Is Philosemitism Dangerous?
Yaniv Feller on Gerard Daniel Cohen's Good Jews: Philosemitism in Europe since the Holocaust
In Good Jews: Philosemitism in Europe Since the Holocaust, historian G. Daniel Cohen traces how befriending the figural and living Jew became fundamental to Western Europe’s postwar self-understanding and identity. In his review essay, Yaniv Feller, author of The Jewish Imperial Imagination: Leo Baeck and German-Jewish Thought, shows how Cohen’s argument is a crucial, complicating mirror to the West's modern moral identity.
Jews have long occupied a special place in the European imagination, yet they comprise only around 0.2% of the population of the European Union and the United Kingdom. In medieval times, Jews were the quintessential Other to Christianity and Islam. Since the Enlightenment, the so-called Jewish Question, namely whether Jews should be granted political and civil rights, became a framework through which empires and nation-states came to define themselves. The Jewish people occupied a central role in the Nazi worldview and in the regime’s expansionist and genocidal policies. In the aftermath of the Holocaust, the political and symbolic function of Jews changed once more.
In Good Jews: Philosemitism in Europe Since the Holocaust (Cambridge University Press, 2025), historian G. Daniel Cohen sets out to understand how philosemitism became a core component of European politics and identity in the postwar era: the story of befriending Jews—the philo in philosemitism—is the story of Western European countries’ postwar self-understanding.
Cohen’s eight-decade history draws on a great variety of non-Jewish and Jewish sources, including surveys of public opinion, political statements, and popular culture ranging from travelogues to films. Good Jews complements, in this respect, David Nirenberg’s Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition (2013), which offered a longue durée history of the West through the negative image of the Jew. Anti-Judaism is concerned with what Sarah Hammerschlag called the “figural Jew,” namely the ways in which Jews were imagined by non-Jews, primarily in religious and philosophical texts. Good Jews similarly devotes attention to figural Jews, but it is also concerned with real, living Jews. From a bird’s-eye perspective, it is a story of historical development, but Cohen’s careful reconstruction shows progress that was neither linear nor preordained. Philosemitism emerges as a multifaceted and ambiguous concept that can accommodate different and, at times, competing ideologies.
In 1963, the Jewish Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch warned that philosemitism “implies something like a certain element of antisemitism, that while vanquished, remains immanent.” The sociologist Zygmunt Bauman later used the term allosemitism – allo means other – to capture a spectrum of positions that stress Jewish difference, whether negative (antisemitism) or positive (philosemitism). The line between the two can be razor thin, as both share the premise that Jews are somehow not like other people. Often, the rise of a new form of philosemitism is accompanied by antisemitic eruptions of various kinds, be it the genteel classist antisemitism in British society, a revisionist memory culture of the Holocaust in Poland, or the desecration of Jewish cemeteries in Germany.
In the immediate postwar years, explicit antisemitic attitudes lingered. A 1946 survey in France, for example, found that more than a third of the population would not consider Jews “Frenchmen like all others.” Exposure to the horrors of the Holocaust and the presence of the United States on the continent delegitimized public expressions of antisemitism. What took its place was anti-antisemitism, the idea that to be a member of Western society, European countries and individuals had to repudiate antisemitism. For some, this was merely what Cohen calls tactical philosemitism. Germans after the war, for example, asked Jewish friends or colleagues to vouch for them in an attempt to find a place in the new order. These letters became known as Persilschein, or “clean bill of health,” playing on the name of a popular detergent brand.
At the same time, anti-antisemitism received serious philosophical and theological elaborations. In his 1946 Réflexions sur la question juive, Jean-Paul Sartre famously declared that antisemitism is a problem of the antisemite, not of the Jew. Writers like Sartre in France and George Orwell in Britain argued that a shift in societal attitudes could come about through individual and collective self-reflection. Several Christian organizations and denominations similarly went through a decades-long process of self-reckoning, epitomized by the Second Vatican Council’s 1965 Nostra Aetate declaration that stressed the shared “spiritual patrimony” of Jews and Christians and explicitly condemned antisemitism and the persecution of Jews.
The founding of the State of Israel in 1948 provided a new vehicle for philosemitic feelings. From Capra and Seymour’s portraits for Life magazine in 1949 to Willem van de Poll’s 1952 coffee-table album Daybreak of a Nation, photographs of Israeli Jews—beggars and workers, Holocaust survivors and soldiers—helped humanize Jews in Israel and made them more relatable. Cohen notes that Palestinians were mostly absent from this visual representation of the region, and when depicted, they were Orientalized and presented as miserable beings in need of pity. “The humanitarianization of Palestinians,” he writes, “contrasted with the humanization of Israelis.” But roughly twenty years later, attitudes toward Israel started to shift. Israel’s status as a regional and occupying power after 1967, as well as economic opportunities in the Middle East, led European politicians to seek neutrality. Yet support for Israel did not vanish. When the 1975 United Nations General Assembly Resolution 3379 condemning Zionism as racism was adopted, European politicians, like their North American counterparts, rejected it.
