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Masha Gessen will receive Hannah Arendt Prize after all, following controversy over Gaza essay
(JTA) – The writer Masha Gessen will still receive a prestigious award named for Hannah Arendt, after the German foundation that administers the prize had initially said it would pull its support due to Gessen’s recent writing on Gaza.
Gessen, a Jewish writer for The New Yorker magazine, published an essay last week comparing the Gaza Strip to Nazi-era Jewish ghettos, sparking backlash from Jewish and pro-Israel activists in Germany. That led the Heinrich Böll Foundation to say that it would no longer support a ceremony for Gessen receiving the award named for Arendt, a 20th-century German Jewish thinker and author.
But on Friday, the foundation told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that Gessen will still get the award, including 10,000 euros in prize money, and that the author should still be honored.
“We want to make it very clear that we do not want to strip Masha Gessen of the award, or deny them the prize, and that we honor the relevance of their work,” the foundation said in a statement. “Gessen deserves great merit for their unconditional commitment to democracy and to debating uncomfortable issues. We greatly appreciate Gessen’s critical work, their demonstrated passion for freedom and commitment to defy any autocratic tendencies.”
The award is given annually to political theorists who continue the philosophical tradition of Arendt. Gessen is a refugee from the former Soviet Union and the descendant of Holocaust survivors. They have been widely acclaimed for their writing on the Russia-Ukraine war and LGBTQ issues.
The foundation’s initial objections, and those of the German city of Bremen that co-administers the prize, stemmed from a Dec. 9 New Yorker essay by Gessen entitled “In The Shadow Of The Holocaust.” In the piece, Gessen critiqued modern German, Polish and Ukrainian approaches to Holocaust memory, and also castigated Israeli policy toward Gaza.
“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,” Gessen wrote. “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.”
They added: “The ghetto is being liquidated.”
Following the essay’s publication, the German-Israeli Society’s Bremen chapter criticized Gessen’s comparison of Gaza to Jewish ghettos, which society chair Hermann Kuhn wrote could have “only one explanation: a deep-seated and fundamental negative prejudice against the Jewish state.” Kuhn also took issue with Gessen’s stance on Germany’s approach to the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement against Israel, which the German government has defined as antisemitic.
In an open letter calling on the prize’s administrators to refrain from honoring Gessen, the society wrote that giving them the award “would honor a person whose thinking is in clear contrast to Hannah Arendt’s.” Founding members of the prize also campaigned against Gessen receiving it due to their “statements about the Middle East conflict,” in a letter quoted by the German newspaper Die Zeit.
Subsequently, Bremen’s Senate announced it would be pulling out of a planned ceremony for the award, and the foundation said it would no longer sponsor it. But then it backtracked and attributed its decision to a lack of a venue for the ceremony. Later, on Friday, it said that it objected to Gessen’s characterization of Gaza but that they should not be stripped of the award.
“We disagree with this statement, and fully reject it,” the foundation said regarding Gessen’s comparison of Gaza to a Nazi-era ghetto. “The award ceremony would not have been an appropriate place for an earnest dialogue on the culture of remembrance, which is why we are trying to find another format with Masha Gessen in which a more substantive discussion can be had.”
The awards ceremony, originally scheduled for Friday, has been postponed to Saturday in light of the foundation’s departure, but will reportedly still be presented on a smaller scale. According to Gessen, it will also lack many of the trappings usually associated with the award, including a promised lecture at Bremen University.
Gessen did not respond to multiple JTA requests for comment, including about the foundation’s statement on Friday. They told Middle East Eye in an article published earlier Friday that the New Yorker essay, which quoted Arendt, accorded with Arendt’s writing and thought.
“Hannah Arendt wouldn’t have gotten the Hannah Arendt prize if you applied those kinds of criteria to it,” Gessen said. “She was very insistent on comparing the Israeli policies and Israeli ideologies to the Nazis. And her project was very much what I’m building on, which is you have to compare in order to identify dangerous similarities.”
In an interview prior to the prize controversy, Gessen told the same German paper that Arendt was a major inspiration for them. Gessen was also recently placed on a wanted list in Russia and accused by the Kremlin of spreading false information about the Russian Army, accusations which American journalism institutions have said are meritless.
The Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York, where Gessen teaches, said in a statement Monday, “We categorically reject the criminal investigation of Professor Gessen,” adding that Russia’s “persecution is part of the broader effort to stifle independent journalism.”
Controversy over responses to the Israel-Gaza war has caused turmoil across the world of arts and letters. Last month, a Jewish sponsor pulled out of the National Book Awards after learning that nominees planned to issue a statement criticizing Israel and calling for a ceasefire during the ceremony. The incident followed a controversy at the New York City Jewish cultural center 92NY in which it canceled a planned talk by an author who had signed a letter critical of Israel’s actions in Gaza, leading to resignations at the center; a similar sequence of events unfolded at the magazine Artforum.
Gessen’s Holocaust essay also criticizes Germany’s formal policy of considering the BDS movement antisemitic. They report that German officials have frequently gone after intellectuals and activists who invoke the campaign. Gessen also criticizes Israel’s own alliances with far-right factions in Germany and Poland and its refusal to overtly align with Ukraine in that country’s war against Russia.
At one point, the essay quotes Arendt’s own 1940s-era writings that compared future Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin’s political party to the Nazis. Germany’s policies combating antisemitism have been criticized by some left-leaning intellectuals for being overly harsh toward critics of Israel.
The Heinrich Böll Foundation is allied with Germany’s Green Party and has offices in Tel Aviv, Ramallah, Washington, D.C., and other locations. On its Israel website, the foundation backs a two-state solution, condemns the Hamas attacks and notes “the disastrous humanitarian situation in Gaza” and “the suffering and pain of the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.”
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The post Masha Gessen will receive Hannah Arendt Prize after all, following controversy over Gaza essay appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Palestinian Detained after West Bank Terror Ramming
Illustrative: Israeli police at the scene of a car-ramming terrorist attack near a market in Jerusalem on Monday, April 24, 2023. Photograph: Ronen Zvulun/Reuters.
JNS.org – A Palestinian rammed his vehicle into a cop car in the West Bank on Saturday in what the military was investigating as a terror attack.
The incident occurred at the Eli gas station, the scene of repeated acts of terrorism against Israelis.
“A Palestinian vehicle accelerated towards a police car and collided with it, there were no casualties,” according to the Israel Defense Forces.
“Troops caught the terrorist and transferred him to security forces for further investigation,” added the statement.
On Sunday, three Israeli police officers were killed in a drive-by shooting near the Tarqumiya checkpoint, some 7.5 miles northwest of Hebron in Judea.
They were named as Chief Inspector Arik Ben Eliyahu, 37, of Kiryat Gat, who is survived by his wife and three children; Command Sgt. Maj. Hadas Branch, 53, of Sde Moshe, who is survived by her husband, three children and granddaughter; and 1st Sgt. Roni Shakuri, 61, of Sderot, who is survived by his wife, daughter and granddaughter.
Shakuri’s other daughter, 1st Sgt. Mor Shakuri, 29, was killed on Oct. 7 while battling an attempt by Hamas terrorists to take control of the police station in Sderot, in southern Israel near the border with Gaza.
The post Palestinian Detained after West Bank Terror Ramming first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Ukraine Concerned at Reports of Iranian Ballistic Missiles to Russia
A missile unveiled by Iran is launched in an unknown location in Iran in this picture received by Reuters on August 20, 2020. WANA (West Asia News Agency) via REUTERS
Ukraine’s foreign ministry said on Saturday it was deeply concerned by reports about a possible impending transfer of Iranian ballistic missiles to Russia.
In a statement emailed to reporters, the ministry said the deepening military cooperation between Tehran and Moscow was a threat to Ukraine, Europe and the Middle East, and called on the international community to increase pressure on Iran and Russia.
CNN and The Wall Street Journal reported on Friday that Iran had transferred short-range ballistic missiles to Russia, citing unidentified sources.
Reuters reported in August that Russia was expecting the imminent delivery of hundreds of Fath-360 close-range ballistic missiles from Iran and that dozens of Russian military personnel were being trained in Iran on the satellite-guided weapons for eventual use in the war in Ukraine.
On Friday, the United States, a key ally of Ukraine, also voiced concern about the potential transfer of missiles.
“Any transfer of Iranian ballistic missiles to Russia would represent a dramatic escalation in Iran’s support for Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine,” White House National Security Council spokesperson Sean Savett said.
