Some German Jews say their country goes too far defending Israel

What do an Indian poet, an Australian political scientist, an Irish folk troupe, a British architect, a Bangladeshi photographer, an American historian of the Holocaust, a Chilean composer, an Israeli-Austrian playwright, a Dutch footballer, a German-Nigerian journalist, a Palestinian novelist, a South African artist and Bernie Sanders, the American senator, have in common? All of them—and many others, too—have in the past three months found themselves abruptly cancelled in Germany. The reasons cited for pulling the plug on their shows, grants, contracts, awards or meetings with public officials have varied slightly. Yet all hang on a single fear: that these disinvited people, quite a few of whom happen to be Jewish, might have said something that someone might see as antisemitic.German ultra-squeamishness about antisemitism did not begin on October 7th, the day Hamas gunmen from Gaza launched a murderous rampage that left 1,200 Israelis dead. There is a context, beginning obviously with the Nazi regime’s murder of 6m European Jews. One answer to that horror by subsequent generations of Germans has been to embrace the creation of Israel as a “happy ending” to their own national nightmare. Over time, says Eyal Weizmann, the British-Israeli leader of Forensic Architecture, a research group that has probed antisemitic attacks in Germany as well as Israeli human-rights violations, Germans have come to see any challenge to this redemption myth as something akin to committing a sin.