Treblinka (1964), Sobibor (1965), Belzec (1965), and Chelmno (1962–65), also fulfilled a pedagogical function. They nonetheless encouraged demands for an end to accountability. Proceedings against former concentration camp personnel, demanded a majority of respondents to a poll conducted in 1965, should draw a final line under the Third Reich era.Footnote ³⁴

Since the late 1950s, however, a cohort of male academics, writers, and social commentators born in the 1920s and the early 1930s – the so-called 1945ers who like Günther Grass, Jürgen Habermas, Martin Walser, or Hans-Magnus Enzensberger experienced the collapse of the Third Reich as young adults – redirected memories of the war from exculpation to criticism.Footnote ³⁵ Signs of change were also discernable in visual culture. In 1960, Gerhard Schoenberner’s photobook Der gelbe Stern [The Yellow Star] put into circulation images of Holocaust atrocities unseen by the public since the Nuremberg Trials.Footnote ³⁶ In schools, history teaching underwent slow transformation. But compared to the evasive curriculum of the 1950s, the revised or new history textbooks introduced in the early 1960s became more explicit on German crimes against the Jews.Footnote ³⁷ Meanwhile, three documentaries on the Nazi era including footage of ghettos and extermination camps were shown on West German television in 1960–61.Footnote ³⁸ Other television programs such as Jews in Germany Today: Taking Stock of a Loss (1963) contributed to a “fashionable philo-Semitism” noticed within the educated public.Footnote ³⁹ In 1964, the exhibition Monumenta Synagoga: 2000 Years of History and Culture of the Jews Along the Rhine organized in Cologne attracted 67,000 visitors. Curiosity for the vanished German Jewish past went hand in hand with increased interest in the planned murder of European Jews. In Frankfurt, exhibitions on the Warsaw Ghetto (1963) and Auschwitz (1964), respectively, drew 61,000 and 88,000 predominantly young visitors.Footnote ⁴⁰ In October 1965, Peter Weiss’s Die Ermittlung [The Investigation], based on statements made during the Auschwitz Trial, was performed in twelve theater stages (as well as four others in East Germany) and broadcast on national radio. The play documented the horrors of the camp and attacked German hypocrisy. In keeping with New Left interpretations of Auschwitz, Die Ermittlung also blamed the extermination of Jews on a “capitalist society driven to the most extreme perversion – exploitation even of blood, bones, ashes”: The Jewish identity of the victims mattered less than neo-Marxist theory.Footnote ⁴¹ Weiss’s anonymization of Jews in favor of “late capitalist” Auschwitz prefigured an attitude soon prevalent among radical students. Yet within the intellectual Left, a critical memory culture predicated on the integration of “Our Auschwitz” into national identity was already discernable before the Holocaust became “the Holocaust” of a later era.Footnote ⁴²

In Austria, the one-act satire Der Herr Karl (1961), plays shown on national television between 1963 and 1967, or the provocative song Weg zur Arbeit written in 1968 by the Jewish cabaret artist Georg Kreisler, questioned the dominant “victim thesis” without noticeable consequences for societal soul-searching. Literary authors who criticized historical amnesia, such as Ingeborg Bachmann or Ilse Aichinger, wrote and resided outside the country.Footnote ⁴³ In schools, history textbooks in use in the 1960s only referred to the Holocaust allusively. One of them simply informed pupils that “tens of thousands [of Austrians] were tortured to death or executed in the torture chambers of the concentration camps.”Footnote ⁴⁴ Austrian socialists and communists, for their part, subsumed crimes perpetrated against the Jews within the memory of Mauthausen and its sub-camps. For the left, remembering the war during the 1960s meant honoring the anti-Nazi resistance movement against the commemoration of fallen soldiers who served in the Wehrmacht. This task was devolved to the Documentation and Resistance Archive founded in Vienna in 1963. But despite evidence compiled by Simon Wiesenthal’s one-man research center in 1966, public debates over Austrian co-responsibility in the killing of European Jews did not occur before the Friedrich Peter scandal (the far-right politician exposed as former SS infantry officer in 1975), the screening of the Holocaust TV miniseries in 1979 and above all, the Kurt Waldheim affair in the mid-to-late 1980s.Footnote ⁴⁵

The Holocaust, on the contrary, was a recurrent topic in French public conversations. In 1961, the Eichmann trial covered at one time by forty press correspondents highlighted the Jewish tragedy as a unique subject of memory. French society, observed Léon Poliakov in the aftermath of the trial, had “heard the message.”Footnote ⁴⁶ Three high-profile polemics involving prominent French intellectuals further familiarized the educated public with specific aspects of the Holocaust. One revolved around Rolf Hochhut’s provocative play Le vicaire [Der Stellvertreter, 1963], an indictment of Pope Pie XII’s failure to speak out against the annihilation of the Jews. The second followed the publication of Jean-François Steiner’s Treblinka (1966), a scandalous yet best-selling account of the death camp prefaced by Simone de Beauvoir. A third controversy similarly revolving around the themes of Jewish passivity or complicity erupted in the wake of Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem translated into French in late 1966. “Auschwitz,” as the Holocaust came to be named in the mid 1960s, found itself at the forefront of public discussion. A “Vichy syndrome” still prevented the examination of the French state’s responsibility in the Final Solution, but the Jewish catastrophe itself already attracted significant attention.Footnote ⁴⁷

In the Netherlands, the twenty-one-episode series De Bezetting [The Occupation], Lou de Jong’s historical documentary featured on black-and-white television between 1960 and 1965, raised the issue of the Dutch Jewish tragedy. In 1962, the Jewish academic and community leader Salomon Kleerekoper took notice of a “strong philosemitic current” in society, which he attributed to feelings of guilt now afflicting his countrymen. A year later, the national commemoration of the war traditionally held on May 4 was rescheduled one day earlier day to allow the participation of Orthodox Jews without violation of the Shabbat.Footnote ⁴⁸ A key milestone in the trajectory of Holocaust memory in the Netherlands was the publication of Jacques Presser’s two-volume Ondergang [The Destruction of the Dutch Jews] in 1965.“The book concerns the history of a murder,” announced the Jewish historian, “the murderers were Germans and the murdered, Jews.” But Presser also exposed the role of part of the population in abetting the Final Solution. His narrative of the war, in which Jewish victimization no longer took the back seat to Dutch rescue and heroism, especially appealed to a young generation born in the 1940s: 140,000 copies of the book were sold in 1965 alone.Footnote ⁴⁹ Written from the victims’ perspective, Ondergang inscribed the Jewish tragedy into Dutch history. In the Netherlands as in Western Europe, no other scholarly study had until then placed the wartime experiences of Jews at the head of the public agenda.

In Italy, to be sure, Renzo de Felice’s History of Italian Jews under Fascism (1961) heightened the profile of Fascist antisemitism in the public domain. But the historian also claimed that Mussolini’s racial laws were unanimously rejected by the Italian population; and that even if facilitated by Fascists, the deportation of Jews carried out during the German occupation was a crime unrelated to Italy.Footnote ⁵⁰ The closely watched Eichmann trial, during which the Israeli prosecutor Gideon Hausner praised the Italian people for its benevolence toward Jews, reinforced this favorable view. The case against Eichmann elicited interest in Jewish victims without redirecting attention toward the role of Italian functionaries or civilians in the persecution, round-up and deportation of approximately 8,000 Jews.Footnote ⁵¹ Newspapers of the Italian left opened their pages to Jewish testimonies or stressed the moral depravities of Nazism. The political heirs of the Italian resistance, however, still viewed the murder of European Jews as part of the battle between antifascism and fascism.Footnote ⁵² Nevertheless, through a series of films starting with Gillo Pontecorvo’s controversial Kapò (1960); the success of Giorgio Bassani’s autobiographical novel The Garden of the Finzi-Continis (1962); RAI television documentaries; the publication of thirty new survivor memoirs by the end of the decade; the translation of historical scholarship from English and French; and Primo Levi’s growing prestige, the Holocaust made its first entry into Italian public culture over the course of the 1960s.Footnote ⁵³

