Arts & Culture Alliance Berlin looks toward shifting the establishment narrative on the Berlin Antisemitism Funding Scandal
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For a long read about Berlin cultural repression, see our October 2025 article:
“Your artistic freedom ends where our political sensitivities begin.” This is what Sarah Wedl-Wilson, then state secretary and now successor of the disgraced Berlin cultural senator Joe Chialo, allegedly said to Louna Sbou, director of the Oyoun cultural center, shortly before the center’s public funding was cut, according to Sbou. This quote neatly sums up the attitude of many Berlin politicians who simultaneously monetize the city’s image as a symbol of cultural freedom while doing everything in their power to ensure that only content they approve of is given a platform in Berlin.
Now, details of the main vessel for this attempt at narrative hegemony are coming to light: On January 30, the first meeting of the Committee of Inquiry into the Allocation of Funding for Antisemitism Prevention took place. Established to investigate the major Berlin funding scandal, the committee was initiated by Die Linke and The Greens, and is tasked with determining if legal regulations were broken in the allocation of millions of Euros for so-called projects of significant political importance. By early May, the committee is set to question former cultural senator Joe Chialo (CDU) and his successor Sarah Wedl-Wilson (independent, CDU-aligned) on how the €3.4 million allocated to the cultural department from a total pot of €20 million for “antisemitism prevention” was spent on their watch. Revelations this week from WhatsApp messages analyzed by Berliner Morgenpost point to the Israeli embassy’s direct involvement in the allocation decisions.
The Action Fund Against Antisemitism was a juryless pot of cash allegedly divvied out per Chialo’s personal discretion at the behest of several Berlin parliament members from his CDU party, including to vehemently pro-Israel groups and individuals backed by the CDU. This played out amid a dramatic federal push to redefine criticism of the state of Israel as antisemitic under the highly contentious IHRA definition. A parallel controversy is now taking place over the admitted CDU influence over the composition of the juries responsible for allocating the full €20 million fund.
A trove of thousands of documents have been released by the freedom of information portal Frag den Staat, including countless emails between the Senate Department for Culture and politicians, as well as from external entrepreneurs and lobbyists. Despite evidence of pushback from workers within the Senate offices, who called out procedural irregularities over and over again, funding criteria and guidelines appear to have been largely ignored. Instead, projects personally selected by CDU members were favored, some of whom even contacted the senator directly—addressing him in emails informally by his first name only, which is rare in German professional contexts—to exert pressure to secure public funding, as was the case with the questionable US-backed lobbying organization ELNET.
The scandal has attracted copious amounts of media commentary across all major German outlets. However, the sheer volume of data available in the Frag den Staat dossier means that its medial interpretation tends to be skewed towards various political interests vying for the spotlight as the election year in Berlin kicks off.
The funding included €1.4 million awarded to the Nova Exhibition via Chialo’s old music business contact Benjamin Budde of Budde Music publishing. The propagandistic Nova Exhibition Berlin received criticism from the start, which ramped up when the radical Israeli settler and alleged war criminal Elkana Federman was invited to speak as part of its public program, and again when the administration tried to have schools encourage their pupils to visit the graphically violent show, a clear violation of the Beutelsbacher Consensus which prohibits overwhelming students with indoctrination. Yet the main focus of press scrutiny has been on the Zera Institute, a self-styled anti-antisemitism think tank run by Maral Salmassi, a former DJ with no expertise in antisemitism prevention, who emerged in the last two years as an aggressively anti-Islam right-wing influencer. She has made countless dehumanizing statements along with promoting antisemitic conspiracy theories, and is now under fire for tweeting in February 2025 “Soros is and has always been a parasite.” Another highly controversial conspiracy theory she developed was retweeted by Elon Musk, leading to a rise in her followers. Incredibly, this influencer status apparently garnered her a place on the board of the CDU-Lichterfelde alongside Christian Goiny. Goiny is now at the center of the funding scandal, along with CDU colleague Dirk Stettner, for aggressively pushing their funding wish-list on the cultural administration.
[See our new article focused on Zera Institute and its development of surveillance AI to detect what it defines as “implicit” antisemitism in social media comments, aka criticism of Israel. ]
The “Fördergeld-Affäre” testifies to the tradition of corruption of the CDU [Ex.1, Ex.2, Ex.3], yet the ethical acrobatics of Staatsräson continue to enchant the German press and political establishment, who prefer to focus on bureaucratic missteps rather than the systemic discursive function or obvious international context of these maneuvers. Public discourse around the scandal—and even the investigation itself—has been dominated by pro-Israel politicians looking to instrumentalize it for their own political gain. In doing so, they obscure the inherently problematic diversion of funds from other potential areas of the city budgets and funneled to redefine antisemitism in order to legitimize German support for Israel as it commits an internationally recognized genocide that is largely unacknowledged in Germany.
