OnCurating: In your book Attitude and Resistance. An Epic Battle for Values and Worldviews’[1], you describe how ‘race’ as a concept functioned (and still functions), which defines social difference as a relation of domination. I was fascinated by how you describe how the nobility was located as a ‘’race’’ in the Middle Ages and how the invented relations of skin colours with their associated racist attributions came about. Can you please explain this briefly?

Jutta Ditfurth: For centuries, the German concept of race’ (which is ethnically and biologically charged and differs from the English race) served to justify social inequality among white people. The slaves of ancient Greece, for example, were White. White populations in Europe, such as the Franks and Gauls, stigmatized each other as inferior. The nobility was the ruling class for centuries and defined itself as a race superior to peasants and day labourers. Both groups were White. But if you were malnourished and had to work hard physically, you would have calluses on your hands and your blood wouldn’t shimmer blue through your skin like it does with fine noble ladies who protected themselves from the sun. That's where the racist term ‘blue blood’ came from. As a child, other children scratched me because they wanted to know if what their parents were saying was true. The concept of ‘‘race’’, which is attached to skin colour, came later.

The ‘race’ theory, based on the social construction and fusion of (actual and supposed) skin colours with (assumed) character traits, originated largely from the German master philosophers of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831). Skin colours were political colours. Before the Chinese were made ‘yellow’, for centuries, European travelers described them as being as white-skinned like themselves. But yellow was the colour of the Chinese imperial court, what a subjugation through European arrogance! Native Americans were sun-tanned people according to the first European travelogues before they became ‘redskins”. They were made into a ‘race’ when they began to resist extermination. Skin colours are political colours.

The European became increasingly pale and superior in European travelogues. Immanuel Kant's ‘Reason’ and Hegel's ‘World Spirit’ became the cronies of European imperialism and its colonization of the world. The Enlightenment was ambivalent. It contained humanism and universalism but also its opposite, capitalist ‘reason’ for the purpose of the imperialist and colonialist exploitation of man and nature.

With the colonial conquests of parts of the African continent, things became easier for racists. While people in Africa had very different skin colours, they were undeniably darker than the typical German. This argument was used with the evil intent of subjugation. Hegel wrote: ‘The N*** represents’ the ‘natural man in all his wildness and unruliness ... there is nothing resembling humanity to be found in this character.’ Hannah Arendt believed that African people at the time of their ‘discovery’ possessed neither ‘human reason’ nor ‘human feelings’ and had not even ‘produced a primitive culture’ that surpassed that of animals. The racial devaluation of Black people combined with their lower susceptibility to European diseases—in contrast with Native Americans—proved to be used as a justification and of tremendous economic benefit during the Atlantic slave trade.

During Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period, the German aristocracy was Christian and antisemitic. Around 1800, Romanticism developed as a countermovement of the German elites to the French Revolution, whose idea of equality threatened their rule. They feared social equality, humanism and universalism. In the 19th century, antisemitism became increasingly aggressive in parallel with every economic crisis. Theologians, journalists, teachers and poets led the way.

The First World War during 1914-1918 was, as far as the Germans were concerned, a völkisch antisemitic propaganda machine. In 1924, my great-granduncle Börries Freiherr von Münchhausen was concerned about the '‘purity of blood’ and ‘purity of race’ of the German nobility. By this he meant as opposed to the ‘fremdrassige’ (foreign race of) Jews. This question was ‘the most important question of our entire nation’. The requirements for the ‘Jew-free racial purity’ of an aristocratic family tree were more drastic than those of the SS later on. For example, Münchhausen and his friend Joseph Goebbels ‘cleansed’ the Berlin Academy of Arts from 1933 onwards. (I wrote about this in my book ‘The Baron, the Jews and the Nazis. Aristocratic Antisemitism’.[2]

OnCurating: How did the close relationship between the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Husseini, and the Nazi leaders Adolf Hitler and Goebbels come about?

