Although Berlin does not look like it did in 1933, for many Jews it feels uncomfortably close.
After October 7, antisemitism in Germany did not merely spike – it erupted. Jewish homes were marked. Israeli flags were torn down. Demonstrations celebrated the massacre under the language of “resistance,” while university campuses normalized slogans that erase the world’s only Jewish state.
Yet much of the political and NGO landscape clung to a narrow explanation: antisemitism, we were told, is primarily a far-right problem.
That assessment is no longer sufficient. Traditional far-right antisemitism does remain a serious and persistent threat – but it is no longer the only one.
Today, some of the most dynamic and socially tolerated forms of antisemitism emerge from Islamist ideology and segments of the radicalized far Left – rhetorically sophisticated, globally networked, and cloaked in the language of anti-colonialism and human rights. Israel becomes the metaphysical villain, “Zionism” becomes the permissible substitute for Jew.
Pointing this out disrupts Berlin’s moral equilibrium.
Large parts of the activist ecosystem have built their authority on the premise that antisemitism belongs to Germany’s nationalist past – not to contemporary progressive alliances.
After October 7, an Iranian former refugee and an Israeli Jew decided this analytical blind spot could no longer be ignored. We founded the ZERA Institute as an investigative project to map discourse, trace ideological convergences, and identify how anti-imperial rhetoric and Islamist theology reinforce hostility toward Jewish self-determination.
Antisemitism, Islamophobia debates badly handled, avoided
For years, I voted Green. I believed in its moral promise. But over time, I watched how debates around Islamism and antisemitism were handled – or avoided. As someone who grew up under a regime where antisemitism is the state doctrine and Islamist ideology shapes public life, I could not ignore the parallels in rhetorical indulgence. When it came to confronting antisemitism in its Islamist and far-left forms without euphemism, only one major party was willing to break with comfortable consensus: the Christian Democratic Union of Germany (CDU).
So, I joined.
That decision would later become the subtext of a scandal.
ZERA, however, was never conceived as a partisan project. It is open to the full democratic spectrum – provided there is alignment with the IHRA definition of antisemitism and a clear commitment to confronting it in all its contemporary forms.
When funding for ZERA was attacked, my party membership was presented as evidence of impropriety. Not procedural irregularities, not documented misuse: political affiliation.
Pause there.
In Berlin’s civic ecosystem, NGOs routinely receive funding from state institutions whose advisory boards include political actors. Structural proximity is described as governance.
One of the most vocal critics in this affair, Green politician Susanne Kahlefeld, sits on the curatorium of the Landeszentrale für politische Bildung Berlin – a state authority – while chairing BIWAK, an NGO funded by that same authority.
This arrangement is treated as normal; my CDU membership is treated as suspect.
No coherent principle has been articulated to distinguish the two.
The matter did not evolve into controversy organically – it was driven there. In outlets such as taz, Tagesspiegel, and Der Spiegel, allegations were presented as narrative fact long before any formal findings existed. Quotations were extracted without analytical context; procedural details that would have complicated the storyline were absent.
What emerged was a steady repetition of insinuation.
Repetition has a purpose. It transforms allegation into atmosphere.
Projects centering Israeli victims, including the Nova exhibition, faced extraordinary interrogation. A fund established to support Israeli filmmakers and actors affected by the BDS movement was publicly described as a “letterbox company.” Media coverage shifted from procedure to personal discrediting – including the public discrediting of female Jewish staff members of our institute, two of whom themselves come from refugee backgrounds.
The asymmetry is revealing.
Criticism of Israel that minimizes antisemitic dimensions is framed as sophisticated discourse; structural analysis of contemporary antisemitism is framed as provocation.
The funding decisions were formal acts within the legal framework of the State of Berlin. Sen. Sarah Wedl-Wilson approved them – including the Nova exhibition – under her full political responsibility, despite internal disagreements reported in the German press. The controversy that followed speaks more to the political sensitivity of confronting contemporary antisemitism than to administrative irregularity.
The real question is not administrative compliance – it is who is permitted to redefine the boundaries of acceptable analysis.
ZERA was conceived as a structural experiment. For the first time in Germany, minorities from the Middle East – Jews from Muslim-majority countries, Iranian dissidents, Kurds, and Arab reformers – worked alongside cultural figures, human rights advocates, and serious academics – not symbolic participants but as equal architects.
We understood that antisemitism circulates through culture, activism, academia, and digital space simultaneously. Confronting it requires pattern recognition, not ritual remembrance.
This interdisciplinary constellation did not previously exist in this form in Germany. Novel structures tend to disturb established ones.
For many of us who grew up under Islamist regimes – Iranians, Jews from Muslim-majority countries, Kurds, and Arab reformers – the Western progressive treatment of Islamism as a misunderstood or emancipatory force is bewildering. We know what happens when such ideologies gain power. We have seen minorities erased, dissent criminalized, and women reduced to symbols of obedience. To watch these forces reframed in Europe as partners in liberation is not merely intellectually frustrating: It is existentially disorienting.
This shared experience – between Middle Eastern minorities and Israelis – is part of why ZERA was founded. It is not an abstract policy debate: It is lived history confronting Western naivety.
The writer is chair of the ZERA Institute in Berlin. An Iranian-born entrepreneur and cultural producer, she focuses on contemporary antisemitism and Islamist ideology in Europe.