About haGalil

haGalil

haGalil onLine is a Jewish online magazine in the German language, operated from Munich and Tel Aviv and considered the most widely read publication of its kind in German. Founded in 1995 by David Gall together with his wife Eva Ehrlich, the magazine set out to counter antisemitism and neo-Nazism on the internet by publishing authentic information on Judaism, Jewish life, and Israel. The name is Hebrew for Galilee. Since the death of its founder in 2014, the editorial leadership has been held by his daughter Andrea Livnat, a journalist and historian. Financed by donations and advertising, haGalil presents Jewish life, history, culture, and religion alongside intensive coverage of Israel, the Israeli-Arab conflict, and contemporary antisemitism in German-speaking countries, offering a platform to all Jewish religious movements and to the full spectrum of Israeli political opinion.

Overview

haGalil publishes articles and short communications on Jewish life, Jewish history, culture, and religion in German, making it the central German-language online address for these topics. Additional core subjects are Israel and the Israeli-Arab conflict as well as modern antisemitism in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. Judaism is presented in a broad sense, with equal representation for all Jewish religious movements, from Orthodox to liberal, and the magazine provides a platform for all political opinions in Israel, from classical Zionism to oppositional groups. Some articles are taken from other media and translated from English and Hebrew into German.

The magazine's founding motto was quantitative as well as qualitative: to oppose every hate and propaganda page with a hundred pages of genuine information, pushing antisemitic content down in search-engine rankings. At its peak the site counted more than 380,000 monthly visitors, a remarkable reach for a donation-financed independent publication. The readership includes Jews and non-Jews, students and educators, journalists, and anyone seeking reliable German-language information on Judaism and Israel. The site is updated continuously with news, commentary, essays, and documentation.

History

The project was founded in 1995 by David Gall (1956-2014), a Munich-based German Jew, together with his wife Eva Ehrlich, who served as co-publishers. In a 2001 interview, Gall explained the founding motive: searching the early web for terms from Judaism such as Talmud, Shabbat, or kosher, as well as for words like Auschwitz or Hitler, led almost exclusively to Nazi websites, and this discovery prompted the creation of a Jewish counter-presence online. The first web pages were created under the shock of the assassination of Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin in November 1995, and haGalil then grew gradually into a professionally operated service.

The founders' programmatic statement was to respond to the growth of Nazi pages on the web and to the centrality of antisemitism in neo-Nazi propaganda by confronting each hate page with a hundred pages of real information. In February 2006 the magazine was attacked by hackers, apparently in response to its republication of the Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons; the editor stated that he found the cartoons tasteless but published them as a response to the violent reactions across Europe. After David Gall's death in 2014, his daughter Andrea Livnat, a journalist and doctor of history, took over the editorial leadership, continuing the magazine into its third decade.

Coverage and Content

The magazine's content spans the full breadth of Jewish topics in German. Articles on Jewish religion explain holidays, customs, texts, and practices across the denominations; historical pieces cover Jewish history from antiquity to the present, with particular attention to German-Jewish history and the Holocaust; cultural coverage includes literature, music, film, and art. Israel reporting follows politics, society, security, and culture, with commentary representing diverse viewpoints within the Zionist and post-Zionist debate.

A distinctive and continuous focus is the documentation and analysis of contemporary antisemitism in German-speaking countries: incidents, statistics, political debates, and the strategies of extremist movements are reported and contextualized. The magazine also covers interreligious dialogue, Jewish-Christian and Jewish-Muslim relations, and the integration debates affecting Jewish communities. Opinion pieces, interviews, and essays complement the news flow, and the archive, built over nearly three decades, functions as a German-language reference library on Judaism and Jewish history. The editorial line is independent and pluralistic, committed to democratic values and to the fight against antisemitism in all its forms.

Organization and Ownership

haGalil is operated from Munich and Tel Aviv as an independent online magazine. It was founded and published by David Gall and Eva Ehrlich; since 2014 the editorial leadership has been held by Andrea Livnat. The magazine is financed by donations from readers and supporters as well as by advertising revenue, a model that preserves its editorial independence from communal institutions and political organizations. The team includes editors, authors, and translators working across the two offices.

Unlike the official publications of Jewish communal bodies, haGalil is a private journalistic venture, which allows it to take independent positions and to host debates that institutional media might avoid. The magazine's pluralism, giving space to all religious movements and political tendencies, is both an editorial principle and an organizational consequence of its independence. Detailed current staffing figures are not publicly confirmed. The site's long continuity under family leadership, from founder to daughter, is unusual in German online journalism and has given the magazine a stable identity across three decades of internet history.

Significance and Reception

haGalil occupies a unique position in the German media landscape as the most widespread German-language Jewish online magazine. Its founding insight, that the battle against online antisemitism must be fought with better information rather than only with deletion and prohibition, anticipated the strategies that platforms and civil-society organizations would adopt decades later. The magazine's search-engine strategy, flooding the German web with authentic Jewish content, was an early form of what would now be called counter-speech.

The 2006 hacker attack demonstrated the risks of the magazine's independent stance, while its survival and continuity demonstrated its resilience. For German Jews, haGalil has served as a daily companion and a forum; for non-Jewish readers, as an accessible introduction to Judaism and a reliable source on Israel and antisemitism. Journalists, educators, and researchers use its archive as a reference. In a media environment where Jewish topics are often covered only in the context of conflict or commemoration, haGalil's daily coverage of Jewish life in its normality and diversity remains its most distinctive contribution.

Digital Presence

As a digital-native publication founded in 1995, haGalil has existed online for the entire history of the German-language web, making it one of the oldest continuously operating German online magazines of any kind. The website at hagalil.com is the sole publication platform, carrying the full archive alongside current articles. The magazine maintains social media presences where articles and commentaries are shared and discussed, extending its reach into the networks where debates about Israel and antisemitism unfold.

Newsletters deliver the magazine's content to subscribers' inboxes, and the donation-based financing is organized through the website. The site's longevity has made it a landmark of the German internet: few online publications from the mid-1990s survive in continuously updated form, and haGalil's persistence testifies both to the dedication of its publishers and to the continuing need for its mission. For the German-language web, it remains what its founders intended: a hundred pages of genuine information against every page of hate.