Jutta: Jews, Druze, Christians and Arabs settled in a region that was later called Palestine. This is where the kingdoms of the Jews had been 3000 years ago, until their expulsion by Roman invaders. Palestine was a small region of the Roman Empire and later, until the end of the First World War, a district of the Ottoman Empire, in which Jews had long since returned. Many new Jewish people returned from the 19th century onwards, fleeing discrimination and persecution in Europe.

After the First World War, the Ottoman Empire disappeared, and the region became a British Mandate territory. Mohammed Amin al-Husseini was the representative of one of the most influential Arab clans. For tactical reasons, the British Mandate made him Grand Mufti of Jerusalem from 1921 and President of the Muslim Supreme Council in 1936. The colonial rulers thus made him the most influential Arab in the Mandate of Palestine. There were moderate Arab clans such as the Nashashibi, who embraced Western modernity and were prepared to negotiate with the British and Jews. If they had prevailed, there might have been a Palestinian state alongside an Israeli one since 1948.

The German Nazis were very interested in concluding a pact with Husseini. The Germans had started and lost the First World War. Now they were gearing up for the next world war and plotting against the Jews. Husseini often came to Berlin to visit and usually stayed for a long time, well provided for by the Nazi regime with a villa, weapons and money. The joint plan of the Nazi regime and the Grand Mufti was to exterminate all Jewish people in the Middle East and North Africa. Fortunately, Germany lost the Second World War. But the expulsion of the Jewish population from almost all Arab states in the region succeeded—except in Israel.

German edition of The Mufti of Jerusalem and the Nazis: The Berlin Years

OnCurating: How did Husseini assert his supremacy among the Arab families in Israel and Palestine?

Jutta: Husseini had opposing Arabs, who wanted to communicate with the Jewish people, murdered. It was also a reactionary cultural struggle over Arab identity. For example, Arabs in Palestine were occasionally murdered by Husseini Arabs because they wore modern clothes or because some women did not veil themselves. Before the rule of the Mufti, certain modern Palestinian women followed Parisian fashion, and modern Palestinian men wore the tarbush (fez) with their suits. These modern, democratic Arabs fell under the wheel of regression and repression.

The Nazi regime supported Husseini and financed ‘liberation uprisings’ of Arabs against Jews, including massacres between 1936 to 1939. Just as Judith Butler and other supposed leftists today falsely describe the massacre of 7 October 2023 as a ‘liberation struggle’, the antisemitic pogroms of the 1930s in the Middle East are reinterpreted by the völkisch ‘left’ as ‘anti-colonial Arab revolts’ right up to the present day.

In 1943, Reichsführer SS Heinrich Himmler telegraphed Amin al Husseini: "The National Socialist movement of Greater Germany has, since its inception, written the fight against world Jewry on its banner. It has therefore always followed with particular sympathy the struggle of the freedom-loving Arabs, especially in Palestine, against the Jewish invaders." This was the firm basis "of the natural alliance between National Socialist Greater Germany and the freedom-loving Mohammedans of the whole world. ... Greetings ... for the happy execution of your struggle until the certain final victory [Endsieg]."[3]

The Grand Mufti set up SS divisions in Bosnia, visited the Auschwitz-Monowitz extermination camp and was personally responsible for the deaths of thousands of Jewish children. Even two or three years after the end of the Second World War, this war criminal remained the leading representative of the Arab Palestinians.  He was considered a hero by those who had sided with Hitler against the British Empire and wanted to expel Jewish people. Incidentally, this is also one of the reasons why The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and Hitler's Mein Kampf are still in bookshops in the Middle East today .

OnCurating: You describe the post-war period as a paradoxical time, for a very short time even the Soviet Union and the USA were in agreement, they voted for the partition plan into an Israeli state and a Palestinian state. What can you say about this? What were the paradoxes and why didn't a two-state solution come about?

Jutta: In 1947, the plan for the partition of the Mandate of Palestine into the state of Israel and a Palestinian state was adopted by the UN General Assembly. The USA voted in favour. In a passionate speech, the representative of the Soviet Union, Andrei Gromyko, pleaded for a state of Israel with reference to the horrors of the Shoah. But the Arab side rejected the Palestinian territory offered to them. So, in 1948, Israel alone was founded in the designated region.

