Building on the concept of antisemitism as developed in early Critical Theory, especially on Adorno’s works on guilt and defense, this lecture explores debates surrounding German guilt for the crimes of the Shoah and how feelings of guilt have influenced Germany’s relationship with Israel since 7 October. The slogan ‘Free Palestine from German Guilt’, which has been frequently chanted and graffitied over the past year, reflects accusations that Germany’s memory culture has led to a misguided policy towards Israel.

In this lecture, recent debates on German guilt, particularly within parts of the German left, will be examined alongside right-wing extremist narratives that accuse Germany of fostering a “guilt cult.” These discourses will be positioned within a broader international framework, drawing on textual examples that address German guilt, Holocaust memory, and their necessary consequences.

The theoretical focus of the analysis is on the dynamics of guilt and defense as identified by Adorno in the 1950s in the post-Nazi context. However, the phenomena of guilt and defensiveness against guilt have since evolved and expanded, becoming global rather than confined to post-Nazi nations.

While intensifying its ethno-nationalist and antisemitic rhetoric, the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) has simultaneously sought to position itself as a ‘friend of the Jews’ and a ‘supporter of Israel’. AfD statements following the Hamas’ pogrom ranged from expressions of solidarity with Israel to calls for halting German arms deliveries, accusations of “invading Palestine”, and conspiracy ideological insinuations that the US had pulled strings behind the Hamas attack. Drawing primarily on comprehensive analyses of speeches in the Bundestag and the European Parliament, the talk will examine this spectrum: It includes racist projections of antisemitism solely onto ‘the Muslims’ (and ‘the Left’), ‘pro-Israel’ stances, ‘equidistant’ positions, and rhetoric hostile to Israel. Even ‘positive’ statements about Israel will be shown to primarily reflect authoritarian and/or antisemitic motives rather than genuine solidarity. The analysis will specifically reveal authoritarian identification with Israel as ‘the aggressor’, using Anna Freud’s concept of “identification with the aggressor”. These findings will be discussed within the broader context of German and international discourse on Israel and antisemitism in the aftermath of October 7.

The paper focuses on the so-called incel movement as a contemporary expression of anti-democratic authoritarian rebellion in which antisemitism and misogyny are intersectionally fused.

The “black pill ideology” of the incel community has so far been analysed primarily for its extreme misogyny. Meanwhile, the fact that incels express antisemitic views and, unlike other manosphere groups, are consistently highly critical of neoliberal capitalism has gone largely unanalysed. As a result, previous research has failed to take into account that, according to Moishe Postone, a truncated ‘anti-capitalism’ is fundamental to modern antisemitism. Furthermore, analyses of the incel worldview have not considered the socio-historical co-occurrence of ideologies such as antisemitism with sexism, misogyny and anti-feminism.

To address these research gaps, I will examine the incel movement and its ideology using the framework of the authoritarian personality developed by Theodor W. Adorno and others in the 1940s, as well as Karin Stögner’s concept of the intersectionality of ideologies. This approach allows me to focus on the ways in which antisemitism and misogyny intertwine to form the anti-democratic authoritarian syndrome under contemporary neoliberal economic conditions, while also highlighting the importance of sexuality and gender in the constitution of authoritarian personalities.

The history of antisemitism in Latin America and its impact on global antisemitism has been mostly neglected within the international research on modern antisemitism. The reasons for this are to be sought in the particular constellation of the region in between the tides of universal history: On the one hand, Latin America is – just as Anglo- America – part of the so-called new world that constituted a republican emancipation from colonial European power in the early ‘long century’, 100 years before the process of decolonization of the ‘short century’. On the other hand, Latin America only partially broke with the formations of European aristocratic governance imposed by colonial rule, and is to the present shaped by its postcolonial condition. It has become, in a nutshell, a result of double alienation: The other new world and the other old world, an external projection that the Columbian author Gabriel García Márquez labeled ‘the solitude of Latin America’ (1982).

Even though antisemitism in Latin America has played a peripheral role in the reproduction of transnational antisemitism, their dynamics are intertwined: 1492 is not just an icon for the brutal colonization of the Americas, a cipher for the beginning of modern age, it also saw the racist expulsion of Jews by the royalty of Spain. After Auschwitz, European Nazis fled to South American countries, and the fact that those nations were ruled by authoritarian, often antisemitic regimes is largely overlooked. Since the Cold War, the Latin American Left has become a vanishing point for global revolutionary desire, regularly discounting the blatant antizionism that the Guerilla, left wing populism and new social movements have engaged with and that has flared up again since 10/7. The lecture will briefly map out and summarize this Latin American particularity of modern antisemitism.

Based on my master’s thesis and the proposal for my Ph.D. thesis, the paper is dealing with the question of antisemitism in different activist groups of the German climate movement, its function, appeal and forms of expression. The presentation will analyse how antisemitism is reflected and discussed in the climate movement and which positions are taken by different actors.

Through a qualitative analysis of text-based content, the groups ‘Fridays for Future’, ‘Letzte Generation’, ‘Extinction Rebellion’ and ‘Ende Gelände’ were analysed in depth. The analysis showed that, firstly, Israel-related antisemitism frequently occurs and that Israel serves as a target for antisemitic projection. Secondly, numerous conspiracy ideological approaches can be found in the climate movement, which often implicitly operate with the old antisemitic image of a Jewish world conspiracy. Thirdly, there are also openly shoah-relativising expressions in the movement (e.g. by Extinction Rebellion Founder Roger Hallam).

In large parts of the German climate groups there is a complete lack of understanding of the expression and function of modern, coded and Israel-related antisemitism. However, the discourse around antisemitism in the movement is highly contested and heterogeneous and influenced by different ideological positions, events and actors.