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JTA — At a political rally in Berlin in June, a younger Jewish homosexual man carrying a turquoise kippah launched his marketing campaign to signify certainly one of Germany’s most ethnically various constituencies in parliament.
The person, 34-year-old Marcel Yaron Goldhammer, promised to stoke the “embers of unity, justice and freedom” throughout his announcement speech in entrance of about 200 individuals within the southeastern Berlin neighborhood of Neukolln.
However he’s not operating for a liberal get together, or one selling multiculturalism.
Goldhammer, a twin German-Israeli citizen and a former soldier within the Israel Protection Forces, is operating on the ticket of AfD, or Various for Germany, a right-wing populist get together that opposes immigration from Muslim international locations and needs Germany to go away the European Union. Its critics name it radical, inherently xenophobic and antisemitic.
Goldhammer is the get together’s no. 6 candidate in Berlin, the place it gained 4 seats over the past elections. Germany goes to the polls once more on Sunday.
“It’s not a positive factor that I’ll grow to be a lawmaker, but it surely’s undoubtedly throughout the realm of chance,” he mentioned.
Goldhammer belongs to a rising minority of Jews in Western Europe who’ve joined the ranks of the populist proper due to its nationalist beliefs and its opposition to Muslim immigration. They consider left-wing actions threaten the way forward for European tradition, in addition to that of the continent’s Jewish minority.
A former supporter of outgoing Chancellor Angela Merkel’s center-right Christian Democratic Union get together, or CDU, Goldhammer grew up in Germany in a “culturally Christian dwelling,” as he outlined it in an interview with the Jewish Telegraphic Company. His mother and father labored shifts at an area manufacturing facility in Kaiserslautern, a metropolis located about 380 miles southwest of Berlin.
However his life took an surprising flip when he got here out as homosexual on the age of 15.
“My mom had a tough time with it. It turned laborious to proceed dwelling at dwelling,” he mentioned.
So he left for Berlin, the place he accomplished his highschool research whereas dwelling at a housing challenge for youngsters in comparable conditions. He was pursuing a profession as an actor when his curiosity in faith introduced him in touch with a Reform Jewish group.
Lastly, Goldhammer says, he felt like he was dwelling. He determined to transform, finishing the two-year course of in 2005. Upon visiting Israel for the primary time, Goldhammer “fell in love,” he advised Israel Hayom, an Israeli newspaper, in an interview. “I knew I needed to reside there.”
He immigrated to Israel in 2013, shortly earlier than the 2014 Gaza Warfare between Hamas and Israel.
That was the start of Goldhammer’s rightward shift from Merkel’s CDU to Various for Germany, he advised JTA.
“I got here from a spot the place being happy with your id, if it’s German, is unsuitable, to a spot the place the alternative was true, a spot that doesn’t dismiss itself,” he mentioned of Israel.
Goldhammer says he was shocked by “the true freedom of expression” in Israel.
“Certain, the media has its preferences, however everybody can converse their thoughts. Not solely about politics, occupation, Hamas. But additionally on the coronavirus,” he mentioned. “This may by no means have been allowed to occur in Germany.”
Finishing his military service within the Israel Protection Forces spokesperson’s unit, Goldhammer put down roots in Tel Aviv. However his associate, a Chinese language nationwide, needed to reside in Europe, in order that they returned to Germany, the place he now works as an actor and mannequin.
However his nation, and particularly Berlin, had modified in his absence, Goldhammer mentioned.
In 2014, a whole lot of 1000’s of immigrants, a lot of them asylum seekers from the Center East and Africa, have been allowed into Germany after a polarizing choice by Merkel. The inflow heightened tensions and galvanized Germany’s neo-Nazi fringe, whose members have carried out a number of violent assaults on immigrants, left-wing politicians, journalists – and Jews.
For a lot of, a spate of sexual assaults on girls throughout road celebrations on New 12 months’s Eve in 2016 mirrored the depth of Germany’s immigrant integration drawback. And the scope of violent antisemitism started to climb precipitously, from a mean of 342 incidents per yr between 2013 and 2015 to 978 incidents on common yearly within the following 4 years, in accordance with the RIAS watchdog group.
In 2019, the surge got here to a head when a younger white supremacist tried to shoot his means right into a synagogue within the metropolis of Halle, close to Berlin, on Yom Kippur. After he failed to interrupt by the fortified door, he killed a patron of a kebab store and one other passerby.
Goldhammer, who doesn’t normally put on a kippah, has not been the goal of any antisemitic incidents, however says he has witnessed antisemitic hate speech, primarily by Muslims.
