The Red Hands: Antisemitism with a Human Face

by Niels Betori Diehl

Still image of video footage of pro-Palestinian demonstration in Berlin, October 11, 2023. Image by the author.

The following essay originally appeared in German as “Die roten Hände: Antisemitismus mit menschlichem Antlitz” in the anthology Siebter Oktober Dreiundzwanzig: Antizionismus und Identitätspolitik, ed Vojin Saša Vukadinović (Berlin: Querverlag, 2024). Translated by Julius Bielek and Niels Betori Diehl.

The still perceivable, albeit somewhat dusty sublimity of a certain conceptual art from the 1960s and 1970s stems from its abstention from any political symbolism. Whoever comes across the sculptural work Variations of Incomplete Open Cubes (1974) by Sol LeWitt (1928–2007), who coined the term “conceptual art,” is confronted with a logically systematized sequence of 122 open cubes, which, by avoiding identical repetitions, consistently takes into account and plays through all configurations. In this consistency also lies the key to the work’s interpretation. An unambiguous reading, as is expected in today’s attention economy, is not provided. “Irrational thoughts should be followed absolutely and logically,”¹ states one of LeWitt’s “Sentences on Conceptual Art” from 1969, a fundamental art-theoretical text. In her essay “LeWitt in Progress” (1978), art historian Rosalind Krauss has identified the subversive element in LeWitt’s relentless commitment to an idea, reading his work through Samuel Beckett. It is precisely this consistency that turns against the “purposelessness of purpose,”² according to Krauss, while the act of thinking things through to the end reveals itself as a joyful farce. Conceptual art as a humoresque. Land art pioneer Robert Smithson, as the thoroughly humorless nature boy that he was, once described LeWitt’s works as “prisons devoid of reason,”³ a comment that should be taken as a compliment. Chuckling while contemplating his open cubes means understanding them.

Like the disappearance of the fireflies, which Pier Paolo Pasolini used as a metaphor for the transition from agrarian values to the “hedonistic fascism” of modern-day Italy in a 1975 article for the Corriere della Sera newspaper, the dying down of this blissful enjoyment is the measure of the dreadfulness of our time. It is a time of aversion to the imaginative and the ambiguous, an aversion that we find sublimated in the queer movement’s normalized ideas of otherness: to each penchant its own flag. In their 1950 study The Authoritarian Personality, based on Erich Fromm’s research work, Theodor W. Adorno and his co-authors described this reflex as “anti-intraception” and included it as a variable in the “fascism scale” they developed.⁴ As Marxist Jewish intellectuals who had emigrated from Germany to the United States during the Nazi era and were trying to apply social scientific methods to the task of identifying the causes of the turn toward authoritarianism and antisemitism, they located the authoritarian character on the right—and on the right only. The limits of a critique of ideology that set out from ideology—Marxism—to uncover ideological motives in society are easy to recognize, especially in view of Adorno’s earlier strategic silence on Stalin’s suppression of the Left Opposition and on the Moscow Trials of the late 1930s. To this day, this significant structural flaw makes recourse to the authoritarian character a useful club with which to beat down on any conservative impulse, although for instance Else Frenkel-Brunswik’s concept of intolerance of ambiguity,⁵ that is, the inability to tolerate uncertainties and contradictions, lends itself perfectly to clearly identifying the woke, identitarian left, with its moralizing, discourse-averse, and discrediting posture, as authoritarian and inevitably antisemitic.

Reading Adorno, one can almost forget that he happened to be a Marxist, albeit one who, with the drying up of revolutionary labor movements and the fading of any hope for the possibility of a “true” socialism in the Soviet Union, gradually rejected the notion of class analysis. Had he not insisted on going hiking in Zermatt in the summer of 1969, he might have avoided death by exhaustion, and the conservatism immanent in his incomparably sharp descriptions of experiences of loss might have emerged more clearly in his work in the following decades—let us just imagine Adorno’s writings of the 1980s! “From a distance, the differences between the Viennese workshops and the Bauhaus are no longer so considerable,” writes Adorno in Minima Moralia: “In the meantime, the curves of the pure purposive form have become independent of their function and pass over into ornaments, just like the basic shapes of Cubism.”⁶ Compare this with the critique of consumerism by the modernist traditionalist and pioneer of architectural postmodernism Adolf Loos, from his 1908 manifesto “Ornament and Crime”: “The turnover of ornaments leads to a premature devaluation of the product of labor. . . . A woman’s ball gown, meant only for one night, will change its form more quickly than a writing desk. But woe betide if a desk has to be changed as quickly as a ball gown, because the old forms have become unbearable.”⁷

If only one could edit out the Marxist trappings, which, like a compulsory exercise in Adorno’s work, make his reflections appear shallow and, at times, prosaic! Adorno’s greatness lies precisely in the fact that one can reflect with him on the damaged life even without necessarily confining the cause of the damage to capital and consumption.

The Percolation of the Postcolonial

Out of sheer necessity and in order to counteract the aesthetic exhaustion of our time described by Adorno and Loos, which no one seems to be able to address today, a method has been established in art of methodically charging artworks with politics. The old, tried-and-tested artistic strategies serve at best as visual bait, while the pseudo-progressive obsession with identity-political concerns and increasingly marginal or entirely imaginary grievances lends a work the necessary gravitas that it is no longer able to generate as art as such because any ambivalence is immediately branded as reactionary. L’art pour l’art! No verdict sounds more devastating today.

An artist like Santiago Sierra, whose career began in the mid-1990s, still consciously employs art historical references with refreshing boldness and delivers messages that come across as downright down-to-earth Marxist: Sierra’s quoting of the aesthetic formulas of early conceptual art is blatantly obvious, from the technical sobriety of the titles to the black-and-white documentation of his performance works, while thematically he works his way through exploitation and class conflict again and again. The stark contrast between people who watch and people who work, however, can be experienced sensually in Sierra’s work without having to embrace his political convictions en bloc: For 160 cm line tattooed on 4 people (2000), Sierra hired four heroin-addicted prostitutes to have a continuous line tattooed on their backs, one next to the other, for the price of a fix; for 7 forms measuring 600 x 60 x 60 cm, constructed to be held horizontal to a wall (2010), Sierra recruited 28 temporary workers through an agency to have them carry seven black minimalist blocks on their shoulders for a minimum wage, in reference to the caryatids of classical architecture.

The absolute primacy of the idea, as celebrated by Sol LeWitt, is nowadays completely historicized and inaccessible as an artistic practice. Yet even the critical realism of an artist like Santiago Sierra is at best disparaged, if not vehemently rejected as morally offensive. When the Spanish artist tried to join the postcolonialist game at the Dark Mofo festival in Tasmania in 2021, the outcry was huge. For his work Union Flag, he intended to use Instagram and Facebook to call for voluntary donations—“WE WANT YOUR BLOOD”—to obtain blood from Tasmanian Aborigines in which to then soak a British flag.

The festival’s creative director, Leigh Carmichael, gave in to the pressure of protests and canceled the work, and the private collector and founder of the hosting Mona museum, David Walsh, apologized publicly. The chairman of the Aboriginal Land Council of Tasmania, Michael Mansell, however, defended Union Flag and demanded that it be exhibited.⁸ Obviously, Carmichael and Walsh are white, while Mansell is Aboriginal, and, obviously, Mansell’s wish was not granted. The hyperventilating of the professional-managerial class, which always kicks in when minorities are considered to be at risk, and the composure of those supposedly affected have by now turned into a running gag, into material for memes. But even if Sierra’s kitschy gesture, with which he intended to shift the focus from the omnipresent discourse on racism to extraction as a capitalist economic model in colonialism, had passed censorship, it would have to be regarded as a rule-confirming exception: artists who deal with “social reality,” and thus express themselves politically in an explicit way, are not just somehow compelled, like Sierra, to “keep up with the times” and take up issues of identity politics, but must always do so in awareness of their own positioning. If one wants to talk about exploitation, one must of course talk about the exploitation of minorities. The white working class, on the other hand, the deplorables, are to be ignored at the very least. If artists belong to a supposedly oppressed minority, this circumstance confers authority on them. Their work is then above and beyond any criticism in terms of content, unless the critic belongs to an officially even more oppressed minority.