The war criminal Husseini pursued a policy that led his people into the refugee camps. The wealthy man was the political mentor of his young relative Yasser Arafat, who had been born in Egypt and was politically close to the Muslim Brotherhood. The old man sent the young one to be trained in weapons and war technology by German Wehrmacht officers living in exile in Egypt.

Arafat invented the Palestinians as nation state people. Previously, Palestinians were described as all the people who lived in the Ottoman district of Palestine: Jews, Christians, Druze, Arabs. Now a national identity was constructed. Arafat founded the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO). The kufeya, the Palestinian scarf, was originally a cloth used by Iraqi farmers and agricultural workers to protect themselves from heat and dust. Arafat made it into the Palestinian symbol of his war campaign against Israel. All peace agreements failed because of him. The Palestinians under Arafat sided with the Soviet Union during the Cold War. I met Arafat in Moscow in 1987 at the Kremlin and I was not impressed.

OnCurating: The left was divided early on in its assessment of Israel, even though both the Soviet Union under Stalin and the USA voted in favor of the state of Israel in 1948. So why didn't the two-state solution come about?

Jutta: The German leftists who aligned themselves with the Soviet Union did not immediately become opponents of Israel. There were also a lot of other conflicts and Israel was not the center of attention. For example, the process of African independence, the Algerian War, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, and later Chile. We, undogmatic, anti-authoritarian leftists and supported international liberation movements for social revolutions, but the majority of us were on the side of the Jewish people and Israel. That was the lesson we learned from Nazi history. We had great sympathy for the small country that made desert land flourish with extraordinary effort and tried out socialist concepts of community in the kibbutzim.

Very important for young people like me were Jewish teachers like Herbert Marcuse, who came back to Germany with his books and his open-mindedness for insecure young people and encouraged us to think critically. Literature and art came back from exile. Every debate about modern art showed us what was behind the obdurate lies that surrounded us in Germany.

During the Cold War, the left was roughly divided into a dogmatic wing that leaned firmly on the Soviet Union big brother and was largely uncritical of the GDR as a supposedly socialist state. After 1945, in view of the Holocaust and the many millions of Soviet citizens who had been murdered by the Germans, Stalin could not openly show himself to be the Jew-hater that he was. He called his antisemitism ‘anti-Zionism’. This is one of the poisonous traces that still runs through the dogmatic left today, including support for Hamas, BDS and the supposedly pro-Palestinian ‘solidarity movement’. These are least of all concerned with a free, self-determined life for Palestinian people. It is still about the hatred of Jews.

The label ‘revolutionary movement’ for Palestinians living in various Arab states in reality covered up existing feudal social structures, ethnic nationalism, hostility to democracy, reactionary religiosity, sexism, hostility to LGBTQ* people, antisemitism and the absence of universal human rights.

Israel's victory in the Six-Day War of 1967 thrilled the German media. From Der Spiegel to the BILD newspaper, they shouted ‘Blitzkrieg!’ and celebrated Moshe Dayan like a reincarnated Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, who somehow won the Second World War for the Germans after all. Absurd.

Young leftists were awakened from their romantic kibbutz dreams by the abrupt change in the situation and were confused. I was only 15 years old in 1967, lived in the countryside and didn't understand much of anything at first. Biographies also contain many coincidences. I was just lucky not to fall into the camp of ‘left-wing’ antisemites. I started to read. I went to the private Elisabeth von Thadden School in Heidelberg. The founder of the girls' school had been executed by the Nazis in Plötzensee. When I started studying at Heidelberg University in 1970 and working as a student assistant, my first employer was Rolf Rendtorff, the new rector. He had co-founded the German Israeli Society in 1966 and was also a fierce opponent of the Vietnam War and a defender of radical left-wing student groups. Fortunately for me, I soon found political groups in which left-wing Jews also worked and where we also read texts by Jewish Marxists.

OnCurating: What is the argument of the alleged world domination of capital that distinguishes between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ capital and then calls the ‘bad’ capital antisemitic? How do the arguments of part of the left meet those of the ultra-right?