Today, criticism of the State of Israel has come to signify certain political or social views on both the right and left. At least until the 1967 War, however, Israelophilia and idealization of Israel were a staple among left activists and thinkers. The radical Italian philosopher Antonio Negri, who later became a harsh critic of Israel, thought that in the 1950s kibbutz utopia was realized. Less than three decades later, philosemitic sentiments were evoked again, this time in the name of neoliberalism. In 1979, the newly elected British prime minister Margaret Thatcher described Jews as hardworking, valuing education, and capable of self-help. Jews became a model minority for the Iron Lady’s political agenda. Others turned to Jews who were no longer there, casting a nostalgic gaze toward a lost past. In his now canonical essay “The Tragedy of Central Europe” (1983), the Czech novelist Milan Kundera expressed a longing for a Central European amalgamation of small nations that once transcended national borders. Jewish intellectuals such as Freud, Kafka, and Mahler were exemplars of a cosmopolitan identity that Kundera sought to recover, and that the European Union aspired to adopt. Whether socialist, capitalist, or cosmopolitan, the same tags that were long utilized by antisemites have now turned into badges of honor. Through the history of different decades and nations, Cohen shows how each era and region had its own definition of good Jews.
After the war, Holocaust commemoration grew in importance as part of European identity grounded in a philosemitic worldview. The heritage and museum landscape of Europe illustrates this point. Since the 1980s, Holocaust memorials and Jewish museums were established across Europe. The Association of European Jewish Museums, founded in 1989, now includes seventy institutional members. This number does not capture many smaller museums and commemoration sites that are not members of the AEJM. A recent survey of memorial and research sites dedicated to Jewish history and culture lists no less than 188 institutions in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland alone. The challenge for Holocaust education and public memory is emblematic of the tension in contemporary philosemitism more broadly. Under the banner of “Never Again!” Holocaust education is touted on both sides of the Atlantic as a vehicle for combating prejudice, raising levels of tolerance, and promoting democracy as a general ideal. This is one of the reasons it became central to attempts to forge a shared European identity. Scholars in recent decades caution, however, that the efficacy of Holocaust education in increasing tolerance or specifically inoculating against antisemitism is mixed and limited.
The three pillars of European philosemitism—supporting the State of Israel, preserving the memory of the Holocaust, and supporting Jewish life—were well established by the end of the twentieth century. In the last two decades, these pillars have undergone, according to Cohen, a process of change. Good Jews was completed less than a year after Hamas’s attack and the war in Gaza, but Cohen’s work suggests that the pillars of philosemitism were already teetering. Developments since October 7, 2023 accelerated this process. Increasingly polarized politics in Europe, Israel, and the United States, as well as the rising political and social backlash against the State of Israel, especially among younger people, might usher in what Cohen calls a post-philosemitic age, which he promises to explore in a subsequent study.
“Investigating ‘love’,” Cohen writes early on in Good Jews, “requires permanent attention to its oppressiveness.” In other words, what was preached in the name of tolerance can still breed intolerance. Nowhere is this more evident than in Germany, often described as the world champion of remembrance culture. If the memory of the Holocaust is at the foundation of what it means to be a citizen of democratic, reunified Germany, how can one explain the success of radical right parties like the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD)? And where does this remembrance culture leave Muslim citizens and immigrants who came after the war? Should they be expected to have the same relation to the three pillars of philosemitism, including support for the State of Israel in the name of Holocaust memory? Since the early 2000s, special Holocaust education programs for Muslims have been established across Germany. While purporting to include them in the shared narrative, for which their forefathers were not responsible, these programs cast them as suspected carriers of what is sometimes referred to as imported antisemitism. Anthropologists such as Sultan Doughan and Esra Özyürek show how Muslims become a foil, or “subcontractors of guilt” in Özyürek’s language, that allows the German majority to feel morally superior. In a similar vein, the suffering of Germany’s past colonial victims, as well as contemporary Palestinians, is marginalized because it does not align with philosemitic support for Israel as a post-Holocaust moral obligation.
In a much-discussed March 2024 article in The Atlantic, Franklin Foer argued that the Golden Age of American Jews, which started in the postwar era and reached its apex in the 1990s, has come to an end. The two contexts are, of course, very different. Postwar Europe did not produce Jerry Seinfeld, Barbara Streisand, or Steven Spielberg. Jews in postwar Europe were not considered part of mainstream culture, but rather exotic, often barely visible others. This is why nostalgia plays such an important role in contemporary European philosemitism. Yet the feeling of crisis and the end of an era is eerily similar and suggests a broader phenomenon.
