Karlsruhe Dialogues 2009
Jörg Fischer-Aharon
Speaker
Jörg Fischer-Aharon was a Neo-Nazi in his youth and now works as a journalist amongst others for haGalil.com, the biggest jewish internetmagazine in Europe as well as for the political magazines Fakt (ARD), Frontal 21 (ZDF), Mona Lisa (ZDF) and aspekte (ZDF). He also writes for the internetmagazine mut-gegen-rechte-gewalt.de (courage against right-wing violence) and juedische.at as well as for the taz and the Jüdische Zeitung (Jewish Newspaper). In addition, he is the editor of the German-Israeli news- and information-magazine www.derberliton.de.
As a consultant of education he works for institutions, which deal with political education, for several county offices of the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung and the Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung, for adult education centres, for labour unions and other institutions, which are concerned with adult education.
Fischer-Aharon is the assistant chairman and managing director of the association haKadima – Bildungswerk für Demokratie und Kultur e.V. His main areas of interest are anti-Semitism, right-wing extremism, violence of youth, the Middle East conflict and Islamism. Fischer-Aharon joined the right-wing extremist scene at the age of 13 and abandoned it nine years later. It took him many years more to learn, that his own grandfather as a Jew was killed by National Socialists in World War II. Since 1996, Fischer-Aharon as a dropout talks about the dangers of right-wing extremism especially at schools.
In the 1990s, he wrote for the magazine Chuzpe of the association of Jewish students in the National association Hesse/Germany. He was a member of the editorial of the Nürnberger Schwulenpost as well as assistant chief editor of the monthly magazine CGN – City Gay News.
He was guest in several TV shows and talked as an expert about the social reasons for right-wing extremist activities and about the possibilities to work against them. In the year 1999 he published his autobiographic book “Ganz rechts” and in 2001 his book “Das NPD-Verbot”.