Top of the Classless
Today on Tablet, James Kirchick on Jakob Augstein
January 22, 2013
What does it take to make it on the list of the world’s Top 10 Worst Anti-Semites? And how did an obscure German publisher make the list? Today on Tablet, our Continental Drift columnist James Kirchick takes a look:
For Augstein, his inclusion on the list only confirmed his own previously stated claim that Jews tend to use the label promiscuously, as a smear against legitimate criticism of the Jewish state. Last April, when Günther Grass published his now infamous poem “What Must Be Said,” alleging that a “general silence” had descended over Germans on the subject of Israel because “the verdict ‘Anti-semitism’ falls easily,” Augstein was, aside from neo-Nazis, one of his few defenders in the country. “Grass knew that he would be chided as an anti-Semite, a risk taken by any German critic of Israel,” Augstein wrote at the time.
Check out the rest of this important piece here.
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