There are many reasons I care about Germany.

First, my mother was a German Jew who survived the Holocaust but lost much of her family in Hitler’s infamous gas chambers. Second, I lived there for a while as a young man and have returned occasionally to visit. Recently, in fact, I discovered several German relatives I never knew I had. And finally, my children and I have applied for German citizenship under a program serving the descendants of those once forced to flee.

So you can imagine my alarm after seeing a headline screaming that German Jews “fear a throwback” to Nazi Germany. “To me,” one lamented to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, “it is a pure Nazi party.”

She was talking about the far-right Alternative for Germany—popularly known as AfD—which had just won 43.8% of the vote in the former East German state of Saxony-Anhalt. Which, interestingly, is close to my mother’s hometown of Chemnitz, where the AfD also enjoys wide support.

Then I got another surprise. The party’s leader is an openly gay woman living with........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)