Jutta: With the emergence of the capitalist mode of production in the sixteenth century, the lack of understanding of its structure began. When people did not understand something at all—storms, natural disasters, epidemics—they invented gods or witches as culprits or, as in the case of the plague, the Jews. The failure to understand the structures of capitalism led to its personalization. The old anti-Jewish codes about the Jews' supposedly special relationship to money were revived. The fact that the Christians had forced Jewish people to trade in money and obtain special qualifications to do so came from this, and this had long been forgotten. Without historical knowledge and political-economic analysis, however, capitalism remains inscrutable. Long story short: antisemites divide the owners of capital from the capital. They attribute an exchange value of a product to ‘grubbing capital‘ and artificially separate it from ‘productive capital’, which generates the use value of the goods. In the end, in the view of antisemites, capital is split into supposedly ‘unproductive’ and ‘productive’ capital.

But the crazy thing is that the production of a product and its utilization require both, so capitalism is inseparable. How can a product be utilized without being sold? So, it needs accounting, management, distribution, trade, credit, foreign exchange—in other words, banks. To the antisemite, anyone who trades in money and takes interest appears to be a particularly evil capitalist. This gives rise to the delusion that interest-bearing capital exploits producing capital, that ‘grubbing’ capital plunders ‘producing’ capital and, ultimately, that ‘the Jew’ exploits the Christian German worker.

Since the cross-fronts (leftists joining forces with right-wingers) of 2014, antisemitic terms from the Weimar Republic have returned to the dogmatic, partly Stalinist sections of the left. We find them in the new Russia-friendly ‘peace movement’ but also in the pro-Hamas Palestine solidarity scene. We recognize them by their language and their images: "international financial oligarchy", "East Coast", "Jewish world power", "child murderers", "Jews as child murderers", slogans such as "free Palestine from the river to the sea" and "Intifada for ever". As the annihilation of Israel and the death of all Jewish people. Antisemitism is the archetype of all conspiracy ideologies and adapts to every era without ever wanting anything other than to destroy all Jews.

OnCurating: The citizens of Israel are about 75% Jews, 20% Arab Israelis, 5% Christians and Druze, what rights do they have in Israel? Why do many Palestinians still live in camps in the surrounding Arab countries? In which countries do Palestinians have civil rights?

Jutta: There is no doubt that Israeli society, like all capitalist nations, is unfortunately also a racist and socially unequal society—like Germany, England, the USA etc. But Arabs, Druze and Christians have the same rights in Israel as Jewish Israelis. They can become members of parliament, judges, doctors, officers. There are glaring social inequalities—like in Germany, England and the USA. Is that why we are calling for the dissolution of these states? It is analytically wrong to describe Israel as an apartheid regime. Anyone who seriously claims this has no idea how completely different the apartheid regime of South Africa was organized —a subjugated, segregated black world with separate workplaces, schools, hospitals and residential areas.  Love affairs between Blacks and Whites were criminal offenses. If you really want to know, you can read about it. To call Israel an apartheid regime is an expression of political illiteracy with antisemitic intent.

The tragedy of the Arab refugees from Palestine in 1947-48 was that they were at the mercy of the strategic plans of the leaders of the Arab states, who had no interest in integrating them. Israeli historians such as Benny Morris have researched whether, how and by whom the Arabs were expelled from the region of Palestine in 1947-1948. It is a complicated picture. Many were expelled by Jewish military and paramilitary forces. In many places, the Arab leadership chased away their own people to clear the battlefield, promising them that they would soon return to a ‘Jew-free Palestine’. Many therefore took their house keys with them.

Of the Arab-Palestinian refugees from 1947-48, no more than 30,000 people are still alive today. Only they experienced the expulsion themselves. But today UNRWA counts around 5 million Palestinian refugees. Why is that? Palestinians are the only refugees in the world who can inherit their refugee status, which is paid for. They are also the only refugee group that has its own UN aid organization, UNRWA. The rest of the world's refugees are looked after by the UNHCR. It is a contradictory special status that creates conflict. Palestinians live in some miserable conditions in the surrounding Arab nations in around fifty-eight UNRWA refugee camps. They are an instrument that can be used against Israel if necessary. This is particularly easy under the radical right-wing Benjamin Netanyahu government and its brutal warfare.

