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Dispatches from the front lines with Sharon S. Nazarian
• WORRISOME SIGNS IN GERMANY’S ELECTIONS
For the first time since World War II, a far-right party has come in second in a German national election. The mainstream conservative party—the Christian Democratic Union—won the national election, putting Friedrich Merz on track to be the next chancellor, but gains by the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) signal that it will be a fearsome opponent to his ruling coalition.
The AfD, which has morphed since it was founded in 2013 from a party of anti-EU economists to an anti-immigration, pro-Russia group, won the backing of one in five Germans. (The party also got strong signals of support from Elon Musk and U.S. Vice President JD Vance.) However, the AfD has little chance of joining the government, as the other parties maintain a “fire wall” to keep it out. AfD leader Alice Weidel implied in her victory speech that it was only a matter of time before that changes. “Next time we’ll come first,” she said.
The president of Germany’s Central Council of German Jews, Dr. Josef Schuster, posted on X: “It must concern us all that a fifth of German voters are giving their vote to a party that is at least partly right-wing extremist, that openly seeks linguistic and ideological links to right-wing radicalism and neo-Nazism.”
AfD leaders have made antisemitic, anti-Muslim and anti-democratic statements and continue to be under surveillance by German security services as an anti-democratic threat to Germany’s constitutional order.
Alexander Gauland, an AfD co-founder, former party leader, and current member of Parliament, has engaged in Holocaust trivialization on several occasions. In a 2018 speech to the AfD youth wing, he said, “Hitler and the Nazis are just a speck of bird poop in more than 1,000 years of successful German history.” Gauland also said in 2017 that Germans should be “proud of the achievements of German soldiers in two world wars.”
AfD’s gains are also consequential in light of the strengthening of far-right parties across Europe, especially in France (the National Rally party, formerly Jean-Marie Le Pen’s National Front), Spain (Vox party) and Sweden (Swedish Democrats). Such normalization of nativist and extreme nationalist political parties, which all share neo-Nazi and Holocaust-denying ideologies, is naturally of great concern for Europe’s Jewish citizens.
A complicating factor is the reaction of the Israeli government. Three weeks ago, Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Saar instructed his office to open quiet talks with the far-right parties in France, Spain and Sweden that have until now been officially boycotted by the Israeli government. According to journalist Barak Ravid, this is a dramatic policy shift on the part of the Israeli government, which now views these parties as legitimate and is prepared to maintain official relations with them. “We do not agree with the entire platform of these parties or with every statement made by their leaders, but we believe that we can have a dialogue with them,” a senior foreign ministry official told Ravid. Two other far-right parties that were under review by the Israeli foreign ministry are the Austrian Freedom Party and AfD.
While Jewish communities have had to contend with such parties’ antisemitism and Holocaust denial, they’ve also at times found common cause with them regarding Muslim extremism and the impact of large-scale Muslim immigration to these countries, including Germany.
As a final note on AfD’s success in Germany’s latest national election, what I witnessed during a month-long visit to Germany last May was a unified opposition from civil society and grassroots organizations to AfD’s often hateful rhetoric around race, gender and sexual orientation but a complete denial of their antisemitic past and rhetoric. So while weekly anti-AfD demonstrations were held in the heart of Berlin, no mention was made of Jews or the Holocaust or antisemitism. A concerning trend on its own.
• AUSTRALIAN NURSES THREATEN ISRAELI PATIENTS
On February 12, Australia’s ABC News reported that two nurses at a Sydney hospital had been suspended from work for saying in a TikTok video that they would refuse to treat Israeli patients—and even threatened to kill them. One of the nurses was arrested Tuesday and has been officially charged with federal crimes related to making violent threats.
Since October 7, multiple cases of stark antisemitism have occurred in Sydney and Melbourne’s healthcare systems, as they have in some European and North American systems. But this case of two nurses voluntarily admitting to their wish to harm Israeli patients was seen as crossing a new red line.