In Britain, the Eichmann trial brought new information on the Final Solution but had scant effect on commemoration or historical research. In the 1960s, the niche field of Holocaust memorialization only existed thanks to Anglo-Jewish efforts. Jewish activists also invoked the Holocaust in their campaigns against neo-Nazi agitators.Footnote ⁵⁴ Centered on the sacrifices needed to defeat Nazism on the home front and overseas, British collective remembrance of the war paid little attention to Jewish survivors who like the Polish-born refugee Kitty Hart felt that “they were not supposed to embarrass people by saying a word.” As in the first fifteen postwar years, however, awareness of the Holocaust was preserved across a variety of media.Footnote ⁵⁵ National television provides a case in point. Except for Warsaw Ghetto (1965) or The Joel Brand Story (1965), the BBC did not produce Holocaust-specific programs. But before the World at War series shown on Thames TV in 1973–74, which included a distinct episode on “genocide,” the topic of Jewish persecution already had a regular presence in BBC documentaries on World War II. The catastrophe of European Jews was merely an add-on to war memories and only became a subject of public historical commemoration at the end of the twentieth century. Yet even if “in Britain, nothing has been done” to mark the Holocaust, as the Israeli historian Yehuda Bauer regretted in 1979, knowledge of German crimes against the Jews was already availed to a public on the whole uninterested in the details of the Final Solution.Footnote ⁵⁶

The Six-Day War and Holocaust Memory

In Britain as on the continent, mounting tensions between Israel and Egypt on the eve of the Six-Day War (June 5–10, 1967) sprang the Holocaust into consciousness through the lens of the Arab–Israeli conflict. Demystified historical scholarship has since illuminated the complexities of the road to confrontation. Gamal Abdel Nasser’s long view was always to settle accounts with Israel at the appropriate time, but before his brinkmanship went over the brink, his goal was to improve Egypt’s strategic position without immediate recourse to war. American and British military experts, in any case, doubted the possibility of Israeli defeat. And while intense fears of “second Auschwitz” gripped Israeli society, a confident military elite saw in Nasser’s moves an opportunity to both smash the Egyptian army and enlarge the country’s “Auschwitz borders.”Footnote ⁵⁷ Yet for anguished diaspora Jews, the prospect of Israel’s annihilation awakened traumatic memories of the Nazi era – a watershed moment for Jewish communities across the world and for assimilated Jews who awakened to Jewishness in June 1967. Like other bellicose Arab statements relayed to the Western press by the Israeli Foreign Ministry, Nasser’s announcement that in the event of “hostile action against Egypt or Syria (…) our objective goal will be the destruction of Israel” added to the angst-ridden atmosphere.Footnote ⁵⁸ That in this speech Nasser conditioned “total battle” to an Israeli first strike did not diffuse tensions. “If Israel were destroyed,” summarized on June 2 the future director of Shoah Claude Lanzmann, “it would be more serious than the Nazi Holocaust.”Footnote ⁵⁹

The superposition of a Holocaust narrative on the Middle East crisis, however, was not only traceable in emotionally charged Jewish reactions. In France, the looming conflagration activated a vocabulary already rooted in public discourse. “Should [the Jews] lose Israel,” stated a lead article in Le Monde on June 3, 1967, “it will never return. It is Auschwitz that will return.”Footnote ⁶⁰ Critics of triumphant Israel soon protested the “cynical exploitation of the dead of Dachau, Auschwitz and Treblinka” at the expense of occupied Palestinians. Yet on the eve of the conflict, both Jewish and non-Jewish defenders of Israel dramatized the escalation as a reenactment of Hitler’s war against the Jews. Jean-Paul Sartre, for his part, found “unbearable to imagine that a Jewish community, no matter where or what it is, might again have to endure such torment and offer up martyrs to a new massacre.”Footnote ⁶¹ Such rhetoric was less audible in Italy where Christian Democrats worried about ties with Arab countries and Leftist parties had long criticized Zionism. Reformist socialists warned against a “threat of genocide” on June 5. Statements of solidarity with the Jewish state, signed among others by Federico Fellini or the philosopher Norberto Bobbio, also appeared in national newspapers. The filmmaker and unorthodox Marxist Pier Paolo Pasolini nonetheless remained a rare figure from the cultural Left to invoke the Holocaust as a reason to side with Israel.Footnote ⁶² In West Germany, however, talk of “second assassination attempt” against the Jews proliferated in the Springer press and among guilt-stricken Protestants or socialists. Expressed from Vienna, support for Israel validated a national narrative of victimhood. “Austria itself,” declared the socialist politician Bruno Pittermann on June 7, “knows what happens when a small state is being attacked and when democratic powers ignore such a situation” – a reference to the annexation of the country to the Third Reich in March 1938.Footnote ⁶³

“Within days,” generalized the French-Jewish historian Pierre Vidal-Naquet on June 13, “Europe exonerated itself from collective guilt in the drama of the Second World War.” The scholar of ancient Greece whose parents perished in Auschwitz in 1944 had defended on June 3 “the absolute, uncontestable right of Israel to live.” Yet the former campaigner against torture in colonial Algeria also viewed the sudden surge of Holocaust imagery as Europe’s absolution “on the back of the Arabs.” On June 20, 1967, the Marxist-Jewish historian Isaac Deutscher similarly stated that “Arabs paid the price for the crimes committed by the West against the Jews,” a view shared by the Jewish literary critique Franco Fortini in Italy. In addition to leftist Jews critical of Israel, however, Arab intellectuals such as the Paris-based Egyptian journalist Loftallah Soliman also explained to the public that “assigning to Arabs the unspoken antisemitism of others” was nothing but a “transference of culpability.”Footnote ⁶⁴ This argument likewise prominently featured in the rhetoric of radical protesters in West Germany. A month after the conclusion of the Six-Day War, the Konkret journalist Ulrike Meinhof still claimed that “there is no reason for the European Left to abandon solidarity with those who were persecuted,” namely, Jews in the diaspora and Israel. But the future cofounder of the Red Army Faction also denounced the “questionable reconciliation” of Germans with Jews “not because we acknowledged our own crimes but (…) in solidarity with brutality, with actions that drive citizens from their homes, and with conquest.” Germans claimed to love “Jews,” Meinhof added, not because of their humanity, but out of admiration for their ferocious “blitzkrieg.”Footnote ⁶⁵

Such images, retorted critics of leftist anti-Zionism appalled by the comparison of Jews to Nazis, erased the Final Solution from public memory. “In the consciousness of the West,” the historian Saul Friedländer wrote in 1969, “June 1967 cancelled the import of the Holocaust.”Footnote ⁶⁶ But the opposite proved true. The Six-Day War, of course, encouraged transgressive Holocaust inversion within radical subcultures, most notably in West Germany. The permissive Nazification of Arabs in strands of pro-Israel advocacy, however, preceded ultra-leftist (and ultra-rightist) equations of Zionism with Nazism. More frequently, New Left veterans of the 1967–68 student protests charged that invoking the Holocaust to defend the Israeli state whitewashed European guilt at the expense of Palestinians. Yet in the long run, the “year of the barricades” also propelled Holocaust memory to the forefront of public conversation: a key legacy of 1968 in West Germany and France.