On the other hand, they are showered with donations, most of which flow into the pockets of corrupt leaders such as Hamas and other jihadist organizations. In the camps, even the youngest children are taught to hate Jews. How is a free, self-determined Palestinian nation supposed to emerge under these conditions

A solidarity movement that supports these conditions and defends Hamas does not mean well by the Palestinian people. It defends, mostly unconsciously, the crimes of their ancestors. And it serves its own unreflected, growing antisemitism. The ideals of a genuine social revolution of free and equal people are being turned on their head here. What presents itself today as pro-Palestinian resistance has docking points for the ethnic nationalism and Jew-hatred of the old and new right. It is frightening to imagine what is brewing here and what could turn into a new global nationalist, antisemitic mass movement.

OnCurating: What does UN General Assembly Resolution 3379 of 1975 say? And what stereotypes did the propaganda use, with what justification? And what were the political conditions in 1991 when this resolution was deleted?

Jutta: The central sentence was: "The General Assembly ... determines that zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination." A "low point in the history of the United Nations", as UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan judged years later. The motion was submitted by Somalia. It was supported by 19 Arab states, the West African states of Dohomey and Guinea, Afghanistan, Cuba and the Soviet Socialist Republic of Ukraine. He received 51.8 percent. The votes of the Soviet Union, China, the Arab states, Mexico and Brazil were decisive. After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the UN General Assembly withdrew the shabby resolution in 1991. The still-existing Soviet Union voted in favour of the repeal, as did some of the African states

However, the 2001 UN World Conference against Racism in Durban, South Africa, returned to the old hatred of Jewish people. Large Christian churches and US foundations (Ford Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation and Rockefeller Brothers Fund) financed around 100 NGOs with a clear agenda against Israel. The NGO Forum in Durban in 2001 mutated into an antisemitic hate festival with swastikas and Hitler quotes. The South African Palestinian Solidarity Committee distributed the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, probably the most famous antisemitic work in the world.

In this run-up to the founding of the BDS campaign against Israel (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions), Christian anti-Judaism and Muslim hatred of Jews were combined. Where Hamas is not allowed to operate internationally because it is on terror lists, BDS was able to step in as its foreign policy arm. The central demands of BDS are all aimed at the destruction of Israel. Probably the most important is the right of return for all Palestinian refugees and their descendants. Israel has only 9 million inhabitants, including Christians, Arabs and Druze. An unlimited right of return for all 5 million descendants of Palestinian refugees would be the demographic and political end for Israel. The aim of the BDS campaign is the eradication of the small Jewish state of Israel and in its place the establishment of a Muslim state of Palestine "from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea", i.e. across the entire territory of Israel.  This is the only way to understand the battle cry "Free Palestine from the river (Jordan) to the (Mediterranean) sea".

Imagine a comparable demand for all Germans expelled from Silesia or Poland during the Second World War! Millions of German ‘displaced persons’ would be forced to ‘return’ to East Prussia (Russia), Silesia (Poland) or the Sudetenland (Czech Republic and Slovakia) as great-grandchildren, great-great-grandchildren and great-great-great-grandchildren. Wars would be inevitable. When Germany surrendered in May 1945, there were 10 to 12 million ‘displaced persons’ (DP) on its territory, the majority of whom were survivors of labour, concentration and extermination camps. They spoke thirty-five different languages. When the Western Allies handed over responsibility for the DPs to Germany in 1950, only 150,000 people were still living in camps. Millions had been returned to their countries of origin, taken into the Federal Republic or emigrated to third countries

The misfortune of the Arab refugees from Palestine in 1947-48 was that they were at the mercy of the strategic plans of the Arab leaders, who had no interest in integrating the refugees. Instead, they used them as an instrument against Israel.

