The political foundation behind a prestigious German award is yanking its support for the prize’s presentation to a well-known staff writer at The New Yorker this week, condemning them for publishing an essay earlier this month that drew parallels between Jewish oppression under Nazi occupation and the Israeli bombardment of Gaza today.
Masha Gessen’s 7,500-word essay, “In the Shadow of the Holocaust,” argues “that we place the Holocaust outside of history and refuse to learn from it,” they tweeted after it was published on Saturday.
The piece also makes explicit reference to “the Jewish ghettoes of Occupied Europe” in discussing the modern conflict in the Middle East. As in the former, Gessen, who is Jewish, wrote that in Gaza “there are no prison guards—Gaza is policed not by the occupiers but by a local force.”
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“Presumably, the more fitting term ‘ghetto’ would have drawn fire for comparing the predicament of besieged Gazans to that of ghettoized Jews,” Gessen continued. “It also would have given us the language to describe what is happening in Gaza now. The ghetto is being liquidated.”
That passage was singled out in a Wednesday press release from the left-wing Heinrich Böll Foundation, which announced the revocation of its backing “in agreement” with the state government of Bremen, the German city that funds the prize.
Gessen’s rhetoric, according to the foundation, “implies that Israel aims to liquidate Gaza like a Nazi ghetto. This statement is not an offer for open discussion; it does not help to understand the conflict in the Middle East.”
“This statement is unacceptable to us,” the foundation said, “and we reject it.”
The move came hours after a scorching open letter on Gessen’s essay was published by the Bremen branch of the German-Israeli Society. The organization called the comparison between Gaza and Nazi ghettos “incomprehensible,” accusing Gessen of harboring “a deep-seated and fundamentally negative prejudice against the Jewish state” of Israel.
Germany’s Die Zeit newspaper also reported that two founders of the prize had written a letter on Monday to colleagues and donors calling for the ceremony to be canceled. The letter reportedly argued that Gessen had disqualified themselves from consideration with their recent “statements about the Middle East conflict.”
According to the newspaper, the prize will still be presented to Gessen on Saturday—instead of Friday, when it was originally scheduled to occur—but the ceremony will take place in a different location.
Literary Hub was the first English-language outlet to report the development on Wednesday. The site pointed out that Gessen’s grandfather was murdered in the Holocaust in 1943.
The Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thought was created in 1994 to honor “individuals who identify critical and unseen aspects of current political events and who are not afraid to enter the public realm by presenting their opinion in controversial political discussions,” the Heinrich Böll Foundation says on its website.
The New Yorker did not immediately comment publicly on the matter, but noted at the bottom of a new interview with Gessen that the foundation has chosen “not to participate in the granting of the award.”
Read it at Die Zeit