The Committee
The composition of the investigating committee itself has raised alarm bells. According to Parliament rules, the committee make-up reflects the party proportions of the senate and consists of nine members (three CDU, two SPD, two Green, one Die Linke, and one member of the far-right AfD parliamentary group who, however, is set to be excluded due to insufficient votes.) As part of the governing coalition in Berlin whose party members are alleged to have violated the law, the CDU and SPD are, in effect, legally investigating themselves, while the Greens and Linke are utilizing the inquiry for traction in an election year. Facing an additional state audit from the Landesrechnungshof, the CDU has already attempted to present any irregularities merely as “formal errors.”
Die Linke has appointed the former Bundestag member Martina Renner as Referentin (speaker) of the committee; notably, she has accepted gifts of all-inclusive trips to Israel from the pro-Israel lobby group ELNET on at least three occasions (one of which had to be publicly disclosed on her Bundestag profile), presenting a probable conflict of interest. Here Renner appears in promotional videos for ELNET, the very same organization that received at least €200,000 of Berlin public funding in 2024 and 2025, and which is frequently mentioned in the Frag den Staat documents related to the funding scandal. ELNET also has close ties to Chialo himself, among the main protagonists in this affair. (You can read Arts & Culture Alliance Berlin’s full statement on Renner’s appointment here.) Abgeordneten Watch has published an extensive article about how ELNET’s paid trips to Israel are funded and staged so that Israeli arms dealers can solicit European politicians. Meanwhile, ELNET lobbies on behalf of Israel for political access, economic favoritism, and international networking—even flying the antisemitism commissioner Felix Klein to the annual AIPAC meeting in Washington.
Committee member and Green Party MEP Susanna Kahlefeld has been a leading voice in leveling corruption accusations against the SPD and CDU. However, Kahlefeld personally helped set off the first wave of hysterical anti-Palestinian repression against Berlin culture in late 2023: She made false accusations of antisemitism against Oyoun, the aforementioned BIPoC and women-run cultural center in Neukölln, after Oyoun refused to cancel an event organized by Jüdische Stimme (Jewish Voice). Kahlefeld only retracted her lies about Oyoun after they hired a lawyer who issued two cease and desist orders which she signed. Although Oyoun was legally cleared of all antisemitism accusations, Chialo and his administration still refused to reinstate its funding, forcing the institution’s closure and the loss of dozens of jobs. How can Kahlefeld be trusted to oversee this inquiry when her own perspective and prejudice seems to align so closely to that of Chialo and Sarah Wedl-Wilson?
While there seems to be almost complete agreement in the opposition and media coverage of the breach of trust by Chialo and Wedl-Wilson in the funding scandal, criticism focused solely on the technicalities of the allocation obscures the deeper problem within German politics and across all parties. “Procedural” and “formal” errors by civil servants in the allocation of public funds are just the tip of the iceberg of scandalous ethical failures. In Germany, it seems expedient to deflect attention from German complicity in the gravest of crimes by placing henchmen of authoritarian anti-antisemitism like Chialo and Wedl-Wilson under scrutiny with possible legal consequences for rule violations in the implementation of this program, while a deeper investigation of the program itself is avoided. Wedl-Wilson should indeed resign out of principle, but hopefully not just so the CDU/SPD can return to business as usual.
Tel Aviv Connection
The first meeting of the investigating committee was chaired by Melanie Kühnemann-Grunow who was a central force in enthusiastically promoting the Tel Aviv-Berlin City Partnership: one of the more cynical expressions of “Israelsolidarität” against the backdrop of an ongoing genocide.
The documents released by Frag den Staat reveal that politicians repeatedly pointed toward the new city partnership between Tel Aviv and Berlin to justify their urgent need to fund “projects of particular political significance.” In an email dated May 28, 2025, Wedl-Wilson herself explicitly stated that due to the Tel Aviv partnership, the newly founded Zera Institute should have its budget fully covered despite not meeting standard criteria.
Indeed, Wedl-Wilson has often touted her Israel connections, posting that her August 2025 meeting with Ron Prosor, Israeli ambassador to Germany, was her first conversation with an ambassador as senator, underlining “the special importance of cooperation and close friendship between Berlin and Israel.”
Scandal within a Scandal
The primary scandal of historical dimensions is, of course, the German government’s diplomatic, financial, and material support for Israel despite the mounting consensus on the genocidal nature of its ongoing assault on Gaza and Palestinians. A pending ICJ case brought against Germany by Nicaragua for aiding and abetting genocide in Gaza has been downplayed, when not totally ignored, by the German media. This is compounded by over 1,000 criminal charges against Scholz, Baerbock, Merz, and other leading politicians who supported and facilitated Israeli crimes against international law. Such developments foreground an uneasiness among the German political class, as legal analysts point to a potential reckoning for German civil servants complicit in international crimes.
Meanwhile, the chasm between the German public and its political and media class continues to widen. More than half of Germans support military sanctions against Israel. Over 62 percent of German voters believe that Israel has committed genocide, and around 80 percent are against Israel’s military actions in Gaza. Since domestic popular opinion could have real consequences for politicians who are found to be complicit in crimes against humanity, control of the narrative is of central importance for their political survival. This control has been steadily slipping: in late 2024, it was reported that 48 percent of Germans have “little or no confidence” in German reporting on Gaza. Yet the German press continues to dismiss pro-Palestine demonstrations as “mobs” of “Jew-haters” to an increasingly disenchanted public.