After decades in which postcolonial theory percolated into every pore of the art scene and in accordance with intersectionality—that is, the analysis of the intersection and overlapping of various forms of discrimination that lead to the constitution of a hierarchy of the oppressed—the white artist is left with no other role than that of the remorseful penitent, or that of the zealous “ally.”

Cocaine and the KGB

And it was precisely a hundred of these types that were sitting on the cold stone floor of the University of the Arts (UdK) in Berlin on November 13, 2023, holding up their palms, which were neatly painted with blood-red paint, in solidarity with a “people” that never existed. Or, as Hamas’s former interior minister Fathi Hamad put it in 2012: “Allah be praised, we all have Arab roots. . . . Brothers, half of the Palestinians are Egyptians and the other half are Saudis.”⁹

The desire for a Palestinian state is largely a Soviet invention. The drafting of the PLO Charter in 1964 in Moscow goes back to a time when the Soviet Union was interested in creating so-called “people’s liberation fronts” that would serve as centers of Marxist indoctrination and anti-capitalist opposition. The KGB created the PLO, financed it, trained its terrorists, and supplied them with weapons—with the aim of undermining Israel as the only representative of the democratic West in the Middle East. That same year, the KGB also founded the Bolivian National Liberation Army, led by Ernesto “Che” Guevara, and, in 1965, the Colombian National Liberation Army. Article 24 of the original charter states that no “regional sovereignty” would be exercised by the PLO over the West Bank or the Gaza Strip: the imaginary “Palestine” claimed by the PLO from its inception extends over the entire territory of Israel. According to the memoirs of the late Ion Mihai Pacepa (1928–2021), the former personal security adviser to the Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu and a high-ranking defector, Yasser Arafat’s sole aim was always that of destroying Israel.¹⁰ And how could it have been otherwise, since Arafat was the direct successor of the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Amin al-Husseini (c. 1895–1974), who met with Adolf Hitler in Berlin in 1941 to discuss the final solution of the Jewish question. In a conversation documented in photographs, as was al-Husseini’s visit to a concentration camp, Hitler assured him that one of Germany’s goals was the extermination of the Jews residing in the Arab world under British protection. He hoped that Germany would soon be able to open “the Caucasian gate to the Middle East.” For Hitler, al-Husseini¹¹ became the most important non-European sidekick in the Middle East, and he played a crucial role in the spread of antisemitism in the Arab world.

The Kremlin provided Arafat with prominent advisors. Ceauşescu was supposed to help polish up his image and to contribute to his moderation for strategic reasons. We have knowledge of the tenor of Ceauşescu’s manipulative efforts at persuading Arafat from Pacepa’s 1987 tell-all book Red Horizons. “How about pretending to break with terrorism?” he suggests, “pretending over and over”: “The West would love it.”¹² Then he starts philosophizing: “Dialectical materialism works like cocaine, let’s say. If you sniff it once or twice, it may not change your life. If you use it day after day, though, it will make you into an addict, a different man. That’s the qualitative transformation.” Arafat replies: “A snort of a pacifist Arafat day after day . . . ?”¹³ And Ceauşescu answers: “Exactly, Brother Yasser. The West may even become addicted to you and your PLO.”¹⁴

General Võ Nguyên Giáp, a close associate of Hồ Chí Minh and a master of Communist organizational techniques and propaganda in the Vietnam War, advised Arafat to “stop talking about annihilating Israel and instead turn [his] terror war into a struggle for human rights”—so that he would “have the American people eating out of [his] hand.”¹⁵ This had proven successful in Vietnam, where the reframing of the conflict between socialism and capitalism as a struggle for the freedom of an “indigenous” population had successfully turned Westerners against the war.

Similar advice was given to Arafat by Mhamed Yazid, Minister of Information in two Algerian wartime governments. He recommended distracting from Israel’s status as a small country, whose existence was threatened by the Arab states, by presenting Palestinian hostility as a struggle for liberation. The Arabs would then take on the role of an existentially oppressed people, set against not only the Zionists but the whole of world imperialism.¹⁶

In 1975, the Soviet Union pushed for the adoption of UN Resolution 3379 on the “Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination,” which designated Zionism as a form of racism and placed Israel in the same category as South Africa and Rhodesia.¹⁷ Proto-antiracism, Soviet-style. A year earlier, in 1974, Arafat had adopted the same academic vocabulary of the radical American left of his time in his famous olive-branch-and-gun speech at the United Nations, which the unsuspecting UdK students were in turn regurgitating with their “Condemn Genocide” and “Stop Colonialism” chants.¹⁸ He called Israel a “Zionist entity,” that is, an illegitimate state, and declared Zionism to be an “ideology that is imperialist, colonialist, racist,” that is “profoundly reactionary and discriminatory,” and that should be equated—and here comes the twist that is still popular today—with antisemitism, like “another side of the same base coin.”¹⁹

Published in Russia as early as the beginning of the twentieth century, the antisemitic pamphlet The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which purported to reveal the plans of conspiring Jews and reinterpreted antisemitism as a Jewish strategy to maintain their power, continues to be influential in the Middle East, especially in academic circles. “Antisemitism is indispensable to us,” writes the unknown author in his fictitious role as a Jewish conspirator, “for the management of our lesser brethren,” meaning: to maintain cohesion among the lower classes of Jews.²⁰ In 1942, Martin Heidegger noted that “essential Jewishness” was the “culmination of [the Jew’s] self-destruction in history.”²¹ Their “calculating reason” had led to a “Judaization of technology,”²² which turned against the Jews in the course of industrialization. The Holocaust thus makes possible a “purification of being,” the Nazis become “instruments of processes justified by fate,”²³ as Emmanuel Faye, Sidonie Kellerer, and François Rastier put it in a 2015 article on the occasion of the publication of Martin Heidegger’s “Remarks.”

Today, we see the same reversal of offender and victim roles not only in a flood of TikTok videos in which people with no knowledge of the subject use a pseudoscientific tone to sell the alleged “genocide” of the Palestinians at the hand of the Israelis and the legitimacy of jihad to a young audience; or on platforms like The Grayzone by Max Blumenthal, who blames the Israeli military for most of the victims of the pogroms of October 7 and uses snippets from press articles to engage in manipulation on a massive scale.²⁴ A major TV news channel like CNN equally volunteers as a Hamas propaganda machine, reporting that Israeli forces searching for the remains of the October 7 hostages had “desecrated” at least sixteen cemeteries in Gaza.²⁵

Smooth Transition to Barbarism

In the so-called German “Qualitätsmedien,” on the other hand, the black-clad UdK students and their red hands caused an uproar and were instantly associated with a well-known lynching incident. In October 2000, two Israeli reservists took a wrong turn and ended up in Ramallah, where they were arrested and taken to a police station. Men armed with knives and poles then stormed the place, lynched the two Israelis, tore out their eyes and internal organs, burned one of the corpses, and dragged it through the streets—as an act of revenge for a Palestinian youth who had been killed two days earlier in clashes with Israeli forces. One well-known picture shows one of the young murderers, Aziz Salha, proudly smiling as he presents his blood-soaked hands to the mob.