The Long March of Philosemitism through the Institutions

“The students have taken on a bit the role of the Jews,” observed Theodor Adorno on June 5, 1967. Three days earlier, the killing of the twenty-six-year-old demonstrator Benno Ohnesorg during the visit of the Iranian shah in West Berlin marked the beginning of the student movement in the Federal Republic. Although Adorno later dissociated himself from activists “degenerating into abominable irrationalism,” he initially sympathized with allegorical Jewish protestors subjected to the police’s “social sadism” and the taunts of onlookers.Footnote ⁶⁷ The twentysomething baby boomers who turned against their parents’ “Auschwitz generation,” however, could also pass as metaphorical Jews through symbolic filiation with German Jewish spiritual fathers. Max Horkheimer’s aphorisms on the “authoritarian state,” and above all the writings of Theodor Adorno and Herbert Marcuse, educated young intellectuals in antiauthoritarianism.Footnote ⁶⁸ None of the Frankfurt school stalwarts claimed that Nazism and the Federal Republic were absolute equivalent. Yet Adorno’s warnings about the persistence of “authoritarian character structures” within democracy, like Marcuse’s thoughts on “repressive tolerance” in advanced capitalist societies, afforded Jewish legitimacy to the idea of enduring fascism. Under the influence of the charismatic Rudi Dutschke, the Socialist German Student League (SDS) shied away from quiet theory in favor of direct action. But the initial “67ers” not only drew inspiration from New Left ideology and a transatlantic language of protest: They also resisted “fascism” with theoretical ammunition obtained from German-Jewish witnesses of the Holocaust.Footnote ⁶⁹

1968 in the Federal Republic, however, was also a revolt against German philosemitism. In 1964, the German-Israeli Study Groups, an organization both sympathetic to the Jewish state and close to the New Left, had already derided “the ease with which most people in Germany” subverted “Jewish sub-humans” into “fellow human beings.”Footnote ⁷⁰ Coinciding with the outbreak of the Six-Day War, the nascent protest movement added a new component to the discourse of anti-philosemitism. While older left-leaning intellectuals pledged solidarity with Israel, SDS spokesmen distanced themselves from the “unlimited support of the Israeli government that came from West German public opinion.” Effusive pro-Israel reactions, the SDS Chairman Reimut Reiche wrote on June 13, 1967, exemplified the “reversed antisemitism that is being produced in the Federal Republic today.”Footnote ⁷¹ Three months later, the SDS officially veered toward anti-Zionism. A blend of Marxism, Third Worldism, and revolutionary internationalism, as well as close contacts with Arab students in West German universities, accounted for this evolution. At a national meeting held in early September 1967, at least one section of the movement declared the “Zionist state entity” illegitimate.Footnote ⁷² A call for the “rehabilitation of hundreds of thousands of Arab refugees back to their homeland” likewise testified of a generational shift: Unlike old left intellectuals, young activists released themselves from obligatory commitment to the state of Holocaust survivors.

This reversal shocked Jewish commentators who like the Vienna-born writer Jean Améry only saw “virtuous antisemitism” in the New Left’s anti-Zionism. For the former Auschwitz prisoner until then indifferent to Israel, the “sanctuary for deeply exhausted survivors” in existence since 1948 deserved the solidarity of “any left not intent of abrogating itself and there is no reason why it should ignore the unbearable fate of Arab refugees to honor this commitment.” Against the students’ “anti-Zionist furor,” Améry drew a comparison destined to weaponization: “Antisemitism resides in anti-Israelism and anti-Zionism as the thunderstorm does in the cloud.” West German intellectuals offended by the students’ “doctrinaire anti-imperialism” likewise lashed out at their “unacknowledged anti-Judaism.” The SDS Chairman Reimut Reiche, however, had already fended off this accusation in June 1967 when he announced that “we do not have a problem with racism and do not have any antisemitism to overcome.”Footnote ⁷³ Double dissociation from the sins of their parents and from the guilt of the old left not only afforded 68ers the benefit of “militant innocence and moral superiority,” as veterans of the movement later admitted.Footnote ⁷⁴ It also allowed them to reverse the terms of leftist solidarity. In 1967–68, Palestine did not yet supersede other anti-imperialist causes but the direction was clear. Throughout the 1970s, far-left support for the Palestinian revolution was more pronounced in the Federal Republic than in any other West European country. As the observer of West German radical politics Moishe Postone noted at the end of the 1970s, “no western Left was as philo-Semitic and pro-Zionist prior to 1967. Probably none subsequently identified so strongly with the Palestinian cause.”Footnote ⁷⁵

Fringe but disproportionately important splinter groups went further. Emancipation from philosemitism, wrote the leader of the West Berlin Tupamaros Dieter Kunzelmann on November 27, 1969, meant freedom from Judenknax: the “Jewish tick” affecting postwar Germans, including fellow leftists. Hang-ups about Jews, Kunzelmann lamented upon his return from Palestinian guerilla bases in Jordan, “dominate all questions and discussions.” At first glance, the brain behind the failed firebomb attack against the West Berlin Jewish Community Center three weeks earlier only demanded the replacement “of our simple philosemitism with (…) clear solidarity with AL FATAH.” But in a leaflet issued four days after the act of violence in Berlin, its perpetrators had already called a spade a spade. “The Jews,” they explained, “have themselves become fascists who, in collaboration with American capital, want to eradicate the Palestinian people.” The fedayeen, on the other hand, waged a vanguard battle against “the Third Reich.”Footnote ⁷⁶ Here redress of historical injustice mattered less than psychological relief. The question of Palestine was more salient in Berlin and Frankfurt than in Paris and Berkeley, yet like Israel for the old left, it still functioned as projection screen for German guilt. For a fringe minority, the fight against “sacred cow Israel” also entailed lethal attacks against Jews in Germany, such as the anonymous arson of a Jewish retirement home in Munich which killed seven concentration camps survivors on February 13, 1970.Footnote ⁷⁷ Members of the Red Army Faction perfected this mechanism of psychic reversal. In 1972, the imprisoned Ulrike Meinhof revived Nazi terminology when in defense of Black September hijackers, she blamed Israel for the “incineration” of its own athletes at the Munich Olympics. Like her comrade Gudrun Ensslin, she also compared her incarceration to the “gassing” of Jews in extermination camps. “It turns out that my Auschwitz fantasies were realistic,” Meinhof wrote during her harsh solitary confinement in Cologne.Footnote ⁷⁸

Culminating in the bloody autumn of 1977, paranoid violence was only one outcome of the student movement in the Federal Republic. A quantitative lens reveals another trajectory. Before its dissolution in 1970, the SDS only represented 10 percent of the student body. Until its rapid decline in the second half of 1968, the mass protest movement included a wide array of participants united above all against the authoritarianism they saw in society. Most followed a nonrevolutionary path: While former 68ers populated the Marxist–Leninist or anarchist groupings formed in the early 1970s, 100,000 students joined the Social Democratic Party after Willy Brandt became federal chancellor in October 1969. His pledge to “dare more democracy” paid off. By 1972, the SPD had received 200,000 additional young members seeking, in their own words, “democratization of all areas of life in society.”Footnote ⁷⁹

Their migration to reformist socialism brought with it an obsession with “Auschwitz” peculiar to the 1968 generation. The emblematic site of extermination, however, always had elastic meaning in the eyes of the New Left. In 1965, the writer and poet Hans Magnus Enzesberger severed Auschwitz from its German context to warn against nuclear Armageddon, a generalization repaid by a scolding from Hannah Arendt. Student protestors, for their part, proclaimed like anti-war demonstrators in the United States that “Vietnam is the Auschwitz of America.”Footnote ⁸⁰ Whether the transnationalization of Auschwitz was “escapism,” as Arendt claimed, or a point of entry into other forms of genocide, later became a cardinal question in debates on the singularity of the Holocaust. But on December 7, 1970, Willy Brandt’s spontaneous “knee fall” in front of the Warsaw Ghetto memorial in the Polish capital redirected “Auschwitz” toward Judeocentric guilt: The diplomatic thaw between the Federal Republic and its Iron Curtain neighbors started with a solemn commemoration of Jewish martyrdom.Footnote ⁸¹ Back home, half of the public disapproved of the chancellor’s “overdone” repentance. The memorable Warsaw genuflection nonetheless introduced the idea of inescapable responsibility in a social democratic party bolstered by the arrival of pacified rebels. Unthinkable before the student movement threw open the taboos of the “fascistoid” Federal Republic, Brandt’s gesture created a template for a still distant age of official atonement. Deeper reckoning with the genocide awaited the post-reunification era, but the domestication of 1968 into a Holocaust-centered memory culture had tentatively begun.

