Dr. Fabian Weber: "Exceptional Jews’: Jewish interactions with Germany’s New Right"

There have been few but prominent Jews that supported the venture of a New Right emerging in the 1960s Federal Republic of Germany. New Right activists usually avoided explicit anti-Jewish attacks, but were harshly opposing Germany’s attempts to cope with the Nazi Past. Jewish voices were to a lesser extent a propaganda instrument underlining New Right’s distance to traditional, ‘Hitlerist’ right-wing positions. Right-wing Jews followed their own agenda. They were inspired by ideas of conservatism merged each with concepts of Jewish identity. But were they truly welcomed, mainly functionalized or covertly despised by New Right intellectuals? The lecture will investigate the relationship between right-wing Jewish individuals and the New Right and shed light on the conflicts that arose between Jewish and non-Jewish members of this joint network. What attracted far-right Jews to contribute to a still extremist network of antiliberal and nationalistic thinkers?

Dr. Fabian Weber is a researcher at the Bucerius Institute for Research of Contemporary German History and Society at the University of Haifa. He received the Manfred Lahnstein Post-Doctoral Research Fellowship of the ZEIT-Stiftung. His dissertation was published in 2020 at Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht with the title Projections on Zionism. Non-Jewish perceptions of Zionism in Germany 1897-1933 (“Projektionen auf den Zionismus. Nichtjüdische Wahrnehmungen des Zionismus im Deutschen Reich 1897-1933“). Fabian Weber worked at the Ludwig-Maximilian-University and the University of the German Federal Armed Forces (Universität der Bundeswehr) in Munich, where he started to research on German far-right extremism after 1945. Since April 2022 he is affiliated to the Institute for the History of the German Jews in Hamburg as a postdoctoral researcher on the project “Debates on Kosher slaughtering in Western Germany since 1945”.