This overinterpretation of the student action assumed that the UdK students had actually celebrated the pogroms of October 7 with a similar impetus to that of the hate-filled Salha when he committed his crime. But aren’t these clueless youths actually ignoring the Palestinian massacres? And aren’t they, in their delusion, looking at the Palestinians as defenseless victims of Israeli violence? If only we were dealing with a group of radical glorifiers of terrorism, how much easier would it be to make it generally understood that this is not to be tolerated? Instead, we are confronted with the subtle terrorism of the well-meaning, to which journalist Claudius Seidl reacted in an interesting way in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. In his article “Die Politik der Verdammnis” (“The Politics of Damnation”) in the November 23, 2023 edition of the FAZ, the features editor reported about students’ claims that the red-painted hands were to be understood as a metaphor for the blood that is “on the hands of German politicians who support the Israeli war with arms deliveries.” Seidl, however, does not believe the students: “Anyone who has studied Israel’s recent history will interpret the red hands . . . differently.”²⁶ The crux of the matter, however, is not only that very few people actually engage in these studies: the main issue lies above all in the way in which this recent history of Israel is conveyed in schools and in the media today.

One might ask Seidl in return: how does the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung actually report on Israel? In contrast to the Süddeutsche Zeitung, the ZEIT, the Spiegel, the taz, or the Frankfurter Rundschau—not to mention formats such as ZE.TT and FUNK—the FAZ is generally not suspected of having been taken over by young wokesters, and alongside the Neue Züricher Zeitung is still considered a refuge of common sense.

However, in July 2020, Jochen Stahnke claimed in an article in the FAZ entitled “Die Kehrseite des Zionismus” (“The Flip Side of Zionism”)²⁷ that annexing occupied territories in the West Bank would “transform Zionism into a Greater Israel project of continued settler-colonial land grabs” and “undermine the legitimacy of the entire state,”²⁸ thus placing conditions on Israel’s right to exist on the front page of one of Germany’s most widely read newspapers.

In January 2022, Wolfgang Reinhard wrote in an opinion piece entitled “Vergessen, verdrängen oder vergegenwärtigen?” (“Forget, Repress or Remember?”)²⁹ that “along with the duty to remember, it now seems appropriate to recall the right to forget.”³⁰ Mind you, the article is about the Holocaust. In the concluding sentence, the historian quotes the Jewish “political scientist and Germany expert” Alfred Grosser, who wrote in 1970 that “attention to the special status of Judaism must inevitably generate hostility.”³¹ He calls for moderation: “Too much anti-antisemitism may generate antisemitism.”

In May 2022 already the subheading of Christian Meier’s article “Warum die Lage in Jerusalem gerade sehr angespannt ist” (“Why the Situation in Jerusalem is Very Tense Right Now”),³² published in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, featured the popular inversion: “On Sunday, nationalist Jews will hold their annual flag march. Palestinian groups see it as a provocation.”³³ The Jew as agent provocateur, needlessly enraging the Palestinians.

A month later, at the height of the antisemitism scandal surrounding documenta fifteen (the 15th edition of the recurring exhibition of contemporary art), the arts editor of the FAZ, Niklas Maak, assured readers that “on the first walk around Documenta, there was absolutely nothing to be seen that would confirm the fears.”³⁴ Instead, Maak reported on an “attack on the exhibition building” in which, fortunately, “nobody was hurt.”³⁵ While there were depictions of Jews as pigs and octopuses throughout the show,³⁶ which must have escaped Maak’s notice, any trace of an attack was missing, other than a few stickers reading “Freedom not Islam,” “Solidarity with Israel,” and “Free Gaza from Hamas”—and a few tags, presumably by teenage hip-hoppers. A scenario of imagined racist acts against Documenta curators and artists was deliberately constructed to distract from the evident antisemitism. The false claim that there had been an attack was never retracted.

Hanno Loewy, director of the Jewish Museum in the Austrian town of Hohenems, is a staunch opponent of the German parliament’s May 2019 resolution against the BDS movement. In December 2020, he put forward a bold thesis in the FAZ, according to which the fight against BDS brings about “a much more effective boycott against Jews . . . than BDS itself could have ever initiated.”³⁷ In terms of an organization, he claims, BDS is as insignificant as “a mouse” and only uses “toothless means . . . to occasionally put pressure on a festival.”³⁸ Either intentionally or, more fatally, out of ignorance, the do-not-buy-from-Jews movement is trivialized to the extreme. Thanks to the resolution, “friends of the AfD” (the right-wing populist political party Alternative für Deutschland) and “‘anti-German’ activists” could now “take particular pleasure in labeling anti-Zionist Jews as antisemites,” Loewy fumes.³⁹ He frames the “fight against BDS [as] a demonstration of power on the side of the state”⁴⁰ in the style of Viktor Orbán, whom he compares, en passant, to the heavily armed right-wing extremist who tried to break into a synagogue in the East German city of Halle in 2019, ending up killing two passersby.⁴¹ Loewy also brings up the apartheid accusation, claiming that “Israel’s definition as a ‘Jewish state’” degrades “its Arab residents, in some cases long-established ones . . . , to second-class citizens.”⁴²

Patrick Bahners, who is responsible for the humanities section at the FAZ, claimed in June 2023 in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung that by condemning BDS as an antisemitic movement, the “boycotters are being accused of hatred of the boycotted,” which causes the “number of antisemites to constantly increase.”⁴³ Under Bahners’s post of his own article on Twitter, one user commented sarcastically: “It’s the fault of the Jews when people have something against them.” In December 2020, Bahners tweeted: “By the way, ‘Israel-related antisemitism’ (supposedly the most common form of antisemitism) was invented to scandalize criticism of Zionism.”⁴⁴ In September 2021, in response to a tweet by German-Israeli author Ahmad Mansour about the trivialization of Islamism, Bahners wrote that Mansour’s choice of words “assumes without reason that Islamism is per se something bad.”⁴⁵ We are told that there is good Islamism and bad Islamism.

In January 2023, the FAZ retracted an article about the corrupt Palestinian government, entitled “Doppelstandards für den Frieden” (“Double Standards for Peace”), because it allegedly contained a “considerable number of factual errors.” Instead of correcting the article, only a run-of-the-mill apology with a list of errors was posted online.⁴⁶ Israeli ambassador Ron Prosor reacted to the retraction with a letter to the editor expressing concern about the recurring, seemingly random public acts of shaming of “editors who write positive things about Israel.”⁴⁷ Yet even the very blunt letter, which Prosor also posted on his Twitter profile, had no effect. The article was simply made to disappear, as was any reference to its author.

And in December 2023, in a report on a conference about antisemitism organized by the founder and director of the Frankfurt Research Center on Global Islam, Susanne Schröter, Alexander Jürgs commented on the publicist Malca Goldstein-Wolf’s interjection at one of the panel discussions, in which she stated that she felt that Israel was “not really doing much wrong,” concluding: “Anyone who talks like this is not interested in a real debate.” After all, a “yes” to Israel must always imply a “yes but.”⁴⁸

In recent years, overlaps between “serious” media of all stripes and pseudointellectual antisemitic defamation platforms à la Electronic Intifada have become increasingly frequent. The transition to barbarism is smooth. In view of the extent of institutional capture by the new identitarian left and of the media’s interest in keeping up with an increasingly radicalized pseudo-progressive cultural hegemony that sees Israel as an alien element in the heart of the Global South, this development should not come as a surprise. Whoever lives under the illusion that it is possible to buy a conservative German-language newspaper at the newsstand is part of the problem.

