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Gil Ofarim is a problem for Germany. The German-Israeli singer, whom I am told is famous, sneaked out of defamation charges the other week just in time to avoid a verdict that was looking to go against him. In Germany, you can do this for some crimes — say you’re sorry and make a donation in exchange for getting the case dropped, thus keeping your record clean.
Think of it is as a kind of charitable bribery. To maintain his official innocence, the Jewish Community of Leipzig and the folks who keep watch over the Wannsee Conference villa get €10,000 (more on that twist below). Additionally, a court spokesperson told me that Ofarim reached a civil settlement with the victim he did not, legally speaking, defame. The amount remains undisclosed.
If you don’t know what I’m talking about, here’s some background: About two years ago, Gil Ofarim walked into the lobby of the Westin hotel in Leipzig and, in the course of some kind of tense exchange, claimed that a hotel manager refused to check him in until he “put away his Jewish star necklace.” We know this happened because a tearful Ofarim said it did — in a widely shared and now deleted video he posted to Instagram from the hotel parking lot shortly after the alleged antisemitic remark was uttered.
As you can imagine, German Officialdom promptly lost its mind, tripping over itself to rush to Ofarim’s defense. The (deep breath now!) Federal Government Commissioner for Jewish Life in Germany and the Fight Against Antisemitism; the president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany; and the Federal Anti-Discrimination Agency were just some of the many major voices to hastily throw due process and presumption of innocence under the bus by amplifying Ofarim’s claims.
Forget about Germany’s sensible privacy laws protecting the accused; its stubborn history of informing on others; and deeper issues of class and power that arise when a well-off and well-connected celebrity denounces a working-class hotel staffer. A Jew claiming that someone said something mean to him cancels out all other aspects. In the Teutonic Imaginary, the case is that simple.
Except it’s doubtful that it went down as described. I went to Leipzig a day or so after the incident in question and was skeptical from the start. Such an antisemitic remark is of course possible, but is it probable? The Westin is a high-end, international hotel chain that surely rigorously sees to it that its employees swallow hard and are nice to guests no matter what. A manager would likely act even more by the book while on the job. Meanwhile, Ofarim is a pop star who, as such, might expect a certain level of priority service. The lobby at the time was apparently full of other guests with other needs, some of whom later attested to Ofarim’s prima-donna behavior.
So what’s more likely: A hotel employee is such a raging antisemite that he would risk his job, and the social and legal consequences, just to vent his raging antisemitism, and do it in such an explicit manner; or, a touring musician shows up at a fancy hotel late one evening, gets cranky when he can’t fall into bed as fast as he might like, and knows that playing the Jew card might score him some points — especially in Germany and on social media?
Maybe neither or something entirely else happened. Maybe Ofarim honestly thought he was being discriminated against; after all, I know Jews who say they see antisemites everywhere all the time. Whatever the actual case, the point is there is no way anyone, least of all those representing Germany’s liberal democratic order, could stand by Ofarim’s claims beyond a reasonable doubt. Doing so is the very basis of rule of law, and few cared to uphold it.
Thankfully, facts do still speak louder than virtue signaling. Within a few days Ofarim’s claims began to unravel, as the accused denied that version of events and a number of witnesses couldn’t corroborate it. Even firmly establishing whether Ofarim was wearing a Jewish star necklace at all, and in a clearly visible way, proved elusive. By the time investigators turned their attention to Ofarim, however, the damage was done: Protests outside the hotel, national headlines, and a hotel worker facing death threats. He was so stigmatized by the experience that he said he later left the Westin to work at a different hotel.
I don’t really care that much about Gil Ofarim, though it was pretty obnoxious of him to drag out a legal process for two years only to make it go away at the last minute when it looked like the tide was turning against him. He could have said “sorry” and removed the Instagram post at any time. That aside, it’s German Officialdom’s crisis of conscience that is the salient point here.
Its illiberal jump to conclusion is based on the philosemitic assumption that Jews are history’s Kissingerian schlemiel and, as a result, can only be “good.” This position is not held in the interest of Jews, but establishment Germans for whom Jewish life is mostly minstrel show. “Magical Negro” discourse is a rough parallel for understanding the German-Jew dynamic.
For Germany to redeem itself, Jews have to be morally unimpeachable. This is inherently dehumanizing because actual humans are capable of, and entitled to a range of emotions and characteristics, and not all of them are nice. Yet the Teutonic Imaginary’s tokenized, two-dimensional conception denies Jews’ access to the full spectrum of human behavior. There is simply no space to entertain the possibility that Ofarim might have been exaggerating, misinformed, misremembering, or outright lying — especially regarding an issue as consequential as antisemitism. That a Jew, as the docile victim, might have it out for someone else is even less conceivable.
