Author’s note: A version of this article was delivered as a talk in May at a conference entitled “Antisemitism and the Crisis of Liberalism” at Yale University.
I first started spending time in Germany, where I now live, in 2018. It was Trump’s first term, and the far right was well on the rise across Europe, even if the fortunes of various European far-right parties had seen some ups and downs.
The Germans I discussed politics with warned me that whatever it was that was happening, it would end badly for Jews. Whenever and wherever there was nationalism in Europe, they said, Jews sooner or later became targets. I remember responding that, while Jews might always be vulnerable members of their communities in certain ways, this time, on a broader plane, it was not Jews who would become the official scapegoats. This time, in Europe, it would be immigrants, and Muslim immigrants in particular, whose fortunes would be manipulated by governments for the purposes of the political power game.
Since then, the gruesome attacks of October 7 have taken place, and for well over a year and a half Israel has been engaged in a relentless war against Hamas and the people of Gaza. There have also been agonizing, and even deadly, instances of antisemitism in Europe and in the US, of which the chilling murder of two young staffers at the Israeli Embassy in DC earlier this year stands as a horrifying expression. Yet for now at least, as minorities in both Europe and the United States, Jews have not been victimized by the state, and indeed have been protected by it, at least allegedly. Yet it is and has been more complicated than I appreciated in 2018—the realities more brutal, the logics more twisted, and the future more unsettled, both here in Europe and around the world.
An “Anti-Anti-Semitism” Litmus Test for Far-Right Parties?
In Europe, for the last 70 years, denouncing antisemitism has been the sine qua non of democratic politics. After 1945, as the French sociologist Michel Wieviorka has written, it took some years, or rather decades, but eventually Europeans listened to their Jewish compatriots, and in some places, anti-Semitism literally became a crime. And for European political parties on the right of center, acknowledging national responsibility for what happened in the Holocaust has become, since the 1990s, the cost of admission into mainstream parliamentary politics—with a gatekeeping mechanism achieved largely by elite consensus.
This dynamic developed to the point where far-right parties had to denounce antisemitism and even demonstrate a commitment to pro-Israel positions in order to gain legitimacy in the European system. In Italy, for example, the post-fascist Italian Social Movement (MSI) was founded in 1946 by some of Mussolini’s followers to keep elements of the fascist legacy alive. It is also the progenitor of current Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy (FdI) party. But before the turn of the century, during the Berlusconi years of the 1990s and under the new leadership of Gianfranco Fini, MSI changed to National Alliance (AN).
Far-right parties had to denounce antisemitism and even demonstrate a commitment to pro-Israel positions in order to gain legitimacy in the European system.
Fini had long been a proselytizer of a new “fascism for the year 2000,” but eventually made what was, for his supporters, a controversial visit to Yad Vashem in 2003, as part of a broader moderating effort (Yad Vashem is the World Holocaust Remembrance Center in Jerusalem, and Israel’s most important institution dedicated to Holocaust memory.) A Ha’aretz headline declared, “Fini to visit in effort to legitimize party.” A few years later, Fini became president of the lower house of the Italian parliament and his party, having paid deference to its history, merged with Berlusconi’s in 2009 to form the People of Freedom party (PdL), paving the way for the eventual emergence of Giorgia Meloni herself and the party she leads, which came into being in 2012 as a right-wing split from the PdL.
France offers an even more dramatic example of these trends. In France, the National Front was co-founded in the 1970s by the avowed anti-Semite Jean-Marie Le Pen, along with a former member of the Waffen SS, and a member of the Vichy parapolice. Jean-Marie’s daughter, Marine Le Pen, took over the party in 2011 and set out to “dedemonize,” or normalize, it. But during her 2017 presidential campaign, she said that France was not responsible for the July 1942 roundup in which French police arrested and deported approximately thirteen thousand Jews. “I think, generally speaking,” she said, “if there are people responsible, it’s those who were in power at the time. It’s not France.” Five years later, in the 2022 presidential race, she carefully avoided the topic. By the time snap parliamentary elections were held in France last summer, some 9 months after the October 7 attacks in Israel, Marine Le Pen was arguing that French voters should choose her and her party as a bulwark against what she claimed was rampant antisemitism among both French Muslims and the French left, whose influence she promised to tamp down. Remarkably, the French Holocaust survivor and “Nazi hunter” Serge Klarsfeld met with Marine and later announced that, if it came down to it, he would vote for her over the left. “An anointment from such a respected figure among French Jews could shatter one of the last obstacles between the RN and its accession to power,” wrote Le Monde.
Jean-Marie Le Pen, whose most infamous line was that the gas chambers were a mere “detail of history,” died this past January at age 96. And just two months after his death—and some 20 years after Gianfranco Fini made his pilgrimage—we saw the absolutely astonishing images of his granddaughter, the extreme right-wing politician Marion Maréchal, who had always proclaimed herself the “political heir of Jean-Marie,” visiting Yad Vashem, too. Jordan Bardella, the young president of France’s now-rebranded National Front (the party has gone by National Rally since 2018), traveled to Israel at the same time. He posted photos of himself on Instagram at Kibbutz Re’im, one of the sites of the October 7 massacre, and at Yad Vashem, for which he received 50 thousand likes from his right-wing followers.
