Entertainment

This Is What Happens When You Walk Around Berlin as a Jew

This video originally appeared on VICE Germany

On the 15th of February, Israeli online magazine NRG published a video in which a reporter quietly walked through Paris while wearing a kippah. During his walk, the reporter was repeatedly insulted, threatened, and spat on – apparently for no other reason than his visible Jewishness.

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The video was published shortly after the terrorist attacks at a café and a synagogue in Copenhagen, which caused Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu to urge European Jews to leave the continent and migrate to Israel.

We wanted to know if the same would happen in Berlin. While such videos are obviously in no way representative, we thought it would be an interesting experiment nevertheless, especially in light of the current political debate and seeing as such videos have recently become a media phenomenon. So we asked Israeli-German actor Amit Jacobi to walk from Schöneweide to the New Synagogue in Berlin’s Mitte district. The result was fortunately underwhelming.