Horror behind the Mask of Humanism

With “The Politics of Damnation,” Claudius Seidl has written an honest article expressing his genuine horror. He is a sensitive observer of the situation, seriously concerned but, like many others, reluctant to descend into the sewers to poke around in the foul water. Out of sheer revulsion, he does not even try to understand what drives the UdK students with their red hands, but merely describes the shock of what seems new to him. He writes that, by comparison, the protest actions of the students of the 1968 generation appear “like philosophical exercises” to him; their arguments “so clever and rational.”⁴⁹ “Ho-Ho-Ho Chi Minh!”—was that chant clever and rational? Seidl’s observation about differences in protest aesthetics draws a dividing line where there can be none. It was precisely the students of the 1968 generation who avoided the conflict with their family environments contaminated by National Socialism, projecting it onto an allegedly fascist America.⁵⁰ They are the trailblazers of the anti-Western, pro-Palestinian UdK students who now denounce Israel as a fascist state. However, the students of yesteryear understood the universities and later every other institution as battlegrounds for the fight against the old establishment, only to become the new establishment themselves, while the UdK students are creatures of the establishment, egged on by their professors to protest against Israel and attending courses in which they are taught that “with the appropriate indigenous knowledge, you can hear the trees talking,” as Seidl reports.⁵¹ They are, despite all personal responsibility, victims of a takeover that their parents’ and grandparents’ generations have facilitated, willingly or out of indifference. Only a series of traumatic experiences, caused by the same barbarization in which they unwittingly participate, will possibly tear them out of their sectarian existence one day, if at all.

Seidl and all those who, like him, have only dimly grasped the situation must see the UdK students as nothing more than liars, deliberately concealing their true intentions, especially since the image of their raised red hands continues to evoke that of Aziz Salha. But the somber, devout, earnest demeanor of those students hunkered down on the art school floor has nothing in common with the youthful glee of the animalistic slaughterer. The essential question is: why should the students have deceived us all about their intentions, given that their red-hands action, which had been evidently planned in advance, was aimed at conveying a strong and unequivocal message? Seidl writes that “what one sees there” is impossible to grasp and can only make one ashamed.⁵² But what he has seen, he cannot comprehend and does not want to comprehend. It is the horror that returns behind the mask of humanism, which considers all peoples, cultures, and religions as equal and must therefore seek a rational reason for the massacres in the kibbutzim—a reason it is however unwilling to find in Islam as an ideology of conquest and subjugation. That is when talk arises of a “spiral of violence,” behind which history disappears. Israel’s military superiority, which after thousands of years of persecution finally enables Jews to defend themselves against annihilation, makes them nothing but perpetrators. Somewhere at the beginning of this ahistorical “spiral of violence” stand the strong, who are always necessarily the oppressors.

This secular humanism characterizes the new antisemitism, which cries out “Israel!” in rage and deludes itself into thinking that it is criticizing the Israeli government when it is in fact referring to the Jews. It is the antisemitism with a human face that is systemic in the culture and the media. And since it is systemic, it must be talked down as much as possible, because anyone eager to succeed in these spheres has to accept it in some form or another and therefore has to resist actually comprehending it. That is why even in the most reasonable reactions of the media, despite all the indignation, there is usually a sense of reluctance to understand individual episodes as part of something much larger. Instead we are confronted with occasional isolated outrage and the learned inability to properly interpret intentions, statements, and signals. Only the most obvious manifestations are scandalized and attributed to single actors. The ideology that permeates and drives these actors remains concealed.

The red-handed protest arose within a comfortable bubble, where no one risks getting distracted by historical contexts or reports from the real world. If Israel is an illegitimate “entity,” as it is now called in jargon, then anything that puts the Palestinians in a bad light or even exculpates Israel is illegitimate. But by accusing young ingenuous souls with little or no analytical skills of glorifying terror, as the German press from FAZ to taz has done, the media hands them victimhood as a weapon on a silver platter. Now they can once again grow indignant about all the nastiness showered on peace-loving people who care so much about Palestinian children—and only about those children! This way, those who already think alike discover even more commonalities they share: on the one hand, mainly white middle-class kids, for whom solidarity with the Palestinians seems obligatory according to intersectional logic; and on the other, easily outraged Arab young men and hijab-wearing furies, brandishing ISIS flags, wrapped up in their own victimhood on the streets of Western capitals. Together they will besiege a New York pediatric cancer clinic screaming “shame” because it collaborates with medical facilities in Israel.⁵³

We are witnessing, even if with farcical traits, the coalition of non-integrated minorities and the radical intelligentsia that Herbert Marcuse had envisioned in the 1960s as the new revolutionary subject in the fight against the existing capitalist order.⁵⁴ This alliance mirrors the historical invention of Palestinian nationalism, which arose from Communist expansionism and Arab resentment over the existence of Israel. The 1968 generation is often credited with having read a lot, and yet despite or perhaps precisely because of that, they fell for the mass murderers Che Guevara, Hồ Chí Minh, and Mao Zedong. Today’s generation does not read at all, and so the unsophisticated project of Islamic autocracy gradually overrides the broken dream of Communism as an old yet new collectivist project—in the form not of mass conversions to Islam but rather of sympathies for jihadist fervor and of a steadily growing animus toward Jewish exceptionalism. But how was such a degree of intellectual impoverishment possible? One can trace aspects of this development by looking at the example of the Berlin art school where the red hands protest took place.

IDF T-shirt and Chanel N°5

When Katharina Sieverding took up her professorship at the UdK in the early 1990s, the reek of nineteenth-century rot must have been smelled from afar. When I joined her class in 2000, she had already turned the place upside down. She had set up photography and computer labs within the old walls of Hardenbergstraße 33, which until then had only witnessed painting technique courses and art history classes that did not venture further than Francis Bacon. And with the theoretical approach of the class, which she had named “Visual Culture Studies” in reference to music journalist and “pop theorist” Diedrich Diederichsen, she managed to bring new people into an institution where little or no theory had been taught before. Unlike her fellow professors with their select circles of students, our class was open to anyone who wanted to drop by, and new students were chosen via democratic vote to join the class, even if some votes counted more than others. It was a reenactment of what Sieverding had experienced as a student of Joseph Beuys at the Düsseldorf Art Academy: a class without size limit, with a teaching practice shaped by the students themselves. And she brought a glamorous touch to the worn-out drabness of the Berlin art school—the ever-flawless fiery red lips, the sunglasses worn even at midnight, the large Chanel N°5 bottle that was occasionally whipped out.

But with the new theoretical positions, with the supposed breath of fresh air, a theoretical vocabulary of the humanities and social sciences that was itself already in an advanced state of decay was transplanted into the students’ minds. What took place was an import from the Anglosphere of those academic disciplines that end in “studies,” which subordinate academic research to ideology in order to concentrate entirely on activism and filling positions with like-minded people. The trendy leftist discourse of the semester was delivered: Italian workerism, Afrofuturism, and the like. All the old stories revisited. The intrinsic focus of the activist disciplines on specific identities, contexts, and “political practices” led to strange alienating effects due to the lack of any prior knowledge. Students read Antonio Negri not only without having absorbed Marx but also without knowledge of the terror of the Red Brigades or of the socioeconomic situation in Italy in the late 1970s, but they were equipped with terms such as “multitude,” which could then be effectively incorporated into long-winded rehashes of Jean-Luc Godard’s essayistic cultural revolution pop film La Chinoise, shot with a mini-DV camcorder and a group of friends in shared flats in Kreuzberg. Although during those innocent first years of the new millennium, young minds were being contaminated by Edward W. Said’s resentment of the West or by Frantz Fanon’s fantasies of decolonial ethnic cleansing⁵⁵ just as the generation that preceded them had been, before the dawn of the age of social media and within societies that had not yet been reshaped by identity-political conflicts they were only exposed to these ideas in school. Watching Sun Ra’s 1974 Space Is the Place in a seminar back then—a trash epos about a utopian space colony to which only purely black people are admitted—one could only find amusement in it, completely unaware of the fact that two decades later, the anti-white subtexts familiar from blaxploitation films would find their way into political party programs and human resources departments.

