2020, Eckhart was accused of
antisemitism for her political-satire contribution to
Mitternachtspitzen in 2018, a broadcast of the German public-broadcasting institution
WDR. In her
satirical contribution
The holy cow has BSE (
Die Heilige Kuh hat BSE) she used sarcastic
character speech to ask the question “What to do, when the untouchables start touching others”: meaning when Jews as
Harvey Weinstein or
Roman Polański, people of color as
Bill Cosby or
Morgan Freeman sexually harass women or when homosexuals as in
Kevin Spacey harass men. It would be the "wet dream of political correctness". Eckhart was criticized for the statement "Jews have always fought against the accusation that they only care about money, and now suddenly it turns out that they really don’t care about money, they care about women, and that’s why they need the money." The Jüdische Allgemeine, a weekly newspaper representing politics, culture and religion of German
Judaism, wrote that her recipe for
kabarett would be in the "simple breaking of
taboos, which never were any – also in terms of antisemitism".
Felix Klein, the antisemitism commissioner of the German federal Government, called Eckhart’s contribution in 2018 "tasteless and reprehensible" and explained her
punch line would be based on "antisemitism, racism and misanthropy". Ariane Lemme on the other hand defended Eckhart’s humor in the
Taz, a German daily newspaper, under the title
Satire must be allowed to hurt (
Satire muss wehtun dürfen). The
WDR, the German public-broadcasting institution responsible for broadcasting said contribution, defended Eckhart against the accusations with the reasoning that she wanted to expose stereotypes. As well as
Henryk M. Broder of
Die Welt, a national German newspaper, and Götz Aly of the
Berliner Zeitung, a daily newspaper based in Berlin, who defended Eckhart against the accusation of antisemitism. Gerhard Haase-Hindenberg stated in the Jüdischen Allgemeine, a weekly newspaper representing politics, culture and religion of German
Judaism, that he experienced Eckhart as an artist, who “exposes societal prejudices solely by exaggerating them”. Audiences welcome this breaking of taboos. The
ORF, an Austrian national public broadcaster, broadcast a performance of Eckhart on 9 November 2021, in which she asked: "Why are the Jews two noses ahead of women when it comes to humour?" In the
Bayerischer Rundfunk, a Bavarian public service radio and television broadcaster, the music journalist Hardy Funk called her performance "clearly antisemitic" and evaluated, that her humor "would lack even a trace of a
false bottom". Especially towards criticism in November of 2021 of her program The Benefits of Vice (Die Vorteile des Lasters), which was published one year before, Eckhart described the reception as a "common reflex (…) of reaction to certain triggering words", and as a "malicious misunderstanding" to the
DPA, a major German news agency based in Hamburg, and asked the question of "How to handle antisemitism and racism? Do you elevate it to a taboo, or do you degrade it to a joke? I am always on the side of humor." ==Bibliography==