As usual, the German case is a little different. After 1990, all of civil society in East Germany, which had previously been run by the socialist state, collapsed. And at this moment, many neo-Nazi groups that had long been taboo (and illegal) in the West moved into the vacuum in the East. Still, a far-right party could not gain a foothold until the Alternative for Germany (AfD) was founded after the 2010 euro crisis. The AfD began as a protest party against the euro, but was gradually radicalized by its more extreme members, initially in the context of the migration crisis in 2015, when Chancellor Angela Merkel decided not to close the border to nearly 1 million refugees. As the AfD grew, it became a catchall grievance party and, additionally, a magnet for some who felt that Germany’s Erinnerungskultur, or “culture of remembrance,” distorted German history and prevented appreciation of the great achievements of German culture before and after National Socialism. At the same time, however, current AfD leader Alice Weidel has said that she accepts the consensus of Germany’s “raison d’état,” which includes the security of Israel.
Anti-Muslim Marriage of Convenience?
So, in Western Europe, there have been two litmus tests (the one related to the other) for admission into the governing elite: acknowledgement of national responsibility in the 20th century genocide of European Jews (hardly an insignificant achievement)—as well as a commitment, at some level, to the state of Israel. As it happens, both of these principles now coincide with one of the main preoccupations of far-right parties in Europe, which is Muslim immigration.
The litmus tests needed to enter the governing elite in Western Europe now coincide with one of the main preoccupations of far-right parties in Europe, which is Muslim immigration.
To start with the obvious: the longstanding contestation by Arab and Turkish immigrant groups across Europe of the Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands and its denial of rights to the indigenous population, and, in the last year and a half, their protests against Israel’s destruction of Gaza, have been wielded by the far right as reasons against naturalization for these immigrants and their descendants. According to this argument, and sometimes placed under the banner of “anti-antisemitism,” these (majority Muslim) groups are “importing” antisemitism into a place that has spent the last 80 years atoning for and abolishing it.
Antisemitism certainly exists among communities of immigrant origin, just as it also remains endemic within European nation-states. A 2023 report by France’s National Consultation Committee on Human Rights noted that antisemitism does exist on the French left, but it is of no comparison with the level of antisemitic conspiracies (for example, the widespread idea that French Jews have “dual loyalty”) present among the supporters of the French far right. But let’s take the argument for a moment. One of the most curious phenomena of the European right in recent years has been the rise of Éric Zemmour, the French Jewish radical-right pundit who ran for president of France in 2022 with backing from some wealthy members of France’s most devoutly traditionalist Catholic right wing. Zemmour’s bottom line has always been a hysteria about the so-called “Islamization” of France. In 2018, he made a bizarre claim about something he called “Opération Ronces,” saying that the French Army was preparing to “reconquer” the territories on French soil that had been “occupied” by Islamist immigrants. He further claimed that the French army had trained for the operation alongside Israeli troops, who “transmitted to their French colleagues their experience in Gaza.” The notion of “Opération Ronces” has been thoroughly debunked, including by the French Army.
Far-right politicians in Europe have long upheld a narrative of the Jewish state as the last European frontier against its Arab neighbors, the so-called “villa in the jungle.”
Far-right politicians in Europe, along with right-wing politicians in Israel, have long upheld a narrative of the Jewish state as the last European frontier against its Arab neighbors, the so-called “villa in the jungle.” The Dutch far-right leader Geert Wilders has said that “Israel is ‘the West’s first line of defense’ against Islam.” There is a conception, or even an envy, of Israel as the illiberal democracy par excellence—what with its unapologetic nationalism, its muscular defense of an ethno-religious state, and its overt violence against the largely Muslim Arab population. A stated friendship for Israel also makes for an excellent cover for lingering antisemitism at home, of course.
There is no better example of this than Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, staunch defender of Israel and friend to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who brags that Budapest is the safest city in Europe for Jews while simultaneously blaming everything that doesn’t go his way on the Jewish Hungarian-American financier George Soros. Such support for an imaginary Israel doesn’t have much to do with Judaism, nor with the actual composition of Israeli society (which includes many Jews of both European and Middle-Eastern origin). And, as Israel has increasingly explicitly embraced ethno-religious nationalism and dismantled the state’s democratic features, it has become easier for right-wing nationalist parties to speak with Israel. As the writer Peter Beinart said recently, “They like the idea of countries with clear legal hierarchies between a dominant group and everybody else. They like the idea of countries that have immigration policies that only let in the members of the dominant group.”
