On Equating BDS With Anti-Semitism: a Letter to the Members of the German Government

http://www.counterpunch.org/2019/06/04/on-equating-bds-with-anti-semitism-a-letter-to-the-members-of-the-german-government/
Date Written:  2019-06-04
Publisher:  Counterpunch
Year Published:  2019
Resource Type:  Article
Cx Number:  CX23675

An open letter to the German government by a Jew arguing against a motion equating BDS with anti-Semitism.

Abstract: 
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Excerpt:

My mother, Taube, and father, Abraham, survived Auschwitz among other horrors. My father was the only survivor in his family of six children and my mother survived with only one sister in a family that was larger than my father's. I know, without question, that if they were alive today, the motion you are being asked to endorse would terrify them given the repression of tolerance and witness that it clearly embraces....

If your history has imposed a burden and an obligation upon you, it is to defend justice not Israel. This is what Judaism, not Zionism, demands. ... By insisting on treating Jews as an exception, you are weakening us by again making us a kind of anomaly, an intruder, a negation of Europe. It makes us more vulnerable to and unsheltered from the racism and the true anti-Semitism now resurgent throughout the world.