Hating Judy

A postscript to my essay on German "Psychozionism"

[Back in July I published a loooong essay in n+1 about German public discourse post-10/7. The piece is almost 6000 words long as it is, but there was still much I wasn’t able to touch on in sufficient detail. This part of the argument I didn’t really develop — and it’s been getting, if anything, even more interesting and telling.]

A few weeks ago, I came across the following tweet that I found both unremarkable and deeply telling. Maike Klebl works at BILD, Germany’s largest newspaper (where “newspaper” is very loosely understood). And she’s doing something I’ve been noticing a lot over the last year, and something I’ve become fascinated with:

A brief bit of context: Klebl is responding to a tweet (from 2023, for some reason) by the rightwing “media-watchdog” account ÖRR Blog (it appears to be run by a politician from the conservative CSU) — about a media personality (hence the media-watchdog’s interest) during a parliamentary hearing calling “feminism” part of a “fascist ideology”. No points for guessing that the feminists in question are TERFs — Grischkat was not calling their “feminism” fascist, he’s calling their calls for trans exclusion fascist. And he cites an article the philosopher Judith Butler wrote for the Guardian.

This is where Maike Klebl’s tweet comes in: “By the way, Judith Butler”, she writes, “who is cited by this ‘expert’ in the Bundestag to defame feminists, is also a rabid antisemite. It’s frightening who our politicians give a hearing to.” It’s a fascinating two-step: a (non-Jewish) German person calling a prominent Jewish intellectual an anti-semite may be kind of shocking to the uninitiated, but in Germany these days it’s par for the course. You needn’t be Jewish to be a target of antisemitism; and if you’re Jewish, your odds of being accused of it in Germany seem to go up these days. But note the further implication that Butler — who besides being a prominent Jewish intellectual is a noted gender scholar and has written extensively on trans-exclusionary feminism — should not be invoked, should not be referred to, should not be “given a hearing” in the Bundestag.

This is, I think, a fascinating dynamic we have been paying too little attention to: German media are extremely ready with interpretations of Judith Butler’s remarks as anti-semitic. No real surprise there. Germans have been extremely ready with interpretations of anyone as anti-semitic, so long as that anyone isn’t them. But a lot of German media have used that diagnosis to also call into question Butler’s expertise in the field they are most known for — namely gender theory. And in a further step they have used it to call into question that very field. Note that in this post, for instance, Butler’s supposed “rabid antisemit[ism]” is implicitly introduced as a reason to give credence to TERF talking points.