Award Ceremony Suspended After Jewish Writer Compares Gaza To Nazi-Era Jewish Ghettos
US-Russian journalist Masha Gessen won Germany’s Hannah Arendt prize for political thought
By Kate Connolly
The Guardian (12/14/23)
A German foundation has said it will no longer be awarding a prize for political thinking to a leading Russian-American journalist after criticising as “unacceptable” a recent essay by the writer in which they made a comparison between Gaza and a Jewish ghetto in Nazi-occupied Europe.
Masha Gessen was due to be presented with the Hannah Arendt prize for political thought on Friday. But the award ceremony will now not take place as planned after the Green party-affiliated Heinrich Böll Foundation (HBS) said it was withdrawing its support. The HBS said it had reached its decision in agreement with the senate in Bremen, the northern port city where the ceremony was scheduled to take place.
According to the German newspaper Die Zeit, which broke the story, the prize will still be presented to Gessen, though “in a different setting”, and on Saturday instead of Friday. It remains unclear who will present it, what they will be presenting and whether Gessen and other invited guests still plan to attend.
The HBS said it objected to and rejected a comparison made by Gessen in a 9 December essay in the New Yorker between Gaza and the Jewish ghettos in Europe.
Supporters of Gessen, who is Jewish, and whose grandfather and great-grandfather were among family members murdered by the Nazis, have been quick to point out the irony of suspending a prize awarded in memory of Arendt, the German-born Jewish-American historian, philosopher and antitotalitarian political theorist who coined the phrase “the banality of evil”, in connection with the trial of leading Nazi Adolf Eichmann.
In the essay, Gessen, who uses they, criticised Germany’s unequivocal support of Israel, drawing attention to the Bundestag’s 2019 resolution condemning the Israel boycott movement BDS as antisemitic and quoting a Jewish critic of Germany’s politics of Holocaust remembrance as saying memory culture had “gone haywire”.
In the paragraph the HBS draws attention to, Gessen wrote that “ghetto” would be “the more appropriate term” to describe Gaza, but the word “would have drawn fire for comparing the predicament of besieged Gazans to that of ghettoized Jews. It also would have given us the language to describe what is happening in Gaza now. The ghetto is being liquidated.”
The foundation said Gessen was implying that Israel aimed to “liquidate Gaza like a Nazi ghetto”, adding that “this statement is unacceptable to us and we reject it”.
Gessen was contacted by the Guardian for comment.
On X/Twitter, they wrote that no German media representative had tried to contact them, despite the story being widely reported in German media on Thursday. …
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"Politics of Memory": Masha Gessen's Hannah Arendt Prize Postponed For Comparing Gaza, Warsaw Ghetto
Democracy Now! (12/15/23)
We speak with the acclaimed Russian American writer Masha Gessen, whose latest article for The New Yorker looks at the politics of Holocaust commemoration in Europe. Gessen was scheduled to receive the prestigious Hannah Arendt Prize in Germany on December 15, but the ceremony was postponed after some award sponsors withdrew support over Gessen's comparison in the article of Gaza to the Warsaw Ghetto. A smaller award ceremony is set for Saturday.
Gessen says Germany's culture of learning about and atoning for the sins of the Nazi regime has morphed into steadfast support for the state of Israel despite its actions, while banning most forms of pro-Palestinian solidarity as part of a flawed effort to fight antisemitism. The cornerstone of this form of "memory politics" is that "you can't compare the Holocaust to anything," says Gessen. "My argument is that in order to learn from history, we have to compare."
“The biggest insult to the memory of the Holocaust is not denying it but using it to commit genocide against the Palestinian people.”
— Norman Finkelstein
The Gaza Ghetto has 5 times the population of the Warsaw at its peak. The German Nazis had a far easier task in crushing the rebellion; the wannabe Zionist upstarts have a big job ahead of them, but with adequate support from their sister democracy, all things are possible. Lacking adequate gas chamber and disposal oven facilities, burial at sea is always an option. The official cause of death for two million souls might read: Suicide by drowning.