The announcement is made just in time for the Jewish New Year, which begins on Friday evening Jewish General (YES) a change in the editor-in-chief. Starting next week, Philipp Peyman Engel, who was head of the weekly newspaper for five years, will take over the management.
The 40-year-old journalist, who previously headed the newspaper’s features section, recently attracted attention with comments in which, for example, he sharply criticized the cultural representative Claudia Roth in her role in Documenta fifteen or the essayist Fabian Wolff, who revealed in the summer that his claimed Jewish identity did not correspond to the facts, called him a “costume Jew.”
The new boss wants to make the paper more controversial and relevant
Josef Schuster, President of the Central Council of Jews, describes Philipp Peyman Engel in the JA as “strong of opinion” and “experienced in debate”. Engel emphasizes that he wants to make the newspaper more visible in the German media landscape and take a stronger position. The paper should therefore become more controversial and relevant than it was under the twelve-year leadership of David Kauschke, 64.
The Jewish weekly newspaper has a circulation of almost 10,000 copies and is published and subsidized by the Central Council of Jews in Berlin. Its thematic focus is on Jewish life in Germany, so the weekly newspaper debates anti-Semitism and how to combat it. The new editor-in-chief Engel explains in an interview with the New Zurich newspaperthat the leaf line could not be assigned to a left-right scheme. When it comes to social policy issues, the editorial team is more left-wing, but when it comes to foreign policy it takes a clear transatlantic position and solidarity with Israel, which does not mean, however, that the government is not criticized.