The 2018 rape and homicide close to Frankfurt of Susanna Feldmann, a Jewish 14-year-old, by a 21-year-old asylum seeker from Iraq shocked Goldhammer particularly. Whereas the crime was by no means established to have been antisemitic in motivation, it was broadly perceived as symptomatic of the issues of mass immigration from societies the place violence towards girls and minorities is extra widespread.
“I began to see that in far too most of the individuals who got here, there was no need to combine. Quite the opposite,” Goldhammer mentioned. “I’m all for immigration. It makes life extra attention-grabbing. It enriches society. However provided that it’s premised on belonging. However belonging is tougher to individuals from the Center East, particularly those that despise European tradition.”
These sentiments aren’t unusual amongst as we speak’s European Jews, who more and more discover themselves supporting and becoming a member of populist right-wing actions that have been extra broadly thought-about untouchable 15 years in the past — and nonetheless are by many Jews with bitter reminiscences of the hazards of ultranationalism.
In France, a 2014 ballot urged that Jewish help for the far-right Nationwide Rally get together was at 13.5% — only a few factors beneath its complete price of help all through the nation. The get together was previously headed by Holocaust denier Jean-Marie Le Pen, however his daughter Marine succeeded him in 2011 and kicked him and different antisemites out the get together — which she famously mentioned in 2017 could be “the most effective defend” for Jews towards radical Islam.
Within the Netherlands, the Get together for Freedom led by Geert Wilders, an anti-Islam and pro-Israel right-wing populist, emerged in a 2017 ballot as third-most standard amongst Dutch Jews. About 10% of the 800 Jews polled mentioned they’d vote for Wilders’ get together, which had the help of 15% of the overall inhabitants that yr.
However within the former cradle of Nazism, right-wing populism is very alarming to many native Jews.
In 2019, Charlotte Knobloch, a Holocaust survivor and former president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, throughout a speech in parliament mentioned Various for Germany “bases its coverage on hatred and exclusion.” The Council and dozens of different Jewish teams issued an announcement forward of the elections calling AfD “a hotbed for anti-Semitism, racism and misanthropy.”
Get together leaders reject this, arguing that German society has overcompensated in its rejection of nationalism after Nazism.
However a few of them make statements that few German Jews can tolerate.
Alexander Gauland, the get together’s honorary chairman, in 2017 mentioned that Germans “don’t should be held accountable any extra for these 12 years [of the Nazi regime]. They don’t have an effect on our id as we speak any longer. And we’re not afraid to say so.” He added: “We have now the correct to be happy with the achievements of German troopers in two world wars.”
The subsequent yr, he known as the Nazi period “only a speck of chook poop in additional than 1,000 years of profitable German historical past.”
Such remarks are “unhelpful and regrettable,” Goldhammer mentioned.
“My get together does have antisemites, don’t get me unsuitable. However so do all different German events. In Various, we kick them out as quickly as they’re discovered,” he mentioned.
The hostility of individuals like Knobloch and plenty of different Jews “is straightforward to know,” Goldhammer mentioned. “She’s been by a variety of trauma and their households as properly and a variety of German society. However that doesn’t imply that the populist proper is routinely unsuitable about every thing or immoral.”
Goldhammer additionally mentioned that he’s not anti-Muslim.
“I’m towards generalizations and offending individuals. Islam has a political dimension and that’s problematic. Nevertheless it’s additionally a faith with many good individuals following it. So I’m towards Islamist ideology: political Islam. I’ve no intention of insulting the religion or its members,” he mentioned.
Regardless of criticism within the media and by many Jews, Various for Germany has elevated its reputation in Germany — from 4.7% of the vote within the 2013 parliamentary elections to 12.6% in 2017, making it the third-largest get together in Germany as we speak.
Within the years following his popping out, Goldhammer’s relationship together with his mother and father has improved, he mentioned. They don’t discuss a lot about politics. They usually don’t contain themselves together with his conversion to Judaism, Goldhammer mentioned.
“One exception was after I bought circumcised. My mom was apprehensive and known as me to see if I used to be in ache, the way in which moms do,” he mentioned, laughing.
Within the Israel Hayom interview, he recalled feeling damage by how, in his account, his mother and father didn’t fear about him whereas he was serving within the military in the course of the preventing with Hamas. Residing with different troopers who had made aliyah, he observed how “they acquired phone calls nonstop from their households,” Goldhammer mentioned. It strengthened his resolve to be Jewish.
“It confirmed the nice distinction between Christian households and Jewish households, which are typically shut and caring — additionally due to the hazard,” he mentioned.
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