Losing at a game of Juden Raus

It took me a good part of the last year to realize that I was playing the game a “Juden Raus!” and that I was losing. It took me months to understand that I was never a member of the club that banished me. And that even when I was allowed into the building, that my rules were not the same for me as they were for others.

Juden Raus! Was a board game of the Nazi era. Using crude antisemitic stereotypes and imagery, the game’s themes reflect racial hatred, forced deportations, and confiscation of Jewish property. The board shows a walled town, through which players move to round up Jews and deposit them outside the city walls, where a slogan reads “Auf nach Palästina!” ( “Off to Palestine!”) The winner is the first to remove six people.

Although the game was not endorsed by the Nazis (it was seen to trivialise Nazi policies) and contains no Nazi insignia, the casual, cheery tone used in the text accompanying the game reveals how socially acceptable bigotry and antisemitism was at the time.

I had been a member of my club since attending university in Johannesburg. I was the “liberal” in the family and my parents, like many other Jewish second generation children of survivors, were afraid. They didn’t believe that Jews should raise their head above the parapet, especially at a time when the apartheid government was so aggressive.

The pull towards the anti-apartheid movement, as a result of the horror of what was going on around us was too much for me to resist. And so I became involved in the first non-racial Law Student Council. Not as simple as it sounds. I also became the editor of the Wits Law Student Journal, which skated very close to the edge as far as the government was concerned. But it didn’t matter, because we were on a mission and this was no longer Europe in the 1940s.

Had anyone told me that the board game of Juden Raus! had been set up for play on October 7, 2023, and that I was one of the characters, I would have dismissed it out of hand. Indeed, I might be a Zionist and a Jew and indeed there might be differing views on Israel, but no one in their right mind would side with barbarism. No one would try to justify sexual assault, kidnapping, or murder of the innocent. And the fact that the terrorists filmed and shared their crimes would make it impossible to deny.

Only they did. They demanded proof of sexual assault. They denied and then demanded we prove and parade our dead. A rule that we would soon see would only apply to Jewish members. And that any allegation made by Hamas would be reported without question.

It was disturbing. But I chose to work within the confines, because at least an alternative voice was being heard on mainstream media in South Africa. Until even that became too much. And for reasons unexplained, I was deplatformed. I was shown the Auf nach Palästina!” sign. The loss of truth was the antisemites victory.

And not for the first time in our history, the doors to the club were slammed shut. With those inside nodding sagely to each other, that this made sense. That they were better off without our perspective. Without Jews who wouldn’t shut up.

I am far from alone. Around the world backs have been turned. Feminists have been abandoned by their sister movements, free speech activists told commentators to keep quiet, and LGBTQ+ supporters and organisations marched for Gaza.

The world has played Juden Raus! and in many cases we are no longer on the board.

Only this is not 1940. Jewish voices will not be silenced. No Jew needs to be sent to “Palastina” when we have Israel, and no matter how many times they tell us that we are standing on the wrong side of history, we know that the very opposite to be true.

More than anything, attempts to cancel and silence Jews can only achieve limited success. History has taught us that they might remove us from the club for now. But that it will be a blink of the eye before we will be back to celebrate a glatt kosher bar mitzvah taking place in the Esther and Shlomo Goldberg ballroom on the first floor.