A New Yorker writer who was set to receive a “political thought” award had their ceremony suspended when its German sponsors withdrew following their essay comparing Gaza to Nazi-era Jewish ghettos.
Masha Gessen, who is Jewish, was due to receive the Hannah Arendt Prize Friday, but it was suspended until Saturday after the Heinrich Böll Foundation, criticized their latest New Yorker piece.
Gessen, who goes by they/them pronouns, published a piece titled “In the Shadow of the Holocaust” last Friday, which struck a chord with the foundation, particularly a passage where the writer compared the situation in Gaza to the “Jewish ghettos of Occupied Europe.”
The well-known magazine writer, 56, whose grandfather died in the Holocaust, wrote that the ghettos had “no prison guards” before saying that “Gaza is policed not by the occupiers, but by a local force.”
The Heinrich Böll Foundation highlighted that passage when it released a statement announcing that it would be withdrawing from the ceremony, and was “in agreement with the Bremen Senate,” where the ceremony was set to take place in Germany.
The organization accused the Russian-American writer of implying 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 and we reject it,” it wrote in a statement Wednesday.
On Monday, two founding members of the Hannah Arendt Prize — which honors the 20th-century Jewish political philosopher — called for the political thinking prize to be canceled in a letter to donors, citing Gessen’s New Yorker piece, according to German outlet Die Zeit.
Founding members Lothar Probst and Helga Trüpel said the author “disqualified herself [sic] with statements about the Middle East conflict in a way that would discredit everyone involved in the award ceremony, but especially the German-Jewish thinker Hannah Arendt.”
Gessen took to X to address what they called “the Arendt Prize debacle.”
“You’d think, with all the attention to the Arendt Prize debacle, I’d be inundated with media calls/texts. You’d be wrong. Not one German journalist has reached out for comment. One US journalist did. All reporting has happened with no input/reaction from me. Inaccuracies pile up
Later, they told the Washington Post that “the only way we can learn from history is if we compare it to the present. That’s actually our own tool. We’re not any smarter or better or more moral than the people who lived 100 years ago. The only thing that we have that they didn’t have is an awareness that the Holocaust was possible and remains possible. It’s a lesson, not a particularly complicated one.”
The New York Post has reached out to Gessen for comment.
Despite the withdrawal, Gessen will still receive the award a day later at an unknown setting, according to Die Zeit.
The writer — who began contributing to the New Yorker in 2014 and became a staff writer in 2017 —was receiving the award for their work involving Russia and US and the political landscape of both countries.