Of
Till Briegleb
There has never been a discussion like this in Germany, a euphoric Susan Neiman called into the microphone at the end. What got the director of the Potsdam Einstein Forum and organizer of the big Berlin conference “Hijacking Memory – The Holocaust and the New Right” so enthusiastic in the House of World Cultures was the joint tour of the publicist Daniel Cohn-Bendit and the US -political scientist Peter Beinart through a minefield of explosive terms – with the whimsy of a late-night show. But that wasn’t what the organizer of the conference and Director of the Potsdam Einstein Forum Neiman so enthusiastic. It was a fair argument about the core question of this four-day event: How can it happen that in Germany criticism of the Israeli government and the disregard for the rights of the Palestinians is often silenced with the accusation of anti-Semitism?