The profound effects of the crackdown on Palestine solidarity on the Berlin cultural field are detailed in our last article for etos.media.
READ MORE: Kultur in Zeiten des Völkermords
The German media landscape has almost without exception failed to engage with the country’s abject inability to prevent another genocide, instead doubling down on attacking Palestinians and those in solidarity with them. This approach often dovetails with racist accusations of “imported antisemitism” and anti-immigration rhetoric.
The funding scandal has presented the German media with an opportunity to jump on this particular issue in order to appear vigilant, with press inquiries mostly led by the unabashedly pro-Israel Berlin newspaper Tagesspiegel. At the time of writing, the funding scandal has generated only a single international article by the Jerusalem Post, and the narrative is still dominated by pro-Israel outlets and politicians who have contributed to the manufacture of consent in Germany for Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
Authoritarian Anti-Antisemitism
In the context of the German government’s almost unequivocal support of Israeli aggression, funding structures set up to prevent antisemitism are highly vulnerable to instrumentalization. Indeed, such funds may be more likely to harm than protect Jewish life. The German political establishment frames Jewish people as a homogenous “other,” and criminalizes Jewish dissent—see the latest attacks on Jüdische Stimme by Uwe Becker, the antisemitism commissioner of Hessia and a member of the medieval crusading Deutscher Orden—while advancing the agendas of groups tied to the Israeli occupation. Simultaneously, many Jewish-Muslim dialogue projects have been denied further public funding, while money is diverted toward German anti-Muslim and sometimes antisemitic influencers and entrepreneurs with no expertise in battling antisemitism, as long as they prioritize Israel’s interests.
VIEW MORE: Die deutsche Heuchelei: Shelly Steinberg über Staatsräson und den Missbrauch jüdischer Identität
This doubling down on backing Israel’s genocide in Gaza has proven profoundly detrimental to non-Zionist Jews in Germany who have refused to be instrumentalized on behalf of a state with which they do not identify. As Naomi Klein famously quipped, “At this rate, Germany is going to run out of Jewish intellectuals to ban.”
None of the politicians involved in the funding scandal are Jewish yet the incompetence of the conservative and centrist politicians involved in this funding scandal have done society a great disservice by potentially creating an association between the fight against antisemitism to preserve Jewish life in Germany and the underhanded misuse of public funds and secret, self-serving agreements among elites.
What now?
Wedl-Wilson’s resignation is now hopefully inevitable, while the political futures of Goiny and Stettner hang in the balance. Further evidence of the misappropriation of funds by the CDU/SPD coalition are likely to surface as the inquiry and audit continue. The big question remaining is: who will manage to spin this scandal to their advantage?
The Greens and Die Linke can sense the CDU blood in the water, and are looking to play this to their own benefit for the 2026 Berlin elections. Currently, an astounding 37 percent of Berliners are not eligible to vote, which raises fundamental questions of the political system’s democratic legitimacy. When it comes to political participation, it is clear that those without voting rights can still shape public opinion just as loudly, not least through their presence on the streets, while only EU citizens can influence local politics through elections. Die Linke Berlin is at least in favor of full voting rights for Berliners without an EU passport. No coalition should govern without the support of the majority of Berliners, and one that allows itself to be influenced by genocidal national policies and external lobby groups over the will of its constituents should not be given a government mandate in the future.
The CDU/SPD are playing a dangerous game with both democracy in Germany and for themselves, as mass disenchantment with a self-serving neoliberal political class has already encouraged voters to flock to anti-democratic far-right parties across Europe. So far, it seems that their only tactic has been to mimic AfD talking points. If Die Linke and The Greens fail to present appealing alternatives beyond political nepotism or a reactionary incorporation of right-wing ideologies, the rise and normalization of the AfD as a perceived anti-establishment party will continue unabated.
As someone whose past allegiances to ELNET are likely to further undermine the credibility of the investigative committee and the role of the Left Party in Berlin, Martina Renner should recuse herself from her position as the speaker of the committee immediately. Even the SPD has announced that they will no longer accept ELNET trips while Die Linke’s leadership has remained silent despite outcry from its grassroots supporters. If Die Linke wants to retain political legitimacy as a party representing the working-class and immigrants, it must take a firm stance against the Israeli genocide and occupation while also fighting for full suffrage based on residency. Accordingly, Zionist, genocide-denying, or even genocide-glorifying Linke MEPs such as former policeman, former CDU, and former FDP member Andreas Büttner (who taunts Palestinians and dismisses international law, and who joined Zera Institute’s advisory board just last week) have no place in such a party. If Die Linke or SPD want to follow the road to the mayorship taken by Zohran Mamdani, they must honestly recalibrate their glaring hypocrisy on the Gaza Genocide and the occupation of Palestine.„“
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