The German Green Party-affiliated Heinrich Böll Foundation, has decided to withdraw from the Hannah Arendt Political Thought Award from Russian-born American Jewish journalist and author Masha Gessen.
The decision is attributed to Gessen’s criticism of Germany’s Israel policy in a New Yorker article and their comparison of the situation in Gaza to Jewish ghettos under Nazi Germany’s occupation of other countries.
The German Green Party-affiliated Heinrich Böll Foundation, “in agreement with the Bremen Senate,” is withdrawing from awarding the Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thought to the Russian-American journalist Masha Gessen, citing Gessen’s recent New Yorker essay “In the Shadow of the Holocaust” as the reason for the decision.
In the essay, published on December 9, Gessen criticizes Germany’s Israel policy (including the Bundestag’s controversial BDS resolution, which condemns the Israel boycott movement as anti-Semitic) and its politics of remembrance, and compares the plight of today’s besieged Gazans to that of the ghettoized Jews in Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe:
“For the last seventeen years, Gaza has been a hyperdensely populated, impoverished, walled-in compound where only a small fraction of the population had the right to leave for even a short amount of time—in other words, a ghetto. Not like the Jewish ghetto in Venice or an inner-city ghetto in America but like a Jewish ghetto in an Eastern European country occupied by Nazi Germany. In the two months since Hamas attacked Israel, all Gazans have suffered from the barely interrupted onslaught of Israeli forces. Thousands have died. On average, a child is killed in Gaza every ten minutes. Israeli bombs have struck hospitals, maternity wards, and ambulances. Eight out of ten Gazans are now homeless, moving from one place to another, never able to get to safety.”
Born as the second child of a Jewish family in Moscow, Gessen moved to the United States with their family in 1981. With a portfolio boasting over 10 books, Gessen’s writings have graced the pages of prestigious publications including The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, The New Republic, The New Statesman, Granta, Slate, Vanity Fair, Harper’s Magazine, and The New Yorker.
“An Ironical Move”
The German government has come under heavy criticism in the last two months for openly supporting Israel’s actions in Gaza and exerting pressure against pro-Palestinian activism and advocacy. The German cultural scene, marked by cancellations of museum exhibitions, book awards, and artist commissions in recent weeks, has become a focal point of reactions and disapproval.
The author and editor of Lithub, Dan Sheehan, said regarding the decision: “The irony of calling for the suspension of a prize named after an anti-Totalitarian political theorist in order to appease the authoritarian government of a rogue state currently committing genocide against an already-subjugated people seems to be lost on the Bremen DIG.”
Source: LitHub