Dispute over historical responsibility
On the "Jung & Naiv" podcast, Roth recounted friends asking when she would free herself from the guilt of history or approach it differently. She said she had been unable to do so in 2024.
JSUD President Ron Dekel interpreted the account as an indirect suggestion that Germans must shed their historical guilt to criticize Israel openly. Speaking to Jüdische Allgemeine, he accused Roth of having a blind spot on Israel-related antisemitism.
Roth told Stern that she had merely quoted her friends, not adopted their views. She rejected the accusations against her as unacceptable and said confronting the crimes of German history and the enduring responsibility they entail had been a central concern throughout her political life and would remain so.
Calls for an apology and a party response
Dekel told Redaktionsnetzwerk Deutschland that Roth's remarks were alarming and left him speechless. He accused her of calling for release from German guilt at a time when, in his assessment, antisemitism in German society was at an all-time high. He demanded both a public apology and a repudiation of the remarks.
On Instagram, Dekel said he had not expected such comments from a politician who presented herself as left-wing and likened her language to that of the AfD. In his interview with Jüdische Allgemeine, he also demanded that the Green party leadership publicly distance itself from Roth. As of November 6, 2026, he said, he had heard no Green voice do so.
Roth served as minister of state for culture in the Chancellery from 2021 to 2025. Dekel said that if her present stance genuinely reflected her views, her appointment to that office represented a failure by the governing Ampel coalition.
The dispute follows earlier criticism of Roth's initial response to antisemitic imagery at the 2022 documenta exhibition in Kassel. Dekel said he had then considered her unreliable in the fight against antisemitism, while believing that portrayals of her as an antisemite did not tell the whole truth. He also recalled that she was booed at the 2023 Jewrovision music festival, partly over her handling of documenta fifteen. According to Dekel, the JSUD had called on attendees to leave the room when she entered.
Gaza comments and the Central Council
Roth also used the podcast to disavow comments she had made in a SPIEGEL interview criticizing incidents at the Berlinale awards ceremony. She said her statements about the Gaza war at the time had been a mistake and attributed them to intense pressure from the Central Council of Jews in Germany.
She further said she would now describe the situation in the West Bank as apartheid, reversing her 2024 position rejecting an equation of Israeli government policy with apartheid.
Dekel told Jüdische Allgemeine that Roth's account suggested the Central Council wielded power over German politics. He said this fed longstanding antisemitic conspiracy narratives and questioned whether she herself might harbor antisemitic resentment.
Stern reported that people close to the Central Council accused Roth of apparently being willing to use any means to stave off political irrelevance.
Volker Beck breaks with Roth
Criticism also came from Green politician Volker Beck, who has served as president of the German-Israeli Society since 2022. Beck publicly broke with Roth over the podcast, saying he was shaken by her remarks and announcing on X that he was ending his association with her.
Beck said her statements came close to AfD politician Björn Höcke's accusation of a cult of guilt. He also compared them with remarks by writer Martin Walser, who in 1998 used the German term Moralkeule, or moral cudgel.
