Hi and welcome back!
I’d like to take you on a quick jaunt down memory lane, back to March of 2020. Almost the entire world was stuck at home, during COVID lockdown number one, and it felt like everyone was watching a little show on Netflix called Unorthodox (when they weren’t watching Tiger King, of course.)
Deborah Feldman is a German American writer* who lives in Berlin, and Unorthodox is based on her 2012 memoir, Unorthodox: The Scandalous Rejection of My Hasidic Roots, about her life growing up in a Satmar Jewish community in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.
I loved watching Unorthodox, and I’ve held a great amount of respect for Feldman since then. Yesterday, that respect reached new levels, when she published an extremely powerful opinion piece in The Guardian, titled “Germany is a good place to be Jewish. Unless, like me, you’re a Jew who criticises Israel.”
I highly recommend reading the whole piece, as it offers an immense amount of clarity on Germany’s vehement (read: baffling) pro-Israel position, which is particularly noteworthy as 90% of antisemitic attacks in Germany are committed by right-wing groups and individuals (Aiwanger, I’m looking at you.)
***
My grandparents came to Germany in the late 60s, as Turkish guest workers, to help rebuild the German economy that had been destroyed during World War II (I don’t believe I need to elaborate any further here.)
My mother was raised in Hamburg, but is not a German citizen, because it took Germany, a jus sanguinis state, until the year 2000 to change the citizenship law to allow guest workers the right to citizenship — Germany, very famously, treated guest workers as second-class citizens, and did not want them to stay, despite how sorely they were needed. My entire family, including my mother, abided by Germany’s hopes for them and left for good in 1985, to head back to Istanbul.
But here’s the thing about moving to a new country at such a young age. Despite not having a passport, my mom is German. It’s her native language, it’s the culture she was raised with, and it’s the source of all of her schooling. Germany’s influence was so immense in our home that despite us both being born in Istanbul and neither of us having a drop of German blood, she raised me speaking German. She was extremely diligent about it, making sure I always had German friends growing up, sending me to Hamburg for summers during high school, and never speaking a word of English (or Turkish!) with me.
The day after 9/11, I remember my mom pulling me aside and in a whispered, serious, tone she told me never to tell anyone that I was Turkish or that I was Muslim. “Tell people you’re from Germany,” she said. I remember thinking, “but I’m not from Germany. You’re from Germany.”
So for the 20 years or so that followed, I never once mentioned that I was Muslim. I took that little (large) secret of mine and locked it right away. I worked hard to distance myself from the religion. I often went to church and temple with Christian and Jewish friends growing up in Sarasota, Florida and learned as much as I could about their religions. I remember I used to wish I was born into a Protestant or Reform Jewish family — I did not realize back then how similar all of our religions were.
I have the immense privilege of being white (and I worked to make myself even whiter) so it’s thankfully never come into question, aside from one time in ninth grade when a classmate said “your people blow up airplanes.” As a 14 year-old firecracker, I shot back “your people blow up abortion clinics” (this was met with a “touché” and a laugh.) But as a “secret Muslim” I’ve overheard countless micro aggressions and blatant Islamophobia.
It’s only been in the past few years that I’ve felt comfortable enough to be honest about my roots and my heritage. And while I now consider myself Agnostic, it’s felt like a dagger in my heart anytime a friend has said “no, you’re not Muslim” to me, despite it being the religion of every single member of my family. It took me 20 years to feel comfortable enough to admit my heritage. I’d never dare to imply to anyone that they’re not Jewish or Christian because they don’t go to temple or to church as an adult. I often wish that same courtesy would be extended to me. Sometimes I think I did too good of an acting job.
As a result of the commitment I made to my mom, to only publicly share my “German” heritage, and the extensive time I’ve spent in and around the culture prior to moving to Berlin at 27 years old, I’ve always been fairly defensive of Germany. I’ve jumped to defend Germans when Americans call them cold and weird (“they take longer to open up, but once they do, they’re so loyal!”) or criticized the obsession with rule-following (“an orderly society is a good society!”) but I’m finding, recently, it’s getting harder and harder for me to take these positions.
I used to naively make excuses for their silence on issues of injustice (“they hold so much collective trauma because of their history, it’s too complicated to explain,”) and I used to take their criticism of Americans in stride (“yes, we are so dumb and uneducated” “totally, American politics are just insane!”) until I realized the issues they’d speak on were cherry-picked and their criticism was one-sided. As soon as I tried to insinuate that Germany always finds itself taking the side of the oppressor (which I would openly and ardently argue for America as well) my German friends were angry and defensive, ready to tell me (once again!) how “stupid” I am.
My American friends would never do that. In fact, I know they’d all readily agree — it’s not exactly a “hot take” I’m making here.
***
I am used to being “othered” by Germans on the topic of Israel. Because I do not hold a German passport, and because I was not raised in Germany, I am accustomed to hearing that I could not possibly hold enough knowledge of the “unique history” of the country that I have very willfully chosen to study in, to work in, to pay my taxes in, and to make my home. As Feldman writes, “Because of the enormous power the official institutions and communities wield, non-affiliated voices are often silenced or discredited, replaced by the louder ones of Germans whose Holocaust-guilt complexes cause them to fetishise Jewishness to the point of obsessive-compulsive embodiment.”
One distinction Feldman beautifully makes in her Guardian piece is how Germany is quick to malign any criticism of Israel as “antisemitic,” a catch-all term designed to refuse separation between the idea of religion and criticism of state. In doing so, Germany succeeds in effectively dog-whistling to their blatantly antisemitic far right.
It was a center-left politician from Germany’s governing coalition, in response to a discussion about some of the hostages held by Hamas having German citizenship, who told Feldman privately, “Das sind doch keine reinen Deutschen.” This translates to “well, those aren’t pure Germans,” — additionally noteworthy as he chose to use the Nazi term, meant to distinguish between those of Aryan descent and those not.
Germany has a real problem, and it neither starts nor ends at its blind commitment to the genocide Israel is carrying out in Gaza. I have such great admiration for voices like Deborah Feldman (and the large community of Jewish academics, writers, and artists who signed an open letter rebuking Germany’s position) for shining such a valuable light.
I enjoy Feldman ‘s writing in particular because she knows what it’s like to not feel entirely at home in one place — to be torn between multiple cultures, past and present. She knows intimately what it feels like to never be fully accepted by the people around you. I have been able to relate to these feelings for much of my life.
For over four years in Germany, I felt like I had found my permanent home. I am no longer sure of that.
*It’s not lost on me that I can’t feature a Palestinian voice here, no matter how badly I would like to. I want it to be known, however, that they are the true heroes here.
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