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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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University of California Rejects Ethnic Studies Admissions Requirement in Faculty Assembly Vote

Demonstrators holding a “Stand Up for Internationals” rally on the campus of the University of California, Berkeley, in Berkeley, California, US, April 17, 2025. Photo: Carlos Barria via Reuters Connect.
The University of California (UC) Faculty Assembly has rejected a proposal to establish passing ethnic studies in high school as a requirement for admission to its 10 taxpayer-funded schools for undergraduates.
As previously reported by The Algemeiner, the campaign for the measure — defeated overwhelmingly 29-12 with 12 abstaining — was spearheaded by Christine Hong, chair of the Critical Race and Ethnic Studies department at UC Santa Cruz. Hong believes that Zionism is a “colonial racial project” and that Israel is a “settler colonial state.” Moreover, she holds that anti-Zionism is “part and parcel” of the ethnic studies discipline.
Ethnic studies activists like Hong throughout the University of California system coveted the admissions requirement because it would have facilitated their aligning ethnic studies curricula at the K-12 level with “liberated ethnic studies,” an extreme revolutionary project that was rejected by California Gov. Gavin Newsom in 2023. Had the proposal been successful, school officials of both public and private schools would have been forced to comply with their standard of what constitutes ethnic studies to qualify their students for admission to UC.
Being indoctrinated into anti-Zionism and “hating Jews” would essentially have become a prerequisite for becoming a UC student had the Faculty Assembly approved the measure, Tammi Rossman-Benjamin, executive director of antisemitism watchdog AMCHA Initiative, told The Algemeiner on Friday. AMCHA Initiative first raised the alarm about the proposal in 2023, calling it “a deeply frightening prospect.”
“Ethnic studies never intended to be like any other discipline or subject. It was always intended to be a political project for fomenting revolution according to the dictates of however the activists behind the subject defined it,” Rossman-Benjamin explained. “And anti-Zionism has been at the core of the field, and this became especially clear after Oct. 7. Most of the anti-Zionist mania on campuses that day — the support for the encampments, the Faculty for Justice in Palestine chapters — it was a project of Ethnic Studies. At UC Santa Cruz, 60 percent of Faculty for Justice in Palestine members were pulled from the ethnic studies department.”
Founded in the 1960s to provide an alternative curriculum for beneficiaries of racial preferences whose retention rates lagged behind traditional college students, ethnic studies is based on anti-capitalist, anti-liberal, and anti-Western ideologies found in the writings of, among others, Franz Fanon, Huey Newton, Simone de Beauvoir, and Karl Marx. Its principal ideological target in the 20th century was the remains of European imperialism in Africa and the Middle East, but overtime it identified new “systems of oppression,” most notably the emergent superpower that was the US after World War II and the nation that became its closest ally in the Middle East: Israel.
UC Santa Cruz’s Critical Race and Ethnic Studies (CRES) department is a case study in how the ideology leads inexorably to anti-Zionist antisemitism, AMCHA Initiative argued in a 2024 study.
Following Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel, CRES issued a statement rationalizing the terrorist group’s atrocities as political resistance. Additionally, the department days later participated in a “Call for a Global General Strike,” refusing to work because Israel mounted a military response to Hamas’s atrocities — an action CRES called “Israel’s genocidal attack on Gaza.” Later, the department held an event titled, “The Genocide in Gaza in our [sic] Classrooms: A Teaching Palestine Workshop,” in which professors and teaching assistants were trained in how to persuade students that Zionism is a racist and genocidal endeavor.
Imposing such noxious views on all California students would have been catastrophic, Rossman-Benjamin told The Algemeiner.