Revisionism, Antisemitism, and Illiberal Love for Israel
Such support from and for Jews and Israel makes it easier for far-right figures to claim, effectively, that “We’ve dealt with our history, we can relax.” Sometimes, though, this claim serves as cover for blatant historical revisionism. In another curious episode, Éric Zemmour attracted the attention of the French courts in 2014 when he argued in his book French Suicide that the Vichy regime that governed France from 1940 to 1944 had been slandered by a generation of historians. In fact, he claimed, it deserved to be recognized for having saved French Jews from the Nazis, as evidenced by the comparatively lower number who died in the Holocaust.
Support from and for Jews and Israel makes it easier for far-right figures to claim, effectively, that “We’ve dealt with our history, we can relax.”
This is a strange, indeed nearly inexplicable position for a French Jew to take, given the facts of Vichy’s “National Revolution.” But it starts to make sense if you understand Zemmour’s position. One of his protégés explained to me a few years ago that, in the present, the legacy of Vichy is preventing the French right from being a true right. The denunciation of Vichy that is now ritual for French elites is, according to this view, negatively affecting the fortunes of France, because only a right wing that permits itself to be truly right can act against immigration to save the country. And so, paradoxically, the French right—including Zemmour, a Jewish man—uses reputation laundering for Vichy to try to restore its sense of self and dignity, and to destroy the social taboo.
Such sentiments and rationales are also used by the newer, more radical AfD in Germany. Yes, they concede, Germany is responsible for what happened. But the past is the past: it has been atoned for, and this obsession with national guilt is preventing the country from acting in its own national interests today. Indeed, the negation of national interest “has become a political maxim in Germany since World War II,” former AfD leader Frauke Petry said in 2017. For the German far right, the taboo of national pride interfered to the point that Angela Merkel’s decision on refugees was a result of Nazi-era guilt. A dearth of German patriotism, a misplaced guilt complex, and a misreading of German history has, according to these figures, led Germany to disastrous consequences.
There seem to be two dynamics at work that are nearly, but not quite, synonymous: anti-antisemitism, by which far-right figures use the cover of fighting against historic antisemitism to further their own agenda; and philosemitism, in which Israel has come to represent a model for illiberal forces (both in Europe and around the world).
In Germany, for historical reasons, there is certainly something more like philosemitism at work. Wieviorka defines philosemitism as “a love of non‑Jews for a Judaism that is somewhat imaginary,” and which may, it seems to me, ultimately have very little to do with actual Jewish Europeans or with Judaism. There seems to be something along these lines happening on the Christian right in America, where evangelical support for Israel sometimes travels alongside overt antisemitism. The Dutch historian Evelien Gans has written that “the same processes that generate a love of Jews also generate a hatred of Jews.” Perhaps, then, philosemitism and antisemitism can be understood as two sides of the same coin, a paradigm in which Jews remain somehow separate or different from, rather than simply part of, a heterogeneous liberal society. As Theodor Herzl said, if Jews can be regular folk in a regular state, there will be no antisemitism—nor, we might add, philosemitism. To the extent that Jews have prospered in European societies, and in America in particular, it is largely thanks to liberalism.
Peter Beinart has also argued that European far-right parties often have a problem with the Jews in their own societies, because the latter tend to be inclined against the idea of ethnonationalism: as a small minority, Jews tend to want a more secular government, one that treats them equally. These days, I’m not so sure that’s true. Of course, there are left-wing Jews. But in Europe, Jews tend to be organized along more communitarian lines, and, for obvious and grotesque reasons, their origins are different now than they were a century ago. In France, Jews of North African origin make up a majority of the Jewish population, and in Germany, it is Soviet Jews who came after 1990. These groups tend to be more conservative, and their leaders often settle into an affinity with right-wing forces in their countries. In the United States, Jewish Americans still tend to vote for the Democratic Party even as the leaders of Jewish-American organizations have been cozying up to the Trump administration and its supposed “anti-antisemitism” campaign.
Yet, as Herzl said more than a century ago, “The antisemites will be our best friends.” He understood that people who didn’t want Jews in their country would like the idea that Jews could go to “their own” country.
We should all be wary of making bargains on the backs of liberal principles, or at the expense of Muslims and others who also depend on liberalism for their survival.
These are dangerous wagers. We should all be wary of making bargains on the backs of liberal principles, or at the expense of Muslims and others who also depend on liberalism for their survival. Do Jewish citizens really believe that Jews and Judaism have been so integrated into the imaginary of the European nation, or of so-called Western identity, so as not to be ultimately threatened by the illiberal project now rapidly proliferating across Europe and the US? Even my 2018 self wouldn’t bet on it, and our politics has only devolved since then.
Elisabeth Zerofsky is a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine. She is currently at work on a book about the rise of the far right in Europe and the U.S. and a new era of illiberal democracy, to be published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux. You can find her work at elisabethzerofsky.com.
Image made using “Ras ‘Atiya,” by Paolo Cuttitta licensed under CC Attribution 2.0 Generic; “Jordan Bardella – Strasbourg European Parliament September 2022 (Cropped),” by Raphael Attal licensed under CC Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International; “2019-04-11 Pressekonferenz der AfD by Olaf Kosinsky-8135” by Olaf Kosinsky licensed under CC Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Germany. Other images used are in the public domain.
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