Seeing Ally Against Muslims, Some German Jews Embrace Far Right, to Dismay of Others.
BERLIN — Efforts by Jews to form their own group within a far-right German political party have been met with criticism from the country’s leading Jewish organizations.
The move among members of the group, the Jewish Alternative for Germany, comes amid a spike in anti-Semitic incidents in the country. With some of the attacks coming from Muslims, some Jews have thrown in their lot with the party, known as AfD.
“The AfD is the only party in Germany that focuses on Muslims’ hatred for Jews, without playing it down,” Dimitri Schulz, who is Jewish and joined the organization in 2014, said in a policy statement defining the new group’s purpose.
Many of the country’s traditional Jewish organizations are critical of any alliance with the party. They point to its embrace of nationalist and populist positions and a push by several prominent members to abandon Germany’s culture of remembrance and atonement for its Nazi past.
“We disagree with the notion of a few Jews that it could be in the interest of Jewish people to join the AfD in order to have an influence on their politics,” read a blistering editorial in Jalta, a magazine covering Jewish life in Germany. “On the contrary, we consider membership in such a party to pose a great danger to our security, for Jewish life and migrant life, which are inextricably linked in Germany. We consider this a threat to democracy.”
Earlier this year, Alexander Gauland, a co-leader of the AfD, dismissed the Nazi era as a “speck of bird poop in more than 1,000 years of successful German history.”'>>>
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/26/world/europe/alternative-for-germany-jews-afd.html?
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