“The goal of admissions requirements is to make sure that students are adequately prepared for college,” she noted. “Their goal was to use their power to force students to take the kind of Critical Ethnic Studies that is taught at the university, with the goal of revolutionizing society. The idea should have been dead on arrival, being rejected on the grounds that there is no evidence that it is a worthwhile subject that should be required for admission to the University of California.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
The post University of California Rejects Ethnic Studies Admissions Requirement in Faculty Assembly Vote first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Israeli FM Praises Paraguay Decision to Label Iran’s IRGC, Proxies Hamas and Hezbollah as Terrorist Organizations

Paraguayan President Santiago Peña praying at the Western Wall in Jerusalem on Dec. 12, 2024. Photo: The Western Wall Heritage Foundation
Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar praised Paraguay’s decision to designate Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) as a terrorist organization, and to broaden the country’s previous designation to include all factions of Hamas and Hezbollah.
The top Israeli diplomat congratulated the South American country and described President Santiago Peña’s decision as a “landmark move” in addressing security challenges and fostering international peace.
“Iran is the world’s leading exporter of terrorism and extremism, and together with its terror proxies, it threatens regional stability and global peace,” Sa’ar wrote in a post on X. “More countries should follow suit and join the fight against Iranian aggression and terrorism.”
I commend Paraguay and @SantiPenap for the landmark decision to designate the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, Hamas, and Hezbollah as terrorist organizations.
Iran is the world’s leading exporter of terrorism and extremism, and together with its terror proxies, it threatens… https://t.co/OzWACbWcno— Gideon Sa’ar | גדעון סער (@gidonsaar) April 24, 2025
On Thursday, Peña issued an executive order designating the IRGC as a terrorist organization “for its systematic violations of peace, human rights, and the security of the international community.”
The executive order also expanded Paraguay’s 2019 proscription of the armed wings of the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas, the al-Qassam Brigades, and Hezbollah, the Iran-backed terrorist group in Lebanon, to encompass the entirety of both organizations, including their political wings.
“With this decision, Paraguay reaffirms its unwavering commitment to peace, international security, and the unconditional respect for human rights, solidifying its position within the international community as a country firmly opposed to all forms of terrorism and strengthening its relations with allied nations in this fight,” Peña wrote in a post on X, emphasizing the country’s strategic relationship with the United States and Israel.
Iran is the chief international backer of Hamas and Hezbollah, providing the Islamist terror groups with weapons, funding, and training. According to media reports based on documents seized by the Israeli military in Gaza last year, Iran had been informed about Hamas’s plan to launch the Oct. 7 attack months in advance.
Last year, Peña reopened Paraguay’s embassy in Jerusalem, making it the sixth nation — after the US, Guatemala, Honduras, Kosovo, and Papua New Guinea — to establish its embassy in the Israeli capital. During the same visit, he condemned the Hamas-led massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, calling the perpetrators “criminals” in a speech at the Knesset, the Israeli parliament.
The Trump administration also praised Paraguay’s decision to officially label the IRGC as a terrorist organization, describing it as a major blow to Iran’s terror network in the Western Hemisphere.
“Iran remains the leading state sponsor of terrorism in the world and has financed and directed numerous terrorist attacks and activities globally, through its IRGC-Qods Force and proxies such as Hezbollah and Hamas,” US State Department spokesperson Tammy Bruce said in a statement.
The US official said Paraguay’s action will help disrupt Iran’s ability to finance terrorism and operate in Latin America — particularly in the Tri-Border Area, where Paraguay borders Argentina and Brazil, a region long regarded as a financial hub for Hezbollah-linked operatives.
“The important steps Paraguay has taken will help cut off the ability of the Iranian regime and its proxies to plot terrorist attacks and raise money for its malignant and destabilizing activity,” the statement read.
“The United States will continue to work with partners such as Paraguay to confront global security threats,” Bruce added. “We call on all countries to hold the Iranian regime accountable and prevent its operatives, recruiters, financiers, and proxies from operating in their territories.”
During his first administration, Trump designated the IRGC as a foreign terrorist organization (FTO), citing the Iranian regime’s use of the IRGC to “engage in terrorist activities since its inception 40 years ago.”
At the time, Trump said this designation “recognizes the reality that Iran is not only a state sponsor of terrorism, but that the IRGC actively participates in, finances, and promotes terrorism as a tool of statecraft.”
“The IRGC is the Iranian government’s primary means of directing and implementing its global terrorist campaign,” he continued.
