How do Germans views Israelis who live among them?

After receiving another email inviting me to a poetry festival in a major German town, I replied that I would be happy to participate. I have never visited the city where the festival is to be held. As I delved into the festival program, I realised that I was the only Jewish poet among the participants. This discovery led me to ponder whether my invitation might have been influenced by a "Jewish quota".

It’s a recurring issue. Every time I present my poetry at a festival in Germany, I find myself pondering: how do the German institutes and curators perceive me? Can I transcend the label of a “Jewish writer” in Germany?

How do the Germans see and perceive the Jewish writers who write in Hebrew or Yiddish? Did the Germans' perception of the Jewish-Hebrew-Yiddish literary space change after the Holocaust? With the establishment of the State of Israel, are there new perceptions of the Germans about these literary centres?

In recent years, Berlin has emerged as a thriving literary hub. Hebrew poets, writers, and editors convene in Berlin, establishing the largest Hebrew literary center outside of Israel. Simultaneously, a vibrant and youthful Yiddish literary center has also taken root in the city.

Rachel Seelig writes in her book Strangers in Berlin: Modern Jewish literature between East and West 1919-1933: “Whether focused on assimilation or recalcitrance, scholarship on German Jewry has generally portrayed the German-speaking Jew exclusively in relation to the non-Jewish German, thus producing a one-dimensional image of the “the Jew” as the undifferentiated “stranger” of German society.”

In this context, I often wonder whether I am by now perceived as a German Jew, or will I always be viewed as an Israeli Jew residing in Berlin?

These literary hubs have a history. Between the world wars, Berlin hosted a flourishing literary scene in both Yiddish and Hebrew. One astonishing fact that struck me was the presence of more Hebrew publishing houses in Berlin than in Palestine during the interwar period from 1914 to 1933.