Populism: What happens when Deborah Feldman sees a police officer?

Not an easy discussion. “It was an attempt,” Markus Lanz had to say soberly about his broadcast last Thursday. It had begun peacefully and movingly; alongside director Adriana Altaras, historian Michael Wolffsohn and lawyer Michael Fürst, a deeply moved Deborah Feldman, who gave free rein to her emotions, spoke of her helplessness and desperation in the face of the catastrophe in the Middle East. But the writer soon changed the register, adopted an insolent, sometimes sarcastic and mocking tone – and dished it out on all sides.

On the one hand, it was directed against the German state power, which had been infiltrated by right-wing extremists and was arresting Jews critical of Israel (“Now I get (a) heart attack when I see a police officer”), and on the other hand against an abstract, totalitarian culture of remembrance (“There are peace actors who… Stages are banned because the culture of remembrance has a problem with it”). And of course against one-sided media and censorship rigorously enforced by the police. The performative proof was to follow: After quoting a pro-Palestinian slogan, she asked Lanz to delete her speech if necessary – “otherwise I’ll be in jail tomorrow.”

Her conclusion was: “I’m afraid of the state, I’m afraid of politics, I’m afraid of the discourse and the way the media works in this country.” That’s the only thing Adriana Altaras candidly said in this program The fact that Michael Fürst advocated criticism of the Netanyahu government and Michael Fürst asserted the Palestinians’ right to their own land and opted for a two-state solution, and even supported the founding idea of ​​the BDS boycott movement, in no way disturbed the furor of Feldman’s censorship claims.

With almost stoic composure, Wolffsohn, constantly interrupted by Feldman, began his argument again and again until – apparently pushed to the limit of what was reasonable – he finally made a move to leave the group. Of course, even if the others did not behave in such an unruly manner, Feldman was not exactly treated with kid gloves when it came to rhetoric and was confronted with many accusations that may have seemed exaggerated in view of her concrete statements.

This vehemence is probably due to Feldman’s earlier statements, with which she, as a pseudo-representative of the Jewish community who is constantly present in the media, completely antagonized the Jewish community: Not only did she collectively deny the post-Soviet Jews in Germany – and thus an oppressive Jewish majority – their Jewishness, in order to present themselves as the mouthpiece of a fictitious community of “real” Jews – with positions that are not just crude, but also marginal in this country. In addition, she had repeatedly claimed that only pro-Israel Jews were welcome, protected and tolerated in Germany; But in general, Judaism in Germany means power, influence and money – this is how Feldman used classic anti-Semitic stereotypes. When you put these fictions together with their claims of censorship, you inevitably conjure up the old propagandistic idea of ​​a Jewish or Zionist infiltrated, if not controlled, press.

Even though Feldman constantly highlights right-wing extremism as the greatest danger to Jews, it becomes clear that she is much closer to right-wing rhetoric than she would like. Because it makes use of a populist discourse maneuver that was characteristically played out by the right until recently – for example in the context of vaccine skepticism or in the wake of common cancel culture accusations – and quite rightly ridiculed by the left. The underlying procedure, which can be called “staged censorship,” is based on an old and effective sleight of hand: saying what many people say, but at the same time saying that you are not allowed to say what you say.

This strategy may well reflect a perceived reality in Feldman’s world: It is not untrue that many media outlets follow a decidedly pro-Israel and anti-Semitism line. Alone: ​​This also applies to the opposing position. It has already been scientifically proven in previous years that public media headlines often tend to portray Israel in a negative light.

However, neither in one nor in the other case is it a matter of censorship: There may always be injustice, one-sidedness and ignorance, there may be shitstorms, exclusions and animosity – but falling into a perversion of reality and causing ubiquitous state censorship is nothing but one A gesture of defiance of pseudo-subversion: in the struggle with powers that have been escalated to phantasmagoric dimensions – whether the media, the state, or diffuse, mostly Jewish-imagined elites – it produces a gesture of cheap revolt. And so Feldman’s populist, bright world is primarily a backdrop for less than glorious self-heroism.