More must be done to keep anti-Semitism in check, a German parliamentary hearing concluded.
Meeting Monday at the Bundestag in Berlin, lawmakers and experts offered suggestions and described the challenges.
Deidre Berger, the head of the American Jewish Committee office in Berlin, urged the German government to install a professional at the Bundestag designated to respond to the issue.
Henryk Broder, a journalist and co-founder of the Axis of Good Web site, warned of “modern anti-Semites who have good manners instead of shaved heads.”
According to Heinz Fromm, the head of the German Federal Service for Protection of the Constitution, 20 percent of Germans have a “latent tendency to endorse anti-Semitic attitudes.”
More Germans reject the notion that they bear a special responsibility to guard against anti-Semitism because of the Holocaust, said Werner Bergmann, a professor at the Center for Research on Anti-Semitism at Berlin’s Technical University.