“Citizens’ initiatives,” alternative scenes, and new feminist and environmental social movements were other offshoots of the German student protests. The immediate afterlife of 1968, however, invigorated “participatory democracy” but did not generate immediate interest in the singularities of the Holocaust. Whether orthodox or unorthodox, young leftists entered the 1970s with an understanding of Nazism inherited from the previous decade: a variation of fascism associated with capitalism, bureaucracy, or authority, but devoid of a unique anti-Jewish driving force. Defensive comparisons between Nazi Germany and Vietnam, or between Nazism and “National-Zionism,” likewise deterred confrontation with the Jewish dimensions of German history. And despite the near disappearance of the German-Jewish population, swathes of the hard left remained hostile to Jews perceived as irritating reminders of moral vulnerability, or complicit with the “bridgehead of imperialism” in Palestine.Footnote ⁸² Contrary to the critique of Zionism developed in the late 1970s by Edward Said in the United States, West German leftism did not concomitantly reflect on “what anti-Semitism has meant for the Jews.”Footnote ⁸³ Such question was cast aside in favor of fervent identification with the Palestinian liberation movement precluding empathy for the Jewish victims of Nazism – and for Palestinians as a people with history instead of proxy revolutionaries. After a German hijacker separated Jewish hostages from non-Jews at the Entebbe airfield in late June 1976, the sociologist, former SDS member, and advocate of Palestinian rights Detlev Claussen denounced the “ahistorical anti-Zionism” of his leftist peers. In 1983, the self-critical intellectual also recognized that the subversive “Never Again Auschwitz postulate” had failed to translate into serious confrontation with the burdens of the German past.Footnote ⁸⁴

While 1968 did not revolutionize memory culture, the inflationary use of the epithet “Nazi” in the vociferous public sphere of the 1970s nonetheless turned the past into a political present.Footnote ⁸⁵ The mainstreaming of the student movement’s rebellious spirit likewise heightened public awareness of the Nazi era. “More democracy,” in Willy Brandt’s eyes, distinctively entailed a “neither easy nor hasty” reckoning with a dark history. It did not imply, however, wholesale abandonment of the “Germans as victims” narrative or the goal of “final line” under the nation’s past. His socialist successor Helmut Schmidt became in December 1977 the first sitting West German chancellor to visit Auschwitz. There he told his Polish hosts that “we Germans of today are not guilty as individual persons, but we must bear the political legacy of those who were guilty.” A year later Schmidt called the Reichskristallnacht of November 1938 a symbol of “bitterness and shame” for all Germans. In Auschwitz, however, the word “Jew” was not heard once in the speech he delivered at the site.Footnote ⁸⁶

Yet under two successive social–liberal coalitions, “more democracy” resulted in an unprecedented dissemination of knowledge on the Nazi era. Between 1970 and 1978, observed the historian Martin Broszat in 1979, the twenty-two largest West German universities offered 650 classes on the 1933–45 period. Only twenty-two of them specifically dealt with antisemitism and just two focused on the genocide of European Jews. A dominant view of Nazism as top-down totalitarian dictatorship, or debates on intentionality and structure in Nazi policymaking, still obscured the victim perspective.Footnote ⁸⁷ A new generation of students nevertheless discovered the Hitler years through history instead of fascismustheorie: a more likely conduit to “Holocaust consciousness” than abstract conceptions of National Socialism.

Outside of academic institutions, activists turned the memorialization of the Third Reich into public history. At the end of the decade, veterans of the student protests joined by amateur historians conducted local research, organized exhibits, or mapped out sites of Nazi persecution. Like the more scholarly “History of Everyday Life,” the History Workshop movement close to the Green Party approached the Nazi period from the standpoint of ordinary Germans, not their Jewish victims. Their propensity to “historicize” Nazism, or fragment its study through local histories, provoked fierce controversies. And while the “history from below” phenomenon made its way to television programs, its impact paled in comparison to representations of the Jewish genocide imported from the United States. Watched by 20 million viewers in January 1979, the Hollywood TV miniseries Holocaust did far more to sensitize the public to the murder of Jews than grassroot historical initiatives. Yet in 1982, at the dawn of the center-right Helmut Kohl chancellorship, “coming to terms with the past” was no longer the commitment of old left intellectual elites. A cohort of younger educators, museum workers, junior academics, journalists, lawyers, and public sector employees – as well as thousands of high-schoolers who entered essay competitions on the history of their hometowns under Nazism – also made critical memory the centerpiece of political engagement.Footnote ⁸⁸

Neonationalism, of course, was not foreign to “new social movements.” The Green Party’s antinuclear environmentalism, like the peace movement’s struggle against the deployment of American missiles in the country, rejuvenated the discourse of German victimhood. Within fifteen years, however, 1968 had spawned enough civil society actors unwilling to partake in “the grace of late birth.” The activist memory boom of the early 1980s admittedly challenged Helmut Kohl’s conservative national narrative without special focus on crimes perpetrated against the Jews. Its goal was to inscribe “the topography of [Nazi] terror” into the public space. But sites of destroyed synagogues were now increasingly marked across West German cities; and before the Stolpersteine of later years, more plaques or memorials commemorating murdered Jews appeared in West Berlin between 1980 and 1990 than during all preceding decades. Meanwhile, parents who named their children David, Jakob, Judith, or “Sarah” (as the Nazis called their female Jewish victims) resurrected a ghostly yet symbolic Jewish presence in West Berlin and other cities: The deradicalization of the student movement entailed acceptance of the Holocaust as touchstone of German identity.Footnote ⁸⁹

After the fall of the Berlin Wall, observers of reunification feared that surging nationalism would forever relegate the Holocaust to the depths of German history. But as discussed in Chapter 7, the opposite took place. “Coming to terms with the past,” the moral imperative of progressives only until 1989, morphed into state-sponsored “remembrance culture.” This was, however, more continuity than rupture: Some of the key actors of Holocaust memorialization in the 1990s had entered the field of memory activism during the last decade of the Cold War.Footnote ⁹⁰ Such an outcome looked improbable before 1990, but “the long march through the institutions” envisioned by Rudi Dutschke in 1968 to transform society from within would also result in the institutionalization of philosemitism in reunified Germany.

May ‘68 and Its Jews

While student activists in the Federal Republic occasionally portrayed themselves as “long-haired substitute Jews,” one of the most memorable May ‘68 slogans in Paris remains to this day the iconic “We are all German Jews.” In addition to their uneven popularity, however, the two phrases also differed in meaning. When they self-identified as new Jews, West German 68ers only drew attention to their own victimization. Ulrike Meinhof had already devised her own substitution theory several years prior to the student protests. “The only possible response to anti-Semitism,” she wrote in 1961, “is the rejection of every kind of political terror [against] those who think differently, those who believe differently, and those who feel differently.”Footnote ⁹¹ Rudi Dutschke followed suit in 1968. Rabid anticommunism in the Bonn Republic, argued the former East German citizen, had become the new antisemitism. This comparison allowed him to portray participants in the movement as the “Jews of anticommunism.” Police brutality, argued other SDS members, was akin to “pogroms.” In lieu of murdered Jews, ersatzJuden bore the brunt of fascist oppression.Footnote ⁹²

First shouted in Paris on May 24, 1968, “We are all German Jews” suggested similar usurpation. But unlike radicals across the Rhine, French protesters did not simply substitute themselves for assassinated Jews. The rallying cry conveyed solidarity with the de facto leader of the revolt Daniel Cohn-Bendit, the son of German Jewish refugees born in France, a West German citizen on a student visa now declared “undesirable” in the country of his birth. The defiant chant heard in his defense, the twenty-three-year-old sociology student commented on June 12, 1968, “was the most important thing we had in France in the last days.”Footnote ⁹³ In a notorious essay, the French Jewish intellectual Alain Finkielkraut retrospectively charged that such “facile and flashy” generosity reduced Jewishness to an empty symbol. Whether Jewish like him or not, 68ers draped themselves “with the torture that others underwent.”Footnote ⁹⁴ Thirty years after the uprising, however, Cohn-Bendit still wished the phrase “a long life.” The 50,000 to 70,000 protestors who in late May claimed the mantle of Jewishness were not despoiling it, as Finkielkraut lamented, but subverted a “racist anathema (…) into antiracist anathema.” On the fiftieth anniversary of the revolt, the former far-left activist and long-time editor of the newspaper Libération Serge July avowed that among all the movement’s slogans, “We are all German Jews” remained for him “the most beautiful of all.”Footnote ⁹⁵

