A little Middle Eastern music, well known in Europe, resonates against all expectations in Chile, where 18,000 Jewish Chileans and 400,000 Chileans of Palestinian origin live. Thus, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a regular guest in the political life of this country and, more than that, constitutes an important marker in the game of political affiliations. Gabriel Boric, the new Chilean president in office since March 11, comes from the extreme left and has sometimes taken an anti-Zionist stance. Although he has softened politically on this issue as his political stature has grown, a few tweets have resurfaced during his campaign, including one that has become famous in Chile and has been much commented on: “The Jewish community of Chile is sending me a small jar of honey for the Jewish New Year, reaffirming their commitment to ‘a more inclusive, supportive and respectful society’. I appreciate the gesture but they could start by asking Israel to return the illegally occupied Palestinian territories.” Ariel Borohodzaner, founder of the Jewish Students of Chile, sheds light on the political context of his country, the situation of Jews living with the world’s largest Palestinian community outside the Middle East – all in a country where the far-left candidate won against a far-right leader, Jose Antonio Kast, who praises the Pinochet dictatorship and whose father, a German immigrant to Chile after World War II, was a member of the Nazi party…
The shadow of Nazism, again and again: it is in the joint history of Nazism and Hungary that Victor Orbán’s policy stumbles in the pact he intends to propose to Hungarian Jews. In an earlier article in K. from April 2021, János Gadó explained the kind of coexistence with the Hungarian Jewish community that Orbán envisaged as functional, his efforts to enlist it in his nationalism, and the divisions within it as a reaction to his Jewish policy. He continues his account as the next Hungarian parliamentary elections take place on April 3. As János Gadó explains, the Jews and the issue of antisemitism have been overly instrumentalized during the campaign: Orbán presents himself on the one hand as the authentic defender of the Jews in Europe and labels his enemies as antisemites; but he does so using anti-democratic, nationalistic and religious rhetoric reminiscent of that of the Horthy regime between the wars – a regime considered by most Hungarian Jews as the antechamber of the Shoah for them. If a part of Hungarian Jews – around the Chabad movement – supports the pact that Orbán is proposing to them, the majority of them remain intransigent concerning the rewriting of the history of the Shoah that this implies. A rewriting of history where Hungary presents itself as a nation of heroes and victims of Nazism.
This week we wanted to finally put the beautiful testimony of Ruben Honigmann back on the front page, who presents himself as the heir of a German language attached to an outdated world: “It’s the same story every time. I am in a Parisian square and people ask me what language I speak with my children. My “Jewish face” throws them off the trail with two wrong answers: either it’s Yiddish or Hebrew. Either way, they don’t recognize my mother tongue, spoken by one in five Europeans. (…) The Berlin German I speak is a fossil.”
