Jewish Opposition
to Zionism

Erich Fried - A Courageous and Upright Jew and Great Poet

Erich Fried - the most famous German-speaking poet in the modern world - was one of the first sponsors of the RETURN statement. He was a refugee from his native Austria, from where he fled after the Anschluss in 1938, his father having been beaten and tortured to death by the Gestapo

It was because of his experience of Nazism and anti-Semitism that Erich Fried became a mentor to the anti-Vietnam war movement in West Germany. He was particularly close to Rudi Dutschcke and spoke up for those who, like Ulrike Meinhoff, sought quick solutions to the problems of modern-day German capitalism

During the war he became a broadcaster for the BBC External Services. He remained a committed socialist and a trenchant critic of Stalinism in Eastern Europe

It was because of his experience of racism and fascism that he was to take up the cudgels against Zionism and in support of the Palestinians, who, like himself, had been driven from their native land to exile

During the controversy over the PERDITION, Jim Allen's play which documented the collaboration of the Zionist movement with Nazism, Erich Fried came out staunchly in defence of the play. In the book of the play he wrote that he wished that he could have written such a play, such was his modesty

Erich Fried was an is an inspiration to anti-fascists and anti-Zionists everywhere, especially in the growing numbers of young anti-Zionist Jews for whom he was a living link with an earlier generation of socialist Jews

In the last years of his life, the BBC featured him in their series EXILES, which drew a predictably hostile response from the Zionist Jewish Chronicle, but which was a long overdue tribute to this most courageous of fighters

Erich Fried's poem 'A Jew to Zionist Fighters, 1988' was included in his last collection 'Unverwundenes - Liebe, Trauer, Widersprüche - Gedichte' (Uninjured - Love, Grief, Contradictions - Poems), published by Verlag Klaus Wagenbach, Berlin, 1988. The translation, by Frank Monahan, was published in RETURN magazine, March 1990, with permission of the publishers and of Katherine Fried