Figural or real, however, the Jewish dimensions of May ‘68 in France did not immediately jump to the eye. Far-left splinter groups, to be sure, counted several Jews in their leadership. Yet if Jewish radicals later invoked identity or second-generation Holocaust trauma to explain their involvement, conscious Jewishness remained invisible in the gauchiste movement. “Had people told me in May, you are doing this because you are Jewish,” recalled the former Maoist Alain Geismar in 1978, “I would have thought of them as completely crazy.” Cohn-Bendit himself reiterated in 2018 that being Jewish played “no role” at the time.Footnote ⁹⁶ “We are all German Jews” has now achieved celebrity status, yet the shout only erupted one week before a massive pro-Gaullist rally on the Champs-Élysées spelled the end of the uprising. Had Cohn-Bendit received authorization to reenter France after a short absence, May ‘68 would not have been “German Jewish” at all. Two posters gave visual form to the slogan, one of them featuring the alternative inscription “We are all Jews and Germans.” Both were abandoned in favor of “We are all undesirables,” a subversive badge of honor no longer explicitly grounded on Jewishness. In the chronology of May ‘68, German Jews arrived late on the scene and only for a brief moment.Footnote ⁹⁷

Although ephemeral, their appearance in the vocabulary of protest nonetheless stunned some of the first commentators of the events. For the French Jewish political philosopher Raymond Aron, of course, May ‘68 only amounted to an “elusive revolution.” In his anti-utopian analysis of the uprising, Aron did not detect in the “We are all” chant any seismic change in the perception of Jewishness in France. The phrase, he noted in passing, merely signified youthful rejection of the Gaullist “dream of French grandeur.”Footnote ⁹⁸ The literary critic Maurice Blanchot, to the contrary, waxed lyrical about “an inaugural speech event, opening and overturning borders, opening and overthrowing the future.” Identification with the Jewish outcast de-ostracized all outcasts: an emancipatory politics which the enthusiastic Blanchot called “communism without heritage.” His friend Emmanuel Levinas interpreted the slogan differently. Parisian students, the philosopher of alterity suggested in 1969, encountered the Other through “German Jews in 1933 (…) that which is most fragile and most persecuted in the world.”Footnote ⁹⁹ While Blanchot embraced the phrase for its liberating promise, Levinas paid attention to its historical connotation. If German Jews conjured up the Final Solution, or the Vichy regime’s complicity, then not only the Jewish outsider but also the Holocaust itself loomed behind the “We are all” proclamations.

In the summer of 1968, students at the London School of Economics imported the German Jew template to chant “We are all foreign scum” in solidarity with the Pakistani-born organizer Tariq Ali. In Paris, the Maoist Gauche Prolétarienne positioned the Palestinian cause under the tragic aura of German Jews with “We are all Fedayeen.”Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Over the next decades, “We are all foreigners” or “We are all undocumented” would similarly impart the shadow of the Holocaust on pro-immigrant advocacy in France. The Jewish victim as a metaphor of moral force had already appeared in French anti-colonial writings during the late stages of the Algerian war, when revulsion from torture and police violence conjured up images of “ghettos” and “Auschwitz.”Footnote ¹⁰¹ What developed in the wake of May ‘68, however, is less “multidirectional memory” than Holocaust totemism: the Jewish genocide as supreme standard of atrocity and trauma.

French humanitarian activists played a key part in this evolution. When sans-frontiérisme – the “Without Borders” ideology – displaced revolutionary Third Worldism as a form of radical engagement, the Holocaust began its new career as historical referent for the Western humanitarian movement.Footnote ¹⁰² Founded in 1971, Doctors Without Borders (MSF) was not a direct heir of May ‘68. Some of its progenitors, including the future celebrity “French doctor” Bernard Kouchner, served as Red Cross volunteers in Biafra while French students confronted riot police in the streets. Yet the birth of sans-frontiérisme in France coincided with the propagation of iconoclastic narratives of the wartime period. Released in 1971, Marcel Ophül’s film Le chagrin et la pitié [The Sorrow and the Pity] challenged the heroic myth of collective anti-German resistance. Two years later, Robert Paxton’s bombshell La France de Vichy: 1940–1944 revealed how wartime rulers initiated anti-Jewish policies without pressure from German occupiers. A pivotal juncture in the history of the “Vichy syndrome,” the years 1968–73 paved the way for an “obsession” with Jewish memory in literature, film, and scholarship.Footnote ¹⁰³

Doctors Without Borders, for its part, bound the legacy of the Holocaust to a new humanitarian imperative. “Bearing witness” to human rights abuses, the organization’s distinctive concept, echoed other political speech acts born in May ‘68. For the group of volunteer physicians who had returned from Biafra, however, witnessing or témoignage was also a response to the Red Cross’s public silence during the Holocaust era. Such passivity, they charged, was once again on display when the Nigerian federal army starved the secessionist Ibo population without public protest from Red Cross officials.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Bernard Kouchner popularized this version of MSF’s origins. After learning that the wartime Red Cross “had chosen not to reveal the existence of extermination camps,” he explained in 1979, the French doctors in Biafra “refused collusion with the executioner.”Footnote ¹⁰⁵ During the first years of MSF’s existence, “bearing witness” lost ground to a more neutral commitment to care in far-flung conflict zones. But the Holocaust continued to inform sans-frontiériste portrayals of humanitarian emergencies. As the 1970s drew to a close, MSF activists referred to atrocities in Khmer Rouge Cambodia, and to the exodus of boat people in the region, as “Auschwitz in Asia.” Nonintervention, they warned, would replicate the world’s silence during the Holocaust.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ A decade after May ‘68, the condition of victimhood in the French humanitarian imagination was grounded on similitude with the abandonment of the Jews during the 1930s and 1940s. Unbeknownst to them, humanitarian subjects in South East Asia also all became German Jews.

Contrary to the rise of sans-frontiérisme, the “breakthrough” of human rights ideology in the decade following May ‘68 stemmed from heightened consciousness of the Gulag more than Auschwitz. Disillusionment with Marxism and the appeal of Eastern European dissidence prompted a disparate group of French intellectuals to search for moral renewal through rejection of revolutionary politics. In the mid 1970s, an anti-totalitarian front comprised of former gauchistes and late discoverers of liberal political thought found in Eurocentric human rights – the denunciation of oppression across the Iron Curtain – a political commitment unsullied by radical utopianism.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ The French contribution to the surge of (selective) human rights talk in the West during the 1970s, however, also had Jewish dimensions. The twenty-nine-year-old Bernard-Henri Lévy and the older André Glucksmann, the two best-selling “new philosophers” whose books published in 1977 assailed the Left’s philo-Marxism, were not only abjurers of revolution turned anti-totalitarian absolutists. They also belonged to a new generation of Jewish writers who openly assumed their cultural identity. In the aftermath of May ‘68, homosexual activists, feminists, immigrant and regionalist groups clamored for “the right to difference”: a valorization of identity also conducive to greater affirmation of Jewishness in the public sphere.Footnote ¹⁰⁸

The media-friendly Lévy and Glucksmann added to this “coming out” a touch of Jewish chic, and not only because of their telegenic looks. Although derided by its numerous critics as shallow posturing, the “new philosophy” phenomenon elicited voguish interest for the Jewish intellectual as irreverent moral voice and metaphorical dissident. On television sets especially, “BHL” and Glucksmann excelled in this role. The Polish-born Marek Halter and from 1980 onward, the essayist Alain Finkielkraut, followed on their footsteps. Jewish “media intellectuals” in the 1970s and early 1980s almost single-handedly resurrected the old-fashioned French universalist intellectual, indefatigable crusader for justice since the Dreyfus Affair.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Away from the spotlights, the belated consecration of Emmanuel Levinas and Vladimir Jankélévitch as major ethical thinkers focused attention on Jewish philosophers “as Jews.” The turn from “revolution to ethics” in post-1968 thought, interlaced with the rise of human rights ideology and Holocaust memory, elevated the moral appeal of Jewishness in the French intellectual sphere.Footnote ¹¹⁰