But the campaign against Israel has already borne stinking fruit. The same US Christian foundations that funded the NGOs against Israel are now funding BDS and its support groups Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) and Breaking the silence. Judith Butler, Naomi Klein and Noam Chomsky sat on the JVP advisory board. Butler judged the massacre of 7 October to be legitimate "armed resistance" and "non-antisemitic". Twenty years earlier, Butler, a professor at the University of Berkeley, had played a decisive role in opening the doors of US universities to BDS by bringing Omar Barghouti to podiums and introducing him to the public. Barghouti never left any doubt that the victory of the BDS campaign would mean the annihilation of Israel.

OnCurating: How do you explain that all these relatively easy-to-research facts are ignored by many young people in the West who see themselves as left-wing and on the side of oppressed people?

Jutta: They know so little and hardly read, and they have probably never been interested in the anti-Jewish crimes and war crimes of their ancestors. An example: Since 1945, old Nazis and new right-wingers have raised the accusation of a ‘cult of guilt’. The Germans were being forced to atone for the Shoah, which they had nothing to do with. Of course, the term ‘cult of guilt’ was nothing more than an aggressive defense of the Germans' guilt and shared responsibility for the world war and the Shoah. The political right spoke of ‘national masochism’, with which German national pride was to be brought to its knees

This secondary antisemitism in the form of a defense against guilt never ceased. In 1986-87, historians wanted to relativize the Holocaust by describing it as a consequence of crimes committed by the Soviet Union under Stalin. In 1998, Martin Walser spoke in the Paulskirche about the ”moral mace of Auschwitz” and received a standing ovation from the entire political and cultural elite.

After the horrific pogrom of 7 October, BDS supporters adopted the slogan of the “cult of guilt”. Do they remember? Eleven days after the worst anti-Jewish massacre since the Holocaust, antisemitic demonstrators chanted "Free Palestine from German Guilt" in front of the Federal Foreign Office! And "From the River to sea Palestine will be free"! These new-right, supposedly ‘left-wing’ demonstrators wanted to free themselves from responsibility for the crimes of their ancestors in one fell swoop—preferably by wiping out Israel.

Poster at documenta fifteen

OnCurating: How does it work that BDS networks threaten cultural figures such as Claude Lanzmann, Leonard Cohen and others, why are so many people afraid to criticize the BDS movement?

Jutta: When the Jewish-French documentary filmmaker Claude Lanzmann, creator of the masterpiece Shoah, came to Hamburg in October 2009 to show his film Warum Israel (Pourquoi Israel, 1973) at the B-Movie arthouse cinema, the event was violently prevented. Members of the neighboring anti-imperialist center B5, the Tierrechtsaktion Nord (TAN) and other ‘anti-imperialist’ groups blocked access to the cinema with objects, fists and antisemitic shouting (“Jewish pigs”). “Never before has the screening of one of my films been prevented anywhere in the world,” said Lanzmann, shocked.

One of those politically responsible was Susann Witt-Stahl, who comes from a DKP background, is the founder of Tierrechtsaktion Nord (TAN) and is still editor-in-chief of Melodie & Rhythmus at Junge Welt-Verlag 8.  She is a key string-puller for antisemitic and BDS-supporting actions in the cultural sector, including within the trade unions. The BDS milieu threatens those who think differently. Since the Revolutionary May Day Demo Berlin 2016, it has been documented how BDS critics are not only insulted but also beaten up.

OnCurating: Have you personally been threatened and by whom?

Jutta: Yes. My group ÖkoLinX had written a flyer critical of BDS for this demonstration. Before that, after many years of cooperation, we had left the alliance for the annual Revolutionary May Day demo because it had been hijacked by BDS- and Hamas-friendly organizations. With other left-wing groups joining in or pretending not to see through the conflict, it no longer made sense. We wrote a two-page leaflet about the events and distributed it at the edge of the demo. We were attacked and beaten up for it. A little further away from the demo sat three people with pot-bellied Israel flags. A group from the demo ran up to them and beat them with long pieces. It is all documented. The attackers, who were able to return to the demo unmolested, shouted: "Zionism is racism" and "Long live Hamas!".

Today, I cannot go for a walk in certain parts of Berlin because Nazis who have threatened me with death might recognize me and I've been doing anti-fascist work for decades. And in other parts of Berlin, I can't walk around without protection because BDS antisemites want to beat me up. At my last event in Berlin-Kreuzberg, I needed protection from Jew Haters in the hall and to get to my accommodation safely.

