2026 Runners-Up III: The Antisemitism of the Others
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The Antisemitism of the Others
by Emma Tenzler
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On the day Hitler killed himself, my neighbour Manfred hung the red-white-black flag of the Reich from his balcony. In the village of my grandparents, on Germany’s eastern border, the national colours dot each street like forgotten Christmas decorations.
Manfred and I had first struck up a conversation over the garden fence. May 2025; gas prices were rising, the local lido had been reopened to great triumph, and Israel had killed almost 67,000 people in Gaza.
I nodded away a conversation that circled the usual topics of inflation, the mistreatment of Russia, and immigrants, then startled. Manfred had said something like this: “It’s them this time, hurting the Jews, not us. But they are not really victims either.”
A few miles to the west, in the east German state of Saxony-Anhalt, Hans-Thomas Tillschneider, a local AFD politician, shares Manfred’s concern with the Jews. He regrets the massacre of Israeli festivalgoers. Shortly after the Hamas attack of 7 October 2023, he posts that Israel is punishing Palestinians collectively for the crimes of Hamas; then, in the same breath: “Exactly the same applies, incidentally, to the Germans and the Holocaust. You cannot hold the entire German people responsible for the crimes of a few.”
Tillschneider routinely scorns the commemoration of these minority crimes as “Schuldkult” (guilt cult), and has warned that the Central Council of Jews in Germany is flooding the country with migrants in a variation of the “Great Replacement” theory.
Victor Klemperer, the Jewish philologist who survived the Nazi years in Germany, observed how language was used to dehumanize Jews by making them an abstract category. When the Nazi press wrote about “Jews”, they meant the threat of the “international Jewry”, cut neatly off its human referent.
The anti-antisemitism of the AFD is not concerned with the safety of the Jew, but with the question of who gets to cross the German border.
A month after I spoke to Manfred, Fox News asked Chancellor Friedrich Merz about the rising antisemitism in his country. The German government and the “vast majority of German people”, said Merz, abhorred Jew-hatred; the new antisemitism on German soil was “imported”. Rising antisemitism in Germany can, in part, be attributed to migrants; but reducing the problem to this risks obscuring its more persistent, homegrown forms.
Merz reassured his audience: “We are doing everything we can to bring these numbers down.”
“Everything” has included the amendment of both citizenship law and public funding regulations so that both depend on affirming the IHRA definition of antisemitism and affirming Germany’s responsibility for Israel. Some twenty years ago, Oxford philosopher Brian Klug warned against a “new antisemitism” that equated Jew-hatred with criticising Israel. Writing about US debates, Klug’s conclusion fits neatly in Germany today. “When antisemitism is everywhere, it is nowhere.”
Scan any conservative newspaper in Germany, and you will probably find a dozen or so articles on the “new antisemitism”.
These papers have, in general, less to say about the threat posed by the AFD. Most antisemitic crimes continue to be committed by the far-right. The AFD is under investigation for antisemitic incidents; the AFD is leading the polls; and the focus has shifted to the antisemitism of the others.
What was coined to protect Jews has become, in the hands of their historic persecutors, a word that does two things at once: it risks licensing the antisemitism it claims to fight, and it hollows out the tools that might fight it genuinely.
At an AFD rally two years ago, a woman holds the German flag with an Israeli flag pinned over it. It might be the lighting, but the Israeli flag is almost transparent. A faint blue and the Star of David are draped over the black, red, and gold that dominate the frame. It is an image of appropriation; the symbol of the persecuted is used by the persecutors to free themselves of responsibility and project it elsewhere.
Manfred probably thinks he is one of the good ones. Because the word that should make that impossible has been made to make it easy.
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Target Audience/Publication: If I were to try to place this piece in the UK, I would pitch it to the London Review of Books. Its combination of anecdote and structural critique, the scaffolding drawn from Klemperer and Orwell, and its restrained, ironic voice align with the LRB’s essayistic style and tolerance for intellectual digression. When writing it, I had in mind a politically engaged readership interested in debates around Israel and Palestine, and in the political force of language.
Alternatively, it could work as a Long Read for The Guardian. For a broader audience, I would add more contextual framing, particularly around German politics, and reduce the assumed familiarity with the IHRA debate.
In the US, I would try n+1 and leave the piece largely unchanged.
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Critical Reflection
Orwell’s essay “Politics and the English Language” (1946) forms the backbone of this piece. His argument that political language is designed to make lies sound truthful, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind, is what I am trying to show happening to the word “antisemitism” in Germany. When Merz says his government is doing “everything” to combat antisemitism, or when the AFD claims to “protect Jewish citizens”, the word is doing the opposite of its intended meaning.
His essays on antisemitism shaped the piece more personally. In “Antisemitism in Britain” (1945), Orwell does something that was unusual then and still is: he turns the accusation inward, insisting that English liberals who congratulated themselves on their tolerance were not examining themselves honestly. That is Manfred´s function in my piece. He´s the ordinary man Orwell kept returning to, whose prejudices persist because they are not named.
In “As I Please” (Tribune, February 1944), Orwell finds that antisemitism is rarely discussed frankly; people either deny it exists or treat it as someone else’s problem. That evasion, the antisemitism of the others, is where my title comes from.
I was also influenced by Orwell´s logic of doublethink from Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). The debate I am describing has reached a point of terminological collapse: a man who warns that the Central Council of Jews is conspiring to destroy Germany presents himself as the guardian of Jewish safety; the German chancellor attributes rising antisemitism to immigrants only. Far-right politicians use the term “antisemitism” to mean its opposite, and this inversion is increasingly normalised.
Orwell was a leftist who rejected the left’s self-flattery. He distrusted institutions and wrote from outside. There is something in that posture, suspicious of every side’s clean hands, that this piece tries, however imperfectly, to inherit.
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‘The Antisemitism of the Others‘ by Emma Tenzler is Highly Commended in the Column Category of the 2026 Orwell Society/NUJ Young Journalists Awards. Emma Tenzler is studying for the History and Politics Tripos at the University of Cambridge. She began writing for her local newspaper at 14. She has been acting as Features editor for Varsity, the largest student newspaper in Cambridge, for six months, and has written extensively for the Features and Arts sections.
This post is the fifth, final of a series of the winners and runners-up in 2026
All photography thanks to Tiger Ant Productions