“Rabbi Jacob”: Bursting Jewishness on Screen

The long May ‘68 also affected the representation of Jews – and the Holocaust – in French film. The 1970s mode rétro, unlike the New German Cinema of the same period, revisited the Nazi era by featuring lead Jewish characters. Contrary to the simultaneous vogue of sexualized and psychoanalytical films on Nazism in Italy, the French mode rétro fixated on the occupation years without obsession with sadomasochism or scandalous eroticism.Footnote ¹¹¹ With the exception of François Truffaut’s Le dernier métro [The Last Metro, 1980], however, Jewish-themed rétro films only achieved moderate box-office success. More than 7 million movie-goers, on the other hand, saw Les aventures de Rabbi Jacob [The Mad Adventures of Rabbi Jacob] upon its release on October 18, 1973. Many more enjoyed the movie over the next decades, leading the Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin in office between 2005 and 2007 to hail Rabbi Jacob as “the patrimony of French families.”Footnote ¹¹² In this satire featuring France’s favorite actor Louis de Funès, the film director of Jewish origin Gérard Oury used the character of Victor Pivert, a bigoted bourgeois Catholic turned imposter rabbi, to tackle the problem of racism in French society. Stereotypes abound in this comedy, yet remarkably without stigmatization of Jewishness. To the contrary, it is the distinctively ethnic Jews from Paris’s rue des Rosiers who expose Pivert’s narrow-mindedness and educate him in pluralism. Concluding the film, a famous klezmer dance scene cements their reconciliation. Donning a shtreimel and dressed in a caftan, Pivert-de Funès overcomes bigotry through the healing power of Hassidic joy. Les aventures de Rabbi Jacob, according to its cowriter Josy Eisenberg, won over the public with a “sympathetic, warm, welcoming” image of Judaism. But it also allowed French audiences to laugh at franchouillard or “typically French” racism without need for soul-searching. The comedy became an instant blockbuster because of de Funès’s politically incorrect outbursts, not worries about antisemitism. For the star actor, however, Rabbi Jacob proved transformative. This experience, he confided, “scrubbed the dirt off my soul.”Footnote ¹¹³ The film did not have such a radical effect on French society. Yet this burst of Jewishness on screen inaugurated the normalization of Jewish difference in French popular culture. The mid 1970s was also the moment when the Yiddish-accented stand-up comedian Popeck, followed by the Tunis-born humorist Michel Boujenah, endeared ethnic Jewishness to a wide public – all the while popular entertainers like Pierre Péchin enjoyed success with the mockery of Maghrebi accent.

Arab difference was also on display in Les aventures de Rabbi Jacob. Released during a year rife with racist attacks on North African immigrants, the slapstick comedy sought to combat xenophobia through laughter. The only Arabs featured in the film, however, are not Algerians, Moroccans, or Tunisians – their presence in mainstream French cinema was still negligeable – but assassins dispatched by a dictatorial North African regime to kill the revolutionary Mohamed Larbi Slimane. Violent, conniving, or seducing, postcolonial Arabs are still portrayed through colonial stereotypes. The secular and well-mannered Slimane admittedly receives better treatment. Disguised like Pivert as orthodox Jew to escape a bloodthirsty “colonel Fares” and the French police, Slimane does not share the prejudiced views of his accomplice. He is above all the story’s “good Arab,” however, because of his embrace of Jewish “distant cousins.” Unintentionally released during the Arab–Israeli war of October 1973, the blockbuster film did not directly address the Middle East conflict. It nonetheless recycled the myth of ancestral struggle between Arab and Jews while evacuating the question of Palestine through caricatural terrorists. Played by a French actor, Slimane epitomized for millions of viewers the progressive but moderate Arab capable of peace with Israel in the name of “Semite” brotherhood. Jews in Les aventures de Rabbi Jacob, contrary to foreign Arabs, come across as equally ethnic and French. But like Slimane, they also fraternize with their supposed historical enemy. This influential representation of the Arab–Israeli conflict as Arab-Jewish family quarrel kept the question of Palestine at bay: The celebration of tolerance also blurred the distinctiveness of Palestinian national aspirations.

Public opinion polls released during the Arab–Israeli war of October 1973, however, revealed that in France as in the EEC, the majoritarian pro-Israel sentiment of June 1967 declined in favor of growing neutrality. More respondents still supported Israel over Arab countries, but with the exception of West Germany, Austria, and more surprisingly Italy, an equal or greater number did not take side. In Britain, 47.5% were favorable to Israel at the end of the first week of the war, 5% supported the Arab bloc, but 48% remained noncommittal. Even in Israel-friendly Norway, Denmark, and the Netherlands, neutrality gained ground. The Palestinian cause, publicized a year later with Yasser Arafat’s “gun and olive branch” speech at the UN General Assembly, simultaneously began to receive attention. Before a sharper pro-Palestinian swing in the wake of the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, surveys conducted in the mid 1970s already indicated widespread support for Palestinian self-determination in territories conquered by Israel in June 1967. This was not an endorsement of the “one democratic state” to replace the “Zionist entity,” the solution to the conflict promoted by Yasser Arafat at the United Nations on November 13, 1974. This option, in any case, did not figure in the list of questions presented to poll respondents. Support for Palestinian rights nonetheless gained a foothold in public opinion.Footnote ¹¹⁴ The new resonance of the Palestinian issue, however, did not sound the death knell of Israelophilia: The dawn of the two-state solution era not only salvaged but strengthened Israel’s legitimacy in mainstream European politics.

Israelophilia: The Post-1967 Sequel

At the start of the 1970s, the pre-1967 harmonious relations between Western Europe and Israel already looked like a distant past. The reversal of the country’s image from David to Goliath, the threat of terrorist attacks by Palestinian groups, and awareness of the Middle East’s economic potential, accounted for this change of course. In 1971, the EEC “Schuman Document” set a new tone by calling for the withdrawal of Israel from territories occupied in June 1967 with only minor border corrections, the internationalization of Jerusalem, the return of Arab refugees to their home or their indemnification.Footnote ¹¹⁵ Like his predecessor Charles de Gaulle, the French president Georges Pompidou (1969–74) yearned for French “radiance” in the Arab world – as well as for increased arms sales and manufactured exports. In Britain, the conservative prime minister Edward Heath (1970–74) cultivated vital commercial ties with the Middle East. In Italy, ephemeral ruling coalitions dominated by Christian-Democrats continued to view good relations with Arab states a matter of national interest. In West Germany, Willy Brandt’s Ostpolitik (1969–74) ended the prohibition of contacts with governments who recognized the German Democratic Republic: Conciliation with the Eastern European bloc also meant rapprochement with Arab League members. In June 1973, Brandt’s landmark visit to Israel was not another display of Holocaust contrition. To interlocutors still incensed by the failure of West German security forces to rescue Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics, the chancellor signified that Bonn favored “even-handedness” in the Arab–Israeli conflict. Brandt also turned down demands for additional reparation payments. The Federal Republic, he declared, sought with Israel a “normalized relation with a special character.” While certainly not abolished, the “special relationship” entered troubled waters.Footnote ¹¹⁶

The outbreak of the Arab Israeli war on October 6, 1973, forced EEC members to take a stand. Two days after the joint Egyptian–Syrian attack in the Sinai and the Golan Heights, Pompidou’s foreign minister Michel Jobert wondered if “trying to repossess one’s land” should be considered “unexpected aggression.” Like France, Britain refused to condemn the Arab military campaign. Invoking impartiality, Heath declared an embargo on arms sales to both sides of the conflict. Despite dissent within Tory ranks and protest from the Labour opposition, the prime minister also denied American airplanes ferrying weapons to Israel the use of British airfields in Cyprus. West Germany allowed American supplying vessels to used its ports. Bonn nonetheless reversed course on October 25 when news of the discrete arrangement became public: Since October 17, the oil embargo enforced by Arab members of OPEC against countries supportive of Israel accelerated Western Europe’s diplomatic reorientation.Footnote ¹¹⁷

Cutbacks in the supply of oil most severely punished the Netherlands for its delivery of material assistance to the Israeli army. The socialist minister of defense and former resistance fighter Henk Vredeling invoked the persecution of Dutch Jews to justify the transfer of ammunition and spare parts to Israel. “I had seen the Jews drift away once,” he later explained, “and then I could not prevent it. I thought that would not happen to me a second time.”Footnote ¹¹⁸ Oil shortages only lasted a few weeks, but this experience earned the Netherlands the admiration of Israel’s supporters. Amsterdam’s progressive atmosphere likewise established the country’s philosemitic reputation. The Dutch government, however, swiftly fell in line with the EEC. On December 14, 1973, the European Nine reiterated their support for UN Security Council Resolution 242 interpreted as full Israeli withdrawal from territories occupied since 1967. Whereas the UN resolution only called for “a just settlement of the refugee problem,” EEC heads of government also demanded that the “legitimate rights” of Palestinians be “taken into account”: enough to placate Arab oil-producing countries, intimate to Israel that concessions would be compensated by security guarantees, and watch pax americana condemn the so-called Euro-Arab dialogue to irrelevance.

