Over the course of three weeks, a German man who stoked antisemitism while claiming to be Jewish was unmasked and faced a public downfall.
Frank Borner, a school teacher, had hosted two gatherings called “Meet a Jew” on the island of Fehmarn, on the northern coast of Germany.
On Tuesday, the news website Fehmarn 24 reported that the organization that was hosting these talks pulled the plug on future events with Borner. When asked by Fehmarn 24 if he is a Jew, Borner refused to answer.
Fehmarn 24 cited i24NEWS’s article from July 30 about Borner.
German Jewish author Henryk M. Broder and his colleague Moritz Gerlach first broke the story about Borner’s manufactured Jewish identity in the daily broadsheet Die Welt on July 19. The Welt journalists wrote that Borner claimed that Jews have a “capacity for suffering.” Borner linked the alleged Jewish suffering to a “victim role” that adheres to Jews “archetypically, like primordial slime.”
Borner also claimed in his talk that New York and Hollywood are “full of Jews” and “firmly in Jewish hands.”
After the publication of the Welt exposé, i24NEWS reached out to the Central Council of Jews in Germany. The German state-subsidized Central Council issued a message about Borner on X, formerly known as Twitter, stating “The damage done by such charlatans to such an important project is great.”
The local Jewish community also said that Borner was never a part of their “Meet a Jew” program.
The “Meet a Jew” program faced heavy criticism from Yigal Carmon, president of the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), in his essay titled “Fight Antisemites, Not Antisemitism,” published in late July.
Carmon wrote about “Meet a Jew” and other like-minded programs in Germany: “It is interesting to note that a similar approach was adopted in 1933 by the Zentralverein (Central Organization of Jews in Germany), which, in an attempt to counter the threat posed by Nazism, published a 1,060-page encyclopedia about the contributions made by Jews in various fields.”
He added “It is clear that the European approach, which seeks to integrate the Jews into society, is motivated by good intentions. However, the chosen methods are misguided and cause the opposite of the desired effect. Moreover, they evade the crucial task of confronting antisemites themselves, and focus on the less demanding task of doing PR for the Jews.”
The Lübecker Nachrichten, a regional daily covering the northern German state of Schleswig-Holstein where Fehmarn is located, has declined to correct its previous reporting on Borner as a Jew. The editor-in-chief of Lübecker Nachrichten, Gerald Goetsch, did not respond to press queries.
The commissioner tasked with fighting antisemitism in Schleswig-Holstein, Gerhard Urlich, has so far not commented on the Borner case. The Simon Wiesenthal Center called on Ulrich to resign last year because he reportedly preached antisemitic sermons when he served as the Protestant Bishop for northern Germany.