I rejected postcolonial theory from the very beginning, before I even understood what it was. I am also convinced to this day that Homi K. Bhabha is impossible to read. I sat there in my IDF T-shirt to annoy the tutor, Katja Diefenbach. She, however, took it with composure. It was the time of post-Marxism: that was not woke yet, and there was still some leeway. Antisemitism was explicitly dealt with in a seminar that I can still recall, but the topic was limited in time and space to the brief period of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s artistic directorship at the Theater am Turm in Frankfurt, and none of the participants apart from me had ever watched a Fassbinder film. For many, it was a state of constant overload. Besides that, the status that the class enjoyed in the Berlin art scene thanks to Katharina Sieverding’s prominence and influence encouraged hubris in some and intimidated others. At some point, Katharina brought to the UdK the former RAF getaway driver Astrid Proll, with whom we were to read Susan Sontag’s Regarding the Pain of Others in a seminar. Katharina clearly enjoyed the whole thing; for her it was a game. I just thought to myself, isn’t there anything beyond this leftist rubbish? Still, I also had fun because I understood her game. It was an anarchic game with a sense of the absurd, ultimately a bit like Sol LeWitt with his open cubes.

However, the crucial point is that due to her formation steeped in the insouciance of old-left circles, Katharina failed to recognize the arsenal she was playing with; she was unaware that by arbitrarily transforming an entire institution from a snooze club into a neo-leftist indoctrination center, she was helping pave the way for the authoritarians of tomorrow. Most of the students didn’t understand the game anyway; they simply seemed to accept everything uncritically while at the same time looking visibly uncomfortable. I was happy to contribute to this discomfort: I was pretty tough and sometimes mean during the vodka-soaked and smoke-filled group critiques, which sometimes went on late into the night. I simply was not able to stand the embellishment of every artistic product with a politically acceptable veneer. As most of the students puttered about as complete art history virgins, they kept presenting works that at first glance appeared to be completely derivative, but which were ultimately just forgeries without any awareness of the original. And then the same line, over and over again: “My work is about . . . ”

After having skimmed through some photocopied excerpts from Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble and having watched the New York ballroom culture documentary Paris Is Burning, they were now ready to adopt the poses of drag for some photo project—after all they even knew a few gays personally. They felt pressured into interrogating their own identity and did so frantically, problematizing their own origins and persistently filming themselves while inspecting their own physiognomies; they assembled documentaristic collages, in which found objects and random associations of images suddenly appeared to make for some profoundly significant social criticism; they used makeup to paint little feminist statements on art-supplies-store canvases; they came back from vacations with some accidental video footage and tried to retroactively charge it politically by adding some postcolonial window dressing. A student set up a polling station in an artist-run gallery and invited perplexed migrants ineligible to vote to take part in a fictional election. Two others founded the “Transnational Republic,” printed their own currency, and issued mock passports in empty retail spaces. None of this was touched by any anarchistic spirit or playfulness; everything was uptight and self-serious and shrouded in would-be relevance, since it had something to do with queer, something to do with body politics, something to do with migration and open borders.

Compensatory Functionalization

The misery of having to introduce every artwork by compulsively providing a declaration of intent, which is also meant to serve as the work’s raison d’être, had to do with the ever-increasing urge for a compensatory functionalization of art—a kind of art that is ashamed of simply being art. In the climate of the New Left’s cultural hegemony, any ambition to make “political art” can only result in politicized art, art with a purpose other than art. Art that, as Juliane Rebentisch, a professor of philosophy and aesthetics with ties to BDS, put it from a left-wing perspective, is set to become “an instrument of the practical-political realization of utopia”⁵⁶—in other words, applied art. Art history has lost its object of inquiry and can only offer itself as a quarry of visual strategies because the functionalized art that is being produced on a massive scale today is precisely just an instrument and should therefore actually be historicized as a separate discipline. What remains is the desire to participate in something, no matter what, and the longing for a purpose. Both find their most pathetic expression in the political symbolism of the pro-Palestinian ceremony held by the UdK students. And both are traits of the authoritarian character, which strives toward the totalitarian.

The artist has two choices: the market or the institutions. Some perform well in both at the same time. But the game that used to spark joy has been over for quite a while, at least for those who keep an eye on current affairs. The extinction of the figure of the art collector as an upper-class bourgeois intellectual, which is no longer being produced by society, and the resulting transition from collecting art as an aesthetic obsession in intellectual kinship with artist friends to collecting as capital investment is consistently explained away as a symptom of late capitalism, while it was precisely the left that carried out the destruction that led to this society. The trick of completely ignoring one’s own cultural hegemony and instead blaming every unwelcome development on an undesired economic system must immediately strike anyone as absurd who does not get a kick out of the cocaine of Ceauşescu’s dialectical materialism. The takeover and undermining of institutions and academies were carried out with such ruthlessness that any actual criticism or individual form of expression was bound to suffocate in the resulting vacuum. And contrary to oft-repeated claims, art criticism has not been annihilated by the diktat of the art market, but rather has been turned against itself and wrecked in the service of propaganda. An art market consolidated around a group of industrialized mega-galleries and the institutions gutted by a hostile takeover that has left no one inside still willing to expose themselves—out of passion or intellectual pioneering spirit—to any risks, now represent the only filters, the only selective instances through which only functionalized art is washed to the surface. Just notice the embarrassed looks one receives when simply mentioning the term “quality” in connection with art—it is worth trying out. Quality is a highly subjective standard, but due to the neo-Maoist campaign of annihilation against any form of subjectivity, there seem to be no more criteria for determining it. What is left are the economically connoted category of “value” and the ideologically connoted category of “relevance.”

By eliminating any criterion “based on authority through authorship,”⁵⁷ that is, on the “principle of Western intellectuals, writers, philosophers, and artists,”⁵⁸ we fall back into the “culturalism”⁵⁹ of the collective, which is necessarily hostile to any individual and which carries antisemitism within it.⁶⁰ In short, this is how art theorist Bazon Brock put it in a brief radio interview for Deutschlandfunk in the summer of 2022, in which he offered by far the most poignant commentary on documenta fifteen. However, when it comes to assessing the root causes, Brock remains very much the Fluxus boomer that he is: “From Erdoğan to Putin to Xi, in all these totalitarian fundamentalist regimes, the front line of culturalism is being strengthened. And in the West, too, the cultures and their main representatives are given the leadership over art.”⁶¹ Brock seems to be applying Arendt’s old concept of totalitarianism here, thereby explaining away the entire project of the neo-neo-left, which in its various shades of postcolonialism, intersectionality, critical race theory, and wokeness not only has served as the foundation for this last Documenta but has also been dominant in art at least since Catherine David’s Documenta X in 1997. The decision to go with the curatorial collective Ruangrupa and its brazenly naive, juvenile, folksy antisemitism was, as Brock correctly observes, “really intended as a strategy.”⁶² But Brock is mistaken in his definition of the motive: “People are fed up with the variety of demands that require historical knowledge, etc. And they reject it, because they don’t know anything. That is why they return to the sheepfold of cultural identities.”⁶³ But no, intellectuality is not rejected due to lack of knowledge: the de-intellectualization is intentional, it is programmatic. This is not a return to identity with a reactionary mindset; it is the elevation of identity to a progressive category.