OnCurating: How did the legal dispute with Mr. Elsässer come about? Regarding the antisemitic Queerfront, with which speakers did he appear?

Jutta: From January 2014, I started researching the Nazi Karl-Heinz Hoffmann, head of the fascist Wehrsportgruppe Hoffmann, which was banned in 1980. He met with the Swiss conspiracy ideologue Daniele Ganser and with Jürgen Elsässer. Elsässer, a sexist and homophobe, had previously been a communist. He had become an antisemite, cooperated with right-wing extremist networks, including Russian ones, and appeared at conferences of Holocaust deniers. He was preparing a ‘cross-front’ between nationalists, antisemites and some left-wingers from the Left Party, for example Diether Dehm and Andrej Hunko, both members of the Bundestag for the Left Party at the time.

I called Elsässer a "rabid antisemite" in a TV interview on Kulturzeit/3sat. He sued me. It was a bizarre trial that began in October 2014. His lawyer had also defended antisemites such as David Irving and the Turkish Gray Wolves. Petra Grönke-Müller, the presiding judge of the Munich I Regional Court, rid Germany of the majority of its antisemites in one fell swoop. She said that only those who referred positively to the Nazi regime of 1933-1945 could be called antisemites. During the proceedings, Elsässer agreed that I could call him an “antisemite” if I refrained from using the word “rabid.” So, I was allowed to call him an antisemite. Nevertheless, in a paradoxical case in legal history, the court ordered me to pay all the costs. In the end, it amounted to around 55 000 euros, which I was only able to pay with the help of donations and loans. A very expensive adjective.

OnCurating: In a recent article you called for "Jews to be able to rely on leftists".  Can you say something about the often joint, communal struggle for fairer living conditions and emancipation and the left and the Jews, why Jews are often found at the center of left-wing movements?

Jutta: If you as a Jew are persecuted and expelled for thousands of years, you are forced to get to know more of the world than a Christian German craftsman or farmer with a living radius of a few kilometers. Languages, cultures, travel routes, science, etc. Jewish people have passed on their knowledge advantage over many generations. Because they were forbidden from owning land and working in the trades for a long time, they qualified in activities they were allowed to do. Jews were allowed to become lawyers, scientists, writers, journalists, artists and bankers. As soon as the laws allowed it, from the nineteenth century onwards, Jews sent their children, including girls, to secondary schools. They were the most enlightened social class of the nineteenth century.

This connected them with other social groups and classes, such as the proletarians who fled from the factories, as well as the imperial subject, to aspire emancipation. Where would the workers' movement have been without Jews? Where would the women's movement have been? The arts and intellectuals? Anyone who claims to be on the left today but detests Jews and rejects Israel is also betraying this shared emancipatory tradition.

Jutta Ditfurth’s birth name is Jutta Gerta Armgard von Ditfurth. She is a German political activist, sociologist and author of politically engaged non-fiction and fiction. As a foreign reporter, she has reported on social issues around the world. Some of her books have become bestsellers and standard works, such as Ulrike Meinhof. Die Biografie (Ulrike Meinhof: The Biography). She has been active in the undogmatic left since 1970. She lived in Detroit and Glasgow. Her early work in the early German anti-nuclear movement and the feminist movement against the abortion ban was decisive. From 1978 onwards, she was involved in the founding of the Green Party, becoming its co-founder in January 1980. As a ‘eco-socialist‘ she was one of the best-known representatives of the Green Party. From 1984 to 1988 she was one of three federal chairpersons of the Green Party. As chairwoman, she met Fidel Castro, Andrei Gromyko, Mikhail Gorbachev and many other politicians such as Yasser Arafat. When the Green Party decided to pursue a ‘realpolitik’ course and abandoned key structures and programme points, she left the party along with 10,000 other members during the period 1989-1991. Today, she is a City Councilor for the ÖkoLinX-Antiracist voters’ association in Frankfurt and is currently conducting professional research into German colonial crimes in West Africa.