In March 2019, shortly before tens of thousands of Berliners marched against rising rents, the Governing Mayor, Michael Müller of the Social Democratic Party (SPD), voiced a historical warning. If the initiative to socialize large housing companies succeeded, Müller said to Deutschlandfunk, “Jewish owners in Germany might be expropriated for a second time.”
After the state election in September 2026, Müller spoke again. Together with Walter Momper, another former Governing Mayor, and other leading SPD politicians, he signed a resolution against coalition talks with the Left Party (Die Linke). It accuses the party of making common cause with antisemites. In 2019 Müller invoked Jews as the owners whom socialization would harm; seven years later he invokes antisemitism in an effort to keep the socializers out of government. These two positions risk tying a Gordian knot between the struggle for Berlin’s housing and Jewish identity. It does not take great political foresight to realize: this association is as bad for Jews as it is for renters.
I write this not only as a Jew, but also as a legal scholar who has studied antisemitism and its instrumentalization. I arrived in Berlin in August 2024, on leave from the University of Haifa, Israel. As my flat was temporary and the rents have since risen, I was recently forced back onto the housing market. My family and I found it hard to find a new home. The offerings were more expensive than I had expected, and often when I visited the apartments on offer, I left disappointed. This, of course, is not a Jewish question.
Die Linke won the election on 20 September with 25.7 percent of the vote, having campaigned above all on rents and promising to socialize companies that own more than 3,000 flats. But since election night, the question of who governs Berlin has been argued largely in the vocabulary of antisemitism. This turn—whose intensity I did not expect—adds socioeconomic icing on a cake of imagined Jewish interests, projected by various groups for their own ends.
Since the enormous terror attack against Israeli civilians on 7 October 2023, and against the backdrop of the genocide in Gaza, relationships between communities in this city have turned tense. However, while searching for an apartment, one Wilmersdorf landlord asked me about the Israeli migration to Berlin: “… but do you Jews feel safe here?” I could not help noticing the disappointment on her face when I said I feel safer than ever, surely safer than in Israel. This was just before she dropped a comment about the need to cut down “migration from the Middle East.”