The emergent post-philosemitic era is difficult to grasp because it is tied to the fact that two dangerous phenomena can be simultaneously true: the rise of antisemitism and the increasing misuse of anti-antisemitism in social and political rhetoric. Regardless of which definition of antisemitism one adopts, there has been a noticeable increase in antisemitic incidents worldwide. According to Tel Aviv University’s Antisemitism Worldwide Report for 2024, the United Kingdom saw a twofold increase in antisemitic incidents since October 7. In France, the increase was threefold. In a 2025 American Jewish Committee survey, 47% of young American Jews reported feeling personally targeted by antisemitism.
The European Union established the role of a coordinator for combating antisemitism in 2015, and several member states followed suit. They often base their understanding of antisemitism on the definition of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA), which has been criticized as conflating too easily criticism of Israel with antisemitism. Some of these functionaries, most notably the German commissioner Felix Klein, follow this line closely and use the power of their office to label criticism of the State of Israel as antisemitic. In the United States, the Trump administration threatened to revoke major universities’ tax-exempt status and to withhold billions in research funds, arguing they were not doing enough to combat antisemitism. Critics frame this attempt as part of a broader attack on academic freedom and free speech rather than a fight against antisemitism. Regardless of whether one interprets the current attempts as a tactical, even cynical, ploy or honest philosemitic feelings is not the primary concern of Cohen's book, what they betray is the weaponization of the fight against antisemitism in the pursuit of political agendas.
“Which side are you on?” is a question that every Jew is asked to answer now, whether they like it or not. A consequence of the radicalization of philosemitism in the twenty-first century, however, is that it insists on one correct answer. A contemporary radical philosemitic perspective cannot accommodate anti-Israel dissent, even when those expressing it are Israeli Jews. There is a corollary, albeit with significantly less political impact, in certain activist circles. Jewish college students in the United States, for example, report being excluded from campus groups fighting for social causes, or being required to publicly pledge that they disavow Zionism and the State of Israel. In this instance, the good Jews of Cohen’s title would be those who, ideally in the name of Judaism, are anti-Zionist. While such a phenomenon is less pronounced in Europe, it seems that this trend is crossing the Atlantic.
Holocaust memory is also being transformed. Basic knowledge about the historical events is declining, as is their affective power. Fewer and fewer children and university students have exposure to people who lived in the pre-war era. A colleague who teaches post-Holocaust literature quipped that for our students there is no real difference in terms of historical distance between the First and Second World Wars. Thus, while Holocaust memory is likely to remain central at least for another generation or two, there is no guarantee that it will continue to have the same pedagogical and political valence. The reason has more to do with the natural passage of time than with the State of Israel, but global politics do play a role. Precisely because the nexus of official philosemitism insists on linking support for Israel with Holocaust memory, a critique of Israel might be tangled up with resentment toward official memory politics.
In one of the most thought-provoking moments in Good Jews, Cohen writes that “The state of Israel, which according to Zionist ideology 'normalized' Jewish existence, may have now de-normalized the Jewish condition.” But this normalization was always only a hope, if not sheer fantasy. Zionists and anti-Zionist thinkers, Jews and non-Jews alike, stressed and continue to stress the uniqueness of Jews and the Jewish state. From tactical antisemitism to cultural appropriations in which non-Jews perform allegedly Jewish music for other non-Jews, Cohen’s history of European philosemitism shows that neither Jews nor Israel were ever normalized.
Earnest or strategic, religious or secular, philosemitism remains a misguided stance. Cohen writes as a historian, but his work has normative implications. Good Jews shows that we must resist placing Jews into predetermined categories, whether in terms of religious practice or political belief. This perspective advocates for a more nuanced approach to Holocaust education, one that moves beyond abstract universal lessons or reductive narratives of Jewish victimhood. Antisemitism should be opposed because it is inherently unjust, not because its opposition is a convenient instrument for political purposes. Likewise, the State of Israel should be open to criticism for its policies and conduct without assigning inherent moral value to its existence. Much of the pernicious political consequences of philosemitism is connected the fact that it is easier to love the idea of an abstract Jewish collective rather than interact with real, living Jews. It is a testament to the continuing allure of philosemitism that the treatment of Jews as everyday historical and political actors can still seem heretical.
Yaniv Feller is a scholar of German-Jewish philosophy and history and Assistant Professor of Religion and Jewish Studies, University of Florida. He is the author of The Jewish Imperial Imagination: Leo Baeck and German-Jewish Thought and is currently working on Jew in a Box, a guide to Jewish museums worldwide. Yaniv can be reached via email or LinkedIn.