Other EEC statements culminating in the 1980 Venice Declaration reaffirmed this position. The Palestinian problem was no longer “one of refugees”; Israeli settlements presented a “serious obstacle” to peace; dialogue with the PLO was indispensable to secure a “just solution.” Although the declaration recognized “the right to exist of all states in the region, including Israel,” it did not express particular sympathy for the Jewish state. Emphasis on “the Palestinian people, conscious to exist as such” testified to this change of tone. The European mediation attempt, however, did not address the details of border arrangements. It also conveyed to Palestinians that sovereignty in or parts of the West Bank, the Gaza strip, and East Jerusalem, was the most they could expect. The declaration was nonetheless anathema to the right-wing Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin always keen to compare the PLO to “Arab SS.” Torn between armed struggle and diplomacy to defeat Zionism, the Palestinian leadership in Beirut rejected the proposal for its evasiveness on statehood.Footnote ¹¹⁹ The document, in any case, had little practical value: The Camp David Accords signed in 1978 between Israel and Egypt had already secured Washington’s control over a PLO-less peace process. It nonetheless laid out the parameters of the US-backed Oslo Accords (1993). The Venice Declaration already symbolized the late 20th century Western consensus on Zionism: a recognition of its historical legitimacy compensated by overtures to Palestinian claims.

Reactions to UN General Assembly Resolution 3379 which on November 10, 1975, determined that “Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination,” had already demonstrated the resilience of Western support for Israel. Twenty-eight years after the United Nations adopted the partition plan of Palestine, the question of Zionism was back on the agenda. Decolonization, however, changed the balance of power on the UN floor: a Soviet, Arab, and Non-Aligned coalition passed resolution 3379 by 72 votes against 35 and 32 abstentions. Ideologically, the motion condemned Zionism as part of a broader campaign against “neo-colonialism, foreign occupation, apartheid and racial discrimination.” Diplomatically, the maneuver sought to isolate Israel on the international stage a year after South Africa’s suspension from the United Nations. Like the United States, EEC countries unanimously opposed the resolution. Yet they justified their vote without American hyperbole. In a fiery speech, the US ambassador to the United Nations Daniel Patrick Moynihan led the Western charge against “the terrible lie that has been told here today.” The Cold War hawk inveighed against the granting of “symbolic amnesty – and more – to the murderers of 6 million Jews” – a phrase which even Secretary of State Henry Kissinger found “just wrong.” The General Assembly, added Moynihan, gave “the abomination of anti-Semitism (…) the appearance of international sanction.” With the passing of Zionism-is-Racism, Antizionism-is-Antisemitism officially entered the vocabulary of US foreign policy.Footnote ¹²⁰

Western Europeans kept their distance from such equivalence. They nonetheless concurred with the overall American position. Resolution 3379 undermined “the right of the State of Israel to exist and the United Kingdom (…) will oppose any such move,” declared the Labour-appointed British ambassador Ivor Richard. “The equation of Zionism with (…) racial discrimination is devoid of any foundation,” stated the West German Rüdiger von Wechmar, a former lieutenant in Erwin Rommel’s Afrika Korps. A Free French during World War II, Paris’s envoy Louis de Guiringaud condemned an “initiative (…) directed against those who were not very long ago the victims of the most odious form of racism.” Public opinion in their respective countries supported this view. In December 1975, a Gallup poll showed that only 25% of the British and French public agreed with resolution 3379, and less than 20% in West Germany and Switzerland.Footnote ¹²¹ Thousands of Dutch or Scandinavian young adults did not see Israel as racist either. Jobless at home since the 1973 oil shock, they enjoyed the countercultural lifestyle of volunteers in kibbutzim. Goodwill was also perceptible at the level of economic relations. Private companies seeking contracts in the Middle East continued to abide by the Arab boycott, but in May 1975 a trade agreement turned the EEC into Israel’s largest commercial partner.Footnote ¹²²

Historians have portrayed the European left’s change of heart about Israel after 1967 as a fateful “divorce”: Responses to resolution 3379 nonetheless show that the categorical delegitimization of Zionism only took place within the militant but electorally weak radical left.Footnote ¹²³ Zionism-is-Racism was nothing new to the Marxist-Leninist groupings which since the 1967–68 student protests threw their lot with the Palestinian revolution. In France, however, second thoughts about revolutionary violence contributed to the self-dissolution of the pro-Palestinian Gauche Prolétarienne in the wake of the 1972 Munich Olympics. A sympathizer of the violent Revolutionary Cells in the Federal Republic, the future Green Party foreign minister Joschka Fischer began a two-decade journey toward liberal-Atlanticism in the wake of the 1976 Entebbe hijacking. Yet Zionism remained unquestionably racist for West German radicals, Lotta Continua! in Italy, French far-left groupuscules, British Trotskyist students – and the Palestine solidarity committees active on university campuses since the start of the decade.

The two largest communist parties in Western Europe differed on resolution 3379. In France, the PCF accepted it with qualifying “nuances.” The party’s mouthpiece L’Humanité, however, reaffirmed that “French communists support without ambiguity the existence of the state of Israel” alongside “an independent and pacifist Palestinian state.” Italian communists, for their part, disagreed with the UN condemnation. Zionism was a “reactionary and conservative ideology,” stated the PCI, “but on grounds of principle we do not equate Zionism with racism.” Although more successful in Italy than in France, “Eurocommunism” distanced both parties from Soviet orthodoxy: For the heirs of the anti-Nazi resistance struggle, calling Israel “racist” was a Rubicon too symbolically charged to cross.Footnote ¹²⁴ Midway between social democracy and the far left, the non-Marxist New Left denounced Israel’s ethnonationalism or oppression of Palestinians without categorical anti-Zionism. In Paris, Le Monde’s editorial on resolution 3379 typified this position better defined as anti-Israelism. The prestigious newspaper called Zionism a “nationalist doctrine (…) which often established questionable distinctions among human beings” yet still deplored the “harmful” UN decision.Footnote ¹²⁵

Left flanks of socialist parties, including Labour’s left wing in Britain, shared in the anti-Israelism described above. Bruno Kreisky, who from 1973 to 1977 led a peace mediation in the Middle East on behalf of the Socialist International, never hid his dislike of Zionist ideology which he called “a mysterious racism in reverse.” His Third-Worldist Swedish colleague Olof Palme stood among the most vocal socialist sympathizers of Palestinians.Footnote ¹²⁶ Yet if the defeat of the Israeli Labor party in April 1977 ended an already fading romance with socialist Israel, mainstream social democracy never delegitimized Zionism: The preservation of a perfectible but esteemed Jewish state through compromise with Palestinians became the new version of socialist Israelophilia. From 1974 to 1979, the British Labour prime ministers Harold Wilson and James Callaghan embraced the two-state platform with a flexible interpretation of UN resolution 242 allowing for border arrangements. They also insisted on the PLO’s official recognition of the Jewish state as precondition for peace. Wilson later portrayed himself as the “best friend Israel had in the Western world,”Footnote ¹²⁷ yet the emblematic philo-Zionist socialist of the 1970s remained François Mitterrand. In 1972, the head of the new Parti Socialiste entered into electoral alliance with Communists. His long history of friendship with Israel, however, did not end in divorce. While premised in his eyes on the “equal right of Palestinians and Israelis to self-determination,” the two-state solution allowed him to pledge attachment to a Jewish state he always held in high regard. Equity demanded the realization of Palestinian self-determination, Mitterrand already claimed in the mid 1970s. Yet he simultaneously drew the limits of his pro-Palestinianism. Zionism-is-Racism, commented the future French president, only deserved “scorn.”Footnote ¹²⁸

