Allowing Jews to molest women is “reparations”, says Austrian comedian

V LISA ECKHART, an Austrian comedian and cabaret artist, is at the centre of a storm over antisemitism, free speech and cancel culture over of a stand-up routine which some German and Austrian politicians and Jewish communal representatives have said perpetuates “primitive antisemitic stereotypes”.

The furore goes back to her appearance in September 2018 on German television’s long-running late-night cabaret show Mitternachtsspitzen entitled, “The Sacred Cow Has BSE”.

In her set, Ms Eckhart, 27, posited that the #MeToo movement against sexual harassment was antisemitic because many of its most prominent targets including Roman Polanski, Harvey Weinstein, and Woody Allen were Jewish.

“I think it’s only right and proper if we now allow the Jews to molest a few women”, the comedian said, for to pay Jews reparations with money would be akin to offering Red Bull owner Dietrich Mateschitz a can of his own drink.

Ms Eckhart continued, “Most disappointing of all are the Jews. We have always defended them from the dumb accusation that everything is about money and now suddenly it turns out it really isn’t about money — it’s women, and that’s why they needed the money”.

At the time, her remarks passed unnoticed. But 18 months later, when the broadcaster WDR shared her routine on Facebook, they prompted widespread outrage.

Michael Wuliger set the tone in the Jüdische Allgemeine when he wrote, “One need not be a specialist in antisemitism to recognise in [Ms Eckhart’s words] the classic antisemitic stereotype of the money-grubbing Jewish defiler of young women.”

The German government’s antisemitism tsar, Felix Klein, called the routine “tasteless and worthy of criticism”, while the AJC’s director in Berlin, Remko Leemhuis, accused Ms Eckhart of “reproducing primitive antisemitic stereotypes”. The Greens’ Volker Beck, a staunch campaigner against antisemitism, said Ms Eckhart’s set was a “potpourri of antisemitic cliches”.

But WDR has stuck by Ms Eckhart, arguing her routine was both contemporary and satirical. To use these antisemitic stereotypes in her routine, they said, was to bring them to light.

Ms Eckhart is now publishing her first novel, Omama. But after rumours of protests by left-wing groups including Antifa, the Hamburg literary festival Harbourfront disinvited her from an event in August, sparking a litany of opeds in the German press defending the comedian as a victim of cancel culture.

But far from cancelled, Ms Eckhart remains in contention of the festival’s Klaus Michael Kühne Prize to be handed out in September. And, in spite of entreaties from representatives of the Austrian Union of Jewish Students (JÖH), Ms Eckhart’s invitation to Vienna’s summer-long O-Töne literary festival still stands as she continues to promote her widely-reviewed and discussed novel.

Writing in the Standard, the JÖH’s general director Benjamin Hess argued that the right to free speech is not to be confused with the right to a platform and that “primitive antisemitic stereotypes” should be allowed to pass “under the cover of satire”.

The Hamburg literary festival disinvited her’