A recent ruling by the Higher Administrative Court of Thuringia upheld the Buchenwald concentration camp memorial's right to refuse entry to visitors wearing the Palestinian keffiyeh. The court argued that such attire could disturb the site's solemn purpose and unsettle Jewish visitors, emphasizing the memorial's duty to preserve historical dignity and prevent political agitation.

The Contemporary Antisemitism Haifa 2026 conference positions itself as the world’s largest academic forum for the study of antisemitism, promising pluralism, “scholarly” debate, and intellectual refuge. Yet to convene such a gathering at the University of Haifa, at a time when Gaza is enduring what scholars, human rights organizations, and international jurists increasingly recognize as genocide, exposes the deep entanglement of antisemitism research with what Palestinians and their allies have termed scholasticide: the systematic destruction of Palestinian educational institutions, scholars, and students. The University of Haifa is not a neutral space. It has long been implicated in apartheid structures through the disproportionate targeting of Palestinian students in disciplinary measures, the celebration and material support of “student soldiers” in the Israeli military, and active efforts to delegitimize pro-Palestinian activism. In the context of scholasticide, where universities in Gaza have been bombed into rubble and hundreds of educators and students killed, the spectacle of an international academic conference on antisemitism hosted at an Israeli university functions as an act of erasure. It re-centers Israeli institutional legitimacy while Palestinian academic life is being annihilated, effectively weaponizing the language of antisemitism research to obscure state violence and to criminalize critique of Zionism. Rather than fostering “critical and respectful dialogue,” this conference exemplifies how academic infrastructures are mobilized to normalize genocide and launder state crimes through the authority of scholarship. I am currently developing a paper on precisely this entanglement and the ways antisemitism research is being instrumentalized in the service of scholasticide. 

In my dissertation, I have become an expert in antisemitism discourses in Germany—examining how they operate through racialisation, securitisation, and memory politics—yet I cannot apply for most if not all jobs in Germany that deal with antisemitism in research or non-profit. The irony is sharp: I am Jewish, I live here, I speak German fluently, and I have all the skills and competences one would expect. But the positions are framed around a very particular kind of “expertise” in what they call Israel-bezogener Antisemitismus—Israel-centered antisemitism—which in practice means focusing on so-called “Muslim” or “imported” antisemitism. These jobs advertise themselves as fighting antisemitism, but the work they prescribe largely sustains a racial divide, policing and pathologizing specific communities rather than researching, understanding, or dismantling the racial order that produces these divisions in the first place. Sometimes this racialised agenda is explicit; other times it’s more implicit, becoming clear only when you examine the projects, the partnerships, and the cooperations of the employers. It’s not always spelled out, but the patterns are there, and I’ve learned to approach job postings in this field with suspicion. In the current climate, “combating antisemitism” is too often reduced to surveilling protests and cataloguing dissent, especially in pro-Palestinian spaces, rather than engaging with the structural dynamics that underlie antisemitism in the first place and how it directly relates and more so correlates to racialising mechanisms in Germany. The space for critical, nuanced, and historically grounded expertese—even from someone like me or actually particularly from someone like me —feels vanishingly small in the current climate in Germany.

The recent coverage in the German "Bild" reveals a troubling pattern in how Palestinian voices are discredited and erased. Within a single week, the paper published one article claiming that famine in Gaza was staged for “Hamas propaganda” and another reporting the killing of Al Jazeera journalist Anas al-Sharif not as the assassination of a reporter, but as the elimination of a Hamas “mastermind disguised as a journalist.” In both cases, the Israeli army’s propaganda is presented as fact, while the work and testimony of Palestinians are either sidelined or cast as inherently illegitimate. In Germany, the label “terrorist” in the Israeli military lexicon functions much like the label “antisemite” in domestic political discourse: once applied, it overrides the need for evidence, context, or due process. Both operate as totalising accusations that collapse complex realities into moral absolutes. “Terrorist” justifies extrajudicial killing, erases civilian status, and silences documentation from Gaza. “Antisemite” delegitimises Palestinian narratives, constrains criticism of Israeli policies, and polices solidarity movements and migration. These accusations work through the same mechanisms: pre-emptively discrediting a source before their words or images can be considered; collapsing a person’s role into the accusation so that a journalist is no longer a journalist, a protester no longer a protester; and granting immunity to state violence by making it politically and morally unassailable. The targeting of journalists in Gaza is thus not only an attack on press freedom but it is part of a broader logic in which Palestinian speech is always-already suspect, whether under the label of “terrorism” or “antisemitism.”