The students with the red hands, who declare racial-nationalist butchers of Jews as their protégés because they are “people of color,” epitomize a takeover that has been allowed to happen. The 1968 generation, which set the long march in motion, still carried the old world within it, despite its glorification of the revolutionary, but it opened the gates to a generation that has only anecdotal knowledge of that world and is pressing ahead with the degradation and destruction of our present societies with much greater pragmatism. After one or two more generations, the thread will have been severed for good.

Max Horkheimer, who headed the Institute for Social Research from which the Frankfurt School emerged, and who, together with Theodor W. Adorno, wrote the seminal work of Critical Theory Dialectic of Enlightenment, had understood this development. During the Nazi era, “the only hope was the revolution,” but now “the opposite danger exists that this revolution precipitates a new totalitarian, terrorist state.”⁶⁴ Horkheimer pointed to the conservative character of Critical Theory, which he considered to be in keeping with the times, and to the necessity of preserving the achievements of bourgeois societies: “To be radical today means to be conservative.”⁶⁵ Israel is, in this sense, a conservative project that could never be made comprehensible to woke students. Conservatism itself as a return to all that seems to have been lost today, in order to create the conditions for its reemergence in a new form appropriate to today’s state of affairs, is the counter-project to the current cultural hegemony.

The pictures from the entrance hall of the UdK are glimpses into a generalized entropy. After the takeover, the hollowed-out institutions always reproduce the same ideology in ever more radical forms and become an inhospitable place for any expression of dissidence. When art itself was still an expression of this dissidence, when it still possessed the autonomy to reject being fully functionalized neither for the market nor for institutionalized forms of political activism, it thrived on the abstraction that makes it art in the first place—the abstraction that the authoritarian character is unable to bear. Every curatorial project that sets out to combine twentieth-century artworks with contemporary art represents, willingly or unwillingly, a testimony of a rupture, and must inevitably result in a discordant ensemble, in which ambiguous, mocking, and venturesome documents of a lost era stand irreconcilably opposed to the safe mock-ups of the applied arts of the new millennium. Lautréamont’s absurdist image of “a chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissecting table”⁶⁶ has turned from a pleasurable surrealist game to a description of a condition.

Black Dada BLA

At the Mumok in Vienna, I walk through an exhibition by the gay, black American artist Adam Pendleton, who, according to the exhibition text, “has articulated much of his work through the idea of Black Dada, an ever-evolving inquiry into the relationship between Blackness, abstraction, and the avant-garde.”⁶⁷ What I see is easily sellable medium formats, spray paint on silkscreen, letters that fail to form words. “Anagrammatic,” as Galerie Max Hetzler puts it; “a visual chorus of excited multiplicities,”⁶⁸ according to Pace Gallery’s website. The sequence of letters “BLA” sticks out on one of the paintings in the exhibition.⁶⁹

After Pace came under fire in 2020 amid the George Floyd fever for lack of diversity in its staff, a two-person “Culture & Equity” team was put together, and two years later, black activist Kimberly Drew was installed as associate director and curator. On October 9, 2023, Drew shared a series of posts on Instagram⁷⁰ celebrating the massacre at the Nova music festival in the Negev desert as “the largest ever Palestinian liberation operation in modern history”⁷¹ and as an “act of resistance” in the fight “for life, dignity, and freedom.”⁷² When I confronted Pace with screenshots, I received a carelessly cobbled-together routine email response from the Associate Director of Public Relations: “Pace supports meaningful freedom of speech and respectful differences of thought among its employees.”⁷³ One can guess what kind of conversations actually take place behind closed doors at a gallery founded by Arne Glimcher, who is Jewish, and run by his son Marc Glimcher. But this dash of Blackness secures the gallery’s reputation, and Adam Pendleton, as an artist of the gallery, is likely to contribute significantly to it as well.

The term “Black Dada” is a response to the “Black Lives Matter” slogan; “they are both very clear short statements,” Pendleton says in an interview.⁷⁴ His painted Black Dada Flag (Black Lives Matter) was flown at the Venice Biennale in 2015 and then in large format on a flagpole on Randall’s Island in 2018 for Frieze Art Fair in New York. Pendleton was prompted to create the work by his participation in a 2013 protest march for Trayvon Martin, a 17-year-old unarmed black teenager who was shot and killed by neighborhood watch volunteer George Zimmerman—a Latino—in self-defense. After Zimmerman’s acquittal, the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter spread across social media and a movement of unprecedented anti-white obtrusiveness was born, which never substantiated the criminological aspects behind this violent act.

Since then, references to BLM have repeatedly appeared in Pendleton’s work. In his exhibition Who Is Queen? at the MoMA in New York in 2021, a year after a “Summer of Love” marked by riots, assaults, and murders, the protest aesthetic of BLM was re-evoked for the white cube, with Pendleton integrating audio recordings of a Black Lives Matter demonstration into a sound work.

The multi-million-dollar empire of BLM is essentially built on donations and misinformation about an epidemic of police violence against black people, which is statistically completely refutable. But any attempt at refutation can also be instantly discredited by insinuating racist motives. In 2020, at the height of the BLM hype, an artist friend told me that an acquaintance had contacted him to encourage him to donate to Black Lives Matter. When he hesitated, the evidently fanaticized woman blackmailed him, threatening to defame him as a racist within the scene. Obviously, he transferred the amount, but he also convinced other friends to donate as well, and was even grateful to the woman for opening his eyes to the injustice done to blacks. When I asked him how many unarmed blacks he thought are shot by police in the United States every year, he told me he didn’t know, but that they had to be in the thousands. However, according to statistics, in 2019 there were only 14 (and, for comparison, 25 unarmed whites)⁷⁵—in a country where blacks make up 13.6% of the U.S. population⁷⁶ and are responsible for 51.3% of the murders.⁷⁷ However, since most of these murders are committed by black people against black people, they never receive any identity-political attention, because the sociopolitical reality of “black-on-black crime” contradicts the most basic woke convictions about white violence against innocent people of color. The fact that some BLM activists are in part in cahoots with the fanatically antisemitic Nation of Islam, that they maintain direct ties to Hamas through the front group Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), and that in 2020 they marched through Los Angeles smearing antisemitic and anti-Israel slogans on synagogues, schools, and Jewish memorials, vandalizing Jewish businesses⁷⁸ and shouting “Death to the Jews”⁷⁹—all that too has never reached the art world or is dismissed as a right-wing conspiracy theory.

The Art of Allusion

Adam Pendelton glamorizes BLM but never positions himself clearly. Everything remains in limbo between endorsement and pop-cultural citation. Being forty years old, he is part of a generation that seems to be solely concerned with generating a diffuse sense of the political. He is miles away from the critical realism of someone like Santiago Sierra, who is only eighteen years older. Pendelton has mastered the art of allusion, juxtaposing references just like Balenciaga does with neon-colored ball gowns, homeless-inspired layered looks, and XL sneakers on steroids. In Pendleton’s own words, Black Dada is about “problematizing the relationship between conceptual art and civil rights, or between the avant-garde and the history of black people in America.”⁸⁰ “Formally” it relates “to modernist painting and the monochrome,” but “also sort of messing it up.”⁸¹ He throws around references that are never resolved. His 2016 exhibition Becoming Imperceptible at the Contemporary Arts Center in New Orleans included, according to Pendleton, “various historical references, from the Bauhaus to Malcolm X to the Black Panthers to Godard.”⁸² Sol LeWitt’s open cubes are also quoted at times in his works, and superimposed with characters, or referenced like in the installation Rendered in Black (2007), where thirty glazed ceramic cubes—black, of course—are studiedly arranged in space in random patterns. When Pendleton, however, attempts at spontaneously quoting from LeWitt’s “Sentences on Conceptual Art” during an interview, the result is “Illogical judgments lead to new experiences,”⁸³ a kind of motivational-training version of “Irrational thoughts should be followed absolutely and logically.” At this point at the latest, one cannot but realize that someone here is playing around with material that he does not have a clue about. But, conveniently, there are hardly any authoritative figures left who would care to point this out. And why would they? It is all about success, and Pendleton has a lot of it. That is the measure of all things. Whoever expresses critique today ends up looking like an envious, pretentious loser.

