Peter Schäfer

He was the director of the Jewish Museum of Berlin until June 2019 when he resigned amid criticism after a museum spokesperson issued a tweet critical of a Bundestag resolution that said the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement had an anti-semitic character. Subsequently, he received letters of support from 95 museum directors and curators, 445 Jewish studies scholars and 45 Talmudists.

Schäfer became a target for anti-BDS activists when Berlin's Jewish Museum presented an exhibition "Welcome to Jerusalem", which included a Muslim narrative as part of its depiction of Jerusalem. The criticism reached a peak when the museum's spokesperson issued a tweet critical of a May 2019 Bundestag resolution that said the BDS movement had an anti-semitic character. Schäfer resigned as director of the museum in June 2019 to protect it from further attacks. Regarding the criticism, he said: "The accusation of antisemitism is a club that allows one to deal a very rapid death blow, and political elements who have an interest in this used and are using it, without a doubt".

In 2018 Schäfer was criticized for inviting a Palestinian scholar to give a lecture at the museum and giving a personal tour to the cultural director of the Iranian embassy. Iran is regularly criticized for antisemitic statements

From 1983 to 2008 he was Professor for Jewish Studies at Freie Universität Berlin. Since 1993, he has been co-editor of Jewish Studies Quarterly. Schäfer's research interests include Jewish history in late antiquity, the religion and literature of Rabbinic Judaism, Jewish mysticism, 19th- and 20th-century Wissenschaft des Judentums and Jewish magic. He is a member of both the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society. He won the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Distinguished Achievement Award in December 2006. In 2014 he was awarded the Dr. Leopold Lucas Prize by the Protestant Faculty of the University of Tübingen, and in 2021 the Pour le Mérite for Sciences and Arts.

Peter Schäfer (born 29 June 1943, Mülheim an der Ruhr, North Rhine-Westphalia) is a prolific German scholar of ancient religious studies, who has made contributions to the field of ancient Judaism and early Christianity through monographs, co-edited volumes, numerous articles, and his trademark synoptic editions. He was a Professor of Religion and the Ronald O. Perelman Professor of Judaic Studies at Princeton University from 1998 to 2013.