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The printed editions of Berlin Review, Zeitschrift für Bücher und Ideen, are a feast (three times a year in print, eight online). About half the articles are in German and you’re constantly drawn in by the beautiful big words in the titles: Sprachkundige Guerillas, Mündlichkeit und Schriftlichkeit, Schwarze Welten.
I fell into an (English) essay by Deborah Feldman, who wrote the memoir Unorthodox, many will know its Netflix adaption. It is titled « For the Love of Jews » and it arrives at a time when sensible Europeans are asking whether guilt-induced philosemitism colors the EU’s soft stand against Israel.
I fell: after scanning the name Edgar Hilsenrath, for whom certain postwar cases crystallized « a disturbing moral paradox at the heart of postwar European society ». Feldman opens with those cases: Nazi perpetrators who after 1945 tried to hide by pretending to be Jewish, and so: victims. She admits to the « strange hobby » of collecting these people for whom « Jewishness seemed but a convenient or even profitable costume », but her exploration of conversions becomes more sinister, citing a converted German-Jewish scholar she writes,
[Barbara] Steiner claimed not to know of a single Jewish family in Germany who had not at one point been before a Beit Din, a rabbical court that adjudicates conversion and questions of lineage.
There was even talk of « a black market for Jewish grandmothers, » shortly after the war, and Feldman’s story turns truly absurd (and apparently quite true) when in 2023 a German broadcaster uncovered ten Jewish associations that were in fact led by antisemitics claiming they represent « true Judaism. »
Philosemitism, she says, oscillates between admiration and othering:
Philosemitism functions not as the opposite of antisemitism but as its incubator — a vessel in which a new, stealthy and more virulent antisemitism can develop.
In 2025 the historian Gerard Daniel Cohen published Good Jews, a history of philosemitism in Europe. Feldman writes that Cohen moves beyond the German-centered frame and traces
the phenomenon across multiple countries and generations, revealing how it functioned as a transnational discourse shaping contemporary European politics, culture, and social hierarchies. Cohen argues that philosemitism now forms a structural and systemic framework, embedded in institutions, media, education, and policy, that underpins Europe’s postwar self-conception and defends it against perceived threats.
Those last words — ‘Europe’s postwar self-conception’, ‘perceived threats’ — suggest, in Feldman’s reading, why the EU does not make firmer demands from Israel, and why, when Israel started bombarding Iran in June 2025, chancellor Merz, said: « Das ist die Drecksarbeit, die Israel macht für uns alle. »