LeWitt himself became Pendleton’s first collector. In 2002, an assistant drew his attention to a painting by the young artist, and he traded it for a work of his own.⁸⁴ An article in the Observer states: “Hearing of LeWitt’s interest confirmed Mr. Pendleton’s feeling that his own work was conceptual, rather than abstract painting.”⁸⁵ So the focus here is on the strategy rather than the concept: “I was like, ‘Well naturally he would want this brave piece of conceptual art.’”⁸⁶ Performative statements such as this are testaments of an arrogance perceived as justified, which is part and parcel of the modern reading of Blackness based on the self-conception that one is technically still entitled to reparations 160 years after the abolition of slavery. Everything about Pendleton is inflated hip-hopish ego, proudly displayed self-interest, and feigned indifference as a statement. Functionalized art at this level, regardless of the extent to which it lends itself to serve as a mouthpiece for ideology or to become a product for the international art market, is unencumbered by self-doubt. Pendelton has masterfully applied the recipe for success of our time: choosing, as a non-white person, a “white-coded” reference like, in this case, the Dadaism movement that originally emerged in Zurich at the time of the First World War, stripping it of any historical depth and specificity, sterilizing it to the point of pictogram-like self-evidence, and imbuing it with identitarian kitsch and book-review intellectualism. Where Dadaism turned against the subservient art scene of its time with sarcasm and parodistic furor, Pendleton appropriates the Dadaist vocabulary as a vehicle for the same old catchphrases, like “Black Liberation” and “Resistance.”⁸⁷ Where Sol LeWitt’s work was shaped by a cheerful purposelessness that was extraneous to the authoritarian because it did not feel the need to explain anything to anyone, and where Santiago Sierra’s critical realism escaped didacticism by virtue of its physicality, in Pendleton’s work the political has crystallized into ornament.

In the near future, when the artists of the old world will all have disappeared and their work can only be understood as inventory, of which to freely dispose, swindlers like Pendleton will have replaced the masters. And the red-handed students will try to emulate them, because it will be the only craft they will have been able to perfect.

Topics: Israel Initiative • TPPI Translations

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Niels Betori Diehl is a conceptual artist, architect, and writer living in Berlin. His collaborative work with artist Barbara K. Prokop runs under the acronym NBDBKP and encompasses exhibition-making, interior design, political theory, and clothing.

1. Rosalind E. Krauss, The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986), p. 255.

2. Ibid.

3. Ibid.

4. Cf. Theodor W. Adorno, Else Frenkel-Brunswik, Daniel J. Levinson, and R. Nevitt Sanford, The Authoritarian Personality (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1950).

5. Else Frenkel-Brunswik, “Intolerance of Ambiguity as an Emotional and Perceptual Personality Variable,” Journal of Personality 18, no. 1 (1949): 108–43.

6. Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life, trans. Edmund F.N. Jephcott (London and New York: Verso, 2005), p. 32.

7. Adolf Loos, Sämtliche Schriften, 2 vols. (Vienna: Verlag Herold, 1962), 1:284.

8. “Mansell Calls for Union Flag to Be Reinstated by Dark Mofo,” Tasmanian Times, March 24, 2021, https://tasmaniantimes.com/2021/03/mansell-calls-for-union-flag-to-be-reinstated-by-dark-mofo/.

9. As cited in Michael Calvo, “Internationaler Strafgerichtshof: Parodie auf die Justiz?,” Audiatur Online, June 24, 2020, https://www.audiatur-online.ch/2020/06/24/internationaler-strafgerichtshof-parodie-auf-die-justiz/.

10. Cf. Ion Mihai Pacepa, Red Horizons: Chronicles of a Communist Spy Chief (Washington, DC: Regnery Gateway, 1987), p. 92.

11. “Der Großmufti von Jerusalem beim Führer,” November 28, 1941, NS-Archiv: Dokumente zum Nationalsozialismus, https://www.ns-archiv.de/verfolgung/antisemitismus/mufti/in_berlin.php.

12. Pacepa, Red Horizons, p. 25.

13. Ibid.

14. Ibid.

15. As cited in David Meir-Levi, History Upside Down: The Roots of Palestinian Fascism and the Myth of Israeli Aggression (New York: Encounter Books, 2007), p. 29.

16. Christopher Fish, “The Deception of Palestinian Nationalism,” Stanford Review, February 27, 2008, https://stanfordreview.org/deception-palestinian-nationalism/.

17. Cf. Manfred Gerstenfeld, Anti-Israelismus und Anti-Semitismus, ed. Ekkehard W. Stegemann and Wolfgang Stegemann (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer Verlag, 2018), pp. 45ff.

18. Claudius Seidl, “Die Politik der Verdammnis,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, November 27, 2023, https://www.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/debatten/udk-berlin-antisemitismus-und-israelhass-treten-offen-hervor-19343147.html.

19. “Speech of Yasir Arafat at the UNGA,” November 13, 1974, available at Interactive Encyclopedia of the Palestine Question, https://www.palquest.org/en/historictext/9639/speech-yasir-arafat-unga.

20. Cf. Jeffrey L. Sammons, ed., Die Protokolle der Weisen von Zion: Die Grundlage des modernen Antisemitismus—eine Fälschung. Text und Kommentar (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 1998), p. 56.

21. Emmanuel Faye, Sidonie Kellerer, and François Rastier, “Die ‘Reinigung des Seyns,’” taz, April 12, 2015, https://taz.de/Werkausgabe-von-Heidegger/!5013583/.

22. Ibid.

23. Ibid.

24. Michal Perach, “Masterclass in Manipulation: Exposing Max Blumenthal’s Lies about Israel and October 7,” Haaretz, November 27, 2023, https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2023-11-27/ty-article-opinion/exposing-max-blumenthals-deceptive-claimisrael-is-responsible-for-most-october-7-victims/0000018c-102f-d65f-a7dd-f0ff7b550000.

25. Jeremy Diamond et al., “At Least 16 Cemeteries in Gaza Have Been Desecrated by Israeli Forces, Satellite Imagery and Videos Reveal,” CNN, January 20, 2024, https://edition.cnn.com/middleeast/live-news/israel-hamas-war-gaza-news-01-20-24/h_4c94252a882656838ebe134dd8eaade7.

26. Seidl, “Die Politik der Verdammnis.”

27. Julian Reichelt (@jreichelt), X, July 1, 2020, 3:03pm, with screenshots of an article by Jochen Stahnke, https://x.com/jreichelt/status/1278403764622368768.

28. Ibid.

29. Wolfgang Reinhard, “Vergessen, verdrängen oder vergegenwärtigen?,” faz.net, January 10, 2022, https://zeitung.faz.net/faz/politik/2022-01-10/5ffe2fb25ae2c548764085e86c1c0f4c/?popup=user.lf-ns.

30. Ibid.

31. Ibid.

32. Christian Meier, “Warum die Lage in Jerusalem gerade sehr angespannt ist,” FAZ, May 27, 2022, https://www.faz.net/aktuell/politik/ausland/warum-die-lage-in-jerusalem-gerade-sehr-angespannt-ist-18063404.html.