The post Israeli FM Praises Paraguay Decision to Label Iran’s IRGC, Proxies Hamas and Hezbollah as Terrorist Organizations first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Yale’s Silence Is Allowing Blatant Campus Antisemitism — and Betraying the Promise of ‘Never Again’

Yale University students at the corner of Grove and College Streets in New Haven, Connecticut, U.S., April 22, 2024. Photo: Melanie Stengel via Reuters Connect.
As darkness fell over Yale University on Wednesday evening, Jewish students faced intimidation that echoed history’s darkest chapters. The following day, as the sun rose on Holocaust Remembrance Day, the world solemnly reflected on the devastating consequences of unchecked hatred.
Yet, disturbingly, at Yale, the shadows of that same hatred linger once again.
For several nights now, radical anti-Israel activists, primarily organized by “Yalies for Palestine,” an anti-Israel hate group, have targeted Jewish students at Yale — in many cases, based solely on their outwardly Jewish appearance.
On Wednesday, protestors blocked walkways, physically intimidated Jewish students, and hurled bottles and sprayed liquids at them — all while campus police stood by and did nothing.
One Jewish student described her chilling encounter with the protesters the night before, on Tuesday: “When I tried to get through, they blocked me, ignored my requests to pass, and handed out masks to those obstructing me. Yale security told me they couldn’t help.”
The immediate trigger for this harassment is the invitation extended by Shabtai, a Yale Jewish society, to Itamar Ben-Gvir, an Israeli government minister. Whether one supports or opposes Ben-Gvir’s politics is beside the point. Notably, Naftali Bennett, a former Israeli prime minister, was also protested and disrupted during a separate campus event in February, underscoring a broader trend of hostility toward Israeli speakers regardless of their political affiliation.
These events signal more than isolated protests; they constitute a redux of hatred that historically escalates when met with institutional silence or indifference.
Yale’s administration, under President Maurie McInnis and Dean Pericles Lewis, has failed to adequately respond. Though Yale revoked official recognition from Yalies for Palestine, its tepid actions have not halted the dangerous slide toward overt hostility. The silence — from both the university and the Slifka Center, Yale’s center for Jewish life — is deafening.
This isn’t the first troubling instance at Yale. A year ago, similar demonstrators disrupted campus life with vitriolic anti-Israel rhetoric, silencing dialogue and fostering an atmosphere hostile to Jewish students.
Earlier this year, CAMERA on Campus documented Yale’s Slifka Center pressuring students to erase evidence of anti-Jewish harassment during a pro-Israel event, effectively whitewashing antisemitism and emboldening extremists.
As CAMERA’s Ricki Hollander has powerfully documented, the rhetoric of anti-Zionism today often revives the antisemitic patterns of the past, particularly those propagated by the Nazi regime in the 1930s. These tactics, she explains, echo Nazi-era propaganda that portrayed Jews as subhuman, sinister, and uniquely malevolent — a narrative used to justify marginalization and, ultimately, genocide.
These dynamics — scapegoating, dehumanizing, and ostracizing Jews under the guise of “anti-Zionism” — are not relics of history. They are alive and active across elite American campuses. And now, unmistakably, they have taken root at Yale.
McInnis must break the silence and condemn the open harassment and assault of Jewish students. She must also hold the perpetrators of the heinous actions and those responsible for the safety of students accountable for their inaction.
This week has revealed a grave failure of moral and institutional duty on many fronts. When law enforcement stands by as Jewish students face intimidation and assault, it sends a chilling message: their safety matters less.
We must demand a full investigation and real accountability. Condemnations of antisemitism are not enough. Policies must be changed to ensure Jewish students and organizations can freely exercise their right to free expression without being subject to harassment and assault. Anything less would betray Yale’s stated values — and the promise of “never again.”
Douglas Sandoval is the Managing Director for CAMERA on Campus.
The post Yale’s Silence Is Allowing Blatant Campus Antisemitism — and Betraying the Promise of ‘Never Again’ first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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