Mitterrand’s indignation was not unique to social democrats. In West Germany, it was not only chancellor Helmut Schmidt or SPD intellectuals who bristled at the condemnation of Zionism. Liberal coalition members, as well as the CDU/CSU opposition, also joined in outrage. The Societies for Christian-Jewish Cooperation (to which virtually no Jews belonged) hurried to dedicate their yearly Brotherhood Week to “Zionism: Liberation Movement of the Jewish People.”Footnote ¹²⁹

On November 13, 1975, the European parliament rebuked the UN decision without a dissenting vote. No detailed rebuttal was offered. For the assembly seated in Luxemburg, the “profound” differences between Zionism and racism were simply too “obvious” to be spelled out. The UN resolution was above all an affront to the post-Holocaust conscience: The “unacceptable” suggestion that Jewish victims of racism became enforcers of racism. The Italian Christian Democrat who tabled the anti-3379 motion reminded his colleagues that “the people of Europe (.) had direct experience of the cost in blood and tears of the tragic confrontation between Zionism and the most merciless racism.” Since the Third Reich exterminated “Zionists,” he seemed to believe, the vilification of Zionism at the UN was a continuation of Nazism by other means. Other speakers similarly viewed the resolution as an unbearable breach of morality. This was not only true of parliament members who considered Zionism-is-Racism a perversion of antiracism. Communists abstained, yet for them too resolution 3379 “incomprehensibly linked [Zionism] to racism.” The French Gaullist Louis Terrenoire, a vocal anti-Israeli since 1967 and leader of the Progressive Democrats faction, was also a former resister and survivor of Dachau. Like other politicians of his generation, Terrenoire still associated racism with Nazism, not apartheid-like racial oppression. Even for the future founding member of the France–Palestine association (1979), branding Zionism as racism was uncomfortable terrain. The “legitimate rights of the Palestinian people” awaited vindication, but the “regrettable” UN decision only delayed the achievement of peace.Footnote ¹³⁰

In Britain, 160 members of the Houses of Parliament called on the UN “to repudiate all attempts, racialist in themselves, to pillory the democratic state of Israel.” In France, Italy, and West Germany, signatories of open letters where not all self-declared “friends of Israel.” What they similarly defended from the charge of racism, however, was the “the aspiration of Jews persecuted by racism to recover a national identity.”Footnote ¹³¹ That the 1975 Nobel Peace Prize recipient Andrei Sakharov entered the fray added weight to their protest. In his Oslo lecture read by his wife Elena Bonner, the Soviet prisoner of conscience sympathetic to Jewish refuzniks in his country affirmed that “all impartial persons know that Zionism (…) is not directed against any other people.”Footnote ¹³² Like other opponents of resolution 3379, Sakharov applauded the “national rebirth of the Jewish people” from the point of view of Zionist ideology. Palestinian spokesmen offered another perspective. “The policy of the Zionist state,” retorted from Paris the PLO representative at UNESCO Ibrahim Souss, “seeks to systematically separate the Jew from the non-Jew, to prepare the evacuation of the non-Jew.” The “Judaization” of Palestine, he added, was tantamount to “racial discrimination, if not plain racism.”Footnote ¹³³

Yet as Sakharov’s address confirmed, the explosion of human rights language and activism in the West afforded Zionism a moral shield against disrepute. Since the late 1960s, to be sure, Amnesty International clashed with the Israeli government over its treatment of Palestinian prisoners. To the dismay of Jewish critics decrying double standards or a dubious obsession, the transnational NGO did not spare Israel from shaming. In its anti-totalitarian version, however, the North Atlantic “breakthrough of human rights” offset the delegitimization of Zionism at the United Nations or within the hard left. Not only could Israel’s reputation be defended by exposing the human rights violations committed by its Soviet-bloc, Arab, or African accusers: Zionism itself preserved its status of just cause in the Western liberal imagination. A new form of sympathy contributed to this resilient esteem.

Pourquoi Israël

Released to international audiences on the eve of the 1973 Arab–Israeli war, Claude Lanzmann’s Pourquoi Israël [Israel, Why] exemplified the mutation of cultural philo-Zionism after 1967. Gone was the romance with blooming deserts and socialist achievements. “In no way a work of propaganda,” assured its author, the film sought to capture “the awe-inspiring wonder of a normal, Jewish state.” Three years in the making, Lanzmann’s unambiguously pro-Zionist directorial debut showcased everyday Israelis: intellectuals and workers, new immigrants from the Soviet Union, older ones from North Africa, Holocaust survivors, Mizrahi Black Panthers, or one of the first Jewish settlers in al-Khalil/Hebron. Dominating the film, however, is the figure of the introspective liberal, of Ashkenazi origin or leftist kibbutz member, reflecting in fluent English on the challenges of nation-building or the prospect of peace. Against the triumphalist mood of the post-1967 years, Pourquoi Israël portrayed the twenty-five-year-old state as an uncertain yet extraordinary quest for Jewish normality. “We have never seen anything like this before,” exclaimed the German-Israeli thinker Gershom Scholem after the film was shown in Jerusalem.Footnote ¹³⁴

Lanzmann’s exploration of Israel’s social and political tensions nonetheless shared a common trait with earlier representations of the Jewish state on screen: the conspicuous absence of Arabs over more than three hours of interviews. Palestinians in a Gaza refugee camp briefly appear as the director follows an Israeli army patrol. An elderly man exchanges a few untranslated words with an officer; silent coffee-drinkers avert their eyes from Lanzmann’s intrusive camera; children are seen from a distant alley; a passer-by carrying a basket is stopped at gun point: This is the extent of the Arab presence in Pourquoi Israël. Fascinated with the “reappropriation of violence by the Jews” after centuries of victimhood, the future creator of Shoah did not seek to hear what Palestinian onlookers might think of this historical reversal. With noticeable empathy for “an army unlike any other,” he instead gave voice to Israeli conscripts dissatisfied with “being in Gaza … playing cat and mouse, but this is our duty, we have to finish off the terrorists.”Footnote ¹³⁵

Like other reviewers of the film in West Germany, Italy, or the United States, the French historian François Furet questioned Lanzmann’s “strangely marginal” treatment of the Palestinian issue. But like other film critics enthralled by the “unique tonality of Israeli existence,” the preeminent scholar of the French revolution found logic in Lanzmann’s partiality: “Is it not (…) because the Arab problem, and this is its tragedy, is ultimately lateral and almost accidental in relation to Israeli consciousness?” The depth of “human meanings” in Pourquoi Israël, he observed, conveyed a “profound historical truth” independent of other considerations. Despite their one-sidedness, Lanzmann’s interviews illuminated “a ‘return’ which is not only historical and sentimental, but also spiritual and metaphysical.” For the former communist intellectual now committed to rescue the historiography of the French revolution from Marxist “catechism,” the film raised questions hitherto ignored by the anti-colonial left: “What is a Jew? What does the resurrection of a Jewish state in Palestine mean? What is the historical identity of an Israeli?”Footnote ¹³⁶

Furet’s approval of Pourquoi Israël reflected a liberal-centrist turn in both pro-Zionism and philosemitism. After a short romance with the young state of Israel, argued the former Communist, the left now reduced “the Exodus passengers” to colonial settlers perhaps unaware of their sins, “yet colonial settlers nonetheless.” Empathy for persecuted Jews after World War II, he added, did not erase all traces of “latent antisemitism” within the progressive camp. But Furet above all criticized the left’s inability to accept Jewish particularism, whether national or religious: two categories about which Marxism or philo-Marxism “never had much to say.” The “Jewish problem,” he countered in 1979, is not “normalizable” through revolution or universalism. Only a left emancipated from utopia and Manichean anti-fascism could comprehend the complexities of the Jewish reality, “live with it, as it is, and at the present time.” Confrontation with this “immense question,” wrote the scholar fascinated with “the Jewish destiny in the 20th century,” was a cardinal feature of post-Marxist liberal politics.Footnote ¹³⁷ Furet’s intellectual trajectory, of course, only exemplified a rightist inflection among members of the French left reconciled with market society and Republicanism. But a decade before 1989, his import of philosemitism into late twentieth-century centrist-liberalism proved prophetic for Europe as a whole. Politically situated between center-left and center-right, Euro-optimists yearned for a union transcending the boundaries of economic community: They also discovered unique affinities between Europeanism and Jewishness.