33. Ibid.

34. Niklas Maak, “Der große Streit um die Documenta fifteen,” FAZ, June 17, 2022, https://www.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/kunst-und-architektur/streit-um-die-documenta-antisemitismus-vorwuerfe-und-ein-anschlag-18108688.html.

35. Ibid.

36. Cf. Niels Betori Diehl, “Defund Documenta,” Jüdische Rundschau, August 8, 2022, https://juedischerundschau.de/article.2022-08.defund-documenta.html.

37. Hanno Loewy, “Boykott gegen Boykott,” FAZ, December 21, 2020, https://www.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/debatten/antisemitismus-die-bds-kampagne-und-die-deutsche-kulturszene-17111660.html.

38. Ibid.

39. Ibid.

40. Ibid.

41. Cf. ibid.

42. Ibid.

43. Patrick Bahners (@PBahners), X, June 23, 2019, 3:24am, with a screenshot of the article Patrick Bahners, “Antisemitismus,” FAZ, from the same day, https://x.com/PBahners/status/1142694983134273536?s=20.

44. Patrick Bahners (@PBahners), X, December 20, 2020, 4:47pm, https://x.com/PBahners/status/1340775970404528144?s=20.

45. Patrick Bahners (@PBahners), X, September 13, 2021, 12:27pm, https://x.com/PBahners/status/1437452890344497159?s=20.

46. Correction of the article “Doppelstandards für den Frieden,” faz.net, January 4, 2023, https://www.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/debatten/korrekturen-zum-artikel-doppelstandards-fuer-den-frieden-18576433.html.

47. Ron Prosor (@Ron_Prosor), X, January 12, 2023, 4:35pm, https://x.com/Ron_Prosor/status/1613650911204712459?s=20.

48. Alexander Jürgs, “Eine ‘neue’ Querfront aus Muslimen und Linken,” FAZ, December 9, 2023, https://www.faz.net/aktuell/rhein-main/frankfurt/konferenz-debattiert-ueber-neue-querfront-aus-muslimen-und-linken-19375367.html.

49. Seidl, “Die Politik der Verdammnis.”

50. Cf. Jens Bisky, “Götz Aly über die 68-Bewegung: Der große Kater,” Süddeutsche Zeitung, May 17, 2010, https://www.sueddeutsche.de/kultur/im-interview-goetz-aly-der-grosse-kater-1.269606.

51. Seidl, “Die Politik der Verdammnis.”

52. Ibid.

53. Cf. “Pro-Hamas Group Targets NYC Cancer Center, Accusing It of ‘Genocide’,” Times of Israel, January 16, 2024, https://www.timesofisrael.com/pro-hamas-group-targets-nyc-cancer-center-accusing-it-of-genocide/.

54. Cf. Douglas Kellner, Herbert Marcuse: Collected Papers of Herbert Marcuse, vol. 3, The New Left and the 1960s (London/New York: Routledge, 2005), p. 84.

55. Cf. Frantz Fanon, Die Verdammten dieser Erde (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlg, 1966), p. 27.

56. Juliane Rebentisch, “Realism Today: Art, Politics, and the Critique of Representation,” Diaphanes, https://www.diaphanes.net/titel/realismtoday-art-politics-and-the-critique-of-representation-2231.

57. Bazon Brock, transcript of the radio report on Deutschlandfunk “Documenta 15 ist die ‘Re-Fundamentalisierung der Kunst,’” June 21, 2022, https://bazonbrock.de/werke/detail/?id=3996.

58. Ibid.

59. Ibid.

60. Cf. ibid.

61. Ibid.

62. Ibid.

63. Ibid.

64. Otmar Hersche, “Otmar Hersche über Max Horkheimer: Kritische Theorie,” theoriekritik.ch, November 4, 2014, http://www.theoriekritik.ch/?p=766.

65. Max Horkheimer, “Die Pseudoradikalen,” in Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 14, Nachgelassene Schriften 1949–1972, ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer Verlage, 1988), p. 413. See also Stephan Grigat, “Israels Freiheit. Befreite Gesellschaft und Israel. Zum Verhältnis von Kritischer Theorie und Zionismus,” Jungle World 5, February 1, 2006.

66. Lautréamont, Die Gesänge des Maldoror (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 2004), p. 191.

67. Exhibition description of Adam Pendleton, Blackness White, and Light, March 31, 2023, to January 7, 2024, on the website of the Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, mumok, https://www.mumok.at/ausstellungen/adam-pendleton-blackness-white-and-light.

68. Artist page for Adam Pendleton on the website of Galerie Max Hetzler, https://www.maxhetzler.com/artists/adam-pendleton/selected-works.

69. Artist page for Adam Pendleton on the website of Pace Gallery, https://www.pacegallery.com/artists/adam-pendleton/.

70. Cf. Kimberly Drew (@museummammy), Instagram, https://www.instagram.com/museummammy?igsh=MWswZmxvYnBrYnl5ZQ==.

71. Let’s Talk Palestine (@letstalkpalestine), Instagram, October 10, 2023, https://www.instagram.com/p/CyMmuPdNzxZ/?igsh=MmMwMGdyNG1peXpk.

72. Decolonize This Place, Instagram, October 7, 2023, https://www.instagram.com/p/CyGh-aWu_PA/?igsh=NXlndThlMHF0anRl. (Post no longer available.)

73. Email response from Claire Hurley, Associate Director of Public Relations at Pace, New York, October 19, 2023.

74. Allie Biswas, “Adam Pendleton with Allie Biswas,” Brooklyn Rail, September 2016, https://brooklynrail.org/2016/09/art/adam-pendleton-with-allie-biswas.

75. Cf. Heather Mac Donald, “There Is No Epidemic of Fatal Police Shootings against Unarmed Black Americans,” Manhattan Institute, July 3, 2020, https://manhattan.institute/article/there-is-no-epidemic-of-fatal-police-shootings-against-unarmed-black-americans.

76. Cf. United States Census Bureau, “Quick Facts about the United States,” 2023, https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/US/RHI225222.

77. Cf. FBI, Criminal Justice Information Services Division, “Crime in the U.S. 2019,” https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2019/crime-in-the-u.s.-2019/topic-pages/tables/table-43.

78. Tom Tugend, “LA Jews Reeling after Local Institutions Looted and Burned in Floyd Protests,” Times of Israel, June 3, 2020, https://www.timesofisrael.com/la-jews-take-stock-after-george-floyd-protests-batter-local-institutions/.

79. Wendy J. Madnick, “Defending Jewish Los Angeles,” JLiving, September 2, 2020, https://jlivingmedia.com/defending-jewish-los-angeles/.

80. “All You Need to Know about Adam Pendleton,” Phaidon website, https://www.phaidon.com/agenda/art/articles/2020/september/03/all-you-need-to-know-about-adam-pendleton/.

81. Biswas, “Adam Pendleton with Allie Biswas.”

82. Ibid.

83. Ibid.

84. “Three Things You Should Know about Adam Pendleton,” Artsy, October 16, 2013, https://www.artsy.net/article/editorial-three-things-you-should-know-about-adam.

85. M. H. Miller, “Adam Pendleton Brings Black Dada to MoMA and Pace,” Observer, April 16, 2012, https://observer.com/2012/04/adam-pendleton-brings-black-dada-to-moma-and-pace/.

86. Ibid.

87. Cf. Angela N. Carroll, “The Residue of Representation: Adam Pendleton,” BmoreArt, September 11, 2017, https://bmoreart.com/2017/09/the-residue-of-representation-adam-pendleton.html.