Iran’s mission to the United Nations in New York said on Friday that Tehran’s position on the Ukraine conflict was unchanged.
“Iran considers the provision of military assistance to the parties engaged in the conflict – which leads to increased human casualties, destruction of infrastructure, and a distancing from ceasefire negotiations – to be inhumane,” it said.
“Thus, not only does Iran abstain from engaging in such actions itself, but it also calls upon other countries to cease the supply of weapons to the sides involved in the conflict.”
The post Ukraine Concerned at Reports of Iranian Ballistic Missiles to Russia first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Pakistani Man Charged with Planning Terror Attack Against NY Jews on Oct. 7 or Yom Kippur
The flag of the ISIS terrorist group. Image: Reuters/Alaa Al-Marjani/File Photo.
JNS.org – A Pakistani national, whom Canadian authorities arrested on Wednesday, planned to carry out an ISIS-styled, mass shooting terror attack against Jews in New York, the U.S. Justice Department alleged on Friday.
Muhammad Shahzeb Khan, 20, who also answers to Shahzeb Jadoon, “attempted to travel from Canada to New York City, where he intended to use automatic and semi-automatic weapons to carry out a mass shooting in support of ISIS at a Jewish center in Brooklyn, N.Y.,” per the complaint.
Khan allegedly distributed ISIS videos and literature and expressed support for ISIS on social media and via encrypted messages. Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham is a U.S.-designated terror organization.
The defendant allegedly wrote that he wanted to target “Israeli Jewish Chabads … scattered all around,” per the 19-page complaint.
The Justice Department alleges that Khan “conveyed that he hoped to carry out this attack on or around Oct. 7, 2024—which Khan recognized as the one year anniversary of the brutal terrorist attacks in Israel by Hamas, a designated foreign terror organization, which, on Oct. 7, 2023, launched a wave of violent, large-scale terrorist attacks in Israel that resulted in the deaths and hostage taking of hundreds of civilians, including American citizens.”
Khan allegedly told undercover officers that he wanted to “go for Oct. 7 or Oct 11, Yom Kippur, a major festival for the Jews,” per the complaint. “Khan emphasized that ‘Oct. 7 and Oct. 11 are the best days for targeting the Jews,’ because ‘Oct. 7 they will surely have some protests and Oct. 11 is Yom Kippur,’ and ‘they don’t have any other major festival then till next summer.’”
“In selecting New York City as his target location, Khan told the undercover law enforcement officers that ‘New York is perfect to target Jews’ because it has the ‘largest Jewish population In America,’ and, as such, ‘even if we don’t attack a event, we could rack up easily a lot of Jews,” the complaint adds.
The defendant told the undercover officers that “he intended to kill as many Jewish civilians as possible, proclaiming that ‘we are going to New York City to slaughter them,’” per the complaint, which added that Khan allegedly sent a photograph “of the specific area” where he planned to attack to the undercover officers.
Per the complaint, Khan also allegedly told the undercover officers not to wear beards, so they wouldn’t attract attention, and that “you guys will even have to attend some synagogue or Chabad sessions” to “check the insides of the buildings.” He told them it was necessary to identify emergency exits in buildings, “so we can trap them and kill them inside,” per the complaint.
“In addition, Khan also explained that they should not record their ISIS allegiance video, or ‘bayah,’ until later because it would run the risk of them being caught by law enforcement prior to the planned attack,” the complaint alleges.
One of several cities that Khan flagged had “more relaxed” gun laws, he allegedly told the undercover officers.
“What’s the point of living till you’re 70 and dying on a hospital bed when we can attain shahadah in our youths, Inshalah,” he said, per the complaint. (The complaint defines the first term as a declaration of faith and the second as God willing.)
“The defendant is alleged to have planned a terrorist attack in New York City around Oct. 7 of this year with the stated goal of slaughtering, in the name of ISIS, as many Jewish people as possible,” stated Merrick Garland, the U.S. attorney general.
“Thanks to the investigative work of the FBI, and the quick action of our Canadian law enforcement partners, the defendant was taken into custody,” Garland said. “Jewish communities—like all communities in this country—should not have to fear that they will be targeted by a hate-fueled terrorist attack.”
The post Pakistani Man Charged with Planning Terror Attack Against NY Jews on Oct. 7 or Yom Kippur first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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