Representatives of doctors and nurses in New South Wales have condemned the video, as has the union representing nurses and midwives. “It’s the responsibility of every healthcare professional to foster a culture of safety, because trust is important,” Dr. Supriya Subramani from Sydney Health Ethics at the University of Sydney told ABC News, stressing the ethical obligation to do no harm. Subramani says the video should lead to a wider review of structural discrimination in Australia’s healthcare system.
Australia was among the first democracies that saw mass anti-Israel and antisemitic demonstrations right after October 7. Since then, Australian synagogues, Jewish day schools and Jewish leaders have been consistently attacked, while Australia’s political leadership has seemed uninterested in taking the threats seriously.
In a damning critique of Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and his government, Australia’s Special Envoy to Combat Antisemitism Jillian Segal has called for stronger laws, cuts to extremist funding and expanded education to address the scourge of antisemitism across the nation.
• UCLA SUSPENDS TWO STUDENT GROUPS
Given the intensity of antisemitic and anti-Israel incidents at UCLA last year—involving encampments, occupation of buildings and targeting of Jewish students—it looked like a shift in direction last week when UCLA administrators announced they were suspending two student groups, Students for Justice in Palestine and Graduate Students for Justice in Palestine. The decision came after masked pro-Palestinian activists demonstrated outside the Brentwood home of University of California Regent Jonathan “Jay” Sures, who is Jewish. They vandalized his property, surrounded his wife while she was in her car, and held signs with threatening messages such as “Jonathan Sures you will pay, until you see your final day.”
In a campus-wide message, UCLA’s new Chancellor Julio Frenk, who has publicly and privately stated his commitment to addressing antisemitism on campus, said that the decision by the UCLA Office of Student Conduct was an interim suspension while internal judicial procedures go forward.
Frenk, whose wife is the daughter of Holocaust survivors, has shared with the campus community a lesson of the Holocaust that he says has motivated his professional and academic career: During the 1920s, on annual lists of the top 20 universities in the world, seven or eight were consistently German. Since WWII, he says, no German universities have appeared on that list. Frenk says he is committed to that never happening to American institutions of higher learning.
• LAWSUIT SETTLED WITH CALIFORNIA SCHOOL DISTRICT
On February 20, major Jewish organizations announced that the Santa Ana Unified School District (SAUSD) in Orange County, CA, had agreed to settle a lawsuit brought against the school district for introducing ethnic studies courses that were said to have been developed in secret and infected with antisemitism.
As part of the settlement, the school district will cease instruction of two courses—Ethnic Studies World Geography and Ethnic Studies: Perspectives, Identities, and Social Justice—until they are re-designed with the opportunity for public input in accordance with California’s open meeting laws. The lawsuit alleged that the courses contained false and damaging narratives about Israel and the Jewish people. Antisemitic content will be removed from Ethnic Studies World Histories so that the course can continue being taught for the remainder of this school year only.
Santa Ana Unified also agreed to recognize the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a controversial issue and to strictly adhere to the policies that apply when teaching such issues: Teaching must be based on fact and allow for alternative views; teachers must ensure all sides of a controversial issue are impartially presented; students must be taught to separate opinion from fact; and no teacher or speaker may use the classroom or materials to advocate their own religious, political, economic or social views.
The ethnic studies curriculum in California has been contentious for over three years, and the issue has been gaining ground in several other states. Commenting on one of the SAUSD courses in May 2023, the ADL wrote that it “presents a biased view of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, an inaccurate representation of the history of the region, and a narrow view of Jewish history. The essential questions are leading and portray the Jewish community in Israel as settler-colonizers, rather than providing proper historical context on the Jewish people’s ancestral connection to the land and why Jews from both Europe and also neighboring Arab countries sought refuge in that region in the 20th century.” —Sharon S. Nazarian
Top image by Zinnmann, CC BY-SA 4.0
Sharon S. Nazarian is the president of the Y&S Nazarian Family Foundation and serves as vice chair on the national board of directors of the Anti-Defamation League, having previously served as ADL’s senior vice president of international affairs. She also teaches as an adjunct professor at UCLA and is a Moment Institute senior fellow.