Hungary Jewish Culture and rising anti semitism

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By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN
Published: May 7, 2008
BUDAPEST — Ostensibly, a rock concert sparked it, reminding us that culture is not the exclusive province of liberals, certainly not here in Europe. A young woman (who knows whether she was just intending to make trouble) walked into a ticket office in the traditionally Jewish 13th District in this Hungarian capital several weeks ago and asked about Hungarica, an obscure extremist far-right band.

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Cultural Tensions The woman said the ticket agents called her a fascist and threw her out. The agents said that she spouted anti-Semitic abuse when told the office didn’t handle that event. A little later somebody tossed a Molotov cocktail outside the office. Then a blogger, Tamas Polgar, with the screen name Tomcat urged neo-Nazis to rally at the ticket office, and about 30 turned up on April 7 along with 300 counterdemonstrators. Tomcat called for a second rally, four days later, and about 1,000 more extremists were met that time, across police barricades, by 3,000 antifascists, including the beleaguered Hungarian prime minister, Ferenc Gyurcsany, and the former German chancellor Gerhard Schröder.

It’s hard to know whether to feel disheartened by the large showing of neo-Nazis or encouraged by the larger opposition to it. It turns out that aside from the well-documented rise of the far right, Jewish culture has also been conspicuously on the rise here.

That said, anti-Semitism can thrive even in the absence of a single Jew. History has proved that repeatedly. Hungarica served its purpose without having to play a single note.

The other day Gyorgy Kerenyi, a producer at Hungarian Public Radio who founded a Gypsy-run station, remarked that today’s counterculture among the students he meets at the university where he teaches often seems nationalistic and right wing, tapping into an old European avant-garde tradition.

Might this be because there’s an absence of political engagement on the other side of the spectrum? I inquired first at Trafo, a city-financed theater and art gallery. The gallery recently organized a show by a Polish artist, Artur Zmijewski. (Mr. Zmijewski, among other things, made a video in which he touches up, or “refurbishes,” to use his word, the tattoo of a Polish Auschwitz survivor, perhaps Jewish, perhaps not.) The theater presented a Dutch troupe, Hotel Modern, which staged a performance about the Holocaust. Both events were sensitive, in complex ways, to issues of anti-Semitism.

But, as Gyorgy Szabo, Trafo’s director, noted, the artists involved were foreigners, not Hungarians. “In the Hungarian arts community, we don’t have a tradition of confrontation,” he said. He obviously wasn’t thinking of Hungarica.

He then harked back to the Communist days: “In the former era there was a social treaty that said you can have your privacy as an artist if you don’t touch on political issues.”

Peter Gyorgy, a professor of media theory and an art critic here (he wrote admiringly in the leading Hungarian daily newspaper about Mr. Zmijewski’s show), nodded when he learned what Mr. Szabo had said. Like everyone, he acknowledged that anti-Semitism is more out in the open today.

“Hungary is a deeply traumatized society since the First World War, and the Holocaust, of course,” Mr. Gyorgy said. “After the early years of Hungarian Communism, to be Jewish was one’s private affair. Then after Communism, in the early ’90s, when the multiparty system started, we missed our chance for a public discourse about this situation. Now there’s a confluence: the instability of the government, the hatred for the prime minister and the fact that Jewish culture has become more conspicuous. A new generation of Jews has emerged, which behaves like Jews.”

He was talking especially about young Jews, not necessarily religious, but also not shy about identifying themselves culturally as Jews. “To be Jewish today is a question of one’s public culture,” Mr. Gyorgy went on. During the Communist era, he explained, many Jews grew up hardly knowing they were Jewish; he was among them. “Before, I was defined in a way I could influence,” Mr. Gyorgy said. “Now, as happened in Germany and Austria, that’s over. In today’s political atmosphere, there’s less space for autonomous self-definition. You are forced to address your own Jewishness, to see it as a problem.”

Agoston Mraz, a young centrist-minded political analyst for the Hungarian think tank Nezopont, put it a little differently: “There is a new Jewish pluralism, and Jewish culture is flourishing in Budapest. And one result is that, while I myself don’t think there is such a clear increase in anti-Semitism, there is now the opportunity to be more explicit about it.”