Contact Teaching
Last summer, Anke Brueggemann, an eighth-standard teacher at the Geschwister Scholl School in the German town of Solingen, heard a teenage boy on the playground scream, “Jude.” His tone was bitter and he was clearly using the word as a slur, Brueggemann said. She remembered seeing a newspaper advertisement about Rent A Jew, an organisation that facilitated interactions of Jewish people with youth in educational institutions in Germany. “I knew it was time to invite them to meet the students,” she said.
Jude—German for Jew—is a common insult on football fields in Germany. Seventy-five years after the Second World War ended, Europe’s largest economy is still wrestling with anti-Semitism, owing primarily to two reasons: the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which