To think badly of a Jew runs the risk of feeling or appearing antisemitic because any negative attribute is ascribed not to the person’s human personality, but to his Jewish character. That mode of thinking is not only itself antisemitic, but can have real and serious consequences. When a German military officer was arrested in 2017 for plotting a far-right attack disguised as a Syrian refugee calling himself David Benjamin, the “Moroccan interpreter in his asylum hearing later testified that she had doubts he spoke Arabic. But because of his Jewish-sounding name she did not dare speak up. As a Muslim, she worried about sounding antisemitic.”
The true-crime story is bonkers and says everything about how little exposure Germans have to Jews or Syrians or most anyone else. It only takes an iota of worldly understanding for a Syrian named “David Benjamin” to raise a red flag. Yet Germany seems it would risk jeopardizing its own national security and public safety for its wild pursuit of historical salvation.
Speaking of (actual) asylum seekers, the anti-/philo- symbiosis applied to Jews is merely an extension of a broader projection that German Officialdom casts upon all “outside” groups. Arabs and Muslims are cuddly refugees of war abroad and targets of far-right extremism here, deserving help and sympathy — until they present a more complex picture of themselves with perspectives that run contrary to German expectations of how upstanding people should think. It’s at this point that the stereotype flips from positive to negative, as German efforts at liberalism run into old impulses of authoritarianism: Diversity is welcome and opinions are fine, so long as everyone already agrees with us. If not, we need to start talking about deportation and denial of citizenship.
This was all rather foreseeable. Germany hasn’t done a great job making even fellow Germans — whether the post-war ethnic or post-communist eastern kind — feel much at home so how could it possibly do any better with foreign groups from more distant places? As always, “freedom” in the German sense is more about from others than for everyone. When Germans start talking up Freiheit, everyone else should get a little worried.
For those who read German, Spiegel has a nice wrap of the many mea culpas that followed Ofarim’s own mea culpa. Oh the shame!, shock!, and sadness!, but very little self-reflection. The hotel manager, once swiftly vilified, now “deserves the greatest respect.” Felix Klein, the antisemitism commissioner, got ahead of the curve with a statement a year ago, in which he excuses his initial reaction by basically saying, “How can you blame me when there’s just so much antisemitism here? It made sense!”
Then there is the Central Council, which pretends to speak for Jews in Germany but hardly does, with this to say:
Yes, let’s talk about that “damage” done to the dues-paying Jewish Community that helped fuel it. Back when they were for him before they were against him, Germany’s Jewish officials were quite pleased with all the media and political attention Ofarim’s accusations attracted. The local Leipzig Community now gets money as compensation for the “burden” caused, as the court spokesperson explained, but at the time the head of the Saxony state Jewish Community, to which Leipzig belongs, saw quite a few benefits to the “outcry.” Maybe Ofarim was lying, but at least everyone was talking about antisemitism.
As such, Jewish Officialdom shares responsibility in this case — and in the longer process of dehumanizing Jews, along with its German counterpart. Many therein are glad to play the minstrel and serve as a receptacle for German guilt. Original sin is a rather Christian concept, but playing along can be a win-win: One side earns a few shekels selling hummus while the other side can feel it’s making up for history by eating it. Who cares if the beach bum in Tel Aviv and Tevye from the Pale start to look alike. It’s all fun and games — until a Molotov cocktail goes through a synagogue window.
For years, I have been writing about how ill-prepared Germany is for a truly liberal, heterogenous society — warts and all. Now we are seeing it: You let in a million refugees from places with a pretty legitimate beef with Israel, express shock when realizing that’s the case, and then declare them antisemites because the Holocaust means that Israel is your “Staatsräson.” It’s a fine way to transfer your own deep-seated antisemitism, replacing it with a misguided overcompensation that undermines a central tenet of Israel’s existence even as you tie yourself to it: the ability to show strength and make autonomous choices.
Through Israel, Jewish nationalism has been able to evolve from powerless object to powerful subject, destroying the Holocaust lie that Jews are sheep led to slaughter. Meanwhile, Germany’s past cult of antisemitism that ended in Jewish extermination bleeds into contemporary fervor for philosemitism that ends in Jewish irrelevance.
Such tension is what makes the Ofarim case so dissonant. He made a choice, but it was the “bad” one. Germany is left flailing. It is tragic coincidence that, two years later, the consequences of that choice have come to fruition right as Israel is also making fateful choices. In this sense Ofarim is, for Germany, Israel personified.
Like Ofarim’s initial protectors, Germany needs to assume that Israel is “good” and will jump to its side regardless. That is not for Israel’s sake, but for its own. Like Israel in Gaza, Ofarim in that hotel lobby concluded that the only way to defend himself was to hurt someone else. The binary is false and fatal — foremost for Palestinians, but ultimately for Israel, the Jews, the Germans, and then everyone else with an interest in avoiding a despotic modus operandi.
While the parallels between the national and the personal are strong, there is a big difference: In the end, at least Ofarim said, “I’m sorry.” Better late than never.
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